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{{NavBlockDialogs}} <h2>Predicaments</h2> <p class="V">V {{#counter: || set = 0 }} — People talk endlessly about ''problems'', about ''predicaments'' not so much. What's the difference?</p> <p class="R">R {{#counter: }} — Well, problems may be parts of predicaments that we have cut down to a simple causal problem to solve with a series of if-then propositions that work in a sequence.</p> <p class="V">V {{#counter: }} — OK, but what is the predicament?</p> <p class="R">R {{#counter: }} — It is hard to think about predicaments causally, for they arise as complicated conditions. A predicament is a condition that persists through the interaction of many situations, via linkages among them, that make the predicament self-sustaining because action on one part complicates the interactions in other parts.</p> <p class="V">V {{#counter: }} — Sorry, but that's pretty abstract. Can you give an example?</p> <p class="R">R {{#counter: }} — Let's take fire. People have been living with it for many generations, long before history started to be recorded, so many aspects of fire are pretty routine and we deal with them causally—"Here are the steps to build a campfire." But fires in the wild first confronted humans and many other animals with terrible predicaments, and they still do.</p> <p class="V">V {{#counter: }} — Yeah, a friend's family lost their house in one of those fires last summer north of LA. Her parents were lucky to be safely evacuated. As you say, with problems we tend to look for causal solutions—problem, program, implementation. Can we do the same with full predicaments?</p> <p class="R">R {{#counter: }} — I think that is a mistake, although a lot of that goes on, but it leads to action on symptoms that leave the sustaining interactions in operation. To get at those sustaining interactions, people need to develop a relatively sound theory of what is happening, and then they need a commitment to change patterns of behavior to channel and shape the processes underlying the predicament.</p> <p class="V">V {{#counter: }} — Would the predicament of infectious epidemics illustrate what you are saying? Epidemics mystified people in pre-modern times. They would respond in useless ways, often destructive one, scapegoating minorities and the like. In the 19th century, they began to develop germ theory and map contagion. They slowly instituted good water and sanitation systems and changed behaviors against a lot of opposition. More recently people changed behavior with smoking. My grand dad describes how in college, he would smoke a French cigarette, "Galwaz," and everyone would get after him, not because they weren't smoking and he was, but because these cigarettes had an unpleasant, acrid smell!</p> <p class="R">R {{#counter: }} — It's ''Gauloises''. You have the point. To affect a predicament, people need a relatively sound understanding of the underlying interactions sustaining it, and then they need to generate a commitment to alter those interactions, which may be deeply ingrained in the fabric of life.</p> <p class="V">V {{#counter: }} — With these examples, catastrophic fires and epidemics, natural processes largely sustain the underlying interactions. Is that always the case?</p> <p class="R">R {{#counter: }} — Not at all. Humans have a role in those, and other predicaments arise almost completely through the complexities of human interaction. Consider the predicaments arising in civic life from the disruptive effects of social media. Where will those lead? Do we have an adequate understanding of what is taking place to grasp what sustains the disruptions. Those are bad enough, but then we have been making the really unprecedented one—not nature making life difficult for humans, but humans changing the patterns of interaction in the natural world in ways we neither understand nor control.</p> <p class="V">V {{#counter: }} — Oy! Almost a predicament of predicaments, multiple predicaments! Each makes it harder to grasp what we have to do to tamp down their sustaining behaviors. You're suggesting that we have to study here how self-development and liberal learning can support theorizing about these predicaments and perhaps disclose ways to stop sustaining them.</p> <p class="R">R {{#counter: }} — Not {{apts}} alone, for the big predicaments have many complex sides to them. But a strong sense of self-command and autonomy in action have essential parts in generating the civic will to meet historic predicaments.</p> <p class="V">V {{#counter: }} — I suspect you are right about that, but what you mean is not self-evident. Many people will hear it, some happily others, scornfully, as a reason to delay decisive action.</p> <p class="R">R {{#counter: }} — Predicaments can induce significant forms of panic—some leap to do something, anything! right now, while others withdraw, preferring to avoid destabilizing the status quo.</p> <hr> <!-- See also [[Dialog:Predicaments-old]] from late May, 2020. Here: ; V—I'm aware of all that, but that's not my question. What do you mean by ''predicaments'' and why are they important in {{apts}}? : R—OK. I just want to make sure that you understand that a predicament is not just a big or difficult problem. ; V—An example would help. "A persisting condition that sustains itself through the interaction of many situations" is too abstract for me. : R— We usually think of them as something we need to solve. And generally, we have a way of doing that: delimit the problem, work out a course of action that will result in its solution, and carefully implement it. I call that the pragmatic paradigm—problem, program, implementation. If you can name it, you can get advice on solving most any problem for free or a fee. Of course, all these problems are important in our lives, pervasive. But they are not central to self-formation and liberal learning. Yesterday, a friend of turned up his nose when I told him about {{apts}}. He was turned off because a teacher a couple years ago critiqued all the pressure in the culture to change your life. The teacher referred to a book about "anthropotechnics" by a German with an unpronounceable name. He said things here sounded too much like what the book criticized. : Ah, that's Peter Sloterdijk, one of Europe's high-gloss thinkers—2 books a year, thick ones, each with an aura of originality. That ''You Must Change Your Life'',<ref>Peter Sloterdijk, ''You must change your life'', (Wieland Hoban, trans., Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013).</ref> secondhand, leads your friend to distrust {{apts}} doesn't surprise me, although quite possibly we are doing exactly what Sloterdijk calls for at the end. But let's not talk about the book—neither you nor your friend have read it, and I don't like the style—it turns prolixity into celebrity cool. But Sloterdijk points to a problem, the problem of coping with problems, which we should discuss a bit. ; OK, but what do you mean by the problem of coping with problems. As I understand it "anthropotehnics" concerns the amazing variety ways humans go about making themselves human—this cure, that regimen, training, discipline, self-overcoming, perfection, practice, just about all of culture. : Yeah. The need to do things well, adequately, to maintain capacities, to learn, to improve, to overcome difficulty pervades subjective experience. But the effort to help another do something well and so on may simulate the outcome while doing little or even degrading the person's capacity to do it. ; Um. I need an example. : In the early 1990s, three friends and I gave a conference presentation at Epcot Center in Florida. We had some time to kill between sessions and went out nearby to the modest lake—"The World Showcase". Architectural clichés of ten or so countries surrounded it, each a visitor center that one could walk or take a little boat to. At the edge of the quay, a picturesque sign caught our attention—"Kodak picture spot". It marked exactly where someone should stand to have the structures emblematic of Germany as the background of a snapshot. ; Oh, yeah! It's still around, now called [[Picture Spot]]. My Dad used it planning to take my little sister to Magic Kingdom. There's now even sample photos posted to prompt people how to pose! It probably generates cost-effective advertising for Disney but I doubt it improves people's capacity to compose good pictures on smart phones. : Not to pick on Disney, but we do an awful lot to improve the outcome of what people might want or need to do in ways that leave their capacities for it unchanged, or even degraded. ; That's true, everything seems pre-selected and highly captioned. But how does all that differ from what {{apts}} is doing? : That's a tough question that we need to keep asking ourselves. To go back to my Epcot Center moment, I like to think we are offering open tickets to Europe to anyone and all, not telling them where to stand to take a picture of their kids pointing to a simulacra of a German village. ; I get bugged by the exploitation in so much of the "let us help you" assistance. Picture spots make sure that visitor's mementos make Disney look good. : Yes. It is important that participants feel encouraged to examine possible ulterior motives, including ones we might be unaware of, so that we can develop ways to minimize their adverse effects. It is also necessary to distinguish between problems and opportunities that we should deal with on {{apts}} and those inappropriate for it so that we can maintain the coherence of the site. ; Do you have thoughts on how to begin that? It seems difficult. A lot of the most important problems and opportunities, for instance, climate change, have multiple dimensions occasioning many operational actions probably outside the scope of things here and some challenges to first-person views of basic human capacities, say how to act reasonably within a very long tie horizon, that might be a major topic for study. : You point the complexities out well. I think the whole area could be developed by asking participants to suggest problems and possibilities for study and having a period for discussing the suggestions and then having a fairly simple process for choosing to put a few of them for active study by the whole community of participants. After a time the results might be more or less archived, but open to further contributions, with a new wave of topics adopted for active study. We should make working such procedures out high on the agenda.
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