ON THROWING ME OUT

 

Part One

 

Do you wonder who will dispose of you?

Will you participate?

 

I am in the basement wrestling

What goes?  Can some of this be kept a little longer?

 

       Bagging my history

       One bag, one shelf at a time

       Nearly out of sorts

 

Nearly out of me

 

Here’s a book on The Sexual Life of Savages

Maybe if it had more illustrations

Out it goes

With what seems like a million more

Textbooks, Handbooks, Proceedings, Classics

Those items you can find in a good library

 

       But I’m overdue

       Sins of accumulation

       Time to pay the fine

 

Not much remains relevant for very long

Some of these books were willed to me

By retiring colleagues,

And represented a continuation of the profession

But I fear their disappointment

Their books did link careers

And now, into a bin

 

       Others, more basic,

       Taught me critical thinking

       And logical skills

 

The books most useful to me were time-bound

They solved problems or provided inspiration

At important points as my career evolved

From economics and sociology

Toward human ecology

 

They were focused on time

How poignant

 

Part Two:  My Academic legacy:  tossable?

 

Feel free to skip to Part Three

 

As a sociologist working with human ecologists

One of my early missions was to understand

The relationship between

Social and nonsocial systems

And, as it worked out,

The concept of time was central

 

The term we used in sociology, “interact”

Would not work with nonsocial phenomena

Our maple tree and I cannot “take the role of each other”

 

But I discovered “transaction”

A concept developed

In the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism

Referring to how we take the presence of things into  

Account and the ensuing

Augmenting or redirecting of our behavior

In a (continuous) transactive cyclical process

Not conducive to a one-way

Cause and effect approach

Thus, the key dimension of time

 

I learned to see how social systems

Such as families

Continuously travel through space/time from one micro-ecosystem to another 

Drawing from and returning to

The macro-ecosystem the elements needed to function

Artifacts, places, personal traits

 

Moving from home to automobile

To a workplace or a trout river in the woods

 

I developed a MODEL of how the parts

Of ecosystems function and transact through space/time

Leaving their effects on the macro-ecosystem

 

A second mission of mine was to understand how such transactions transform the things we use  

My background in economics suggested “production and consumption,”

But there were issues with

Where production stopped and consumption began

Consider the long process of producing, marketing and eating a meal

 

Where does the production (incrementing of utility/usefulness) stop

And its decrementing (consumption) begin?

 

I found a beautiful way (to me) to interrelate

The intentionality of economics

       Why we use things

       In our attempts to be productive

And the sociology of consequences

       How the effects of our actions are

       Often unforeseen but functional

       Including what ends up getting consumed

 

Here is my link between sociology, economics and ecology

 

The more we do, over time,

To transform resources into useful products

Manufacturing, transporting, trading, adapting to personal tastes

Concentrates their utility

Into increasingly narrower regions of social space

And disperses their loss of utility to a broadening range for others

 

Cutting trees, choosing to make pulp and not lumber

And eventually making a ream of paper that ends up in my personal office

Precludes the potential uses of the trees by others along the way

 

To me this provided a new (social) way to think of “waste”

What gets “consumed” in “productive” processes

 

Working with ecologists helped me appreciate “waste”    

And our challenge to manage it

To analyze waste management,

I described similar transformations as above

But with reverse effects

By transferring waste’s disutility (nuisance value)

To fewer specialized others

       Garbage haulers, for example

Gets it out of my way, and the community’s

Gradually reducing its onus and opening up potential options for broader regions of social space

A garbage dump transformed into a solar power field

 

Truly elegant, if you ask me

“Progress” is not monotonic, but cyclical

Production and consumption

Occur simultaneously, but for different people

In a long, continuous cyclical process

It was my attempt at developing THEORY

Of course, time was central to it

 

 

 

These process issues led to the desire to describe

The states of systems along the way

For example, the health of a person or family system

 

In the pursuit of this I was influenced by

Kurt Godel’s discussion of consistency and completeness in logical systems*

Yes.  There is a practical reason to study logic.

Godel concluded that

Systems cannot be both consistent and complete at the same time

For Godel it was about self-reference in logic

But, for me, it suggested that

The novelty needed for systems to adapt and grow

Clashes with the need

To maintain the consistency to function as a unit

The challenge of life, if you will

And this seemed pretty basic and useful

 

To resolve the decision challenges

(Consistency? Completeness?)

I was helped by Alan Turing’s work on what he called “Decidability” in computing systems*  

To evaluate system outputs and make decisions one requires external referents

Systems cannot evaluate their own products

He described writing a computer program that would stop when encountering an error

And the issue of it’s continuing to run . . . for how long?

The system cannot decide on its own. 

This seemed to me to be an essential part of how

Human ecological systems make decisions over a lifespan

And the challenge of, e.g. evaluating our children

We rely on neighbors, teachers, coaches, and employers

 

A whole new SYSTEM OF CATEGORIES

Completeness, Consistency and Decidability

To describe system states and

To challenge us with some realistic but uncomfortable competing tasks

Which, also, interestingly, can be thought of as the source of the tension needed

To keep a system moving, …, through space/time

 

Thank you for letting me refresh my thoughts

But, for me, this is part of what I will leave behind

At least for those interested in

Conceptual frameworks, i.e.,

Systems of categories (naming the things that are important to us),

Models (how to understand how they fit and function together)

And theories (how we explain, predict

And attempt to control our systems)

I credit Fred Bates and others for this

Three-way approach to conceptual systems

I credit colleagues in a family health research project*

For the opportunity to develop some of these ideas

 

A reference below* includes citations to all the references used here

 

 

Part Three:  Getting back to the question at hand

 

What is being left behind?

What to do with all the books that supported me 

If I don’t do the tossing, someone who doesn’t know these books must

 

There is some satisfaction

In personally being in control of the toss

 

Of course, at some point, someone else must take charge

Of throwing the rest of me out

One role at a time

Those who can, do

Those of us with declining abilities, must accede

Maybe help others to appreciate and learn what we see as important

 

I have not read all of these books

So, part of what I am throwing out are unmet aspirations

Something sobering to accept

 

And, guess what.  I discovered that a lot of my old books smell pretty bad

Getting them out of the basement and into some fresh air makes that apparent

 

       And my aromas?

       Now or eventually

       Who will air me out?

 

It takes energy to follow through with this sort

Bending over at age 86

Filling sacks

Carrying them, and me, up from the basement to the car

 

Take a break

Refresh that old cup of coffee

Or is it martini time?

Write a few more of these lines

Then head back downstairs

 

Give the sort another shot

Give someone else another shot

 

What Phoenix will arise from recycling me?

New opportunities

Will you assume the role of the “the oldest member?”

Will you develop memories?

Will you turn from care giver to care sharer?

I have been blessed with both

 

 

DRK

7/21/23

2/12/24

 

*Keefe, Dennis R. 2017 Revised Edition.  Time in Human Ecological Conceptual Systems:  Transactions, Transformations and Tension.  Author Publication.