“Attention as a category isn’t that salient for younger folks,” Jac Mullen, a writer and a high-school teacher in New Haven, told me recently. “It takes a lot to show that how you pay attention affects the outcome—that if you focus your attention on one thing, rather than dispersing it across many things, the one thing you think is hard will become easier—but that’s a level of instruction I often find myself giving.” It’s not the students’ fault, he thinks; multitasking and its euphemism, “time management,” have become goals across the pedagogic field. The SAT was redesigned this spring to be forty-five minutes shorter, with many reading-comprehension passages trimmed to two or three sentences. Some Ivy League professors report being counselled to switch up what they’re doing every ten minutes or so to avoid falling behind their students’ churn. What appears at first to be a crisis of attention may be a narrowing of the way we interpret its value: an emergency about where—and with what goal—we look.
Knauss eyed some passersby. “The first seven-minute phase is known as Encounter,” she said. “I think of it as entering a party. First, you take a look around the scene.” On arriving at the action site, the Birds wander. The subject of an action is rarely, if ever, identified in advance, but usually it is the most desperate-looking work in sight. (“In a museum, it will be, like, the painting next to the bathroom or on the wall opposite the ‘Mona Lisa,’ ” Burnett told me.) The work is unnamed because the Birds are supposed to find it by paying attention. Those who don’t can follow the flock.Next comes Attending, announced by the first bell. “At the party, that’s when you maybe settle into conversation with someone,” Knauss explained. The Birds line up before the work, side by side, in what is known as the phalanx. For seven minutes, they silently give the work their full attention. Three things are discouraged during this period, Knauss told me. “One is what we call studium”—analysis from study. Another is interpretation, and the third is judgment. If Birds find a work offensive (or simply bad), they’re meant to put aside that response. Alyssa Loh, Burnett’s partner, who is also a Bird, told me that she understands the injunctions as a guard against the ways that people shut down their attention. “There’s a question you often hear in relation to art objects: What is it for and what do you do with it?” she said. “In the Bird practice, we mostly answer that in negatives—you can’t ‘solve’ it, can’t decide if it’s good, can’t victoriously declare that you have correctly identified its origins or that it’s an example of an eighteenth-century whatever.” You just keep attending.The second bell heralds the start of Negation, a phase in which Birds try to clear the object from their minds. Some lie down; some close their eyes. At the third bell, seven minutes later, the group reconvenes in the phalanx for Realizing.Knauss said, “A good way to think of Realizing is the question: What does the work need ?” In some cases, the answer may be concrete—to be moved to a nearby wall—but it is often abstract. Perhaps a sculpture needs children climbing on it. “It might need you to hear its song,” Knauss somewhat mysteriously noted. At the final bell, the Birds disperse. “Leave the scene, find somewhere quiet to sit, and write down your experience of the four phases,” Knauss said.A short while later, they meet up, usually in a café, for Colloquy, in which they take turns describing what they went through, distractions and all. Some Birds consider Colloquy the most important stage; it distinguishes their approach from “mindfulness” and other solo pursuits. The discussion can take on an uncanny charge. “It’s unusual to spend so much time in a small group looking at one thing, and even more unusual to talk about your impressions to the point of the ultra-thin vibrations and the associations they give rise to,” a Bird named Adam Jasper, an assistant professor of architectural history at the Chinese University in Hong Kong, told me. “With people I’ve Birded with more than a few times, I know more about how they work emotionally and mentally than I have any right to.” The writer Brad Fox described the experience as “seeing people at their best.”Knauss, checking her phone, seemed suddenly in a hurry. “I’m going to leave you,” she said. “But first there’s a tradition that I give you this.” She pulled a piece of saffron-colored cloth from one of her belt loops, tore off a strip, and handed it to me. It was how the Birds recognized one another, she said.
These are the charmed years when you can, if you so choose, become anything you wish ... [you] also have the opportunity to survey your alternatives -- not merely those current in your time or provided by careers, but those available to you as human beings. The importance of these years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get to him.
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Philosopher Francis Bacon once said, “Knowledge is power.” Deep knowledge, it seems reasonable to say then, would be wisdom. “Mother Trees” bring knowledge and wisdom that can be accessed by everyone in our organization. In fact, a few hours before the dinner on May 7, Joan will be teaching a class for Zingerman’s staff who would like to come and learn from her.At the start of Finding the Mother Tree, Simard says,This is not a book about how we can save the trees.This is a book about how the trees might save us.Following Simard’s insightful lead, we too might do well to look more closely at how the words and wisdom of our organizational “Mother Trees” can help us to reground and see things in more effectively holistic ways. If you have a few minutes, you might reflect on who the “Mother Trees” are in your ecosystem, how you have learned from them, and how you can continue to learn from them for many years to come. Wisdom, cultural insight, and the long-term health of our organizations might well depend on them. Let me know what you learn!The people I’m thinking of as organizational “Mother Trees” here at Zingerman’s have been such positive influences on what we have done over the years. Like Joan Nathan, it’s hard to imagine the Zingerman’s Community without their influence. In Joan’s case, it’s with food and cooking. With Peter Block (who I was honored to have interview me last week in Cincinnati at a book event at 50 West Brewing Company), it’s philosophy and learning to lead without relying on power and authority. With Wendell Berry, it’s about understanding old-school agriculture, traditional ways of life in rural communities, and developing more holistic and more helpful ways to see the world. Grace Lee Boggs teaches me how to push for positive change, honor the humanity of everyone we meet, and stick with what we believe in even if others around us have not. There are others as well, but you get the idea. All of these people, these “Mother Trees,” have a presence that contributes to the quality of the work we do. And all of them, quietly, without drama, inform and inspire. As Suzanne Simard says:It’s not always about becoming bigger and better in a traditional or a visible way that we might measure as wealth, for example, or power. You know, the most powerful parts of our social systems can be the elder that has aged and is guiding younger people, or guiding their culture. And yet, they can be almost invisible in the hierarchy of our social system.The “Mother Trees” in our organizational ecosystems do just that. Their impact is almost invisible to an average onlooker, but their impact is, ultimately holistically, enormous. Suzanne Simard summed up all this in a 2017 journal article about Mother Trees, in which, she writes,Elders fill a special role in any community, having earned the respect of the tribe for their life-long wisdom, knowledge, and teaching. They help link individuals to the broader community as a whole, and connect the past with the future. Not all old individuals are elders, nor are all elders old. In my family, grandmothers and grandfathers usually filled the role of elders … connecting the family through the ages.…I have taken to calling these elders “Mother Trees” because they appear to be nurturing their young. Mother Trees thus connect the forest through space and time, just like elders connect human families across generations.As I’ve said, this strikes me as very much the role that Joan and the others I’ve listed above have played here over the years. In the spirit of which, Zingerman’s would be a different organization without her and without the wisdom from all these other wonderful “Mother Trees.” Their wisdom, I’m confident, will continue to inform what we do for decades to come. Thankfully for me and so many others, most of them record their thoughts in the form of books and articles. It’s a lovely coincidence I suppose that their deeply rooted philosophies and perspectives will be kept alive on paper—from trees—for centuries to come.Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said in an interview the other day,Think about the people we want as our leaders, and just look at that as sort of a template … Humility … Empathy … Resilience … Accountability, kindness, compassion, and ambition for something larger than themselves not for themselves. Those are the leaders that have led us. And that means the citizens respect those kinds of leaders.
The beauty of Quin’s atlas comes from this sense of mystery achieved by revealing the known parts of the World according to the period of the map, with the rest of the World covered by thick, dark billowing clouds. With our knowledge of the World growing with each map the clouds withdraw a little further and more of the World is revealed.
Argue for the Proms to be strictly classical and you’re likely to be told to lighten up. Yet one cannot fail to notice that our countless pop and rock festivals feel no similar obligation to include classical artists in their line-ups: they do what they do, loud and proud. Endless debates about the Radio 3 schedules go over similar ground, pitting “fusty” purists against more chilled-out listeners who insist the station will die if it doesn’t adapt to changing times. Meanwhile, Radio 1 continues to do its own thing. I like an eclectic mix of music as much as the next person, but I feel it is legitimate to ask why only one type has to make all the concessions.It is a similar story in universities. Most music lecturers who were students in the 1980s and 1990s will have taken an academic degree course devoted entirely to classical music. By the 2000s a wide array of different types of music started to feature on the curriculum, and this diversification was seen by most as a good thing.We have reached a point where the pendulum has swung so far the other way that classical music is struggling to maintain a foothold at all on some university music courses. If any academic were to propose a degree course based entirely around classical music — and I imagine few would dare — they would be regarded as eccentric at best, politically dubious at worst.This is the nub of the embarrassment. Classical music is no longer simply something that people enjoy listening to, playing, studying and writing about; rather, it has been intensely politicised. The relentless elitism barbs have already done a great deal to turn people off classical music, but in recent years these historically illiterate insults have morphed into something even worse, as the elitism stereotype has merged with wider debates about equality in ways that are making the classical music world very edgy indeed.There is no reason why classical music shouldn’t appeal to people from all social backgrounds as it used to in the past ... It is downright insulting to suggest that classical music cannot speak to people from non-white backgrounds. Yet narratives that construct such music as the preserve of a privileged, white “elite” abound, and they are even hinted at, or even asserted explicitly, by the very institutions we would expect to be championing the arts.
The wonder of the worldThe beauty and the powerThe shapes of things,Their colours, light and shadesThese I saw,Look ye also while life lasts.
Steve points to Matthew Crawford's essay on AI's ability to alleviate the burden of thinking ...
Mechanized judgment resembles liberal proceduralism. It relies on our habit of deference to rules, and our suspicion of visible, personified authority. But its effect is to erode precisely those procedural liberties that are the great accomplishment of the liberal tradition, and to place authority beyond scrutiny. I mean “authority” in the broadest sense, including our interactions with outsized commercial entities that play a quasi-governmental role in our lives. That is the first problem. A second problem is that decisions made by algorithm are often not explainable, even by those who wrote the algorithm, and for that reason cannot win rational assent. This is the more fundamental problem posed by mechanized decision-making, as it touches on the basis of political legitimacy in any liberal regime.
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