neon synthesist

The Erotic Economy

2016-08-27T10:49:00.000-07:00

This article originally appeared in openDemocracy's Transformation series (April, 2016)

The Erotic Economy

(it's not what you think)

If we stopped imprisoning our emotions in industrially manufactured profit centers,

desire could become an engine of social transformation.

By Amy Rubin for openDemocracy

At a recent event featuring my son’s choir in Indianapolis, I was dismayed when the director urged the audience to fill out a national “economic impact of the arts” survey that had been inserted into our concert programs. Are we still making the arts and humanities justify their existence like this? It’s a trend that emerged 20 years ago when I worked at my first arts organization at a time when Bill Clinton was elected President on the back of his famous slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

In the intervening years I’ve seen the business model take over more and more arts groups, universities, NGOs and even cities (aka the “city as start-up” or “CEOS for Cities”), a process that’s been accompanied by increasing poverty and inequality, failing infrastructures and social safety nets, and systems that perpetuate war and austerity. Yet despite these failures we still cling to business-as-usual economic icons.

I turned my back on these icons long ago. Not only do I balk at creativity born in service to pragmatism (because it’s illogical as well as uninspired), but I also fear the loss of the ‘poetic’ in society—something I’ve since learned to be a gender-coded word for ‘not us,’ its power diminished to second-class status under all things feasible, fundable, scalable and profit-making.

As a social entrepreneur and a consultant to others who are trying to push the economy further in the direction of caring, equality and sharing, I’ve found it impossible to conform to what has been expected of me. Rather than sales tools, the advice I offer is purposely thoughtful and philosophical, but rejected as “too pink” by one tech incubator, so “stick to your knitting.”

Even the urban-creative Maker’s Movement, awash with bearded transcendentals heralding a much needed return to craft, is over-masculinized in its bias for doing and making things by artisans, tech- and tool-makers and ‘men of action.’ Meanwhile, no one is talking about the more complex, relational, change-centered, feminine equivalent called poiesis or the craft of the imagination. No concrete outputs or return on investment? You’re fired!

Image of Audre Lorde courtesy of literary journal
Kaleido[scopes]: Diaspora Re-Imagined

All of which has made me lean out still further in my attempts to prepare for a radically different economy, but what language should I be using to describe it? ‘Poetic’ sounds fine to me but seems ‘too feminine’ to others, but then I listened to American author and activist Audre Lorde and that’s when it hit me: the erotic economy is really what we need.

“The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros,” she writes, “the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony…it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical. What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary, a meditating gunrunner?”

Of course, well trained by mainstream economy’s consumer and capitalist underpinnings, a phrase like erotic economy is bound to turn our thoughts to the sex industry, pornography and adult entertainment or, perhaps even worse, to the dreary notion of sexual capital - a dark, asset-based perspective on erotic power.

We are inundated daily with images of balloonishly inflated boobs, untemptingly taut torsos and artificially outsized arses or the opposite—skeletal legs and faces. This isn’t erotic, it’s neurotic, cartoonish and grotesque. These cultural fetishes are junk food, offering a momentary mirage of satisfaction but in the longer term sexually malnourishing. If you’re like me, you are sick of these dehumanizing cultural phenomena: tired Kardashian tropes about what is sexy and the constant application of the word capital to human beings who are used, exchanged and depleted in the process.

But we don’t have to think this way. Here’s Lorde again:

“Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”

Unfortunately, conventional economics does just that—settling for the convenient, shoddy and expected by focusing on private profits and the financial bottom line. What’s missing is creative tension, a vital and free interplay between forces, people, ideas, exchanges, colors, genders, sexualities and intellects, brimming with hopeful and authentic purpose and satisfaction.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the depths of economic reductionism parallel the heights of capitalism’s hubris. After all, a recent Presidential ‘debate’ between Republican contenders in the USA featured Donald Trump comparing his genitals with those of a group of fellow frat boys. Definitely not erotic.

What Lorde is saying, it seems to me, is that “erotic knowledge” in the deeper and richer sense provides a radically different foundation for politics and the economy, and one that has some strong historical precedents. For example, less than a year after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 in which more than 100 young women perished in New York, the Bread and Roses textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts galvanized the international labor movement by refusing “an economistic approach that reduced the question of justice to the fulfillment of bare needs.”

Instead, their campaign slogan—“We need bread, but we need roses, too”—challenged the prevailing notion of a ‘hierarchy of needs’ by placing human dignity and creativity at the same level as physiology. As a sustainable apparel entrepreneur, I’m keenly aware that just over a century later in 2013, more than 1,100 people died in the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where many American clothing companies manufactured cheap, fast fashion. In the process, people of relative privilege in one part of the world made themselves look sexy in exchange for the blood, trauma and lives that were lost elsewhere. This is the opposite of a true, erotic economy.

In the existing scheme of things, people are objectified in a system that’s invested in making sure that we dress, act, perform and compete in the public arena as economic units, while keeping our erotic power silenced in private isolation. The conventional economy manipulates and manufactures our desires; it doesn’t liberate them to be used in processes of transformation as Lorde demands.

That sort of transformation starts with the moral and aesthetic desire to design a better system that reflects our highest ideals. Then it provides a structural platform made up from a basic income, fair labor and wealth distribution, and social-safety nets on which people can be free to learn, contribute, care and create rather than to compete, leverage and destroy. An erotic economy like this would underwrite and unleash everyone’s creativity and capacity for living, re-imagining economics not as a manipulative and mechanistic game but as a humanly crafted means to liberation.

In my own work I’m trying to put these ideals into practice by creating a radically different incubator called the Imaginarium, which aims to honor and nurture the value of poetic, creative and erotic elements in new start-ups. I envision a free, local community platform for discussion, engagement, and the development of ideas, which will help to reclaim the human capacity for free thinking and imagination.

The erotic economy is a yin economy, a full inversion of everything we currently believe about economics, driven not by unsexy abstract dollars and cardboard men in suits but by human beings who fulfill their unique capacities for inquiry, inventiveness, experimentation, emotion, love, empathy and free expression. If these things can be made into our common currency instead of money and shareholder value, then true wealth might be available to all, even to those who are already financially well-off.

If we stopped imprisoning our emotions in industrially manufactured profit centers and let them permeate our entire human enterprise, desire will be ours again. The erotic economy could be a supremely renewable form of energy and an engine of social transformation.

Fashion Revolution and Beyond

2016-04-24T09:10:00.000-07:00

As originally appeared in Huffington Post on 4/20/16

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amy-rubin/remembering-rana-plaza-is_b_9728416.html?utm_hp_ref=style&ir=Style

Remembering Rana Plaza:

is Fashion Revolution Enough?

Before I knew how to read, my pre-literate brain wondered why a tag on the inside of my clothes said “igloo”?

That ILGWU (International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union) label and memories of the “Look for the Union Label” ditty I heard growing up, mean much more to me now. The 1981 radio/TV ad, to support union-made-in-America clothing, was a political campaign to keep American unions and jobs.

The labels, sometimes featuring the name or number of the maker, were literally part of the fabric of my youth. There’s only one reason I still see them: I sell vintage clothing. The reason I would love to see them come into fashion again: I’m asustainable apparel entrepreneur and local sewing and manufacturing talent is hard to find.

As Fashion Revolution Week commemorates the April 24, 2013 Rana Plaza tragedy (2,500 injured and 1,134 killed in a shoddy garment factory complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh) it puts our focus on the fashion industry, to promote sustainability and call out corporate accountability.

As a vintage seller, my perspective is wider and more inclusive. Not everything you wear has to be in current production. A Bust article joked that seeing a “made in the U.S.A.” label was about as rare as seeing a NY taxi cab in a thunderstorm. But when I look at #whomademyclothes, I often see the ILGWU union label.

Two things are missing from the talk and promotion of sustainable apparel and the Fashion Revolution — both have to do with history.

First, the power of historical, used clothing.

Vintage fashion, an important resource and inspiration to designers, is downplayed in the media. When it does receive attention, it’s more as museum pieces, the collectible designer labels, rather than the everyday vintage items I like that blend seamlessly with my lifestyle and wardrobe. And too often, vintage clothing is left out of discussion of sustainable apparel, which is ridiculous, because purchasing used clothing — vintage and thrift — is one of the most sustainable ways to build and supplement your wardrobe, with the added perk of cultivating a more individual style.

Many current fashion trends play off historical styles. For the consumer, vintage clothes are an excellent resource for creating similar looks. Gucci 2016, for example, borrows heavily from graphic, contrasting prints typical of the 1970s. So, if, like me, you’re not interested in spending upwards of $3,000 on one authentic designer item, I’m here to tell you: there are more sustainable options.

If you turn to your favorite internet, mall or department store brand, know this: you could be supporting sweat- and blood-labor in other countries. Without corporate transparency, there is no guarantee your purchase wasn’t made by someone who will die in a factory like Rana Plaza. Try shopping vintage to find iconic pieces you can mix for the same Gucci-esque mod iconoclasm. You could buy an entire outfit (dress, jacket and scarf) for $50-$80 total.

If you tend to buy knockoff styles at big discount retailers, you’re in the same position, making yourself look and feel good for a great, personal, price but at the potential cost of endangering someone’s life or health halfway around the world. If this is you, I suggest perusing local thrift shops regularly. You can find the exact same clothes someone else discarded, often never worn. Plus, you might get lucky and score a unique vintage find.

We must begin including vintage and thrift as sustainable options, not only for the practical reasons: encompassing all three “Rs” (reduce, reuse, recycle) and increased affordability. But for poetic reasons as well: our conscience, our style, our soul, our sense of history.

That brings me to the second issue, the history.

I laud Fashion Revolution’s and other’s campaigns, but am disappointed when a tragedy like Rana Plaza is not further grounded in historical fact. Knowledge creates a healthy skepticism; after all, our new demand for transparency in#whomademyclothes directly results from discovering that big-name American brands manufactured their clothes in that death trap.

When we only know the most recent example of corporate irresponsibility, it creates the illusion of merely tragic mistakes, exceptions, rather than the whole picture, the truth that goes back to the 1911 Triangle Shirt Waist fire in New York City.

Images of young women, locked on their factory floors, forced to jump to their deaths, bodies piling up on the sidewalks ... the Triangle Shirtwaist fire was a turning point for America, for women, for manufacturing, for labor history — at least for a few decades. Like Rana Plaza, it was more than a preventable tragedy; it was an intentional injustice. Do we think that if the same horror happens on a different continent it doesn’t matter?

As The True Cost documentary asks, did we fall for the promise of globalization? Believing in a dual benefit of affordable consumer goods here, more jobs abroad? Quality suffers all around.

It all goes back to that union label, a symbol of the phoenix that rose from the ashes of the Triangle Shirt Waist fire, a symbol of the power of women organizing for fair wages. A former stamp of working-class, feminist fair trade.

When I look for labels, I look for the union label and smile, both with a sense of nostalgia and with knowledge that it represents the struggle of women protesting to feed their families. It conveys a very real, sustainable thing to me, because I think the best way to slow your style is to know your history.

I challenge you to go find a union label and get inspired!

Uses of the Erotic THOUGHTSTREAM

2016-01-15T13:45:00.001-08:00

Bachelard on Reverie THOUGHTSTREAM

2015-12-04T13:39:00.001-08:00

Discriminatory Arts of Sex + Race

2015-10-14T14:25:00.001-07:00

Discriminatory Arts

or, Which Kind of Sexist are You?

by Amy Rubin for NeonSynthesist

Mirror, Mirror ...

The fact that the word "discriminate"--to perceive difference--became a cultural negative attests to our hegemonic worship of conformity, our discomfort with the traits that distinguish us as human beings. Using the terms sexist or racist "discrimination," misleads us from the true meaning and important function of noticing differences as a critical thinking skill; such as noticing this difference in the word's cultural function. As a euphemism for hateful feelings, or friendly silences, it masks the positive value of the discriminatory arts as practiced in human beings' highest function of careful consideration--the act of caring and thinking--further neglecting to remind us that discrimination happens in our minds. It is our choice to
discriminate well, poorly, or, as is sadly much of the case, not at all.

When we make the effort to better distinguish between, say, the "-ists" and
"-isms" of gender and racial discrimination, we gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between perpetrator and victim, individual and society, and the full spectrum of behavior ... from personally intentional, to structurally sustained, to culturally symbolic. To comprehend how we might, ourselves, be part of the problem, we must take our focus off the victim and turn the mirror back on ourselves.

Complaining about feminism

Complaints about feminism abound from both sexes and across all media. "17 Things Feminists Need to Stop Complaining About," "The 10 Most Common Feminist Myths," "Dumb Things Feminists Say," etc. Here is one example (obviously written by a man):

"The world of feminism is a strange one. Some of us might see the cause as lost and irrelevant, while others might see it as an essential part of equality. There may have been a time when feminism served its purpose in North America, but it's difficult to justify its need today ... modern feminism seems to have deteriorated into mindless sophistry. From advocating for free contraception to complaining about "cat calling" and exaggerating the threat of rape ... modern feminism's puerility is everywhere."

The complaints range from authentic and helpful to skeptical and sadistic. I just recently saw and responded to a post from a Facebook friend. I appreciate his admitted frustrations. I think we are all feeling that way. And we should be. Unless your scope of judgement goes no further than your own skin and you've absorbed patriarchy's model of extreme narcissism, things are pretty messed up, the numbers aren't good, humanity is stressed and Earth is in crisis.

Men are having a problem understanding feminism and feeling a part of it; or rather, which part of it? Women are not sure which stand, strand or brand of feminism they should take ...

And I'm not going to fall into the trap. White this. Black that. Intersectional this and that. The really important thing is to keep learning. Be open. Share your heart. Read bell hooks.

So why is feminism a problem?

Let's take a moment to appreciate, in full heart, this fractured state of feminism.

Let's watch how the little, sharp, shattered pieces--like so many horcruxes--only seem to draw attention to and saddle Feminism's doubled-down failure toward freedom. Feminism's flawed and fraught fight for equality is, it turns out, Sisyphean by design.

Can equality be accomplished? earned? granted? Can it really be given?

And if so, then why didn't you all just give it to us right away? Because you wanted to give it to us while not giving it to us? Because you wanted to give us a pale copy of it instead of the real thing? Because you wanted to pretend for a while, buying time to re-channel your supremacy?

And then you could put women in charge of managing all this bloody, starving, milkless mess, at much lower wage, to create more mayhem for more thankless jobs?

Congratulations, you are a fraud and a hypocrite; a mere nasty landlord in a poor neighborhood, raising rent. Shame.

Or, haven't you noticed? Equality is dead:

"What we have today is a neoliberal neopatriarchy.

And you see that expressed most clearly

in its dependence on two ancient patriarchal practices:

the sexual division of labour, and violence."

So--yes--all those annoying chards of fierce feminisms make the path to understanding it difficult to navigate, a painful enterprise. So. Stop. Stop Trying.

Stop F**king Blaming the Victim.

We are your mirror, dummy. And it is broken.

Broken from your failed attempts at self-reflection. We are your Narcissus. Drowned.

Gender discrimination is this hapless tradition men continue to perpetuate in ever newer ways. And now men are struggling with and annoyed by patriarchy's unfortunate results. Noticing, for example, how feminists sometimes contradict themselves, men whip out some sad excuse of reason to uncritically critique sexism's violent results. Not realizing they have already beaten the dead horse. All the while ignorant of the fact they haven't looked in the mirror.

The primary act of self-reflection too often averted.

That was your unconscious speaking ...

Let's be clear: feminism exists because of patriarchy and its main engine, gender discrimination. Gender discrimination. Feminism. And your patriarchal, shattered-glass failures at self- and cultural reflection. These are all your problem. A problem for men.

When women began to organize better in the 19th century, they began to describe your problem to you. It was your problem, reflected back at you, and you called it "the woman problem."

The "woman problem"--or as it was known in the 19th century as the "Woman Question"--may have been, on the surface, a problem about women ... but it was only a problem of women for men.

Intellectually, socially and politically, and all manner otherwise, it has been a great nuisance for women who simply have a lot to do, a lot to care for, and a great many problems to solve.

... Least of which has been your obsfucating "problem of women;" which has, around sexism, engendered a great many institutionalized variants and innovative social trends that have, no doubt, become the professional full-time jobs of many women. You keep us very busy.

The Woman Question was your unconscious speaking. A cultural projection of your intellectual violence.

This year's Heartland Film Festival
features a screening of this film

Daily Lessons of Disagreeable Dimensions

It would be nice to wander into my favorite bookstore in one of my favorite cities on a beautiful day and not just so happen to have the first book I pick up and the page I turn to be a rape scene, described by a male character, as if it is not. I felt sick to my stomach for a good half hour.

That stuff happens all the time. Micro-aggressions:

"brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership" ... generally happening below the level of awareness of well-intentioned members of the dominant culture"

Our social media lives are filled with trigger warnings. We've had some horrendous lessons in the treatment of people of color, LGBT and women over recent years, and it seems to be getting worse. In addition to the ongoing War on Women, chipping away at hard-won reproductive rights and sovereignty over our own bodies, we continue to be exposed to countless rape, murder and domestic violence cases, the global "culture of rape" (including in our own military-ouch) the kidnapping and abuse of three girls in Cleveland (did we forget already?) and the infamous Indian gang-rape incident (check out Heartland Film Festival's screening of a movie about this, called India's Daughter here). We've had cop beatings and killings of black men, the murder of so many innocents and record levels of school shootings and gun violence.

We've had to fight for awareness about the more institutionalized inequities like equal pay for women and the unheard of levels of incarceration that steal the lives of young black men. And none of this even touches upon America's backward lack of embrace for family-work balance policies, another relatively invisible root cause and environmental disadvantaging that disproportionately affects women, children, people of color and the poor.

And we still hear desperate invocations for tradition over democracy and inclusion. Focusing on tradition--not an argument but an emotional appeal--has always diverted important discussion away from essential human rights.

But before anyone starts to think "this doesn't apply to me" ... I urge you to think again.

Because it does. And don't suddenly abandon your ability to discriminate (in the classical sense e.g. critical thinking) if accused of discrimination. When you least expect it, or feel progressively exempt from it, it will happen.

Flipping the script on Mother's Day

Mother's Day, 2013, I didn't receive anything more than good thoughts, warm hugs and great pancakes. But I had a series of requests (and I just added the 5th) for my partner and two sons:

Embrace feminism and refer to yourself, unabashedly, as feminists.
Do something now for the betterment of the state of men.
Do something in the next 5 years that contributes to better outcomes for men.
Continue on a path into the future that benefits men in a way that will benefit everyone.
Become an anti-Patriarch

What needs to happen is to reverse not only institutionalized violence, sexism and racism, classism--all those forms of leveraged, unearned power--but also the language, the thinking and the framework.

As victims of abuses of power,

we are forcing a much-needed gestalt switch

that will turn the lens back on the viewer.

We are holding up a mirror.

You are the perpetrator.

If you are white, you are a perpetrator. If you are male, you are a perpetrator. If you are cisgender, you are the perpetrator. Etc. I am a perpetrator. The first step is admission.

The mirrors--whether held by yourself or someone else--are there to help.

So which kind of sexist are you?

Though women continue to suffer the disadvantages and consequences of--too often deadly--male behavior, sexism is one-hundred-percent a male problem. And, it applies to all men. It even applies to many women, who have been formed and guided within patriarchal systems. Ironically, men think they are particularly exempt by way of their good works, best behavior, or leaving all well enough alone.

You cannot have existed as a man and not have participated in sexism, the male-privileged systems of society. Sorry but men themselves have set it up this way, through institution and tradition. If you breathe and you are a man, you are a perpetrator--not even through any particular action, just existing, in a scheme that my not have been your making.

Now, if, in addition, you are silent or passive about this system, then you are actively participating in sexism through your non-action--even if you, as an individual and through your actions, treat your personal relationships with true equanimity and your best social-justice conscience.

I am assuming that no one reading this needs evidence that women are discriminated against. The evidence is endemic in the news. But what you might not be expecting is discrimination back. Of course, I am not talking about the perverse, illogical and non-existent "reverse sexism" (see future post on the life and death of reverse racism), I am referring back once again to the human mind and its ability to harness the brain's complicity in critical thinking.

So, moving on with the kind of discrimination that sorts things into categories for learning, not hate, I am talking about 4 basic categories of sexists. Which one are you?

#1: the Misogynist

Remember this 1970s-era T-shirt
that many men proudly wore?

The Misogynist, aka the Woman Hater (or a man who proudly wears the handle Male Chauvinist Pig) is an active participant in sexism. The misogynist gender stereotypes women (and often men too) and likely treats women badly and unfairly in his personal life. There is no need to worry about "the system" of sexism here because this person 1) doesn't believe in sexism and 2) perpetuates it through his behavior, attitudes, words, slurs and actions. When Misogynists perform public actions that promote gender stereotypes, advocate double standards for women or uphold behaviors and systems that keep women and girls disempowered, this spreads, informs and influences others negatively and cultivates renewed interest in maintaining the status quo, or in some cases returning to a time when things were worse.

Think many U.S. Congressmen and other political figures. Think nearly all of the current male Republican presidential candidates. These are offices of significant policy outcomes and cultural influence. (Our public offices filled with Misogynists? It is pretty shameful that this is happening when you think about it.) Think of certain Rappers, authentic in their misogyny or not ... being commercially exploited to create misogynist music and lyrics that reinforce negative attitudes toward women and girls (not to mention also men). You don't have to be a man to be misogynist either. In fact, a male privileged society works to ingrain male attitudes in everyone and against power of the female kind. Think the 1970s unfortunate icon, Phyllis Schlaffley, who argued against women's liberation. Misogynists paradoxically make a habit of being sexist while also denying that sexism exists.

P.S. On the flip side, misogynists can be great source for pointing out causes we might actually be interested in, like the Ukraine's FEMEN project, that had a bunch of men all caught up in their shorts.

The Neo-Patriarch
is the invisible norm.

#2: the Neo-Patriarch

The Neo-Patriarch may personally or even publicly declare and show belief in women's rights, women's equality and gender equality, but one thing that seems to slip by most people is that it is a false equality--unachievable, and, if you haven't noticed, not achieved--for it's non-sensical to think equality can be earned or fought for. Nevertheless, this elusive "equality" in reality bespeaks a system of inequality, now known as male privilege, formerly known as patriarchy, that the Neo-Patriarch is apt to hold onto because it clearly holds him in a position of power. Or, the Neo Patriarch may show clear frustration with the status quo, but be resigned to it and deem it futile or fruitless to advocate against it--even though it maintains the (unequal) status quo.

The Neo-Patriarch, liberal, conservative or otherwise, may often look and feel progressively modern but is a passive participant in continued, often disguised and actively denied, misogynistic systems that perpetuate preference, privilege and powers to men and male-designed social, cultural and economic systems. The Neo Patriarch is the fattest part of the bell curve, when most men can easily stand and benefit from male privilege while also saying and appearing to be against sexism. It is a "safe" form of supporting women and upholding the ideal of equality that, unfortunately, contributes to their demise. The Neo-Patriarch may be a staunch anti-sexist in the home or in public discussion, but when it comes to the male-dominated, competitive social, civil, political and economic arenas, his actual behavior will steel to the limelight, as knower, leader or savior, positioning himself advantageously within the male system and in obvious or subtle ways over and above women and minorities. The people and money will follow. By the way, any gender can be a passive participant in sexism and Neo Patriarchy.

#3: the Male Feminist

The Male Feminist is not only comfortable with feminism and referring to himself as a feminist, but is intentionally, strategically and persistently using his voice, position, vocation or resources to confront, call out and try to change sexism. But, here's the bad news. You are still a participant in sexism. But, as a Male Feminist, you are a non-conforming participant.

As an author, like John Green, you write (naturally) about strong female characters and publicly say things that are obvious but not said enough (e.g. the Venn diagram quote). If you privately sometimes wonder about whether your material got published over women's writing, then you may also express this fact and help advocate for systems that actively privilege women over men. As an artist, your expressions are sensitive to, investigate and challenge audiences to question their sense of security with male domination and encourage exploring what it means to give it up. As a philanthropist, you understand that helping men redefine themselves and confront their insecurities, as well as promoting programs that change systems and empower women are as important as helping women that have suffered. In addition, you take a deep and penetrating look at the investments of your foundation to make sure they are not supporting systems of domination and control. As a community development leader, you embrace feminism and anti-racism fully and you confront the cognitive dissonance that a good portion of what you are doing is in arena of real-estate, not people. So you find a way to stop pretending. As a venture capitalist, you've got your work cut out for you. You may be one of a kind at this point. Your money goes to women, feminist and female-empowering initiatives, including male-feminist enterprises.

Faces of male feminists

Here are some different faces and expressions of male feminism.

This kind of thing.

Now, for the real deal.

#4: the Anti-Patriarch

The Anti-Patriarch embarks like Shackleton on a venture of wicked problem solving. You might not succeed. you might go hungry. It will be dangerous. Etc.

But don't worry, there is something very sexy about being the least sexist of the bunch. The Anti-Patriarch doesn't just wear a T-shirt for feminism, but talks about patriarchy--something feminism isn't even doing--knowing some will laugh at the use of the word.

You've kept us so busy at the back end of social change. Feminism is so embattled in its fight to "achieve equal," the "p" word is hardly used. But we got to keep sight of the big picture. We've got to get back to some basics.

The truth is, even I'm trying to move from feminist to anti-patriarch status ... The Chalice and the Blade sits on my bookshelf, as do other 1960s and 1970s intellectual classics that got buried in a flurry of 1980s and '90s "it's the economy stupid" era. Sometime after the Gaia movement's funeral, Earth got renamed--without Mother (who was apparently on welfare and drugs).

No answers here on how we fight this. But we work together. And you defer leadership to feminist women when you can. And you bring more of your male (and female) friends into an understanding of valuing life, women, children, caring, empathy, learning and sharing ... over money ... over fame ... over recognition and success. You help change the systems. You try to participate in The Next System, whatever it is. Those who are privileged enough, do the outreach and take the time to tell the story.

Search for images for "war on patriarchy." Almost nothing there. One zine cover, that's about it. Fine, tell me what I have to do, you say? No. Figure it out yourself. We're not going to do the work for you.

Why I understand

Believe me, I know how much it sucks. You can feel very helpless and ineffective with regard to "the system," one that you didn't choose and would like, at every possible turn, to opt out of. I know this very well, even though I'm female.

That's because I'm white. Or at least, coded as that mythic but very real social color.

You see, the same goes for racism. Racism is the problem of white people. And, this applies to all white people, even if you are not one of those people who denies its existence. Even if you receive very little societal benefit from being white. Even if you are white and poor, white and uneducated or white and homeless; you still receive some benefits. Because you are still above someone on the totem pole.

You cannot deny the totem pole. We live in a social and historical context of cultural hierarchy. We live in economic hierarchy, backed by hierarchical systems of monetary value and perpetuated indefinitely as long as we worship the economic godhead of competition.

I'm white, female and progressive. But I am a perpetrator.

Why?

A conflation of -ist v. -ism

The "-ist" words generally refer to individuals. Bigots, people who hate or discriminate on the basis of race or gender identity, are racists and sexists.

The "-isms," on the other hand, indicate a level of institutionalization that is part of our culture, part of our history, part of our culture's design; which, unfortunately, means it is largely not in our personal control. In fact, it has been practically programmed into ourselves and our environment.

Technically, "-isms" are defined as:

"a distinctive practice, system, or philosophy"

And this is why we are all in this together: since "-isms" indicate something too big to have created ourselves, we are simply not in a position to own it or disown it. It just is. It's just us.

It is the difference between "ist" and "ism" that makes me, regardless of my views, education or upbringing, part of the problem. As a woman, I am not (in general) a sexist or a perpetrator of sexism (although, if I perpetuate male attitudes toward others, which I undoubtedly do despite my best intentions, I might be). And, as a white person, I am not a racist, but I am a part of the problem of racism and live in a socio-economic system that was built up by racism.

It's confusing and the line blurs. For example, although I am not racist, I may catch my brain in the act of formulating a racist thought. It records what it hears after all and attempt to spit it back. The brain alone can be indiscriminate like that. It stores all sorts of junk. But, I'm lucky and educated and developed enough to have a mind that can discriminate, censor it, recognize it for what it is. "Nice try ..."

Also, people regularly conflate the two and often use "racism" at the personal level (which, admittedly, due to the systemic nature of it, does exist there too). And, partly because of this, another trend has been to use the (redundant) phrase "structural racism" to emphasize the institutional aspect in place of the "-ism" having lost its sense of scope.

Not acknowledging the existence of the institutional aspects (not personally controllable) of racism and sexism amounts to ignoring them--and that is as good as denying and enabling them. Remember the 1980s movie The Accused? Yes, that's right, when you ignore it, look away, watch and do nothing or say you can't control other people, without trying, you stand by as a witness. "The Silence of our Friends." Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this.

So, the question for all of us who fit into these institutionalized witness-"perpetrator" roles (and depending on which way you slice it, we all do) is:

What can we do now to intervene?

And what can we do over time to increase

the chances of not having to intervene in the future?

We all have work to do and need to push up our sleeves. Preaching to the choir on Facebook only goes so far ...

White women--but white men especially--you have a lot of thinking and work to do! Even though we are hammered daily with the message that we need to start with action (warning: the influence of more pervasive "-isms" at work, e.g. anti-intellectualism, pragmatism, behaviorism, and let's not forget the "man-of-action-ism") this project needs, unequivocally, to starts with critical thinking.

White people can start with Tim Wise's groundbreaking book, White Like Me. It's the book that spells out the institutionalized racial privilege from which all white people have benefited. I do not know of an equivalent book for gender. Male Like Me, anyone?

So what am I going to do?

I'm working on it. Just like a man, if he means it and acts it, should call himself a feminist, I call myself an anti-racist even though my very racial presence, or deeply held racially preferred ideas, will sometimes work against anything I personally think and do.

I would like to help convert Neo-Patriarchs into Male Feminists and more Neo-Racists into Anti-Racists. If an increasing number--or imagine if even the majority--of all the "silent friends" become more active in even just discussing racism and sexism in their effects, then Racists and Misogynists might be influenced to pay more attention and notice the more nuanced details. Maybe feel less afraid of the outcomes.

Imagine if the only choice

were to be Racist or Anti Racist?

What a different world it would be ...

Our fragile identities

Enter the concept of "fragility." The basic idea is, when we are vulnerable and we choose to act defensive and aggressive, we are fragile. And, paradoxically, when we are vulnerable, admit it, recognize it and appreciate it, we are strong. Strong but open.

Male feminists are not fragile; or, at least they can recognize it. Neo Patriarchs are either fragile about the criticism of their manhood and masculinity, or are narcissists and a-holes. Misogynists are SO fragile about themselves as men that they have to hate the opposite sex in many not-so-subtle ways.

White fragility is the same concept as male fragility. If you are reading an article about one, you can substitute the other. It's the same damn reluctance for dominance to confront its own power--and, well, fragility. In a Salon/Alternet interview, Robin DiAngelo, originator of the concept--from years of doing workshops with white people on racism--iterates the problem of the vanishing "-ism" and the violently binary thinking it triggers:

For white people, their identities rest on the idea of racism as about good or bad people, about moral or immoral singular acts, and if we’re good, moral people we can’t be racist – we don’t engage in those acts. This is one of the most effective adaptations of racism over time—that we can think of racism as only something that individuals either are or are not “doing.”

In large part, white fragility—the defensiveness, the fear of conflict—is rooted in this good/bad binary. If you call someone out, they think to themselves, “What you just said was that I am a bad person, and that is intolerable to me.” It’s a deep challenge to the core of our identity as good, moral people.

Perpetrators, whether intentional or unsuspecting, get defensive when the mirror tilts back their way.

The tyranny of euphemisms

When talking about "white privilege" with our then-17-year-old son a couple years ago, he said he didn't think it sounded right that we referred to ourselves as "privileged." I recalled the years we told our kids they would "earn their privileges" if their behavior showed an understanding of our house rules ... My partner and I do not have such positive associations with privilege. We understand it as criticism.

Though the term goes back a century at least to W.E.B. DuBois' description of the "white-skinned privilege" the poor white classes were encouraged to feel, so as to be less dissatisfied with their lower status, I agree. It doesn't sound right. And it perpetuates the disproportionality just by speaking it. I also do not want to refer to white culture as "supreme," even though it has acted that way.

Where's that mirror when we need it?

Now I see it. It is a violence that starts in the mind as unearned and unequal status between two equally human beings. A lie that hurts, perpetually hurts and perpetuates the perpetuity of hurt.

Conceptual violence really is the worst kind.

###

Post Script

Go ahead, grab a feminist cup of coffee and watch this TED talk, illustrating the grammar of oppression. It nearly takes us back to grade school, but an adult version where we diagram a sentence in order to uncover a lie. The perpetrators (nouns) became systematically de-linked from acts of aggression and violence (verbs that quite often lead to death) and their objects (women).

How the passive and misleading, half-truth constructions of "rape victims" and "battered women" keep us focused on the victims, even blaming them.

This got me started a couple years ago. I still find it inspiring. Plus, it's an example of a Male Feminist fighting the deeper patriarchal reaches of our language and thought. More exemplary usage of the proper human use of the discriminatory arts.

Updated Oct. 9, 2015

from original post, On the -Ists and -Isms of Gender and Racial Discrimination, May 24, 2013

Philanthropy's Bloody Origins

2015-05-01T06:30:00.000-07:00

PHILANTHROPY GAMES, PART II

by Amy Rubin for NeonSynthesist

Truthbombs:

a People's History of Philanthropy,
or Charity's Bloody Origins

The Battle of Homestead is one of the most famous events in American labor history,

and perhaps the most significant. Just after dawn on July 6, 1892, the battle

erupted when locked-out steelworkers of the Carnegie Steel Works in Homestead, Pa.

together with citizens of the town, broke into the closed and fortified mill nick-named

"Fort Frick" after CEO Henry Frick. On the bank of the Monongahela River,

they confronted a private army of Pinkerton agents hired by Frick as they attempted

to land and secure the mill. The battle was soon joined, and raged

throughout the day with gunfire, burning oil, and cannon.

The Industrial Origins of Modern Philanthropy

Before we get to what raging battles and labor wars had to do with the origins of modern philanthropy, let's take a look at one particular response to Peter Buffet's recent article "The Charitable-Industrial Complex." (see Philanthropy Games, Part I)

Matt Bishop, an editor for The Economist, argued:

"The term ‘charitable-industrial complex’ deliberately evokes the ‘military-industrial complex’... [Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961 of a] “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry" ... that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” [Mr Buffett] certainly does not think it has acquired unwarranted influence. He is not suggesting that we should be alarmed because Bill Gates has become Barack Obama’s puppet master."

But the facts are against this (poorly constructed) argument.

First of all, let's remember that metaphors are not literal and they often invoke a poetic leap of thought. That's creativity.

Second, just because you use an analogy doesn't mean that every literal detail has to transfer. That peculiar expectation of literal transcription in the use of analogy seems to be a rhetorical trick. The analogy, in other words, may have been in the what, or mere existence, of undue influence rather than the how, or an exact replication of methods. (See future blog post on the Death of Metaphor).

Third, an ancillary point, it's true that Buffet doesn't indicate the government is puppet to Bill Gates, however Bishop's use of the Gates example is ironic, since the Gates Foundation has actually been quite invested in the educational reform movement.

Fourth, Bishop may do well to see the issue of undue influence in historical context. You will have to judge for yourself, once you see the Rockerfellian origins of the philanthropic enterprise and read the section on the Walsh Commission of 1912 below.

Really, does no one expect us to look up our history anymore?

Haymarket Square Incident of 1886

The bloody Haymarket Square Incident in Chicago started when an unidentified person threw a bomb during an otherwise peaceful protest, killing police and bystanders. Immediate police gunfire ensued killing several participants who had been protesting for the eight-hour work day.

The protest-turned-incident led to labor strikes and the news reverbated internationally, especially with the trial and hanging of a handful of innocent jailed protesters. Though the famous Chicago affair may have been a temporary blow to labor rights, it grew to internationally heroic proportions, both in leading to the eventual eight-hour-work-day standard and the widely celebrated May Day for labor rights (called Labor Day in many countries).

Homestead Steel Strike of 1892
During the Homestead Steel Strike at one of Andrew Carnegie's factories near Pittsburgh, Pa., strikers were prepared and ready for battle if necessary. Indeed it was; it required the state militia. According to the American Experience website:

"Carnegie's involvement in the union-breaking action left many men dead or wounded and forever tarnished Carnegie's reputation as a benevolent employer and a champion of labor."

As everyone knows, his big idea in philanthropy— and it was a profound vision—was the American public library system. But, as a recent NPR report noted, whereas the steel workers had claimed that ‘when they work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, they don’t have time for a book!’ Carnegie responded with:

‘If I raise the wages, they might just choose to spend it on a better cut of meat and more drink with their dinner.’

That didn't sound very generous or charitable. And, of course, it was a straw-man argument, painting a false choice between raising wages and creating libraries. Carnegie could have, and probably should have, done both.

Bread And Roses Strike of 1912

The "Bread and Roses" Textile Strike in Lawrence, Mass., led by the Industrial Workers of the World, broke out with a two-hour-per-week work/wage deficit affected the mostly immigrant (representing 51 nationalities) and female factory workers.

A political cartoon from the time dramatized the City's demeanor toward women and their concerns about having enough to feed their children.

"We Want Bread,
but We Want Roses Too"

The Walsh Commission of 1912

A Council on Foundations newsletter spells it out. Initiated before the Revenue Act of 1913, the Walsh Commission of 1912 was part of President William Howard Taft's interest in studying the causes of industrial strife "including the role foundations may have played in creating social unrest." The context? Suspicions about the Rockefeller Foundation and John D. Rockefeller's influence in industrial relations, as well as several instances of violent labor strikes at his factories:

John D. Rockefeller

"After three years of hearings, more than 700 witnesses and 6.5 million words of testimony, the Walsh Commission concluded that a small group of wealthy families dominated the nation's major industries and educational and social institutions through their foundations ...

Senator Walsh ... characterized foundations as a "menace" and urged the government to regulate them to recover the fortunes they had "embezzled from the people."
Louis Brandeis, who had not yet been named to the Supreme Court, testified that he thought large foundations were inconsistent with democracy and that Congress, by chartering them, was creating a new and possibly uncontrollable kind of power."

A "new and possibly uncontrollable kind of power." That might be like undue influence. In addition:

"The commission pointed out that the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations alone had assets twice as large as federal expenditures for education and social services, and the assets of foundations then were tax-exempt and generally free from public control."

And that's not all, in addition to suggesting they be federally controlled, it also recommended that:

Foundations should not exist in perpetuity and should be required to spend all their money in a specified period of time. [FAIL]

Foundation assets should have a size limit. [FAIL]

Foundations should be required to submit reports to the federal government. [PASS]

Foundation boards should include representatives of the federal government because most foundations were controlled by private financiers who had little regard for the public. [FAIL]

Not only have Philanthropy and Industry been intimately intertwined--one might even say married on the altar of capitalism--the dire circumstances in their connection to social strife and unrest was proclaimed as early as one hundred years ago. (This is not the only issue we seem to have 100-year amnesia about--same for education.)

So high-wealth Industrialists of the Gilded Age created the field of philanthropy as we know it, with help from "government" or congressionally approved policy. The progenitor of the modern philanthropic organization, the Rockefeller Foundation, was established the same year the Revenue Act of 1913 passed, paving the way for the tax-exempt status for charitable organizations. The, very thorough, Walsh Commission, didn't conclude until 1917, the year in which individual donors to foundations and charities were allowed to take tax deductions.

It is no coincidence and certainly not irrelevant, therefore, that the great American philanthropic-industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were also referred to as robber barons.

The Social Good sector appears to have had violent beginnings, marked more by Social Unrest. Philanthropy still depends tremendously on Industry. That connection is becoming clearer to the American public again.

Uprisings are beginning to stir.

Philanthropy:
an Industry in Question

One hundred years ago, workers and citizens not only saw the hypocrisy of the system, but went to battle over it!

What does Bread and Roses even mean anymore? You can still find it in a few places. Such as this Occupy event poster. Or, references in the teenage dystopian series The Hunger Games...

Stress fractures have become increasingly visible in the philanthropic sector. During the recent economic recession, small nonprofits have closed, corruption scandals in large nonprofits have become more visible and the usual scramble for donations became even more fierce. Worries about how the tax-exempt clause, if altered, would affect the industry and a general desire to reconceive some of the basic tenets of philanthropy, especially since the economic meltdown of 2008, and subsequent questions arising about the sustainability of current capitalistic economic models.

The nonprofit sector has struggled to conceive a more affirmative identity for itself—social good, third sector—beyond their non-status, generic branding of “non-profit," “non-governmental” organization.

But the "non" in nonprofit clearly indicates it is running off another system. It is, alas, capitalism co-dependent--on corporate wealth, on inherited wealth, on Wall Street. The very economic systems, some say, that create the social and economic problems and poverties in the first place.

And as we've just seen, this isn't a new thought. (No wonder politicians don't like Howard Zinn's coverage of labor history.)

Some of the questions arising since the meltdown have been: Should nonprofits and churches be exempt from taxes? Are the millionaires and billionaires giving enough to charity? Are they paying enough in personal income and capital gains taxes? Are corporations paying their fair share in taxes?

New industrialists Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have advocated for both higher tax rates for the very wealthy as well as increased philanthropic giving. Warren Buffet, during budget deliberations in Obama’s second term, publicly pointed out that his secretary was paying a higher tax rate than he was.

Other influences have empowered the public to ask more questions, represent information in new ways and to discover and fearlessly promote awareness of institutionalized hypocrisies as well as absurdities of the status quo. Trends include:

Increasing presence and dominanceof TV “news comedy,” adept at juxtaposing contrary visual or auditory evidence--experts in hypocrisy;

Increased and highly networked socialmedia;

Emerging trend of infographics, which convey critical information in simple but powerfully visual social-media friendly formats; and

The Occupy movement, critical of Big Money and Wall Street, turned our consciousness toward a new, sweeping but simple, numerical representation: 1% versus 99%.

Now, perhaps as a result of these trends, the public is wondering why Walmart won’t pay its workers—who often rely on forms of public assistance such as food stamps and Medicaid—living-wage salaries? Then, putting two and two together, the concept of “corporate welfare” arose. This is where companies—by design, whether intentionally or unintentionally as part of “the system”—depend on low-wage workers on welfare, enabling a corporate model indirectly dependent on public money.

Now, again, citizens are no longer falling for false choices and are showing intolerance to such hypocrisy. The Walmart example is evidence that the public is actively engaging in a higher level of critical thinking again—systems thinking—a synthetic function of literacy that discovers linkages and weaves important pieces of a system, or story, together.

Hungering Once More

In The Philanthropy Games, Part I, we saw how hunger is used in games of political gain and in campaigns of terror.

And in our own country's game of soft control, real poverty is demonized, or worse ignored. Perhaps even worse, when merely the subject of teenage novels like the Hunger Games.

But not to be mistaken--at least there--as the symbolism is clear in "the citizens of Panem" ("bread") and of course Tribute 1 from District 12, Peeta, works in a bakery, where he is depicted illegally tossing a loaf of bread to the starving-class Katniss Everdeen. And evil President Snow of the Capitol is darkly symbolized by white roses (which may symbolize the White Rose, an anti-Nazi student resistance group beheaded by the Gestapo in 1943) that he carefully cultivates, prunes and controls.

Questioning 'the System'

Those who engage in systems thinking don’t disregard existing benefits and short-term answers of current systems—they know for example of the many benefits of philanthropy. But they tend to be more focused on looking past the status quo, for new designs that better serve the values and purposes both inherent and possible in the larger ecosystem.

Systems thinking requires knowing the variables and values, as well as the desired end, but giving up your agenda. Putting your investments aside. No stakeholders allowed. Idealists, pattern seekers and problem solvers are best suited to look at the big picture, focus on the critical fault lines and temporarily overlook what works well, in order to imagine a system that works better in the future.

In other words--as systems-thinking author of The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge, made central to his work--you have to be in a learning mode. This requires openness, inquiry and non-attachment.

Although Senge applied this principle to what he called ‘learning organizations,’ there are individuals who either exercise these qualities naturally, or whose status predisposes them to more easily access this learning mode.

For example, teachers, journalists, thinkers (in theory, at least) and natural inquirers probably inhabit this learning mode and are more capable of systems thinking; or, individuals whose thinking and personality styles are so strong in this direction that they have a tendency to override personal benefits that might arise from not engaging in such thinking (think of Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King, Jr.); or, those who are either below or above needing the kinds of personal gains and validations that come attached to promises of increased power, networks, reputation, money and status.

Theoretically, there should be a good strong sector of systems thinkers. But that is for another blog post.

Truthbombs

When any of the above conditions occur, truthbombs can happen to varying effect. When dropped by someone in a particularly powerful position, significant visibility, if not influence, can result.

That's what happened with Peter Buffet's article. He questioned the system:

"As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity."

Bomb.

"But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place.The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over. Nearly every time someone feels better by doing good, on the other side of the world (or street), someone else is further locked into a system that will not allow the true flourishing of his or her nature or the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life."

Bomb.

"… as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine."

BOMB

Buffet's an idealist, problem solver and truth teller who is capable (of the luxury) of putting his agenda and investments aside. He operates one of his family’s foundations and was brought up in a family of some of the greatest capitalistic wealth generation of the last century. It helps that he’s an Emmy-award winning composer and not a drug-addicted trust fund baby. It also helps that he has first-hand experience running a sizable foundation. And, it helps he is “above it all.”

Because, being above it all is not a disqualifier, actually the opposite. It just means that, for him, there were few foreseeable negative repercussions of telling the truth, other than probably upsetting people in his industry and lifting the veil of goodness off of what he argues are chronically over-valued wealthy donors and philanthropists.

A lot of defensiveness has surfaced.

Now would be a good time to do a reality check at Urban Dictionary. According to the UD, philanthropy is:

Rich-ass bitch: hmm im rich what should I do? I already have a mansion with 23,555 rooms and 6 pools and 345 cars. And my garbage disposal broke from all the money i tried to get rid of, what should i do with it now? Oh i know! I know! I'll pretend to be a good person and give it away! Hmm isnt it called being a philanthropist? (looks in the mirror) What would the world do without me?

Yep.

Back to Buffet. One article tried to indicate that he somehow dismantled or defrocked his philanthropist father. I doubt that. Warren Buffet seems quite aware of the problems and hypocrisies. He’s the one who sloughed off personal wealth and bypassed usual philanthropic protocol by directly funding infrastructure projects. He also coined the ironic turn of phrase for trust funds as “food stamps for the rich.” He’s smart, not only in gaming the system but knowing and openly acknowledging so.

And Matt Bishop's article, mentioned above, really wasn't so much a critique but a defense of the namesake of his own blog, Philanthrocapitalism.

To continue reading more about the challenges of the philanthropy sector and a popular literature review on the topic, click below for Part III of the series.

Philanthropy Games, Part III: Crimes of Capital

Philanthropy Games, Part IV: Special Race Edition

Philanthropy Games, Part I: May the Odds be Ever in Your Favor

References

Buffet, Peter. "The Charitable-Industrial Complex." New York Times, July, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/the-charitable-industrial-complex.html?_r=0

Bishop, Matt. The Economist. See his LinkedIn profile.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20130729195515-211889-why-buffett-is-wrong-about-the-charitable-industrial-complex

U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, 1912-1915
http://cisupa.proquest.com/ksc_assets/catalog/10933.pdf

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Slow Your Style ... Know your History

2015-04-24T09:30:00.001-07:00

Slow your Style ...

Know your History

and other steps along the way
to your own "Fashion Revolution"

Earth Day, 2015

Amy Rubin, Polymath | modern vintage

for NeonSynthesist

They say your clothes say a lot about you. Likely, this sentiment used to carry class implications, and it probably still does. But the sustainable clothing movement has given it new meaning.

Years ago, a nonprofit fundraising colleague shared her (rather classist) method by which she assessed whether prospective donors"had money:" look at their shoes. Of course, you can have wealth and so-called class; but that doesn't guarantee taste--or a conscience.

Nowadays, "what your clothes say about you" has a lot less to do with status and more to do with sustainability--human rights, working conditions, animal rights, environmental and social justice and economic policies.

As the "Slow fashion" gains popularity, the Fashion Revolution movement (#FashRev, #ShowYourLabel, #WhoMadeMyClothes) debuted its Show your Label campaign for this year's Earth Day.

Show your Label

Fashion. Death. Revolution. It is no accident that the Show Your Label campaign coincides with the (second) anniversary of the highly preventable Rana Plaza garment factory tragedy in Dhaka, Bangledesh, that killed 1,133 and injured 2,500 workers.

According to Fairtrade India’s event page, Show YourLabel, the Fashion Revolution movement started two years ago after the Rana Plaza complex collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

The Show Your Label campaign asks people to get involved in the Fashion Revolution by doing these 4 things:

Take a selfie, showing your label or turn your clothes inside out
Share photo on social media, ask favorite brand, “Who grew your clothes?”
Use Hashtags #ShowYourLabel and #FashRev and #WhoMadeMyClothes
Make our message louder. Nominate 3 friends to do the same.

Know your history

NPR's brief story this morning about Slow Fashion and the anniversary of the Rana Plaza tragedy made it sound like those in charge were not aware of the problems of the factory and that many of the factories have been undergoing intensive inspection, evaluation and redesign according to industry standards.

Not a single mention of history. We need much more than a fashion revolution.

The billionaires of big fashion brands like Benneton, Joe Fresh, Zara and big box stores like J.C. Penny and Children's Place--all of these were companies actively having clothes made with what American Apparel CEO called the slave labor at Rana Plaza ...

It may not be top of mind to think of the American slavery system in the context of fashion. But we know too well how the blood, sweat and tears of their lives and labor were at the crux of the cotton textile industry. The three words you need to know beyond that are:

Triangle. Shirtwaist. Factory.

NYC, 1911. Mostly women, some children and men. Mostly immigrants.

You see, the mostly young women who worked there were locked on the factory floors by their male managers so they would not take unauthorized breaks. Injustice breeds injustice. When a fire broke out due to unsafe and unregulated conditions, the women couldn’t escape. They jumped to their deaths or burned in the fire.

Reading stories of eye witnesses and survivors, it was a grisly affair with bodies piling up on the sidewalks.

When we lead too much with only current events, and not history, the world is ... upside down.

Wear Your (True) Colors

Maybe it's not a matter of knowing your history, but caring about it.

The United Colors of Benneton, despite it's humanity-inspired brand, did nothing to prevent another tragedy more than 100 years later.

The growing American conservative movement--advocating deregulation, union busting and outsourcing of key manufacturing jobs to foreign countries--set America on an unfortunate path that has taken us back 100 years or more in sophistication, accountability and ethics, not to mention jobs and living wages.

At some level, then, we consciously chose to trample on people again as disposable resources. But this time, far away in another country with fewer regulations and cheap labor, it would be out of sight and out of mind.

#FashRev is a social movement to raise awareness and create personal change around unsustainable fashion industry practices and products.

Who made what are you wearing? It asks.

Find the labels. Show the labels. Dig into the company practices. Because, ultimately, we too cannot claim ignorance and are also, as consumers, responsible.

Made in the USA ... again, please!

In the 1960s and 1970s, most U.S. fashions were made in the U.S.A.

I am reminded of this because I wear and sell vintage clothes. It is not uncommon to find the old union label in them, a trademark of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union or ILGWU. I remember always seeing this label, often with the number of the worker on it, in my clothes growing up. I didn't know what it meant. But I do remember the reminder to "look for the union label" in an a public awareness campaign song forever etched in my memory:

Listen to it here.

That union label, you can be sure, was a sign of sustainable wages and industry practices. They must have made a pretty decent living for their factory jobs. Why? Because it was all taken away--that's when we know, in the eyes of company board members, they were getting paid too much.

Does anyone remember the “huge sucking sound” that Libertarian presidential candidate Ross Perot referred to in the 90s? According to him, it was the sound of the drain of United States manufacturing industry jobs to other countries. And it was too late. Federal policy favored corporations outsourcing critical jobs—the “manufacturing base” that has been mourned in recent years—to foreign countries, where they didn’t have to pay decent wages, have decent industrial conditions or have nearly the accountability and sustainability that the unions had demanded.

Full circle. There is a movement back toward clothes made in the USA.

But, in the meantime, what can we do?

Aside from taking a selfie and showing your label to raise awareness today, here is a punch list for you to take up--one I'll elaborate more on in the future.

6 things to get you started on on a fashion revolution

Ditch Fast Fashion
Cultivate individual style to transcend fashion trends
Incorporate thrift and vintage into your wardrobe
Shop locally made clothes
Buy sustainable basics
Know your history!

I look forward to elaborating on each of these steps in a future post.

Stay tuned! Some of the ways you can do that is subscribing to my blog NeonSynthesist, or finding us at Polymath |modern vintage on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

For links to these pages visit http://www.polymathvintage.com

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Irrationality Incorporated: What is Business? Part I

2015-03-16T12:38:00.000-07:00

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."--Voltaire
Voltaire's dictum works well for concepts too; those we are the most beholden to, the ones that glue together the illusory scrim that hangs over our eyes, our days, our lives--those are the ones. Like this one: what is business?

by Amy Rubin for NeonSynthesist

The Idealization of Busy
We are all busy, with life, with learning, with relationships, projects, partnerships, work, business. We seem to love to measure the quantity of our busy-ness, not so much the quality. The ways in which we weigh the relative values of busy are at best uneven, if not irrationally biased, as they seem to emerge more from cultural habit than method.

Traditionally, certain kinds of "busyness" have and still do carry social status, such as wealthy women making themselves busy with charity work for the poor and wealthy men making profitable decisions in the board room or lucrative deals on the golf course. The single mother working two jobs and eighty hours a week to make rent and feed her children, however, though sometimes idealized, is often subject to social stigma, not status--even if she isn't receiving government support. The farmer working his daily butt off to maintain a living in competition with Big Ag firms--even though receiving government subsidies--remains unconsciously mythical in importance to the American dream.

The working-class laborer is the romantic subject of Chevy commercials during the Super Bowl, and that is to sell product, but the day- or immigrant-laborer doesn't make the grade.

So busy, even while hierarchically, socio-economically segregated, is the idealized, or at least compulsory, mode of American being.

The most glorified kinds of busy? They are highly abstract (but not abstract as in thinking) in that they are largely based on numbers and highly monetized. And, they carry the very namesake of busy …

That is, business. Exactly what is it?

My own initial survey of responses to the question might include the following:

a method for making money
the means to earn a livelihood
the exchange of goods or services
producing services or products that fulfill needs for which people will pay money
the formal economy, as documented by law, tax, trade and valuation systems
the backbone of the economy
the economic measure of our national power
an opportunity to create wealth
the path to achieve extreme wealth and power

Notice, the act of "being busy" isn't apt to make the list. But it is the deeply ingrained, self-referential aspect of business.

A famous answer to the question provided by Chicago School economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006) seemed to answer the question by hermetically sealing shut the door of inquiry, at least for a few decades, with his highly imitable, now infamous, maxim that:

"The business
of business
is business."

It turns out, he may not have said those exact words. It may have morphed from a more documented phrase he used, that "the social responsibility of business is to make profit." Even the most conservative corporate responsibility (CSR) officers might scoff at that …

The maxim, nonsensical in meaning, nevertheless effectively translated and popularized his controversial brand of free market economics that promoted the idea that shareholder value was all that mattered. An advisor to President Reagan, this brand was widely adopted during the Reagan-Thatcher years and beyond. We've been living the consequences of this extremist, largely Republican, economic platform for the last few decades. While this one particular view about shareholder profits was particularly strong, to be fair his ideas about freedom and government were Libertarian in nature, probably more complex, likely misunderstood and, in the end, cherry picked for practical use in conservative politics.

The sound-byte-ready saying, whether truly Friedman's or a cultural caricature, neatly and in no mean way encapsulates the money-as-power worldview: it shuts down all philosophical discussion and critical reasoning with its self-referential, circular construction. Either it's what is known in logic as a tautology, a type of informal logical fallacy that repeats its meaning via redundant parts (it might even be a double tautology). Or, it may be another logical fallacy called a circular argument, which contains as an assumption the very thing to be proved. Reminiscent of the popular, also tautological, phrase "nothing succeeds like success," it defines itself by itself, emanating a radiant self-evident truth bolstered by continued unquestioned agreement.

Did anyone, I wonder, ever respond that this puts business on an entirely illogical and erroneous foundation? That the purpose of business is, in essence, not rationally founded or understood while at the same time asserting that this does not matter? That would have been a good response. It's never too late.

Business is irrational.

Business and the Power of Irrationality

That is why it has to be justified by a phrase like "the business of business is business,"-- which is curiously, in my opinion, like another well-worn phrase no longer worth its salt:

"boys will be boys"

Non-entry of thinking, or questioning, or difference, is critical to both. Slam! Keep Out!! Pirate's Code! (No Girls Allowed).

Just using the phrase made me feel I should stop the line of inquiry. Or risk embarrassment. Out of bounds.

Or, maybe I just bumped into that thing I am not supposed to criticize?

Seriously, though, maybe thinking is out-of-bounds when it comes to business. That is what I am supposed to think. Question myself. Friedman's saying is like a magical curse with a touch of ad hominem in it: deflect the question while making the questioner appear spurious.

In the end, the phrase does feel like DominanceSpeak, a kind of "mansplaining" or powersplaining, wherein the explainer exploits his authority or deploys unearned authority and privileged access to the truth and/or the ability to better communicate it.

Plus, a little propaganda--in the form of full-strength vintage 1980s marketing--is on its side. Remember the cliche about repeating a company name or branding message three times for maximum impact? Done. Rather eloquently, I might add.

The business of business is business. So, a little word trickery is in the saying's favor. It's self-love is enchanting, yet entirely opaque in its complete self-reflectivity. Nevertheless, when we desist the spell ... it may have the opposite effect: what the hell does that mean? What exactly is this all-important, holier-than-thou, annoyingly deflective and impenetrable "business?"

As with so many concepts and meanings, the underlying notion and history of the thing is in the word itself. Etymology doesn't solve everything, but it often provides insightful clues.

Too Busy to Think

For years, I thought about the "busi" in the word "business," assuming it probably did have a relationship to the word "busy." But, being busy, looking it up remained a back burner task. Until, that is, a Hedgehog Review article caught my attention and completed the assignment. The article also assured me I wasn't the only one thinking about it--business, that is, which takes up an enormous amount of social, economic and cultural capital; if not modern spiritual suffrage.

The article, questioning the appropriateness of the corporate business model in academic decision making, examined several interesting word roots that are related in their parallel--and opposite--meanings, all of which are loosely associated with definitions of leisure and not-leisure activities.

"The words scholar and school come to us from the Greek schole, which can be translated at least roughly as "leisure," in the sense of time free from the need to labor. Aristotle regarded such freedom as the precondition of the most valuable sorts of thought and action, and in particular for the sort of thought that is an end in itself … he was giving voice to a prevailing Greek opinion … [that] leisure opens the possibility of genuinely free thought--thought born of wonder and free to unfold in accordance with its own internal demands, rather than … activities whose point lies in some conceptually separate state of affairs they are calculated to produce.

"This broadly Greek understanding of the opposition between leisure and leisure-lessness was taken up into Latin … with there term otium and its contrary, negotium. This latter Latin term itself traversed a long etymological path, one of whose endpoints is the contemporary Spanish word negocio, which means business … the word's English-language equivalent … though ordinarily it spills out of the mouth too quickly for its etymology to register in the ear. I wonder if business school might not lose some of its appeal if its name were enunciated more deliberately. Wouldn't people think twice before signing up for a school of busyness?

"Maybe they wouldn't. But I hope at least that you can now hear the lingering oxymoron in that phrase. A school of business. A schole of the negation of schole. An institution devoted to discussion and thought unfolding under its own internal demands, yet offering training for the sort of life that has no place for such thought--the sort that places thought in service of need." (1)

So, maybe thinking has no business in the world of business, after all? Yet, before we accept this historical and rather ancient either/or semantics and apply it wholesale to modern times, let's think through this a little more carefully.

Thinking v. action
There is an ongoing tension that sometimes lights to a full-out either/or battle in our culture via the thinking versus doing meme. In business, for some reason, this dichotomy achieves a particular level of defensiveness, expressed in common phrases like 'we're doers, not thinkers' or 'we don't just sit around and talk, we take action' or 'ideas are cheap, implementing ideas are what matters' … that kind of thing. This is of course a false dichotomy. Both are equally important, mutually exclusive and essentially incomparable.

And, if the hyper-masculinized, over-emphasis on action seems familiar, look no further than the quintessential American mythology of The West:

"One personification of the myth, embellished by Hollywood, is of the Lone Ranger, the solitary gunman riding into town to clean things up. John Wayne and Clint Eastwood didn’t become cultural icons by portraying consortial leaders. They played isolated individuals who kept their mouths shut, let the others make fools of themselves with words, and then when action was demanded, gave it—usually from a gun barrel."(2)

In her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking (2012), author Susan Cain examines this myth via the introversion/extroversion dichotomy, where the Man of Action assumes the guise of the Mighty Likeable Fellow, who embraces the extroverted ideal associated with social and financial success. It is what she describes as a 'culture of personality,' and according to Cain "The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves, and never be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up." (p.31)

The Man of Action mythology is gendered. Thinking, academics and intellectualism all tend toward the fancy, feminine, superfluous, over thought, complex, European, Old World … In a word, fuddy duddy. Ineffective. Impractical, almost embarrassing.

For God's sake, we say, Just Do It. ™

America--the business world in particular--has a really bad case of this. Very ironic, given one of the meanings of the word "busy":

excessively detailed or decorated; fussy

"they papered the bedroom with a busy pattern of satyrs and dryads"

synonyms: ornate, overelaborate, overblown, overwrought, overdone, fussy, cluttered, overworked

So, apparently our post-war, hyper-masculinized, latter-twentieth-century best thinking brought us to this double-edged moral judgement: 1) that demeaning all things soft and feminine is a good and clever strategy and 2) that thinking is a 'soft' activity.

Considerable derogatory use of "soft"--despite contemporary trickle-down legitimacy in instances like "software" from the digital world--continues, but we don't need to look further than non-Western thinking for edification. As Cain discusses in a chapter titled "Soft Power," Asian concepts embrace the notion of leadership "by water rather than by fire." (p.197)

Highlighting thinking, then, as a kind of soft activity, not only points to its alleged softness but also to the fact that thinking is an activity. It is a verb, believe it or not. Though we think of it as the opposite of action, it remains a particular kind of activity despite it's signature lack of the kind of action we normally associate with activity, i.e. physical activity.

Thinking v. busi(y)ness
The funny thing though is that where thinking is a verb and a kind of activity, busy is actually an adjective that describes a state of being. Exactly opposite what one would think: thinking is action and business is a mode of being?

Although I've taken my fair share of philosophy classes and read Heidegger's Being and Time among others, I didn't find any quick reference or "list" of different "modes of being." So, with my background in the subject, I'll just take a stab at it.

Being describes how we exist and relate to the world. When we talk about modes of being, it's easy to say "being busy" with x or y form of activity because busyness is usually defined as relating to activities that accomplish tasks, that is when it's not being defined as "much of" something that can be passive, like a "busy" design. Conversely, we don't say "being thinking" because we don't usually put two verbs together, we usually qualify verbs with adverbs, or in the case of an intransitive like "being," with an adjective. We do say that someone is "busy thinking," in other words completely occupied with it.

But thinking is a peculiar type of activity. One of the mind. And since it does involve a particular orientation of our mind, with regard to our experience, our environment and the world by way of our own existence, thinking is really much more like a mode of being, not so much an activity. After all, if so, it's a mode of being that, requiring leisure, seems to preclude engaging in other activities. But, on the other hand, that's true of a lot of activities, isn't it? You can't run and walk at the same time. So it's a peculiar mode of activity that is more like a mode of being?

So, thinking would seem to share being a mode of being--one quite opposite that of busy--while also being a kind of non-physical activity. In fact, the non-physical aspect is what seems to drive thinking, as thinking is a state of being that involves the mind as it engages quietly with itself, with a book or in a kind of relationship or communion with the world.

Most philosophers, of course, would agree there is something very special about thinking. Descartes expressed this with his famous I think therefore I am; logicians like to separate and sort our thinking mathematically; and this unusual "activity" of thinking forms the subject of modern philosophical tracts like Martin Heidegger's What is Called Thinking (1976), as well as recent inquires such as Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011).

Busy and business, on the other hand, describe largely physical modes of being--what we call actions and activities. And though thinking is an activity of our mind and brain, it is also one of the most basic states of being in which humans engage. Doing and action are also foundational modes of being, like thinking or dreaming.

These essential modes are naturally different but equally basic to human existence. Culturally, however, they fight for hierarchy and bolstered status. Mythologies create different systems of these states of being. In America, we like to put doing first and we praise the "man of action" and an industrious ethic over the intellectual and leisurely. Religions are apt to place more emphasis on worship and ritual as methods for expressing a spiritual state of being, praying. And indigenous Australians count "dream time" as equally real and valuable as waking hours.

Minding our (Philosophy of) Business
Now business, and its likeness busyness, being about non-leisure, are about working and doing, action and implementation--about being busy and not having the leisure to (properly) think. But of course, most coordinated actions are guided by some kind of philosophy of practice, so that if we don't take the time and/or leisure to think about, shape and evaluate how we practice our actions, the system defaults to whatever mode happens to be at play, is designed into the system or is most convenient.

And, if systems continue to default to this status quo, necessary adaptations may not occur. Anticipating change and creating adaptations is what business strategy is for, and it in turn should be informed by and help inform business philosophy. In other words, if the why and the how of our business/busyness are divorced--when the means and the ends conflate--results are not likely to reflect humanity's potential, level of knowledge and wisdom. That is largely where we are now in business and socio-economic realities in most places around the globe: not working for 99% or more of us. Highly effective for some people; maladaptive for most.

In fact, the levels of non-strategic busyness that persons, families, even institutions and corporations assume seem more and more out of proportion. In poverty, individuals and families are busy working an irrational number of hours each week, struggling to merely survive. Among the middle class, individuals and families and their businesses of patronage are compulsively busy with consumerism, buying and spending in a scheme, they are promised, will make them thrive.

Though somewhat counter-intuitive, at the extreme wealth end of the spectrum, there may be the most busyness. This is where busyness creates busyness, business creates business, money creates money, and whole jobs, companies and even industries emerge to grow wealth and keep wealth. Here, individuals and families and, by proxy, their institutions, corporations, philanthropies, assets and properties, and the service providers managing their wealth, finance and property--banks, investment firms, accountants, lawyers, stock traders--are in a constant state of non-strategic busyness. They are busy, and highly paid, to keep money in the right places, spend enough to keep pace with their growing net worth. They are busy taking steps to dominate markets and evade taxes. They are constantly busy investing in their own wealth in a way that requires further investing in their own wealth. In general, they are simply busy with the madness of trying to outwit the consumptive disease of capitalism through the treatment of more capitalism.

And that didn't even touch on the very critical form of busy the ultra wealthy and their proxies engage in: politics. The Koch brothers have made this quite visible.

So, it's a different game of busyness at different levels. But much of it is a very repetitive, not clearly measurable or impactful level of busy. There is no goal or end to the game in sight. It's Sisyphean. The means is the end. For a culture often obsessed with product over process, all our time is spent in process. And there we get back to that sense of irrational circularity. The self-defining, self-justifying "the business of business is business." It's irrational. And that is not a very good philosophy of business.

But irrationality is a powerful force on people who are not only busy, but have a social stake in adopting, or appearing to, the widely idealized state. Keeping people busy, not thinking, not having the leisure time to think or critical thinking skills is important to keeping the game going. Thus we have a popularly adopted and widely promoted, albeit unthinking, anti-intellectualism. We buttress this attitude with metaphors of war and battle and victory, of winning and losing, but there actually is no game.

It's a mythology that we participate in and consent to in so many ways.

Academy v. Corporation: separate but not equal
All human beings are born with the capacity to think. Poor environmental conditions, such as abuse and neglect or poverty and lack of education or leisure, may inhibit its full development and the brain's crude calculations may sometimes be mistaken for thinking. But improvement in these conditions may allow for the full development of our thinking capacity--to develop and entertain our own thoughts and use our minds independently.

It is in higher education, at the academy or university, where the industry of the thinking arts has its home. There, people are quite busy learning, teaching, researching, reading, writing, speaking, experimenting and asking questions. Ever since the university became less a playground and more an economic industry--I don't know when, but would guess the 1980s--the corporate business model has guided the industry of higher thought and education, demanding measurable educational and economic outcomes, diminishing the important leisure aspect of learning and free thinking, requiring more industriousness in the way it performs its business, as well as increased emphasis on preparation for joining an income-generating industry.

Similarly, all human beings engage in busyness. Action is required to accomplish physical and sometimes even mental tasks. If someone is engaging in business, it usually means a lot of time and energy spent on activities of that particular business--whether it is exporting goods, drilling for oil, appraising artwork--or even thinking, as a scholar can be described as 'attending to the business of thinking.' In this broad sense, business is akin to practice, something repeated, rehearsed, developed.

The "home" for the business sector, dispersed among high rises and store fronts, farms and industrial parks, however, is reserved not just for economic, but monetary, activity, excluding the still largely female realm of what was formerly called "home economics." Now, business stands for the private sector exchange of financial or service goods and includes nonprofit organizations.

Comparing thinking and busyness, two issues of non-parallality arise. One is logical. Busy, implying activity, is the broader category because it is not a particular kind of activity per se, like thinking, but a state of being engaged in any activity. One can be very busy thinking but (in most cases) cannot be thoughtfully busy at another activity (with some exceptions usually involved mindless activities that allow the mind to wander such as knitting or sealing envelopes). The pervasive application of a state of being--as in the addition of the adjective "busy"--versus the natural limit of a particular verb's meaning, in this case thinking--an activity involving free mental states and defined in opposition to being occupied with various activities. There is some validity to needing the freedom and open space to really think; but that shouldn't necessarily translate to unequal, non-reciprocal status or engagement in these modes of being.

Another issue of non-parallality is cultural and historical. Why are some kinds of busy seen as mere busyness, but not "business"? And why are other kinds of busy the epitome of what "business" has come to mean? Somewhere along the line, certain kinds of busyness became strongly associated with functional, worldly activities and economic exchanges. How is it that a mode of being, then, became a whole category of human activity? That kind of busyness, turned into a noun called "business," encompass a whole category of busy activities with which humans were involved. Busy became less a mode of being that applies to all activities and more a mode of doing that only applied to selective activities.

And the tense iron curtain came down, for real, between thinking and doing, accompanied by a handsome dose of the Industrial Revolution and the machine-like mechanical need for work, work, work and the division of work, work, work into financially compensated labor.

And, culturally, thinking became less an activity in its own right that happened to thrive off a sense of leisure, and instead became associated with a state of being that was, by definition, inactive, unpractical and unproductive while doing became associated with the state of being busy that is strongly linked with having a steady source of income, having more money, more assets and power or, in the case of charity work, allowing others to have what they need to meet basic criteria for survival.

Academics and business are often--quite purposely--separated. But while this separation has been functionally critical, it has also led to some unforeseen and unfortunate consequences.

The separation has not been, and still is not, equal; it is more or less one-sided, and is often and conveniently broken for the sake of business. This is exacerbated by the fact that the academic/educational model over the last few decades has been remade in the image of the corporate business model. While the consequences of this movement may have seemed practical in a fairly minor way during its nascence in the 80s and 90s, many are realizing that the long term effects are anything but minor.

One of the consequences has been a separation of content--actually, knowledge.

The Knowledge Economy Lacks: Knowledge
Are we in the practice of examining possible unconscious motivations in the business world? No. Do we act in daily life as if time may warp and curve? No. Do we see mythological significance to models of leadership that are espoused? No. Do we think that logical constructions, philosophical musings and critical thinking have their place in the board room? No. Do we understand the limits of knowledge and advocate for attaining truly new knowledge in our talk about thought leadership? No. Does sociological theory about race and poverty and economics drive community development? No. Are male leaders enlightened in their practice by feminist theory? No.

The answer is almost always no, except in some cases where dollars, power, status and assets may be enhanced or increased. For example, cutting edge art and creativity are currently being engaged for the purpose of community development because such projects beautify otherwise rundown areas, increase property value and attract talent, wealth, investment and young professionals. In other words, they help gentrify the neighborhood.

In fact, if we are hopeful that human history moves forward on any small track of progress, many functions of daily life are running nearly 100 years behind, or more, than the level of knowledge practiced in the academy.

Personally, this has led to many 'what the f*ck' moments. I honestly wasn't prepared for it. It made my graduate education obsolete and made communication in the "business" world frustrating. I mean, the university was full of black holes, anti-matter, postmodern theory, archeological knowledge, critical race theory, literary criticism and deconstructed history. And then, it was like I had mistakenly travelled in a time machine to the early 19th century, except for the cars, planes and iPhones. Out here, there is no understanding of the ravages of colonialism; on the contrary, NeoColonialism rules in almost every facet of life. And that's city life ... no wonder the Confederate flag still flies in rural communities.

There are some areas where it is finally seeping through. Some change is certainly happening, but oftentimes the change takes place in finite, well-contained or safely delineated areas, such as technology. Daily, when we look down at our smart phones, for instance, we accept not only virtual but parallel realities and we live them happily and simultaneously next to our plain, mechanical, Newtonian lives without being fazed by the wrinkles in time. Marketing and design departments, full of otherwise creative spirits, lately maximize metaphor and find literary motifs among business and design strategy. And art is the vehicle of choice lately for a brand of community development called creative placemaking. These are all signs. Yet, they defer their most prolific truths and profound discoveries, yielding to the utility and practicality of their caretaker: economic prerogative.

And finally, do we deconstruct the business of business? No. And that is the problem. We continue in our daily lives--too much, way too much--on these consensual agreements, which gain in an appearance of truth only as they are more widely accepted and not questioned. If we apply some, not even very current, psychology, we understand that there is cognitive dissonance going on. When group behavior dictates a norm, the act of questionning what has become powerful and pervasive through consensus becomes the irrational choice. It's really a fancy way describing peer pressure.

But the more that is invested, the more the idea becomes cognitively dissonant. And because a lot of time, money, savings, identity, asset holding, power and status are at the core of what we have come to call "business," the act of questioning it--a thoughtful and rational thing to do on any subject--is perceived not only as irrational, but worse: unnecessary, futile, unactionable, a waste of time. In other words, laughable.

Deconstructing Business
I don't know the whole history and evolution of the concept of business, but I think this obvious birth from the state of being busy to its development as the seat of human power is interesting. The classically 'male' ways of being busy are in that seat, while the traditionally 'female' ways of being busy are not; they are still often invisible and unaccounted for economically.

The meaning of economy
Ironically, the word origin of "economics" and "economy" stems from the Greek term oikos for "management of a household," certainly a very busy activity.

I always thought the word "economics" in the term "home economics" sounded strange--like a stretch, like something trying to be what it wasn't. And, indeed, the completely unnecessary act of adding the word "home" to "home economics" gave off the impression that "home" needed to be visibly linked to "economics" in order to be relevant. It's funny how counter-intuitive real life can seem, and how--so often--our perceptions are 180-degree distortions from the truth. Or, in other words, a direct result of being misguided or misled.

So when it sounded like home economics borrowed the "economics" moniker for legitimacy. Think again. It must have been the other way around. Corporations and organizations are, after all, modeled off of bodies. When and how the divergence of cultural meaning happened, I do not know. But clearly we are all still living under it. And, unlocking the entrance to the chamber of secrets Friedman so eloquently masked with his phrase "the business of business is business," is the first step. Acknowledging that all activities to one degree or another operate under philosophies of practice is another step.
Proactively developing your own philosophy of business practice is the final step.

Most of us are working within the capitalistic framework--guarded so fiercely at mid-century that those who questioned it, or espoused other philosophies, were blacklisted. The extremes of cognitive dissonance played out in McCarthy's policies. They served to demonstrate just how entangled our economic system was (is) with our political and nationalistic investments.

This framework is the air we breathe, the water we swim in. And yet, as history always forces us to see, the context for business has been vastly different, even opposite.

"Business life, as a legitimate money making practice, is not the "universal human activity it is sometimes thought to be. It is, instead, a remarkably modern and culturally peculiar phenomenon" (Solomon & Hanson, 1983, p. 34) whose infancy was triggered by the industrial revolution during the 18th century and supported by individualism and the Calvinist Protestant ethic …

For thousands of years, business existed only at the fringes of society. Society thought little of people in business, and people in business expected little of society. Profit was their only reward because power, social status, and even social acceptability were closed to them." (3)

The breakdown of capital
If you look up "deconstructing capitalism," you'll see that it is an academically burgeoning enterprise. Thomas Piketty's recent book, Capital in the 21st Century, has spurred that further, warning a return to patrimonial capitalism if economic growth or government intervention do not step in.

Extrapolating a bit from The Economist's admittedly brief overview (4) of Piketty's book: if you are practicing business in a way that you are participating in the economy of wealth creation, you are basically generating inequality. Add another vote for inequality if you are voting for tax structures that support this philosophy of business.

You are not only generating, but perpetuating the generation of, inequality. How many people really wish to generate, and perpetuate the generation of, inequality? Koch bros., please do not respond.

But it's not just the Koch Bros. According to Peter Buffet, who recently dubbed his own entangled industries, wealth generation and philanthropy, the "Charitable Industrial Complex." Nonprofits are complicit in the creation of what he called a "perpetual poverty machine."(5)

So, the message shouldn't just be to economists and to policy makers, but to you, reading this, working at a corporation, or a foundation, or a nonprofit dependent on corporate and private wealth, or an artist, or an entrepreneur: what is your philosophy of business?

Don't have one, you need to get one. You might start by asking what your purpose is, and then see how well it matches up with the system. And if it doesn't, don't stop at just being an entrepreneur: be a systems entrepreneur.

The Purpose of Business
Milton Friedman's "the business of business is business" or, more accurately, "the social responsibility of business is to make profit" certainly tried to shut the door on inquiring about the purpose of business. It may have worked for a while, but the time has come to put away our childish toys and ask the question(s):

Is it to make money? We may have the means confused with the ends. Is it to exchange goods? Then we may ask in what proportion the exchange of goods should satisfy human needing, wanting, having and being? Is it to create capital? Then for whom or what are we leveraging this abstract notion of power? Are we translating research into practice? Whose research into what practice and for what purpose?

Social Darwinism eats us for breakfast
In a paper called The Evolution of Business, author Kathia Laszlo cites Carolyn Merchant's (1996) classification of three ethical modes of business--egocentric, advantaging individuals; homocentric, advantaging humanity; and ecocentric, balancing advantages with respect to all systems. Remarking on the self-limiting nature of our current, egocentric, approach, she says:

"Because egocentric ethics is based on the assumption that the individual good is the highest good, the collective behavior of human groups or business corporations is not a legitimate subject of investigation" (Merchant, 1996, p.521). Also, "it includes the assumption that humans are 'by nature' competitive and capitalism is the 'natural form of economics" and as a result "ecological effects are external to human economics and cannot be adjudicated" (p. 521). The point is that the trickle down economic theory does not work in reality. Rich people become richer while poor people become poorer. That is, the egocentric ethic does not bring about social good."(3)

At the heart of the egocentric model is competition among individuals, a "dog eat dog" world that is informed by the illogical but nevertheless widely influential 19th-century complex of ideas called Social Darwinism, which, though they owed little grounding in Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, were unfortunately perpetuated by Darwin himself, who used Herbert Spencer's phrase "survival of the fittest" in his fifth edition of The Origin of Species in 1869. According to Wikipedia:

Social Darwinism is a modern name given to various theories of society that emerged in the United Kingdom, North America, and Western Europe in the 1870s, and which are claimed to have applied biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology and politics … Many such views stress competition between individuals in laissez-faire capitalism, while others motivated ideas of eugenics, racism, imperialism,^[3] fascism, Nazism, and struggle between national or racial groups.^[4]^[5]

Social Darwinism resonated less with what was essentially true and more with what many seemed to want to be true, and a truth unfolded as a passion play on the theme of power in society. It was largely illogical due to its resting on what is called the naturalistic fallacy, the extension from what is observed in nature into the human social and cultural realm.

Obviously, the ecocentric approach has made some significant headway since the establishment of the fields of ecology and environmental sciences in the middle of the last century. But not enough yet. The current climate crisis may or may not tip the lever in its favor. Meanwhile, the establishment of a new field within the ecological approach, social business, promises to turn attention and awareness, as well as investment funding, toward business models that practice social impact, sustainability and the "triple bottom line" of people, planet and profit.

"in 1979, Quaker Oats president Kenneth Mason, writing in Business Week, declared Friedman’s profits-are-everything philosophy “a dreary and demeaning view of the role of business and business leaders in our society… Making a profit is no more the purpose of a corporation than getting enough to eat is the purpose of life. Getting enough to eat is a requirement of life; life’s purpose, one would hope, is somewhat broader and more challenging. Likewise with business and profit.” (6)

To be fair, apparently Friedman's subscription to fundamentally free market and limitless profit for profit's sake was part of a larger economic scenario he painted that included a negative income tax, also often known as a universal basic income. Adam Smith's economic philosophy was also reduced beyond inclusion of his moral treatise that was meant to be inclusive of his vision.

Intellectual reductionism is part and parcel of the problem, to be sure, as it enables a kind of dis-constructed, dismembered thinking about issues so critical to our humanity and its evolutionary sustainability. So we are stuck with the consequences of our overly analytic, immature level of literacy.

So, business people of every stripe, from COO of a fortune 500 company to the artist-entrepreneur, what is your purpose in business, the purpose of the business(es) you serve, and the purpose of the profits accepted and generated in the process?

Are you generating, and perpetuating the generation of, inequality?

I hope not. But chances are, a lot of you are doing that very thing.

The Business of Purpose
Enter social business. It's name may have the unfortunate ring of the kind of 'social' that dominates 'social media,' when instead it is more focused on issues of community and social justice. We are already, I believe, paying for that mistake. If we called it 'human business,' it may be mistaken for the limited, 'homocentric' ethical mode mentioned above. The term 'systems business' could be more accurate, but sounds technical. I guess we'll make do with social for now.

Social business spans from social enterprise, where social impact alone is the purpose and measure of the model and profit merely a by-product that sustains it, to a large corporation that is driven equally by social impact, sustainable systems and profit.

The business of purpose and more people becoming concerned about their everyday busyness having a purpose have been gaining increased acceptance and structure. Social business aims to re-establish monetary infrastructure and profit as the means, rather than the end, of business activity and crown human purpose as its end.

"To focus beyond the bottom line does not implie forgetting about the "profit motive" but transcending it toward a mode of wealth creation that pursues personal, social and ecological gains in addition to financial results. "The gift of working for sustainability is its meaningfulness." (Paul Hawken in Nattrass & Altomare, 1999, p. 203)." (3)

Social business is not new, of course, and sustainability is in many ways something very old that we need to regain.

The co-operative legal structure of business, which gets suspiciously little attention and produces unwarranted stereotypes in our minds (organic grocery stores in college towns or farming co-ops), is a legal structure that is open and available, but seems to be shrouded in a mystique of inaccessibility. It's a heavy cloak of the armor of competition that we bear.

I recently visited the Indiana Cooperative Development Center to learn more. And I left wondering why each and every citizen isn't a part of one cooperative or another. Imagine if Walmart or Costco (sorry, they really shouldn't be compared) were cooperatives (!)

B-Lab, the new vanguard of social business, was founded in 2006 and has since created a certification process and promoted legislative adoption of a new business/tax structure in the United States and beyond. Now, half of our country's states have signed up and changed legislation to facilitate the creation of more "triple-bottom-line" companies ("people, planet, profit) called B-corporations, that can act like profit/non-profit hybrids in order to serve social-business missions. Here is a list of the states that have already passed B-corporation legislation:

Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Hawaii
Illinois
Louisiana
Maryland
Massachusetts
Minnesota
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New York
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
Washington, D.C.
West Virgina

Indiana, under legislation (House Bill 1015) introduced this January by Fort Wayne representative Casey Cox, is now considering becoming the 26th state in the nation to embrace not only business-minded purpose but purpose-minded business.

B-Lab, with its B-Corps certification process, unlike co-operatives, has the targeted branding message that, I think, will serve to elevate and increase the visibility of all social-mission businesses, especially those that place a high value on co-operation and collaboration over competition.

De-tenuring the way we teach and do busy
Many of us are looking to find our purpose and put down our swords.

In February, the University of Vermont announced a new program called the Sustainable Entrepreneurship MBA. Soon enough, universities will realize they have a real stake in humanity and the humanities and they too may begin to embrace more sustainable models.

Could all of this just be the next and most extreme great experiment of the Neoliberal idea? That progressivism and liberalism can be achieved through economic and monetary means? It may be. But, in the process, it could also change, expand and hopefully transform the meaning of business itself.

In the meantime, we can re-examine ourselves and ask: what are we busy at?

Are we engaging in a form of busyness that deems itself more important, more monetizable and more powerful than another's? Why? Is it a solid case based on reason, or an empty promise of self-actualization through higher income brackets, unearned and elite social reputations, and consumer-driven wealth but not worth?

Maybe we should just simply ask, what makes your busyness good and how is your busyness helping to achieving systemic change for individual, human, ecological and systems good?

If you can answer that whatever you are doing for busyness/business is good for you, good for humanity, good for the planet and good for perpetuating good systems. Good.

If not, get the f*** busy.

References
(1) Brewer, Talbot. "The Coup that Failed: How the Near-Sacking of a University President Exposed the Fault Lines of American Higher Education." Hedgehog Review. Volume 16, no. 2 (Summer 2014).

(2) Garcia, Thomas. Remarks from Cooperation in a Competitive Environment, meeting of the Association of Research Libraries, Albuquerque, NM, 1997.

(3) Laszlo, Kathia Castro, Ph.D. The Evolution of Business: Learning, Innovation and Sustainability in the 21st century. July, 2001, 45th Annual Conference of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS)

(4) R.A., "Thomas Piketty's 'Capital' Summarized in Four Paragraphs", Economist. May, 2014.

(5) Buffet, Peter. "The Charitable Industrial Complex." New York Times. July, 2013.

(6) Denning, Steve. The Origin of 'The World's Dumbest Idea': Milton Friedman. Forbes. June, 2013.

w/c 7,018

Straw Men, Paper Tigers, Iron Fists

2014-09-05T15:10:00.001-07:00

Straw Men, Paper Tigers, Iron Fists

by Amy Rubin for NeonSynthesist

May 3, 2013 at 3:52pm

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw.

(From T.S. Elliot's The Hollow Men)

The Straw Man Revisited

WARNING: Once you see the straw man, you will start seeing him everywhere.

You will notice him in our board rooms, chat rooms, committee meetings, political debates, community conversations and even our most engaging dinner discussions, where we have, knowingly or unknowingly, made a special place at the table for this invisible gentleman of such subtle and powerful persuasion.

But, like trying to see in a dream, when we attempt to look directly at this unexpected guest, he disappears, then reappears at a different place setting, blurs and blends in as he flutters about, shimmying seamlessly into every argument.

Perhaps, if we are keen enough, this all too dry, stuffed character catches fire through exposure to the light or by candlelight and burns to a quick demise--only, unfortunately, to reassemble from the ashes of such occasional clear sight.

What is the straw man? Here's a classic example, from often-rehashed themes that have emerged largely by pitting two critical social areas against each other in recent years: "the economy" and "education." Merely examining one article will help illustrate the rather heavy role this lightweight plays in our daily lives.

Education v. Jobs

A NYTimes article by Frank Bruni, Questioning the Mission of College, talked about the battles brewing in higher education that have been coming to a rather [STRAW!] head with the economic downturn. He asks:

"Is college for liberal arts education

or for job training?"

Of course, I gravitated toward the liberal arts answer. But this article prodded me to take an even closer look at this issue--actually, the question, which put me on the defensive so fast that it activated my recently developed vigilance to the presence of straw men in arguments.

So first let's take a closer look at the meaning and application of the term.

A straw man, according to Wikipedia also known in the UK as an Aunt Sally, is a type of argument called an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.

To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the "straw man"), and to refute it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.

This technique has been used throughout history in polemical debate, particularly in arguments about highly charged, emotional issues. Hmm, like ... education?

Either ...

The NYTimes article is a particular variety of the straw-man fallacy that takes the form of a false dilemma, choice or dichotomy.

Not always, but the false choice often comes in opposites, or at least apparent opposites, crafted for rhetorical purposes to promote, or resulting from, what is called binary thinking: that agreeing to one precludes the other as if a switch must be in either the "on" or "off" position. I'm reminded of Mr. Potter uncovering his prophecy in the Department of Mysteries.

"neither can live while the other survives"

Is there a bit of Voldemort v. Harry Potter in the straw man? After all, Harry, it turns out, has a bit of Voldemort in him and Voldemort, for all his evil, cannot destroy the boy who lived.

In the education v. economy example, the dichotomy is the choice between learning for an internal purpose--for self-awareness and for learning's sake--and learning for the purpose of job preparation.

It is an either/or proposition for how, and what, we learn. It promotes the assumption that we have to choose one or the other.

For example, the NYTimes author most likely intended to defend the college-education-for-learning position, but in the process created a straw man for its antithesis, education for job training, prompting its readers to dig in their heels in defense of intellectualism and learning.

Readers in a different, less comfortable and less idealistic context, however--struggling middle-class or working poor families--would read it and have their fears and insecurities aroused. And though these were probably not the intended readers, this over-defensive position tends to, among the broader public, create the opposite result: an education-for-learning straw man accompanied by outcries regarding opportunities, financial futures and livelihoods.

The larger context is that we have been in an economic recession with growing concern over the job market and ever-increasing college fees, so the question potentially creates a very unsettled feeling about the relationship between education and economic security. Given that context, many people might feel compelled to choose the later ...

Context helps create meaning. But it's slippery. It may be invisible. And it may change; and yet, it is no handmaiden to meaning. While well-intentioned meaning is humanly put forth, context is always responsible for the end point: meaning's transformative digestion.

That's the power of either/or arguments and straw men. They caricature truths and diminish contexts.

Only when we take the context into consideration, or actually only when we question the question itself as a fallacy, can we ask our own questions, such as: Do we have to choose one or the other? Are they really mutually exclusive? Are you sure we can't have both? Can one incentivize the other? Will jobs one day better mirror liberal arts and the humanities so that we don't have to give up our most human features in order to stockpile money?

What if we required all students to have jobs, work-study, service or internship opportunities, cultivating an existing trade, while immersed in learning critical thinking skills and the many facets and nuances of the great human experiment as only provided by the liberal arts?

The straw man's either/or proposition blocks thinking, limits choices and cripples action.

Or ...

As an example of someone promoting the education-as-job-training model, Bruni quotes North Carolina governor Pat McCrory, who stated publicly:

“If you want to take gender studies, that’s fine, go to a private school,” he added. “But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.”

Jobs, a hot issue no one is denying, certainly strikes education on an emotional chord. The first thing we might think about is this emotional hot button--no one really wants to pay for a lengthy and expensive college experience and end up with huge debt and being economically insecure. No one wants that. It is an important issue, and many are suffering.

First, let's dismantle the inanity of McCrory's quote ...

McCrory is politically conservative and considers gender studies to be an overly liberal, unnecessary subject matter. McCrory probably didn't benefit from gender studies in his education, so let's not be fooled ... Quick reality checklist for the likes of McCrory even attempting to use the word gender in a sentence of any kind. Is he:

Conservative? Check. (It's called Liberal Arts for a reason ...)
Baby Boomer, or older? Check.
Male? Check.
White-privilege? Check.

The bottom line here? This person is uneducated and in power.

That simple. And that real. He has probably frequently committed sexual harassment of women unknowingly. And he probably thinks the word gender relates only to women.

Yep, Gender Studies is the straw man, again set up as an absolutely false choice between what he ignorantly mistakes as an unnecessary, off-centered topic [and what educators consider a culturally pivotal critical thinking skill] and job preparation.

The False Choice

It's a matter of rhetoric folks. Let's look at an excerpt from Understanding Arguments, showing the relationship between straw men and false choices, with an example or two from politics.

"...from the 2004 presidential election, when John Kerry suggested that the United States should have conferred more with its allies, including the French, before attacking Iraq. In response, at the Republican National Convention Senator Zell Miller said Kerry would 'let Paris decide when America needs defending.' Surely Miller knew that this mischaracterization of Kerry's position was unfair, but it achieved the desired reaction from the crowd ...

In more insidious cases, straw men are often set up by means of a related fallacy--false dichotomy ... Political rhetoric is filled with such false dichotomies that set up straw men. A cable news host is reported to have said, 'Sure, it's not great having the government collect our telephone records, but it is better than having them collect our body parts.' ...

"Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists."

False dichotomies like these are parodied by Stephen Colbert when he says, 'Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists' or 'Either you're for the war in Iraq or you hate America,' and his best 'George W. Bush: great president or the greatest president?' The trick here is obviously to give you some choice, so that you end up committed to the option that you choose, but your choices are limited to the ones that Colbert gives you.

After listing his dichotomy, Colbert usually adds, 'It's that simple!' The best response is to recognize that these issues are usually not simple at all. These tricks work partly because many people long for simple choices or they fail to notice any third option. Whenever someone tells you that you have only two alternatives, you should look carefully for other possibilities. And whenever your choice among the options seems obvious, you should ask whether the rejected options have been set up as straw men rather than characterized fairly."

With regards to education, the problem is not just jobs vs. learning. We are swimming in an ocean of informal fallacies of logic, dominated by the false choice.

What we are experiencing--in addition to the recession, high unemployment, higher long-term unemployment and a general lack of alignment between jobs available and education--is a crisis in critical thinking and, quite frankly, a crisis in our future.

It is a moral crisis that some--particularly those who stand to gain personal or financial gain from such ignorance--would not admit to. Here's what Gore Vidal had to say:

"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."

Remembering the Wall

I subscribe to this belief that there is a moral crisis.

I believe that our greatest purpose is to fulfill our biological-evolutionary-God-given highest human purpose and potential. Aside from loving and hating, thinking is the most unique thing that we do. Any conclusion other than to say that we should put our thinking to the use of good, to the benefit of creating good, and to the perpetuation of our species, would be absurd and self-defeating.

Those who do understand this crisis are not with the current program at all: we don't want to just train students to plug into existing jobs. We don't want to do the easy thing if it is the wrong thing. Because that would be like putting bricks into a wall that is already crumbling.

Remember the wall? We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control.

We don't want to be just another brick in the wall.

What is needed is learning that constitutes intellectual integrity and inquiry at its best and ignores the dictates of the status quo, a kind of plug-and-go job training that prepares us only for the past and creates benefit only by the creation of destruction.

So let's get back to that gender studies thing.

Senator McCrory may be entirely oblivious, arrogantly unaware or willfully ignorant of the importance of understanding the role of gender in culture.

But should we really listen to a man
who discounts his privileged status as a man by dismissing the entire field
of study that questions his privileged status?

Good question. Either that is a very carefully chosen straw man, or the level of ignorance is way worse than we may have thought! Mark Twain had it right.

Dismantling the Beast

The reality may be just as frightening, or worse, as a mental picture forms: a mythical monster in a bestiary whose fearful proportions convey an aggressive animal perplexity of ignorance and arrogance, automation and intentionality, misleading power and uneducated representation, and whose potential lethal impact is palpably felt because it is off the page and among us.

Let's not forget that the ability to think clearly is priceless. Choices, on the other hand, are polemical, come with price tags and have impact. The better the thinking, the better we frame our choices and the better the results.

Thus empowered by thinking and seeing the straw man for what he is we may ask why we are being pushed into increasingly false choices? Who ever said we couldn't answer, 'We want both?' Or, 'that is a false choice.'

"If I only had a brain," the straw man pined ... In order to create a better future, we need better thinking and better formulas for change. X=X and Y=Y will no longer do. X+Y=Z probably isn't even sufficient. Or whatever. But here's what you can do:

Don't let the straw man fool you.

If we agree that so many things across the board are not working--from traditional financial models to national security, to education and political representation--and we agree that we are living in an advanced knowledge economy aspiring to be something of an Innovation Age, then we need fully educated, critical thinkers who are not only going to create new jobs, but altogether new economies and, we hope, an altogether different future!

So Much Hay

That is a huge task at hand--one that needs full reign of freedom, financing, faith and, let's face it, its own philosophy, because ...

It will be a matter of vision, of perspective, whether we see the forces that are manipulating our daily lives--the invisible straw man at the table--serving as fodder for a system that benefits few and brings humanity to crisis as paper tigers or iron fists.

Seeing the crisis as a paper tiger seems to give us power and choice, if not also a little fearful symmetry, for we seem inundated with informal fallacies of logic on all sides. Although hopeful, it could very well be a false choice: begging the question of the impossible.

For this iron fist of ours that promotes immature thinking and ignorance--well documented now in daily comedy TV shows that demonstrate how pervasive this is in the media--seems too powerful. It's no longer visible, concrete and immediately threatening like kingdom, monarchy and empire, but has been sublimated into our political, cultural and economic unconscious. It is very much as George Orwell put it:

"If you want a picture of the future,

imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever."

That will require imagination enough to see this new insidious, cognitively-culturally reinforced iron fist as nothing but a paper tiger. Perhaps the glue that holds it all together is nothing more than the soluble starch-and-water mix of paper mache. And now we are back to the paper tiger, true to its (literal or literary) form yet still suggestive of its original, oxymoronic meaning.

"If a cat is called a tiger

it can easily be dismissed

as a paper tiger;

the question remains however

why one was so scared

of the cat in the first place."

(Paul de Man, Resistance to Theory, 1982)

Culture War Diaries: Accidental Terrorists and American Taliban

2014-06-10T08:40:00.000-07:00

Confederacy of Dunces

by Amy Rubin for Neon Synthesist

What is politically (diplomatically) called an extreme lack of "gun sense" in America is more than wacko-nut-jobs' love of guns; more than more-often-than-not misguided aggression of men in late adolescence; more than the Tea Party off its rocker; more, even, than decades of disinvestment in education and the intentional cultivation of ignorance for votes, power, money.

True, the NRA does provide ample ammunition, literally in its support of the gun industry, and figuratively through its arsenal of words, images, money and political power. But it's more than the unchecked NRA propaganda monster created through clever repositioning of 2nd ammendment rights. Though that has created perfect conditions for daily bloodshed.

It's the bloody, logical, tragic end of America's 30-year Culture War.

We're at War
America's Cold War. A second civil war, from the non-resolution, non-healing of the Civil War.

Knowing and unknowing affiliates of the Culture Wars--that collectively conservative political wedge which, on several fronts, has hawked tradition over progress, right over left, heritage over history, religion over science (such either/or propositions are the false dichotomy form of propaganda ... #strawman)--now stand their ground and voice their rights and concerns pre-emptively through guns.

Apparently, guns are people too. Don't offend or discriminate against them and don't limit their use and vicissitudes of expression. That's gun culture.

How ironic, the word culture after gun.

Some are surprised to learn that gun laws were much tighter under conservative icon Ronald Reagan. Apparently, we didn't know what conservative was to mean, to become--its Orwellian opposite: liberal, lax, nurtured, forgiven, treated with kid gloves. Downright darkly romantic. ... Leaving so many amber wakes of blood, fear, intimidation, sadness and hopelessness, at turns marked by utterly incomprehensible, needless loss, or with all the dark glory of the Joker.

The Culture Wars' conservative, anti-culture brigade has now developed a "culture"--and the kind of false confidence and faceless courage guns provide.

Perhaps its really arsenal, and we should stop calling it culture; there's a reason this thing was called a war in the first place.

American Taliban
In America's own war against progress, this new confederacy, which many have compared to the Taliban, has come fully out of its silently separatist stance.

Tea Party zealots and Don't Tread On Me constituencies--with all their intentional and accidental fatalities including students, children, toddlers, infants and other innocents, including mentally ill perpetrators--now seem to be on a joyride, out and about with no curfew, defensively shooting, killing and maiming at will, out of fear, ignorance, innocence, insanity, inanity.

What might Freud say about these politically manufactured antiheroes, now referred to as #ammosexuals?

Hari kari, open carry
There is no honor here. And, as John Stewart's quote may say all that needs to be said, the logic is circularly flawed and suicidal creating a downward spiral with an unwelcome Perpetual Violence Machine, courtesy of NRA propaganda.

Side effects may include fear, intimidation, a disinclination to shop at stores allowing open carry, such as Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America's current target, Target.

I found myself in a line at a convenient store doing a quick eye check at hip level for any holster-wearing types.

The complete empowerment of America's weakest links--violence-challenged men, the mentally unstable, those who turn to street crime and drugs for livelihood, and those easily swayed by culturally conservative messages and media--paints a picture of possible cultural self-implosion.

The grief and the blood of this war is wearing on us.

Who let the dogs out?
It's quite one thing to have an intellectual divide in world views, battled out passionately through ideas, painting, sculpture, science, morality, religion, law.

(Mark Rothko)

Did you know that during the Cold War, the CIA created a division called the Propaganda Assets Inventory and secretly promoted modern art in order to convince the Russians we were not the cultural backwater they said we were? Even while most of the artists were (ex)Communists? And while at the same time publicly disavowing its aesthetic merits, with Truman saying, "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot.?" Yep, here's the article about it.

"It was this office which subsidised the animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm, which sponsored American jazz artists, opera recitals, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's international touring programme. Its agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, even as travel writers for the celebrated Fodor guides. And, we now know, it promoted America's anarchic avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism."

So maybe it's not the economy, stupid.

Maybe it's culture and how culture is wrapped up in power and representation. If we do our own propaganda inventory, we might find that the NRA, while holding our country and elected officials supposedly hostage, is a puppet in the Culture Wars.

Fascinating. It just goes to show you how complex the political-intellectual war rooms can become. So you might not want to underestimate the rather-untalked-about Culture Wars we've been fighting--and losing loved ones over.

Perhaps those bodies should be draped in flags and honored as victims of a most insidious war.

But when the gun has become the paintbrush?

That's tenfold more abstract, obtuse and confounding an Expressionist study in red than Mark Rothko's Cold War era painting.

#gunsense #culturewars

Getting Schooled in White Privilege, Part II

2014-05-23T13:23:00.004-07:00

Dominance and Democracy

by Amy Rubin for Neon Synthesist

Peggy McIntosh, pre-eminent resurrector of DuBois' "white privilege" and inventor of the concept that priveleged groups and classes, such as whites in America, carry an "invisible backpack" filled with a handful of free tools and cultural passes--kind of like a free lunch--wrote:

For this reason, the word "privilege" now seems to me misleading. We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work systematically to over-empower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one's race or sex.

Locally, I've witnessed this “over empowerment” or dominance. In a recent community development effort, one over-powerful and dominant white male continually stated that he wanted his neighborhood (the most gentrified portion of an otherwise inner-city 'hood') to be “over-represented” at key meetings.

With white privilege, there is a presumption about the universality of one’s own ideas and for the need for unlike philosophies, ideas, practices and people to assimilate ...

That expectation of assimilation to the dominant process, method, economic system sounds like Capitalism, Globalization, Westernization and Commercialism ... It can't be stopped, like an evolutionary force of nature we do not control.

Sorry, it says. This dominant force will have its way.

White privilege became the Corporate Agenda became the New Colonialism. Commercialism and Globalization are the New Manifest Destiny. But this is where it gets tricky, according to author Benjamin Barber of Jihad vs. McWorld (1995) because that's where we are not only running into (and fighting wars over) terrorism globally, but at the same time creating the right conditions for it as we live out a kind of world domination based on the economic reductionism of humanity.

Hyperbolic commentators ... have described the current divide in the world as a global clash of civilizations, and warn of a cultural war between democracy and Islam, perhaps even between "the West and the rest." But this is to ape the messianic rhetoric of Osama bin Laden, who has called for precisely such a war ...

A system of dominance requires more dominance and creates more dominance, in one form or another. Apparently, our imperialism has been channeled into economic systems, and in that arena we have checked our democratic ideals at the door.

Seeing Invisibes and Voicing Silences

The “invisible,” unconscious, aspect of white privilege is not unimportant. For, let’s face it, if we’re using the language of the unconscious, it would be an omission to ignore Freud.

According to Freud, unconscious thoughts and behaviors—other than finding distorted expression in dreams—played a role in our lives either by aggressive and regressive actions against others or by creative, sublimated cultural expressions, ideas and endeavors.

Whereas regression was considered a primary defense mechanism, sublimation was a:

a mature type of a defense mechanism where socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are consciously transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior, possibly resulting in a long-term conversion of the initial impulse. (Wikipedia summary)

So, according to this phenomenon and applying these concepts to cultures in addition to individuals, oppressing colonized populations through violence or threatened violence, taking people like property for slaves and lynching blacks would fall under the first category—regressive acts of violence that are defensive mechanisms of the first order.

Whereas creating a system for generating wealth from corporate stock and inheritance, sinking more state budget monies into prisons than into schools, and creating, but never actually enforcing, the Fair Housing Act would fall into the second category of defensive mechanisms--sublimation.

Peggy McIntosh, in her famous article, says it best:

To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these subjects taboo.

Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.

It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already. Although systemic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me and, I imagine, for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the perquisites of being light-skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.

I think the fact that she sees the close alignment of gender privilege and race privilege is important. If it is the case that these are quite intimately entwined, we might ask, what dangers and threats do females and those of non-white colors share? Do they share a tendency toward a different worldview—a different game than White Male Economic Dominance and all that it has sublimely become?

If White Male Dominance is historically aligned with (or even forms some mathematical equation of) imperialism, oppression, wealth, capitalism, privilege and dominance, then could these “Others” to the norm, at least those less interested in assimilating and who have noticed that this system has not advantaged them--imagine an alternative system? A more female worldview? A non-Western philosophy of thought? Socialism and Marxism? Ancient philosophies that are not Greek? If so, it is a threat to the status quo that dominant groups are advantaging from and therefore a threat.

Systems change is needed.

It’s time to stop regressively taking over the world with over-empowered and grandiose globalization and financial oppression and start sublimating a more beautiful vision of humanity.

The humanities are not asking these questions. They are safe and secure within the Neo-Liberally endowed walls of the University.

If we truly think society should be set up for everyone's success, let's keep asking the questions, questioning the system and lifting the veil of silences while we actively practice imagining:

A more beautifully sublimated vision for humanity.

The Spoken Word of Buckminster Fuller

2014-05-09T13:47:00.000-07:00

A genius for sustainability

the spoken word of Buckminster Fuller

April 25, 2012 at 12:52pm

by Amy Rubin for Neon Synthesist*

Think sustainability is a modern concern, brought on by scientific studies of climate change and economic stresses since the Great Recession? No, sustainability is very 1960s. Think the Gaia movement, Love Your Mother and Back to the Garden. It's just gotten less flowery and more masculine. Sustainability is about science and engineering and energy kind of stuff that makes the word Earth, the name of our planet, sound kind of soft and flimsy.

God is ______ .

Nietzsche--revolutionary philosopher and cultural critic--is known for having said that God is Dead.

And then there was the quirky American thinker and inventor, Buckminster Fuller. His cognition seemed to involve a mix of science, aesthetics and compassion.

He said 'God is a Verb.'

" God is a Verb "

(He was a synthesist.)

The art of 'livingry'

Even before the Flower Power revolution, R. Buckminster Fuller envisioned domed cities for optimal energy use, geodesic domes for homes and strange 3-wheeled car/buses (the Dymaxion car) that carried 11 people with minimal energy output.

This was the stuff of World Fairs. (He would be fascinated by 3-D printing capabilities.)

But, "livingry over weaponry," he said.

He was a huge advocate for sustainability--and not just energy, but people. He wanted, desperately, for human society to work for the benefit of 100% of humanity. No less.

He authored more than 30 books and toured the world speaking about his experiences, philosophy and vision for design and technology that would help facilitate this transformation into a sustainable future for humanity on our "spaceship earth," as he liked to call it.

He called it design science.

But, more than a technologist, he was serving an important social and civic purpose.

Genius

He was a polymath, engineer and inventor who got kicked out of Harvard several times and knew the pain of business enterprise failure and near destitution. That's when his imagination got going. He visited the future through detailed, projected human-trend analytics (or possibly a time machine). What he saw was that we were going to desperately need help in about 50 years. That's right about now.

He qualified for all meanings of the word "genius," but he certainly knew the importance of its more etymologically derived meaning: one who achieves or fulfills the potential of some natural, individual capacity or talent (that he did) or is guided by a spirit (that he was).

But it took incredible hard work, determination and an intentional turning away from society's expectations and conventions. He followed his internal voice. He said:

"Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them."

This same sentiment with regard to the meaning of genius is heard in the words of Baudelaire:

"Often, while contemplating works of art, not in their easily perceptible materiality, in the too-clear hieroglyphs of their contours or the obvious meaning of their subject, but in the soul with which they are endowed, in the atmospheric impression that they convey, in the spiritual light or darkness which they pour into our souls, I have felt entering into me a kind of vision of the childhood of their creators. Some little sorrow, some small pleasure of the child, inordinately inflated by an exquisite sensibility, become later on in the adult man, even without his knowing it, the basis of a work of art.... Genius is nothing but childhood clearly formulated, newly endowed with virile and powerful means of self-expression."

Fuller actually created guidelines almost like a 12-step process for cultivating one's own uniqueness and self-actualization, despite the many forces of culture that ask us to homogenize. He called them "The Self Disciplines of Buckminster Fuller" and they are featured in the early pages of his 1980 work Critical Path.

Critical Path was his last ditch effort before he died--after traveling the globe engaging and exciting students about a new way of thinking for the future--to advocate for human sustainability.

The start of the book is strange. He liked to make up his own words. And he liked to be poetic. Sustainability is about business now and business doesn't like to be poetic.

Wild rantings of a visionary?

Actually, I think that is redundant.

This excerpt crecsendos into an almost Walt-Whitman-meets-Jay-Z aesthetic, from Buckminster Fuller's 1980 treatise Critical Path. He was speaking about sustainability 30 years before it became popular ...

It no longer has to be you or me.

Selfishness is unnecessary ...

unrationalizable as mandated by survival ...

war is obsolete ... the more-with-less technology ...

The invisible technological-capability revolution ...

it is a matter of converting the high technology

from weaponry to livingry.

The essence of livingry

is human-life advantaging

and environment controlling.

With the highest aeronautical and engineering facilities of the world redirected from weaponry to livingry production, all humanity would have the option of becoming enduringly successful.

Well, 'livingry' has not been achieved for 100% of humanity.

Not even close. The hoarding of natural abundance by an outdated but still muscular power continues. (Pirates, those Koch bros!)

Rough road ahead

It will take a second attempted revolution in thinking, living and creating. And compassion, leading with more feminine, feline qualities. But during my morning workout at the gym, I saw an add for testosterone deodorant ...

Until then, as we, hopelessly or optimistically at turns, cringe over poverty and violence and what seems like increasingly horrific news, we'll do things like create hotels, bakeries and spas for our canine companions.

An alternative ending for humanity, perhaps, where--recalling the final scene of rebirth of man in Kubric's Space Odyssey 2001--barbaric man is sublimely compensated for by ... an enlightened caninity.

Ruff ruff.

*dedicated to Arash Aazami, fellow RBF afficionado

Bossa Nova Baby

2014-04-08T08:16:00.000-07:00

Bossa Nova Baby

What is a boss?

Bump. Lump. Hump. Bulge. Protuberance. Beat. Push. Blow. Thrust. These are some of the layers of meaning embedded in the many word roots of “boss,” as well as Bundle of Flax (bozo, German) or Master (baas, Dutch).

I was thinking about the word—in the context of the Ban Bossy campaign—and it made me skip over a neuron or two to the term bossa nova—the Latin jazz samba that defined much of my upbringing ...

So I looked it up.

Bossa nova means a new way, tendency, trend or “new wave,” a stylistic term used in many art forms, especially music and film. It became the moniker for the new Brazilian influenced music of the late-mid-20^th century. A soft, pulsating tempo. Never to be mistaken for easy listening, but nevertheless so easy to listen to ... Almost clinically calming.

Think of The Girl from Ipanema by Brazilian songwriter, guitarist and piano player Antonio Carlos Jobim. The rhythms of American saxiphonist Stan Getz and his orchestra. And especially the Jobim, Getz and Gilberto collaborations, which created the bossa nova craze of the 60s and 70s. Others came along achieving massive popularity, like Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass. Go ahead and experience this post in all its loose associations. Play Sergio Mendezand Brazil 66 while you read.

So the “hump” or “bump” in the sexy, boss-derived word bossa in bossa nova is that of the overwhelming power and sway of a cultural wave (not to mention in the rhythm of the music).

Boss Not Exactly Bossa

In an exploration of "boss," there are exceptions. With more than 30 entries in Urban Dictionary for “boss,” in slang it can mean anything from “awesome” and “the best” to sexually explicit acts that pleasure men.

In Latin cultures, bossa means something that has charisma. So, on the one hand we have something with sway and charm, and on the other we have something just outright dominating. "Boss” in the business world is clearly the latter. In the model of corporate hierarchy, the "boss" is literally on top.

The business paradigm's ingrained, stubborn circular definition (Milton Friedman's famous "the business of business is business," so don't screw with it) is like a straight jacket that surely tightens when we ask this daring question that tries to break down the walls between so-called "hard" reality (science, industry, business, economics) and "soft" reality (art, humanities, creativity, empathy):

If we can have "new wave" art, music and cultural expressions,

why can't we have a new wave in business? What would that look like?

In that dead silence of asking a possibly ridiculous question, let’s think about it.

Putting that sexy, slow swing of Bossa Nova aside ...

I’m left with my brain’s best, inferior, equivalent: the carefully choreographed, slow-motion office pornography of financial decadence in Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street—the office, that is, as painted by Heronimous Bosch. Or, Animal House graduates from frat houses to office cubes.

That might not be exactly the everyday reality, though there have been recent reports, there is at least some metaphorical equivalent in the Wall Street theatre with its frenzied swaps and trades. And trends in business are waves that dominate and become standards of use, so that if you don’t comply, you lose. Keep busy. Look busy. Fit in. Wear the uniform. Follow best practices. Please the boss. Win the client. Kill the competition.

Whether real or satirized, business as usual rarely gets us thinking beyond the material and practical plane--the money, success and social status. And at its apparent wildest (office ping-pong and the like) business does try its darnedest … but rarely achieves true bossa. Just not the real thing.

So bossa nova? Forget it. It’s simply not derivative and won’t deliver quarterly results.

A true new wave in business will need to be one of spirit. Many entrepreneurs seem to be grasping that now and choosing to participate in something akin to a cultural movement--one that truly could prove bossa. More on that in another post (especially on a local inclusive feminist approach I'm involved in) and how new efforts to do things differently could shape into a wave.

Banning Bossy

With Sheryl Sandberg’s recently announced “Ban Bossy” campaign, on the heels of her book Lean In, it looks like a decidedly material—and conservative—model that is trying to “make waves,” just not as powerful as one big new wave.

And it is making some waves, enough to achieve its mission of equal treatment for women in business, which is important. For, I seriously doubt that in the future any man—or woman—will be able to get away with using the word bossy on female workers and leaders without inquisition.

Sandberg’s recommended leaning in is silent, almost physical (just be there and don’t budge except forward and up), and individual. Plus, the "ban bossy" mantra only proclaims what we can’t say.

So where is the actual female voice of leadership on what leadership actually is? And is there a collective female voice?

Elvis has left the building.

Boss | Bossy

The Ban Bossy campaign will be successful.

Someone had to finally and publically proclaim the bossy word dead. It was ready to fall. Because the message rings true, and it is needed.

It’s time to attend to those little details, the ones that all add up together to squelch dreams, clip wings and curtail the true nature and abilities of girls and women. It’s time to mitigate these cultural nuances of patriarchy. Perhaps they will collectively have trim tab impact on the system.

Boss-y … It’s one of those things that should be obvious to us, but easily overlooked as it is deeply systematized in our language--like referring to any animal or God as “he.”

One of the effects of adding a “y” to the end of a word is taking on one of the several versions of diminutive form (others include adding “ie” or “a” or “ina” or “ista”) that indicates smaller, lesser, “cute”or more familiar.

This is so embedded as to be frequently found in proper names and nouns for our culturally diminutive groups—females and children (girls fit both categories). So you have John/Johnny for men and boys and Chris/Chrissie, Alexander/Alexandra, etc. for men and women.

Imposter Syndrome

The “y” can also imply that something is “like” something or shares qualities with it, as in the musical genre “blues” but a particular song may be “bluesy.” Not quite blues, but with some elements of it. Or, in some cases the thing with the “y” has too much of the original quality, as in someone who practices a “craft” but in some cases may be a bit too “craftsy.”

At any rate, men are bosses, women are boss-like or too-boss-like. They are boss-y. Not quite the real thing. In fact, possibly distorted. Whether cute, contrived or bothersome, the attempt at being a “boss” is somehow perceived and/or actually off target, inappropriate, miscalculated.

It is a perversion of sorts. A woman who is “bossy” is bossy in a way that is cute, which is the opposite of boss. Or perhaps she is a nag and a bitch, where “bossy” seems to borrow its brand from the traditionally sexist domestic sphere. Or perhaps the woman who is “bossy” is just faking it, in order to "try" to act in charge because a “boss” by connotation is considered a male quality. Therefore any female, by definition, who is trying cannot really achieve it.

All sorts of real and perceived distortions that only begin to fade when we aim our critical gaze back at the accuser and the context. It is not surprising to find distorted behavior that occurs under the invisible cultural forces--such as the effects of being treated unequally in the first place--where tension, constraints and contortions must occur when these forces are experienced, felt and especially under attempts overcome or compensate for them.

It is, nevertheless, still widely perceived as not the real thing. She is not a leader.

The Business of Boss

So, true as the campaign may be, it still leaves us empty handed and stuck with a long-gendered word. Are we just left with the same old Business of Boss, dressed up in lipstick and a skirt? Do we really want to mimic the well-worn ideal already in place?

Afterall, the word “boss,” that is, when not meaning awesome in slang, is usually invoked under more negative circumstances, such as complaints, mismanagement, micro-management and cow-towing to the office’s sometimes many-tiered, hierarchical power structure.

It’s not a very aspirational vision of leadership. It is no vision of leadership, actually: only management.

Otherwise, under more positive implications, the person in charge is known as a leader.

In the Ban Bossy campaign, will girls only aspire to be the new boss man?

Mas Que Nada

I’m not sure merely having women physically shoe in as boss in a perpetually man’s game will create a meaningful wave.

Maybe it's mas que nada--more or much of nothing, as the famous Sergio Mendes bossa nova tune proclaims. Go ahead, click and listen. It'll get you in the mood. Or add a little Hip Hop and listen here to Sergio with the Black Eyed Peas.

I mean, in business, if you said "Oh, come on, get out of my way. Let's samba" ... what would that mean? Metaphorically speaking, of course. That's for a later post, on sketching the outlines for a New Wave in business.

So the imperative--not bossy--Ban Bossy campaign may only be a requisite bump on the road to equality. But if we doubt the actual quality of that equality, it could prove a barrier to actual freedom. But one thing’s for sure.

It’s no Bossa Nova, baby.

C'mon. Let's samba.

Content: a love story

2013-11-24T16:42:00.001-08:00

Content: a love story

Can social media like Facebook actually help us develop a more meaningful relationship with our information? When you nurture an ongoing relationship between intelligently aggregated, intentionally curated and thoughtfully crafted content, you cultivate a fertile ground for new ideas and make a place for yourself and your citizenship in the business of work.

What is Content?
Content. Empty-sounding word for something that’s supposed to contain all the ever-changing stuff we create, share and tweet about.

What did we call it before content?

I'm not sure, that word is so ubiquitous now ... Maybe, resources? Programming? Information? Knowledge? Here is business dictionary.com's definition in three parts, the third being obviously the most jargony and least sophisticated:

1. Text matter of a document or publication in any form. Content is both information and communication: the sum total of the freshness, readability, relevancy, and usefulness of the information presented, and the manner in which it is presented.

2. Essence of a communicated message or discourse, as comprehended or received by its intended audience.

3. Glue that makes a website 'sticky' makes visitors return, and keeps them from leaving.

The most intriguing of these is content described as "both information and communication."

That could imply several things, such as that it is packaged information for consumption; that, since this is most likely a business meaning of "communication," that information is the preferred format for appeal, that consumers expect to be engaged by information, not just advertising; that consumers want to make informed choices; that consumers are learners; that the business-consumer interface is one of interaction. These are all interesting. Signs that we are no longer in the "Ad Age."

“Content,” as we now use the term, thus appears to be a product of the convergence of the late knowledge economy, middle information age and early social media era—an environment in which advertising has had to reconfigure it's modus operandi and the new digitally-available information and information-based tools, products and practices could widely circulate at no cost, to the extent that now all marketing departments conduct some level of customer service through online marketing via social media.

Information, something that was formerly behind the scenes, to be found in libraries and proprietary files, was now expected to be easily accessible to anyone.

The opportunity to use information was available at both ends. And where business was concerned, there was an opportunity to create, shape and control information as a tool for marketing, primarily as a sort of indirect, soft sale by means of positioning as a resource, authority or information hub within a business' industry. White papers, used as marketing devices, serve this purpose as do other sharable and online documents.

“loves are like empires:

when the idea they are founded on

crumbles, they, too, fade away.”

--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being--

The Unbearable Lightness of our Content
Complaints abound about the fecundity of the proliferation of social media channels, the difficulty of managing them and worry about our efforts to obtain and share information, communicate and create message and brand are getting spread too thinly, taxing our efforts while weakening the results ... Are we being twitterized to death? Is the 140-character limit only exacerbating the shrinking attention span? Will our brains shrink? Evolutionarily, it's possible, I suppose.

Will the limit in words, thoughts, attention cause us to think less thoroughly, think less or actually not think but just react and retweet? Possibly.

There certainly is a lot of junk to sort through.

The verdict is out on whether the lightness, or should I say liteness, of the content is in the end good or bad. Lightness itself has different connotations. It can mean lightweight, as in not rigorous enough; it can mean light as in not serious and playful; it can also indicate non-attachment.

In the film adaptation of Milan Kundera's novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, there is a theme of contrast between content and frame, especially in the play of mirrors.

A mirror in one scene is a frame within which the content keeps changing and is dependent on and manipulated by what it reflects, including Sabina in a sexually provocative scene. Here the mirror is the object that reflects different subjects. In another scene a mirror takes the shape of a standing human being, making the frame and contents nearly indistinguishable and suggesting that the human form can also be less solid and more permeable, reflecting nothing but changing contents. Here the mirror is seemingly the subject, but one with which we have no fixed orientation point.

And, in the novel/film, the main character has two girlfriends, two subjects with contents, so to speak. One girlfriend is light and playful, profound in her emotional weightlessness (at least when politics isn't involved). Her character's content is ever changing and unattached. The other, introverted and emotionally heavy, is a person with a story and fears and inhibitions, weighted by history. She is all "content." In the end, he chooses the "heavier," content-fixed girlfriend. Light by means of simplicity, her lack of complexity attracts and presents a different kind of lightness.

Which path is "light," in the end, is unclear. As motif, it is suggestive and meant to make us think of the content/frame dichotomy and how it is relevant to life and circumstances.

Content v. Frame, Product v. Process

Back to the empty sounding container for everything that is in flux: content.

The word itself is a frame. There is no content without frame; no frame without content. They can’t exist without each other. Yet sometimes they don’t get along.

They try to dominate each other. Frame is quiet, powerful, invisible, assuming; content is in your face, busy, detailed, distracting, attention-draining, anxiety creating, master of drama.

“There are times when focusing on the frame is helpful,” says Darren Olstad, of MindValley Insights, in his video “On Content vs. Process" because “Innovation is in the underlying process.”

The process is the flow, repeated patterns and behaviors that help create the frame.

“The underlying flow of how you do things is your process. The content is the thing that throws you off. Process doesn’t ask about the size, scale or difficulty of something nor isn’t concerned with individual attachments, or what “has always been.” Individual attachments play a big part in process, because it’s always going to get in your way. So I encourage you to establish the process outside of what your personal attachments and motivations are …

“When you see things in terms of process, you can actually see an end to things, because you’re not caught up in all this daily content of the daily grind, you’re actually able to zoom out for once and look at things in terms of a process.”

Your Content Marketing is Getting in my Business Strategy
But it’s a two-way street. Content does shape frame and sometimes determines the form.

There is this essential tension, between which, learning takes place.

This is not just content for marketing and sales that I'm talking about.

It’s a relationship: you and the world, collected, curated and created for your audience, for yourself, for your cause, for your business.

The more authentic, the better—for everyone, not the least of which is yourself.

When you bring your whole self to content, especially to frame, you’ll increase your odds of being creative and innovative. All of us, if we allow our unique selves to show up in what we do, have genius, the birthright of being one of a kind. Why should anything change that--especially money?

By flexing our independent thinking while becoming informed, we create an ecosystem for breeding new ideas, creations and connections: new content, if you insist.

According to the Content Marketing Institute …

“The new marketing department is now part marketing, part publishing."

True. But this reminds me of my recent mantra: you only write as good as you think.

And thinking is this relationship between content and frame, information and perspective, you and the world.

So if you’re thinking of content marketing as only supporting sales and marketing goals, you’re not thinking deep enough.

You have the opportunity to develop business and cultivate thought leadership.

Our Content, Ourselves

Try to look at content differently. Like it’s got color. Energy. Potential. Secrets even.

And think of the frame—the questions you ask, the assumptions you make—this way too.

Because when you court your content mindfully, while being conscientious of the frame, you may learn about where your cause, effort or business can innovate.

If you use a content delivery system, or scour the internet anxiously for information, you’re relating to the world, yourself, your audience in a less mindful, more mechanical way.

But--we are not machines.

Despite organizations, funders, clients limiting our aspirations, none of that changes the undeniable truth: we think independently. Something machines, organizations, institutions can’t do.

Unique, on the job or off, we can only be ourselves.

“The very best thing you can do for the whole world

is to make the most of yourself.”

--Wallace Wattles--

The so-called, modern-day "content" we are looking for, meanwhile, is everything not ourselves. But, we can make it what we want. We curate it and represent the world. Imagined by us. Delivered to our portal of choice.

Your content will only be as sexy and intelligent as you imagine it. So be there for it. In the present. With all your senses, thoughts, feelings and intuitions.

Ask, how will it shape my world today? How can I shape others’ worlds? Are you delivering content, or shaping worlds? Obstetrics with anesthetics and forceps? Or a fully engaged vital force whose creation remains tethered to the source?

Co-Creation: a case study of curated newstreams using Facebook

One of the ways I connect to the world is through a custom business Facebook newsfeed. I use Facebook not just as a portal, where I post and receive posts, but as a tool for customizing and curating content.

Let me reiterate: I am not talking about personal Facebook. I am talking about business, community or cause Facebook.

When your business, community or cause’s Facebook page “likes” other causes, groups and organizations (not to mention authors, publishing houses, think tanks, bloggers, institutes, foundations, etc.)--and be sure you're logged in as the business, not personal, profile--you create a customized newstream that is conveniently one “share” away from your followers.

For example, the Imaginarium at Whitepaper Bluesky shares content that relates to “knowledge, creativity and leadership in the 21^st century”—a broad, malleable topic interpreted by me, which allows me to carve a line of thought or inquiry between subjects that I may not even be able to consciously articulate. This intellectual newstream runs the gamut from bold visual sources to think tanks and social justice orgs.

So, you might see a newstream made up of a Bill Moyer’s video interview on social and economic justice, a Council on Foundations report, a Buckminster Fuller Institute update, a Knight Foundation challenge, a Symphony of Science music video, or an Open Culture archive of Jefferson Airplane performing “Go Ask Alice” in protest to the draft.

Here's another example. A community page I set up called Urban Inclusion collects a newstream from diversity, tolerance, inclusion and social justice sources like Colorlines Magazine, Feminist Wire, Teaching Tolerance and the Institute for Social Inclusion, to name a few.

When I want to see what’s going on in one of these worlds, I interact with them—browsing, sampling, reading, learning and sharing, and sometimes bookmarking items for future blog posts.

You can have access to primary sources that traditional news sources refer to. Here’s an example, while you might have read in an Associated Press article, featured in the Indianapolis Star, that the Brookings Institution released a report on urban housing trends, you might also “like” the Brookings Institution on Facebook to receive the actual report, in which case you will be able to see that they used a term like ”reverse white flight” that none of the other media sources, including the head of SPEA, mentioned. That, alone, tells you something. How many other organizations and news sites are glossing over key information?

Here are some benefits of creating a business Facebook newsstream:

· Facebook collects and partly curates for you

· Customized newsstreams around a theme, cause or industry

· Connections to primary sources, reports, studies

· Newstream inclusive of experimental info. happenning at the margins

· Content is just one “share” button away

The main drawback I’ve experienced is that it’s not optimized for mobile yet, so I like to connect over a cup of coffee on my laptop or main computer.

Create a World
So, dive into another world that you’ve created.

When you stretch beyond what you know you are more likely to learn what you don't know, or what you didn’t even know you didn’t know …

Pay attention to intuition, it largely comes out of patterns noticed by the right brain that are not yet articulated by the left brain via language.

Go ahead and include news/thoughtstream sites in your feed that you are attracted to, even if they seem random. There may be a connection. You can always unlike the source, but first give it a chance. Plus, make sure that the "world" that you are creating is challenging you and pursuing the difficult questions. If you balance your news/thoughtstream between sources of inspiration, analysis, creativity, opinion and synthesis, you will be sure to be covering enough terrain to keep you on your toes, as well as engaged on the issues while thinking with both sides of the brain.

Carla Johnson, of the Content Marketing Institute, notes:

"When he created his masterpiece, “The Thinker,” French artist Auguste Rodin created a man in an awkward, unnatural, and uncomfortable position: sitting, with his right hand on his left knee, supporting his chin. Take a minute and try to replicate this position. It’s awkward. Unnatural. And uncomfortable. You have to think just to get into that position." (Carla Johnson,"Why You're Thought Leadership Strategy Should Make you Uncomfortable")

To cultivate thought leadership, she says you have to get familiar with the awkward, unnatural, and uncomfortable.

Because that’s the fertile ground from which innovation springs.

Dead Ideas: Anti-Intellectualism

2013-11-08T18:31:00.000-08:00

“But human beings are not machines,

and however powerful the pressure to conform,

they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice

that they dare to declare their independence.

In that historical possibility lies hope.”

DEAD IDEAS IN LEADERSHIP

Anti-Intellectualism in the Academy:

truth bombs and counter-revolutionaries

It was, and is, embarrassing. Not just for Indiana, for all of us. For humanity seemed to take a giant leap backwards, or remind us what our conscience feared true: even “moderate” Republicans—like Mitch Daniels, who sold himself on a fiscal-conservative-no-culture-war agenda—manipulate and mold what the rest of us, the “reality-based community", consume as knowledge, in this case history.

Daniels' harsh words of censorship, uncovered earlier in 2013, lifted a veil of decency, revealing a crass mockery of a most complex blend of truth, empathy and optimism: the brand of Howard Zinn.

Historical Truth and Non-Nationalized History

Howard Zinn dropped more than a few truth bombs on the American people over his career. In fact, he made a career out of it.

He was as much a bombardier of truth as he was a bombardier for the air force in World War II, which he had patriotically and enthusiastically volunteered to do.

He dropped bombs on German military forces. He dropped bombs on German civilian targets. He even dropped bombs on a small village in France where German captives were suspected to be hiding.

By the end of the war, his patriotism had been tested. It waned by the Vietnam War, which he protested vehemently against. By the end of his life, he knew he had discovered a different kind of patriotism: one to be clearly distinguished from, but often confused with, the interests of nationalism.

No, history should not be taught from a nationalistic point of view. It shouldn't be censored. There was a lot of catching up to do. He knew that both terrible and unfortunate events and hopeful and courageous events--no matter how big or small, popular or unpopular--needed to be told, and mattered to people even if they didn't matter to the powerbrokers and the state.

Howard Zinn embarked on gathering historical stories to include in writing A People's History of the United States (1980). These were the stories all too often being left out that he thought would help develop in people a more complex understanding of our history and our own identities.

As a historian and civil activist, Howard Zinn came to believe that what distinguishes humans from machines is the choice, and what he considered patriotic duty, to disobey when what they are told to do strays from their values and the values put forth as cornerstones of our democracy:

Mitch Daniels vs. “that Terrible Anti-American Academic”

in which the dead guy and real patriot, Howard Zin, wins

The news—that Purdue University president, former Indiana governor and even recent presidential prospect, Mitch Daniels, tried to control how history is taught in universities and schools in Indiana by censoring Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States—revealed the underbelly of the American corporate agenda. An agenda so far advanced over the last few decades as to penetrate Tea Party and Academy alike.

In a set of emails between himself, Tony Bennet, Scott Jenkins, David Shane and others, Mitch Daniels called Zinn a "terrible anti-American academic" whose People's History was a "truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page." Some are not convinced Daniels has read a single page, for it turns out he lifted (plagiarism is also not a good example) most of this phrase from another critic of Zinn named Wineburg. What is edifying about this set of emails, is the level of "conservative" thought being tossed around in this group. Like when Scott Jenkins states:

So, conservative, reactionary, demeaning and uninformed opinion are all involved here, at an official level. But, worse, there is just plain indecency.

Daniels, to put it politely, discounted the contributions of a--dead--World War II veteran, inveterate freedom fighter, passionate civil rights activist, celebrated hero/historian of the disempowered, prolific author, icon, innovator.

In one short phrase, Daniels insulted him three times: "Terrible. Anti-American. Academic." For, let’s not be naïve, the last word was as much an insult as the first.

Let’s talk about that.

Infidel Within

While, in the last decade, the American public of every stripe were forced to find themselves concerned over the oppressive Taliban in the Middle East and fearing for their personal and national safety on a near daily basis due to the War on Terror, the Bush Administration was instilling a nationalistic New World Order.

This new order included many things, one of which was a powerful political-corporate cadre who wished to further financially gut public education, then privatize its disinvested ass through Education Reform, an attempt to mold education to the needs of the 21^st century economy as seen through the twin lens of national and corporate hegemony.

James Loewen

Not ironically, the first thing Mitch Daniels announced as president of Purdue University was to cut its budget. And the more that, especially public, universities cut their budgets and/or receive less from state funding, the more they rely on pubic-private partnerships and corporate-interest funding and agenda setting.

We have ourselves to fear; more than we knew.

That is, if we want more than just military-scientific-industrial innovation …

We are, it turns out, our own best machine against human progress.

Innovation of the Non-Industrial Kind

Innovation exisits on a spectrum from small adaptations to existing models that can produce big or small changes, to the most profound forms of innovation--which are not even called “innovation.”

They are called “revolution.”

Revolutionaries dream up entire new systems, creating an infinite number of new opportunities for innovation. They create revolutions in thinking and practice, whether an entire new platform for thinking, creativity and imagination, or new ways to adapt and express how we live in the world and embrace our humanity.

Freud revolutionized the philosophy of mind and helped create the new discipline of psychology. Einstein re-imagined time and space beyond mechanics with his theory of relativity. And smaller scale innovations and adaptations in academia create new theories of practice, new solutions for dealing with old and new problems. Here are some revolutionaries that Mitch Daniels et al. might not have approved of in or out of the academy, and still might not value some of them:

The image above is from Apple's ingenious Think Different ad campaign in the 1990s, which borrowed the power of this notion of revolutionaries to apply to its own kind of innovation in technology/design. I've argued before that this campaign was so successful, it made us feel like revolutionaries, just simply by holding an iPhone or buying a Mac. It made us believe we, too, could be revolutionaries with the right tools in hand (and I would also argue it has played a role in that). Finally, it made us so strongly associate innovation with technology that .... we did that, and we have since forgotten about the importance of academics, disobedience and revolutionaries. To this, we should say: bring back the crazy ones.

The public may have forgotten, but corporations don't. They've formed alliances with academia. That is why IUPUI, for example, has a program called Translating Research into Practice (TRIP). The program aims to accelerate the application of new knowledge, understanding and meaning into the practice of business, technology and industry—at least that’s where the focus of that program is. Not the humanities.

Howard Zinn, Translating Research into Practice

Zinn was a thought leader and innovator. As a working-class Jew, World War II bombardier and trained academic, he understood what was missing and went about filling that gap. That’s what A People’s History of the United States is, a critical gap filler that not only told history not from the point of institutions and power structures, but from the regular citizens and marginalized peoples whose contributions to human history and social change were mostly ignored.

In academia, historiography—the practice of history—had changed. New kinds of historical research, analysis and storytelling had emerged during the post-war years, such as social history, intellectual history, cultural history, the history of ideas, not to mention women's history, immigrant history, African-American history, Native American history, even time-based perspectives such as pre- and post-war, colonial and post-colonial, etc. The change had spawned new disciplines. There was no longer a monumental History, but many historical perspectives.

His innovation was his single handedly translating this academic revolution that had occurred in our understanding of historiography (the philosophy and practice of telling history) into not just daily civilian life, but this is where it got radical: the children in our society first learning history.

Zinn intuitively understood that when you make academic advances in method, practice, knowledge and understanding, there is no excuse not to adopt those advances across the board, including in elementary and high school education. Because, why shouldn’t they have the best, most current understanding? Why should they have to relearn or unlearn what they “learned” using outdated systems?

Howard Zinn saw the gap and went directly to its most critical juncture: schoolchildren. A People’s History of the United States and its abridged version called A Young People's History of the United States didn’t aim, as some have said, to “rewrite history” but aimed to “fill the gap” in historiological methods.

Textbooks still tended toward a nationalistic storytelling punctuated by the stories of heroes (hagiography) and heroic events, while only very selectively indulging in the stories of struggles and the everyday people that were often behind significant cultural changes.

In A People’s History, Zinn collected stories and referenced primary works that told of the ‘other histories,’ class and labor struggles, and the fight for equal status among women, African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, the disabled and other marginalized or forgotten groups.

As a supplement, his work succinctly crossed over time and space, overcoming the sometimes near-50-year-or-more gap between academic and civilian understanding.

Since then, the Zinn Education Project has aligned his writings with national curriculum standards so it can be even more useful and relevant to teachers. If you “like” the Zinn Education Project on Facebook, you will receive daily posts that convey important stories that are often left out of textbooks--and, frankly, daily life.

Big Win for Howard Zinn

I attended the Howard Zinn Read-In at Purdue last week, an event organized and held in protest to the leaked truth of the opinions and censorship activities of their university president, Mitch Daniels.

The event took place on Nov. 5, the birthday of famous Indiana socialist Eugene Debs. The Read-In also attracted national attention, with more than 10 other universtities from coast to coast holding similar read-ins to support the legacy of Zinn. Mitch Daniels was not there.

Since Daniel's publicized gaffe and lead up to the Read-In, new and renewed interest in the works of Howard Zinn have surfaced, stirred up by what has turned out to be excellent PR. According to Zinn Education Project coordinator, Rethinking Schools:

"Thanks to the exposure generated by former Gov. Mitch Daniels' attempt to ban Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States from Indiana schools and teacher education programs, the Zinn Education Project has been flooded with visitors looking for people's history teaching materials," Bill Bigelow, Zinn Education Project co-director, told Common Dreams via email.

"Teachers and parents have told us that they are redoubling their commitment to teach people’s history in the face of the proposed censorship. We invite other governors to attempt to ban Zinn's works—it helps introduce A People's History of the United States to huge new audiences," Bigelow added.

In the spirit of Howard Zinn, at the Read-In, James Loewen, anti-racist and author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, shared new research on Sun Down Towns, white-on-purpose towns that you better not be black in after the sun goes down, as the lore goes.

He showed us a map of current day Indiana. It is littered with them.

Loewen ended with a slide that asked the question 'What is to be Done with Mitch Daniels at Purdue?' There was only a number one, in answer, with the audience, perhaps, expected to fill in the blank.

What we need, he said, is more patriotism, less nationalism. And it's not even Mitch Daniels, per se, that is the problem. It is the idea of Mitch Daniels.

I'll talk more about Loewen's idea of precensorship in the next post …

(in a forthcoming Part II)

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Philanthropy Games, Part IV: Special Race Edition

2013-11-01T14:59:00.000-07:00

Philanthropy Games, Part IV:
Race Edition

In the New Jim Crow Era, everything is a game, anything can appear on the chopping block, and we are all gladiators/tributes in what appears as the logical conclusion to the new Social Darwinism that has accompanied, over the last few decades, a powerful collision of trickle-down economics, conservative Right-wing politics and the increasing breakdown of the public sphere. We won the battle of civil rights but lost the battle of economic justice. Neo-liberalism, the concession prize, fueled a complete counter-culture reversal: you’re either on the bus or off the bus—of Capitalism. This dissolution of the democratic ideal has tickled back down to the broad concepts and local details of civic life—even to how we frame questions of race.

Faces of Philanthropy

Philanthropy, modern torchbearer of our civic life and ideals, has many faces bound together by a single invisible thread, one that is becoming more apparent as it unravels.

That thread represents its deep roots in the economic and financial systems of business.

That philanthropy—the nexus of investments, funders and nonprofits that together form our society’s main method of institutionalizing acts of charity and encouraging humanitarian dreams—is steeped in business culture and has inherited its economic values should come as no surprise.

It’s a simple matter of tracing a backwards trail to the provenance of the money. To use a favorite term of the industry, it is a matter of legacy. That legacy--including relationships to robber-barons of the past and the present, as well as the current unprecedented inequity of our tax structure--breeds a silent, uncomfortable cognitive dissonance.

It’s a dissonance we can all face together. But, it is one that will require unafraid people to speak out, point out, single out (at risk of also being singled out), deliberate, draw diagrams and discuss before that happens.

The legacy of a nonprofit’s program (philanthropy’s end or delivery point) is colored by the money and the story of its passage in many ways—from money that is made from investments in non-humanitarian industries, to corporate board leaders, to the generally accepted and adopted style of business culture, which is one of corporate leadership, values and financing.

So, although we see many faces of philanthropy, good and bad—and frankly mostly good—there is this common thread that in its current undoing threatens to unwind the whole structure. That is what has been happening in the last decade, with the world of philanthropy experiencing the vicissitudes of economic bubbles and a recession. I reviewed some of the basic tenets of this literature in Part II of this blog series (Philanthropy Games, Part II).

As that thread further unwinds, many of the good faces of philanthropy—happening on the surface through so many programs that help the poor, fight injustice and promote the arts—are being overshadowed by a more sinister image, glimpsed in Peter Buffet’s recent New York Times commentary “The Philanthropic Industrial Complex.”

Philanthropy as a Game

In my past two Philanthropy Games posts (Part I and Part II), I explored the history of philanthropy using the guiding metaphor of The Hunger Games, a young adult dystopian social commentary that is highly resonant of our current culture’s unprecedented levels of wealth, power, income, and quality-of-life inequalities. The Hunger Games introduces us to the silent sufferings of characters who live in the “districts” while the “Capitol,” the 1%, entertain themselves with annual “Hunger Games,” where children from the districts fight each other to the death. (See Philanthropy Games, PartI)

We are, after all, living in a time highly reminiscient of the early days of institutional philanthropy: Rockefeller, steel, Carnegie, and union battles including guns and cannons and actual deaths, all due to the non-living-wage-near-slavery of the poor whose work padded the coffers of the megarich. That’s the short story. It was kind of ugly and violent (even if admittedly fun to read). (See Philanthropy Games, Part II.)

Now we’re living in similar times—maybe worse. And, despite the number of guns we own, in case we want to rise up against the powers that be and defend our liberty, we are, instead, letting our children, young adults, families and the poorest of the poor turn the guns on themselves.

No need for a fancy arena. Apparently.

Katniss Everdeen … where are you?????

The arena is life as we know it, which if you haven’t noticed in the last decade, is full of competition. Real competition. Competition to get good grades. Competion to get into college. Competition to get a job. Competition to keep a job. Competition to start a business. Competition to stay in business.

In the philanthropic world, there is competition to get grants, to be selected as finalists for competitions and to be chosen as, indeed, the victor, to the exclusion of all the other contestants. It is a vision of limited resources, not abundance, and it is also actual limited resources. For it is true. And it is our vision and dream. It is self-limiting.

We see this vision of our time played out in umpteen reality shows. Project Runway and Top Chef have been our family favorites.

But are we really competing ... or are we just promoting the idea of competition?

It’s possible we’re manipulating as well as being manipulated. We’ll get to that later …

Some Modern Roots of Competition

Despite a good decade of blasting some of our basic assumptions about the social good sector, both national and local philanthropic representatives and nonprofits, continue to deliver the same old thing—with the new twist of promoting the very thing that creates enormous poverty and inequality in the first place and serves as a main lever of capitalism: competition.

Although sometimes fair sounding, this notion of competition is inherited from business. As such, it represents an essentially unfair game that promotes meritocracy while practicing social dominance. Historically, this is the inheritance of what is called Social Darwinism, a 19^th-century idea that spawned some unfortunate conclusions about race and culture, including eugenics.

This would be a whole separate post requiring research … but there probably was a difference between the original Social Darwinism, which ought to be named after its originator, Herbert Spencer, whose idea may have actually been based more off of Lamarkianism (the idea you can improve or adapt your genes over your lifetime). This relates to meritocracy, the notion that anyone can change or improve their circumstances and has a fair chance at doing so.

This original social-evolutionary thinking, as wrong as its biology was, may have had a more positive social application. Because if you think about it, once society realized that the biological mechanism was more about natural selection, Darwinism, then the outlook becomes one of realizing that you can’t change your genes/circumstances. Recall the dismal phrase ‘You can take X out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of X’. ) In this Darwinian view, change requires winners and losers, and dying off. It would appear that this kind of thinking is what so perversely and atrociously played out in Nazi Germany.

Both views are an example of the naturalistic fallacy. Just because something happens in nature doesn’t mean it happens in culture.

Designing Race

Indianapolis’ philanthropic community, like everywhere else, has gotten on board with the use of public competitions, in addition to the private competitions in its usual course of grant applications.

Specifically, a series of “idea competitions” around themes of art, design, connectivity and placemaking were held this year. To top it off, and perhaps not in parallel alignment with the other themes, is “20K: A Competition About Race” calling for a “reshaping” of the discussion on race as part of Spirit and Places’ 2013 theme “Risk.”

That race is being framed as a competition is curious and offensive. It begs a lot of questions. (See my post What is an Idea?) A lot of serious topics are framed as competitions—some of the most serious, actually. But usually these constitute problems, and most socially moral issues that were framed as problems, or questions, were done so in the 19^th century, not the 21^st century. So that feels off right away.

Then, the notion that the “problem” needs to be “reframed” before it is “solved” feels evasive and manipulative.

Then, given these feelings, the notion that contestants will have had to perform a dog-and-pony show twice in front of a group of judges “about race” and then “only one” will win … not only does the Caesar Flickerman (cheesy game show host of the Hunger Games) factor start to show, but the racist minstrel song “Jump Jim Crow” comes, unfortunately, to mind. I have been writing a lot about the old and new Jim Crow.

wheel about and turn about
and do just so
every time I wheel about
I jump Jim Crow

Then there is also the fact that more than 50 ideas were silently submitted, and we will only know four of them and the rest will never get publically exposed … that doesn’t speak to accountability to people or ideas. A lot is lost for such as serious topic.

In my opinion, any attempt to reshape the discussion on race without addressing the black and white of it including KKK history would not be risky. If you call attention to the deep de facto segregation of the New Jim Crow era in neighborhoods, churches, public schools, property taxes, higher education, media, criminal justice or food and health, that would confront some thorny systemic issues head on.

Will the real risk, complexity, history and context of the idea of Race in Indianapolis be acknowledged and awarded? No.

The four final contestants do not represent very risky ideas, and they may reframe race in ways that won't be productive. Maybe real risk—maybe even the best thinking--isn’t found in the manufactured arena, but in the messy, non-delineated de facto public arena of life.

The Ambiguity of Competition

On searching for articles examining the relationship between capitalism and competition, I found an article referencing to “the ambiguity of competition.” (Monthly Review, April 2011, Vol. 62): “the opposite ways in which the concept of competition is employed in economics and in more colloquial language, including the language of business itself … best explained by Milton Friedman, in his conservative classic Capitalism and Freedom, first published in 1962:

“Competition has two very different meanings. In ordinary discourse, competition means personal rivalry, with one individual seeking to outdo his known competitor. In the economic world, competition means almost the opposite. There is no personal rivalry in the competitive market place … The wheat farmer in a free market does not feel himself in personal rivalry with, or threatened by, his neighbor, who is, in fact, his competitor. No one participant can determine the terms on which other participants shall have access to goods or jobs. All take prices as given by the market and no individual can, by himself, have more than a negligible influence on price …”

So, in our idea competitions, as with so many of our business activities, we appear to conflate these two notions: the meritocratic-rivalrous competitor (dominance) with the healthy-free-marketplace (business). The result is a world-upside-down experience. An ah-ha moment.

Because we talk a lot about and promote the idea of competition, but in business, in realty we have a tendency to create enormous monopolies. It’s in the language: disrupt and dominate, kill the competition, etc.

Competition isn’t the goal, it's a tool--and environment in which we must win, kill, dominate.

From Monthly Review’s “Monopoly and Competition in 21^st Century Capitalism”:

“A striking paradox animates political economy in our times. On the one hand, mainstream economics and much of left economics discuss our era as one of intense and increased competition among businesses, now on a global scale. It is a matter so self-evident as no longer to require empirical verification or scholarly examination. On the other hand, wherever one looks, it seems that nearly every industry is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Formerly competitive sectors like retail are now the province of enormous monopolistic chains, massive economic fortunes are being assembled into the hands of a few mega-billionaires sitting atop vast empires, and the new firms and industries spawned by the digital revolution have quickly gravitated to monopoly status. In short, monopoly power is ascendant as never before.”

Reclaiming the Humanities

Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel describes in his 2012 TED talk “Why we shouldn’t trust markets with our civic life. He says, “The marketization of everything sharpens the sting of inequality and its social and civic consequence. When market thinking, and market values, enter, they may change the meaning of those practices and crowd out attitudes and norms worth caring about.”

Philanthropy and social good are in the business of non-market values, and we may have to redefine what that means. He says:

“If we’re talking about non-material goods and social practices, such as teaching and learning, or engaging together in civic life. In those domains, bringing market mechanisms and cash incentives may undermine or crowd out non-market values and attitudes worth caring about. Once we see that markets and commerce, when extended beyond the material domain, can change the character of the goods themselves, can change the meaning of the social practices … we have to ask where markets belong and where they don’t.”

We need to recalibrate how we do social good so that the meaning of our intangibles, such as equality, access, success, even race don't get inadvertently undermined, redesigned or redistributed through market mechanisms and market thinking.

But, says Sandel, “for fear of disagreement, we fear these questions.”

The questions are about systems, institutions and ideas. Sometimes leaders of organizations forget that and see the systems they've adopted as personal expressions of their leadership, which causes reputation and personal rivalry to also become at stake, only further suppressing the questions.

Let's not fear the questions. Or shoot the messengers. Neither are personal, but just part of the dream of humanity, striving.

Philanthropy Games, Part I: May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor
Philanthropy Games, Part II: History and Truth Bombs
Philanthropy Games, Part III: Crimes of Capital

Dead Ideas in Leadership (Part I): The World Upside Down

2013-10-19T06:39:00.002-07:00

“In the end what will hurt us the most
is not the words of our enemies,
but the silence of our friends.”

--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.--

The World Upside Down

Some everyday inversions and perversions that form the fabric of our irrational, thinly veiled, post-Enlightenment dystopia.

Upside Down Moments

It happens on a weekly basis. But I have trouble remembering the instances. It will be so clear, but then I inevitably forget. Or maybe it's some kind of re-prioritization that happens.

I have started to write these observations down. But when I do, they look like minor, Lilyputian complaints that one little person, or even many, might be wiser not to lodge against the benevolent monster that keeps them.

Let me start with a specific example.

Why I am not sponsoring TEDx this Year

As an entrepreneur, I knew last year that I wanted to put more effort into promoting my business practice, whitepaper bluesky. Sponsoring TEDx seemed like a sensible idea, because even if I was gambling on whether I was reaching out to actual business prospects, I knew that it was completely aligned with my mission and brand.

Now, sponsorships are transactional. They are advertising spots. You get what you pay for … I knew that. I’ve worked in the nonprofit sector long enough.

But I thought I’d try this reasonable gamble and expense, a new experience, an experiment.

As a Thinker-level sponsor, my business logo was flashed once, I was told, on the screen between talks. I missed it. I did, however, get to put basically whatever I wanted in the goody bags, which was helpful, though having a memorable printed piece plus a gimmick was significantly pricey, at least double the sponsorship.

I’m not sorry I sponsored the inaugural Indianapolis TEDx event last year. Not sorry at all … And they have so many sponsors this year, they don’t need me. But, here’s why I’m not doing it again this year. An upside-down moment I experienced.

As I sat in the audience last year and mentioned the limited active exposure associated with the first event my company has ever sponsored, a colleague remarked quizzically and with the kind of sense we're not supposed to acknowledge ...

“Shouldn’t the sponsors who need it get the most exposure?”

Raised eyebrows, a shared understanding and silence followed. There was nothing more to say. If the game were Chutes and Ladders, I had just slid down a chute.

Several thousand dollars later, the world indeed seemed upside down. This was just one of the instances I began taking note of …

Now, this might sound overly idealistic. You could say, hey, these are the rules. True.

The rules are an expression of the pecking order of sponsorships, which reflects the hierarchy of capitalism’s system of social-economic dominance: the strong get stronger, the rich get richer, the famous get more publicity.

So the 800-pound-gorilla sponsors got the most, albeit unneeded, exposure that reinforced their social and economic dominance in the community. And the baby sponsors got a crumb along with no special attention, pretending not to know that a struggling small business was taking its first plunge into promotional advertising.

It’s a positive (or negative, depending which way you look at it) reinforcement loop.

From a historical and cultural perspective, our economic system—capitalism—meant to be a financial tool, merged with a popular 19^th century cultural attitude, belief and rationalization known as Social Darwinism (more on that in another post).

It is what it is. Or is that a statement whose origins might be traced to the oversimplified Darwinist tenet that what survives, survives? Well, I guess nothing succeeds like success.

Back to the point.

The problem is, I don’t think that this hierarchical, naturalistic only-the-fittest-survive fallacy makes sense in the humanitarian space. In fact, in the arena of charity and social good, it sometimes looks ridiculous. And

Not only does the modeling of might over right continue to fall short of progress, I think its time for us to reconcile ourselves with what has happened: we’ve traded common sense with common cents.

A simple substitution, with very dramatic results.

Apparent Heroes and Benevolent Monsters

The 1980s is over.

Can I say that again? The 1980s is over. 1980s. Done. Over. Shoulder pads out. (Ok, so the 80s are back in fashion a bit, but I'm talking more about the general attitude ..)

Corporate heroism. This beast of our making seems to be lightening up on us a bit, just as it is also, unfortunately, doubling down as it reaches for its logical, absurd end.

We are human. For several centuries of now, we’ve lived through the grand analogy of the machine, and we became like gods—and devils. Shedding this mechanistic model of thinking will happen and is happening, even, just as assuredly, this dream of mechanism embeds into a new host and reinvents itself. Welcome, Big Data, our newly fashioned benevolent monster.

Why the charitable sector ever decided to model so closely off the corporate sector is beyond me. It probably didn’t involve that much thinking. It was there, as a viable path, or any path. A path whose continuity self-reinforced, as corporate professionals and landed gentry assumed nonprofit leadership roles in board seats.

But now it is all our jobs to pursue and embrace a more abundant and conscionable framework—at the very least for the social sector, if not for all of business. This is what Arianna Huffington’s and Richard Branson’s Plan B project is promoting.

The charitable sector should be in the business of transformation, not transaction, and should be the thought leader that business looks to for a new model.

Because the damage has been done and the bleeding won’t be stopped by more bleeding or relying on systems that suck the blood out of our humanity. That sponsorship example … while at the same time we advocate strongly for and need them, we loathe and despise them.

A world of benevolent monsters and bloodsuckers.

Vampires Among Us

Here are some other observations of upside-down, inside-out conditions that are sucking the humanity out of us, challenging us with their surprisingly simple and shockingly deep contradictions.

So, in addition to Apparent Heroism, here are three more types ...

Cultural Projection: Inversion by Perversion

First, since we have sexual connotations for the word perversion, let’s revisit the dictionary definition. Perversion is:

“the alteration of something from its original course, meaning, or state to a distortion or corruption of what was first intended.”

So this kind of inversion is a perversion in that sense, and its most common form is otherwise known as “blaming the victim.” It is a cultural phenomenon akin to Freudian projection—where problems and issues uproot from the locus of origin and are reflected back in another form in which they can be perceived more clearly but at the expense of losing connection to their cause.

This perversion, which we could call perpetrator projection, is epitomized in the human epidemic of domestic violence, framed as a women’s issue with diminishing regard to its precursor: male violence. This also happens in a big way with race and racism, where victimization is on all things black, of color or difference rather than the much more racially charged white dominant structures.

Doublespeak: Inversion by Contradiction

George Orwell’s 1984 introduced us to this notion of State or bureaucratized contradiction. It’s here. There are way too many examples in this category of inversion. It’s when something defines itself in terms of its opposite or promoting one concept while invoking an opposite kind of action to achieve it.

For example, achieving security requires invasion of your privacy (e.g. NSA). Safety is achieved through threat or use of deadly weapons (guns or weapons of mass destruction). Policy that promotes the rights of corporations is called Citizens United. Public safety uses a guilty-until-proven-innocent method called ‘stop and frisk,’ conflicting with our innocent-until-proven-guilty constitutional policy.

Social Reduction: Inversion by Abstraction

The reduction of human beings into economic units has been achieved through a numbers-based tool or game of power. While there have always been means of oppression by power in human history, the use of abstracted, quantifiable, units of power led to a unique kind of inversion that comes with the abstraction of things (land, resources, people, things) into numbers.

It's possible that this is actually a specific example of apparent heroism, where our social monetary system develops into an extreme form, through expression via mathematics, into something that controls us more than we control it.

When we became a numbers-based economy, it allowed for different kinds of compounding and growth of quantity, or wealth. Numbers could increase numbers themselves (interest), could represents invested assets (dividends) and could change in value based on other number purchases and sales (stock). When this happened, numbers became able to grow past land, people and things, becoming more ‘valuable,’ leaving people and families with low numbers (the poor) less valuable and less able to navigate the necessities of daily life determined by the transcendent values of a number-based economy.

Metaphorically (but practically literally speaking), if your number is 1, and you multiply it by itself, then 1 x 1 = 1. If your number is 2, then 2 x 2 = 4. If your number is 100, then 100 x 100 = 10,000.

But if your number is 0, then no matter what, you will end up with 0, because 0 x [any number] = 0.
When you are poor you have zero or less than zero, and no amount of additional quantity seems to help get you out of poverty. In fact, things seem to be designed this way.

One small example of how costly it is to be poor is that with less money, you will be charged more fees for having a checking account. People with more money are charged fewer fees. People with less money are charged amounts that they don't have (which easily gets their accounts into negative territory, where they'll be charged more, actually exorbitant, fees). Pretty inverted, don't you think?

So many other inversions exist, I know. But I’m constantly forgetting them like they are tabooed outliers that I should feel stupid dwelling upon. Maybe you can help me remember them. I’d like to keep a running list ...

What twisted, turned, inside-out or upside-down ideas and practices have you experienced?

What is an Idea? (Part I)

2013-10-11T18:25:00.001-07:00

What is an Idea?

Whenever you have a nexus of conflicting ideas swarming around on a topic, you know there is something interesting, inviting, intriguing there … to inquirers, at least, that means there is something to be investigated, maybe even solved.

I don’t mean conflicting opinions like political stances on an issue--that gets more into ideology.

I mean conflicting ways in which we talk about topics without knowing it. In one context, the idea means this; in another context an idea means that. And in other contexts, completely something different.

In certain cases, it is curious, we seem to be OK with that, as though those words-topics-ideas were meant by their very nature to be flexible and adaptive, chameleons to our changing contexts and needs.

Either that, or we just haven’t thought enough about them.

Urban City or Uber City?

For example, I pointed out in an earlier post (Kings of Indy: https://www.facebook.com/notes/the-imaginarium-at-whitepaper-bluesky/friday-philosophy-the-kings-of-indy/465163613577965) that when our local black entertainment magazine, Scoop, says “urban lifestyle,” it means mostly black lifestyle, just like a recording label might use the term “urban music” to categorize music mostly created by and listened to by an African American audience.

While on the other hand, to another local newspaper, Urban Times, “urban lifestyle” mostly refers to historic downtown neighborhoods gentrevitalized by primarily white and/or middle- to upper-income residents.

And then again, for a group like CEOs for Cities, which subscribes to a sort of wealth building through a limited hip-social-good agenda, “urban lifestyle” probably translates to what they call “livability”--walkable, culture- and entertainment-rich downtown areas with ample amenities in close reach, such as restaurants, theatres, galleries, offices and meeting places that attract young professionals, artists and hipsters.

So, all these different meanings, one common word: urban.

It’s complicated. Because, what if the very idea of the word idea is filled with lots of ideas?

Reflexive Imperative: the idea of idea

I’m talking about the multiple meanings and uses surrounding “ideas”—the idea of an idea. What is an “idea?”

Talking about the idea of idea is a reflexive activity. So no doubt we’re in the realm of philosophy. Not only that, but “idea” is a very loaded word in philosophy. That’s not all, the very definition of idea appears to be all-encompassing, as infitinite as universe, a multipurpose container for everything that has to do with thought:

Idea (Greek, eidos, visible form) A notion stretching all the way from one pole, where it denotes a subjective, internal presence in the mind, somehow thought of as representing something about the world, to the other pole, where it represents an eternal, timeless unchanging form or concept: the concept of the number series or of justice, for example, thought of as independent objects of enquiry and perhaps of knowledge. (Simon Blackburn, Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 2008)

So … no wonder the realm of ideas can be wishy washy …

But that’s the stuff of life. The stuff we try to put in words so we can think, communicate, grow, as well as craft, categorize and manipulate.

Ideas can be:

· Visible forms

· Notions, thoughts, plans, schemes or solutions

· Subjective internal representations of the world

· Changing representations

· Objective or abstract concepts

· Eternal/unchanging representations

· Invisible forms

· Objects of enquiry or knowledge

· Theories, mental models and constructs

The use of the word “idea” can be so broad that we walk into a room and see something and ask “Hey, what’s the big idea?” I'm not even really sure what that means.

The Big and the Small of It

The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy goes on to say:

These two poles are not distinct meanings of the term, although they give rise to many problems of interpretation, but between them they define a space of philosophical problems.

Ideas—as intertwined with the very act of thinking—are vehicles of our internal thought processes, fleeting impressions produced by our sensory-cortical apparratus. As the Oxford dictionary states, philosopher John Locke held such a view of ideas as “transient, fleeting, and unstable private presences.”

This is the opposite of Plato’s emphasis on ideas as unchanging forms or archetypical benchmarks or abstractions from which we are able to discern, understand and communicate about empirical reality.

So, rather than siding with one pole or another, as this reference tool suggests, these poles instead circumscribe the space within which we learn, think, understand and communicate, prescribing a means of connection between the internal and external:

Ideas provide the way in which objective knowledge can be expressed. They are the essential components of understanding, and any intelligible proposition that is true must be capable of being understood. (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy)

On the other hand, these two extremes—ultra-personal internal and near-deified external, or perhaps the cognitive/natural versus the spiritual/supernatural—serve to also illustrate the different levels of ideation, a hierarchy, if you will.

A hierarchy not to imply judgment of usefulness or worth, but of complexity. So you have a very basic visual or sensory image on the simplistic end and a whole system of interconnected ideas on the other end. Data and experience on the one end and developed ideas, knowledge and theories on the other.

I think it’s important to keep in mind this whole range. That ideas are sometimes very basic and simplistic and maybe even equivalent to one image or word, and ideas can be intricately developed, designed and complex—a whole system, theory or synthesis of multiple ideas. That we need to see ideas as building blocks, sometimes even temporary constructs that create a foothold to get to other ideas.

For example, taking this back to the city and the streets, when we use the word “urban” to mean a series of desired consequences of designed and planned city-building efforts, or to describe a style of music, then most likely we are using the term, the idea of “urban” more as a code word than a developed, historical, complex concept that relates to cities, people, culture and economics.

When we choose to see the richness and history of our ideas, we are to some extent choosing not to forget, we are choosing to include, we are choosing to represent diversity and accept the challenges of human complexity. As Jane Jacobs warned in Dark Age Ahead (2004):

During a Dark Age, the mass amnesia of survivors becomes permanent and profound. The previous way of life slides into an abyss of forgetfulness, almost as decisively as if it had not existed.

When we defer to simplicity, avoid complexity, and institutions purposely avert aspects of history, memory and context, we encourage cortical shrinkage rather than expansion. We lean into dumb and dumber.

Ideas are the New Currency

So what does it mean that we are now officially in the “idea economy?” It may be less stable than the “knowledge economy” and more exciting … perhaps emblematic of the Digital Age: fast-changing, ephemeral, unpredictable.

And apparently more competitive than ever, given the increasing trend toward idea and innovation competitions. Which seems counter-intuitive, because ideas do not seem in short supply. And yet, they are supposedly the currency. There is this odd mixed message going on about whether ideas are valuable or not, should cost money or be free.

But ideas, nevertheless remain the same—the whole range. The trick, given the new widespread use of “ideas” outside of the academy will be to target or track their quality, relevance and ingenuity.

Idea competitions can be big. The Minneapolis Community Foundation award more than $1 million for a prize. The winner had a simple big idea, to turn a large vacant lot into a hub of local food production. Others are worth just a few thousand. Many are used to generate excitement and publicity for philanthropic sponsors and end up propelling the winners as “stars” in the local scene, business niche, cause or field of study.

The Knight Foundation put together an extensive report on the subject, (the downloadable PDF here http://www.knightfoundation.org/opencontests/), which offers a brief timeline of the history of public contests for ideas and solutions and also "Six Lessons on Designing Public Prizes for Impact:"

Sharing these lessons here is an invitation to others to consider how contests, when appropriate, might widen their networks, deepen the work they already do, and broaden their definition of philanthropic giving. (Knight Foundation Report)

The lessons are worth looking at, but it is also obvious that their perspective is a little more focused on the value contests add to philanthropies as a business more than for the common good. For example, the first lesson is that contests "bring in new blood, new ideas." But, that's a lot of work for a lot of independent organizations and ideas. You could argue that they're doing the foundation's work for them, just like newspapers rely on press releases rather than doing their own inquiry.

There are critics.

In the Stanford Social Innovation Review, though you can find several articles there in favor, a recent criticism on the subject by Kevin Starr puts it bluntly, “Dump the Prizes: Contests, challenges, awards—they do more harm than good. Let’s get rid of them.” (Stanford Social Innovation Review, Aug. 2013, http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/dump_the_prizes)

The innovators I know do so to solve problems, not to win prizes. The only in-depth analysis of social impact contests I’ve seen was a 2009 McKinsey report, which began with a contests-are-wonderful perspective and carried on for 100 pages in the same vein without even a whiff of skepticism.

He outlines four reasons why we should ditch the pitch:

1. Wastes huge amounts of time
2. Too much emphasis on innovation and not nearly enough on implementation
3. It gets too much wrong and too little right
4. Serves as distraction from the social sector’s big problem

He outlines two major exceptions: Foundations that provide significant investment, like the Skoll Foundation, which also selects several winners and has no application process (“Skoll does its own high quality homework”), and the “garden-variety-business-plan-competition,” which serves as good practice and provides immediate feedback.

Here is his grand finale conclusion and recommendations going forward:

All things considered, I’d like to see most of this industry go away, but people love their contests and they’re going to prove hard to kill. That being the case, here are a few draft guidelines to improve both the optics and impact of contests:

1. All prizes must come with a cash award that is at least 20 times the cost of the accompanying award ceremony/dinner, with an additional 30 percent premium if formal wear is involved.

2. Entrants must create first-round proposals during a lunch break and submit them on a napkin.

3. All juries must include a majority of judges who’ve at least tried to do the kind of thing they are judging.

4. A committed adult with a plausible plan must accompany all ideas.

5. All clever product ideas must come with an equally clever idea for distribution.
Mandatory jail time for crowdsourcing or crowd-judging.

Obviously, his guidelines are partly in jest, but do suggest that having guidelines is a good idea.

Revisiting the Race Question

Indianapolis has recently hosted a series of idea competitions sponsored by the Central Indiana Community Foundation and others. Upcoming on the docket: “20K: A Competition About Race” calling for a “reshaping” of the discussion on race as part of Spirit and Places’ 2013 theme “Risk.” No doubt this will bring up some discussion—on the content as well as the frame.

Lots of questions come up even before any content gets presented (although most content will remain unseen) …

Can you really put a figure on The Race Question? Who said Race needed Reshaping? Should Race be a Competition or a Game? Does this send the message that the topic is in some way exceptional rather than part of the regular philanthropic program in the city? Should this really be entertainment? Should people's ideas really be excluded through a public process of elimination?Presenters for the competition will have to do a song and dance, so to speak, in defense of their idea and to win over the crowd. An image comes to mind for me that I can't help because the history of race and racism has been on my mind. It's Jump Jim Crow. The minstrel song's chorus goes like this:

wheel about and turn about

and do just so

every time I wheel about

I jump Jim Crow

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5FpKAxQNKU)

No despcription or briefing on the topic of “reshaping,” nor any judging/selection criteria were publicized, which could be considered red flags for lack of transparency.

It could be interesting. Will the ideas be risky in any kind of permanent, sustainable way? If it's a mural or art project, probably pretty safe. If reshaping race takes on the form of a deferring traditional race issues for current ones centered around immigrants of color, that would be relevant, but it would be the clear path to avoiding risk and further burying (and building) unresolved ill feelings.

If an established organization like the Peace Learning Center embarks on a demonstration project of Truth and Reconciliation with CTS' new Desmond Tutu Center, that would be a step in the right direction. If speakers are brought to the city to stir up conversation on White Privilege or the New Jim Crow, that would be fitting. In my opinion, any attempt to reshape the discussion on race without addressing the black and white of it including KKK history would not be risky.

If you call attention to de facto segregation in churches, public schools, property taxes, access to higher education, media, criminal justice or food and health, that would confront some thorny systemic issues head on. Then again, if it's only $20,000 to spend, that pretty much rules out any systems-thinkging approach. Is the dollar amount risky enough?

In the meantime, in the spirit of Caesar Flickerman, the loveable, cheesy Hunger Games host:

Let Indianapolis'

Philanthropy

Race Games

begin!

So my last question is--with reasonable skepticism--will the real risk, complexity, history and context of the idea of Race in Indianapolis be acknowledged and awarded ...?

As much as a defensive move, the "Competition About Race" is a kind of reaching out, even if a slightly awkward one that comes across to some as outright insulting (and charges $10 a ticket that many cannot afford).

But I am not without hope. I say:

Let us better understand the role of Race in our Spirit and our Place.

P.S. I hope someone invites Fred Wilson!!!

Why Philosophy Isn't Dead

2013-10-05T05:22:00.001-07:00

Why Philosophy isn't Dead
and We Shouldn't Forsake Metacognition

by Amy Rubin for Neon Synthesist

When we ask, why philosophy? … It’s a good and surprisingly relevant question. Philosophy thinks about how we think and knows about how we know. It is an essentially inquisitive and reflective activity, a tool for critical thinking and a reservoir of creative frameworking about our existence. We could use its assistance more in our day-to-day issues ...

Utterly Profane, Massively Divine

What is philosophy?

Let’s get the stereotypes out of the way.

Disheveled-looking old men with beards asking quasi-meaningful, hair splitting questions on the differences between “being”and “Being” can be kind of annoying. And the anal prattle of profs breaking down sentences into “If A, then B, where C is …” feels like a dehumanizing sort of prophylactic against actual thinking.

I had professors like that. Continental Philosophers. Logical Positivists. Classicists. Existentialists. Phenomenologists. Hermaneuticists. Foucaultian Archaelogists. Philosophers of Art, Science, even Medicine. I even had a philosophy professor named Zeno. Really.

Even while they conformed or informed existing cultural stereotypes, most were excellent teachers. Philosophers like to think about thinking, as if it is the divine miracle.

Our capacity to think is so much of who we are as humans. Thinking is our defining characteristic responsible for everything we have made: our houses, our offices, our monuments, our computers, our books—all the stories and thoughts we’ve ever documented.

It is a miracle.

Living or Dead?

I know people wonder … isn’t Philosophy as a discipline, like Latin … dead? Steven Hawking recently declared it so, in his book Grand Design. Because of that, some may think that saying “philosophy is dead” is a recent epiphany. But it isn’t. The same question floated around when I was in college.

I think it’s perennial. I’m not sure why yet, but perhaps I can explore that further in a future post.

Maybe it’s the need to differentiate, to detach from your creator, to erase the rough sketches and penciled calculations from the margins of the paper. It’s sort of something we get embarrassed about periodically, like a primitive religious practice that reveals a more evolutionary perspective on our spiritual development. Or like breast feeding: natural, unnatural, in vogue, out of vogue.

Actually, the attachment metaphor may be useful. Even Steven Hawking can only talk about philosophy in relief from his own field of study, physics:

“Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics."

Ok, genius aside, he’s wrong.

And ironically, it’s my philosophy training that is useful here, because much of what philosophy teaches, I am convinced, is critical thinking. Thinking about thinking, thinking about how we use language and thinking to describe our relationships to the world, to ourselves and to our thoughts. It is a very reflective, intentionally reflexive, activity.

Here’s what’s wrong with Hawking’s stance as reflected in that quote. Either he is so steeped in the world of physics (no problem understanding why that would be the case), or he is unintentionally relying on a straw-man construction …

... the straw man being the supposedly parallel construction between the disciplines, such as Physics and Philosophy. Well, it would seem that way, since all the departments at universities do have a parallel organizational structure. They appear to sit side-by-side. But that’s illusory.

History can tell us that Philosophy, as a discipline, predated Physics—and Science.

In fact, Philosophy not only predated Science and Physics, but gave birth to them. So perhaps they are attached, or were, or remain entwined ... Because what we now call “Science” started out as “Natural Philosophy.”

Natural philosophy—the philosophy of Nature’s workings and laws, the material world—became the what we now know as science. Philosophy of mind became psychology. Etc.

Philosophy Undead: Recharged by Foucault

In fact, a relatively recent brand of French postmodern thought ended up significantly seeping into the philosophies of practice of several disciplines. Twentieth century French philosopher Michel Foucault (at right), a practitioner of Philosophy Proper, developed a method of philosophical thinking that he described as a kind of “archaeology,” which launched a historical-cultural cottage industry across disciplines and throughout the humanities of the analytical method of "deconstruction."

It helped reframe entire sections of other disciplines, especially Sociology, Critical Theory and Anthropology. In fact, it was so significant, that it served as a kind of applied philosophy to how we think about culture, art, language and economics. This blog, in addition to using design- and systems-thinking, works in that same vein.

So, if science is the modern name for only one kind of philosophy, then that means they exist at two entirely different, non-parallel, levels. Science is like a species of philosophical thought. This means they do not make for a very rational, equal comparison. They are trying to do different things. They are not competing.

They’re almost even opposites, half defined by each other. One is Meta. The other Physics. Philosophy, after all, started out and is otherwise known as Metaphysics, interpreted as “beyond physics.”

Ah, but here is why there could be more confusion in the etymological genetic history of the two words “science” and “philosophy.” Before science became a sort of enterprise to uncover the secrets of the universe, the word tended to be used in ancient times to refer to ‘knowledge through rational thinking’ ... which kind of sounds like philosophy, doesn’t it? That was before we had advanced technology and industry as tools for investigation of nature.

The word is sometimes still used in that context, but not too much. I believe this is the notion of "science" that Buckminster Fuller intended when he used the phrase “design science.” True, he was a scientist and inventor as well, but he also believed that critical thinking methods could be applied in designing solutions to problems--in other words, to think like a scientist.

Walking Dead or Unmoved Mover?

So, why does Philosophy Proper still seem so dead?

Maybe it's periodically depleted from its bursts of creativity that result in new, philosophy-rich disciplines, where it can be grounded in practice, articulated by theory, and played with in detail (or ad nauseum) if we wish.

But periodic seeming waning energy doesn’t negate its original, generative, purpose of asking questions, framing the frameworks, metaphorically peering over the edge of the universe and celebrating our curious ability to be equally curious about both real and imagined objects of our contemplation.

I believe Art functions in this generative capacity as well.

Philosophy may well be a tool, rather than a topic. And it is a tool that we can adapt and change as needed, not to mention a tool we can use to craft new disciplines of thinking.

Philosophy will never be dead. It is a kind of Promethean progenitor of our thinking, which we organize into disciplines that lend perspective and frameworking—also philosophy—to create even more specific philosophies of practice that guide how we talk about those frameworks and how we create more specific areas of study within disciplines that enable us to form, share, experiment with news ideas.

So, there is not only the practice/discipline of Philosophy Proper in universities, but there are also Philosophies of Practice--guiding theories, schools of thought, method or ethics of practice--embedded with meaning about each area of study. These metacognitive models tend to be philosophy with a small “p”: philosophy of science, philosophy of art, film theory, philosophy of religion, literary theory, critical theory, education philosophy, economic theory, etc.

And, thank god--because it really needs it--philosophy of business has become big business! Thank you Malcolm Gladwell, et al. …

A Kantian Imperative

No, not Kant’s actual imperatives, because I’m not sure I can remember them off hand and this is a no-research piece of original conjecture.

I am talking about the imperative that says that there is a two-way street between progenitor and progeny. They learn from each other and adapt to each other. And when they are in harmony, they craft the future together.

Immanual Kant just happens to be an example.

So, around the time of Kant—when it was more common for scientists and mathematicians to be practicing philosophers and the disciplines were not yet so differentiated—a certain harmony was forming between Enlightenment-era philosophy and science. Optics, especially, was providing new insight (even Goethe, the poet, studied optics) into how our perception of the world was constructed by our brain and senses.

The science of the day informed Kant’s developing synthesis in how we frame our relationship to the physical world. Kant’s philosophy of how we know and the developing gulf between us and “the thing in itself” was setting itself up nicely for a world into which Einstein was eventually born.

Without the Kantian, modern take on our human, cognitive philosophical underpinnings, I’m not sure relativity would have materialized. Because we could no longer take our perception as absolute—once religion was more or less out of the way of our thinking and our penchant for naturalistic discovery of facts and things was properly satisfied as evidenced in Enlightenment-era encyclopedias—our place in the universe and confidence in the universality of our knowledge was unseated.

Einstein’s relativity theory developed in that environment, one in which the meaning of human existence, the security of our knowledge and the very function of philosophy even (think the rather mad writings of Nietszche) were up for grabs. The success of a scientific theory of relativity then only drove that point home to philosophy, leading to philosophical and cultural relativism in the 20th century and a justified questioning of objectivist viewpoints that was to become postmodern and critical theory.

So, science influenced philosophy, which influenced science, which influenced philosophy …

History points to this interdependence—something that adolescent science doesn’t always like to admit.

Etymologically defined, philosophy means “love of wisdom.” Wisdom is the practical application of knowledge, which is why “philosophies of practice” inform the disciplines. The disciplines then produce teachers, researchers, experts and authors on the subjects of their disciplines.

But here’s what’s missing: Not only do the disciplines have an estranged relationship with Philosophy Proper (periodically calling it dead may not help) but there is also a lack of synthesis and broadening back out of this specialized, informed knowledge to a more holistic--even more practical--level of impact in the community and on the streets. It's like there is a break in what should be a more natural cycle both from and through culture at large. With the 21st century accessibility of information and sharing in the creation and practice of knowledge, this is changing. This blog is part of that trend.

But if we really wish for a New Renaissance and Second Enlightenment, it might be wise to at least promote (if not also achieve) better harmony, rather than divisiveness, between the academic disciplines and our various other levels of cognition and engagement.

Philosophy at work, in the community,
activated for the 21st century
Neon Synthesist's Philosophy @ Work series attempts to bring academic thought and critical thinking to the community, especially in those areas of our lives (business, economics, mass culture, community development) that seem most resistant to--and sometimes even actively obstruct or obsfucate--absorbing what we’ve learned as a culture, how we learn and think, the roles of critical thinking, the importance of philosophy, accessibility of knowledge, and the inborn abilities we all have to practice thinking and create ideas—all “meta” levels of human awareness and cognition.

I think we should appreciate, celebrate and maximize the Meta in our nature: it lives along with us, in our cerebral cortex, and yet allows us to transcend it.

Visit the home page and subscribe at:

http://http://www.neonsynthesist.blogspot.com

Education's Zip-Code Inequality

2013-09-27T10:30:00.003-07:00

Not everyone has a zip code. In fact, economic inequality results, at one

extreme, with the super wealthy, who have no zip code because they travel the

world and own multiple homes in multiple places. At the other extreme are

the homeless. And in between are all the rest of us, who have zip codes.

America's economic inequality--greater than it has ever been--is rooted in an

outdated system of educational inequality ... calculated in part by our zip codes.

The One Sentence that Mattered in Condeezza Rice's Speech

I didn't attend her speech, but I appreciated a sentence that was highlighted in the newspaper's article. It brings an important part of the education debate down to one simple fact. Here is the sentence:

In a day when I can look at your ZIP code and tell whether you're going to get a good education, can I honestly say it doesn't matter where you come from, it matters where you're going? No.

While this might be seen as a statement that would get huge nods and "uh huhs" in the audience, I still don't think most people are seeing the whole picture--and therefore possible solution.

If truly taken not just as demagoguery, but something that touches on everyone's tacit knowledge and feelings for inequality in the educational system, it turns into a problem statement that reads:

Zip codes are a determinant of equality and educational success.

When pared down to that simple statement, the simplicity, and the absurdity of the simplicity, really stand out. It's about zip codes. It's not just a verbally catchy way of encapsulating the problem--it is the problem! So let's simplify again:

Zip codes are the problem.

They are the barrier to educational and economic success. So, the next step is, you ask why--without worrying about whom you are going to offend (something politicians and many business leaders are not good at).

OK, so why zip codes?

Is it the pockets of poverty, the capitalism/poverty culture, the lack of beautification or civic participation, the closed schools, the New Jim Crow, the distressed properties, the depopulation, the uneducated parents, the uncaring politicians, or rampant crime and drugs? Now we're getting distracted ...

Although they all play a role, none of them has a direct, causal, relationship to zip codes. Focusing on this broad set of surface problems is what we continue to do. And its why education and the Education Reform movement are failing: we're rearranging the proverbial deck chairs on a sinking ship.

Granted, actual zip codes are arbitrary and abstract. But let's not get fooled by that straw-man distraction either. The real question is, what is Rice pointing to when she mentions zip codes? What is the meaning? Not just her meaning, but any meaning derived from bringing zip codes into discussions about education? If we rephrase what zip codes are (done in math all the time, for example changing decimals into fractions) ... then we could say something like this:

Zip codes relate to the physical area in which people live.

And, getting back to the problem statement, we ask: what does that have to do with education? The "physical area in which people live" and "education" are actually causally connected by one thing: property taxes.

The Circular Logic of Property-Based Education

Property taxes help fund public education. Yet, they vary. They are not the same for everyone. Rather than being a fixed amount, they change according to the worth of where your home is located, which is in part determined by the quality of the schools nearby.

Anyone beginning to detect a circular relationship?

Higher property taxes are assessed and collected in areas where there is better education, which creates more funding, which results in better education. Conversely, lower property taxes are assessed and collected in areas of poverty with poorer quality schools, which creates less funding, which results in poorer quality education.

Two, very different, circular relationships. One is positively reinforcing, the other negatively so. And that is the danger of circular logic, it reinforces the status quo, which in this case is education inequality. So, in neighborhoods consisting largely of people in healthy economic status, schools will be better funded. And in neighborhoods often with a history of suffering and community disinvestment, or more recently overrun by the flying deck chairs of poverty, crime, drugs, home and property vacancies, etc., schools will be underfunded.

Education not only has to be seen from a historic perspective. The post-war racially motivated and government subsidized white flight to the suburbs planted the seeds for decades of a healthy foundation for well-funded education and quality schools in the suburbs.

But also from a mathematical standpoint: the formula for funding schools is simply unfair.

Social change is needed at many levels, but sometimes the most critical pivots, and pitfalls, are in the details. History can't be changed, and flying deck chairs have proved very difficult to control. But we do control the money and the mathematics.

Balancing our Discourse about Education

Gaining a better understanding about education inequality and how we are choosing to talk about it will help us move past our deck-chair strategies to get to the root of inequities in education quality, socio-economic health and quality of life in neighborhoods.

Turning to root causes of problems in education--the inputs--will also help balance the current heavy emphasis on evaluating teacher, student and school outcomes. Time to look at the inputs of funding and resources. Time to compare apples to apples, suburbans to urbans, underprivileged to privileged.

So if every public school calculated, according to a budget formula, a per-pupil cost of education, it would help us understand the underlying mathematics of how we unintentionally, but persistently, budget for inequality.

Our problem-focus has been on what is disadvantaged, not what is advantaged. Why would you want to criticize what is advantaged and working?

Well, it's a privilege issue. Just like W.E.B. DuBois and Peggy McIntosh pointed out that in order to understand the disadvantages of blacks we need to better understand the advantages of whites, the same goes for education.

It's educational privilege. And it has resulted in separate and unequal: it's de facto segregation. Another New Jim Crow that has been codified into policy, practice and property taxes, as well as misleading cultural attitudes and beliefs. Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities (1991!), argues:

Racial- and class-based disparities in American education result from low spending by the federal government.
Across cities in the U.S., Kozol observed students in schools with the lowest and highest spending per student. His observations illustrated the huge disparities between schools.
property taxes are an unjust funding basis for schools because they fail to challenge the status quo of racial-based inequality.
disparities in school quality perpetuate inequality and constitute de facto segregation

So what happened to that argument? Why isn't everyone talking about the New Jim Crow in education?

Educational Privilege and Budgeted Inequality: A Story of Two Corys

Condi Rice said it best:

"Education is the civil rights issue of our time."

Urban Cory receives
$5,800 in public funding
for his education and no
additional support from
the City or community.

Suburban Cory receives
$12,200 in public funding
for his education, plus
additional support from
the Township's foundation

So, just like with race, gender and all other inequalities (many of which we have confessed in words but still not corrected by numbers), we need to stop paying so much attention to the shortcomings of the victims, particularly, as she said "the kids that have the bleakest prospects."

Because, really, the best way to help kids with the "bleakest prospects" is to look not at what they don't have, but to notice what those with the "best prospects" do have. First and foremost, better funding. Because we know, when it comes to the best schools anyway, that healthy funding directly influences having more and better paid teachers, more optimal class size, better equipment and facilities. It's actually kind of simple.

Underneath it all, we seem to know it. But too many professional, highly paid distractors--politicians, plutocrats, pundits and policy makers--are getting in the way.

Just ask, what is their per-pupil funding?

Anyone with any experience at a private school knows that the per-pupil cost is a valuable number to know. They happen to use it more for fundraising purposes to distinguish between tuition fees and the "true cost of educating one child." This gap is their leverage for soliciting donations. It also tends to be a figure that probably approaches the ideal. It might be useful for setting up a concept for the educational equivalent for the "living wage." Call it the "student learning investment." On this analogy, too many students are at schools earning below minimum wage.

Knowing the per-pupil cost or "student learning investment" would help us quantify and visualize the inequality and get used to seeing it in numbers and pictures.

Let's look at mythical Cory (it could be Condi) ... If inner city Cory's per-pupil cost is $5,800 and suburban Cory's per-pupil cost is $12,200, plus extras, and we put it into visual format, it looks something like this:

So, why are we putting up with this?

Our Property, Ourselves

Either you agree that this most basic inequality shouldn't be the case, and then we get to work on agreeing on (or experimenting with) better formulas--or you don't believe in equality. It's that simple. It's math. Instead of quasi mathematics.

How is quasi mathematics involved? First, let's remember the kind of trouble we got into with the highly sophisticated quasi-calculus that resulted in the subprime mortgage crisis:

It was characterized by a rise in subprime mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures, and the resulting decline of securities backed by said mortgages. These mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDO) initially offered attractive rates of return due to the higher interest rates on the mortgages; however, the lower credit quality ultimately caused massive defaults. Several major financial institutions collapsed in September 2008, with significant disruption in the flow of credit to businesses and consumers and the onset of a severe global recession. (Wikipedia)

Yeah, those new valuations that were internally known as MBSs and CDOs were a pretty messy, purposely obfuscating, kind of mathematics that only experts understood--and within which all sorts of dark loopholes and unsteady, ultimately unreliable financial footholds existed.

In language now as common to community development, neuropsychology and cancer research, these financial devices created "bad neighborhoods" that bred a dangerous, unhealthy environment in the financial world.

I think we have to ask if the same thing is happening in education--that mysteriously zip-code dependent public investment. And, using the mortgage crisis and investment analogy, maybe it would help to shine a brighter light on exactly how that investment works. First let's start with that zip code investment ...

I only have questions, such as: is the "messy math" behind real estate, home and property valuation--our property--underhandedly delivering benefits and profits to already advantaged people and institutions while also disinvesting in the educational per-pupil cost that determines how we--ourselves--develop as people?

Is property valuation playing the higher-returns role while uneducated adults are like the credit default? If something vaguely similar is going on, what roles are universities playing with exaggerated promises of returns on education and puffed-up tuition prices? Or are those prices more like the true cost of education, only with less government funding the bill is footed more by individuals? And then there is the stubbornly high interest rate on college loans. Lots of questions.

What I am convinced of is that we are not even identifying the problem correctly. It's not that the books and studies aren't there. They are. It's not that some states are not experimenting. They are. It's just that it hasn't entered the public consciousness. There is a whole lot of deflection and distraction going on. And a less educated public. Surely a dangerous, defaulting mix.

But if its a constantly shifting, subjective (or at least quasi-objective), complicated process that involves changing demographics, inputs, complicated formulas, banks and financial institutions ... it might just be a dark, non-transparent cultural quality that is in fact undermining our American educational foundation. Or it's just a bad tax system that some people are benefitting from.

Where's the Education Tax?

Beyond, what appears to me, as a deeply unequal, property-based-community-valuation-debacle-of-a-system ... where do public education funds come from and how does it work?

Federally, from the general tax base, as it does for states, from income, corporate, business and sales taxes. We have separate line items for medical and social security funds for retirement that come right out of our paychecks and others we pay up on when it comes time to calculate our taxes. A student essay, I found to be simple and to the point, breaks down the federal (small), state and local contributions by percent and also discusses, for example, Florida's attempt to de-link property taxes by having them flow to the state for redistribution to the districts. (Joshua Berry, Property Taxes and Public Education Funding: Inequality in the System, 2011, academia.edu) He also describes how education is not federally mandated and notes that federalizing education is a choice. Some countries federalize the "formula," funds or curriculum, but not local control by teachers and districts.

There is no "education tax." Maybe there should be. Maybe we should label taxes based on what they fund, not on where they comes from. That would encourage us to focus on the ends as equally or more than the means. It might help get us all looking out in the same direction rather than down at our own wallets and property lines. There is no "national defense" tax, yet so much of our taxes support war, defense and national security--without state and local control. Maybe Education should be the same as Defense. Maybe education is our best defense.

Maybe Local Shouldn't Always Matter?

Budgets are moral documents. I can't remember who said this but it's true. They are code, containing and valuing through quantification and projection, what is important.

Educational privilege, it turns out, has been mathematically, inextricably linked with market-rate and census-data property valuations. These are super-local, almost proprietary, budget calculations that create systems of educational privilege and educational inequality.

These budgets, and the traditional formulas by which school budgets are formed and calculated, need to change. They are the root cause of our educational/national security crisis.

We could change the tax code, or the tax flow, or both. Changing the focus of the agenda-pushers and the public will be just as difficult.

In a 1997 Bloomberg Businessweek article, Keith Hammonds ("Rich School, Poor School: Can We Level the Playing Field?") argued that New York ought to have followed the state of Michigan by de-linking local property taxes from education:

The plain solution: States and localities must guarantee a base of satisfactory public education for all--and allow private money for extras. Michigan attempted this with relative success three years ago, delinking local property taxes from schools and instead allocating education funds centrally from higher state sales and cigarette taxes. Poorer districts won a floor on per-student funding. Rich areas kept their higher budgets but can lift spending just 1.5% a year. Is it fair? Not really. But it does responsibly provide a modicum of quality for all while allowing the opportunity for some districts to create something better.

I'm not sure where Michigan and other states are on this now, or what success did or did not occur. It was the attempt to change the status quo that counted, literally, by altering inputs to the budget, increasing the student learning investment.

Clearly the state sales and cigarette taxes helped bring new money to schools at the local level--a base level--while parents in wealthier neighborhoods were still allowed to do what comes natural, that is, bolster funds for your child's school with private money--at a capped level. So, rather than completely criminalizing private monies, it just caps it at the "bakesale" level of special-project funding, while also providing new monetary foundations for "per pupil" basic quality education costs.

Or, instead of de-linking property taxes entirely from education, perhaps just the flow is redirected to the state or federal level. So that, instead of local property taxes going to local schools, they are earmarked as a revenue stream for more equitably distributed education funds, while other taxes could serve as additional revenue streams, if needed, for equitable redistribution. Taxes are already redistribution. We need equitable redistribution.

Or maybe it makes sense to entirely de-link property from education--what do they have to do with each other? It sounds more sensible that property taxes would be used to improve property. Or just call it an education tax. Or, link property tax to income tax, for state distribution.

Whatever we do will probably require a whole new level of commitment to education in dollars at the federal and state levels. Politically, unfortunately, that is not what most politicians have been fighting for, and the reality is we have seen decades upon decades of cuts to education budgets.

It is not impossible ... maybe we've hit the necessary low point to have that kind of epiphany; but not very probable, given the track record.

Perhaps exposing ourselves to the real, unequal, numbers will help get us there.

If the math isn't equal, the thing isn't equal

I'm interested in the mathematics of educational inequality.

We are not tribes. We do have states and we do have cities with localized policies and even, to a certain extent, identities. And we do have our own families, with rules, principles and guidelines as we see fit.

But our communities and our schools are NOT our property, even as we try to cleverly "brand" and "charter" them, and as more and more public schools now have significant private funding and control.

Schools belong to the community, not us. The community is not our brand or our tribe. All communities are American, and should have equal funding and opportunity--not for the schools, but for the students--to develop and grow without regard to property values, market demands and neighborhood statistics.

If we are in this education thing together, as a country, we simply can't do it with unequal education and potentially devious mathematics behind the scenes, serving only some and not all.

Equal dollars in education for all will continue to be an ideal we can't achieve--not until it is disentangled from our zip codes and recoded into a tax code and flow that supports every student's learning investment.

Getting Schooled in White Privilege, Part I

2013-09-19T17:48:00.001-07:00

White Privilege 101

So the image to the left may stretch a little to make it's point(s). Let's just say it is thorough in pointing out many possible negative implications. And, of course, it is luringly sexy, even while it is mostly right.
But let's double check.

I mean, maybe the woman in the photo is Native American? Technically, she could even be Plains Indian, given the headdress?

But even if she is, let's review the chances of that. Because of white European domination and privilege, Native Americans now comprise less than 1% (of the formerly 100% Native American) of the population. Their numbers in the fashion industry are likely worse.

So I doubt it. I’m not an expert on what “white privilege” means or implies about our culture. But I’m interested. And I’m white. So I should probably learn.

There are no dictionary definitions of white privilege. Which tells you something ... especially since the modern usage of the term is actually much older than I was aware.

So far, I've only, mostly, reviewed the Wikipedia entry on “White Privilege.” It's a start. In doing so, I was quickly reminded of what I should have read in high school, in college, or on my own: W.E.B Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America, the book in which he coined the earliest modern usage of the term, calling it “white skinned privilege,” in 1935. That's right, I said 1935.

The class connection to white privilege was clearly seen by Du Bois, who argued that although the white working class might have received wages similar to working blacks, whites were afforded an additional “psychological wage” that didn’t impact their earnings but did raise their status in society, since they were afforded many of the same white privileges as well-to-do whites, such as participating in the court system, visiting public parks, attending better public schools ... the list goes on and on.

Du Bois contended that this invisible privilege divided the labor movement, empowering poor whites with a special status that set them apart, in reality, yet also somewhat falsely, from blacks. So he apparently believed that, while real, the invisible race privilege was a tool and wedge that helped invisibly enforce class privilege. As such, he believed it related to the global phenomenon of Northern European white supremacy through the political and socio-economic method of oppression that was colonialism.

Later, during the Civil Rights movement, Theodore Allen argued that the White Race worldview was a construction. According to the summary of his perspective, he believed:

the “white race” was invented as a ruling class social control formation in the late 17th/early 18th century Anglo-American plantation colonies (principally Virginia and Maryland); that central to this process was the ruling-class plantation bourgeoisie conferring “white race” privileges on European-American working people; that these privileges were not only against the interests of African-Americans, they were also “poison,” “ruinous,” a baited hook, to the class interests of working people; that white supremacy, reinforced by “white skin privilege,” has been the main retardant of working-class consciousness in the US; and that struggle for radical social change should direct principal efforts at challenging white supremacy and “white skin privileges.”

The Invisible Knapsack Metaphor

Then, Peggy McIntosh’s groundbreaking 1987 article, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, argued that whites advocating anti-racism needed to become better aware of the privileges as well as disadvantages associated with their own race, turning the attention away from the state of the victim to that of the perpetrator, so to speak.

Here is an excerpt from McIntosh’s article:

As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage. I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank checks. Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in women's studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, "having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?"

Sampling 50 items in her own invisible knapsack, here are a few she noted:

I can arrange activities so I will never have to experience feelings of rejection owing to my race

I can be sure that race is not the problem if I have low credibility as a leader

I can easily find academic courses and institutions which give attention only to people of my race

I can expect figurative language and imagery in all of the arts to testify to experiences of my race

I can choose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have them more or less match my skin

Or, how about this one?

Tim Wise, author of White Like Me (2008) would say he privileged from Vanderbuilt University.

His work--now speaking and touring aggressively--continues in the same vein, popularizing the concept of white privilege as apologist/evangelist on the importance of recognizing white as a color, as a race, as well as gender and class privileges.

In fact, Tim Wise will speak in Bloomington at Indiana University on October 10. Free and open to the public. Check it out.

Cornell West calls him his 'vanilla brother in the tradition of John Brown.'

I would quote from his book, but it is missing. I lent it last Friday to a gentleman (as well as angry white male) who attended the "Got Privilege?" forum at the KI Eco Center. He too--like all of us--is getting schooled in white privilege. OK, the book was returned. Mr. Anonymous White Privilege (who we all liked by the way), said he thought the author must be gay. This complicated person, it turned out, grew up with a racist father and a mother who had been in Hitler's youth camp. No wonder ... Good thing we had our empathy skills. We hope he comes back and continues to share his experiences.

Much of the initial objections to the concept by whites is a result of taking personal offense, or over-applying the concept at the individual level rather than structural and institutional forces that have affected all of us for better or worse.

Philanthropy Games, Part I: May the Odds be Ever in Your Favor

2013-08-16T12:48:00.000-07:00

How sharper than a serpent's tooth ... to have a thankless child!

William Shakespeare, "King Lear", Act 1 scene 4

What do philanthropy and hunger, bread and death, fashion and fear have in common? Bear with me, I'm going to use the young adult Hunger Games series as metaphor and backdrop to thinking about these questions. If you haven't read it, then do--fast, easy, fun--or see the movie for more of that. Here's a quick rundown to familiarize or refresh for the sake of argument.

Kill Children. Look Stylish.

In Suzanne Collins’ dystopian Hunger Games trilogy, where "the Capitol” is a futuristic city where the nexus of power—the 1% (using Occupy terminology)—reside. They live lavish lifestyles and display fashion design with flourishes that betray a level of boredom. Their main source of entertainment is watching children kill each other in the annual Hunger Games. Maybe it's not that much fun.

The 99% live in “the Districts” of Panem, the post-apocalyptic nation of North America. District citizens are controlled, often starved, by the Capitol and live in fear—for they provide the children for the games. Two child “Tributes” are chosen each year from each district by lottery to fight, child against child, until death. Tributes train with weapons and develop strategy, alliances, and even brand in order to attract Capitol sponsors. They try to outsurvive the others in an enclosed, multi-ecosystem arena electronically controlled and manipulated by the Capitol. Innumerable cameras hidden within the arena broadcast live footage of the Games to the Districts. Everyone watches. One child survives.

The Hunger Games is the Capitol’s main industry and diversion. Every pomp and circumstance is indulged in, even treating the Tributes to lavish Capitol life before they (most likely) die.

Effie Trinket, a morguishly Victorian, over-mauve visage of a sort of woman-on-the-verge wearing Alexander McQueen, gleefully performs District lottery duties, never failing her charitable sign off:

“May the odds be ever in your favor!”

Caesar Flickerman, the inimitable,

ever-Tony, blue-pompadour-ponytail-wearing Hunger Games host is endearing despite a pouffy blue hairstyle with matching eyebrows. His over-white teeth upon airbrushed face practically bite the air as he aggressively enunciates:

“Let the 76^th Annual

Hunger Games Begin!”

Cinna seems the only real human being in the Capitol. He designs Hunger Games fashions for the main character, savior and Tribute extraordinaire ...

Katniss Everdeen, who refused to let her younger sister be taken by lottery to fight to the death.

Of all these messages, it is not surprising which is getting the most play. Fashion and brand. The metaphorical "Capitol" in our culture--the 1% able to afford haute couture--is finding the fashion statement of the movie more interesting than its fascist message.

The lines are already blurring with a pop-culture interest growing around what is being called Capitol Couture (Google it). Real designers are getting involved. With release of the second installment, Catching Fire, due out in December, we are sure to hear more about this eye candy. Whether actually, or ironically-and-still-actually, shallow, this trend could be the New Punk, where clothes and appearance are boldly disaffected even if a weak blend of tea for social protest.

A Slippery Slope: Money, Power, Poverty,

Hunger, Disease, Starvation, Genocide

Just like in the book, things like poverty and hunger are sometimes used as a political tools to control parts of the population. Let's look at hunger.

Real dictators have used food and hunger as a means to control power, like Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, known to deny access to food for those in opposition parties. According to a 2002 Christian Science Monitor article, not only was the food restricted to only Mugabe supporters, but those in his party were buying up the food and selling it in the black market for profit. Such food games have been going on for centuries.

Citing an article examining food as a political tool in Tanzania, a student-generated blog, part of the Enough Project, discussed how hunger from food can become more than a means of political control ...

Through these social hierarchies, the rich and powerful basically have control over the food supply of poorer population, setting up a situation in which the poor must listen to the rich, or else have their health and access to basic needs jeopardized. This in effect, sets up a situation in which it would not be difficult for the powerful to ration food supply for political gains, creating a situation of genocide, in which a specific group is targeted and systematically destroyed.

Anti-hunger philanthropic efforts alleviate hunger, but are unable to address root causes due to their immediate mission of saving lives and the dangers of meddling in, especially foreign, politics.

Hunger is Not a Game

The internationally renowned anti-poverty nonprofit Oxfam tries to tackle issues of poverty from all sides, including hunger. Partnering with the Harry Potter Alliance's Imagine Better Project , they are promoting a new anti-hunger campaign with the slogan Hunger is Not a Game, using a key symbol from the book—the mockingjay—as a logo for their effort, and citing the storyline on their website:

In the world of the Hunger Games series, everything is controlled by the Capitol, which uses power and money to punish the districts. The citizens of the Capitol live in luxury at the expenseof the districts, forcing others to live in poverty so that they can enjoy their own wealth ... citizens of District 12 are forced to break the law to keep from starving, to maintain an informal and illegal market so that they can eat.
Sound familiar? It should. Our world rests on an imbalanced system. In every country there are people who are starving because of corrupt politicians, injust laws and violent conflict. The most basic needs of millions of people are going unmet ...

In honor of Suzanne Collins’masterful series, we’ll be fighting the injustice of the Capitol and hunger in our own districts. If we want to shut down the Hunger Games once and for all, we need to stop the Capitol from treating hunger like a game by attacking the systematic injustices used to keep the rich richer and the poor hungrier.

You get the feeling they are not just talking about Zimbabwe or Tanzania anymore.

Myths and Fairytales of the Games We Play

The hunger games we play get more insidious:

There's Monsanto--or wait, is that Anansi the folk trickster?--playing a domination game with food, hoarding seeds and agricultural products and processes.

The fast food industry appears to game the system of poverty to make profit off of food that has no nutrition. It's like the story of Hansel and Gretel eating the candy off the house of the witch!

We declare a War on Poverty but don't enforce the Fair Housing Act for half a century. That little pig obviously got the straw house ...

We play other games too, like war--with our children--and call it 'theatre.'

So if we are also playing Charity Games, addressing and rearranging the end results, focusing on immediate, symptomatic needs rather than root causes, Why?

Because that is their history. That is their context. That is their design: the system within which they have been working.

Unfortunately, this is self-defeating, Sisyphean behavior, more often than not perpetuating inequalities and sufferings rather than solving them.

Solving World Hunger

Perhaps that’s why we use the phrase “solving world hunger” ironically when describing any impossible task ... because not only has it so far proved impossible (in the case of hunger, convincing minds politically is more difficult than feeding mouths) ... but the tool simply wasn’t designed to alter the root cause.

The circular pattern of behavior--feeding the machine that feeds the problem--presents a Catch-22, a cognitive dissonance.

That's something super-wealthy investor Warren Buffet’s son, Peter, expressed in a recent New York Times article, he boldly titled The Charitable Industrial Complex

(July 26, 2013):

Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left.

More on his thoughts in Part II of the Philanthropy Games ...

Philanthropy Games, Part II: History and Truth Bombs
Philanthropy Games, Part III: Crimes of Capital and Conscience
Philanthropy Games, Part IV: Special Race Edition

The Fallacy of One Vision

2013-08-05T13:02:00.001-07:00

Movie still, 2001 Space Odyssey

The Fallacy of One Vision

“All hail Plankton.” Evil Plankton has succeeded, temporarily, to control the multifarious sea creatures of Bikini Bottom. Manipulated and controlled by Evil Plankton's wishes, they zombie-walk, with electronically controlled upside-down Chum Buckets on their heads. Anyone familiar with this episode of Sponge Bob may find themselves at times using the Chum Bucket metaphor. At least I do. Because sometimes that’s how top-down, corporate-driven processes feel, and is unfortunately too often what happens in city planning and even more local community development efforts.

Blinded by Commerce

In Indianapolis, we’ve been looking for a city brand. We are in the midst of creating a strategic plan with “key deliverables.” We participate in cutting edge, but possibly limited, ideas coming out of organizations like the Chicago-based CEOs for Cities, including conversations around “the city as start up,” and ArtPlace America, offering new community development tools by appealing to the arts for creativity and as a stand-in for "culture," as in the phrase "arts and culture."

I subscribe to news from CEOs for Cities because there is some good thinking and problem-solving to be found. But, no one could deny their bias toward a corporate view. It's in the name.

The lure of the simple, controllable, commercially viable and potentially lucrative ... not unimportant, but when these aspects rule to the exclusion of all else, a whole huge rich, resourceful tapestry of everyday citizens gets lost in the process.

Mechanized Cities

This isn’t to say that strategies such as branding wouldn’t work—they would and they do. Amateur Sports Capital as example. A single dream, vision, brand. A huge endeavor requiring investments of time and money. And it paid off. But just because it works, doesn't mean it's not outdated. It may not be the most sustainable and forward-thinking approach.

When "one vision" creates a false dichotomy where one must choose and focus in order to be reasonable, effective and successful, the Vision Straw Man is born and says that in order to succeed, only one can be chosen.

Many of us don’t want to live in a homogenized vision of what reality should be. Maybe we don't think that our city should only cultivate sports and bio-science.

We may want multiple realities and a city with tendrils to connect, listen, respond: to discover what original ideas, frameworks, projects and perspectives exist in all sorts of urban crevices, corners, and yes, coffee shops.

Beyond Diversity

We need and talk about desiring diversity of composition, representation and power. Though unfulfilled that remains, diversity is only necessary, not sufficient.

Pluralism of perspective (and more equal opportunity and investment in it) enriches us with a more organic—human—marketplace of ideas, as well as complexity of our urban ecosystem. Artists, scientists, thinkers, entrepreneurs and so many engaged, fascinating citizens among us may want more continuous experimentation. And failure. Livability, yes. But also vitality.

So, one vision—though clean, neat and packagable—isn’t going to cover it. Or be inclusive. Or nurture authentic innovation, which often comes out of tolerance for ambiguity, messy creativity and in science, invisible convergences that form from competing, ad-hoc, multiple theories and realities.

The recently formed Velocity initiative, to create a strategic plan for downtown Indianapolis, lists “a vision” of Indianapolis as the first “key deliverable.” And, because we are all so used to viewing reality through the corporate lens, citizens barely play a role (aside from a predetermined survey with a prefabricated menu that will serve as a rubber stamp for community inclusion). The effort is a co-creation between established organizations within the city.

Another recent community planning initiative put the issue into even greater relief when it promoted “Six neighborhoods, one vision.” Woah. That begged the question even worse. How could there really possibly be one vision for an area that comprised six neighborhoods?

Is “one vision” just another way of saying you can’t have your way—that there will be only one way, and “we” will decide?

The Problem with 'Shared Vision'

Somewhere along the line, “vision” became a misnomer for “value.”

Commonly, visions are ironically couched within "vision statements." Guess what? Vision statements are not visual, they are verbal. Verbal statements consist of abstract human language.

Verbal statements (which are often pretty vacuous in their generality about things people already widely agree on, like 'our vision is a safe community'), can work to create agreement on core values. So, in terms of the Velocity effort, elements of "livability" are like infrastructure, the necessary, but not sufficient, creators of place.

Visions, which are visual, are not only more holistic and organic, being spatial, whole-systems representations, but they are also concrete, specific and often intuitive in their detail. We need lots of these kinds of visions, not just one. For uniqueness, you need visions, and human beings.

So leave the sufficient, unique human vitality stuff more up to the citizens. It's the values and ecosystem of opportunity that need to be cultivated by the city, community planners, organizations and corporations. Let the contents of vision(s) arise, rather than be imposed.

Seeking, encouraging, cultivating and investing in the natural lead of others is a quality of good leadership. This is the city as advocate and coach--not patriarch. Nor even "the City as Startup" (a la CEOs for Cities), in other words sole proprietor.

The more visions and perspectives that are sought and accommodated, the less homogeneity. The more heterogeneity and pluralism, the less hegemony.

Or, we could just stay on course, relying on Hal to steer the ship ; )

The Chaos and Order of Violence

2013-08-04T15:13:00.002-07:00

Modern Ubran Guernica?

The Chaos and Order of Violence

"Our non-systemic ways of thinking consistently lead us to focus on low-leverage changes. Because we don't see the structures underlying our actions, we focus on symptoms where the stress is greatest. We repair or ameliorate the symptoms. But such efforts only make matters better in the short run, at best, and often worse in the long run."

-- Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline --

Violence in the Streets
Violence in schools. Violence in the movies. Violence at the movies. Drug violence. Racist violence. So-called 'black-on-black' violence. Gun violence. Youth violence. Police violence. Violence in America. Violence is everywhere. Youth are in the crossfire, sometimes doing the shooting. Several articles in the Indianapolis Star have focused on violence and public safety in our city:

INDIANAPOLIS — A teenager is shot dead on the Fourth of July amid a heavy police presence in downtown Indianapolis. A few days later, another teen is killed just hours after the city announces a plan to put additional police on the street. The next morning, a man clutching an infant is gunned down.

This recent string of deadly shootings — five over six days that spilled into last week — is piled on top of another grim statistic: 16 people were victims of homicide in June, the deadliest month in an especially deadly year.

From 2009 to 2011, Indianapolis touted homicide numbers that remained under 100. Now, after last year’s climbed back over 100, the city is suddenly on pace for about 150.

Such statistics have fueled intense community discussion and calls for decisive action. They also raise difficult questions: What is causing the increase? What can be done about it?

Putting aside the question of increase or decrease of instances of violence--I believe the general trend in recent years has actually been downward, at least for violent assaults--it's never not going to be a hot topic. It remains a constant urban reality that will always cause soul-searching, at least we hope. Inquiries into human behavior and cultural conditions will always result from highly visible and arguably preventable acts of violence felt throughout the community.

Also, in Indianapolis (and probably elsewhere) the city's public safety budget has been significantly cut.

City representatives don't appear to be concerned with public safety. Instead of identifying problems and focusing on solutions, the Mayor and City-County Council have been busy turning public safety funds (in high crime hot spots, mind you) over to TIF set-asides; appropriating millions to update Lucas Stadium suites (two of them for $1 million each); making plans to build a cricket stadium; and practically accusing panhandlers of stealing $6 million a year from City revenues. Oh, and creating a top-down City strategic plan that appears to unfairly juxtapose "reducing homelessness and panhandling," while they've painted the latter as an economic drag, a nuisance and fraud.

Citizens are concerned that there is not enough attention, care or leadership on public safety.

Although the run of opinion pieces and stories in the newspaper seems to occur yearly, validly connected to crime events, it still feels somehow ritual, just like the way we tally homelessness in January.

But this year something seems different when even Public Safety Director Troy Riggs points to "a breakdown in social structure."

Violence on our Minds

We know that violence is something to be avoided. Increasingly that seems difficult to do. Especially when a 17-year-old walking home in the rain with nothing but Skittles in his pocket is shot dead.

What is Violence? According to the APA:

Violence is an extreme form of aggression, such as assault, rape or murder. Violence has many causes, including frustration, exposure to violent media, violence in the home or neighborhood and a tendency to see other people's actions as hostile even when they're not. Certain situations also increase the risk of aggression, such as drinking, insults and other provocations and environmental factors like heat and overcrowding.

I wonder if the jury consulted the APA's definition of violence in the George Zimmerman case, because clearly this definition points more to the suspicion and provocation acted out by Zimmerman, which lead to deadly and painful consequences: a healthy teenager left lifeless. According to this definition, one came to the scene prepared for violence. He was on watch. He was vigilant. He was a vigilante.

The World Health Organization (WHO) definition of violence includes non-physical acts, such as neglect and intimidation, and conditions, for example social and economic, that . WHO's Violence Prevention Alliance states that violence is:

the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation.

Wikipedia section on non-physical violence, based on WHO's 2002 World Report on Violence and Health, expands on this:

Violence includes those acts that result from a power relationship, including threats and intimidation, neglect or acts of omission, in addition to more obvious violent acts. Violence has a broad range of outcomes – including psychological harm, deprivation and maldevelopment. Violence that does not necessarily result in injury or death, but nonetheless poses a substantial burden on individuals, families, communities and health care systems worldwide.

Many forms of violence against women, children and the elderly, for instance, can result in physical, psychological and social problems that do not necessarily lead to injury, disability or death. These consequences can be immediate, as well as latent, and can last for years after the initial abuse. Defining outcomes solely in terms of injury or death thus limits the understanding of the full impact of violence.

Going a step further, a health journalist, Loolwa Khazzoom, states boldly: Violence is Not a Physical Act. It is Energy. It is Intention.

Elaborating further, she states:

Violence is the difference between falling down the stairs and being pushed down the stairs. Violence is the difference between having sex and being raped. Violence is the difference between getting an injection of medicine and being stabbed with a needle.

Violence itself is not physical, though the delivery system very well may be. Violence is an energy.

... In this society, we are conditioned to be so obtuse that we only recognize violence when it already is in the extreme, super-advanced stage – like someone being killed. But a whole lot of violence leads up to murder. It just may not be apparent in ... realms of our perception.

Violence in our Minds

So, violence is also in our minds. Hidden safely in the privacy of our thoughts and the not-always-decipherable signs of our intentions.

Invisible but no less dangerous shadows of dark hooded figures and gleams of crazy-assed crackers yet linger and loiter about in shameful, preconscious or neglected corners.

We can be known racists on the inside, carefully presenting a more correct exterior.

We can be unknown racists to ourselves, not quite aware of how previously visible, "accepted" racist beliefs and acts of the past (KKK, burning crosses, dead bodies swaying) and other former cultural norms succeeded into new--less visible and institutionalized--codes of behavior, as well as social and economic (white) power and policies.

We can be ignorant or ill-equipped with the kind of critical reasoning to understand the above.

And we can purposefully neglect what we know and how to think, or pretend that reasonable thinking and eloquent ideas are too sophisticated and therefore foolish, in order to preserve our status in the community, with a corporation or for a political agenda.

The Hidden Violence of Order

So, the difference between racist and racism was several decades, the Civil Rights era and "political correctness" ... whereby the disadvantages that previously caused terror and death were replaced by disadvantages that decreased opportunities, shut doors and created social and economic oppression through policies and practices. Less obvious, more insidious and with authority, but without apparent agent, as written into objective looking official handbooks and unofficial, universally adopted cultural norms.

One of the cultural trends that also occurred during this era was specialization--the increasing siloization of cultural categories that decreased communication and integration of thinking across disciplines, along with a critical tool for understanding root problems: systems thinking.

Systems thinking, according to Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, is the discipline that organizes, facilitates and integrates all the other disciplines of being an effective, learning organization.

Though originally published in 1990, the message seems to have gotten little real traction with cultural norms and organizational practices. What is stopping organizations from becoming learning organizations?

The Application of Business Philosophy
to the Problem of Violence
Do we really need a business book to teach us about violence? Apparently so.

According to Senge, there are reinforcing (symptomatic) loops of behavior and balancing (causal or root) loops. We tend to treat violence at the symptomic level. More police (or not!), stricter sentences, neighborhood watch alerts, etc. This is not only ineffective in the long term, but may exacerbate the problem and make it persist. Whereas leveraging change at the root level may disrupt the status quo. According to Senge:

"Weakening the symptomatic response requires willingness to tell the truth about palliatives and "looking good" solutions."

Acknowledging that "social breakdown" is the root cause of recent violence and that things like hunger and poverty critically linked to events of violence would make it seem that Public Safety Director Troy Riggs is a systems thinker:

Riggs is quick to say IMPD needs to improve in some key areas but that he doesn’t believe the department can “arrest its way” out of the problem, and that it will require a community solution, especially to confront what officers and community leaders see in changing attitudes among teens.

When we use systems thinking--a critical tool in the innovation process--we deconstruct the codes that have become fabric to our policies and programmed into our minds.

Creating peace in our minds requires a juxtaposition of empathy and rationality that enables us to discover order within the disorder and disfunction of rules, reasons and the relationships among things.

Violence on the streets and in our neighborhoods, if treated symptomatically, will and has caused increased incarceration and injustice that many are beginning to label:

"the New Jim Crow."

Mike Brown is Dead, Jim Crow Isn't

2013-08-04T15:10:00.000-07:00

Not allowed to walk in freedom?
We may be at a crossroads in our thinking about Civil Rights. The recent acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of Trayvon Martin has galvanized talk about a "new" Jim Crow, for if Jim Crow were truly over, why would a black teenager get shot for walking home from the store to get Skitttles? Or for knocking on someone's front door? Or for walking in the street?

Rather than awaiting passage of some apportioned time before performing post-mortem analysis, there is an opportunity in front of us--now--to actively embrace a more holistic view of our present predicaments in social and economic justice.

When we perpetuate an unhealthy separation between past and future, between what we say and what we do, a kind of cognitive violence impedes a more fundamental transformation in our thinking about the interdependence of economic and social advantages, the framing power of language, and methods of social control.

The Old Jim Crow

On the one hand, freedom for enslaved African Americans began after the Emancipation Proclamation, at the end of the Civil War. But Jim Crow, the institution of legalized segregation and discrimination toward Blacks, ensued and lasted 100 years.

Two Faces of Old Jim Crow

It is unfortunate but true that immediately following the Emancipation Proclamation, 'Black Codes,' similar to if not adopted from the French Colonials in Louisiana, were put in place in many, primarily Southern, states, and were codified into laws.

Known as 'separate but equal,' (in name only; in fact, unequal) such Jim Crow laws legalized systematic segregation of schools and other public services and social structures. These patterns were also practiced, but not codified by law, in the North.

PBS's "Rise and Fall of Jim Crow" outlined both an era of legalized Jim Crow laws as well as other common, but non-legalized practices, including acts of terror.

When Brown v. the Board of Education (1954) and the Civil Rights Act (1964) de-legalized Jim Crow laws and promoted equal protection under law, the formerly legal separate-but-equal practices were discontinued. But some of the practices not codified by law remained, from acts of terror, especially in the wake of signing the Act, to high-impact discriminatory practices in housing.

Many of the latter discriminatory but less visible practices remained. And still newer discriminatory systems and behaviors continued to emerge and perpetuate inequalities, as no laws yet prevented their occurrence. Some unfair practices not entirely "seen" were either purposely carried out "behind the scenes" or unconsciously "unseen" due to a cultural blindness.

The New Jim Crow

So, because we know, for sure, that the Old Jim Crow--in law and in word--is dead, it practically becomes a matter of cognitive dissonance to talk about a 'New Jim Crow,' unless you acknowledge the historical facts of both visible and invisible discrimination, conscious and unconscious deeds and intentions, and especially, the difference between de jure (by law) discrimination and de facto (in practice, or in reality) discrimination. Wikipedia does this nicely:

De jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States. Northern segregation was generally de facto, with patterns of segregation in housing enforced by covenants, bank lending practices, and job discrimination, including discriminatory union practices for decades.

Studies in recent decades have revealed how severe conditions of economic disinvestment--in schools, the poor, black and minority communities, housing practices, education and job opportunities. Unfair practices have continued. The laws have not kept up. Jim Crow, many contend, is alive and well, making history as we speak. And it is in the news again linked to images of Trayvon Martin.

Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow, published in 2010, uses what appears to be historical analogy to argue that the current prison system, along with poor schools, poverty and over-criminalization through the War on Drugs, exerts Jim-Crow-like social control.

Actually, if calibrated to white America's dualistic tension between word/practice outlined above, you could easily argue that it is, in fact, the Old, de facto, Jim Crow with a new set of clothes: state-distributed orange jumpers and handcuffs, instead of a noose.

A brief summary of her book and intent from Wikipedia:

According to Alexander, forms of "racial control" in the United States evolve as required by changing political circumstances and contemporary standards, with the policies of the current criminal justice system replacing Jim Crow laws, which in turn had replaced slavery.

Alexander aims to mobilize the civil rights community to move the incarceration issue to the forefront of its agenda and to provide factual information, data, arguments and a point of reference for those interested in pursuing the issue. Her broader goal is the revamping of the prevailing mentality regarding human rights, equality and equal opportunities in America, to prevent future cyclical recurrence of what she sees as "racial control under changing disguise."

Behind the Word: the Essence of 'Jim Crow'

Disguise--even beyond the infamous white hoods--has been part of the pattern.

The term "Jim Crow" was a fabrication: a name, a word, an image, a satire, a slur, a derogatory term for blacks in Post-Civil War's "Reconstruction" Era. It was apparently first used in a minstrel song called "Jump Jim Crow.".

So it is unfortunate that this original derogatory term was further--and still--used as shorthand to describe the systematic social, political and economic segregation and discrimination of blacks by whites during this time. We seem to need is an equally derogatory poster child for the perpetrator ... Or are we still trying to disguise our behavior with black codes?

Wait, shouldn't that be easy? The true essence, the real face, of Jim Crow is KKK--hate, fear mongering, white supremacy and anti-Semitism. Instead, we refer to an era of American Terror with a quaint-sounding slur, "Jim Crow."

Or how about White Power? Or does that sound too much like the current White Privilege?

In fact, if we look at a description of KKK's main platform, as outlined in a 2007 Christian Science Monitor article, the overlap with the current Republican platform is revealing:

Recent KKK membership campaigns have been based on issues such as people's anxieties about illegal immigration, urban crime, civil unions and same-sex marriage.

De Jure et De Facto

Apparently, the Word was not God. In the realm of human culture, it still isn't. Let's dig up an old schism in philosophy:

nominalism vs. realism

It goes back to the late Middle Ages (a theme in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose). In general, without getting into too much philosophical jargon, Nominalists believed that words were tools, arbitrarily assigned to things, and did not necessarily have an intimate connection with reality. Realists, on the other hand, (similar to the modern term Idealists) took after Plato in the belief in Universal truths and Essences, and that words derived from an important relationship between and among humans and things.

As a people, apparently we are much more nominalists than realists, focused on stated principle more than practice, on intentions more than outcomes, on punishing those that get caught more than preventing punishable actions in the first place, on reacting with principle rather than proactively practicing it.

When you look at history more closely, and examine not just what people say, but what they do, it becomes obvious that we have this ongoing dualism between words and essence, law and reality, representation and practice.

Prior to the troops entering WWII, Eleanor Roosevelt warned that if we could not resolve this difference, we would suffer, die, repeat history and continue to suffer and die:

"Sometimes when I look at the Lincoln statue and read the things which he said, I think that we fought a bitter war which brought suffering to many people and yet achieved no answer to the question—are the colored people free in fact or only in word?" (New Threshold, August 1943)

This crucial difference was a central point, celebrated, in Spielberg's Lincoln. Summarized by a 2012 review in The Nation, the turning point is when Thaddeus Stevens compromises his "radical" position that the races are equal and straddle the uncomfortable duality of the American psyche:

"Before his highly anticipated speech supporting the Thirteenth Amendment, fellow Republicans implore Stevens to drop all references to “equality of the races” in favor of the more conservative and popular formulation “equality before the law.” Whereas the former scandalously implied broader social consequences, the more narrow formulation would have only codified egalitarianism, allowing racists to preserve de facto segregation, as they ably did for another century and more."

Not only is there then a schism between word/reality, but laws are essentially reactive and passive. Practices, on the other hand, actively create our reality. Equality before the Law is not the same nor nearly as comprehensive as Equality in Essence.

So, beginning in 1964, Jim Crow laws were abolished. Jim Crow practices were not.

Unchallenged for a century, due to the "separate but equal" stand-in, this discrepancy, even after the Civil Rights Act, continued to go unnoticed. At least by those in power or in advantaged positions.

Janus-Faced Jim

Taking inspiration from Janus, the Greek mythological two-faced figure seen on ancient coins, and a little psychology--don't we need it?--let's imagine Old Jim Crow and New Jim Crow connected but looking in opposite directions.

Janus, mythological god

of beginnings, portals,

transformation, past and future

In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus is the god of beginnings and transitions, thence also of gates, doors, passages, endings and time. He is usually depicted as having two faces, since he looks to the future and to the past. The Romans named the month of January in his honor. Janus presided over the beginning and ending of conflict, and hence war and peace. The doors of his temple were open in time of war, and closed to mark the peace. As a god of transitions, he had functions pertaining to birth and to journeys and exchange, and in his association with Portunus, a similar harbor and gateway god, he was concerned with travelling, trading and shipping.

Or, if we take the two Janus faces to be the set of widely recognized de jure laws that legitimized white advantage and black disadvantage through segregation on the one side and the less widely referenced de facto practices of inequality on the other--then we start to get a more complete picture of the American psyche.

We see the struggle for racial equality and social justice has been a two-faced struggle between law and practice; between what we say and what we do; between stature and essence. Somewhere in the middle, could there be a portal between past and future promising a transformation, a new beginning, resolving the paradox of this dualism that vexes us?

A Jungian view might see the one side as the conscious, exterior, of our acknowledged history and the other as the unconscious, interior, of how we make history in the present. Let's face it, Americans, minus a brief period of romantic transcendentalism in the 19th century, have never been good at the unconscious.

What we can't acknowledge, we marginalize.

We like to bash it, defame it, compare it to excrement, call it Anti-American ... don't we Mitch Daniels? That's what he was trying to do, de facto, to Zinn's archive of marginalized racial and social history.

A Vague Comment about Wandering Otherness, Vagrants, and Other Vagaries

Most individuals who form a subset of a minority group (minority in terms of cultural dominance) have experienced being treated as "other" rather than "same" in situations--that is part of what maintains dominance in groups.

Certainly that is how Trayvon Martin appeared that night in February to George Zimmerman, who, it turns out, was primed with suspicions and multiple calls to the police. As an "other," Trayvon was more likely to be perceived as suspicious. Since, according to police records, prior to that day Zimmerman was primed and actively suspicious, psychologists might argue that some level of projection was happening for Zimmerman when he spotted, stalked and confronted a dark, hooded figure--a convenient mythological or Jungian "shadow" archetype to his psychological state.

Jung's "shadow" theory is complex, but interesting in its succession from shadow appearance to shadow encounter, shadow merger and shadow assimilation. Nevertheless, a less "vague" (mythology is more nebulous) phenomenon that most likely was at play is what is called "implicit bias," of which fairly extensive studies have been done.

Implicit bias is akin to unconscious profiling (http://www.biasproject.org/) functions at a level of cultural associations we have (what we do) even though we may fiercely advocate for more neutral associations (what we say). Malcolm Gladwell has a section on this (a small test) in his book Blink. So, even though Jung pointed out the significance of the work of the unconscious on the level of cultural myth or folklore, cognitive studies are now proving that these unclaimed biases for more specific stereotypes exist and can be powerful factors in our decision making.

And, there is another factor, that certain old European patterns of behavior may survive in the most subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, ways ...

For instance, ancient European or Colonial 'black codes' used for slavery and free persons most likely included vagrancy laws--and yes, the word vague is related to vagrancy ... So, do you think a black person walking at night with a dark hood might look vague, and maybe even harken this old sense of vagrancy? Possibly so. During Jim Crow, students sitting outside a store protesting peacefully to be allowed in were arrested for "loitering."

The poor and homeless were also arrested on charges of vagrancy. Wait, that sounds familiar. The Panhandling ordinance Ballard is trying to pass! This doesn't necessarily say anything except indicate that certain practices die hard and continue in unsuspected ways.

In our thinking, too, whole-systems approaches can be accused of being too vague, and therefore suspicious--or maybe it represents thinking that wanders too far, steps out of bounds or loiters uncomfortably on painful or difficult topics, or works outside the realm of proven science.

It is worth remembering that science, or natural philosophy, is only one kind of thinking.

Unconscious Practices of Ongoing Discrimination

And Michelle Alexander is right, the picture of what we're doing isn't looking good, especially in light of past efforts to subjugate and control Black America. Here's what's looking especially bad:

The over-enforcement and over-incarceration of drug crimes disproportionately and alarmingly affects young Black men, with many never regaining their voting rights. Even defining the terms and framing the War on Drugs ignores lessons learned from the Prohibition

The over-inflated prison industry appears to be profiteering off of discrimination. Some are even talking about a 'School to Prison Pipeline." During the Civil Rights Era, Martin Luther King Jr.'s main strategy was to overcrowd the jails. One could argue that the jails got bigger in response.

Recent efforts of Southern States to curb voting rights and accessibility--this harkens directly to past actions by the KKK!

Laws like 'Stand your Ground' encourage vigilantism--that's what KKK members were. And, like in Trayvon's case, black persons died as a result.

Anti-immigration and anti-education stances were (are) also typical of KKK

Of these, voting rights suppression efforts, most comparable to KKK history, particularly in Southern States, are the least unconscious of these practices, therefore the most unconscionable.

And, at a bureaucratically invisible, but no less dramatic, level:

Critical legislation of the War on Poverty, the Fair Housing Act, has--over all these decades-- lacked enforcement. According to a recent Propublica article, which dissected the records and found no enforcement, this continued even up to within the last few years ...

By this time, Shaun Donovan, appointed HUD Secretary under Obama, had to defend the Fair Housing Act as something that didn't infringe on people's rights!

"The folks fighting segregation aren't social engineering. Segregation was created by social engineering," Donovan said in speeches across the country. "Far more often than not, segregation, isolation and poverty don't occur in spite of government. They happen because of government—by government dollars and government decisions made with government authority."

If we want to use the potential portal that our Janus-faced consciousness presents--and bring what we say and what we do into closer alignment--we have to care about analyzing what is happening now and bring it into the same field of vision with what happened in the past.

And--sorry Mitch Daniels--but I mean what really happened in the past.

Banning books that teach the lessons we need to know in order to reconcile the two faces of Jim Crow, two faces of history, is a step backward.

Mitch Daniels, while governor, and other key players in the "education reform" movement recently tried to censor Howard Zinn's works from curriculum. Daniels is now President of Purdue University. (to read more on this and the Howard Zinn Read-in at Purdue, see my blog "Anti-Intellectualism in the Academy"

The teaching of history is not business and should not be played with as if it were. It is our future. It is what we decide the history and future to be.

Response to #Ferguson
Monument Circle, today from 5-7 p.m. Here is the event link. Please join and share:

https://www.facebook.com/events/293616864162372/?ref_dashboard_filter=upcoming

This is happening all over the country. You won't be alone. Don't be silent. This blog started with Trayvon Martin and repeated with Mike Brown. It won't be the last time it cries out. It is time to empathize and act and let our voices be heard--over and over and over again.

"Our lives begin to end

the day we become silent

about things that matter."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.