Scott London

Blog: The Trouble with Ideas

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:08:12 -0800

Today I read a remarkable passage from Nigerian novelist Ben Okri. It touches on the fate of great ideas and how the world tends to marginalize “true believers” and drive them down the path of disillusionment and defeat. The quote is from Okri’s book In Arcadia:

If you believe in something your very belief renders you unqualified to do it. Your earnestness will come across. Your passion will show. Your enthusiasm will make everyone nervous. And your naïveté will irritate. Which means that you will become suspect. Which means you will be prone to disillusionment. Which means that you will not be able to sustain your belief in the face of all the piranha fish which nibble away at your idea and your faith, till only the skeleton of your dream remains. Which means that you have to become a fanatic, a fool, a joke, an embarrassment. The world — which is to say the powers that be — would listen to your ardent ideas with a stiff smile on its face, then put up impossible obstacles, watch you finally give up your cherished idea, having mangled it beyond recognition, and after you slope away in profound discouragement it will take up your idea, dust it down, give it a new spin, and hand it over to someone who doesn’t believe in it at all.

Photos: Common Ground Magazine

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:11:50 -0700

About a dozen of my photos from Burning Man 2009 appear in the October issue of Common Ground magazine. It’s a Bay Area-only publication, but you can view the full issue online at www.commongroundmag.com. My images begin on page 18.

Blog: Ostrom’s Prize in Economics

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:26:10 -0700

I was delighted by the news that this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics went to Elinor Ostrom (along with Oliver Williamson). She’s a maverick, someone who has challenged conventional wisdom in her field for some time. By recognizing her work in understanding resource management systems, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is acknowledging the need for new models and new ways of thinking in economics. It was a bold choice, and I think a very good one.

The subject of her research has long been considered peripheral to the main business of economics. But today, as we face a global recession and a very serious environmental crisis, her work has special resonance. She’s shown that the three dominant economic models used for dealing with collective resource management — the tragedy of the commons, the prisoners’s dilemma, and the logic of collective action — are all inadequate. They are not necessarily wrong, but the conditions under which they hold are very specific. Her research suggests that there are other viable systems that work. For example, she has looked at Swiss grazing pastures, Japanese forests, and irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines based on sound principles of collective decision-making that are both democratic and empowering to ordinary people.

Ostrom was the first woman to win the economics prize, which is significant. And with the exception of the prize to Amartya Sen (for his work on welfare economics) it’s one of the few awards that have recognized alternatives to the traditional neoclassical economics. I’m confident that her ideas will help us broaden our thinking to make resource management more democratic, more participatory, more community-based, and above all more responsive to everyday citizens.

My review of Elinor Ostrom’s book Governing the Commons

Blog: More on the Peace Prize

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:48:41 -0700

It’s been a big week, juggling a thousand projects and, in the midst of it all, getting swept up in the media whirlwind surrounding the announcement of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama. Like many people I was stunned by the news. I certainly agree with the Norwegian Nobel Committee that no one has done more “to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” as the citation put it, and that thanks to President Obama the United States is now playing a more constructive role on a wide range of global fronts, from democracy and human rights to climate change and the reduction of nuclear weapons.

But prizes awarded to statesmen always present certain challenges. There have about about three dozen such prizes, by my count. The most significant problem is that political leaders who win the prize are being awarded for work they were appointed or elected to do. If the fundamental task of a political leader is to keep the peace, as it were, then they hardly deserve a prize for that.

In his will, Alfred Nobel stipulated that the prize should go to individuals who have won some victory for peace during the preceding year. But in the case of statesmen this rules out a longer term perspective, to say nothing of a deeper analysis of documents and other evidence about the underlying motives behind their efforts to solve conflicts and promote peace.

Few of the prizes awarded to statesmen have stood the test of time, in my view. Even the two awards to sitting US presidents (Roosevelt in 1906 and Wilson in 1919) were controversial. Roosevelt was hardly a man of peace, as we know, though he did manage to help bring the Russo-Japanese war to an end. And Wilson’s great achievement, the League of Nations, failed to accomplish what it was supposed to.

That said, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has taken an increasingly broad view of peace in the 21st century, defining it not in the narrow terms Nobel laid out in his will, but as a broad mission that must include work for human rights, environmental sustainability, international tolerance, economic justice, mutual understanding between peoples, and a range of other pressing challenges. From that broader perspective, the prize to Obama certainly makes sense and might yet serve its intended purpose.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has taken a gamble by giving the prize to Obama. It may weigh heavily on him now, especially at home. But in time we make look back on it as one of the best and most obvious of prizes, much as we now look upon the awards to Martin Luther King Jr., Dag Hammarskjöld, Nelson Mandela, and other great figures who were not only exemplary leaders but also champions of human rights, human freedom and human dignity.

For more of my thoughts on the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, check out the links below. I was interviewed for several newspaper stories and also appeared on a number of radio and television programs. I’ll be adding to the list in coming days as the clips are posted online.

Wall Street Journal: An Award Often Tinged by Politics by Michael M. Phillips and Guy Chazan
Toronto Star: Nobel Peace Prize Coveted, But Oh So Controversial by Olivia Ward
NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: Examining the Road to Becoming a Nobel Laureate by Jeffrey Brown

Blog: Nobel Peace Prize Contenders

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 15:32:20 -0700

The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced in Oslo on October 9. In recent weeks, there has been a lot of speculation — as there is every year — about who will get the award. The Norwegian Nobel Committee will pick from a record 205 nominees this year (172 individuals and 33 organizations). While most of the names on the list are a well-kept secret, nominators sometimes make a point of publicizing their recommendations.

For example, we know that Íngrid Betancourt, the former Colombian senator and anti-corruption activist who was kidnapped and held by guerrillas for six years, was nominated by Chile’s president, Michelle Bachelet. Similarly, Greg Mortenson, the American humanitarian and co-founder of the Central Asia Institute and Pennies for Peace, was nominated by several members of the U.S. Congress.

Unconfirmed nominees this year apparently include French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Do, Bolivian president Juan Evo Morales Ayma, Denis Mukwege and the Panzi Hospital of Bukavu, and the Israeli anti-nuclear activist and whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, among others.

As we move into the final week before the announcement, I’m inclined to favor a number of Chinese activists who have been pressing for basic human rights and expanded political freedoms in their homeland. Among the most prominent are:

Anyone of them, individually or in combination, would be eminently worthy of the award — especially this year. 2009 marks the 50th anniversary of the completion of China’s occupation of Tibet, and the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, two events which continue to cast a long shadow over China and raise troubling questions about its dismal commitment to political freedom and basic human rights.

A year has also passed since the Chinese abruptly broke off talks with the Tibetans following the Olympic Games last year, clearly showing that the discussions were little more than a publicity stunt on their part and that they had little intention of granting the Tibetans greater cultural and religious autonomy.

Just as it’s been 20 years since Tiananman Square, it’s also been 20 years since the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Dalai Lama. It’s worth noting that for the first time he has started to express his doubts about the effectiveness of his policy of nonviolence and open dialogue with the Chinese. That was most likely an important factor in his decision last December to enter into semi-retirement. As we know, he’s been embroiled in a complicated chess game with the Chinese for decades, but time seems to be running out and the Chinese are clearly well aware of that.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee could do worse than to call attention to the plight of those in China advocating basic human rights and cultural and religious tolerance. A prize to those advancing the cause of freedom in China might also lend much-needed support to the Tibetans and the Dalai Lama himself.

No Chinese person has ever been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize (although some Chinese might claim the Dalai Lama as one of their own, he hardly qualifies). That could change this year and I for one hope it does.

Photos: Burning Man 2009

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:23:48 -0700

My images from the 2009 Burning Man festival are finally online. I've gathered a set of 100 personal favorites, as in years past. The 2009 event was beautiful and amazing, wind and dust notwithstanding. Attendance was down by over ten percent — a first in the festival’s 24-year history — which made for a smaller and somewhat more intimate affair. There was also a sense among many I spoke with that the vibe was more low-key this year. That said, much of the art was world class, the performances first-rate, the wacky fashion and outlandish costumes unforgettable, and the people of Black Rock City, well, more beautiful than ever.

Blog: On the Evolution of Ideas

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 08:23:42 -0700

One of Hegel’s great contributions to Western philosophy was a theory he called dialectical progression. As he saw it, ideas and worldviews tend to evolve through a series of stages. First there is an idea or concept, a thesis. Over time it inevitably gives rise to its opposite, its antithesis. The interaction of the two in time leads to a new concept, a synthesis, which in turn becomes the thesis of a new triad.

J.N. Findlay, in a wonderful lecture on Hegel, rightly noted that the theory had been grossly oversimplified and misused. But he went on to say — and this strikes me as central to the notion of paradigm shifts and conceptual revolutions — that the dialectical method always involved “higher order comment” on a thought position previously achieved. In the dialectical process, you operate at a given level of thought and then proceed to stand outside it. That is to say, you’re taken in by an idea and accept all of its basic assumptions. But over time, as the idea is taken to its logical limits, its shortcomings become more and more apparent. At that point, you “become conscious,” in a sense, and begin to see the idea from the outside. It’s not unlike a gestalt-switch, only it’s more rational and linear.

“In dialectic,” Findlay pointed out, “one sees what can be said about a certain thought-position that one cannot actually see in it. And the sort of comment made in dialectic is not a comment on the correctness or truth of what is said in a certain manner or in terms of certain concepts, but a comment on the adequacy or logical satisfactoriness of the conceptual approaches or instruments one has been employing.” In this sense, each stage transcends and includes the one that came before it.

This observation ties in with what Thomas Kuhn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Boulding, Arthur Koestler, and others have observed about how systems of knowledge, or frames of reference, evolve not by an orderly and incremental step-by-step process, but by occasional upheavals in which accepted truths are overthrown and reordered.

Critics of Kuhn and his followers like to play the old relativism card, saying that his notion of shifting paradigms was flawed because it said nothing about the effectiveness of one paradigm or another in getting closer to the truth. But my understanding of the evolution of paradigms is that each one represents, in Findlay’s words, “a series of improving definitions of the absolute.”

For more on this, see:

My review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
My review of Conceptual Revolutions by Paul Thagard
My review of Paradigms in Progress by Hazel Henderson
Literature review: Understanding Change: Strategies for Innovation and Renewal

Blog: On Paying Dues

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:10:09 -0700

I don’t believe in paying your dues, but sometimes it’s the only way to overcome self-doubt or a lingering suspicion that you’re a charlatan.

Blog: The Art of Grafting

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:29:20 -0700

In horticulture, the art of grafting involves fusing the stems, leaves, flowers, or fruits of one plant with the rootstock of another. The process is especially useful with plants that can’t be propagated easily by seed.

The same holds true for ideas. Sometimes the best way to introduce a new concept is to marry it to one that is already firmly established. The early scientists understood this when they depicted the atom as a microscopic solar system, or when the early web developers pitched the Internet as an “information superhighway.” A concept that is fuzzy or abstract often has a better chance of flourishing if combined with one that is already well-rooted.

What’s interesting to note is that grafting, as it was traditionally defined, meant “the healing in common of wounds.” It referred to the process by which the old and the new rub against each other. It was always a time-consuming and painful thing. But if a healing took place, common suffering could become the basis for a powerful and mutually sustaining bond.

Blog: The Mystic Death

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:26:40 -0700

In the mystic traditions, the death of the false self is comparable to physical death. The mercy is that after the first couple of killings, you realize you’re being killed into life. Then, as Andrew Harvey has said, you begin to participate in the killing willingly. “Everyone doing a serious yoga with a master or with God directly is learning how to die in life, how to die into life. They know that the law is that the more you die, the more you live.”

Blog: Creativity and Chaos

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:44:40 -0700

The line between creativity and psychological disorder is astonishingly thin. It seems to me that in our culture we cultivate creativity as if it were a rare hothouse flower while at the same time trying to stave off mental disorder like some kind of pestilence. But they’re really two sides of the same coin. In order to tap our fullest creative potential, we have to become, as Ram Dass once put it, connoisseurs of our neuroses.

Salton Sea

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:00:49 -0700

I recently returned from another trip to the Salton Sea. It was my second time there this year. The lake levels have receded dramatically in recent years and the smell of decay is worse than I remembered. Dwindling inflows and rising salinity levels have transformed the sea from a quiet sanctuary to a toxic wasteland.

The troubled economy has only exacerbated the problems in the area. In Salton City, the collapse of the real estate market has caused many developers to abandon their housing projects half-finished. “For Sale” signs and tattered “Open House” flags flutter disconsolately in the wind. The place is pervaded by an eerie silence.

I’ve been making a point of visiting the Salton Sea as often as I can in recent years in an effort to document, in some small way, the changes unfolding there. I’ve gathered about thirty of my photos along with some commentary here.

Nobel Peace Lectures

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 12:46:04 -0700

World Scientific has just published the latest in a series of volumes of Nobel Peace Prize lectures, which I co-edited together with Irwin Abrams. These are the acceptance speeches of the laureates as they were given at the annual award ceremony in Oslo. The latest volume includes some brilliant and remarkable lectures from people like Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, Shirin Ebadi, and Wangari Maathai, along with presentation speeches, biographical information, notes, bibliographies, and extensive editorial commentary. The work was commissioned by the Nobel Foundation and represents the closest thing we have to an authoritative reference work on the prestigious lectures.

Jesusita Fire

Mon, 11 May 2009 07:05:36 -0700

The Jesusita Fire took almost everyone by surprise when it began on the afternoon of May 5. It’s the third major wildfire in Santa Barbara in just nine months, and many here are still recovering from the devastating Tea Fire last November.

The blaze is still out of control and details are sketchy, but we know that dozens of homes have already been lost. I witnessed some of them go up in flames myself before being forced out by the authorities.

Here are some of my photos:

This image was taken from Painted Cave Road at 3:30 p.m. on May 5, just a couple of hours after the fire began. The trail of the smoke shows the typical sundowner pattern — blowing across the city and out to sea, just as the devastating Gap and Tea fires did last year.

The Jesusita Fire burns in the hills above Santa Barbara, California. Taken from Camino Cielo in the late afternoon on May 5, 2009. The small black dot in the center is a fixed wing aircraft surveying the hotspots.

Smoke and ash darken the sky above Santa Barbara as night falls on day one of the fire.

On the evening of the first day, the fire was still confined to a relatively small area of less than 200 acres, as seen in this long exposure taken from Elings Park.

Thick smoke drifts out over the city on the second day of the fire, as seen in this shot from Las Tunas Road on the Riviera.

The flames rage in the hills perilously close to Santa Barbara’s historic mission. It seems fitting that local firefighters and police would use the spot as an ad hoc staging ground.

Santa Barbara County firefighters gather at the mission to plan their next assault as the fire continues its spread east and south toward the city.

Fanned by strong winds, flames and smoke wreak havoc in the densely populated neighborhood above Foothill Road, just west of Mission Canyon Road.

Huge flames ravage the foothills above Mountain Drive.

Putrid smoke and ash choked the skies and obscured the sun, bathing the city in an eerie red light.

A chopper dumps water over a structure burning on Mountain Drive.

Intense sundowner winds scatter and fan the flames, as seen in this photo taken from Stanwood Drive.

The size and sheer force of the inferno was staggering.

A terrifying firestorm erupts in the hills above Mission Canyon.

A palm tree scorched in the recent Tea Fire stands on a now vacant lot on Conejo Road, as smoke and ash from the new Jesusita Fire darken the skies above.

The eastern edge of the Jesusita Fire was still burning out of control late on Wednesday night. This photo was taken on Ortega Ridge Road in Summerland.

Strong offshore winds continued to fan the flames of the Jesusita Fire above Santa Barbara, as seen in this image taken at Elings Park.

Intense smoke and ash covered the city of Santa Barbara as the Jesusita Fire continued to burn on several fronts on Wednesday night.

Relatively calm winds during the morning and afternoon of day three kept the Jesusita Fire confined mainly to the mountains near Cathedral Peak.

As the afternoon wore on, the winds intensified and fanned the flames westward.

A dark plume of drift smoke could be seen all the way to Ventura and beyond. This photo was taken from Carpinteria at 6:30 p.m. just as the sundowner winds kicked up and stoked the fires anew.

Strong early evening winds fanned the flames and sent black smoke into the skies above Santa Barbara. This image was shot from Ortega Hill at sunset.

As the sun set on the third day of the Jesusita Fire, the sky turned ominously red and ash started falling like snowflakes. The palmettos on Channel Drive can be seen bending in the strong wind.

By 9:00 o’clock on Thursday, the fire was raging out of control across a wide swath of the Santa Barbara foothills, from San Roque Canyon to the east all the way to Highway 154 to the west.

The Jesusita Fire continued to burn in Santa Barbara on Friday, though lower temperatures and relatively calm winds kept the flames confined mainly to the hills above the city. After sunset, the skies were still dark with drift smoke and ash, as seen in this image taken from Butterfly Beach.

By Friday evening, the Jesusita Fire had consumed 8,400 acres and cut a swath some five miles wide from the ridges above Montecito all the way to Painted Cave.

The Jesusita Fire continued to rage in the hills above Montecito on Friday evening.

Flames from the Jesusita Fire lit up the evening sky above Santa Barbara on Friday evening, as seen in this image taken at the Andree Clark Bird Refuge.

The Jesusita Fire

Thu, 07 May 2009 12:36:33 -0700

The Jesusita Fire took almost everyone by surprise when it began on the afternoon of May 5th. It’s the third major wildfire in Santa Barbara in just nine months, and many here are still recovering from the devastating Tea Fire last November.

The blaze is still out of control and details are sketchy, but we know that scores of homes have already been lost. I witnessed some of them go up in flames myself before being forced out by the mandatory evacuation order.

Some of my photos of the fire are gathered here.

The Channel Islands

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 23:18:35 -0700

Another personal favorite, this one of the Channel Islands off the coast of southern California. The three small islands in the foreground make up Anacapa, the large island behind it is Santa Cruz, and in the distance are Santa Rosa and San Miguel islands. The image was taken through the windshield of a Cessna on a return flight from Catalina Island with my pilot friend Sam. A special day.

Speaking to Different Value-Sets

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:52:37 -0700

To create real change, we have to “language” our message so it speaks to different value structures, says Ken Wilber in an interview in the latest issue of Ode Magazine.

For example, when Al Gore speaks of global warming, he says that the entire world needs to change its behavior. “But he says so in a language that is perhaps understood by 20 percent of the world’s population,” Wilber points out. “Gore assumes that people will respond from rational self-interest based on sound science, but that’s the least of the motivations of the majority of the population of the planet.”

To be successful, Wilber says, “Al Gore has to ‘language’ his message in at least four different value structures to get, say, 80 percent of the world behind him. Anything less than that will simply not work.”

See Ken Wilber’s Take On Saving the World Through Cross-Cultural Communication in Ode magazine.

The Future of Books

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:56:26 -0700

After almost six years, I moved my office out of the old Lobero Building last week. I was astonished by the amount of stuff I'd accumulated during that time — the papers, yes, but especially the books. I receive a lot of review copies, but I'm also guilty of buying too many titles. It's a tough habit to break.

As I was disassembling the bookshelves and moving the volumes out to the car, box by box, I was reminded of how I had done the same thing two decades ago, only that time it was vinyl records, not books. Today I can fit my entire collection of music — which in the old days took up a small room — on a single hard drive. In the same way, the arrival of the Kindle and other electronic readers, coupled with incredible search technology like Google Scholar, have rendered much of my book collection dead weight.

Another new development is the fact that used bookstores have migrated online, which makes it possible to track down and order an out-of-print book in a matter of minutes. And if that's too expensive a proposition, your local public library can quickly scan the holdings of other collections across the nation and have a copy in your hands in a matter of days via inter-library loan.

It seems I'm not the only one contemplating the future of books. The subject seems to be on everybody's lips. As we know, the publishing world is in deep turmoil right now partly as a result of our changing reading habits. As the New York Times puts it, publishers are "feeling the same chronic pain as other media businesses, with layoffs, corporate restructurings and a general sense of gloom, doom and kaboom settling over name-brand giants like Random House and Simon & Schuster."

But amid all the anxiety, there is also a sense of optimism about the arrival of the Kindle and other readers. "Just this year," the Times notes, "new electronic reading devices have emerged from Amazon, Samsung and Fujitsu, while mobile phones like iPhone from Apple have flowered seemingly overnight into acceptable reading devices for many bookworms." (See Is This the Future of the Digital Book?)

The question is whether this represents a gradual shift or a watershed event for the publishing industry. How will it affect the way we do our reading and, more broadly, the way we make sense of information? Many have been asking this question with a mixture of dread and fascination in recent months. Bestselling author Paulo Coelho put this question to the readers of his blog recently and it stimulated a flurry of interesting responses. See Your Opinion: Will Books Survive?

Another valuable series called "The Future of Reading" appeared in the New York Times last summer. It took up the question of how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read. See, for example, Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?

This morning, I ran across yet another interesting quote about the demise of the book: "The book, the most traditional means of preserving and communicating thought, has been for a long time destined to disappear, just like cathedrals, walled battlements, museums, and the ideal of pacifism."

What's remarkable about this quote is that it was penned not this year, or even this century. It turns out it was written almost a century ago, in 1919, by Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Museums are mostly doing fine, and the ideal of pacifism seems, thankfully, to be enjoying a renaissance. But it's true, the book does seem to be on its way out.

Obviously, Marinetti couldn't have predicted the rise of computers and the wonders of Google, but he saw that the arrival of cinema as a powerful new art form was already beginning to transform the way we present and take in information.

I ran across Marinetti's words in Richard Lanham's fascinating and prescient essay collection, The Electronic Word. In the book, Lanham looks at the ways electronic text is changing the structure of communication. Unlike printed text which is fixed and authoritative, digitized text is interactive, dynamic, and capable of blending word with image and sound, he explains. The electronic word challenges the traditional concept of "text" derived from the printed book, and since printed books are still the cornerstone of Western culture, it also prompts a basic reassessment of the liberal arts and how they should be taught.

Lanham makes many important points in the book. He says, for example, that the most precious commodity is no longer information itself but rather the attention required to cope with it. In today's digital society, we are confronted daily with a deluge of information. "Dealing with this superabundant flow," he writes, is like "drinking from a firehose." It means that how information is presented is critical. Digital text makes this point clear in a way that printed text does not.

What Lanham does in the book is help us to get beyond the old argument of which is better — printed books or their digital equivalents — which is irrelevant in any case. He takes us a level deeper by asking a series of provocative follow up questions. (More about Lanham's book in my review of it here.)

And that's the conversation we need to be having. The question, as I see it, is how to preserve and enhance the best of both printed books and electronic texts and make sure that we retain the essential qualities that make reading such an essential — and, at its best, deeply fulfilling — activity.

Avoid Success At All Costs

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:03:05 -0700

“Be anything you like,” Thomas Merton once said, “be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”

I love this quote. It’s a reminder to slow down and reexamine what we’re doing.

The fierce drive to accomplish something and make a name for ourselves takes us down the wrong path. The qualities we want in the end are those that go with being free of worldly success.

Ultimately, the aim must be to become indifferent what people think of us — to become immune to applause and unmoved by criticism. There is integrity in that.

The goal must be to be present with what we’re doing, so present that we do it gracefully, effortlessly. There is great joy in that.

Success, when it does come, tends to be relatively short-lived in any case. That means that we’re all thrown back on ourselves sooner or later. When that day arrives we have no choice but to find something more lasting to pin our hopes to.

And that, I believe, is what Merton was saying.

Incidentally, he became very successful himself. But he understood what few of us, in our quest for worldly recognition, realize — that celebrity, when freed of the trappings of ego, is simply another path of service.

On "Branding" and Other Buzzwords

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:50:04 -0700

In his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell observed that just as thought can corrupt language, so language can corrupt thought. "A bad usage can be spread by tradition and imitation," he said, "even among people who should and do know better."

Academic prose is the most obvious example. Many scholarly books are full of not only bad habits, but sentences — and sometimes entire paragraphs — that are completely unintelligible. Here are a couple of specimens I ran across recently:

"One should not draw the conclusion that 'new nations' may not be created or become viable, but rather, that the process by which this occurs is fraught with inappropriate borrowings from extraneous experiences. Legitimation of such new arrangements may be produced at the end of a gun barrel, but more significant is how pivotal elites play the major role in advancing or retarding the process." (Donald Warren, "Displaced Majority Politics")
"There is no easy path between cold cognition of an overdetermined structural analysis and the hot cognition of misplaced concreteness." (William Gamson, Talking Politics)

But even ordinary speech has become increasingly contaminated by meaningless language. If Orwell were alive today, I'm sure he would be fretting about the way many buzzwords and catchphrases are bandied around today that try, as he put it, "to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

I'm thinking of verbs like "score-carding," "leveraging," "monetizing," and "benchmarking," for example. Media producers like to talk about "reconfiguring" and "repurposing" their "content." Business leaders now make the case for "right-sizing the corporation" and making "internal staff-balancing changes." There is no end to examples of this kind.

Australian writer Don Watson has a name for them: "weasel words."

What is perhaps especially worrisome to me is how marketing language has come to infect ordinary speech. Everywhere you look, people have started using stock phrases like "pitching an idea," "enhancing visibility," and "making concepts stick" that come straight out of the advertising world.

This tendency is also reflected in the virtual obsession with "branding." Now even individuals seem to think they need to brand themselves, whatever that means.

Take, for example, a book by Brenda Bence with the remarkable title: How You Are Like Shampoo. The book's subtitle exemplifies the kind language that has become increasingly common, and apparently acceptable to many of us: "The Breakthrough Personal Branding System Based on Proven Big-Brand Marketing Methods to Help You Earn More, Do More, and Be More at Work."

A recent variant of personal branding is the idea of 15-second marketing and the so-called "elevator pitch." Authors, speakers, consultants, bloggers and other independent professionals are advised to spend time crafting a short spiel or pitch that sums up their "unique selling proposition."

See, for example, Steve Pavlina's 15 Second Marketing and ProBlogger's Write an Elevator Pitch for Your Blog.

It's a tantalizing idea, and perhaps a fun parlor game, especially for hyphenated professionals who are cook-musicians, perhaps, or artist-realtors. How do you sum up your professional identity in ten words or less, especially at a time when more and more people are working independently (or not working at all) and trying to stake out a niche online?

The trouble, of course, is that it doesn't work very well. We're human, after all, and no slogan or catchphrase can sum up what we do very well.

And why should it? In order that we might stand out in a crowd? In order to be memorable?

Yes, some say that's the key to success. But let's face it, it's also a kind of vanity. We're so busy objectifying and packaging ourselves that we forget what it is we do, why we love it and how it nurtures us — and perhaps especially, how we can be useful to people and help them be more of what they want to be.

I like the organic approach advocated by people like Merlin Mann and John Gruber. In a talk at the recent SxSW conference with the deliberately buzzword-riddled title 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility! they make the case for doing what you do well enough, and with enough passion, that it sells itself. Then you don't have to.

I love the English language, but I don't think we need to reform or preserve it in all its purity. It's not about purging everyday speech of jargon and contemptible words. Rather, it's about being mindful of all the subtle ways our own thinking is polluted by meaningless vocabularies.

As Orwell said, one can't change the language but at least one can change one's own habits. "And from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs."

I Madonnari

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 08:59:29 -0700

I Madonnari was the name given to street painters in 16th- and 17th-century Italy, itinerant artists who traveled from town to town and city to city rendering images of the Madonna on sidewalks and in public squares. Like street musicians, the "Madonna painters" supported themselves by small donations — usually coins thrown to them by appreciative passers-by and festival-goers. Using chalks and handmade pastels, the artists sometimes created works of remarkable majesty and scale. But the art was always ephemeral, vanishing with the first rain. Today, the tradition of street painting lives on in cities across Europe and in a growing number of communities in North America. This year marks the 22nd anniversary of the I Madonnari Festival in Santa Barbara, California. When it started in 1987, it was the only event of its kind in the United States. Today, it typically draws 25,000 visitors and renowned artists from across the country. My photos from the festival are featured in the cover story of the latest issue of Broughton Quarterly, a travel and lifestyle magazine. Go to photoessay

Espresso

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:38:54 -0700

I had my first espresso in a backstreet café in Venice. It must have been 1985 or ‘86. I had arrived on the night train from Zagreb, Croatia, achy from a long and sleepless night. I stumbled out of the train station and into a café and ordered a coffee. What I didn’t know was that “coffee” in Italian is synonymous with espresso.

It came in a white ceramic demitasse cup, gave off a strong and slightly sweet aroma, and was topped by a curious brown foam. It wasn’t what I expected, or wanted. What I thought I ordered was a cup of brewed coffee, black and unsweetened. But this was something else.

Not knowing any Italian and in any case too weary from a long night of travel, I decided to simply take the poison and let the caffeine do its work. I held the cup to my lips, took in the curious aroma, and had a sip. Then another. And then a third. The fourth sip finished it off.

It was a new and altogether unforgettable taste sensation — like taking in the essence of coffee in its purest form. This wasn’t just a coffee, it was an elixir. I was intoxicated.

It wound up being the first of countless espressos I had during my weeklong stay in Italy, and each one worked its magic like a kind of secret potion.

After leaving Italy and returning to Sweden, where I lived at the time, I started ordering espressos everywhere I could. It became a virtual obsession. But it was hard to find the kind of espresso I’d had in Italy. Even the fancy coffee houses outfitted with gleaming new espresso machines and serving Italian roasts seemed to come up short.

When I eventually moved to the States, getting a good espresso became almost impossible. Sometimes I would order a double shot, and the kid behind the counter would hand it to me with a frown on his face, as if to say, “Are you really going to drink that straight, without any whipped cream or syrup added?”

Sometimes I would happen upon a café that served a decent espresso, but it was so hit-or-miss that the same café, the same machine, the same roast, even the same barista often served me a good cup followed by a foul and poisonous one.

Starbucks prided itself on serving consistently good espressos, but the experience was never quite right: the shots were too small, the cup too large, and the flavor, well, mediocre and generally unsatisfying. Plus, I hated the pretense of it all — asking for a double espresso and having a barista correct me with “doppio,” as if I had committed some sort of ordering faux-pas.

Besides, the smell inside those Starbucks stores is off-putting to me, like a combination of burnt coffee and cough medicine.

At Starbucks, baristas still occasionally hand me a double espresso with one of those unforgiving looks: “Wouldn’t you like me to add some steamed milk to that?”

Then I found Espresso Roma café in Berkeley. It was like being back in Venice 25 years ago. Espresso at its best. When I first found the place, I went three mornings in a row. Every espresso was exquisite. Perfection in a cup.

Now I go there every time I’m in the Bay Area. I can hardly wait to get up in the morning and head down for the first cup of the day. The guys working the machines are a delight to watch. They’re like clockwork — fast, efficient, flawless.

The place is on the corner of College and Ashby. If you love espresso, go there. The Yelp reviews are mixed, but that’s not on account of the coffee. The place is loud and sometimes has dirty tables, single women complain about guys hitting on them, that sort of thing. Also, people are finicky about their addictions, and coffee is no exception. So it’s no surprise perhaps that reviews vary.

I still drink my espressos straight, unsweetened. A piece of dark chocolate goes nicely with it, but is hardly necessary.

It’s not an addiction exactly, but a weakness to be sure. And short of returning to Italy, I can’t think of a better place to indulge it than at Espresso Roma Café.

Salton Sea

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 23:15:08 -0700

I’m back from another trip to the Salton Sea. The lake levels have receded dramatically since my last visit in the fall of 2007 and the smell of decay is worse than I remembered it. Dwindling inflows and rising salinity levels have transformed the sea from a quiet sanctuary to a toxic wasteland.

I’ve been making a point of visiting the Salton Sea as often as I can in recent years in an effort to document, in some small way, the changes unfolding there. I’ve been working on a photoessay, still very much a work in progress, and should have it up on the web very soon. Please stay tuned. Meanwhile, here’s a shot taken at Obsidian Point on the south side of the lake just after sunset earlier this week.

Public Innovators

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:57:24 -0700

Over the past year, I led a fascinating research project for the Harwood Institute on a group of changemakers we call "public innovators." We looked at who they are, how they do their work, and why they are one of the keys to bringing about the change we need in America's communities.

Public innovators are stewards of change in the community. They are not quite civic leaders, not quite community organizers, and not quite social entrepreneurs, but something of all three. Their work is aimed at engaging people, catalyzing conversations, articulating questions and common concerns, and aligning people, organizations, and resources to achieve real impact.

Sometimes they are leaders in the formal sense — city managers, school superintendents, chamber of commerce directors — but just as often they are people whose only credential is a passion for change. They may be neighborhood activists, church leaders, nonprofit directors, schoolteachers, or simply concerned citizens.

What sets their work apart is that they are not just committed to advancing the common good but to serving as agents of meaningful change and lasting impact. They act as a kind of leavening agent in the community that helps to mobilize people from engagement to action on pressing issues.

My report on the study, just released, is called Public Innovators: Forces For Social Change and Civic Renewal. It looks at how public innovators see themselves and their work, how they think about change, what drives them to take on intractable problems, how they mobilize people and generate impact, and what keeps them going in the face of inevitable frustrations and setbacks.

One of the most significant findings was that the public innovators in our study made no distinction between the community and the people of which it is made up. If there is something wrong with the community, they told us, the remedy always has to involve people. It's not enough to make structural changes or implement new systems in the community, in other words. At its core, the work they do is aimed at building relationships and developing people. It is about helping individuals grow, cultivating new capacities, and learning together.

They stressed again and again that change and renewal in the community is meaningless unless it is rooted in some deeper and more fundamental change in the human condition. For this reason, their work focuses not just on making change in the community — important as that may be — but on the deeper work of elevating and transforming people.

The report goes into further depth, describing ten remarkable individuals who are making change happen in ten communities across the country — exemplary changemakers who are defining a new kind of civic activism for our times. Please read the report, share it with others, and let us know how the ideas resonate. Download a copy of it at the Harwood Institute's website here.

Good and Bad News on Global Warming

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 13:50:35 -0700

Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — joint winners of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize — were back in the spotlight this week. In his first newspaper interview since the November elections, Al Gore said he believes we’ve reached a “political tipping point” regarding global climate change and that “a very impressive consensus is now emerging around the world that the solutions to the economic crisis are also the solutions to the climate crisis.” Meanwhile, IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri and other leading climate scientists just wrapped up a conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, where they presented a new round of worrisome statistics. "The world has very little time," Pachauri said after the new findings were presented. The question we need to ask ourselves is whether to stop referring to the crisis as "climate change" and call it what it really is — a climate breakdown. Read the full article

Interview with Stephen Mitchell

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:13:03 -0700

Renowned translator and scholar Stephen Mitchell has brought to life a wide range of literary classics for readers of English, including the Tao Te Ching, the epic of Gilgamesh, the Bhagavad Gita and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. He has also co-authored two bestselling books with his wife Byron Katie. Mitchell has an eye for the genuine, a deep love and respect for words, and an awareness that, paradoxically, connecting with the essence of things always requires going beyond words.

In this conversation, held in front of a live audience at the Lobero Theater in Santa Barbara, California, I talk with him about his latest work, The Second Book of the Tao, his perspectives on writing, his longtime Zen practice, and the rich tradition of wisdom literature that informs his work. Read the interview

Nudge

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 17:17:17 -0700

Like many people, I've been reading the work of legal scholar Cass Sunstein for some time. Over the past two decades or more, he's published a string of first-rate books on issues like free speech and the power of dissent. He was recently appointed as the head of President Obama's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (he's also rumored to be a potential candidate for the Supreme Court). His latest book, written with Richard Thaler, looks at how the process of framing public choices can have great social and political consequences. With its snappy one-word title, the book calls to mind recent releases like Blink, Sway, and Flip. And in the spirit of bestsellers like The Tipping Point and Freakonomics — books that purport to reveal the "hidden dimensions" of this or that — it's targeted at a broad general audience. But unlike so many books in the genre, this one tries to do more than just inform and entertain. It takes a serious academic subject and makes a strong case for more enlightened social and economic policies.

Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2009

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:05:12 -0800

Most people in the entertainment world are busy looking forward to the Academy Awards on February 22. But some of us are still looking back on the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, which just wrapped up on February 2.

The two events are not unrelated. The ten-day festival in Santa Barbara kicked off on January 22, the same day the Academy Award nominations were announced. As it happened, a surprising number of Oscar-contenders were already booked for appearances in Santa Barbara — either as award recipients, presenters, participants, judges, or simply as celebrities making an appearance.

It’s a mark of how well the festival is doing that it consistently manages to spotlight the year’s most significant films, performances, and personalities, often way ahead of others in the industry.

Highlights of this year’s festival included awards tributes to Kate Winslet (who received a nod for best actress for her performance in “The Reader”) Penelope Cruz (nominated for best supporting actress in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”) and comeback of the year, Mickey Rourke, (nominated for best actor for his performance in “The Wrestler”).

Richard Jenkins, who also received a best actor nod, was joined by fellow Virtuoso honorees Michael Shannon, nominated for best supporting actor for “Revolutionary Road,” Viola Davis, best supporting actress for “Doubt,” and best actress nominee Melissa Leo for “Frozen River.”

It was my second year covering the event. Some more of my photos are gathered here.

Coming Up For Air

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 08:57:53 -0800

My blog has been unusually quiet in recent weeks and months. I’ve been busy juggling several projects and it seemed as if all the deadlines converged at once. Frankly, my head has been spinning for the last two or three months.

What have I been working on? One project was a year-long study I led for the Harwood Institute that looks at what we call “public innovators” — who they are and why they’re one of the keys to bringing about the change we need in America’s communities. That report should be out very soon.

Another big project was the completion of a book I co-edited with Irwin Abrams for the Nobel Foundation. The foundation is in Stockholm, the publisher is in Singapore, Irwin Abrams is in Ohio, and I’m here in California. Getting us all into alignment was what you might call a global effort. This was a very interesting and rewarding, if time-consuming, project. The book should be out later this year.

Another reason why it’s been so quiet here lately — and I know you’ve heard this before — is because I’ve been needing to make some changes to the site. It’s cumbersome work. But I’m making behind the scenes improvements as time permits. Meanwhile, there’s much new stuff to add to the site in coming weeks, so please stay tuned.

The Future of Journalism

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:29:58 -0800

"The Future of Journalism: Or, How Americans Are Learning to Have More Interesting Conversations" was the title of a keynote address presented at the fourth annual gathering of the Literary Society of Youngstown, Ohio. In the talk, I made the case that tomorrow's journalism will put a premium on conversation. To stay relevant, the media need to revive the lost art of dialogue and find ways to really engage people in the process of creating shared meaning.

A View From the Melting Pot: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 17:30:03 -0700

Author Poe Ballantine has said that this interview, which aired on National Public Radio stations in 1996 and later appeared in The Sun magazine, impelled him to live in Mexico. It reveals Richard Rodriguez not only as "a valiantly eloquent and gloomily humurous" observer of American culture, but also as "a vivid and courageous outsider." The interview appears in a new book, The Little Brown Reader.

Photoessay: Burning Man 2008

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 10:50:03 -0700

My images from the 2008 Burning Man festival are now online. Thanks to everyone who posed for me this year or freely consented to let me shoot them in the act of dancing, stilt-walking, hooping, making art, or simply being beautiful. It was an enchanting week, perhaps the best one yet.

Our Next Evolutionary Leap

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:39:59 -0700

Social networks and other web-based technologies furnish us with powerful metaphors for understanding the evolution of human consciousness, according to several innovative scientists and philosophers I've spoken with. As they see it, we're advancing as a species toward the point where it will be possible for our minds to join together to create a kind of universal intelligence.

Finding Flow

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:22:10 -0700

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow is an appealing and evocative one. He believes that what makes life genuinely satisfying are those experiences in which we're fully absorbed in what we're doing. During these "flow" states, he says, our body, mind, and consciousness become ordered and harmoniously directed, feelings of indecision and anxiety disappear, and self-consciousness falls away.

The Power of Dialogue

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 23:55:52 -0700

It's a sad fact that while most of us spend a sizeable part of our lives communicating with others, we seem more separate and disconnected than ever. We speak at each other, or past each other. We speak different conceptual languages, hold different values, embody different ways of seeing the world. In these times of accelerating change and deepening uncertainty we need to get smart about how to talk to one another. We need to be able to overcome differences, find common ground, create meaning and purpose, and set directions together. We need to be able to think together as groups, as teams, as committees, as communities, and as citizens. To do that we need to learn the art of dialogue.