A Message from the President
Hope, defined in general terms as an optimistic state of mind based on an expectation of positive outcomes in respect to events and circumstances in one’s life or the world at large, often inspires us to adjust the focus of our human agency and our place in the world in order to effect a different, more salutary outcome in the face of prevailing detrimental challenges. In this respect hope is a sophisticated cognitive strategy, and not a simple emotion or wishful state of mind.
Another way to formulate the stratagem of hope is to define it as a narrative, often one of meticulous construction. As with any narrative, the transformative effects of hope require the perception of a temporal continuity: drawing upon experience and knowledgeable insight (that occurred in the past) selectively reconstituted as a series of steps and purposeful iterations (performed in a progressive present) that can then be imaginatively applied to a subsequent reality (future) and, if successful, instantiate that future. The perception that a four dimensional space-time persists and is subject to our intervention is a psychological condition necessary for the praxis of hope. But sustaining that perception of fluid time is aggressively perverted by a variety of phenomena, to the extent that may augur our collective demise.
Impeding counter narratives that thwart and deliberately frustrate a cognitive environment conducive to hope all arise from human ingenuity, and all attenuate the coherence and continuity necessary for a rigorous, sustained, and shared engagement with our global challenges. Calculated disinformation, lies, conspiracy mongering, and manipulated doubt and denial are pervasive machinations. They result often in seriously reducing responsive action to our sundry crises, as they aggressively contribute to an imaginative equivalent of holding time hostage.
More substantively, two well organized and extraordinarily funded phenomena also contribute to mitigating the practice of hope by excessive fragmentation and obscuring of context. Context is a key aspect of understanding knowledge; context includes the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and can provide terms through which these elements of our world can be fully understood and assessed. Understanding is itself a relation between the knower and an observed object or phenomenon. ‘Taken out of context’ means that a subject is removed from its surrounding circumstances, which can distort its meaning, and efface facts and clues needed to support intelligent behavior. A common feature of disinformation and the varieties of popular cultural media is precisely this decontexualization.
The first is Social Media: the problems with these networks are well established, and documented extensively. These media encourage tribal formations, are reductive in simplicity of social engagement (I like this), and in some cases are themselves ephemeral, images vanishing within a fairly short time frame without a trace. Built upon very short snippets of information exchange, the brevity of expression promotes short-term thinking and removes context from many if not most exchanges. A reliance on singular images to express thoughts, anonymity, and a reliance on performative statements as opposed to a dialogue or substantive conversation epitomizes a kind of denaturing of nuanced, evolving thought formation. Self-referential environments of narrowly targeted ‘recommend’ algorithms tightly encapsulate our sense of self and agency resulting in a complacency of inaction.
Another incessant source of fragmentation and disconnect is the tremendously profitable and seemingly ubiquitous broadcast of news and current events. The methods of conveyance of the news have long been subject to inquiry and consternation for decades. Advertisements, social media, 24 hour coverage of often repeated headlines, the endless unspooling of chyrons—think pop-up news feeds, breathless breaking news, flashing pictures, and an unrelenting reliance on the cheap, reductive drama of contending forces and antithesis (often manufactured to gain attention and emotional connection), foreclose the causal framework that surrounds us. A pixilated float of fragments, shorthand, and snippets disassociate our world, not explicate it, and functionally obscure the depth and complexity required to understand our present dangers.
More benign, but certainly consequential, we might include a third example of narrative patterns that can impede the development of larger contexts and deeper interconnections: the traditions of storytelling in higher education. Contra social media and broadcast news, categorized as popular culture whose negative influence is more easily intuited, universities are often considered a bulwark against the fragmentation evident in social media and contemporary coverage of current events, but this assumption needs to be nuanced.
Much of the problem with narratives produced in higher education can be traced to what we call the arithmetic of prestige. These narratives include not only the artifacts of production (books, journal articles, essays) but also the stories used for promotion and reward for those working within this culture. Regarding the public face of institutions, as a matter of branding, each prize their distinctive, often idiosyncratic, history and mission. Schools aggressively compete for students, funding, faculty, and materiality grounded in this mannered uniqueness, impeding collaboration and cross institutional cooperation. Internally, the strength of their human and intellectual resources relies on pervasive conformities. Disciplines embrace epistemologies that support their respective grammars, vocabularies, research methodologies, and conventions. Professional advancement within these disciplines often depends on mastering the specialized wordplay and guild-like conventions, which also prorogues interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research that is increasingly understood as essential to address the complex, existential problems.
The organization of academic knowledge atomizes our understanding of the world, to the extent that broader collaboration and multifaceted expert inquiry—a robustly polyvalent human agency—can be significantly curtailed.
One of the most threatening, intricate challenges we confront today is climate change. The story of climate change is itself a grand narrative with a conundrum at its core. This unprecedented environmental catastrophe is caused by advanced, cultivated human endeavor. Feats of engineering, our ingenious economic instruments, our reclamation and refinement of dormant energy, our sophisticated algorithms are prologue to our undoing.
Earth has been terraformed by our vision, formulations, and ideas, by our values and aspirations. The now roiling planet is an exhibit of the human mind made manifest. We have thought this world into being and fashioned an interlocking cascade of phenomena that have coalesced to scorch, drown, and asphyxiate us. Achingly difficult to grasp, we are manufacturing our ruin.
The loss of our collective cultural heritage predicted by more violent, stochastic climate events is increasingly a focus of CLIR. This priority builds upon CLIR’s history of preserving and making accessible valuable resources of our collective legacy: how we can safeguard our cultural record, both artifactual and ephemeral, and manage it for reuse and adoption by future generations.
In light of the complexity of climate change, we expect our projects to be more faceted, much longer term, international, and more broadly collaborative. In this model sustainability and infrastructure are understood as symbiotic and undetachable functions, and socially based. Durability is largely dependent on human behavioral choices, as opposed to simply more money and wider technical bandwidth. The time and investment for greater systemic social and intellectual engagement repurposes these efforts to become less of a project in the traditional sense, more of a catalyst for progressive entanglement. We have named this method ‘generative sustainability.’
‘Bringing life to knowledge’ captures the essence of CLIR’s work. A phrase with several layers of meaning, it connotes the humanity that we engage with through our projects—those who prioritize, design, and execute the goals of our regranting. It also refers to the life of the mind that is requisite for the durability of these projects and the intellectual assets they engender. All of CLIR’s work is meant to improve the capacities of planning and organization; making decisions; adaptation to change; evaluating and assessing the importance of newly discovered information resources; and applying that knowledge. CLIR is a memory organization of a vigorously animated sort.
With this increased capacity we can work together within more accurate and sophisticated contexts, and from these contexts arise new stories. The heart of CLIR’s contribution to the public good are narratives, created through discoveries made searching previously hidden resources; new insights derived from restored cultural artifacts that would otherwise deteriorate into silence; celebrations arising from the public accessibility to community archives; the reports of new communities brought together to save their heritage from the ravages of climate change. In each of these instances CLIR provides the opportunity for a more embracing context that fosters deeper understanding.
The application of new capacities is itself a story, one that requires a sensibility of the coherent flow of time, subject to human agency, a bold counter to the divisive distractions and blunt noise of our fragmented discontent, evoking keener intimations of hope.
In Memoriam
Clifford Lynch
Through his wisdom we could always find hope.
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