The Disruption Gospel: A Bill of Goods

Every age has a theory of rising and falling, of growth and decay, of bloom and wilt: a theory of nature. Every age also has a theory about the past and the present, of what was and what is, a notion of time: a theory of history...Our era has disruption, which, despite its futurism, is atavistic. It’s a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse, an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and shaky evidence.

Jill Lepore has a good piece in the New Yorker on the problematic assumption that innovation or ‘disruption’ is necessary and virtuous.  Her point that the evidence on which the problematic assumption lies is flimsy should confirm any thinking person’s suspicions that the intellectual drivel coming out of Silicon Valley is self-interested, demonstrably wrong, and socially dangerous.  In this regard, Lepore’s observation that the innovation ‘gospel’ is in a fact a secularized (or material) faith is apt.  Disruption for disruption’s sake makes no more rational sense than conservatism for conservatism’s sake.  The ideas of disruption or conservatism only make sense or are supportable when they are instrumentalities that increase or safeguard human flourishing.

Our experience in the world is just that:  experience.  Hence, any school of thought, ideology, philosophy, etc. that purports to have answers to the human condition must be judged pragmatically:  does the proposed action or rule increase or protect human flourishing?  If it does, then the action or rule should be adopted, regardless of whether the action or rule is intellectually consistent with an overarching school of thought, ideology, or philosophy, etc.  Belief is not betterment no matter how strong the belief.  Lepore succinctly and delightfully points out what the innovation gospel conflates, “[T]he world may not be getting better and better, but our devices are getting newer and newer.”  Just because someone in Silicon Valley says newer is better, does not make it so.

Lepore most discerning argument against disruption is the most damning:  disruption is a self-fulfilling and inherently circular prophecy.

When the financial-services industry disruptively innovated, it led to a global financial crisis.  Like the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the meltdown didn’t dim the fervor for disruption; instead, it fueled it, because these products of disruption contributed to the panic on which the theory of disruption lies...

It doesn’t explain change. It’s not a law of nature. It’s an artifact of history, an idea, forged in time; it’s the manufacture of a moment of upsetting and edgy uncertainty. Transfixed by change, it’s blind to continuity. It makes a very poor prophet.

Why would we accept a school of thought or an ideology that led to a crippling recession and continues to produce billionaires who claim to know the solutions to all of our problems so long as the solutions involve less regulation, less worker protection, less corporate taxation, less income redistribution, and more privatization of public goods?  For example, Facebook is entertaining, but hardly necessary.  If that is the case, why would anyone think the code writer behind the company would have anything particularly useful to say about public education?  Mark Zuckerberg has no education bona fides.  He is just a citizen and his voice should only count as much as any non-expert citizen.  And yet, his voice counts much more than the average citizen and his gospel is clear:  disrupt everything so long as the disruption is consistent with my vision of how the world works which is based the serendipitous conditions that led to me founding a successful multibillion dollar diversion.

This isn’t to say Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to improve public education is disingenuous, simply that it is dangerous, based as it is on the gospel of disruption, to which he subscribes.

Once more Lepore:

Innovation and disruption are ideas that originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business.  People aren’t disk drives.  Public schools, colleges and universities, churches, museums, and many hospitals, all of which have been subject to disruptive innovation, have revenues and expenses and infrastructures, but they aren’t industries in the same way that manufacturers of hard-disk drives or trucks or drygoods are industries.

The disruption gospel celebrates failure, but is this appropriate for public education?  Do we continue to disrupt the education of our students in the hopes of finding a silver bullet that doesn’t exist?  And what do we do with the fodder of disruption, with the millions of students subject to the whims of billionaires and their policy-making lackeys?  What do we do with the students who fail?  How shall they wear this badge of honor  (“When a startup fails, that’s a success, since epidemic failure is a hallmark of disruptive innovation”)?  

Read Lepore and don’t drink the self-interested, disruption-flavored Kool Aid coming from Silicon Valley.  It is bad for jobs, schools, and the economy.

A Constant, Blinding Rage

I spend a fair amount of time on longform.org because it is a great resource for finding high quality, long form journalism.  One of the things that has been particularly rewarding lately has been reading the James Baldwin essays that the site has posted which have been thought-provoking and have led me to contemplate a number of things.  First, I consider myself a literate individual with a decent grasp of American history and literature.  However, reading James Baldwin has demonstrated that I am both less literate than I thought and have a more incomplete grasp of American history and literature than I previously supposed.  Second, reading Baldwin has demonstrated that despite having made some progress toward becoming a more egalitarian and less oppressive society, that progress has been depressingly small.  Third, reading James Baldwin often puts me in the mode of a spectator, simply observing the deftness and power of his language.  The man wrote with remarkable power, poignancy, and perception.   

The most recent essay I read is “From the American Scene: The Harlem Ghetto: Winter 1948.”  In it, Baldwin tackles a number of issues involving the experience of being a “Negro” in America.  Toward the end he makes a couple of observations that are worth repeating because they are accurate and powerful.  He writes that “oppression – the social and political optimists to the contrary – does not imbue a people with wisdom or insight or sweet charity:  it breeds in them instead a constant, blinding rage.”  He is, of course, speaking of the African American experience.   As noted above, it is peculiar that I considered myself literate when I was exposed to no such perspective.  I carried an enormous amount of passion when I was young for justice and equality and would rage against the excesses and inequities of the farce known as Reagonomics; nevertheless, the experience that stirred my passion was not “oppression” of the sort Baldwin describes in the essay.  While Reagonomics undoubtedly sanctioned inequity and excess, my complaint in truth was one of quantitative degree.  I looked like the very opponents with whom I argued.  I debated Paul Ryan (yes, that Paul Ryan) in AP History class and realistically the only difference between myself and Paul was and is familial wealth.  Redistribute a bit here and there, luck out a bit here and there, and our positions could be flip-flopped.  My arguments were of a vertical sort, addressing the unfair quantitative differences separating people.  There was in me no “constant, blinding rage.”  I could not conceive of such a thing.  Despite my youthful radicalism, I was at base optimistic.  Things would be better if only we just shared the wealth more equitably.  Unfortunately, redistribution is not the answer to oppression (witness the blinding rage stirred by the image of the “black welfare queen”). 

I retain a sort of optimism, though one measured and realistic, tempered as it has been by time and experience.  One such experience adding nuance to my perspective has been greater exposure persons of African American descent, among others.  Coupled with reading Baldwin (and other African American writers), this exposure has opened a window on a part of the American experience to which I had previously been blind.  I was always against and horrified by racism.  Nevertheless, I could only grasp racism as an intellectual concept, as a category that was like class, which could be ameliorated through quantitative means. 

My son is completing second grade and many of his classmates and friends are African American.  They are, like all of his classmates, funny, delightful, mischievous, ornery, regular, goofy, serious, brilliant, difficult, easy, etc.  In short, they are regular kids.  However, I fear that my son’s classmates and friends will be, if they have not already been, subject to the oppression about which Baldwin writes.  Perhaps it will not come in the form of abject poverty and overt discrimination.  It will however, come in some form, be it traffic stops that happen simply because they are black and driving or the palpable discomfort many white people will express simply because they are young and black or the condescension of those who will assume that their achievements were not wholly “earned” because they are black and must have gotten some affirmative action or something or the razor’s edge they stand on as adolescents between freedom and incarceration for doing things that would just be stupid things if they were melanin-challenged and living in a suburb.  Oppression, I fear, will come.  In this respect, I wonder how far we have come, if at all from Baldwin who, in 1948 wrote,

I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life.  All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand, and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.

I look at the boys and girls with whom my son goes to school and I am furious that any single one of them has been or will be irreparably scarred by the conditions of his or her life.  I am furious that I went 40 years before I began to understand in a visceral way that being “black” is not a class category or even a race (as the term is ordinarily understood) but instead is a category of power(lessness).  I am grateful to have encountered James Baldwin on longform.org, but I am furious that I did not encounter him sooner as a mandatory part of my education.  I think every person would do well to read Baldwin and allow his words to percolate and sink in, to consider whether the world about which Baldwin wrote is so different from our own, to consider whether she has been complicit in perpetuating the power differential that causes oppression, to consider whether there is something he can do to change the power differential, to consider whether we want to live in a country where persons deemed “black” are irreparably scarred by the conditions of their lives, to consider how she can fight oppression so that hope and possibility and ordinary striving can “replace constant, blinding rage.”  I leave you with these words from Ta-Nehesi Coates and Lyndon Johnson:

“Negro poverty is not white poverty,” President Johnson said in his historic civil-rights speech.

Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it.