Persistence
It seems like every ten or twelve years or so my life gets totally upended and I find myself shifting into a dramatically different lifestyle. I’m not complaining. I like to fantasize I come out the other side of each of these changes for the better, even (or maybe especially?) when things get a little bumpy along the way. But my best worst habit is that I can’t ever fully grasp something until I’ve really stuck my hands into it all the way up to the elbows and experienced it myself. If you combine this with my persistent and insatiable curiosity…well. It’s not enough for me to just read about something. I have to do it. Otherwise I just keep having this nagging sense I haven’t quite got to the bottom of it.
This of course is how I keep ending up doing things like going from a middlingly comfortable if boring career in tech to being a graduate student, then switching programs halfway through that to leave political theory and start studying the history of science. And it’s how I decide to do dumb things like become the President of the GSAS student council at Harvard during a pandemic (it’ll be a good learning experience! someone has to do it! service is important!) to living in the back of an ambulance foraging for berries while I finish my degree. Sometimes it gets me into trouble. Sometimes I end up having excursions I never could have imagined. Sometimes it does both at once.
I never could take the straightest path, and I don’t know how to explain that all of these questionable choices are relevant and necessary to writing a book about the history of LSD. But somehow they are. One of the red threads that run through it all is the question of judgement — how do we come to know what we know about the world and how do we decide what to do with that knowledge? That is the question underpinning my study of LSD. And it’s part of why it’s not enough to take the answer from just asking people is because, and I’m sorry to say it, the answer you normally get is just so goddamn wrong that I can’t take it seriously. No, Felicia. The answer is not because everyone else in the world is stupid and doesn’t know better and everything would be better if they just did it the way you do it. But this seems to be the answer that you hear all over the place. In op-eds and on twitter and when you eavesdrop on strangers in coffeeshops, from politicians trying to gin up manufactured outrage at “those” people who are doing it all wrong. So what am I supposed to do? I’m clearly just going to have to get in there up to the elbows if I want to figure it out.
Going to Harvard has been one of the hardest and most rewarding experiences of my life, but it has also made me painfully and profoundly aware of the limitations of education in this country. Both my personal experience there, but also in the research area I’ve chosen to study which looks very closely at how people come to believe what they believe, including scientists themselves. And perhaps nothing is more persistently true there than that people like to imagine that what they know — and, more to the point, what they’ve experienced — somehow captures everything important there is to know about a topic. This is exacerbated when that education is formal: it makes people pretty cocksure that they’ve learned what they need to. They were taught by experts, after all! It was scientific!
But the truth is that academia and science are very distinct and tiny bubble worlds with a very narrow way of learning. This doesn’t necessarily make what is being learned wrong. But it does make it limited. And so part of my project has inevitably led me to wondering about other ways of learning and passing on knowledge that happen outside of these formally approved, official channels, and to wondering about the quality, accuracy, and value of what is learned in these other ways. And so I know that if I want to be able to write the book that answers these questions for myself, I have to do it away from that world for a little while. The answers aren’t in books written by people who got them only from books written by people who got them only from books. They’re in the doing.
While it is true that I was homeless for a few years in my youth and have learned a few things about resilience, flexibility, persistence, and always figuring out how to land on my feet, the things that I do not know about surviving in the back of an ambulance without a steady source of income are still profound. I have had to learn very quickly how to balance the problem of sourcing quality goods that won’t leave me stranded or hungry against the problem of sourcing materials that I can afford. I have had to learn how to not just make do with less, but be satisfied with that (honestly, I could probably write an entire post just about how liberating it is to discover how well and abundantly one can live with much less than one would imagine). I have also had to quickly relearn the value of co-operation and trusting in strangers and the world to provide, a good and natural and very human instinct that hyper-competitive places like Harvard punish.
None of these lessons are bad ones. Hard? Sometimes. But not bad. They have also helped me start to see the edges of answers to the other questions I have, the questions about where other learning is taking place, or what we choose to do with that knowledge. And the answer is that it’s all around us, all the time. We just…can’t see it, can’t hear it. We don’t go to those neighborhoods. We don’t listen to those people. Their bread is not our bread, and so we don’t break it with them.
At the moment, Xelona the ambulance is running nicely. I replaced the fuel filter a few days ago and topped up the coolant, but those are minor, routine maintenance tasks and she seems to be in pretty good shape. I picked up a toilet from some friends that’s waiting for me to install it and I still need to plumb in some water at some point. And there are other upgrades that will need to happen before I can go fully off-grid. I’ve been thinking about adding a solar electrical system so that I can camp out and use my tools without having to be tied to a campground or other source of power. But that can run into the thousands of dollars very fast. So yesterday I started investigating salvage yards as a way to maybe get a hold of some deep cycle lithium batteries affordably.
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As I was learning about how salvage yards work (I’ve never been to one before), I remembered an article I read a few years ago lamenting the loss of the ragman. The article was about how environmental practices of the past were often more sustainable and could provide models and lessons for us today. The ragman was a person who would ride around town clanging a bell and yelling out “Ragman! Ragman!” and people would come out of their houses and give them their trash — their rags or old bits of scrap metal or jars or other things they didn’t need but didn’t want to throw away. The ragman would give them a few pennies for the things, and then would go sell them elsewhere. It kept trash out of landfills and honored the “Reuse” part of the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” mantra that somewhere along the line seems to have been reduced to “Recycle.”
The thing is, ragmen still exist. They may not ride around town on their bicycles yelling out their presence for people to run out and hand them things at their front stoop, but they’re still there. They exist in salvage yards, second-hand clothing stores, antique malls, and scrap recyclers. But these are things that poor people rely on, and so they’ve largely vanished from sight for people who have a choice and simply don’t need or don’t want to see them. And if they’ve vanished from sight, surely it means they don’t exist anymore, right?
But traditional ways of doing things persist. Constantly. All around us. If we do not see them, most of the time it isn’t because they aren’t there. It’s because we don’t think them important enough to notice. Another way to put it is that we’ve made them small or even invisible in our minds. And what do we do that with? Things we think have less power than we do, things that don’t need to be attended to. The invisibility of certain kinds of knowledge is often linked to power relations, bound up in things like class, race, gender, religion, and culture. It shows up as people denigrating traditional medicinal knowledge because that knowledge is traditionally feminine, or brown, or poor. It’s the “loss” of skills like metalsmithing that are in fact still vibrant and alive, passed on in industry and also through hobbies by people who are only a generation or two removed from having to do that kind of work for a living.
One of the unintended consequences of the winding work I’ve been doing is a growing appreciation for tradition and an increasing realization that the story of Progress™ is, if not an outright lie, at the very least a profoundly misguided and pernicious mythology about how knowledge forms and changes over time. Plenty of people have, of course, been saying this for a long time. In front of my face. Where I couldn’t see or hear exactly what it meant until I put myself in it. And this, I think, is the biggest error our educational system makes. The biggest error those of us yelling from the sidelines to be heard make. We think it is enough to tell people how the world works, as if teachers were most successful at their task when they are imperious know-it-alls lecturing with words and facts and desperately, desperately trying to pass something on to anyone who will listen, instead of taking a moment to ask where their audience is. But what if people only truly learn when they are in it? When those words stir something that we can feel as true because we have lived them? What if our words fizzle out when they do not touch what others have lived, coming to life and persisting in another only when they do? I have not yet fully grasped how radically approaching it like this would change the way we relate to knowledge, but I can, at least, feel it at its edges. And that, after all, is why I am here.
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