Author: Sam

I write books and talk about stuff.

The Art of James Baldwin

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How do you develop a healthy sense of self when the society into which you’re born has been constructed to deny your very identity?

This is America’s inconvenient truth, the unwanted legacy of the Peculiar Institution, and the fly in the buttermilk of every Utopian American myth and storyline since our founding. And throughout our short and tumultuous history, perhaps no artist has better captured the knotted pathology that has ensnared White and Black America in an intimate dance of mutual self-destruction than a slender, bug-eyed boy from Harlem named James Baldwin.

He was born between the wars to a poor mother in a crowded family. As a child he struggled under the critical eye of his stepfather, a man Baldwin felt had been “defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.” As a young man he came of age alongside the growing resistance of the Civil Rights Movement, a period in which he recognized himself as “a kind of bastard in the West.” And over the course of his life — and a career that spanned six books, three plays, and scores of essays, book reviews, and electric public talks — James Baldwin became a witness to the destructive power of our racist myth-making, and the redemptive power of our capacity for love and reconciliation.

Throughout his life, Baldwin questioned how his fellow Americans could develop a healthy sense of identity in a society that spent so much energy cultivating an image that was not grounded in reality. “What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors,” he wrote. “If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations. 

“We made the world we’re living in, and we have to make it over.”

To make the world over, Baldwin urged us to fearlessly confront the ways in which the current racial structure was preventing all Americans, oppressor and oppressed, from discovering who we were. “One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds,” he wrote. “Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves.” 

Black people (or, more specifically, the people in American culture that have been defined as “Black”) have always been regarded by White people (or, more specifically, the people in American culture that have chosen to define themselves as “White”)  as caricatures, not human beings. But one can only begin to recognize another’s humanity “by taking a hard look at oneself.” 

To recognize one’s true identity as an American, therefore, requires recognizing the full weight of our racial history — no matter how painful — and the full scope of the ways our racial fantasies and attendant myths have shaped the construction of both our individual and shared identities.  “We take our shape within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth,” he wrote. To believe oneself to be White or Black is to deprive oneself of a viable identity. What binds us together is not these artificial categories of social construction, but “our endless connection with, and responsibility for, each other.” 

“If we,” he wrote in 1962, “and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others — do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.

“We are walking in terrible darkness here, and this is one man’s attempt to bear witness to the reality and the power of light.”

 

The Science of Feedback Loops

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Our world is made of circles: 

Living and dying. Energy and entropy. Cause and effect. 

Why, then, do we so often see straight lines?

According to systems theorist Peter Senge, “one of the reasons for this fragmentation in our thinking stems from our language. Language shapes perception. What we see depends on what we are prepared to see.” And Western languages, with their subject-verb-object structure, are biased toward a linear view. 

“If we want to see systemwide interrelationships,” says Senge, “we need a language of interrelationships, a language made up of circles.”

This is the language, and the science, of feedback loops.

Most commonly, we use the word feedback to describe the process of gathering opinions about ourselves — all too often, unidirectionally (“How did I do?”). In systems thinking, however, feedback is a broader concept that means a reciprocal flow of influence. 

We are always a part of the process, in other words, and never an impartial observer. 

Everyone shares responsibility for the problems created by the systems they inhabit. 

And every influence is both cause and effect.  

This represents a profound shift in awareness, one that requires us to acknowledge that we are both influenced by and influencing our reality (and one another’s) all the time. 

Feedback loops provide a language to map and explain that activity, biologically.  

There are two types of loops, the first of which is called regulatory or negative feedback. The balancing feedback these loops provide exist whenever and wherever there’s a goal-oriented behavior required.  The work of a thermostat is an easy example — but so is the myopia of a school district oriented around its test scores. 

In these sorts of systems, if the goal is one you like, you’ll be happy — and if it isn’t, you’ll be thwarted at every effort to change things until you either change the goal or weaken its influence. 

Negative feedback loops, therefore, keep systems on track once the course has been established, and use information to help the system achieve its predetermined outcomes — even if those outcomes are not explicitly named or understood. 

This sort of system is great for machines — and lousy for human beings.

But there is a second type of feedback loop, positive or amplifying. These loops use information differently — not to maintain the status quo, but to notice something new and amplify it into messages that signal a larger need to change.

Positive loops do not promote order, but disequilibrium, which is the hallmark of a true living system — to continuously import energy from the environment and export entropy in order to constantly change and grow. Our understanding of them grows out of Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine’s work on thermodynamics, which demonstrated that, prior to the conventional wisdom up to that point, disequilibrium is in fact the necessary condition for growth in a living system. 

As he explained, they’re called dissipative structures because of their paradoxical nature — they give up their previous form(s) in order to become something new, over and over. This is why they’re called self-organizing systems. As Margaret Wheatley puts it, “The viability and resiliency of a self-organizing system comes from its great capacity to adapt as needed, to create structures that fit the moment. Neither form nor function alone dictates how the system is organized. Instead, they are process structures, reorganizing into different forms in order to maintain their identity.”

They are, in other words, precisely what our human systems are not — and need to be. 

Adaptive, not rigid. 

Resilient, not stable.

In sum, if stability is the goal, runaway amplification can be very threatening — think of a shrieking microphone — and we may be wise to quell it before our eardrums burst. But if what we seek is something more emergent in its response to new information, positive feedback is essential to life’s ability to adapt and change, whether it’s your own backyard, a healthy workplace culture, or the Twitter storm that helped fuel the Arab Spring. 

It is, quite simply, nature’s way of saying that the system needs to change.

 

The Science of a Murmuration of Starlings

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What words can do justice to the magic of a million birds, flying and weaving as one? Improvisatory choreography? Elegant chaos? Symphonic cacophony?

There is no familiar way to make sense of this natural phenomenon — both what starlings do and how they make us feel when we see them.  Yet the flocking behavior of the birds the ancient Romans believed foretold the will of the Gods — indeed, the word auspicious comes from the Latin auspicium, or “divination by observing the flight of birds” — is a natural manifestation of a set of principles for organizing complex behavior,  and an observable phenomenon that runs counter to the way we human beings have made sense of the world for as long as anyone can remember.

Starlings are native to several continents, although North America is not one of them.  Back in 1890, however, a Shakespeare enthusiast decided that all birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays should be brought to North America (the starling makes its star turn in Henry IV, Part 1). His idea worked — a little too well. From an initial group of 100 birds, the starling population in North America now tops 200 million. And it is the behavior of each bird in those massive, undulating flocks that makes the starling so notable — and, for some, so magical. 

Almost a century ago, the British ornithologist Edmund Selous asserted that these “handsome, lively, vivacious birds” were telepathic. Today, the biologist Rupert Sheldrake suggests that starling behavior is an example of his hypothesis of morphic resonance, or the notion that the laws of nature are “more like habits, ones in which each individual inherits a collective memory from past members of the species, and also contributes to the collective memory, affecting other members of the species in the future.” And yet beyond these appreciations and speculations, we have lacked the ability to concretely explain how a murmuration works — how one million individual creatures can dart and soar in self-organizing synchrony . . . until now.

Thanks to the work of two separate studies from 2013, we now know that individual starlings all obey the same few flight rules:

Watch your seven nearest neighbors.

Fly toward each other, but don’t crowd.

And if any of your neighbors turn, turn with them.

Why do they do this? According to one of the studies, “when uncertainty in sensing is present, interacting with six or seven neighbors optimizes the balance between group cohesiveness and individual effort.” 

By following this rule of seven, the birds become part of a dynamic system in which each individual part combines to make a whole with emergent properties. This collective behavior allows the birds to gather information on their surroundings and self-organize toward an ideal density, one in which optimal patterns of light and dark are produced that can deliver information to the entire flock (and protect them from predators). The closer each bird pays attention, the safer — and more cohesive — the entire flock becomes.

Of course, this sort of swarming behavior is not unique to starlings. Many different animals, from birds and insects to fish and mammals, have been observed in their own form of a swarm. So what can this behavior teach us about ourselves, our organizations, and our ability to change the story of the way we work and learn?

According to Andreas Weber, author of The Biology of Wonder, “the spirit of poetic ecology is the spirit of swarms. To understand the individual, we need to understand its environment, and each through the other. We have to think of beings always as interbeings.

“We are a swarm ourselves,” Weber writes, “and we form swarms. A swarm does not have intelligence; it is intelligence. In this respect, a swarm (or a murmuration) is an intensified counterpart of ourselves. It is what we are and what we try to imagine with our conscious thinking. Swarms are solidified feeling. The swarm is — and in its being living dynamics and their expression are welded together in one single gesture.”

In other words, a murmuration is more than just a pretty metaphor for thinking differently about organizational behavior; it’s a reminder, in physical form, that our own bodies, cultures and classrooms are governed by the same rules. As Weber puts it, “we see gestalts of the living that behave according to simple organic laws mirroring the great constellation that every living being has to cope with: to persist, to be close to the other, but not so close as to collide with him. These are the principles of poetic forms that are so thorough we can even teach them to a computer. They are the primary shapes of a poetics of living things.”

The Science of Honeybee Democracy

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There may be no creature on earth more vital to our own well-being than the honeybee — the primary pollinator for fifty different fruit and vegetable crops that make up the most nutritious portion of our daily diet.

Less debatable, however, is whether this same bee is also the ideal model for our ongoing efforts to craft a more perfect union — or at least Shakespeare thought so, when he described honeybees as the “creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.”  

But why? And how?

According to the American biologist Thomas Seeley, it’s because of the ways honeybees relate to one another — clearly, constructively, and collaboratively. “The process of evolution operating over millions of years,” he explains, “has shaped the behavior of bees so that they coalesce into a single collective intelligence. Just as a human body functions as a single integrated unit even though it is a multitude of cells, the superorganism of a honeybee colony operates as a single coherent whole even though it is a multitude of bees.”

Although there are many examples of this in honeybee behavior, the most illustrative occurs every year in late spring and early summer, when a beehive is most likely to get overpopulated. When this occurs, roughly one-third of the hive’s bees promptly elect to stay and rear a new queen — who will ultimately be chosen, no holds barred, from the current queen’s few surviving daughters — while the remaining two-thirds politely accept their eviction notices and leave with the old queen to set out into the great unknown and create a new colony.

When they depart, as many as 10,000 honeybees can form a swarm cloud as large as 60 feet across. Yet within minutes, the bees will quickly reassemble somewhere into a beard-shaped cluster, and then hang that way for the next several hours or days, awaiting word, while several hundred of the swarm’s oldest citizens spring into action as nest-site scouts and begin exploring a swath of the surrounding countryside — as large as 30 square miles — for a suitable new home. 

This is, to be clear, a life or death decision. 

To survive in winter, a hive must be able to contract itself into a tight, well-insulated cluster — about the size of a basketball. They must find a home that is high enough to avoid detection by hungry predators. And they must have space for the copious amounts of provisions — i.e., honey, as much as 44 pounds of it — that will have to sustain them until Spring. 

Despite these stakes, the swarm will make this decision within hours, and from as many as 30 different possible nest sites.  And they will do all of this democratically, without any central leader. Indeed, despite her name, the Queen Bee is not the boss of anyone, and a honeybee hive is governed collectively — a harmonious society of hexagonal cells wherein thousands of worker bees, “through enlightened self-interest, cooperate to serve a colony’s common good.” 

In a swarm, this happens when the nest scouts all set out in different directions in search of the perfect new home. When they think they’ve found one, they return to the group and offer a sort of “waggle dance,” a series of movements that outline the central characteristics of the proposed site, and invite other bees who agree on its merits to join them in waggle-dancing.

This continues as more and more scouts return, and gradually, a face-to-face, consensus-seeking assembly takes place in which an eventual winner is democratically determined. “One way to think of a honeybee colony, then, is as a society of many thousands of individuals,” Seeley explains. “But to understand the distinctive biology of this species of bee, it is often helpful to think of a colony in a slightly different way, not just as thousands of separate bees but also as a single living entity that functions as a unified whole.”

In that sense, the collective decision making of a bee swarm resembles an archetypal New England town meeting, one in which each decision reflects the freely given contributions of several hundred individuals; is informed by multiple sources simultaneously, even ones that are widely scattered; and is made by staging an open competition among the proposed alternatives. “In this way, Seeley continues, “the roughly three pounds of bees in a swarm, just like the three pounds of neurons in a human brain, achieve their collective wisdom by organizing themselves in such a way that even though each individual has limited information and limited intelligence, the group as a whole makes first-rate collective decisions.”

(Y)our move, homo sapiens . . .

The Science of Spirals

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“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes!”

— Carl Jung

A Nautilus shell and a Chameleon’s tail. 

The Milky Way and the Double Helix.

A hurricane and a human finger. 

The Parthenon and the Pyramids. 

Or the dive path of a peregrine falcon and the propulsive power of the human heart. 

All are naturally occurring designs, from the macrocosm to the microcosm. And all are based on the same universal form and formula — the ratio of 1.618 — that has been called everything from the Golden Section to Nature’s Secret Code to the language of God itself.

This is the pattern of the spiral — and it is equal parts science and spirituality, and a reminder of the inherent numinosity of the natural world.

Our awareness of the spiral goes back as far as human history can record, from its ubiquity in Stone Age art to its place in Shiva’s hand as a symbol of the instrument of creation. It is the emblem of geomancy, and the path by which we describe either upward or downward growth.

The word itself is a reminder of its deep roots in our collective memory.  In Latin, the word volute, or “spiral movement,” lives on in current words we use to describe the change process itself, from evolution to revolution. In ancient Greek, the word spirare  means “to breathe.” And in Sanskrit, the word for spiral is also the name of a form of yoga that relies on breath to harness the upward, circular path of tantric energy through the body and towards a higher state of consciousness: kundalini.

Despite its mystical origins, however (not to mention its ubiquitous recurrence in nature), the spiral’s spiritual significance has become somewhat lost in our modern world. But it was not lost to past generations — and if the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung is to be believed, its significance still swirls through our collective unconscious. 

The rules for a spiral’s universal design are simple enough: divide a line into two parts, with one of the two parts longer than the other, such that the ratio of the whole line to the longer section is the same as the ratio between the two sections — a number that is almost two-thirds, but not quite. 

.618. 

Also known as phi, this number was integral to the geometry of antiquity. It was used as a basis for the construction of the world’s most sacred buildings. It provided Leonardo da Vinci with the symmetrical structure of the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, and inspired Vincent Van Gogh’s brushstroke patterns in Starry, Starry Night. 

Da Vinci also saw in the spiral’s form and function an unmatched design for the transmission of energy, as demonstrated in his hydraulic devices and Archimedean screws. And after learning from ancient Sanskrit texts about a different form for its expression — one in which the last two integers of a sequence are added together to make the next number, such that the ratio of each term to the previous one gradually converges to a limit of  . . . you guessed it . . . 1.618 — the Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci helped it achieve a wider application.

Indeed, plants, animals, human beings, and the galaxies of the universe all possess dimensional properties that adhere to the ratio of phi to 1. 

Why?

Its beauty and mystery comes from the fact that no one can say for sure. But close observers feel its upward circular path traces a definable pattern of movement that helps govern the one universal constant: change.

As American astronomer Lloyd Motz put it, “The stellar constellations themselves, and the almost mathematical symmetry of the spiral nebulae, are examples of forms and structures that recur time after time throughout the universe, as though there were identical moulds through space into which the matter of the universe has been poured.” 

The great Hungarian journalist Arthur Koestler agreed. “There are many turns of the spiral,” he wrote, “from the slime-mould upwards, but at each turn we are confronted with the same polarity, the same Janus-faced holons, one face of which says I am the centre of the world, the other, I am a part in search of the whole.”

 

A new film about what saves us

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What saves us? What connects us? And what is it that allows people to feel like they belong to something (and/or someone) larger than themselves?

Our newest film for 180 Studio, “Nuestra,” tells the story of how a father’s tragic loss — the death of his teenage daughter — leads to the birth of a school that helps get troubled teens across Puerto Rico back on track, in the name of the daughter whose life could not be saved.

To learn more about this remarkable school, Nuestra Escuela, visit nuestraescuela.org.

WHY DO WE STILL TREAT EDUCATION LIKE IT’S 1906?

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Why do we still use a 19th-century invention— The Carnegie Unit—to determine if our kids are ready to graduate in 2019?

Also, what the heck is a Carnegie Unit?

Watch the latest video in our #AskWhy series  — a series that has now been viewed by more than ten million of you — to find out.

The same way may not be the best way.

Diverse by Design: Episode 3 (Never Teach Alone)

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Powerful learning is a relational act; it never occurs alone.

Why, then, do we expect our teacher to hone their craft in isolation?

In episode 3 of the four-part series, Diverse by Design, we meet two of Crosstown High’s inaugural class of teachers, and learn why they believe that co-teaching is the only way to go. So be prepared: their perspective may change the way you think about the future of learning — and what it will require.