https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=xvvG_1cJ8NE
Welcome everyone to another voices with Reveki. This is episode 3 with Greg Thomas. Greg has just been Impressing me and inspiring me. I was just talking to him beforehand And of course, it’s been wonderful also for us to get more into a relationship with each other but that the links he’s making between music and democracy Culture and now we’re going to examine with him Hopefully very carefully very respectfully but also very responsibly and with discernment issues around race because we can’t talk about the intersections between music and Culture and democracy, especially the United States without this issue Coming up and of course, it’s a prominent issue today And I am very grateful that Greg is providing Leadership on this and I think that’s the exact right term. Of course, that’s what his course attempts to teach people he does workshops teaching people how to use these concepts to You know really develop leadership and so great thank you so much for being here again, and I want to turn things over to you and Set set this up, you know, I like I’ve watched I read one of your articles I couldn’t watch the video but I would read like I said, I read through all the notes and that the time stamps Which were really excellent by the way And you know get it just to what the argument is. You’re very very careful and you make use of all of this rich Intellectual framework that you’ve already built and and of course as we were talking before this is not just an intellectual thing for you you Turn this into Transformative practices really training a whole generation in a kind of leadership that is very valuable. So Please take us take us forward. Thank you so much John. I so appreciate again the opportunity to to join you as a guest on Voices with revaking and and for if it’s okay before we go into our third session of Our three-part series. I want to recap the first two Oh, please excellent. Excellent. Okay So in so doing I’m gonna add a few other brushstrokes to fill out the picture. Okay, sure Okay, so the emphasis of session one was music specifically blues and jazz and the meaning and values dimension of both with the blues being the foundation of most American music in the 20th century and With what is called the blues idiom Representing a way of life and a way of being in the world with profound philosophical implication Now recall that I quoted from significant writers and thinkers in black American life and history on the blues Such as Martin Luther King jr. Cornell West Tony Morrison Ralph Ellison Albert Murray and Sally Crouch and The picture that surfaced whether it was a distinction between Having the blues as such and playing the blues as music Yeah, excellent distinction and how the music actually counterstates the melancholy sadness and depression of the blues as such So now I want to give you a quick quote that we didn’t hear that helps to sum it sum it up From essayist and novelist Ralph Ellison that I think will clarify this even further Ellison wrote that the blues speak to us simultaneously of the tragic and comic aspects of the human condition and They expressed a profound sense of life shared by many Negro Americans Precisely because their lives have combined these modes This has been a heritage of a people who for hundreds of years could not celebrate birth or dignified death and whose need to live despite the dehumanizing pressures of slavery Developed an endless capacity for laughing at their painful experiences Very poignant. Thank you. So in this quote Ellison not only speaks about the historical reality of His and my idiomatic and ethnic group and I make a clear distinction there cultural idiomatic ethnic not racial and we’ll see why later But he he also reflects the existentialist impulse of the blues that we discussed Impulse of the blues that we discussed Yes. Yes now that existentialism however is less influenced by Sartre and King Camus or Satra and more influenced by Andre Malraux in his novels man’s fate and also man’s hope and Miguel de Unamuro’s tragic sense of life Right, right, okay, I want to clarify that because people here existentialism they automatically go Think of Sartre right. Yes, exactly. Exactly So now your passing also going to say that the blues idiom as I presented is part of an aesthetic That is a post tragic sensibility a term that I learned from philosopher and metapsychologist Zach Stein Yeah, excellent person He sure is and I like the way Jonathan Roussen Describes the post tragic. He really sums it up. Well, he says meaning and Agency on the other side of despair Yeah Excellent. That’s John Roussen. Yes, Jonathan Roussen. Yes Cuz he had Zach Lohan talking about his metapsychology and he’s referenced. Wow, that’s great in some of his recent works Yeah, so and by referencing Albert Murray’s classic work published in 1976 Stomping the blues we put a spotlight on the ritual dimensions of the blues idiom Serious play the blues idiom the areas play With what he called the secular Saturday night function of a community of Afro-americans getting together To engage in what amounts to a purification ritual that dispels the bad spirits celebrates life to fun joy dance and then Transitioning to what amounts to a fertility ritual the romance dance and commit and continuing the species To let the good times roll and get Okay Now since most of black black Americans historically and by the way when I say black Americans, I mean an ethno cultural group I want to specify that I haven’t said that yes They’ve been practitioners of course of Protestant Christianity for the most part So the next morning is the sacred Sunday morning church service Where the congregation sings a joyful noise unto the Lord and a ritual of propitiation and a ritual of devotion And we also discussed how music how through music the sacred and the secular intertwined Rather yeah, yeah dualistic and separate We also mentioned the interesting and perhaps ironic fact that gospel music in the form Of the form of music which was created and enacted with sacred intent Was formerly and structurally grounded in the blues a secular form right and we pointed the composer and musician Thomas Dorsey as the very Embodiment of the secular as a blues musician in his early days as an adult and also as the first great Gospel composer and this is similar to the way saxophones and band leader Louie Jordan Embodied blues jazz and what came to be called rhythm and blues and rock and roll now Regarding jazz which by the way Albert Murray called the fully orchestrated blues statement We began by quoting the great trumpeter and band leader with Marsalis One said that jazz has elements of the Dionysian and the Apollonian the intellectual and the spiritual as well as the sensual and That was evocative of what went his best friend for many decades Stanley Crouch said about the blues which is that quote the blues is the sound of spiritual investigation in a secular frame and Through its very lyricism the blues achieves its spiritual penetration and Then finally we discussed the jazz leadership projects for principle individual excellence antagonistic cooperation shared leadership and ensemble mindset but the first two being more individual in focus in the second two more group oriented and Those principles form the foundation and value system of the ecosystem of the six practices Which was also designed to balance and synthesize the individual and the collective in the shade your sound Big ears or deep listening which has an individual focus by virtue of The first in the shed being a desire to become skilled to play music or say to be a good citizen in a democracy and manifesting as focused deliberate practice yourself being Your individual voice and and style and approach and big ears being attentive to the communication process through attentive and empathetic listening Which can then become soulful generative listening to co-create the future by extending and elaborating and refining dialectic into dialogs Yeah, right. That’s fantastic. Thank you Now these practice then are a basis of the group practices of syncopation an orientation towards being prepared for the unexpected Improvisation as why is spontaneity in the moment of action and interaction and of course Swing it which is the most identifiable rhythmic enactment as yeah and is an actualization of ensemble Mindset which is collaborative co-creation through collective intelligence or as you like to say John distributed commission Right, right, right. Excellent. Excellent. Thank you So if this is going to play an important role as a foundation for the cultural intelligence portion of our conversation today Whose title is or which title is race versus cultural intelligence the agent arena? relationship Now the topic of our second conversation was democracy as antagonist to cooperation for e pluribus uno Which could have been called? democracy as opponent processing for other many oneness So what we did was we elevated antagonist to cooperation which can also be called cooperative opposition and competitive cooperation To the civic and social socio-political spheres along with the mythic aesthetic and musical frame and my use of antagonistic cooperation to buy derived both from the archetypal heroes journey and From a precursor to American pragmatism Ralph Waldo Emerson right Emerson emphasized the antagonistic aspects of human reality in his work Such as the tension and struggle between human power and agency and social and material limitation another Emersonian Polarity was freedom and faith and Recall that as we discussed in relation to democracy the polarity of friendship versus being strangers in a democracy which was a cleat key theme in Danielle Allen’s book talking with strangers and Emersonian turn that typifies this spirit is beautiful enemy Yeah Which he used to describe the dynamics involved in friendship Now mentioning interesting is crucial because of his status again as a forerunner of American pragmatism Proto-american pragmatist pluralist to be specific So pragmatist Pluralism was an underlying philosophical Foundation for my spec my perspective in session to because of the way American pragmatists confronted the reality promise and difficulties of democracy So these are some of the brushstrokes that I alluded to earlier Now for the pragmatist pluralism is an American tradition that’s similar to the blues idiom Gets short shrift these days to the detriment of our discourse Individualism is crucial to this tradition, but not in the sense of either libertarianism or classic liberals liberal sorry classic liberalism in classic liberalism the individual is a rational actor capable of making their own decision The libertarian extends this by focusing on the autonomous individual free from government coercion and that tends towards a Lazaic fader stance, right? So what I like to do is share a quote from a very important book in my understanding of pragmatism And the author is scholar James Albrecht Al br Cht excellent and the title is reconstructing individualism a pragmatic tradition from Ellison to Emerson, so he says pragmatic individualism Mandates that a democratic society must pursue an ongoing effort to remake or reconstruct all Every areas excuse me of human association in order to make them more democratic more able to educate and liberate individuals capacities by allowing them to participate meaningfully and the choice and pursuit of common ends Conversely individuals bear responsibility to cultivate their own talents in a fashion That contributes to common goal Not trusting to the specious operations of an invisible and but pursuing the dictates of one’s own talents or genius working to realize one’s own dearest held ideal and attending conscientiously to the consequences our acts have upon others pragmatism holds to the Fallible excuse me that both individuals and communities are inevitably subject to mistakes and blindness as William James Insisted we must never forget that in striving to realize our ideals we necessarily butcher other possibilities perhaps cherished by other people Thus as John Dewey and Kenneth Burke argued we must consciously scrutinize how our acts impact others and Adopt a charitable but not gullible comic tolerance when others are blind to us End quote so so note how in the last part of that quote John He riffs on the comic dimension that we discussed in session two as Part of what Ellison in the earlier quote called the tragicomic dimensions of our lives As that’s right, thank you. So that’s the first two sessions Hopefully in a nutshell to kind of bring it together for folk. Yeah. Yeah, excellent. Excellent. Okay So with that review in the rear view mirror We come on down the road With them for this session, which we said is race versus cultural intelligence the agent arena relationship so first John I’d like you to say what you mean by the Agent arena relationship and if you could connect that with Your own use of the term cultural intelligence. I think that would be a great way to start Right, okay, so the The use of that idea comes from the book that I wrote with Christopher massed retro and Philip miss of it The book on zombies and Western culture, which in which the zombie is an emergent mythogram of Basically the 20th century for expressing the meaning crisis right and we made use of The made use of Clifford Geertz’s, you know from the classic interpretation of cultures masterpiece and cultural anthropology to my mind and And thank you Geertz’s proposal. Is it the interpretation of course? Is it is it there you come with this? Yes, exactly the interpretation of cultures, yes, okay. Yes. Yeah, which is a masterpiece absolute so in that another work you know Yes, thoughts about worldview and and he also talks Specifically about his thesis of religion as a meta meaning system and his idea is that Why religious utterances are odd is they are not themselves meaningful They are metham meaningful. They’re about creating this interlocking relationship his idea is that this meta meaning system of religion and sacredness and normativity and they’re all organized together Is about how we? How culture shapes us to the environment and shapes the environment to us so that we fit together belong together so Where I did with that with Chris and with Philip and further work with other people is I said, okay Well that and there this goes towards a talk. I just gave at the channel conference as the quest for a spiritual home About the idea that well that that cultural capacity Is exacted to rot like is evolved from taken up from a more basic biological function called niche construction where it’s not just that the Environment shaped organism and then they’re you know, they’re either killed off or they are they adopt that sort of Newtonian take on the Darwinian model But instead it’s the idea that is now much more prevalent in the philosophy of biology and theoretical biology the organism shapes the environment and the while the environment is shaping the organism as the organism it and you get what’s called niche construction and you get the animal and The environment more and more fitting each other you get like a home range For an organism where it belongs and that we we did something interesting We created culture that allowed us to make that home ranging portable and we could move it and land it in different environments Of course, we don’t do that sort of deliberately that but that’s what we do right and so to see a continuity between the biological niche construction and The cultural and then to see that the biological niche construction that mutual shaping that goes all the way down and even fundamental aspects like that the environment Myself as a physical being and the environment I mean are both shaped by gravity And so we are shaped to each other by gravity. And so you have this right? We have you have the idea that we’re not just behaviors We’re agents we can detect the consequences of our behavior and shape the environment to to our goals But the environment isn’t just a blank slate or an empty canvas It is textured and structured and we we conform to it And so it discloses itself to us as an arena an environment in which Physical biological and cultural meta meaning is possible So at all those levels the physical the biological the cultural affordances open up. So think of Walking through your house, right? Okay obviously, there’s an affordance because both you and your house are shaped by Gravity if it was in space, you couldn’t walk through your house Then you go up a biological level right and you were shaped by pedalism and then human beings have created technology that shapes the Environment right and then up culturally you’re taught how to walk and walk through a house and where you how you sit and how You move right? You don’t run in the house right and stuff like that, right all that stuff Right and so at all those levels you’ve got right the agent and arena are co shaping each other and So there’s this horizontal co shaping and then there’s this vertical alignment between the biological agent arena the Biological and the cultural and you get all these affordances Coming up now that all of this fits into the fact that we don’t do this as Just as sort of atomic individuals We are always right An important way in which we are shaping and being shaped is how we participate in the collective intelligence of distributed cognition So, you know a non-controversial example is neither, you know, I invented English We not we’re not envisioned the individually responsible for how English changes over time But neither are we just mere passive spectators you participate in it. We shape it we affect each other’s behavior And so right that’s right and then what we can do is we can form Collective agents that like science the science can track evolution and global warming No one scientist with their own Spatial temporal limitations can do that kind of thing, right? And so the idea is Cultural intelligence has a capacity by enabling curating and coordinating Distributed labor that allows us and we get we know there’s a synergistic effect there to create problem-solving capacities that can deal with huge You know collective action problems and huge hyper objects And things displaced across space and time So because of collective intelligence people in the Middle Ages were capable of building a cathedral They were able to commit to this collective intelligence and they would die They would individually die before the cathedral was completed, but so just trying to give some examples So that’s what I mean by the agent arena relationship and then Right. It’s all all these are all aspects of participatory knowing the way in which the co-shaping physical biological cultural and ultimately Right this that the the power of the collective intelligence of distributed cognition is creating affordances for us and problem-solving capacities for us that we don’t have as Individuals and for which we are we are neither the passive recipients nor are we just that you know The Kantian creators right we are always Participating with both receiving and creating and receiving as great all the way back to the niche constructors So I tried to summarize a lot you did and you did it. I would add if you don’t mind And to the formulation I would just want to add one one Expression you said distributed labor and if you could add distributed play to that Of course. Yeah You know, you know the function of play, you know homo, yeah, etc Yes Yes, so yes very much and all the work on ritual is around how there’s an interplay I had to play between individual and distributed cognition in ritual right and how important that is exactly So, okay. Yeah, I’m very I’m very welcoming about proposal. So there’s there’s all of this machinery gives us this profound Sense and it’s not always a conscious sense, right? But it can rise to consciousness a sense of belonging jazz of connectedness Absolutely now I I’m gonna I had this ready just in case and before I continue with My portion of presenting, you know in terms of culture and race. I want to read a pulse from The modern library Edition of the collected essays of Ralph Ellison because he defines he defines culture in a way that I think is In concert with with what you just said in many ways If Dole aside is not being at home. We haven’t mentioned that word But that’s a part of the very work you’re talking about which I’ve read Being at home then of course is You could say it’s opposite in many ways So he’s this is a yes. This is the essay called what these children are like Bank Street School in New York had a conference and he presented and There at the time this is like 63 They were talking about 1663 They were talking about you know, these Negro children being culturally deprived That was an expression they were using there so Ellison said We must recognize that the children in question are not so much culturally deprived as products of a different cultural complex I’m talking about how people deal with their environment About what they make of what is abiding in it About what helps them find their way Yeah, and about that which helps them to be at home in the world All this seems to me to constitute a culture if you can abstract their matters their codes their customs and attitude into forms of expression If you can convert them into forms of art if You can stylize them and give them many and subtle ranges of reference Then you are dealing with the culture People have learned this culture It has been transferred to them from generation to generation and in its forms They have projected their most transcendent images of Themselves and of the world Excellent excellent. So for me, I mean It’s been a common theme throughout our sessions where for me culture it is is so primary and I think that when we tell our stories of when we post things like race versus culture Which is that’s definitely a framing that I intentionally intended because they are not the same thing Often they are confused which is Horrible to do and so I’m definitely going to Disconnect them Conceptually, I’m going to you mentioned personal I think in the in the second. I’m gonna bracket them from each other But I’m gonna use a particular technique in heuristic Yes, and which is called asset frame This is where before you go into deficits and liability you talk about the assets of a person or people or organization So asset framing so for me culture is an asset through which to frame a generative mode of actuality and Possibility necessary for us to move forward then we’ll deal with race and related issues Which I consider to be liabilities and deficits Could I quickly relate to this and it’ll start with that distinction. I’d known it conceptually for quite some time. Okay But I was watching a documentary and it’s a British journalist He’s black and what he’s doing he was in the Congo and he was going upstream. He was tracing the route I believe it either a French or Belgian European There upon which Conrad based his notion of Colonel Kurtz so as you can imagine in the heart of darks, right? Yeah. Yeah, this person is Becomes quite make a little maniacally evil and he’s he’s going up and he’s tracing the route And then he meets people Where there was a ported massacre and the generations had kept alive the memory of this massacre from the 19th century and They then they take him and they’re Nigerian, right? They take him to I believe the manager yet They take him to that, you know where where there’s a mass grave And so you’re in the middle of like a Holocaust almost right and they even say, you know when it rains the bones Still come to the surface Wow. Oh my gosh. Yeah, and then the black journalist he says something and He’s trying to connect to them and then they did something and they didn’t do it maliciously. They’re they’re they’re they’re sort of laughing and He like he’s he’s sensing. There’s a disconnect that they’re finding Funny in some way and well, they’re he they’re sharing with him this Terrific, you know racist genocide Terrific, you know racist genocide right, right And he goes eventually go like what’s going on and they stop laughing and they say you don’t understand You’re British. You might as well be white. Oh And it was like oh And there was no malicious right no, right, right But and they’re saying you’re British but that matters way more to us than you’re black like us, right? Exactly, and it was like oh, yeah, right. Yeah and but again and this wasn’t this wasn’t them But this was like they were presenting it as you know, I mean It was that was that was the reality in other words they Are in their particular cultural setting and culture milieu They have traditions rituals myths Lifestyles Practices and they’re dealing with this gentleman who may share a similar skin tone tone But what the hell certainly, you know, yes exactly His his way of speaking was British Maybe in terms of the way he moved It had been have been influenced by him being British all these things that are aspects of culture and and and That’s a good way to respond because remember we talked about the tragedy the tragedy were yeah what they were Experiencing or they were they had ritualized and memorialized that but a comic moment came up In the midst of that and race and the fallacy of race became the basis for that comic moment Yes, you know so so so I’m gonna Share do a screen share in a moment. I’m just gonna do a very general riff on culture. Okay Culture the concord of sensibility. It’s a complex of shared values practices meanings and aspirations that constitute how people survive and strive for emotional prosperity that term emotional prosperity I got from a business Consultant and author named Stan slap. I thought that was a really beautiful way of describing culture How people survive well, you still want people that work, but I think it can apply generally How people survive and strive for emotional prosperity? So so is it is it I mean I think I think we’ve heard this your word used on previous discussions Culture helps us survive and strive but also thrive Absolutely properly could you leave and enacted definitely helps us try Now the thing is when people hear culture a lot of times it is thinking about consent consensus reality Yes, so, you know, it’s like the old expression, you know, we’re like fish swimming in water We don’t know they’re in water People are in culture and they don’t even know that you know, they’re in culture But yes when we talk about cultural intelligence We go beyond just swimming in culture and not realizing we’re in the waters of culture That’s right. So Allison again has an expression that I think is gonna be fruitful to our discussion. He calls it conscious culture So this is where we bring light and awareness of being aware Consciousness to focus on what culture is and how it works So we aren’t just beholden to culture as consensus reality But we begin to exercise discernment and how we relate meanings values practices traditions and forms and styles of living and Interacting with one another and world so that’s you know gives you a little sense of What I mean by cultural intelligence, but that’s just a general sense. We’re gonna we’re gonna make our We’re gonna refine our our view we’ll make our lenses even even sharper and to do that I would like to share my screen You have okay. All right Okay so John These are a few slides Excuse me from a conference. I co-facilitated last September Title resolving the racism dilemma which you can see in the lower left my co-facilitators were doctors Carlos Hoyt and Sheena Mason Sheena is a proponent proponent. Excuse me of a model. She called the theory of racelessness and Carlos who is a psychologist? He’s been really influential on my understanding of the racial nexus that I’m going to share today And he advocate for a non-racial identity in his book the arc of a bad idea understanding and transcending race Yeah, so now so I get I guess the foil throughout this is the ongoing proposal That I think what I’m gonna put it up front because I don’t want people to dismiss you ahead of time Okay, thank you guys. I know you’re gonna you’re gonna reply to it Well, this is just this is just you know, the white liberal color blindness Which is just a you know a way of smuggling in racism but you know and smothering it under sort of Pleasant feelings but color blindness is is it is actually something that empowers Racism and that’s all that Greg is talking about and I know you’re not right No, thank you for mentioning that because yeah, I am I am very used to and prepared to deal with What ended up being frankly knee-jerk responses, you know? Yes people are not engaging with their big ears You didn’t hold a lot. Yes Where they’re listening deeply? Where they’re they have that attentive listening their empathetic listening and their soulful listening Sometimes it’s just a knee-jerk reaction not even a response. It’s a reaction, but that’s fine I mean, I will I’m gonna go into detail, but I’ll say this right up front that color blindness in many ways is a misnomer because literally We see color. I Mean I wore the same shirt in our first two sessions And I realized that that’s I’m gonna wear a different color So those who watch it don’t wear it a different color, you know, you got you But the thing is of course, you know color blind is referring to you know not allowing racial distinctions and Skin color to get in the way of people in the way they’re supposed to be treated So in many ways that’s a an ideal of sorts, you know, and that’s in the law So I don’t want to just totally dismiss the idea of color blindness and just backhand it But that is not what I’m talking about. Okay, so thank you. Yes, yes Okay, so as as you were saying Cultural intelligence is a way to solve problems with a full Consciousness awareness of the primacy of culture, but it’s also a crucial step on the way to cultural wisdom. I Think cultural wisdom is the goal and And so we start with cultural literacy. I taught a course on cultural intelligence and the subtitle was transcending race embracing Cosmo So we started with cultural literacy, what is culture then we went to cultural intelligence and we dealt with certain problems Through the lens of culture and then we’re you know, a striving to an aspiring to move towards cultural wisdom Okay, because frankly, I think that’s what we need to confront the meaning crisis and the poly crisis Yes, one of the key to thoroughly agree thoroughly agree. Okay, so I’m gonna use a simile to bring even more clarity And precision to what culture is culture is like a prosthesis Yes, culture is a prosthetic extension of nature So, I mean you talked about those layers so you use that particular, you know methodology or that particular Imagery, you know of a layering and then the affordances at each level so Culture being a prosthetic extension of nature. I get that from anthropologist Paul Bohannon who I mentioned his work how culture works is Is just frankly for about 25 years in terms of culture. I mean as I pulled out You know Clifford Geertz I mean I’ve read a lot about culture but Paul Bohannon who at the time of the writing of how culture works Which I think was like 95. He was the president of the American anthropological association at the time and I just had gained so much over the decades From that book. So what he said, he says we cannot deal with culture as long as we oppose it to nature Rather than and that’s it as an integrated part of nature and as Long as we confuse it with our genetic endowment Which some biologists still do or with God’s will Which some fundamentalist of all faiths always have Okay, so that’s the first part of the statement and then we go to the very next when we finally learn to deal with culture as a part of the natural world But a part separable from our biology we can question ask how it works Take advantage of parts of it and learn to avoid some of its manifestation Just as we deal with any other natural phenomenon Okay, isn’t that excellent John? Yes, it’s very good, okay So now recall in our second conversation. I mentioned Bohannan concept from this book of Recontexting from one area of culture to another as being a basis of innovation Now I associated this process with abductive reasoning But I should have also mentioned as you’ve already said in this conversation Acceptation Yes, which comes from biology which you and awakening from the meaning crisis and in our conversation today Relates to cognition and how the brain works Okay. Now the going we’re going to focus on this book just for a second. So the first chapter of this book Is titled matter life and culture? So matters the fundamental substance of the universe Life Bohannan says is a way of organizing matter Life transforms matter but does not affect the principles of physics and chemistry in the way matter works Then you wrote living matter can be transformed yet again by culture Culture transcends and enriches matter in life, but does not change the way physics chemistry or biology work Cultures emerges from life just as life emerges from matter end quote then for a few pages he discusses the boundary between matter in life and Then he characterized the living things as that which moves grows reproduces metabolizes and functions as Feedback system. Okay, so then the question arises What’s between life and culture? So Hannah says behavior learning and choice and then he came to This following definition where he said culture is a combination of the tools and the meaning that expand behavior Extend learning and channel choice Nicely written yeah two paragraphs later He wrote that cultures like a prosthesis it allows the creature to extend its capacities and to do things That its specialized body cannot otherwise do Okay, which is very much like the notion. I’ve been talking about of a psychotechnology Okay now let’s say that there’s some folks who may follow my work and are new to your work Let’s say there’s some folks. That’s new to your work. Just break down psychotechnology so the idea about a psychotechnology unlike like a particular skill is a Just the way a tool fits your biology and enhances it My water container fits my hand that I can carry way more fluid that I could carry with my hand The psychotechnology is a socially generated and standardized means and formatting of information processing and and communication and computation with information that fits the way our psyche works and It extends it enhances it just the way a physical tool does so I get a non controversial Psychotechnology is literacy literary is literacy is socially generated. It’s socially standardized is socially disseminated It’s the standards are set socially, right? But it’s designed to fit the way human Cognition and vision and a high I even the way our hand and I are in relationship right to each other It fits our biology, but it extends our cognition we can we can store and return to Way more information that we could possibly manage it We had to rely just on working memory at our own individual long-term memory and you and I could collaborate together And you know we can overcome limitations in space and time. That’s a psychotechnologist Gotcha. All right. I think music is a psychotechnology play. I mean, yeah playing music together I mean think about it. So if you have an instrument the instrument is an extension of your voice your personality your identity and you’re Interacting with others to create More than the sum of just the four or five people or the big band or it creates something a we space of sorts And it’s a very powerful thing. So psychotechnology. I think is a crucial concept All right, so now we’re going to transition okay So we are now going to deal with the other aspect Race Okay. Now philosopher Roy Boscar had a term that I think sums up this process that we see in the slide Demi-reality He framed Demi-reality as Demi-reality as Disunity within different and he wrote that then we realities generate dualism alienation fragmentation and it’s dominated by hate split fear Divisiveness and again alienation. Okay, so to me That’s what this Serious process is done. Now we’re gonna begin in the lower right with racialization Which is the process through which so-called races are brought into the social political and social economic sphere Now we have to admit the Categorization that you know is a necessary aspect of our cognitive makeup, you know, we got a categorized things We have to create we create objects, you know, so this is this is a part, you know, you talked about this Now before racialization People were categorized and classified of course, but in terms of being a part of families tribes clans religions nation But with the advent of racialization Which was nascent in the 1500s emergent in the 1600s and codified in North America in the 1700s the infinite range of human variability Was reduced to black and white and the supposed borders between them became impermeable and rock-solid So racialization has five steps They get this so Carlos foets expert book The Ark of a Bad Idea understanding and transcending race Selection sorting Attribution essentializing and active so first. Yeah, let’s say this again. That was actually selection sorting Attribution Essentializing and acting so I’m gonna go through each Please that’s excellent. Okay, so first so this idea here that I’m talking about I mean this seems to overlap with some of the stuff I’ve read about slavery how slavery You know, it’s endemic. It’s horrible in human history But it’s largely no it’s based on other categories other than what we now typically called race until only Much much later. I could be look at slavery in the Roman Empire. It’s based on you know, if you were conquered by the Romans like and and so we tend to we like we We I want to be really careful there right We the the word slavery comes from slaw, right? Which are white people in Eastern Europe, right? Right because they for a long time were considered the prototypical instinct right of the kind of being that was enslaved, right? And so and that was of course an ethnic Categorization And so it sounds to me like you’re you’re picking up on that racialization is very similar to that kind of work That’s been done in the history of slavery and like director. Am I oh, yes framing this definitely I’ll know that at all. That’s definitely a part of it. I mean, there’s a historical trajectory of the distinction between Slavery in ancient times And and what became the transatlantic slave trade and became shadow slavery where you were literally property Into perpetuity. There’s a distinction. I mean in ancient times in ancient Greece you had you know, you had what citizens and barbarians? Right. So if you weren’t a citizen, you’re a barbarian, you know in basic church, but you had the ability If you adopted and this is not just an ancient time But if you adopt the the ways the beliefs if you espouse, you know that you have an allegiance to a particular Mode or model or culture of the civilization you happen to be in sometimes you can be Accelerated into those cults. Okay. Yes. This was a particularly insidious version of slavery all-slavery look, I mean we had to advance and Developmentally grow beyond The belief that slavery is something of course, unfortunately there still is enslavement in parts of the world Yes, it’s not that’s nice. You know have rose-colored glasses on but we have come quite a long way As as a humanity in terms of that particular issue, okay so I’m gonna go through the five steps of racialization. Please and you just wanted to make sure that It’s a lie definitely. Yeah, so those five steps again are selecting sorting attribution or tributing essentializing and active so first some human Characteristics such as hair texture or skin color is selected as a sign of racial difference Then there’s a sorting of homogenous human subpopulations based on selected distinction such as the lightest skin color to the darkest the most straight hair to the most coil and Being of European descent versus African descent. Okay then attributions of certain traits become Stereotypes where certain talents behaviors and temperaments become racial type Essentialism fall in which those differences become natural biological immutable and hereditary and finally those justify actions in which those so-called racial differences justify unequal tweet treatment Right, right so so it’s important for us to to really be analytical about What these are the processes and the reason I’m going into this level of? granularity is because this is a feedback loop racialization creates the idea that there are racial group in the modern set and then That becomes racism acting and behaving Based on unequal treatment and double standards based on the idea of race and the process of racialization But all are held in place by a racial world You okay? So yes, so like I want great you’re saying a lot and it’s beautiful and I want to I want to go through this Very slowly if you’ll allow I’m glad I did I like yeah, I really want to I really want to participate in this I really want to listen deeply. I want to make sure that I’m understanding I want to respect the courage and the clarity you’re bringing to this. I’m really appreciative of it So thank you right and so like it sounds like I mean so we you know if I were to wear just a scientific hat and I’m not wearing just a scientific hat in this discussion I would say Biologically, I don’t know what you mean by race exactly there. You know there’s there’s continuums and might and And so you know biologists even have trouble these days with species because of ringed species and all that kind of stuff So and then what I hear you saying is okay, but what happens is this process? There’s things that are inevitable human beings are gonna they’re they’re gonna write there They’re gonna select and they’re gonna sort because they have to write world is calm Classify you right right they have to categorize But then there’s an extra dimension and I hear that this that so I take it that you’re you’re not sort of Critical of the first two steps in there because we all have to like yeah I know experiments where you can and you know This has been done where you can put people of different racial groups into a setting and you know sort of challenging some of the implicit Literature and you can get people to override those racial differences by putting them in different cults So you put some of the black people and some of the white people in red shirts and some of the white people and some Of the black people in blue shirts and the red blue shirts become much more important to how people Because that’s how we like we want that way yeah, right? Yeah, and so I take it you’re not Criticizing that but then no I’m not I’m basically stating what the process is Right I do agree that we have to classify in short the question is do we have to put in videos? categorization or that’s what I want to get out that’s what I want to get so so You said something was really powerful there. You said something I hope this is right you said but then what we can do is on top of that which is kind of Inescapable for us as human agents right is we can tell a story of a story that stereotypes, right? People now again, that’s problematic because some stereotypes right are they have a basis in truth They say right well like if I go if I go to Germany I have a stereotype that the Germans are gonna speak German to me It was not like oh my gosh, right? Right, right, right? And this goes to some of the work that my My colleague at the University of Toronto does work in on stereotypes and So again It’s it’s it’s a story of stereotyping and and and I think them and that I think the next and the way that is linked to the next move a centralization right, I think is where I hear that it starts to lose touch with Reality what there it is? Yeah, because that’s where the naturalization and I don’t I don’t mean it in a Scientific sense, I mean that’s where the idea that race is a biological Immutable inherited thing or Quality that you’re born with you’re just born with it. You can’t help it. You’re born that way right, right, so That is because you know within the Academy, of course Essentialism has been you know a part of the in Academy for decades So people but it’s those it’s how those other parts lean into Right, right, right, right. We don’t have to start with essentialism. You start with the process of Doing stuff that human beings just do Yes. Yes. Yes. So I and I forgot to mention the name of my colleague will cunning have okay, but Excellent work on stereotypes And so he makes a distinction also between you know Stereotypes that are Morally innocent than once that have moral consequence. That’s a good distinction. So so I’m taking it so One of what I’m hearing though is this there’s also a vehicle of self deception in here. Oh, yeah, it’s Well, what I mean by that is the slow con right the slow con is I? Move you and each step seems reasonable or or like a sororities argument Can you tell that this difference between red and orange at this place? No this place this but so there’s no difference between red Or you do that course sort of thing is like well, yes You slide in this sense from selection to sorting To stereotyping to something that human beings have which is an essentialist bias that if I have a well-established Category there must be an essence that they remember Right, right, right. I think we’re gonna have to know this is you know s1 and s2 Yes, yes condiment, you know, I think this process becomes part of you know the fast thinking but I think We’ve got to get to a place where we you know Can contemplate and reflect on who we are as human beings? Using slow thinking and yes, and one way of doing that is a concept that I learned from Robert Gilman head of the context Institute and the bright future network He talks about Conovans work in a course that I took Last year and he talks about how you know Object relations and categorization. I mean this is human beings have to do that Yes, but if we use the concept of territory Let’s look at ourselves as territory right where You know you look at you as a human being we are territory So you could we have outlined we have boundaries as individual human being a territory. Yeah graphically has boundaries But there when you go down you get the more you get granular There’s always infinite granularity that you can have the deeper you look so we have to engage in Slow thinking where we yes, you know, we are so much more. This is why I want to point to culture Culture is a rich deep Concept that you know, it takes a minute for people to get But once they get it if you counterposed culture and race and realize how so many of the Biases or what do we call these these these mental traps that we get into Those are biases. I care. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah That’s so yeah, you have all kind of you have all kind of bias And these happens in these lend themselves to the foolishness you and these are counter to the wisdom We’re trying to move towards right? But I think we can use the concept not only of territory because I can talk more about that But I want to get to the concept of worldview But sure because in our very next slide John We use you and your definition of worldview Thank you for noticing me Now see the thing is this is the actual slide we use last September and in other presentations I’ve done I’ve used this slide So a worldview is two things simultaneously one a model of the world and two a Model for acting in that world It turns the individual into an agent who acts and it turns the world into an arena in Which those actions make sense, okay now check out my next move Then I applied this definition from a racial perspective Oh a racial worldview is two things simultaneous a racial model of the world and To a model for acting in that racial world Yes, it turns the individual into a racial agent who acts and it turns the world into a racial Arena in which those actions make sense So I don’t know right about you and the viewers John but to me This is this really demonstrates how in yes race racialization and a racial worldview All foundation for racism how insidious it actually is okay, right? I’m going to go into another this for a quick moment And then because I want to look at racial worldview from someone who wrote She was 90 when she passed away a few years ago Audrey Smedley she’s a anthropologist and She defined racial worldview and she was Carlos Hoyt’s dissertation advisor, okay And she wrote the book race in North America origin and evolution of a worldview. Oh, wow Yeah, yeah, yeah by racial worldview I simply mean believing in acting in accordance with the social convention that people can and should be regarded as as members of one or more of a hands full of Nebulous restrictive and contradictory and conflict things sub species called racist Subspecies, okay so so Now now there’s another graphic that I want to show very quickly because what happens when we do this We end up now take a look at this. Just take a moment to look at this Yes, and now you can see you’re on the black side white side quote unquote The racial worldview. This is the mortar That’s going here all of it. But at the bottom racialization is breaking these groups Into black white Asian, then you have other groups. I’m sorry I got to go back here and what what surfaces you have? You have disparity Inequality you have all kinds of problems That are totally connected to racialization in a racial worldview and then of course you have you know people who want to align themselves with white nationalism and then and Neoconfederate or then you have black nationalists, you know what I mean the idea of of Disabusing oneself from race becomes anathema to people who you know want to hold on to race as a part of the identity And what I say is you don’t have to hold on to race. I’m about these racialization That doesn’t mean I’m giving up culture doesn’t mean I’m giving up rights, right, right, right? I see the move you’re making you’re saying look there’s something historical and Important about people’s identity, but we should understand that in cultural terms not in racial terms And you’re criticizing tell me by being unfair both the left and the right because both sides share the piece of position that race is Essential in some fashion. Thank you that am I getting you you are getting me big time And for those who say races are social construction, I’m going to lean on A phrase that comes from my study of integral theory. I’m a student of integral philosophy That’s true. That’s true, but it’s partial So yes, it is the social construction of sorts But it’s partial because oftentimes when people say it’s a social construction it Allows them to not deal with what I’m trying to get to The question is will you as an individual keep racializing yourself? Racializing yourself Right, right, right Racializing other people let’s say a social construction. Okay, I’ll give you that that doesn’t mean I have to keep racializing myself That doesn’t mean I have to keep raping realizing you and others John You can make a decision make a choice to stop doing that because it’s so it’s bit I and then we tap into pragmatism What are the results have been of the idea of rape and racialization let’s be pragmatic about it I mean yes of Any good that you can say has come out of it and I’m sure some could make it cadence Particularly when they confuse race and culture Yes, the negatives and the deficit way outweigh any positives you might be able to point to So you are I think Again, I should frame this as a question it seems to me so tell me if I’m right sure that you’re you’re proposing there You know in these disputes. There’s something important that people are wrestling about. Yes, namely cultural legacy and identity but that gets confused and Confounded with race in a way that’s often self deceptive and self-destructive It might divide am I parsing this correctly? You deaf you definitely are and I’m not bringing I’m not making a case that we can Just throw out race You know, that’s why I’m actually dealing with it in a kind of a nuanced granular way We need to look at what race is what racialization is what a race to worldview is because all of that leads to racism So yes, let’s look at that but the question becomes what action will you take will you become a Cultural agent in a cultural arena. That’s the question and that’s why I Ended this part of the presentation. I’ll take the slides all So worldview definition from a cultural perspective Yes, cultural worldview is two things simultaneously a Cultural model of the world and to a model for acting in that cultural world it turns the individual into a Cultural agent who act and it turns the world into a cultural arena in which those actions make sense Right, right, right so I’ve been so so this is one of the reasons why I’ve been wanting to To have this series because you didn’t even know it but I’ve been using this in my presentations, man What I am glad That makes me happy because you’re doing good. You’re doing good. Hence, you know to see my seeing my work being Understood and appreciated and taking up into good action On an important issue and I’m gonna again request people watching and listening to this, you know, Greg is bringing nuance subtlety complexity to an issue that Both deserves that and that is often You know polarized into simplistic narratives that remove everything he’s trying to get us like The reason why Greg is being complex It seems to me is because all of these things are confounded and confused and interwoven together It’s like Wittgenstein you have to unwind all this Gordian knot in this, you know this and I think I’m asking for people to be willing to follow and listen the to the whole argument and also set what he’s saying into everything he’s been talking about About black culture and music and democracy and blues and the jazz and the plural best funeral, right? and the Omni-american like there’s a larger context and I will I will I am going to Demonize anybody who got grab some sound bite out of this in order to misrepresent Greg I appreciate that I appreciate that. I don’t think you have to worry about that You get I’d really say that is that I’ve been presenting the thesis of deracialization For going on two years now, and of course people have questions people have objections, of course but anyone who actually will will read or listen to The entire framing that I’m giving yes, yes feel the good faith that I’m attempting to do it with you know There that’s all I’m asking for great. That’s all I’m asking for right? Right. My only concern is people who don’t do that and then think they can represent you and Thereby misrepresent you just by grabbing some black thing some sound bite Which of course is a great temptation on YouTube and social media And so I am exactly requesting for what exactly what you said. Thank I agree with that anybody who you know anybody who steps back and there’s Responsible to the good faith and the sophistication Right that you’re bringing to bear and you’re tapping into you know, you know The important thinkers meet many most of them black in order to make this argument Right, right and so I just I mean I’ve seen I’ve seen some people that I also talk with and they they they get pushed aside When they try to do this and so I think what you’re doing and talking about I Mean, you know, I think it’s the way forward. Thank you. It’s the way familiar with with the Jim Rutt Yes, okay And what it had me on his show and we did an entire series on my awakening from the meeting process I remember that so which we did an episode Jim Rutten I and The phrase I used was the Gordian knot of race. Oh So there you go, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly Exactly. So so I think you’ve already made the case very well, but I want to draw it out so explicitly Again, let’s go back to that foil. I think you’ve already Like demolished it, but here’s your chance to speak specifically to you know You’re not being colorblind. You’re not saying forget history. You’re not saying from get slavery But you’re not saying forget Jim Crow. You’re not saying, you know forget segregation. You’re not saying forget what still goes on Today, you’re right, you know, you’re not saying any of that But you’re saying there is a way to solve it and and that requires Basically Shifting from a racial worldview to a cultural worldview and a nutshell. Yes. Yes Yes Couldn’t have said it better myself Well, I think this very mean I think this and it like I say there’s so much content to that thesis because of the first two Episodes see that’s why I put it in that order. I put it in that order consciously For that very reason. Yeah, right exactly. So there’s so much there now and what you’re talking about Thank you. Thank you. Just you know, I think you know John I want to be respectful of your time and the folks who are watching their time. I know we said three but I Like to do another one if I Let’s do it. Okay, I’m totally it Let’s do a fourth one and we can you know that we can draw we can do more of these drawing things together I feeling the same thing you are like we’ve come to sort of a place of a conclusion, but we need to go back We need to retrospect gather all together Explicate more elucidate more think about potential, you know insightful transfers that come out of this applications, etc, right Count on it Greg will set it up and we’ll do a fourth episode. I really appreciate it John and and the next time we’ll just We’ll literally we’ll play jazz. I’m not gonna I’m not gonna you know, we have any prepared quotes per se I’m not gonna have you know, and we’re gonna be able to swaying together and and and I’m hoping really go from dialect to deal with us. It’s yes I Really want that to okay So I’m gonna give you the last word, but I want to take my last word to Thank you for this episode. Like I say for me I’ve been looking for people to Articulate Exactly what you’ve done I’ve been very very dissatisfied by both the right and the left on this issue Very dissatisfied. Yeah And you know, I think that’s part of my general dissatisfaction with both the right and the left right and You’re and you’re not just the center, you know, you’re moving into a different dimension. You’re not right or left. You’re sort of up Yeah, yes. Yeah, and so I like I I want to thank you for doing that. I have found this personally Very helpful. I have been trying to understand how to tackle this issue in a Metapolitical fashion but without sounding like coarse or Polish Yes. Yes all of that. Yes. I don’t want I don’t want to do either one of those right, and you’ve really I’m gonna pay a compliment to you that many people have paid to me. You provided the Vocabulary and the grammar to think about this. Thank you. I really appreciate that job. I So Any final words from you, right? Sure. I would just say that One as we’ve discussed Off-air that Ultimately, I don’t think our solutions are gonna come ultimately from politics from your political ideology From no partisanship. It’s not gonna come from there You’ve got to be involved in a political process, of course democracy itself Involves, you know, we talked about I didn’t mention this when I went through you we talked about, you know democracy 3.0 and power Is a part of that of that triplet or that that trio of concepts. Yes, you know Participation power and wisdom So we so we so we have to participate in it but ultimately it’s not gonna ask is not coming from there Politics is downstream from culture. So I would just yes, I would just leave you with this concept and my own Self-description of my political stance. I’m a radical moderate I Am a moderate not a centrist, but I’m a moderate in that I have the ability to understand the actual principles of Both side the left and the right because both have principles Yes I’m able to When I’m when I go to the voting booth here in in Connecticut and I’m voting locally I check out what the platform is I check out the person and I voted both Democrat and Republican based on that Yes, but it’s also moderate in terms of the middle path in the middle way Yes, also moderate in terms of I like to moderate conversations and discussions the radical part comes from my view on race I know that the racialization Advocating a non racial worldview or what? Our partner in our work together dr. Sheena Mason calls a racelessness is a these are radical notions because race racialization and racial worldview is the norm and It becomes the norm because we are socialized into Yes Before we develop the critical capacity to look at our belief systems in a Subject object way so you’re not the subject to it and subject to consensus reality and and that version of culture Well, you can say oh Let me look high beliefs. Let me look at and let me exercise agency Let me exercise Disturbing me and make up for myself make up my own mind What I am going to do in relation to these issues in particular race, that’s why I gave a challenge antagonistic cooperation folks who Listen to this should have heard a challenge and the challenge is will you continue to racialize yourself and others? A choice can be made I’ve given you a case. I think it’s not easy It won’t be easy even and when we ended our fourth Conversation I’d like to talk about strategies to do that to actually yes How do we go about doing that and we use the tools and the means? From cultural intelligence to do that. So for example, I I riffed on this a little bit in the second session. I Use phrases like white identified racialized as black so there are ways of Separating yourself the very language we use To that we that reinforces and re-envi and reifies the racial identity We do it unwittingly. There’s no blame there, but there are ways of using language itself Yeah, yeah separate ourselves from that process while still saying that well people are identified as black Or racialized as that see there be the subtleties that we can use when we use language as one of the ways to get from this racial matrix I call it Well and on Langer right makes the distinction in learning between absolute right absolute presentation or absolute learning and conditional learning And she says absolute learning is X X is Y you give the definition Conditional learning is one way you can think of X is as Y It’s got all kinds of evidence that the second conditional Leads people to be better problem solvers more insightful more reflective because the first one shuts down all kinds of Connecting making machinery because it says you’re done Your cognition is done. It’s finished. Whereas if you give a conditional presentation Right your brain basically gets this as marked as I need to connect this I need to reflect on this I need to questions and it fits exactly that that’s one of the things we’ll talk about next time That’s one of the things we’ve got a clock and I’ll also add to that Yes, and There’s the whole yes idea of fixed mindset versus growth mindset Yeah, if it’s black and we talked about the web Yeah, yeah Carol Dwaye fixed mindset says this is the way it is It’s the way it has been this is the way it’s gonna be I can’t change it and that leads to what learn It could lead to learn helplessness Looking at your yes as a victim Whereas a growth mindset says, you know Once frankly John once we learned about the plasticity of the brain That should have knocked out the fixed mindset because that if your bullet if your brain can literally Really? Reform its synapses as You have different ways of seeing if another thing talk about practice of its habits. So yes, these are habits But you can change your habits and develop your new habits You know what I mean? So that growth mindset says hey, that’s more frankly of a heroic Perspective, you know in a positive way you can grow you can learn you can change You don’t have to be staying in and you know where you started you can grow and and and go beyond it Well, we’ll talk about we’ll talk about that and then I want to bring out, you know Something that you’re alluding to Habits and virtue and character and where’s all of that in this discussion? Let’s stop because we’re just gonna keep doing this Or we enjoy the things that each other’s mind yeah too much I know so I’m just gonna thank you and we’ll Everybody’s watching my want to hear more. Yes, you do and we want to do more and we’re gonna do a fourth episode So come and see us there Greg. Thanks again. This has just been fantastic. Thank you so much John. I appreciate