Beautiful

"My emergence as a unique individual with my own identity began in the ovaries and testes of my parents when they themselves were embryos in the grandparental womb. The events occurring then were in themselves linked via a continuous thread back through successive ancestral germ lines to the emergence of humanity itself. Just as anthropologists cannot define an exact and absolute point during evolutionary time when our ancient ancestors became human, so I cannot define any single developmental transition at which I became an individual with a clear identity. The evolution of humans and the development of my identity are both continuous processes." (Johnston, 1989, p. 41)

"Surprising parallels can be drawn between the notion of an organism as a stream and phenomena which arise in the study of water. For example, continual movement can give rise to a form which appears static: '...when a wave appears behind a stone in a stream, a form is all the time being created out of movement, with new substance constantly flowing through it. This is an archetypal principal of all living creation - an organic form, in spite of continuous chemical change, remains intact.'" (Schwenkk, 1990, p.33)

"Behavior is a difficult subject matter, not because it is inaccessible, but because it is extremely complex. Since it is a process, rather than a thing, it cannot be held still for observation. It is changing, fluid, evanescent, and for this reason it makes great technical demands upon the ingenuity and energy of the scientist. But there is nothing essentially insoluble about the problems which arise from this fact." (Skinner 1953, p. 15)

Johnston, J.M. (1997). The place of behavior analysis in the academy. Behavior and Social Issues, 7, 99-101.
Schwenk, T. (1990). Sensitive chaos. London: Rudolf Steiner.
Skinner, B.F. (1953). Science and Human Behavior. New York: Free Press.

ABA Phoenix 2009 & other recent occasions

A literally FANTASTIC time was had by all! Great talks, reunions, learning and leisure. What more could you want? My cat had a good time in my absence, too. Also attached are pics from this year's scholarly visits - Dr. Neuringer and Dr. Sidman. What honor!

To my fellow Christians:

Never be satisfied with innocence


I don’t pretend to know the reality of all I see around me. I am a simple creature striving vainly for understanding and wallowing in the care that is so intimately a part of my existence. Were I to gamble on the fact, I would bet that few of you are more certainly enlightened, because of all we have in common, our ignorance remains the most obvious.

Though I am thus under qualified for all judgments, the care that I mention leads me to call to each of you and beg you to consider how insubstantial are our typical concerns. We focus our passion on the cleanliness of our own lives; do we see a widely useful thing in so restraining our standards? Would we take comfort in the despair of the world if once we could show ourselves to be innocent of it? Do we enjoy struggling with a goal both impossible and ineffective?

I am a ridiculous creature, and though I and a handful of others share a curious affection for that creature, I find either the state or the fate thereof lacking in substantial consequence. Shall we as a brotherhood of believers put our energy into purification of ourselves (these silly monkeys!) with the measuring stick of ten simple rules which, even were they even all obeyed by each of us, would not solve our larger, more pressing problems? Why? For heaven? For hell? Forget them – they can’t touch our current concerns. Can’t we put our substantial human potential for progress to work with the ills and pains (and delights!) of this world quite apart from such childish and selfish worry?

If I am damned or responsible than such a fact remains inconsequential. The world does not change through either blame or exoneration; therefore these things are useless and lame. If we as a species and as a people can make the ongoing labor of life for all dear creatures on earth into something better – not in the spiritual sense but in the human one - what do we wait for? Our religion has tried to ideologically align personal spiritual security with community good. Obviously, it’s not working. It’s even often counterproductive. It’s time for pragmatism.

I call on us to forget ourselves. Our innocence is not so important as our passion, our reason, and the useful action to which we put them. Only then can we grow beyond ourselves. Only thus will we matter. We must stop worrying about ourselves – worry about the world around us! Without it, we are nothing. We talk so much about service! What does that have to do with a soul? Let us act as though we knew we were damned. Let’s make the fact count to the good of those around us. This is our only choice. Do not save yourself – it’s an imaginary task. If humans have no other strength, at least we can at times try something else when one thing doesn’t work. It’s time for change. It’s time to grow beyond dogma and mystery and security. Shall we try?

Alone

Have you ever been alone? I mean truly alone. It’s there that one finds oneself. It’s there that the truth rises like bile in the throat – the reality of the animal reaching only for itself. We’ve never been there, to the horizon. It’s not a place, but it’s easy to believe in the direction.

It’s the others, painting in subtle tones with the casual glance and the slight smile – the dance is for them and gyrates one step beyond the pride that denies it. Self-isolation doesn’t work. The very ridiculousness of the idea reminds me of a bearded youth from another life, long hair tickling his chin, visage set, focused, pinched with pained introspection. “The entire summer alone – I need to meditate, I need to think”. Oh how he would announce it, how he would position those both close and far to watch and wait on the edge of our seat to see what bit of wisdom our beloved would emerge with… as we conducted his isolation from outside his walls.

Even were it real, escape from all musicians would seem a foolish wish for any instrument, especially one badly tuned and never played. But what about the occasional fool?

The escape comes from pain – the flight from the deep and well-deserved humiliation of exposure conducted over and over again. When the feeling starts swirling the liver and the lungs into a tightly wrung wad, which rises slowly and gaseously to the head, the running starts. Knowledge of transparency doesn’t stop it. Resonance between impassioned exposure and reflexive isolation achieves neither privacy nor trust. For one spark of life, “alone” approaches closer than ever before, bringing the animal at last to the forced narcissism of the detached. Can I live for those who stay away when I push?

To love from the safety of the shadows seemed noble enough to a youth who would use the twist as an excuse for her cowardice. Some cycles build momentum until they become permanent crutches.

The deprivation creates ridiculous despairs. Gone are the haughty damnations of vanity when once the sheer torture of inadequacy brings the most dignified to their knees to beg in vain for the beauty they believe they cannot emulate.

Through the grind and twist, on the other side of the looking glass, Alice may see a spark – it’s the later and stronger reason to push away, to isolate, to groan. The spark is at times more sought than glances, than laughter, than friendship. It’s powerful enough to make delightful that silly and ineffective ache that comes to announce its imminence. The addiction of it inspires gratitude to the beloved who allow us to retreat into it again and again – we owe much to those would fail to begrudge us our delusion as they wait with open arms outside our walls.

And it creates the paradox of the dupe: I want nothing of you until I’ve learned not to want you.

Best mustered response to a dumb question someone asked me : why are you a democrat?

Why am I a democrat? Honestly and anticlimactically, my relationships pushed me into the distinction. Because of my individual affections and socially-mediated values, I often tend to hold opinions and ideas that rhyme nicely with the Democratic Party’s particular brand of ideology. Officially registering my name according to this tendency allows me to vote in at least one primary. This may be un-American of me to suppose, but I really don’t think that my opinions are autonomous nor that they spring from my properly individualistic existence like a magical snake-in-a-can. If such really was the nature of ideas concerning groups of people and politics, then such ideas might be less useful as tools of social consequence.

I will not postulate (by any stretch of the imagination) that the Democratic Party somehow fights for my values or holds the key to successful government. To me, each party seems to exist largely to compete with the other in the public limelight. The cognitive dissonance that I get when trying to imagine a particular party's set of postulations as anything approximating a system of internal consistency makes me reel. The idea, for example, that the definition of protected life should be expanded sufficiently to render abortion into "murder" but narrowed enough to consider capital punishment "justice" gives me just the sort of laughter that a disappointed idealist might valuable for its intrinsic ability to dull disappointment and keep the door to optimism open.

All that aside, I do think that the Democratic Party shows great promise in many areas, and not least in its newly elected president. This man has ridden the party’s tide of necessary group-think to a position where he may be able to break the poisonous and cyclic troubles that have arisen from that problematic system in the past. He may yet demonstrate to us that while the human structure upon which politics rests may be less than honest or ideal, a particular kind of leader can still use it to be effective. I hope he continues the trend and establishes this much-needed precedent for progressive leadership. His many gestures of reconciliation to political opponents hearten the young spirit who hopes for such things.

I do hope that he and others succeed wildly. Not least among the social pressures that keep me a registered democrat are those distant interactions between constituent and representative. If those that we elect give me good reason, I will remain a democrat. Recognizing the weight of the causation in the case of that eventuality and its alternative, I can only hope that I will remain a democrat for some time to come.

why care?

The ironic thing about care: affective and effective motivation may sometimes fall into mutual exclusion. On the one had sustained emotion indicates (though probably doesn't cause) a situation where behavior will be controlled by certain outcomes. So vital is the state where we may move with great passion toward those interests that our human affections support! On the other hand, the same scenario might mean that the "self" will revert to coercive strategies when progression toward the "desired" fails or slows. How many of us have ruined our most avid cares with the destructive power of dread and desire? How intimate is escape with fulfillment?

I fail yet to discern a fault line between the want and the successful reward (success defined as controlling of the organism and adaptive to the beloved), though the world might yet be holding it firm and still and uncaresssed. I feel the tingling desire to touch it - to dance in understanding rather than blindness with the one that lends "meaning" to the other. Sort of a Russian doll game. One can sympathize with the mystics when such paradoxes arise.

As always, sensitivity to incremental pleasure nicely swells to the exact proportions of the void. Find a place where care controls (or is co-controlled) in one direction only - find the contingencies that not only liberate us from desire but also bestow upon us the single-minded ecstasy of the fact: a rare world is ready for revolution but now is, irrespectively, always the time for better in every frame. (Oh my little animal! - At the least here grows your comfort if not also your answer: the dynamic flow of a fourth dimension and its parent pressures... the cataclysmic fluid that comes from that sacred union... it is evolution and motion itself, not the forms that appear to make it up. Transformation: the illusion and the fact and the chaos - that is my life. We are each a population and a wave. I wish I could tell them that time didn't chain us as we always thought it did. We can each anticipate with every motion the approach of the sweet consummation of every inevitable reinforcement, and thereby will each moment be filled with the power of that selector. And each moment we can meet a new animal.)

I've come to realize that many tears are to be tasted and kissed with loving gratitude. As always, the form of a thing has little importance. It is function that is life. And transformation. Always.

mine mine mine

The root of desire is positive. The painful bits arise only from the absence (or a negative image of a scant presence) of that which is amazing to us. Whenever I therefore feel the want of a thing, I need only focus on the few bits of that thing which do presently contact me - something I do or some stimulation that occasionally contacts me. Were there none, I could not desire, and so the desire acts as a signal to find them. There may be not much more than a memory to turn to, but when the covert nonverbal dialog focuses exclusively thereupon, the lightness that comes from desire fulfilled is mine.

And what if through repeated practice, the memory is worn out, changed, tainted? The beauty of pure tragedy is that one must lose all sense of the thing lost before it is truly gone. At that point, the one who suffers the loss cannot suffer, because there is no indication remaining that anything at all is missing. If it changes, one can only hope that what remains is less than the feeling of something forgotten.

The choice, should one have multiple practiced approaches available for execution, is between systematic destruction of our contact with that which we love, or the toleration of some pain that comes before we can isolate and preserve what we have of the beloved. The first is oblivious tragedy the second self-controlled optimism.

Love for Last Fruits

Some of those who think of God find Him to be an acceptable endpoint, as though the caricature of the universe somehow explained it. What drives us mad, though, is not the lack of meaning (because what the hell is that, anyway?) or the cruelty of a confusing universe. Why do we care what we name “what is,” since it changes the system at hand not at all? Why do we want to solve a problem before we have one? We cannot establish inconsistency between what we know and what we don’t know. If we’re left without a touchstone, we’ve only technically come back to where we started: the inescapable experience that leaves us with the ecstasy of response, the loneliness of biologically intrinsic isolation, and the driving need to believe in an autonomous reality that we can only ever infer. And what do we do with what we started with? We can ignore it or try to understand it or simply persist amid one great silent scream. We arrange the concepts and rearrange them. We elaborate and simplify. We decide we can use it to know more, and then we decide we can’t know more at all. We adopt new values and call new things good. Now it’s survival, now it’s peace, now it’s power, now it’s parsimony, now it’s logic, now it’s lawfulness and empiricism, and above all it is our own center. But we never contact that thing that we crave - the autonomous authority to verify the absolute verity of our very best assumptions. So we judge, we guess, we test, we believe, and above all we change. Those of us who can meet the universe and trust it to speak honestly with us must walk another new circle in the muck, with no more reason to call it better than any other road to nowhere. But we hope for somewhere; we hope beyond hope that hope is enough to keep us going and that there is a world that guides us. In essence, our lives and our strength is built on crazy hope. It’s not that we have nothing left to lose; it’s that we hope that we have it, we hope to name it and understand it, and we hope it is at all.

A true skeptic must embrace the possible, and in so doing risk the invalidation of all, while paradoxically believing that some level of understanding is possible and that some level of empirically-based selection of ideas is useful and progressive. It’s an invitation not from the vine to the branches but from the rock to the sculpture: to rest and rot on passions enflamed by impossible hope and the never-ending pursuit of an invisible lover. I like it that way.