David Harsanyi wrote in the Denver Post that the Obama Administration is running out of people to demonize(http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16321444). This right-wing columnist insists that Democratic “demonization” of the Chamber of Commerce is reinforcing moderate perceptions that the Democratic Party has gone bonkers. Ironically (too painfully so), it is what has become the Republican mainstream that literally (rather than figuratively) demonizes Obama himself, accusing him of being foreign born, Muslim, and, yes, the the anti-Christ. As a mouthpiece for right-wing extremism, Harsanyi has turned reality completely on its head, accusing the opposition of the defects that so dramatically characterize his own ideological camp.
The Denver Post criticizes Rep. Ed Perlmutter (CO CD 7) for, among other things, supporting cap-and-trade (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16281757). I think that Ed is doing a great job in general, is supporting what reason and goodwill dictate that a responsible elected representative support, and has revolutionized constituent services and outreach (his “government at the grocery store” town halls have become famous). But what strikes me as incredible is the Post’s irresponsible position on cap-and-trade on the basis that it raises energy costs.
The rest of the developed world, responding to abundant and compelling evidence, recognizes the need for an affirmative global warming abatement policy (the prime contenders being cap-and-trade or a carbon tax), but has been stymied in its attempt to create a globally concerted policy to address the problem by the short-sightedness of a country that would rather keep energy prices low today than start to reduce the infinitely higher future costs that we can no longer completely avoid. We scuttled the Kyoto Protocol, and now the Denver Post wants to make sure that we make continue to stick our heads in the sand rather than even begin to address this most consequential of challenges. It’s one thing to have to fight popular misconceptions, it’s another to have them amplified by Denver’s last remaining major metropolitan newspaper. I’ve never in my life felt less respect for any newspaper anywhere in America than I feel for this one now.
Susan Greene reports on the strong-arm tactics of the Denver Archdiocese of the Catholic Church, suing a lesbian Sunday School teacher the Archdiocese had fired for brining her case to the Colorado Civil Rights Division (http://www.denverpost.com/greene/ci_16314690). Such strong-arm tactics by institutions that should be in the vanguard of nobler attitudes are all too common. I’ve experienced them at the hands of the current Jefferson County Schools administration, first for trying to bring to the district’s attention the serious problems with a principle who was the superintendent’s “dear old friend,” and more recently for trying to establish a robust school-community partnership in Jefferson County. In all such cases, it is the community’s responsibility to stand up and reject this privileging of power over purpose. I strongly encourage people to be more aware, and get more involved.
The Economist reports on the use of steganography, and a program called “Collage,” which distributes and hides messages among files posted to public websites, and allows intended recipients to reassemble them (http://www.economist.com/node/17243251). It is another example of the decentralized, and unstoppable, flow of information in the modern world, with all of the vast implications that that has. Totalitarian governments will find it increasingly difficult to control what information people have access to, and their ability to organize in opposition to the government. And more responsible governments will find it increasingly difficult to control the organization and implementation of violent extremism.
The blogosphere is a cacophony of arbitrary assertions, unreliable information, angry retorts, and assumption-laden quick commentaries. Long, thoughtful explorations of issues and aspects of our lives are resented on many sites, high volume being instantly equated with low density, and in-depth analysis conflated with unnecessary verbosity. There are reasons for this: The lack of quality control and editorial assistance involved in instantly self-published compositions leadto a lack of confidence on the part of others that investing a large amount of time is worth the effort. And the world has become a more sound-bite driven place, relying more on quick hits of factoids and headlines than insightful discussion of underlying dynamics and implications. The rapid, massive flow of information is a deluge in which no one can swim, and those who try are left grabbing fractured pieces rather than comprehensive narratives.
But lengthy composition does not imply poor quality. Those of us who still read books, read books that are hundreds of pages long, without generally complaining that the author failed to make his or her point in less than 200 words. Even the magazine articles we read are generally of a length that would be greeted with derision in the blogosphere. But those who self-publish are not necessarily writing works of inferior quality, and thoughtful essays cannot be reduced to soundbites without destroying their value entirely.
I started this blog (just over seven weeks ago, as I write) in order to create a more thoughtful haven on the internet, a place where we do something more useful than post links and quick retorts and escalating flame wars. I wanted to create a confluence of thoughts and ideas, a place where people can teach and learn from one another, where we can all lift one another up by using this technology of collective consciousness in a more deeply nourishing way.
But though a fair number of people have been stopping by on a daily basis to read my posts, very few have posted anything of their own. I can’t make this clearing house of ideas and insights and ponderings and contemplations work all on my own; I need the help of others who are also thinking about the world in which we live. Please, post your essays here, on any topic of interest to you, and send the link to this page to everyone you know who might wish to do the same. Let’s create a real confluence of thought, and imagination, and aspiration, right here, and, hopefully, gradually, flowing together with all other such efforts wherever they may be, everywhere.
I look forward to reading your thoughts about the world in which we live, and what we can do to improve the quality of our lives.
When I was a sociology student, the conventional wisdom in the profession was that the paradigm known as “functionalism,” which had predominated until a generation or so earlier, had failed by too-closely linking our understanding of society with an organic metaphor, that of a body with organs that served functions. Many of the critics failed to see the genuine insight embedded in the metaphor, but they were right about the problems: A society is composed of competing interests, and the “organs” in this case (social institutions) function to favor some interests over others, not merely to perpetuate the survival of the organism.
But trying to divorce our understanding of anything from metaphorical thinking either relegates it to the realm of mathematical esoteria (which is itself rooted in metaphorical thought), or simply leaves it flailing for a handhold, something to grab hold of to provide it with cognitive stability. Society is like an organism, and it is like an ecosystem, and it is like a complex multilateral strategic game. But it isn’t quite any of these. We need to build our understandings through complex, multifaceted metaphors, without shackling our understanding to any one of those metaphors.
The October 18 issue of Time Magazine, in the “Briefing” section, has a short report on “induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells,” which are skin cells transformed into stem cells by use of “viruses to ferry new genes into the cell’s genome.” I’m not sure yet what it is, but I’m sure that there’s a valuable metaphor for society, and how to address some of the challenges that we face, embedded in there somewhere.
The challenge with human thought is to balance recognition of similarity and difference, and to understand differences by means of similarities, and similarities by means of differences. For instance, if I explained that if you enlarged a billiard ball to the size of the Earth, it would have deeper canyons and taller mountains than the Earth has, you would understand how smooth the Earth is, because of both its similarity to a billiard ball (it’s essentially a ball), and it’s difference (it’s much larger).
Our challenge is to find metaphors that help us to understand our world –the dynamics by which it functions, the challenges and opportunities embedded within it, the potential ways to most effectively confront those challenges and opportunities– without be seduced into confusing the differences for similarities. We have to apply a bit of formal logic: Just because two sets intersect (similarities) does not mean they are identical (lack differences). The Tea Party mantra that “government spending is always tyranny” is based on the logical fallacy that because tyranny involves centralized government, any centralization of government must be tyranny. The frustration is that anything so transparently fallacious can continue to have such a potent force over our lives.
There are other metaphors we can use to understand that hierarchical centralized organization can be beneficial to those so organized: Corporations, or, inviting more ideologically motivated misinterpretation, species such as bees and ants that thrive through hierarchical organization. Or we can go deeper, and discuss the interplay of centripedal and centrifugal forces, the interplay of that which disintegrates us and that which integrates us, and how the combination of these forces, rather than either one in isolation, is what grants us our vitality, our liberty, our humanity.
What most threatens our liberty is the tyranny of monolithic metaphors, one-sided evaluations of what serves the good and what doesn’t. We don’t want to reduce our understanding of society to the metaphor of an organism, because the health of an organism depends on avoiding any revolutionary changes in its form and function, whereas the health of a society depends on occasionally midwifing such threshold paradigm shifts. And we don’t want to reduce our understanding of society to the metaphor that equates institutional disintegration with individual liberty, because our liberty depends on wisely using our agents of collective action rather than zealously destroying their efficacy.
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I take the title question from The Economist (http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/592), but think it implies a false dichotomy, that religion either is, or is not, a force for good. The truth, fairly obviously, is that in some ways it is, and in some ways it isn’t. Making some assessment of net value (whether religion is on balance a force for good) is fraught with difficulties. But exploring the issue reveals valuable insights into which elements of religion, found both within religion and without, contribute to or obstruct the greater human enterprise.
The title question, furthermore, begs the questions of what constitutes “good”, and what constitutes “religion”, issues trickier and more elusive than they might appear to be at first glance, issues whose on-going clarification is among the universe of “good” to be produced or obstructed by better or worse cognitive tools. And it brushes by the issue of whether it makes sense to discuss “religion” as some monolithic institution that can be, or not be, evaluated en masse in any meaningful way. But, despite these complexities, it raises a fundamental question, with broader implications than are immediately obvious.
In reality, religion is at some times and in some ways, on balance, a force for “good”, and at some times and in some ways, on balance, a force for “evil”, assuming some intuitive definition of these two terms. As a generator of, and focal point for, the “emotional energy” (to use sociologist Randall Collins’ phrase) around which societies coalesce, it may be a fundamental form of the cohesive social force which binds us into functioning collectivities. Just as attendees at rock concerts and sporting events, by sharing an intense emotional experience, feel bonded into something larger than themselves, so too (and to a much greater extent) belonging to a religious order creates a constant undercurrent of that same socially binding emotional energy. This is most evident in religious ceremonies that are designed to excite that emotional energy, sometimes ostentatiously, sometimes in a more subdued form.
One can argue, conversely, that while that was religion’s historical role, essential to the primative formation of both tribal socieities and larger civilizations (almost always defined by a shared religion), it is one which is no longer needed in our modern, decentralized, organically coherent social institutional order. After all, there’s no reason to believe that our modern governments, markets, and plethora of functioning secular social institutions would simply evaporate if religion were suddenly removed from the mix. Religion, arguably, is an archaic remnant of an ancient past, persisting due both to its hold over human imaginations and the vested interests that actively perpetuate it, but no longer either a functional necessity or the most useful of available social institutional tools.
But some religions clearly do some things which most would say contribute to the public good. Leaving aside the question of religion’s value in the lives of individual adherents, there is no denying the “good works” that are performed by religious orders. Soup kitchens, charitable activities, and even community social functions all must be tallied on the positive side of the ledger.
These activities are not always unambiguously good, however. Radical Islamic groups in the Middle East, particularly in the occupied Palestinian territories, at least to some extent definable as religious or religion-based orders, do good works in part in order to gain popular support and recruit people to their cause, a cause steeped in violence. Similarly, Israeli right-wing extremists are often also religious extremists, believing that, since the land was given to them by God, they owe the non-Jewish people who were and are living on it no respect or accommodation. Undoubtedly, their good works among themselves reinforce their solidarity in opposition to others.
This is a fundamental paradox about socially consolidating forces: They increase solidarity within a group, which is beneficial for that group, but also increase the emotional strength of the boundaries between groups, which is detrimental to the ability of those groups to cooperate in order to confront intergroup challenges and opportunities. Like tribalism, nationalism, and even racism, religious solidarity tends to foster interreligious antagonism.
We are served best by vertically (and horizontally) non-exclusive, mutually reinforcing social solidarities, in which belonging at one level facilitates rather than obstructs belonging at superordinate and subordinate levels. While some (far from all) modern religious orders make some (far from comprehensive) effort to move in this more functional direction, it is an effort that swims against the historical current of, at least, the three monotheistic world religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).
This mutual exclusivity has implications for how “good” is defined. To some, “a force for good” is a force which ensures that their own dogma prevails. In such a belief system, it would be the implacable missionary and jihadist zeal that would be considered a force for good, and the move toward tolerance and mutual accommodation a force for evil. In far too many debates with right-wingers, I am quickly cast as a moral and ontological relativist for not accepting that their moral and ontological assumptions are absolute and irrefutable truths.
Those doing so confuse recognition of fallability for relativism, and ethnocentric chauvinism for mere recognition of a an objectively discernible reality. The more subtle and useful perspective is to recognize that there may be moral and ontological absolutes, but that our ability to discern what they are is imperfect. Therefore, we should not confuse failure of others to adhere to our own convictions with a failure to acknowledge the existence of objective reality.
But even leaving aside this war of competing dogmas (with, for instance, Christian and Islamic fundamentalists being remarkably similar and yet completely incapable of peacefully coexisting), discerning what is “good” is somewhat similar to discerning what “quality” means, a topic which Robert Pirsig intriguingly explored in his cult classic novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (a theme I discussed, in reference to moral absolutism, in The Elusive Truth ). Is it better, for instance, to maximize aggregate wealth, or to minimize “the gini coefficient” (the statistical measure of the inequality in the distribution of wealth)? Most (though certainly not all) would probably agree that the maximum good lies in some balance of these two values, though the range of belief of what that balance should be fill the spectrum, with extremists happily ensconced at either pole.
Or, more apropos of religion: Is a greater good served by protecting zygotes from destruction or by helping to expedite the discovery of effective treatments for crippling diseases through embryonic stem cell research? Is a greater good served by preserving the rights of women over their own bodies, or by protecting fetuses from elective abortions? Is a greater good served by ending the discrimination against gay and lesbian couples, or by “preserving the sanctity” of heterosexual marriage? We each may strongly believe we know the answers to these questions, but there is no consensus, and there is no final arbiter to which to turn for the answers as a matter of ontological and moral certainty (though there may be to find the legal resolutions of these disagreements).
Not only is the object (“a force for good”) ambiguous and elusive, so too is the subject. What is “religion”? Most people would say that the defining characteristic is some reference to the divine, by which definition Buddhism is not technically a religion (and Taoism may not be either). But aren’t all-encompassing world views members of some shared category, one which is dominated by religions? Wouldn’t that definition, rather than the reference to the divine, be at least as reasonable a definition? And might that not include most comprehensive political ideologies, including, perhaps, whatever political ideologies you or I consider to be the best and worst, respectively? In which case, some religions, broadly defined, are forces for good, and some for bad, but we’re stuck duking out which is which, not unlike fundamentalist Christians and Muslims.
Furthermore, how broad is “the divine” (if we choose to cling to that more traditional definition)? Does it include all that is supernatural or mystical in nature, such as a belief in ghosts, or in ouija boards, or in New Age fads such as the cosmic-energy-focusing power of tin-foil pyramids on one’s head? If not, why not?
As with many things, our traditional categories are less useful for addressing fundamental, underlying questions than we at first assume them to be. We need to break the world down into more essential conceptual elements, ones that do not have such unstable boundaries. And we need to understand those elemental concepts in terms of continua of variation rather than as dichotomous or mutually exclusive categories. So, for instance, beliefs can be more or less dogmatic, or more or less analytical. It does not really matter whether they are religious or not; it matters whether they serve more to liberate our individual and collective genius, or serve more to imprison it.
While there are similarities that are too often overlooked (such as in their shared foundation in a sense of awe), religious and scientific thought in some ways embody this distinction, in that the former is based on “Faith” (the unquestioning and unquestionable certainty of a proposition) and the latter on “scepticism” (the assumption that nothing should be taken to be the truth until it has been demonstrated to be the truth, and even then, only tentatively so, always subject to new evidence and argumentation). And scientific thought has clearly been a very robust generator of useful knowledge. But the distinction can be exaggerated, and the similarities ignored.
Science, like religion, has immutable precepts at its base, such as the belief in an objectively discernible reality, in our ability to discern it, in the validity of the scientific method as a means of doing so, and in the culturally and subjectively independent validity of its products. Or the belief that reality can be reduced to its constituent parts, without biasing the worldview thus created.
And science, like religion, is based in awe, which may be the real essence of Faith. I have faith that there is some coherent, enormous, systemic reality of which I am a part, far beyond my powers of comprehension, but overwhelmingly compelling in its beauty and complexity and subtlety. That is what I call “pure Faith,” a faith that has no object, no icon, no reductionism on which to hang it, though a recognition that, as in science, various reductionisms can be useful tools in examining it. What we call “religions” are to me part of the huge and gorgeous corpus of world mythology, brilliant, subtle, complex metaphors reaching into the heart of that wondrous suchness and rendering it into stories and forms and rituals that make it accessible.
A scientific understanding of the world divorced from that ecstatic, imaginative “faith-based” one would be dry and incomplete. One can analyze a river, its constituent elements and molecules, the dynamics of flow, but still be missing some appreciation of its essence that is captured in seeing that river as mischievous nymphs singing and dancing their way to the sea. Poetry and fiction are not science, but they are a part of our appreciation and celebration of the world in which we live. Religion is the original context of poetry and stories, one whose essence, at least, should certainly be retained in order to continue to generate such expressions of our passion and wonder.
My dad was a devout atheist, and I saw in him the very same error that had so passionately led him to the absolute rejection of the validity of religious belief: Implacable dogmatic certainty. The problem with such certainty isn’t that it sometimes embraces a good idea, and sometimes a bad one, but rather that it always reduces an infinitely complex reality to some oversimplification or another which then becomes impervious to refinement. We can’t help but to reduce reality to manageable conceptualizations, but we can avoid fortifying those conceptualizations against the lathe of new information and insight.
And that is the crux of the matter. The more strongly one adheres to dogmatic substantive certainties, the more their belief system, whether religious or secular, is a force for bad, by crippling our ability to use our most vital resource, our human mind. And the more one subjugates substantive understandings to a combination of an essentially religious humility with procedural methodologies designed to best allow reason to prevail, to best allow the lathe of new information and new insight to continue to carve our substantive understandings, the more that conceptual framework is a force for good.
Even the substantive beliefs about the procedural methodology have to be subjected to that methodology, so that the methodology itself can evolve. In short, we need to be systematically and imaginatively uncertain, in a way which does not increase certainty, but rather increases understanding.
It is not religion, but rather dogma which is the counterproductive force we must seek to transcend. Secular dogmas are as dangerous and destructive as religious ones, and religious channeling of our wonder and compassion is as productive and useful as any other channeling of such qualities.
The Tea Party, though strongly overlapping with Right-wing Christian fundamentalism, is based on a secular dogma of its own, one which includes what has aptly been called “Constitutional Idolatry”, signalling its quasi-religious nature. But what makes it quasi-religious is its dogmatic reductionism, its reliance on oversimplistic platitudes, not some aspect that is overtly religious.
Even dogma in science is counterproductive, and not in short supply. The premature closing of the mind, the embrace of certainties that are not certain, and are not subtle enough to encompass the complexity they claim to definitively capture, is what we must avoid and oppose, in all contexts.
The best force for good is the best blend of the most useful cognitive material from all sectors of thought and action. Religious recognition of the sublime nature of the universe, our imagination and sometimes ecstatic artistic perceptions, our emotional connection to other people and other creatures, our recognition that in a world of competing factual and theoretical claims all of them must be subjected to an impartial procedures for separating the arbitrary from the well-founded and selecting among competing views, are all components of that cognitive concoction which most effectively liberates the genius within us, and thus best serves our long-term collective welfare.
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I’ve always wanted to be too cool to care about being in the presence of celebs, if and when I ever should find myself in that situation. Reason dictates that it’s both absurd and unbecoming to go ga-ga over people just because everyone knows who they are. But I’m too honest not to admit that I’m not completely immune to the hold fame has over us, that I casually covet my few direct and indirect brushes with those who occupy the stratosphere of social renown, and even a few who hover only slightly above the rest of us.
Here are the brushes (both direct and indirect) I remember: One of my brothers dated for a while (or was just good friends with, I’m never quite sure) Stephanie Zimbalist, who co-starred with the still-famous Pierce Brosnan in the television show Remington Steele a few decades ago; another brother was center screen for an incredibly long time as an extra on “Ali,” playing a reporter taking notes while Will Smith tried to look a hundred pounds heavier than he was; I chatted with Timothy Busfield (of 30-Something, Field of Dreams, and West Wing fame) in line to board a plane from Newark to New Orleans; I met Sam Elliot by the keg at the post-production party for High-Low Country in Santa Fe that I more or less crashed (by invitation from a friend of the host), not knowing anything about the film whose completion I was supposedly celebrating (so when Sam hung out with me, and asked me my name, I thought it only reasonable to ask him his as well, not recognizing him at all until later, retroactively; he seemed a little taken aback that someone presumably on the crew of the movie he had just completed not only wasn’t honored by his gift of a little attention, but had even failed to recognize him!); I had a brief encounter with Condoleezza Rice when she was either Secretary of State or National Security Advisor and living in the Watergate complex, when I was staying across the street and having my morning coffee in a little courtyard in the complex; I just saw Time Magazine icon and Chris Matthews Show panelist Joe Klein walk quietly into a candidate forum in Denver a couple of weeks ago, and kicked myself afterward for not slipping him my card with this URL on it…, and so on. I know there are at least a few other similar encounters that I can’t think of now, but you get the idea. Fame is all around.
I myself have managed to get my mug on local TV, and my mugless voice on radio, a few times over the years, most recently on Denver Channel 12 and some radio station or other on Mike Zinna’s TV and radio shows. The occasional op-ed. Little itsy-bitsy droplets of public recognition.
As a marginal state house candidate, or even just as a social activist, I’ve learned how easy it is to become familiar with political big-shots. I can’t help but play a little game with myself, gauging how well this U.S. Senator or that Congressman remembers me; and they play it as well, demonstrating that they recall my name (when they do), because they know that it’s appreciated. (One found a pretext to shout my name across a parking lot as I was leaving a function, because he clearly hadn’t remembered it the last time we had met).
But why? The last example is the easiest to use to demonstrate the answer: Because fame is social capital. I’m trying to make a career in public policy analysis and advocacy, and getting to know people who are hubs, and hopefully bigger hubs, in the hub-and-spoke social networks in which I want to work is good for my career ambitions. “Social networking” is a valuable skill, because social networks are valuable assets.
It’s primal, and it’s wired into us early in life. When we lived in bands of primates foraging on the savanna, you wanted the strongest to be your friend, and so the strongest was very popular. He had as many allies as he could handle, which made him just that much more formidable. His reputation soared, and the desire to be in his inner-circle soared with it. Life was just better if you could manage to be among the chosen, and you often could, because it served his interests as well as yours. Fame, charisma, the human rallying point of social organization, it’s all tangled together, though not always coextensive (there are famous people with no charisma, for instance).
As a child, if you’re not one of the cool kids, you sure want one of them to take you under his or her wing, because that’s a form of protection. Their local fame provides a penumbra under which you can shelter, and “bask in their reflected glory”. If you can’t be cool, you can at least be a mascot.
People who droolingly seek an autograph from a celebrity secretly dream that they’ll be noticed, have a chance to show how lovable or talented they are, and maybe actually become a friend of the celeb. That desire isn’t irrational (though the belief that it might be fulfilled may be): Elvis’s friends made a darn good living being Elvis’s friends, and becoming a member of a celebrity entourage has long been seen as an awfully good gig if you can get it. The fantasy that contact can lead to connection, like buying a lottery ticket, drives the desire to touch, to encounter, to have one moment to have a shot at striking it big.
But reason sometimes intervenes: I always had a stronger desire to meet and talk with people whose fame was based on accomplishments that impressed me than on non-accomplishments that didn’t. I sincerely have no desire whatsoever to meet the vast majority of today’s crop of celebrities, and even the one’s I respect I don’t care that much about meeting. I treasure my conversations with famous scholars far more than I treasure my chat about the New Orleans weather with Timothy Busfield, or my comical encounter with Sam Elliot.
And I treasure encounters with people whose fame is very minor indeed (or even non-existent), but have some admirable talent or achievements or social network location that make them more famous to me. When (Denver Channel 9 political reporter and talk show host) Adam Schrager emailed me to compliment a fund-raising poem I had written (the same one, with a different last stanza, now gracing the home page of this blog), and stopped by my table at a candidate forum to chat with me for a few minutes; or when (hopefully soon to be Colorado Speaker of the House) Rep. Andy Kerr, with whom I did a legal internship during the 2009 legislative session, treats me like the casual friend that I am; or when State Senator Moe Keller warmly greeted me at a “legislative breakfast” hosted by Mental Health America yesterday, and later emailed me that she “loved” my blog, I was as delighted as I could be, because the accessibility of local luminaries is more valuable, and more pleasant, than the “immensity” of national and international ones.
Andy and Moe and Adam will probably feel, on reading themselves referred to as “local luminaries,” and discussed in the context of the attraction to famous people, pretty much the same way I felt a couple of weeks ago at Summerset Festival in South Jeffco, where I spent the weekend at the Jeffco Dems booth, when a young fellow, probably in his late teens, upon learning that I was a state house candidate, took on the demeanor of someone talking to an important person, with a little bit of a tremor in his voice, not realizing how astoundingly unimportant I really am!
But that’s just it. Importance or unimportance is situational, and subjectively perceived. In this brave new world of ours, we don’t have to wait for gatekeepers to allow us to show our stuff; we can type it on our laptops and send it out there, for others to admire or disdain, letting our own qualities distill from the social continuum a little dew drop of fame, evaporating with the rising sun. The person who posts something witty, or insightful, or inspirational, is admired by all who read it, and admired in a more meaningful and substantial way than a Paris Hilton by a gushing fan. We all have gifts to give one another, a song, an insight, a gesture of goodwill, that we can share as broadly as we choose, and by doing so, generate something of lasting importance, flashing through our social networks, rapidly evolving as it goes. We can earn fame in small doses, for moments at a time, and let others earn it as well. And we can retract it from those who have only attracted attention, reserving it for those who have done something of merit.
Just like other forms of capital, fame can be earned, inherited, acquired by deception or chance, horded, spent, or invested. Celebrities who use their celebrity to promote causes and to raise money for charities are spending their fame. When they open a restaurant in their name, they are investing it. When the promote someone else (such as Oprah regularly did with her book club), they are giving some of it to others, though their own supply is not diminished by doing so.
Fame has become more diffuse, too often trivial, a circus of balloon boys and party goers, but also occasionally well deserved, such as the little girl whose brilliant operatic voice on U-Tube landed her on American Idol. We are no longer apes on the savanna, no longer needing to focus on centralized individuals toward which to gravitate and around which to form hierarchies. We are now a decentralized network of interconnected minds, the juice of fame coursing among us all, lighting up momentarily here or there, and moving on.
Like other forms of capital, it is increased by being dispersed, it flows rather than resides, and it should be invested rather than horded. Recognition from the recognized has value, and increases the quantity and quality of recognition to be bestowed.
Let’s be one another’s entourage, sharing a fame that belongs to no one in particular, bestowing on one another the respect that we can all strive to deserve, and creating together the penumbra under which to shelter ourselves. Let’s bask in each other’s reflected glory, in our collective glory, without burdening any one of us with its exclusive possession, or denying the rest of us its occasional delight.
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On my Facebook page’s link to the post What Does Democracy Mean When The Outcome Of The Election Is All But Certain?, Dave Schemel wrote: “This Democracy is a corporate illusion,” to which Stan Dyer responded: “People have no one to blame but themselves when they believe democracy fails them. For one thing, it should never be considered a “large” turnout because more than half of the eligible voters find time to cast ballots. For another, we can’t put all of the burden of change on the backs of elected officials. Many changes can be enacted by ourselves in our own lives. We all have the power to treat each other equally, to recycle, to promote alternative energy, to talk to our neighbors about positive change, to lend a helping hand, to volunteer, to be a positive influence, etc., etc., etc.. Kennedy said it 50 years ago, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.’
I responded to both: “Well said, Stan. I do think there are roles for government that people can’t effectively perform without it, due to the nature of public goods and transaction costs. But government is our agent, and when it does not act according to our will, that is ultimately our own responsibility. When people refer to the influence of corporations over our democracy, what they mean is that because candidates know that elections hinge on expensive advertising, the need for corporate money to win campaigns makes office-holders beholden to them. But, to the extent that that’s true (which is considerable), it’s true because too many people allow themselves to be too swayed by that expensive advertising, and are not diligent enough about understanding the issues and knowing the facts.
“The failings of our democracy are not caused by those who benefit from them, but by those who participate in them. Perhaps, to some extent, the failings are in human nature itself, or perhaps just the current state of human consciousness. If corporations can undermine democracy so easily, by paying for expensive ads that people allow themselves to be swayed by, then the absence of corporate influence would only mean that electoral decisions are being made on equally shallow bases, even if influenced by other mechanisms.” Or, I would now ad, “even if surrendering their sovereignty to other overlords.”
I’m facing an example of this vis-a-vis Jefferson County Public Schools right now. Several months ago, I formed the South Jeffco Community Organization, and suggested as a first project the development of a robust community volunteer tutoring and mentoring program for South Jeffco kids. It made sense to try to organize such a program in cooperation with Jeffco Schools. Cindy Stevenson’s first reaction, in a Columbine Courier article on the project (http://www.lcni5.com/cgi-bin/c2.cgi?038+article+News+20100420190738038038001), was mildly dismissive (in what I’ve come to know as her style of always sounding open to ideas that she is going to do everything in her power to obstruct).
I’ve since spoken at a School Board meeting, met with Holly Anderson (area superintendent for South Jeffco), met with SJCO members, worked with another SJCO member who compiled a list of volunteers, and complied with requests to distance myself from the project so that Jeffco Schools could avoid any appearance of political favoritism (by actually engaging in politically motivated disfavoritism). But it became increasingly apparent that Jeffco Schools was shining us on, in the end telling us to write a letter to our volunteers suggesting they contact their local schools and offer to volunteer in the classroom, something we and they could have done without Jeffco Schools’ involvement.
In an exchange of emails with Cindy Stevenson, she continued to barrage me with empty assurances, insisting that Jeffco Schools loves having volunteers in the schools, has many, and so on and so forth. But the vision she kept anchoring these assurances in was one of a small trickle of volunteers into the occasional classroom, helping out teachers in very marginal ways. My vision of a robust school-community partnership was clearly not anywhere within the range of possibilities she was willing to entertain (a range basically limited to her own preferences and predilections only).
Rather than play the role she had written for me, of letting her politely stonewall me while wasting my energy accomplishing nothing, I started to challenge her, referring to “the dysfunctional status quo” and “the Kabuki theater of faddish professional development workshops”. As a result of challenging her, I received an aggressive letter from a school district lawyer, stating that Dr. Stevenson will not work with me as a community partner.
In the response I will send to School Board after the election, I write:
[I[f the Jeffco Schools administration refuses to work with me as a community partner, volunteering my time and energy in the hopes of improving our schools, on the basis of my . . . criticisms of some aspects of how Jefferson County Schools is being run, that is a decision over which I have no control, except to insist that it is a violation of the district administration’s essentially fiduciary duty to its stakeholders (Dr. Stevenson manages the school district in trust on our behalf), and to strongly urge that the administration either change or be changed. Dr. Stevenson’s strong-arm attempt to exclude the participation of an interested and knowledgeable Jeffco parent, on the flimsy basis that that parent had the gall to be critical of her, merely serves as further confirmation of the accuracy of my observations, and the legitimacy of my concerns.
In a democracy, constituents have a right to take an interest in, comment on, and even criticize particular policies and particular government officials, when it is their considered belief that those policies are contrary to the interests of the people on whose behalf they have been implemented, or those officials are acting in interests other than the interests of the principal whose agent they are. Despite Dr. Stevenson’s insistence to the contrary, I have every right to make such observations about Jeffco schools, and about Dr. Stevenson herself, without losing my status as a member of this community, and a parent of a Jeffco Schools student….
In accord with my past experience and observations, and numerous confidences shared with me by others, it appears to me that being directly or indirectly critical of Dr. Stevenson (or those she has hand-picked to serve her will), or placing the interests of students above allegience to her, is an invitation to be aggressively targeted. One might speculate that it is precisely this autocratic tendency which motivates her to be so opposed to implementing any truly robust partnership with the community.
As a Jeffco resident and father of a Jeffco student, however, I have a right and a responsibility to take an active interest in how my school district is being run. I will continue to be a vocal community advocate for the implementation of a robust school-community partnership, which I believe is very much in the best interests of our students and of our communities. And I will continue to advocate for fundamental improvements in my school district’s administration, reducing the degree to which internal politics undermines the effectiveness of the school district in delivering the highest quality educational services, and reducing the degree to which ritualism preserves a sub-optimal status quo. These are goals that all people sincerely committed to improving the quality of our schools should find completely uncontroversial….
The only issue at hand is the quality of our school district, and the only questions to be addressed involve the merits of what I am advocating, and the accuracy of my concerns about what internal district dynamics are obstructing consideration and implementation of such proposals on the merits. I am not asking for a seat at some internal school district table from which I can be excluded (as Dr. Stevenson seems to believe); I am taking my seat at the table to which I already belong, that of a Jeffco resident and parent. This is our school district, and Cindy Stevenson is our employee.
Here’s the point: Cindy Stevenson does not succeed at being an autocratic local ruler because of corporate backers, or big money, but rather because of constituent complacency and inattention. It may be that Dr. Stevenson’s talents are more beneficial than her autocratic tendencies are costly, but that is a calculation that the public should consciously and knowledgeably make, not one they should surrender to Dr. Stevenson’s own political maneuvering. But the public is oblivious to what many who work in the district have long known: It is a crony-ridden fiefdom, with many talented people chased out and several egregiously incompetent or counterproductively overbearing ones retained and promoted due only to their personal loyalty to Dr. Stevenson.
Why would the people of Jefferson County surrender their sovereignty, surrender their school district, to an autocrat? Why would the school board that represents the people allow this to happen? The answer to the former question is that the residents of Jefferson County (or any other county) just don’t care enough to take an active role in the governance of their school district, and the answer to the latter is that, knowing that they just don’t care enough, the question for the Board isn’t whether the superintendent is an autocrat, but rather how effective an autocrat she is.
Jeffferson County Schools is a microcosm of the nation. We surrender our sovereignty by either apathy or ignorance (or, usually, both), because the former allows government to serve those who serve it, and the latter, even if not accompanied by apathy, only adds the challenge of disinformation and manipulation to the nexus of power. It does not return it to our hands. Recovering it again is no mean feat. It requires a commitment to well-informed robust participation, something that is currently in far too short supply.
This week’s Time magazine cover story is a chilling reminder that those mad hatter’s sipping their insanity-laced tea are no laughing matter (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601101011,00.html). The number armed and very dangerous militias, training to defeat all of us not-completely-insane (sometimes inexcusably Jewish or African American or Hispanic) people who are to them the devil incarnate, with live rounds, and grease paint, and enough loose screws rattle a civilization.
The number of active anti-government militias in America trippled in 2009, from 42 to 127. In one recent training exercise in Ohio, the scenario at which they shot live rounds, including from a belt-fed M-60 machine gun, was that Islamic terrorists were marauding over America because the current pro-Muslim president “had ordered a stand-down against Islamic troops”. One of them opines that he doesn’t know who the Redcoats will be; could be U.N. troops, federal troops, or Mexicans coming across the border (okay, he said “Mexican troops,” but given our current southern-border-xenophobia, and his complete insanity, if I were a bit more Chihuahuan in appearance, that statement would make me even more uncomfortable than I would undoubtedly already be).
These people are linked by “self-described Patriot beliefs,” including the notion that the federal government is a foreign tyrant. Some groups are white supremacists, some are members of a violent branch of Christianity. Obama the non-white, “non-American”, “non-Christian”, non-Neanderthal alien is their catalyst, their symbol of having lost ground to the “other” that they rally, and rail, against. Some end up walking the walk, as well as talking the talk.
James Von Brunn, the 88 year old white supremacist who shot and killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, was also an anti-government “patriot,” who had taken hostages at the Federal Reserve in 1981, had complained on his website that “the American right-wing (is) nothing but talk”, had originally intended to assassinate David Axelrod, President Obama’s senior White House advisor. Von Brunn had written “Obama was created by Jews. Obama does what his Jew masters tell him to do.”
The Time article has more stories of similar wackos, of swastikas and proclaimed desires to assassinate Obama, all simmering and seething through this morass of hatred and ignorance. Most of the Tea Party isn’t so extreme, so violent, though they speak in the metaphors of war and violence. But, to me, they are implicated in this, because they too are a coalescence of ignorance and anger, of a senseless rage toward some despised “other” (see “The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party,” posted just before this).
America, for all of its very real wonders and triumphs as a society and a nation, has always had a certain defective cultural gene, one not quite matched (though not entirely avoided, either) by the post-World War II Western European nations (maybe because they had seen that gene come to fruition right in their midst immediately before and during World War II, and were shocked into enough sense not to let it fester into malignancy again), whose right-wing extremists were never quite what defined them, as they too often are in America.
As absurd as the folks with misspelled signs and internally inconsistent beliefs, relying on a semi-informed “constitutional idolatry,” railing against the government whose services they are relying on to do so, they, and the frothing crests of the waves atop their sea that form these militias and plot these acts of domestic terrorism, are no laughing matter. We need to figure out how to restore some measure of rationality to this country, and we need to do it soon.
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No sooner do I write and post an essay on the literally evolutionary nature of modern information technologies (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=577), then I come across an article in The Economist zeroing in on one aspect of exactly what I’m talking about (http://www.economist.com/node/17091709?story_id=17091709).
In my novel (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=126), a wizard ruminates that “the genius of the many is a captive giant, whose freedom is the ends and the means of all other things.” Wikinomics is about another large step in the liberation of that captive giant, by reducing the transaction costs involved in massive decentralized network communications. Ronald Coase famously said that in the absence of transaction costs, we would bargain our way to maximum utility. Some have interpreted Coase’s Theorem to be more about the formidable obstacle posed by transaction costs than the efficacy of bargaining our way to paradise. But, in either case, the internet has dramatically reduced the size of that obstacle.
Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards
Susan Greene’s column in today’s Denver Post (http://www.denverpost.com/greene/ci_16114434) discusses the current CU Board of Regents, and the choices Coloradans have. Sue Sharkey, a Republican reactionary in the 4th Congressional District running for regent of our flagship university, states that “[c]ollege graduates are more likely to be liberalized than non-college graduates.” Her solution to this unacceptable result of receiving a higher education is to impose upon it her ideological agenda. Steve Bosley, a current regent, was one of four to vote no on “Preserving the Independence of the Board of Regents,” a vote on whether to appeal an appellate court decision that regents cannot ban concealed weaons on campus. At a Tea Party rally, Bosley said, “We’re the storm troopers. The storm troopers are going to take back America.”
One important measure of a civilization is how much it appreciates and cultivates the gift of human consciousness, and how sincerely it aspires to be a bastion of wisdom and compassion. The term “a liberal education” refers to our tradition of striving to ensure that as many of our young people as possible are guided through an exploration of human knowledge, learning about humanity, who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going. Our universities are indeed our temples of human knowledge and thought, where we go to learn and to create new knowledge, to investigate the complexities and subtleties of our world and universe, to improve our ability to act wisely.
Not only is America under attack by self-proclaimed “storm troopers” admittedly determined to undermine our commitment to providing a broad and comprehensive education to our young people, but they are currently the majority on the Board of Regents of Colorado’s flagship university. When a large and vocal minority, passionate, angry, militant, motivated by the desire to catalyze and assist the contraction of the human mind and the human heart, by the rejection of wisdom and compassion, by the advocacy of ignorance and belligerence, succeed in taking over our temples of wisdom, our institutions for cultivating human consciousness, it is not hyperbole to suggest that this is a threat to the very foundation of what it means to be a civilized nation.
Coloradan’s do have a choice this November. As Susan Greene wrote, “The at-large race is a statewide referendum on what we want the regency to be.” By extension, it’s about something more than that as well: It’s a statewide referendum on what kind of a people we want to be. Melissa Hart, the CU Law professor who is a Harvard Law graduate and former U.S. Supreme Court clerk, represents the choice to be a civilized people committed to wisdom and compassion. The alternative is to allow one more victory of a movement determined to force America to worship at the alter of ignorance and belligerence. Let’s not falter in the face of this truly consequential challenge.
Today’s Denver Post carried an interesting story about the Southern Utes having transformed themselves into a successful mineral extraction corporation (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16039376). It is a fascinating story of how one form of organization (tribal) can be deployed in innovative ways (commercial and industrial), and of how the innovation can serve the interests of the members of the organization. But what does it mean for the identity of the Southern Utes? How much of their traditional identity will survive such a transformation, and does it matter if the answer is “not much”? As in all such stories, the underlying question is “how much is gained, and how much is lost?” And how does this transformation fit into the existing social institutional landscape? Are tribal tax exemptions and paternalistic federal policies under such circumstances relics of the past, exploited and suffered in the present?
These kinds of questions, and the questions of how to keep up with social institutional transformations on the ground, so that our public policies do not address the conditions of the past but rather the conditions of the ever-changing present, represent a critical underlying challenge to our policy makers and, as the ultimate sovereign, to each and every one of us. Our fixed beliefs and stagnant certainties do not meet that challenge: We need to constantly strive to apply a broadly applicable system of analysis to a constantly changing world.
