Technology Angst

One week ago, I was attending the Learning & the Brain conference in San Francisco, eagerly consuming every new nugget of neuroscience data applicable to education in general and teaching leadership and life skills in particular. This was my fifth year attending the conference, but there were two significant differences: it was my first time attending the west coast edition of the conference and I was to present my leadership curriculum development process in the poster session. My poster, entitled "The Development of a Brain Compatible, Scientifically Attuned Leadership/Life Skills curriculum", straddled a table shared by seven other posters entered by college professors, learning specialists, and educational business leaders from across the U.S., Canada, and Israel. The mission of the Leadership & the Brain conference is to bring educators together (in this case, all across the U.S. and from 14 countries) with brain scientists and researchers to share the often startling and always rapidly evolving data stream from new knowledge about brain development and processing, with a goal of enhancing educational practices and providing a practical synthesis and utility for the research. But the unstated theme might well be "technology in action", as we witnessed the utilization of state of the art technology for the research, the presentations, and even for teaching. Multiple projectors driven by multiple computers displayed digital movies, animated charts, and screens from second and even third party computers on distant university networks and the web. One session I attended was presented by a grade school teacher who showed how she contacts her students with advertisements in the form of digital, home-edited films before each upcoming upcoming class, piquing their curiosity and establishing a constructive mindset, a technique she shared with us by utilizing several web sites and many ethernet software locations. It was all wonderful, accessible, and useful.
One day ago, my wife's computer suddenly displayed a note saying that it wasn't well and asked to be excused. It then shut down for good.
One hour ago, my computer, the only other household computer, decided to create a vertical band on the display which obscured the exact area where instructions and choices are offered, not to speak of a quarter of the useful screen, rendering it unusable. And so I write this piece by hand.
My personal crisis, relevant in the moment only to me yet so very critical to me in terms of my daily ritual, livelihood, and state of mind, has caused me to reflect upon the vulnerability of a society so completely dependent upon technology for, well, virtually everything: business, pleasure, communication, progress, and personal and community welfare. We have seen the effects of total trust in the 'house of cards' constructs during the recent fall of the financial establishment. Is it then so preposterous to feel angst in regard to a system that relies upon decaying satellites in orbit around the earth and thin strands of cable stretched along the earth's surface and ocean floor, and towers standing atop the high hills, to be our senses and intelligence? When my computer stopped, so did my brain. I had gone paperless some time ago, and now I found myself unable to devise strategies to continue to function. All of my financial reports and bills, telephone and address books, shopping lists, writing projects, client contacts, even my amusements, were now locked away in an inaccessible computer. It required some time for me to locate a pen and a pad of paper to begin writing this article, by so doing demonstrating pure faith that I would have my computers up and running soon to publish it.
According to scientists who study these matters, we have been most fortunate that the past 120,000 years has been a time of relative climatic calm, a period conducive to gradually building our current infrastructure, launching our satellites, and stringing our wires, but a period that, in the scheme of things, is actually comparatively short. That this very habitable period might well come to an end should not surprise us, given that in earthly climate history such a period is quite unusual.
And so I consider that it is very possible that in the not too distant future we may find ourselves, as I do now, trying to remember where we left our pencils and our paper as we rediscover how we managed to do things "back when". At that future time, I will modestly stake the life skills and leadership qualities illustrated on my poster against all of the advanced technology on display around me. Because if you can't plug it in, it doesn't exist.

The Politics of Care

As an institution designed to represent the people (all of the people), the Congress of the United States appears dangerously close to forgetting the sanctity and, in fact, the simplicity of this original purpose. As insurance lobbies, private health networks, and pure power politics delay and threaten to reverse an embarrassingly tardy health care program meant for the people, our Congress, secure in their own health care provisions supplied by we the people, choose to backpedal, allowing the momentum of this historic effort to fizzle and die, all the while claiming (incredibly) that we the people don't really want it after all. Once again, the poor and the jobless must wonder how to care for their families and the Medicare short-fallers (those retired due to unemployment, but not eligible yet for Medicare) must resume their desperate thoughts of moving to neighboring countries where, although poorer than the good old U.S. of A. in most respects, they somehow manage to take care of the health of their populations.
The Nike slogan "Just do it!" encapsulates the actual simplicity of the issue. How often do we make a task more difficult than it really is by layering it with complexities? When the Good Samaritan, that man of contemptible origins, stopped along a dangerous road to assist a robbery victim of higher caste when no one else would, it was a different time and place. But the circumstances remain familiar. There were many layers of reasons for the Samaritan not to lend care to the man; risks beyond the physical dangers - risks that were political, legal, and social. And there would ultimately be no personal gain. But he did it because he chose to do it, because he chose not to worry himself into indecisiveness by weighing all possible consequences, because he wanted to do the right thing. The United States Congress, regardless of political party or personal interests or consequences, needs to do the right thing for the people. In other words, our leaders need to demonstrate true leadership.
True leadership requires empathy, that quality which compels us to visit those feelings that others must be experiencing. Those that lack it must develop it. I recall a conversation with a brilliant medical doctor whose son was my student. When the discussion turned to role modeling, she resisted the notion that everybody could experience, let alone demonstrate, empathy. "My husband", she said, "has no capability to empathize!" Yet the science of the brain suggests otherwise. Except for psychotic conditions usually due to injury or defect, everyone with a normal frontal lobe structure has the capacity for the "sense of other" that is so necessary for social integration. The genes are there, but the neurological pathways must be traveled frequently enough to maintain the awareness. If we don't prioritize this function, as with every brain function, we will lose it.
True leadership requires courage. It takes courage to turn away from powerful interests, to disagree with the party gurus, to perhaps even endanger the life style to which your family has grown accustomed. But I expect my congressmen to be courageous.
True leadership requires foresight. This comes from global thinking, from extricating one's mind from the daily "trees" to contemplate the social "forest". It means projecting forward the consequences for the population of not having health care and grasping what it could mean to the legions of homeless, of jobless, and aged.
Finally, true leadership requires insight, that capability to know ourselves and know our weaknesses and deficits. It is this insight into ourselves which helps to engender empathy for others. I want a congressional leader with insight.
The Good Samaritan's action seemed selfless, yet it was self serving because it was a small step taken by one individual to role model the kind of community in which he would like to exist. If each individual congressman in this historic instance and for this momentous cause would think and act like a leader, he could lead us all toward a community in which we would all like to exist, a community for the people.