On Tu Bishvat 2025, I recall this bit from: The Healing Art of Storytelling: A Sacred Journey of Personal Discovery by Richard Stone: “Just as clear-cutting an old-growth forest leads to a phenomenon called deforestation — the stripping of the landscape of more than just trees — our culture has been devastated by the loss of storytelling as a tool for communicating, passing on values, learning, and, most important, healing. I call it destorification. It’s effect is as devastating as its ecological cousin’s.”
I have recently revised my activism in language, media, and communication studies given my experience in education, research, and writing endeavors. By challenging my colleagues in librarianship to level up as “meta-literacy counselor” who support “wisdom attainment,” I realize that we are not just the "gatekeepers of knowledge" (cf: David Lankes) any longer: we are entrusted with monitoring who accesses the collective lore and the ways in which those narratives constitute our rich cultural heritage and national infrastructure. As such, I continue to assert how the medium is the lesson.
There are numerous unwise patterns throughout human history whereby people like me have been subject to witch hunts, mccarthyism, and (of course) genocide and slavery. These tactics have become more covert as now we are monitored Orwellian style (“Big Brother” is just a camera nowadays: <
https://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm>) because this emerging post-truth reality continues to invite irreconcilable conflicts that are still best described as “destorification” (in the Richard Stone quotation above).
Human learning involves natural negotiations as our efforts allow realistic rewards and punishments as we are experimentally navigating around our places in the world as lifelong learners. Heuristically, we are learning by trial and error. We are adapting and otherwise being shaped by experiences which offer healthier options financially, intellectually, socially, emotionally, culturally, physically, spiritually, etc. Humanity differs in how we express our needs, wants, and desires as an aggregate of learners who are unique in our individual learning styles, preferences, orientations, aptitudes, modalities, etc.
Rational approaches promote conformity, control, and precision which are important considerations for the sake of efficiency. The unfortunate outcome of these tactics can involve seriously unwanted consequences like witch hunts, mccarthyism, and (of course) genocide and slavery. This also includes xenophobia, hate speech, and other unethical, inappropriate, and ineffective uses of the expansive information, media, and technology ecosystem we are constantly negotiating on a daily basis as we seek to fulfill our unchanging needs, wants, and desires both individually and communally.
The uniquely human attributes that make us “bricoleurs” who can negotiate and progress recursively afford us the luxury of delegating mundane “logical” tasks to robotic artificially intelligent machines. This could offer us new opportunities to realign as a pluralistic and meritocratic democracy of lifelong learners who are informed, engaged, and wise participants in a transnational democracy. The progressions that arise from creative thinking usually invite substantial adversity upon initial introduction; our history in the “diffusion of innovation” teaches us that <
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev.soc.28.110601.141051>
Consider our reactions to headlines involving President Trump’s approach to the most contentious piece of real estate in human history: the Gaza strip! Israel is an extraordinary tourist attraction as the religious capital of the world which means it offers tremendous “renovation” potential. Mr. Trump is a savvy businessman who sees potential by rebranding this modern historical “war zone” possibly into a “spiritual resort.” We haven’t had a president with enough chutzpah to attempt to solve this problem in this way; and I remain pretty impressed by his business savvy to approach this complex problem in this way. Only a real New Yorker could come up with such a plan?!
Wising-up from rationality to morality means rethinking the foundations of civilization which includes all the rich and complex narratives about how we should live, love, create, work, grow, and learn as individuals, neighbors, communities, and as a nation. Even if we look at liturgy (both secular and religious, scholarly and popular) as a kind of folklore, the biblical tales teach us a lot about human nature and history. They offer lessons that provide the foundation for moral discernments which means challenging the status quo. Our needs for stability and change require building anew without forgetting the old.
If we want to continue our path into a conceptual age, I believe that successfully addressing these cultural wars will require that we adopt humility and tolerance for ourselves and one another in order to support this proposed progression. While decentralization offers the benefits of conformity, control, and precision; we still need to recognize the failures we've suffered due to our past forms of "essentialist ideologies" in order to foster an appreciation for the lessons offered by the rich and vital cultural capital that surrounds us on a daily basis. These understandings recognize how we learn and grow over time; and that is everything is provisional! If all of life is a stage, then who teaches us how to act? If allyship is just performative, then how do we know who we can trust? If we are overwhelmed by unrealistic expectations, then how do we make healthy choices?
Wising up means recognizing our shared need for re-evaluating our values, learning, and healing endeavors in ways to recognize a shared common good. As a classroom teacher, I have been criticized for holding myself and my students to this standard. Academic leadership hasn’t supported those approaches because our consumer society is selling us another story. Surveillance capitalism <
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26317877221129290>has raised concerns about our vulnerabilities as consumers under a kind of technocratic, plutocratic regime. And I continue to hope that Mr. Trump will help us wise up rather than fostering a descent into another industrial age.
Thank you for reading; and, as always, please be well.
-Dina (she/they)
Dina L. Hornreich, MS, MLIS
linkedin.com/in/dina-hornreich-113a79283
medium.com/@dina-hornreich
hornreichdina AT gmail.com
413-315-0485
c/o FOH & CSO @29 Industrial Drive East, Northampton, MA 01060
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Advocating for better consumer safeguards and sustainable
economic reform in the age of surveillance capitalism for "wising up" from rationality to morality in this emerging "Conceptual
Age."
Stopping the epidemics of misinformation, disinformation, & malinformation (propaganda)
from disrupting our information, media, & technology (IMT) ecosystems by
facilitating the effective, appropriate, & ethical comprehension/production
of IMT artefacts on our journeys toward integrative recovery & holistic
wellbeing.
Facilitating the acquisition of lifelong
literacies, instead of reinforcing the perception that "natural
vulnerabilities" are "permanent deficiencies," as a community of
learners struggling to fight the onslaught of unhealthy messages
generated by practices which condone/promote the exploitation
of typical human fallibilities reinforcing the greedy, violent, and
misogynistic approaches of a plutocratic tyranny who resorts to
criminalizing, pathologizing, and otherwise blaming the victims of their
wanton ludicrousness.
Alerting
consumers to the impact of numerous illusions and other deceptive
efforts that turn our individual differences into manufactured
deviations (and other forms of "learned helplessness"); thereby
revealing systemic injustices that are perpetuated by ongoing
inequitable power dynamics (i.e. colonialism) and other accessibility
barriers to the basic resources that support our universal human needs,
wants, & desires.
Building
a taskforce of nonviolent communicators who are:
- Promoting an informed, engaged, & wise global citizenry and participatory transnational Democracy. (cf: listography)
- Elevating “Conceptual Age” skills
(design, story, symphony, empathy, play, & meaning) in order to remedy the
shortcomings of residuals from the preceding "Information Age" and
"Industrial Age."
- Preventing media pollution,
information disorder, & “techno-lust” from further disrupting our social,
cultural, political, & economic ecosystems.
- Championing mindful
“meta-literacies” (i.e. becoming adept bullsh*t detectives) involving the
creation, selection, organization, presentation, diffusion, consumption, &
preservation stages for "processing" IMT artefactual innovations.
- Adopting the principles of "Data Feminism": Examining power; challenging power; elevating emotion & embodiment;
rethinking binaries & hierarchies; embracing pluralism; considering context; and
making labor visible.