perception : mackenzian

August 16, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Working the substrate

Substrate (noun): a substance or layer that underlies something, or on which some process occurs, in particular. * the surface or material on or from which an organism lives, grows, or obtains its nourishment. * the substance on which an enzyme acts. — Image via Google.

So much of life is invisible: the roots that nourish plants below the soil surface, the nonverbal communication that conveys our thoughts and attitudes, the years of training that go into a 10-second Olympic sprint.

It’s so easy to be dazzled by whatever appears, and to miss the substrate that props it up.
But the world below the surface matters, and to resolve problems, we have to work that substrate.

Working the substrate might mean not reacting to others immediately, but first reviewing the experiences and assumptions that precipitate their choices and behavior. How did they get here? How did you get here? What’s the wider story, and how can your responses take that wider story into account?

Working the substrate might mean re-evaluating the way an intractable community debate has been framed, and emphasizing what’s possible rather than just what’s been consistent. Is a “problem” group really the source of the discord? Are there new ways you could perceive your contributions and responsibilities as you engage other group members?

Working the substrate might mean transcending the call to conversation entirely in favor of taking action with and for people who are actively harmed and under-served. What does the dialogue circuit require of you? What could you accomplish if you focused less on explaining to the doubtful and more on focused on acting with the willing?

Deal with what feeds the obvious—or work around it, and watch how what grows changes.

August 10, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

In the dark

It turns out there’s such a thing as too much light.

Light pollution is the feature of modern industrial life that means that 33% of the planet doesn’t see the same skies as our ancestors did. Thousands upon thousands of stars would be visible to the naked eye were it not for street lights, lit billboards, traffic lights, home lighting systems, and miscellaneous haze. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 80% of people who live in the US don’t see the Milky Way at all.

Photographer Daniel Kordan recently took some remarkable photographs of the Milky Way from the high plains of Bolivia.¹ The photo below is so clear, so bright. And the glorious swathe of light in it shows us what’s perceptible when we’re not faked out by clouds of artificial illumination.

Daniel Kordan's photo of the Milky Way. The sky is bright blue, purple, and orange. Daniel stands in shadow on a bright, reflective plain. The plain is made of white salt. — Photo credit: Daniel Kordan (Instagram | Facebook)

In the U.S., some of our national parks are just about the last refuge of darkness –- places like Yellowstone and the desert southwest,’ said co-author Dan Duriscoe of the National Park Service. ‘We’re lucky to have a lot of public land that provides a buffer from large cities.’

Light pollution does more than rob humans of the opportunity to ponder the night sky. Unnatural light can confuse or expose wildlife like insects, birds and sea turtles, often with fatal consequences.”

We live in a time with incalculable quantities of data and information. Commentators explain how the exobyte data storm overwhelms us cognitively: our brains don’t have the capacity to manage such a swamp of input.

So we use artificial constructs, frameworks, models, and increasingly powerful computing systems to help us manage the grandeur of the natural and social worlds. Our mental frameworks aren’t objectively real, but the tools and structures we build with them are, and all of them have real consequences. With these constructs, we can navigate our world in ways that would otherwise be impossible.

At the same time, there’s much we don’t get to perceive because our pre-perceptual frameworks create a fog between us and the rest of the cosmos. There’s so much we aren’t aware of and can’t grasp with our current thinking. And the little we can discern is distorted by common fluorescence.

“Look through the telescope,” we say Galileo said (though it probably didn’t happen quite like that). And in the film Enough Room at the Table, I talk about those who because of their models and beliefs cannot or will not shift to an Observe-First, Expel-Later approach to life and difference.

But it’s not quite that simple. Conflicts aren’t resolved simply because we “shift to observation.” We still use our artificial but functional constructs to perceive and interpret the observed world.

Some, meeting a Black man with locked hair, perceive a world-class musician and potential national hero. Others, encountering a man just like him, perceive an Other whose presence in their family merits theological explanation.

Sometimes it’s good to head to a metaphorical national park, to switch off our artificial lights and put our preconceptions on hold. There is a world beyond our notions, we are part of it, and we so easily forget.

It’s worth it to remember.

Thanks to Hugh Hollowell for pointing me to this photo series. [Back to text: ◄]

July 31, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Humility required

Love never ends… When the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.” –1 Corinthians 13

We are always changing because our understanding is always incomplete.” –Dr. Olive Hemmings

One of the most important functions of heterogeneous teams is to expand the individual’s incomplete perception and understanding. And one of the most important functions of heterogenous societies is to expand single groups’ incomplete perceptions and understandings.

If none of us in isolation is all-perceiving and all-comprehending, and if even our groups fail to grasp all there is to know, the only reasonable postures for life are curiosity and humility.

I grew up in an ethnic culture that was still unlearning slavery- and colonial-era disincentives for asking questions and questioning authority. I also grew up in a religious subculture that battles the drive to declare itself the One True Church and all other denominations, apostate. In the first culture, where questions meant an attack on authority, curiosity is not always welcome. And in the second culture, some view religious humility as a cowardly cop-out.

But we get to choose tools that help us transcend our biases, notions, and points of view. In the documentary, Enough Room at the Table, the group that convened in the Napa Valley did just that.

Expanding each other’s worlds. Adding to groups’ perspectives. Filling in our gaps. That’s community at its best.

July 19, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Read with Spectrum: Volf’s Flourishing

Adventist Forum’s Spectrum Magazine is hosting a summer reading group again this year. Last year, we read Richard Beck’s reflections on morality, purity, and disgust in the book Unclean.

Read my article on the body and the private sphere.

This year, we turn to Miroslav Volf’s latest work, Flourishing: Why we need religion in a globalized world.

The book is Volf’s ambitious attempt to integrate reflections on the relationships between globalization and religion and ways world religions can undermine or support human development. Based on his classes at Yale Divinity School, including a course he co-taught with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Flourishing also depends on several international and multi-faith review groups that Volf invited to assess the manuscript. He gives extensive credit to his research assistants and graduate students, a move that I appreciated.

At least in the preface and introduction, whereas Volf defines and delimits religion, he does not define globalization. When he writes “globalization,” does he mean something more substantial than “international and trans-national trade”? I assume so, but in the absence of definition, the term is a cipher that readers can fill more or less as they please, whether with Blair’s modern Western liberalism, with the UN’s sustainable development tenets, or with other signifiers like “freedom, democracy, human rights, market economics, and prosperity” (p. 5). In notes, Volf does mention Joerg Rieger, who wrote the brief Globalization and Theology.

Volf tells us his colleague Linn Tonstad encouraged him to make his positioning explicit:

I could have tried to shed the particularities of my own faith and culture and to survey the landscapes of multiple religions and globalization processes impartially, as if I were a mechanical drone with no biases or interests of my own. But the ‘view from nowhere’ is impossible; drones always fly at somebody’s behest and for somebody’s interest.” —Miroslav Volf, Flourishing, p. 18

I’ll learn more as I read. I already wonder whether Volf takes too much about globalization for granted. And I don’t think he could possibly be right to exclude indigenous and non-conquering religions from his grand synthesis of the future of religions or flourishing humans: we already have enough practical theory based on the praise songs of war winners.

But we’ll see.

Update: My commentary came out the first week of August. Read with us.

July 17, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Checking your lenses

Close-up of brown-rimmed eye-glasses with light brown tinted lenses. — Photo credit: Jean Scheijen

I had an eye exam today, my first in too long.

I’ve had my current glasses for nearly a decade and no substantial changes to my vision. But there was a surprise.

There’s a defect in my lenses.

It’s a small thing, a little whorl in the glass that warps light as it passes through UV-responsive film. The light is warped before it hits my eyes because of that defect.

I had gotten so used to it, to cleaning the lenses despite it, that I didn’t even remember it until in the big chair next to a tray of other lenses and an opthalmologist raising her eyebrow at me.

“It must have been the heat,” I mumbled. It could have been heat weakening the glass over a decade. My lenses could have been poorly manufactured to begin with. The “why” of the defect now didn’t matter as much as the fact that I had gotten used to it and I was making up excuses for it.

How much like life that was.

In a room devoted to nothing but getting me the best lenses possible based on what I need today, I sat acclimated to old, scratched, and dodgy lenses and explaining why they weren’t so bad.

I walked away with a much more current prescription and yet I’m still wearing my old glasses. I have plans to replace them, just not today. I tested out alternatives with my pupils dilated so much I couldn’t read the labels on the display or the price tags, and I didn’t buy. I needed change, and I have not changed.

The lenses that we use to perceive and understand the world can serve us for many, many years without obvious problems. And yet, because being human means being in motion, a constant locus of change, that consistency can become a disservice.

Whether you’re leading others or working with teammates, keep an eye on your lenses. Take the time to inspect the frameworks you use to perceive, interpret, and evaluate people, arguments, and events. Challenge yourself to make sure that your lenses match where you are in life today, not merely where you once were.

And when you have the opportunity to adopt better-fitting lenses, take it.

June 13, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Playing peekaboo with reality

Object permanence is a cognitive development skill that most children learn within their first year. It’s the ability to recognize that other things and people around us persist even if we stop perceiving them: there’s a world beyond us.

This is also a skill that adults regularly fail to use as we navigate life, playing peekaboo with reality.

We do have good reasons sometimes.

For a lot of people in Orlando, FL, and beyond, the drip-drop of news about the mass shooting at Pulse has been incredibly hard to bear. I haven’t watched more than a minute of cable news about it, opting out of pop coverage in favor of connecting directly with friends in mourning and colleagues taking constructive action.

But I’m under no illusions. Tuning out of one context and focusing on another doesn’t stop the wider world from turning. It only determines how much energy and attention I have available to focus on things I can immediately influence.

If you need to take a breather from a tough situation, do that.

Just don’t interpret an information blackout as if it were a resolved problem.