Mushrooms + Realistic + Nature of Technology + Milton Friedman!? + Our Children = Monthly Booklets
Or, a peek at the mycelium.
I am excited to announce I will be releasing a free non-fiction children’s booklet every month for the next year or so. The booklets will be on a wide variety of topics. Everything from how to discuss the complex legacy of an enslaver writing about the unalienable rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to how the most radical action of the LGBTQ+ people in the Stonewall Uprising in 1969 was to act as if they were already free. Like my Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, and Islamic Science booklet in April, they will be written for elementary age children but hopefully interesting for parents as well.
Cover of the June 2023 booklet.
Click the image to sign-up to receive a copy of the booklet when it comes out.
While there will be a variety of topics, the interconnectivity of the topics will be emphasized. For example, I recently learned that the Gay Activist Alliance that was formed after the Stonewall Uprising actually cited Jefferson's Declaration of Independence in the preamble to their own organization's constitution.
But to get to the heart of how I understand this series of booklets, I actually really need to talk about mushrooms.
Mushrooms
Just the tip of the iceberg if the lower part of the iceberg was a massive plant communications network.
Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungus. The real bulk of the fungus, though, is in the massive underground networks of mycelium that also act as the communication network between trees.[1] So when we are taught about the Stonewall Uprising,[2] we tend to learn about it in isolation and not how it was inspired in part by the Civil Rights Movement and included anti-war protesters as well. Likewise, when we learn about the Declaration of Independence, we don't hear about its influence on LGBTQ+ activist in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
There is also another layer to the analogy of mushrooms: teaching myself to edit down without forgetting the network below. As I begin to write these booklets, there is so much that needs to be edited down out of necessity for limitations on my time and children's attention spans. So as I write the booklets, I think of them as the visible mushrooms pointing to the larger network of mycelium below. I will also use these newsletters to include some of the interesting mycelium that I stumble across along the way but cannot fully include in the booklets themselves. After all, the booklets are intended to be conversation starters with your children.
Realistic
There is another word that is important if you want to understand the intent of the booklets: realistic. That's in part because they are not only about current or historical realities, but also possible future realities. We have to be realistic about the current state of our society and work within it to improve it. However, we must also be realistic about preparing our children for the horizon of societal change they will likely experience in their lifetime.
I think about my parents growing up in the Chicago suburbs and in Mississippi in the 1950s. Could their parents have anticipated the amount of change they would see both for better in the Civil Rights movement or for worse in Mass Incarceration and the War on Drugs? I think about myself growing up in the United States in the 1980s. Could my parents anticipate the amount of social progress on LGBTQ+ issues that I've seen so far in my life or, conversely, the hard-fought freedoms some states are now trying to take away? Even from a technological perspective, I think about how my great grandfather saw both first flight and the moon landing in his lifetime.
These are merely 66 years apart...
Likewise, I don't know if I can anticipate the change my own children will see in their lifetime, but hopefully I can prepare them to be active agents in it. After all, if they are healthy, they may make it to see the 22nd Century!
Let that sink in for a moment... 22nd Century.
What will they need to be prepared for? What building blocks and perspectives do we need to help them establish by the time they are adults?
The Nature of Technology
A fascinating book I recently read, or rather listened to on audio book,[3] is W. Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology . In it he presents technological development not as the prerogative of lone geniuses or multi-national corporations, but communities of people sharing ideas and recombining existing technologies to make new ones. What is crucial is not only the ability to problem solve the challenges of recombining those parts, but also being aware of the available technologies to draw from in the first place.
This is where the understanding and presentation of possibilities is so important. So much of our historical and cultural narratives have been built to say, “it has to be this way”. But is that verifiably true? What evidence is there for other alternatives currently and historically? I used to love Jared Diamond’s 1997 book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. However, my experience as an organizer of the readers’ community for 2021’s The Dawn of Everything has shown me how Guns, Germs, and Steel as well as Yuval Noah Harari’s 2011 Sapiens are a woefully out-of-date procrustean beds based on an 18th Century thought experiment that lacked empirical grounding. What The Dawn of Everything did so thoroughly was dispel the myth that societies develop from hunter-gathers to agricultural to industrialized states in some normal progression. They also thoroughly dispelled the idea that in order to be technologically advanced, a society must also fit into this anachronistic conception of a centralized modern state that is often erroneously projected back in time. In short, it dispelled the assumption that our current situation was inevitable.
The Dawn of Everything thus provides a variety of viable options proven throughout history to allow us to recombine to innovate new technologies. That is another fascinating aspect of Arthur’s The Nature of Technology : it understands social technologies (governance structures, organizational methods, etc) can be developed in the same recombinant approach to innovation as with mechanical technology.
Children’s Books
So all that may sound interesting, but what does that have to do with Milton Friedman and children’s books? Because Milton Friedman understood how generational change can happen: through “ideas ready to be used”. The ideas that he and his collaborators developed in the 1940s and 1950s were far outside the post-New Deal political norm of the time but they understood they should continue to develop those ideas so that when the opportune time came, they would be ready. For Friedman, that time came with Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s.[4]
Our children, though, are not waiting “to be used”. They can be proud of their LGBTQ+ family members today or support friends that have them. They can also be ready for what affront to LGBTQ+ human rights may come in the future. They are people active in their communities today and will hopefully be active in their communities for another seven or eight decades. So why not give them the tools to prepare for that? Why not help them understand the recombinant development of social technologies? Why not show them a wide variety of available building blocks now so they can pick and choose what makes sense to recombine and use when the time comes?
But again, we’re talking about children’s books, right? Yes! You can read a children’s book with them about the Stonewall Uprising to learn age-appropriate ways for a conversation explaining the letters in LGBTQ+, why riots/uprisings happen, and what it means co-create freeing spaces. But the booklets don’t stop there. They will all be bi-directionally linked together. The upcoming Stonewall booklet references both the Independence Day and Martin Luther King, Jr. booklets that will be coming out in later months and those booklets will have references back to the Stonewall booklet. The interconnectivity and recombinant nature of these topics are on display and will be developed throughout the series.
This is what I mean by The Unlearning Family . A family that respects the opinions of its members, regardless how young. A family that talks with their children and unlearns the false divisions that LGBTQ+ rights, or civil rights, or economic issues are “other’s” issue and not “ours”. A family that appreciates the common human experience and lessons that can be learned from history. And a family that sets realistic expectations about the horizons of possibility that its youngest members have.
So please, stay tuned. Share this digitally or by word of mouth with others to include them in the conversation and its practical implementations, and let me know what you think. This is a journey for me as much as it is for you. I’m happy to have you with me.
Notes
[1] Yes, Native America ecologists were right, trees talk to each other. European-tradition science has recently caught up to understanding that as well. See Braiding Sweetgrass.
[2] I generally use the term “uprising” to describe Stonewall or the events of Baltimore City after Freddie Gray’s death because there was a whole lot of constructive political activity that was happening in addition to the rioting. The riot is a subset of a uprising.
[3] As much as I’d love to be that person that sits down and mulls over a good book with a nice mezcal to wet the palate, in reality it’s more often listening to a good audio book while putting a way dishes or cleaning the toilets…
[4] As is sadly often the case when intellectuals have influence on the powerful, Reagan only took Friedman’s worst economic ideas while doing the exact opposite of Friedman’s support for marijuana legalization or gay rights!