To Himself

The March of Democracy

2011-06-29T22:43:00.000-07:00

Delivered to the Leadership Edmonton Book Club on June 3, 2o11.

One of the reasons I volunteer to facilitate the book club is because it provides me a venue, unlike any other in my life, where I get the chance to share with you some of things that I have learned along my journey. I get excited to share these things with you primarily because I have loved learning them – along with my family - they are the things that have made my life worth living, and it is the love of learning that has always provided for me the most powerful antidote to despair.

For me, the answer to the question “What does it mean to be alive and human?” has a great deal to do with a sense of awe and a sense of wonder. It is the sense that we are, each and every one of us, little miracles. Somehow the Universe has called us into Being; for some reason it wanted us, and I will always feel amazed and a bit dumbfounded whenever that feeling comes over me.

This learning day is about progress and resistance in government and economics, and as such, I want to tell you a short story of democracy.

In 1830, when the United States was in its relative infancy, a young, 25 year-old Parisian named Alexis de Tocqueville toured the young country. The book he would write of his travels and observations, Democracy in America, was an instant classic. After its publication, it would be reprinted 13 times in Tocqueville’s short life span of 55 years. In the preface to Democracy in America, which is as much studied in American Political Science classes today as it was widely read then, Tocqueville writes lovingly of equality and democracy. Tocqueville, in fact, says he wrote his book “with a mind constantly preoccupied by a single thought: the thought of the approaching irresistible and universal spread of democracy throughout the world.”

Tocqueville saw, in democracy, an inevitable consequence, and there is a passage from the Preface that is worth quoting at length:

“A great democratic revolution is taking place in our midst; everybody sees it . . . Everywhere the diverse happenings in the lives of peoples have turned to democracy’s profit; all men’s efforts have aided it, both those who intended this and those who had no such intention, those who fought for democracy and those who were the declared enemies thereof; all have been driven pell-mell along the same road, and all have worked together, some against their will and some unconsciously, blind instruments in the hands of God.

Therefore, the gradual progress of equality is something fated. The main features of this progress are the following: it is universal and permanent; it is daily passing beyond human control, and every event and every man helps it along. Is it wise to suppose that a movement of society which has been so long in train can be halted by one generation? Does anyone imagine that democracy, which has destroyed the feudal system and vanquished kings, will fall back before the middle classes and the rich? Will it stop now, when it has grown so strong and its adversaries so weak?

This whole book has been written under the impulse of a kind of religious dread inspired by the contemplation of this irresistible revolution advancing century by century over every obstacle and even now going forward amid the ruins it has itself created.

God does not Himself need to speak for us to find sure signs of His will; it is enough to observe the customary progress of nature and the continuous tendency of events; I know, without special revelation, that the stars follow orbits in space traced by His finger.

If patient observation and sincere meditation have led men of the present day to recognize that both the past and the future of their history consist in the gradual and measured advance of equality, that discovery in itself gives this progress the sacred character of the will of the Sovereign Master. In that case, effort to halt democracy appears as a fight against God Himself, and nations have no alternative but to acquiesce in the social state imposed by Providence.”

The Human Venture is the story of many lifetimes – of a march advancing century by century. It's not always linear, but our understanding does continue to deepen and to progress, frequently propelled along by powerful visions of the imagination. Tocqueville saw in democracy an inevitable tide sweeping through time, a flood that would eventually engulf the world, and he believed that the movement of democracy and equality was evidence of God and His will. What most impressed Tocqueville about the United States was the “equality of conditions.” “No novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during my stay there than the equality of conditions.” Tocqueville expresses a vision that inspires me, and as you will see, it is a vision that will help frame our discussion of Naomi Klein's Disaster Capitalism.

This was 1830, however, and Tocqueville was at least aware enough, to speak out against slavery. After discussing the unique natures of essentially democratic composition of the American landscape, he tried to square the sides of democracy’s promise with those peoples who did not enjoy the “equality of conditions” he found so striking - quite namely Blacks, Indians, and women. Tocqueville’s passages and observations are some of the most profound and insightful passages in a work full of profound insights, and well worth the read, if you ever get the chance.

The inevitable march of democracy and the vision that the equality of conditions was a divine mandate that would spread across the globe is a beautiful one that unites many of us in action. When we think about battlegrounds – both thoughtscape battlegrounds and real war zones – it becomes obvious to me that the Greatest War has been the war for equality.

This march of democracy includes the Women’s Suffrage movement from the 1780’s to the 1919, beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), culminating in our hemisphere in the right to vote in the US. But the women's suffrage movement is still ongoing in several parts of the world.

This march of democracy includes the American Civil War from 1861-1865, and the abolition of slavery.

Nineteen years after Tocqueville's visit, , another book would be written that would not only help inspire the American Civil War, it would help inspire freedom fighters throughout the globe - and that work is Civil Disobedience.

In 1849, Henry David Thoreau would write Civil Disobedience. Today, “although seldom mentioned without references to Gandhi or King, ‘Civil Disobedience’ has more history than many suspect. In the 1940's it was read by the Danish resistance, in the 1950's it was cherished by those who opposed McCarthyism, in the 1960's it was influential in the struggle against South African apartheid, and in the 1970's it was discovered by a new generation of anti-war activists.” http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil.html

In Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau was disgusted with slavery and the Mexican American War, and he called on individuals to be a counter-friction to stop the machine.

Originally delivered a lecture entitled “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government,” Civil Disobedience if chock full of memorable quotations, but the one that exists as a central tenet to my own individual morality is the following:

“It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.”

For Thoreau, he was speaking of getting off the Negro’s shoulders with the abolition of slavery. This question, for me, has always been formed in the present and not the past tense - “Whose shoulders am I on? And how can I wash my hands of support for things I do not believe in?” Part of that, for me, has been leaving my country. I am an immigrant, and I join a long chain of immigrants. But I miss the US. I miss Oregon. Being in Canada is still strange and disorienting at times.

But by about 2000, I withdrew my consent. From the United States’s tax policy, to some of the individual State immigration policies, to ill-conceived and poorly executed foreign wars, by 2002, I found myself saying similar things to Thoreau – “It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law so much as a respect for the right. . . I cannot for an instant recognize as my government [that] which is the slave’s government also.” Whether it was the history of the CIA involvement in deposing democratically elected governments in Latin America, the World Trade Organization riots in Seattle in 2000, the Supreme Court’s decision to elect George H.W. Bush, or George H.W. Bush himself and his heart-breaking legacy of "enemy combatants," Abu Ghraib, the PATRIOT ACT, or his embracing and promoting the unfair centralization of wealth, I could no longer recognize the United States as my government. What Tocqueville saw in 1830 was no longer visible. The dream for democracy, at least in the United States, had died.

The equality of conditions had come to mean that everyone but a very few was poor.

And I suppose it was at that moment that I realized that Tocqueville's Grand Dream was only dead if I allowed it to be. The Women’s Suffrage movement was a long, sometimes bloody battle. And t still continues to be bloody. The American Civil War ended slavery, but not oppression. And it continues to be bloody. The Civil Rights movement took, 100 years after the conclusion of the American Civil War, the lives of one of the greatest human heroes who ever lived. The battle for economic justice continues. And it continues to be bloody.

No other man in history did a better job at expressing what kind of government would command his respect than Martin Luther King, Jr.

"We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America only to take the profits out with not concern for the social betterment of the countries and say, 'This is not just.' The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. . . . . We must move past indecision to action . . . . If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight."

This march of democracy has yet to encompass the 3 billion people alive today who still live on the trite statistic of little more than $2/day. The march of democracy has yet to include all the protesters of the Arab Spring who have fought and died to bring down totalitarian regimes. This march of democracy has yet to include anyone and everyone who has fought to keep important ecosystems in place so that their children would be able to grow up with trees, animals, and fresh water.

So what action will you take today to make sure you act in a way that gets you off the shoulders of your brothers and sisters?

Taking Control of Your Flashlight

2011-05-24T21:32:00.000-07:00

My colleague Tiina and I had the pleasure of facilitating a morning dialogue with the managers of our organization. The session explored the limitations of the human mind, and we discussed how we could adopt and implement even better processes to produce good decisions, and processes where we could learn from our mistakes. The key works we used were The Invisible Gorilla, Think Again, Teaching Smart People How to Learn, and How the Mighty Fall. This was my 15 minute introduction to the morning session, which took a look at the special class of mistake made by highly intelligent and successful people.

Taking Control of Your Flashlight

May 10, 2011

For most of this morning, we are going to explore our mistakes through discussion and dialogue. But before we get to the discussion, I want to take a couple minutes and introduce you to a special class of mistake – the kind of mistake made by highly successful people who are well trained and experts in their field. This type of mistake tends to have more catastrophic results for the organizations they work for, and therefore requires a greater deal of scrutiny.

Flashlight as metaphor for consciousness

All metaphors breakdown on a one-to-one comparison, meaning that no metaphor can withstand strict logical scrutiny. But for our purposes today, the idea that your consciousness is a flashlight is a useful tool to highlight some outstanding characteristics of how our evolved operating system works.

First and foremost, the flashlight, like your consciousness, is a powerful tool. It can be directed to help illuminate a dark room. We build tools that enable us to fight and control nature, and our consciousness is a powerful tool that we can direct in a dark room so that we can maneuver safely. It helps us detect information, and if we train it one spot, we can see. Our flashlight enables us to have vision, and with this sight, we can avoid hazards and select our direction.

But our consciousness, like the light of the flashlight, is very limited. If we are in the woods, it may light up the path ahead of us, but it could never lighten up the whole woods, and there may be danger outside our limited vision that presents us danger. Moreover, the light can only shine in one direction. If our focus is directed here, we won’t be able to see what is over there. In other words, we can never pay attention to everything that may be happening in the environment at any given time.

Technologically, most of us know how to operate a flashlight. We know how to turn it on, and we know if it doesn’t work, it probably needs a new battery or a new bulb. We have a general understanding of how bulbs and batteries work, but if we really needed a flashlight and were without one, most of us would have no idea for how to go about building one. We wouldn’t know how to mould the plastics and forge the metals. Most of us have a very shallow understanding of how to build and repair it. Similarly, we know that one of the great final frontiers of science is gaining a greater understanding of how the human mind works – from helping people to recover from strokes to developing a more effective suite of pharmaceuticals to assist people with chemical imbalances. How do the physio-chemical processes work within the mind? Is there a spiritual genotype? In attempting to understand answer all these questions, there is a great convergence of biology, chemistry, and physics – not to mention the implications for religious and ethical thought.

The final consideration in our metaphor is that we can turn our flashlight off, in two ways. First of all, we can choose to turn our flashlight off. If the purpose of the flashlight is for illuminating dark spaces, we can choose not to illuminate the dark spaces in our lives. The educated person is completely aware of the many things they do not know – of their encyclopedic ignorance – and throughout the course of our lives, many of us will exert tremendous effort to illuminate as much of this ignorance as we possibly can. Others of us will accept that there is a great deal of truth to the old adage that “ignorance is bliss” and will turn their flashlights off (in part, because the world has provided so much artificial lighting and we rarely need to exert ourselves). These individuals will cease from the difficult path of inquiry and stop the process of pushing back the boundaries of our ignorance.

And finally, there will come a time when every flashlight has outlived its usefulness. There is, inevitably, death. Not to be morbid on a beautiful Spring Tuesday morning, but there is nothing more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the hour. There will come a time when our flashlight turns off once and for all.

The Triune Brain

I mentioned earlier that all metaphors break down on a one-to-one comparison, and the metaphor for consciousness as a flashlight breaks down at the point of free will. The flashlight cannot “choose” what it is paying attention to. We direct according to our own free will. We make choices. Don’t we?

Neuroscientist Paul MacLean suggests “that the brain can be split into three sections, each of which comes from a different group of our ancestors. The oldest, reptilian section is the brain stem, responsible for managing the daily routines of life: heartbeat, respiration, reproduction, and defensive behaviors. The next section of the brain evolved from our mammalian ancestors and is referred to as the limbic system. This section of the brain is responsible for memory and emotion. It contains the amygdala, responsible for managing fear, and the nucleus accumbens, responsible for managing pleasure. The most recently evolved and largest section of our brain, the neocortex, which we share with primates, is the part associated with consciousness and rationality” (Think Again, pages 43-44).

It is important to understand this cerebral heritage, because in the article Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t, Overbye writes:

"A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.”

I love this image! Instead of imagining a rational little man in my head making logical decisions, there’s actually a circus. This is a very important image because the human part of the brain rests on some very powerful components, and “rational” thoughts may only appear rational. Studies recounted by Overbye have come to show just how constant, and unconscious, the process of self-justification is. The older, powerful reptilian and mammalian parts of the brain – driven by lust and fear, comfort and survival, our defense mechanisms and our desire to avoid unpleasantness – are largely behind our decisions, which we are constantly and unconsciously dressing up with "reasons" to explain and justify them.

The other useful thing about this image of a monkey riding a tiger is that it drives home a very important point. We are born with a biological memory developed over millions of years as an animal, and the truly interesting part of this here is that Joseph LeDoux has developed a map that shows there are two pathways for information to be processed – one is with emotions and rational thought, and the other is emotions without rational thought (Think Again, pages 45-46). The big point is that it is possible for us to make seemingly rational choices without engaging the neocortex at all. It is also possible for these seemingly rational decisions to be deeply flawed. It is possible that we are not directing our flashlight as much as we like to think we are.

And this leads me to the major message for today: Be on guard for those occasions when your mental models – all your thoughts about how the world is or how it ought ti be – inform the evidence, rather than the evidence informing the construction of your thoughts.

To Err is Human

This is one of the reasons why it is so easy for us to make mistakes. Our emotions are more involved than we like to think. This is not to say that emotions are bad. Our emotional brain is very good at making some remarkably good decisions. But when we don’t acknowledge the powerful role emotions can play, we can get into serious troubles, in ways you might not even think.

In How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins outlines a five stage process of organizational collapse. Stage 1 is Hubris Born of Success. Success feels good, and the people responsible for the success begin to “view success as an entitlement” and they “lose sight of the true underlying factors that created success in the first place.” It is the feeling of success that becomes the eventual undoing. And Collins’ research is very analogous to the work of Matthew Olson, Derek van Bever, and Seth Verry who also study corporate collapse and find that 87% of the time, the fault of the collapse is management itself – very frequently (but not always) the very same management that brought the enterprise success in the first place. They write that when a company started to collapse, “we saw a cycle of disdain, denial, and rationalization that kept many management teams from responding meaningfully to market changes.” The role of positive emotions changed the evidence. The authors of “When Growht Stalls” go on to say that the management teams should not have been surprised; “the market data relating to this growth stall were not hidden from executives; the challenge was to separate the signal from the noise.” Many times these management teams couldn’t see the data because collapse was beyond their comprehension – they would rationalize their emotional response. They knew what it felt like to be successful, after all, and these emotional tags assured them they knew how to be successful.

So the big questions become, “How can we detect a growing sense of entitlement? How can we make sure we see the signals within the noise?”

These questions are not as easy to answer as you might think. Chris Argyris begins a short little book entitled Teaching Smart People How to Learn with the following words:

“Any company that aspires to succeed in the tougher business environment of the 1990s must first resolve a basic dilemma: success in the marketplace increasingly depends on learning, yet most people don’t know how to learn. What’s more, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it. I am talking about the well-educated, high-powered, high-commitment professionals who occupy key leadership positions in the modern corporation.”

In other words – Chris Argyris is talking about us. He’s saying that the people most responsible for the organization are not very good at learning. Why? If I had 15 hours, I would still only be able to give a brief answer to that question, but I am going to begin to answer that question by briefly looking internally at one of the essential constitutions of successful people, and then externally at one aspect of the nature of library data itself.

First, we are not very good at learning precisely because we are successful. Both Jim Collins and Chris Argyris state that success presents its own obstacle. For Argyris, successful people are single loop learners. We have learned values and techniques that have made us successful in the first place, and every success we achieve reinforces our underlying assumptions about our customers and the world, our values, and our techniques. Most of the time, we don’t make mistakes because we have learned the techniques that will get us results 99% of the time. Situation X looks a lot like situations A, B, C and D, and by exploiting the same tactics, we will be successful with a new situation based on the success of past behaviors and actions. But when presented with that 1% of occasions when we do not get the results we expect, we become defensive, and instead of engaging in double-loop learning, where we incorporate feedback in order to adjust our mental models, we engage in defensive reasoning.

Chris Argyris conducted studies of management consultants for 15 years, and after 15 years, he observed that most professionals, when asked to find flaws or shortcomings in their work, often tended to find reasons external to them. The failure was attributable to “economic meltdowns, acts of God, or government rulings – things for which managers could not be held accountable (When Growth Stalls, page 3). Teams that failed to have successful outcomes with their clients would point fingers at customers not expressing their requirements properly, some other team not fulfilling their dependencies on time and so on. In a nutshell, a team would blame their managers for not listening to their concerns or for taking decisions autonomously and not taking the team into confidence. The managers would blame their CEOs for setting high and often unrealistic goals and visions. CEOs would blame the board of directors for putting a lot of pressure and pulling all the strings, and the Board of Directors would blame external forces. The buck stopped nowhere.

But, as Jim Collins states it, “Whether you prevail or fail, endure or die, depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.” He even states that successful leadership teams often recognize the role of luck, and that companies have started the process of decline when they fail to acknowledge the role of luck and f events they did not control that might have played a helpful role, instead presuming that success is due entirely to the superior qualities of enterprise and its leadership.

Whenever we externalize blame for our shortcomings, we are possibly engaging in a self-destructive act of defensive reasoning, which makes it difficult for us to see what is really happening in the real world. Our thoughts about ourselves prevent us from seeing the world as it truly is.

The other obstacle to seeing the signal rather than the noise is in the nature of the data itself, especially library data. In the section you read for this session, Jim Collins talks about the dangerous nature of ambiguous data. On page 70, Collins writes “The greatest danger comes not in ignoring clear and unassailable facts, but in misinterpreting ambiguous data in situations when you face severe or catastrophic consequences if the ambiguity resolves itself in a way that’s not in your favor.” Having recently participated in the Business Plan Team, I can state with even greater certainty that most of the data we have and use to make decisions is ambiguous. This doesn’t mean our data is good or bad – it merely speaks to the existential nature of the data itself. Most of the time, it doesn’t mean anything.

The number cardholders – ambiguous. The number of holds on our overflowing hold shelves – ambiguous. The number of visitors, program attendees, and one-on-one computer training sessions – these are all ambiguous. They don’t really tell us anything. The danger is that we often make them mean something favorable to us – not because we are deceitful people, but because there is a certain amount of pressure to present all of these outcomes and outputs in a positive light. Furthermore, when we say these positive messages to external sources, there is the danger that we will believe them ourselves. One of my favorite blog posts is entitled, ‘Don’t Drink Your Own Kool-Aid.”

In the post, Anthony Lee is talking about startup businesses, but it can apply to established businesses, as well. Companies are driven by “passion, optimism, persistence, hope and dreams. All these traits are essential to fueling the process of inventing a product and innovating a business model. The beautiful thing about startups is that they are emotional and intellectual creations brought to life through shared vision and hard work.” This is the beautiful thing about our library. We are an emotional and intellectual creation that has been brought to life through shared vision and hard work. It’s a great definition for us, and as we work to find our niche in a rapidly changing environment, we are like a start-up in a lot of ways.

Lee goes on to say that, “As a leader in a company, it is critical to create a culture that allows for open, fact-based dialogue and dissent.” This is actually a very succinct expression of the behaviors that Collins mentions as very important to leadership teams on the way up. People bring forth data – unpleasant data – and team members argue and debate, not to improve their personal position, but to find the best answers to support the overall cause.

Lee ends his post by saying, “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk. And your good friends, your real supporters in the entrepreneurial enterprise, should not let you fool yourself either. Don’t surround yourself with people who just reinforce your worldview. Surround yourself with advisors and investors who are honest enough to call bullshit. But don’t confuse brutal honesty with a lack of enthusiasm for you or your business. It is absolutely necessary.”

So, with this session today, we are inviting you talk about some mistakes you may made or a mistake that we may have made as an organization. We are asking some very brave questions, and we invite you to give some very brave answers.

· What is the worst professional decision or mistake you have made at work?

· Do you find it hard to answer that question? Why?

· What did you learn about the process of making decisions from your mistake? What have you done to prevent future occurrences?

· Where have we failed organizationally before?

Moral Relativity, Propaganda and the Birth of the Modern

2011-04-16T13:49:00.000-07:00

Leadership Edmonton Book Club

Friday, April 15, 2011

Books discussed:

Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges

Liberty and the News, Walter Lippmann

Before we get to our discussion, I want to take less than 20 minutes and frame our discussion by going back in time a little bit, and hopefully, by doing so, elucidate some key threads that string themselves through Hedges, Lippmann, and Time itself.

One of the more interesting, if ultimately pointless, questions of history is “When did the Modern Era actually begin?” The great historian Paul Johnson believes that the Modern Era began during a solar eclipse on May 29, 1919, shortly after the conclusion of World War I. The eclipse would prove if Albert Einstein's Theories of Relativity, published in 1905 and 1916 respectively, were correct. In publishing the General Theory of Relativity in 1916, Einstein “insisted his calculations must be verified by empirical observation,” and Einstein had devised three tests and invited the world to wait three years and witness the event along with him. Then, and only then, could one pass judgment on the validity of his work.

Einstein’s math would, of course, be proven correct. Gravity affected light, meaning that light itself had mass, and Einstein would instantaneously become a household name around the world as the Quantum Age was born. Two major cultural developments would follow from Einstein’s publication, and each would define the unique culture of the 20th Century. As Johnson states, “The emergence of Einstein as a world figure in 1919 is a striking illustration of the dual impact of great scientific innovators on mankind. They change our perception of the physical world and increase our mastery of it. But they also change our ideas.”

The first effect - our perception of the physical world and our increased mastery of it - was already starting to take place as the utter conquest of science and its applications. Einstein once said that the “eternal mystery of the universe is its comprehensibility.” Our comprehensibility of metallurgy, chemistry and physics extended to our ability to transform matter and entire ecosystems by sheer force of our human intellect and our gargantuan will - often with disastrous consequences. These disastrous consequences were most strikingly visible in the human destroying effects of World War I.

In 1919, at the time of the solar eclipse that would demonstrate Einstein’s genius, the world was in a collective “shell shock” from the horror of a war that many people did not want. Conscription riots in the United States were so severe that the United States abandoned the Bill of Rights by passing the Alien & Sedition Acts, which prohibited the democratic operation of the free press and free speech, and placed dissenters such as Eugene Debs in prison. This remains, in my mind, the greatest betrayal of democratic ideals in the history of the United States, and one of the greatest hypocrisies ever committed, considering we (I still consider myself an American) went to war to "make the world safe for democracy." In Canada, 404,000 men received conscription notices, 385,000 (or 95%) of whom sought exemption. The most violent opposition occurred in Quebec, and Ottawa declared martial law during the Easter Riots.

World War I was not a popular war, and we will return to the suppression of anti-war forces in the United States and Canada in just a moment, but for now, what I want to simply note that there was widespread opposition to a war that would eventually claim 60,000 Canadian lives and leave 173,000 Canadians wounded after the Conscription Crisis of 1917. In Britain, 160,000 wives lost husbands, and 300,000 children lost fathers. France lost 1.4 million soldiers, and this doesn’t even count civilians. In Russia, 4.5 to 7 million children were homeless. 750,000 German civilians had died from the British blockade.

In 1919, at the time of the solar eclipse that would prove e=mc2, the world was reeling and struggling to make meaning in a desolate void. This is the world of after-shocks Walter Lippmann lived in when he wrote Liberty and the News. The second cultural shift that would come as a result of Einstein’s publication of his two theories of relativity would be the transmutation of the concept of "relativity" by the moral realm. If time was relative, perhaps truth and moral standards were also relative. The scientific concept of relativity had become an idea that inadvertently became the force that would displace the traditional moorings of faith and morals. World War I - with its trench warfare, machine guns, mustard gas, millions dead, and the living landscape populated with grotesque zombies of physically and psychologically broken human beings - had left the world confused. In the wake of World War I, the pillars of traditional morality came crashing down, to be replaced by Nietzsche's phrase, "a will to power."

It’s important to note that Einstein’s concept of relativity, for him, only extended as far as his mathematics. Einstein was not a practicing Jew, “but he acknowledged a God. He believed passionately in absolute standards of right and wrong.” But Einstein would live “to see moral relativism, to him a disease, become a social pandemic, just as he lived to see his fatal equation bring into existence nuclear warfare. There were times, he said at the end of his life, when he wished he had been a simple watchmaker.” This statement conveys a feeling of disillusionment and disappointment that I think we have all expressed from from time to time during our time together in this course.

The transmutation of relativism from a mathematical to a moral principle would unhinge the world. The Stone Age Gods had been destroyed, and I want to mention two men who would fill this vacuum - Sigmund Freud and Walter Lippmann. Freud had a profound impact on Lippmann, and he would to write a friend, “I have been studying Freud with a great deal of enthusiasm for several months now,” and Lippmann would see in Freud a new analytical tool that would help to explain why human politics often worked contrary to human needs. Hedges calls Lippmann brilliant, but the “darkest figure of the period” because he was “fearful of popular rule and brilliant enough to manipulate public opinion.” Equipped with his brilliance and his newly found interest in psychology, Lippmann would have intimate, first-hand knowledge of how easy it was to manipulate and control popular opinion.

The unification of psychology and the “mass media” had informally begun 25 years earlier, which is why I, for my own part, mark the dawn of the Modern Era to 1895. Walter Lippmann worked for the New York World, a newspaper that was originally purchased by Joseph Pulitzer in 1883. In 1895, a gentleman by the name of William Randolph Hearst would purchase the New York Journal, and Pulitzer and Heart would become embroiled in a different type of war, a publication war, that relied on two things – corporate advertising and yellow journalism. Through corporate advertising, Hearst and Pulitzer were able to sell their papers for a penny and yet increase profits by securing advertisers who were drawn to an increased readership. And at the low price of a penny, Pulitzer and Hearst’s publishing strategies would sell thousands and thousands of papers, through tactics that have remained virtually unchanged for 115 years and have been successfully transported into the digital world. The newspaper of 1895 looks remarkably similar to the front page to CNN.com. Yellow journalism consisted of 5 characteristics:

scare headlines in huge print, often of minor news

lavish use of pictures, or imaginary drawings

use of faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudo-science, and a parade of false learning from so-called experts

emphasis on full-color Sunday supplements, usually with comic strips (thanks to technology, this has become the daily standard)

dramatic sympathy with the "underdog" against the system.

Hearst and Pulitzer are widely credited for dragging the United States into the Spanish-American War by publishing largely sensationalist and frequently false reports of Spanish atrocities. These reports confirmed the anti-Catholic prejudices of the mostly Protestant U.S. public. Fueled by sensationalist news, anti-Catholic prejudice, and the dream of Manifest Destiny, the U.S would enter the war when the USS Maine exploded and sank in the Havana harbor, killing 266 American Sailors. Hearst and Pulitzer demanded a quick and immediate response, fueling a public demand for war. The media men got their way, despite President McKinley’s hopes to reach a diplomatic solution. The US Army, at this point, numbered only 25,000 men.

The actions of Hearst and Pulitzer, and the subsequent Spanish-American War would inspire the formation of the American Anti-Imperialist League, which counted amongst its members, Jane Addams, Mark Twain, Henry James, Williams James, President Grover Cleveland, John Dewey, and the patron saint of public libraries, Andrew Carnegie. This was the liberal class of 1900.

Walter Lippmann was a young boy at this point, only six years old, but if he had been older, he would have witnessed the exact same pattern that exerted itself in the run-up to World War I. You are all familiar with the saying that “The Pen is Mightier Than the Sword,” but what happens when the Pen is in one hand, and the Sword is in the other? What happens when the the media plays to our most basic bio-social drivers of rage and patriotic nationalism in a concentrated and orchestrated fashion, from the top down? Hedges, on pages 68 - 74, relates the role of the work of George Creel & the Committee on Public Information. As I mentioned, there was widespread opposition to World War I before George Creel began his work, but if you look at the results of his efforts, it is easy to see how quickly propaganda can turn the tide of an unwilling people. One can certainly see why more than Lippmann have been fearful of popular rule and would have viewed “the masses” as unworthy of self-governance. They are easily fooled and easily manipulated. The masses are dumb and malleable.

This underlying assumption of democracy is not only prevalent, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and this is how "the public" are often portrayed by the media. In Public Opinion, Lippmann captures the issue perfectly. When reporting about a labour strike, the reporter only sees the strike, not the complex issues leading up to it. “The strikers feel the temper of the foreman, the nerve-wracking monotony of the machine, the depressingly bad air, the drudgery of their wives, the stunting of their children, the dinginess of their tenements. . . . But the reporter and reader see at first only a strike and some catchwords. . . . it is nature of things that the workers are at a disadvantage. . . . If you study the way many a strike is reported in the press, you will find, very often, that the issues are rarely in the headlines, barely in the leading paragraphs, and sometimes not even mentioned at all.” This is 1922. Almost 100 years later, the situation is practically the same, if only worse. As Hedges states, our current situation can be summed as follows, “Employees in public-sector unions - one of the last havens from the onslaught of the corporate state - are denounced for having ‘Cadillac health plans’ and generous retirement benefits. Teachers’ unions in California and New Jersey are attacked as parasites thriving at taxpayer expense.” (Here is a recent example demonstrating how this works - notice the utter lack of issues and the conclusion sympathetic to the perspective that public employees are on the gravy train.)

The permanent disadvantage of the working class is the end result of what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman have described as the “Propaganda Model,” in their landmark work from 1988, Manufacturing Consent. The Propaganda Model has changed the meaning and redefined the battleground for intellectual freedom. In a highly corporatized information environment, the distinction between public & private has become meaningless, and the word democratic becomes a hard one to use. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's Propaganda Model highlights the effects that corporate media have in constructing “truth” and altering the standard for meaningful democratic action. If “truth” is an accuracy of correspondence, than Chomsky & Herman offer 320 pages worth of proof that our media deliberately deceives us. The "news" does not correspond accurately to actual events. In the propaganda model, truth becomes what governments and the “free press” can get you to believe. Governments are often openly and covertly involved in the deception, by denying access to certain journalists and rewarding others more likely to write a favourable story. Government delays and bureaucratic obstacles also thwart the ability to take informed and meaningful action on events. Ignorance is the absence of that which could be known that would be helpful, and information that is false, omits importants parts of the story, or is never produced and released paralyzes attempts to challenge the status quo and make meaningful human progress.

And the greatest lie we have been told is that we want it this way. We like being misinformed so that we can be more easily manipulated; that's why they call it "market-driven journalism." Chomsky and Herman disagree, saying:

"There is little reason to believe that they [the public] would not like to understand why they are working harder with stagnant or declining incomes, have inadequate medical care at high costs, and what is being done in their name all over the world. If they are not getting much information on these topics, the propaganda model can explain why: the sovereigns who control the media choose not to offer such material."

Chomsky and Herman dedicate Manufacturing Consent to Herbert Schiller, whose Information Inequality was originally published in 1996 and remains a book that inspired me to go to library school. As soon as I entered library school, I knew the battle I would be engaged in; a battle we were most likely to lose. Schiller states:

"American libraries and the profession of librarianship are confronted with a structural transformation in the overall economy. It is nothing less than the thorough privatization of the information function. The production, processing, storing and transmitting of information have been scooped up in to private, for-profit hands. Social sources and repositories of information have been taken over for commercial use and benefit. It is not because American libraries and library schools have fallen behind in the mastery of the new information technology that their existence increasingly is called into question. It is their bedrock principles and long-term practices that collide with the realities of today's corporate-centered and market driven economy. To the extent to which librarians insist on free and untrammeled access to information, they will be treated by the privatizers as backward-looking, if not obsolete, irrelevant, and unrealistic."

And here is our struggle. As librarians, and as a people, we find ourselves in league with everyone who longs for the free transmission of information. Our allies are anyone who has ever wanted their government to be truly transparent, anyone who has struggled for information about the health effects of genetically modified organism's or pharmaceuticals on the human body, anyone who has been curious about the health effects of DDT and other poisons and toxins released by Monsanto, those who crave research about the health of the our waterways, and those who want to know why and where their loved one was taken in the middle of the night. The issue of information inequality and class warfare becomes deeply personal to me because I have watched my parents struggle to understand why my father lost his pension after a lifetime of hard work, and why my mother hasn’t had health insurance for the better part of the last decade in the "greatest country on Earth."

I also point to 1895 for the dawn of the Modern Era because it was in that year that H.G. Wells published The Time Machine, the story of one race of humans endlessly feeding on another group of humans before the final collapse where the Earth's ecosystems are almost entirely destroyed. If this isn’t a fairly accurate prediction of late-stage capitalism, I don’t know what is. The Time Machine was originally published in 1895, and in the concluding pages, Wells writes that the Time Traveller “thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.”

We must live as if the end is not inevitable. We must live as though our corporate civilization will not inevitably fall back in upon itself and destroy us and everything we love. And I do choose to live that way. It is the only way I understand courage. And so, the questions that become more and more important to me every day are these: Who are those that will benefit by keeping us in the dark? And how can we stop them?

Questions for discussion:

What is classical liberalism?

Who are the liberal class? Why are they dying, or better said, who is killing them? Or did they commit suicide?

Books cited:

Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis in America, Herbert Schiller (1996)

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman (2002)

Modern Times: A History of the World from Twenties to the Nineties, Paul Johnson (1996)

Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann (1922, 1997)

The Time Machine, H.G. Wells (1895, 1986)

The Animal Mind

2011-02-01T20:41:00.000-08:00

Introductory remarks delivered to the Leadership Edmonton Book Club on January 7, 2011.

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “the worst enemy you can encounter will always be you, yourself. You lie in wait for yourself in caves and woods.” Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) is perfect proof of this, and this happens because, as James Harvey Robinson plainly says it in The Mind in the Making: The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform, “We do not think enough about thinking.”Our meta-cognitive skills are not yet fully developed, and most of us are on "evolutionary autopilot."

In October 2007, Dennis Overbye wrote a piece for the New York Times called, “Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t.” This article investigated the topic of free will and tackled that famous philosophical question, is free will an illusion? As Rene Descartes asked it, how do we know we’re not just a brain in a vat controlled by an evil genius? The evil genius, in this case, are the instincts and emotions that evolved with us when we lived a very different lifestyle but still reside in us as the much older foundation of the human animal. They are our bio-social drivers - our animal impulses - the basic drive to experience pleasure and avoid pain. In the article, Overbye writes:

"A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.”

I love this image! Instead of imagining a rational little man in my head making logical decisions, there’s actually a monkey trying to ride a tiger, and all the while the monkey is convincing himself he is in control of the much larger and more powerful beast. Studies recounted by Overbye have come to show just how constant, and unconscious, the process of self-justification is. The older, powerful animal brain – driven by lust and fear, comfort and survival - is largely behind our rational decisions, but we are constantly and unconsciously engaged in the process of dressing them up with "reasons" justifying our primordial desires.

We are deluding ourselves if we assume we are in control of the circus. Human intellectual history - whether it is St. Augustine speaking in his Confessions about regretting his sinful indulgence of the flesh or the Buddhist quest to detach one’s Self from all desire – is full of literature that recognizes the reality that we are largely driven by forces requiring a great deal of conscious effort to become aware of and exert control over.

The other useful thing about this image of a monkey riding a tiger is that it drives home a very important point. We are not born as a tabula rasa (blank slate), as the influential political philosopher John Locke suggested. We are born with a biological memory developed over millions of years as an animal. Even though the Creationists have yet to admit it, by the time Robinson wrote this in 1921, it was pretty well established that evolution "is one of the most fully substantiated of historical facts and one which we can never neglect in our attempts to explain man as he is now. We are all descended from the lower animals. We are furthermore still animals with not only an animal body, but with an animal mind.”

Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) provides countless examples of occasions when intelligent people are not as rational or as scientific as their training would lead them to believe. Our thoughtscapes are frequently informed by our illogical desires and our need to protect the self-image we have created for ourselves as learned professionals, because of these inherited and culturally reinforced operating systems.

Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) begins with the illustrative case of Ignac Semmelweiss, a doctor who realized that washing his hands when helping a woman give birth improved both the mother's mortality rate and that of the child. Semmelweiss is remembered by history with the moniker, “The Savior of Mothers.” When he shared this information with other doctors, however, they refused to adopt the practice of washing hands with a chlorinated lime solution because "they [the medical establishment of the time] would have had to admit that they had been the cause of the deaths of all those women in their care." This would have caused too much cognitive dissonance and destroyed the doctors' self-concept as wise healers. And so the medical establishment rejected his ideas. In Semmelweiss’ own words: "Most medical lecture halls continue to resound with lectures on epidemic childbed fever and with discourses against my theories. […] The medical literature for the last twelve years continues to swell with reports of childbed fever epidemics, and in 1854 in Vienna, the birthplace of my theory, 400 maternity patients died from childbed fever. In published medical works my teachings are either ignored or attacked. The medical faculty at Würzburg awarded a prize to a monograph written in 1859 in which my teachings were rejected."

And this leads us to the most important point: We must constantly be on guard for those occasions when our thoughtscape (our self-conception and our prejudices and our desires) informs the evidence, rather than evidence informing the construction of our thoughtscape.

Other horrifying examples cited in the book are the number of innocent people whose lives have been destroyed by repressed-memory-recovery therapy or by the police. Despite the evidence from Holocaust concentration camps that "Truly traumatic events--terrifying, life-threatening experiences--are never forgotten," "clinicians who believe in repression see it everywhere" (p.112-113). And so therapists coerced adults and children into believing they had been raped when no rape had actually occurred. Innocent daycare establishments were destroyed. But even when confronted with "the facts," susceptible individuals refused to realign their reality in order to keep their self-conception undisturbed. The sad case of Holly Ramona will stay with me for a long time, and the metaphor the authors use on page 95 is an incredibly profound one that not only describes the difficulties individuals have in changing course, the but the difficulty we find ourselves in culturally. “To change her mind now would have been like turning a steamship around in a narrow river – not much room to maneuver and hazards in every direction; much easier to stay the course.” It is so much easier for us to stay the course, that the chances of our civilization making the necessary course corrections are slim to none.

As the authors state on page 108, “The weakness of the relationship between accuracy and confidence is one of the best-documented phenomena in the 100-year history of eyewitness memory research.” The strength of a belief or a conviction only proves the strength of the belief or the conviction – not the validity of the belief. Yet confidence, in an of itself, has become a virtue and is one of those things that tends to be very persuasive. We continue to describe people positively who have the “strength of their convictions,” without investigating the quality of the conviction, at all. We need to do better at evaluating the quality of the belief and how that belief was acquired. A person should not be admired when they are confident and steadfastly convinced of a false belief. If it were, we would respect the 19 hijackers who flew into the Twin Towers.

And yet, we can see the existence of commitment to falsehood all around us. As the authors point out in the Chapter Law & Disorder, "The most powerful piece of evidence a detective can produce in an investigation is a confession, because it is the one thing most likely to convince a prosecutor, jury, and judge of a person's guilt. Accordingly, police interrogators are trained to get it, even if that means lying to the suspect and using, as one detective proudly to a reporter, 'trickery and deceit.' Most people are surprised to learn this is entirely legal. . . . Inducing an innocent person to confess is obviously one of the most dangerous mistakes that can occur in police interrogation, but most detectives, prosecutors, and judges don't think it is possible." I was arrested in my junior year in college for a crime I did not commit, and I spent two days in jail being interrogated, after the police had told my mother by phone that I would not need to spend time in jail. My time in jail was, as you might suspect, unpleasant, and the police tried to trip me up plenty of times, even telling me they had my fingerprints on one of the forged documents. It was a grueling 36 hours, but I never confessed and would end up clearing my name on one of the most unreliable police tools in the trade - the polygraph. The police were absolutely convinced I had been involved in the crime, and they were willing to lie and use tactics that would confirm their belief. When I passed the polygraph, the prime investigating officer asked me I had taken Valium, even then believing I was guilty and had simply managed to outsmart the system.

Our internal confidence as professionals prevents us from seeing our own mistakes. As the authors describe on page 131, “the idea that you sent the wrong person to prison for fifteen years is so antithetical to your view of your competence that you will go through mental hoops to convince yourself that you couldn’t have possibly made a blunder.” In addition, there are “plenty of external incentives from denying that you made a mistake” and turning the ship around. The authors describe the “whisperings of the herd” about the criminal justice system in the following way: “Wrongful convictions are extremely rare, a reasonable price to pay for the superb system we already have in place. The real problem is that too many criminals get off on technicalities or escaping justice because they are rich enough to buy a high-priced defense team.” This is an example of an impenetrable thoughtscape that is informed by cultural prejudice rather than the evidence. 2,012 cases of documented prosecutorial misconduct is not enough evidence to change the dominant thoughtscape because that would cause dissonance (lack of confidence in social structure). It would cause discomfort, and is clear evidence that James Harvey Robinson was correct when he says, “The process of emancipating natural science from current prejudices, both of the learned and of the unlearned, has been long and painful, and it is not completed yet.”

Mistakes Were Made is stock full of examples of educated professionals who could not see the errors of their thought processes or admit the danger and harm it caused to innocent people. This is the definition of hubris. Again, Robinson is very clear: “Few of us take the pains to study the origin of our cherished convictions. . . . the result is that most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.” Our convictions are more often, “pure prejudices – in the proper sense of that word. We do not form them ourselves. They are the whisperings of ‘the voice of the herd.’” .

Robinson states that the “origin and progress and future promotion of civilization are ill understood and misconceived. These should be the chief them of education.” As my son grows up, this will form the heart of his curriculum. Perhaps he will be able to add his strength to the helm and help us change course before it's too late.

The Start of Your Long Winter

2010-12-29T15:36:00.000-08:00

Dear Son,

The night before you were born, I was facilitating the Leadership Edmonton Book Club. Every year, the opening session begins with a discussion of Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress, a series of lectures that takes off with Gaugin's three questions, "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" and ends with the ominous conclusion:

"We are now at the stage when the Easter Islanders could still have halted the senseless cutting and carving, could have gathered the last trees' seeds to plant out of reach of the rats. We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones. If we don't do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands. And this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past. Now is our last chance to get the future right."

I must admit that I carry I sense of guilt for bringing you into the world at this time in history, when all I know of human history leads me to conclude that we will fail to get the future right. Where do we come from? It's a long, long story, but your mom and I decided to name you after your great-grandfather, who put bought me my first bicycle and paid me wages for my first labour. He began his working life at 14, shoveling coal, but he would end his life as the Chairman of the local power plant. He was the living embodiment of his name, "The industrious strong one." Mack, as he was called by his friends, was a man's man. He could fix anything (but generally not the first time), but what I remember most about him was that he loved to play. He loved to play cards, golf, bowl, and he took me to my first baseball and football games in Detroit to watch Barry Sanders and Kirk Gibson. He gave me my first camping and fishing memories at East Tawas, which still holds the best memories of my childhood. He lived 76 years, and I have been thinking of this time frame as I stare at you, helpless and innocent in your crib.

The book we read for the book club when you were a month old was The End of the Long Summer by Dianne Dumanoski. On page 3, Dumanoski states of our evolution that “we come from a long line of survivors who were tempered in the crucible of climatic reversals and catastrophic change.” This biological flexibility – this innate adaptability – resides within you, and if Dumanoski is right, you are going to need it.

In a strange twist of fate, we have lost a lot of that survival instinct through the process of civilization. In Laurence Gonzales’ Everyday Survival, he describes that modern man lives in a perpetual vacation state of mind. Because the climate has been uncommonly stable for the past 11,700 years, human civilization has been allowed to flourish. And for those of us who live in the West – where all our needs and wants are met – civilization has deadened our animalistic senses and delivered mind-numbing comfort and convenience. We live in a playground of luxury unimagined by our forebears, and some of the houses near our neighborhood make the Great Pyramids of Egypt look like a bunch of run-down shacks in a poor part of town.

In A Short History of Progress (the book I was reading the night before you were born), Ronald Wright shows in his investigation of failed civilizations that when they were on the point of collapse, they not only failed to change course, they usually went on one last desperate binge most often enjoyed by the elites of those societies at the expense of everyone else. Dumanoski also says that climate change is a problem of the “spectacularly rich.”

But she points to a larger problem that affects all of us, rich and poor alike, and it is this: “We struggle to understand and resolve our dilemma using ideas about the world that are now obsolete and dangerous.” We have entered a crisis of meaning-making where we are having a difficult time erecting new standards of values because of the pervading strength of the obsolete and dangerous ideas, such as "the imperatives of capitalism, the modern ethos of progress, economic growth, and control of nature.” And while you won't be able to see it, it is actually possible to see the dangerous affects of these obsolete and dangerous ideas in the blue sky above your head.

In Chapter 3, "Lessons From the Ozone Hole," Dumanoski recounts the story of Thomas Midgley, Jr., who invented a safer refrigerator using clorofluorocarbons (CFC’s). He demonstrated the safety of CFC’s like a snake oil salesman, by inhaling the CFC's into his lungs and then exhaling out over a candle. He neither died nor exploded, and that was good enough for everyone. He had done similar tricks with tetraethyl lead as well (which poisoned him and caused neurological damage to countless children like you, but no one seemed to notice). Midgley created a new refrigerator at a time when the imperatives of capitalism, the modern ethos of progress, economic growth, and the control of nature were unquestioned. No one understood the ozone layer at that point, but by 1987 and the signing of the Montreal Protocol, the danger would be understood about what modern refrigerators and aerosol spray cans were doing to the constant and necessary interaction between oxygen and ultraviolet rays from the Sun.

Dumanoski asks a question I want you to ponder: “Is innovation, which can prove life-enhancing or lethal, unavoidably a game of Russian roulette?” I want you to stare with wonder with me at Mt. Rainier one day, but never forget when we are hiking around that Nature sets booby traps, and one of the worst booby traps Nature has set is the the human mind. 99% of all the species that have ever existed on Earth are now extinct. Human continuity is not guaranteed, and yet most people seem unable to accept this reality. The greatest force ensuring the destruction of modern human society is the irreducible human ignorance and arrogance that has resulted from all our achievements. I can see this surrounding you in those voices who believe that global warming is not happening, or will happen so gradually that humanity’s endless ingenuity will be able to maneuver us out of any mess (even though there is absolutely no proof of this).

Nature sets booby traps, and human beings set progress traps, such as nitrogen based fertilizers that create oceanic dead zones, and CFC’s that endanger the atmospheric skin that protects all present life forms. For most people in 1930, all they cared about was reliable refrigerators that would not kill them. This was a very basic need, but the damage was not obvious. If you were born in 1930 and lived to the age of your great-grandfather, 76 years, you would have seen recorded the greatest hole in the ozone in 2006. The perceived threat today is our very existence. What the world will look like when you turn 25, I can barely imagine.

The innate human creativity we have inherited is the only thing that can possibly save us, but it will only be able to save us if we can avoid the obsolete and dangerous ideas that are still the dominant mental models that governing human interaction. What I want to know, most of all, is how to prevent the conforming forces at work in our culture from killing your creative mind. Beware the religious and quasi-religious orienting stories that place Man as the pinnacle of Creation, the Master of Matter, the ultimate problem-solver that can ignore the rules of Nature. Beware the obsession with money and the entrenched economic interests that will prolong the status quo until the entire enterprise collapses. Beware of men like Thomas Midgley, Jr., who provide confident and comfortable explanations and leave human misery in their wake.

And no matter what, do not disparage Humanity in its entirety. I cried when I read Dumanoski’s final chapter, thinking of your future:

“If the Earth reverts to wilder music in the decades hence, I want humans, with or without complex civilization, to remain part of the dance. I wish this not because I think we’re exceptional within the Earth’s commonwealth of life – though we are, in our way, just as the camouflage genius, the cuttlefish, is in its way – or that Gaia or the cosmos needs us for any reason, but because there is a joy in being alive and part of this ancient drama. I want others to experience this and have their moment on the green, exuberant Earth. I like to imagine that someone will be equally taken by the sight of wild horses 32,000 years from now and moved to capture it in words or images. In the course of this exploration, it has become clear to me that modern civilization is not the measure of humanity. It is not the only or best way of being human. It is not a reason to conclude that we are doomed by our flawed nature to self-destruct.”

I want you to have your moment on this green, exuberant Earth, and I hope these letters will help you in your times of struggle.

Your father,

A Letter to My Unborn Son

2010-11-03T21:03:00.001-07:00

Dear Son,

You are due to arrive any day now, but I am already thinking of watching you sleep in the warm glow of Christmas lights by the fireplace - of that time when the season of rebirth begins in earnest, when the light starts to reclaim the darkness. As we sit, passing you around from lap to lap around the Christmas Tree, I will think of life, death, and the never-ending march of the seasons, of times long gone, of times I have yet to see, and times I know I will never see.

It snowed last week. The University of Alberta farm was cold and quiet at sunrise. The clouds turned the most amazing purple and red as Olive and I walked off-leash until she got attacked by a coyote and managed to get away unscathed. As I daydreamed about all the the things we might do together, I wasn't paying attention to my surroundsing, and I had forgotten all the dangers that rest hidden in small patches of wheat all around us. I think of you constantly. It is hard to concentrate on anything else. We still don't know what your name will be, or what you will be like, or what your favorite ice cream flavor will be, but I know that you will be sincerely and deeply loved, and I cannot wait to see you swaddled in the many cute outfits your mom has equipped you with.

There's so much I want to tell you on my morning walks, or as I cook, and I hope I live long enough to tell you what I think you need to know to your more mature mind. I hope I get a chance to tell you in person when you ask, "When did you move to Canada?" But I have lived long enough to know that one should not count on anything. We should be wise and prepare for a future we might not have, but recognize that it is simply that - a future we may not have. It is possible I will not live to be as old my great grandmother Edna. She lived in the first floor apartment in the house next door to your great grandfather. As a young boy, she seemed impossibly ancient to me. She could barely walk, and she talked slowly. But she kept her hands busy knitting and crocheting, and each Christmas, she would distribute a new set of hand-made Christmas ornaments to be hung on the tree.

She also knitted the felt Christmas stockings that my brothers and I hung on the banister of our house on Cass Ave. The stocking possessed small felt symbols of boyhood and manhood - a baseball bat, a football, and a pipe, amongst candy canes, cars, and a tree. Our stockings would be the last thing we would open (or possibly the first, I can't remember now). Over the years, I would lose that stocking. Of all the possessions that have fallen into and out of my hands, that is the one possession I would give anything to have back now.

And that is the first lesson I want you to learn - cherish your becoming. People suffered mightily to bring you here. You may one day curse God, me, and the forces of Nature that brought you into this world where ignorance and greed too often triumph over wisdom and selflessness. But not always. After all, you are the descendant of iron and coal miners. You are the descendant of immigrants from the Ukraine who paid $3 aboard the Teutonic to come to create a new life on the prairies of Saskatchewan in 1912. You are the descendant of a Teamster, and at least one man who entered World War I and lived to return home. You are the descendant of hope, sacrifice, and hard work. So recognize the things in your life that are hand-made, unique, and given to you with love. They will be rare and precious, and I hope they will serve as talismans to ward off the dark thoughts that may enter your heart. Others have suffered great suffering because they still believed that Life (their lives and ultimately your life) was a gift worth living.

As I write this, the world you will be born into is crumbling, and there are great forces at work in the world who wish to deny this. Previous generations have taken the best the world has to offer and left you and your friends a dark and uncertain future. It is an unfair burden to give to you, but I hope you will find the strength to pick up this burden and make some contribution to the human race. I don't know what that contribution will be, but do not waste your life whining. I have wasted years shaking my fists at God. Instead, I suggest you bow down; be humble; accept your smallness and the apparent injustice and insignificance of it all, and accept this world on the edge of decay with all its imperfections so that you don't waste your life energy in the pointless pursuit of self-lamentation. It has never been easy to be a human being, so suck it up. The specific challenges your generation will face are not a fair inheritance, but it would be equally unfair if you didn't have challenges that would prove the quality of your character.

I want a lot of things for you, but mostly, I want you to love this life. Bertrand Russell ends the prologue of his autobiography with the following lines. "This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me." That's what I want to give you as a father - the best chance you can have to say the same thing when you assess your life at the end. As I look back on the good things in my life, this is what I see: a celebration at the 50 yard line after a homecoming victory; running with my brothers through the smoky lanes of a bowling alley begging the adults for quarters to play video games; fishing with grandpa for perch off the East Tawas dock before the sun rose high and hot and it was time to go swimming; studying for nine hours straight at university working to understand who I was, the patterns of human nature, and perhaps even, why I was here; meeting your mother at Jasper Park Lodge and walking with her around Lac Beauvert, dark and still in the midnight hour; watching the clouds around the peak of Mt. Rainier shift from turtle to tower as I hiked around the Nisqually Valley; the smell of carmelizing onions in my cast iron fry pan as I worked them into shape for French Onion soup; the touch of your sister's hand in the morning as we prayed before school; the sound of my old dog Moose, snoring at the foot of the bed after a long evening walk; hearing your heart beat for 20 minutes in the hospital today as we listened to make sure you were still doing o.k. in the womb (turns out, all you needed was a Kit-Kat). For these experiences and a million more, I would gladly confront the agony of every disappointment that my own flaws and the flaws of my species have inflicted upon my heart.

To hold you. To see your face. It will be the highlight of everything I have hoped for in my life, and I want you to know that.

So Love. Strive. Laugh. That's the best advice I can give you for just about every situation, and one day, I hope you'll roll your eyes at me when I say them.

Your father,

J

Dead Tree Poem, #1

2010-09-28T19:55:00.000-07:00

Rialto Beach

I finally stopped the car
and put it in park
past La Push, Forks, Hurricane Ridge, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan, and home -
an idea I still struggled with.

On my way to that place where the sand met the sky, I passed a brown and white sign showing a wave

lifting a large tree into the air,

suspended above a family of five about to be crushed to death:

"Riptides Kill."

Sandpipers swooped back and forth in the waves, peeping,
and I moved closer to the roar
of that great big body of water where it all began.

I stared at my unknown parent and took off my shoes and socks.

The sun was going down as the tide was going out;
the constant coastal breeze turned from chilly to cold and
I lost sensation in my toes.

So I climbed up on a large pile of dinosaur bones that had lost their fight with the waves and the wind
and I stared out for miles at the The Great Tree Graveyard -
where there would be no warm embrace

or mercy

or answer.

The clouds were low and thick;
mist hung in the ghostly trees of the seastacks.

A million shades of Northwest gray shrouded the carnage of the fallen bleached bodies,
and all I could hear in the breeze was that message I now heard in all of nature,
"We have suffered most brutally," they announced,

"And we are suffering still."

Amongst the twisted and knotted corpses,
my breath became a wave that got sucked away in an undertow.
My skin turned to sand and began to drift along the dunes.
In the hourglass of my throat,
the sand drained from my head to my heart pounding surf,

and I couldn't swallow as I stood above the tide pools, crabs, and anemones.

All that was left there was the pungent scent of freedom,
the liberation from Time.

Lost in an old box of papers

2010-09-22T21:37:00.000-07:00

I was shuffling through some old papers tonight, trying to find a document from the trial that happened to me when I was in college. My mind still frequently returns to this event because I have been working on a fictional account of that year of arrest and trial for close to two decades now, and until I finish that novel - a task which seems more remote and grows heavier every year - I find it difficult to think about writing anything else.

I never found the paper I was hunting for because I got lost in my first quotations binder which I began collecting during the time of the trial. My friend Eric and I used to read Carlos Castaneda, and I copied down a series of quotes that I dubbed, "The Code of the Warrior" from Castaneda's Tales of Power. During that time, I read these quotations every day and gained much strength from them. It was good to find them again, for they filled me with fond memories of long talks about big thoughts in the large nature center not far from my apartment. They also gave me strength for something else I happen to be struggling with at the moment.

"A Warrior starts off with the certainty that his spirit is off balance; then by living in full control and awareness, but without hurry or compulsion, he does his ultimate best to gain this balance."

"What matters to a warrior is arriving at the totality of one's self."

"There is nothing in this world that a warrior cannot account for. You see, a warrior considers himself already dead, so there is nothing for him to lose. The worst has already happened to him, therefore he's clear and calm; judging him by his acts or by his words, one would never suspect that he has witnessed everything."

"The self-confidence of the warrior is not the self-confidence of the average man. The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls that self-confidence. The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness."

"You must cultivate the feeling that a warrior needs nothing. You have everything needed for the extravagant journey that is your life. The real experience is to be a man, and that what counts is being alive; life is the little detour we are taking now. Life in itself is sufficient, self-explanatory and complete."

The Nature of Nurture

2010-09-03T20:55:00.000-07:00

We attended our first baby class on the evening of the day my stepdaughter went back to high school. Autumn comes early in the North Country; I could see my breath as I walked our dog around the neighborhood before dropping her off at school and then heading off to work. All day, I had been feeling Momentous "back to school" feelings. I wanted to pick up a football. I wanted to rake leaves. This feeling had intensified all day long and it peaked as we walked into the auditorium of the hospital. The back to school feeling, for a 37 year old man, brings with it a hopeless nostalgia, and I was thinking back to the excitement of walking into Biology, Geology, Great Issues in Social Science, Religion & Depth Psychology, Intellectual Freedom . . . . It didn't matter what class it was, the most exciting moment I remember in any new class was looking around to identify the most attractive women in the class and wonder . . . . .

It took me about two seconds to realize that all of the women in this particular class already happened to be pregnant. It took me another second to remember I was married and happened to be sitting next to the most beautiful woman in the class - who happened to be my wife. It was an "Aha!" moment to realize that everyone in the class was sleeping together, and I felt old, in a good way, which is such a rare occurrence that I embraced it wholeheartedly and thought to myself, "My son has no idea what a moronic father he is about to have."

My attention was focused throughout the first part of the class. I took notes on the Fear-Tension-Pain cycle, and wrote down that the most important job I had during the process was to lie to my wife; "Tell here she is almost there, even if that isn't the case." I learned that the uterus becomes the largest and strongest muscle in the body, and I kept looking at the diagrams knowing that this is how we evolved, but the only real thought in my head was this: "10 centimeters equals how many inches? 2.2 centimeters converted into inches equals . . . . I am pretty sure of this . . . . about four inches. And she wants to do this without an epidural?" After this, I faded out for about a half an hour and heard word combinations like "pink mucous," "urinal leakage," "placental explosion," and "six weeks of bleeding afterwards."

There have been times when I have been jealous of the intimacy of my wife's experience. Now was not one of them. After the class, I came home feeling like I did after Biology, Geology, Great Issues in Social Science or Intellectual Freedom - which is to say, a bit stupid and unprepared for the amount of work ahead. In order to tackle my incompetence head on, I went home and picked up Alison Gopnik's The Scientist in the Crib.

"Just about everything about our minds is caused by our brains, everything about our brains is ultimately caused by our evolutionary history. That means, though, that evolution can select learning strategies and cultural abilities just as it selects reflexes and instincts. For human beings, nurture is our nature. The capacity for culture is part of our biology, and the drive to learn is our most important and central instinct. The new developmental research suggests that our unique evolutionary trick, our central adaptation, our greatest weapon in the struggle for survival, is precisely our dazzling ability to learn when we are babies and to teach when we are grown-ups."

This is a big idea - one I wish I encountered far before I entered my undergraduate studies. How many classes did I sit through where we chased our tails - Nature vs. Nurture? Rather than approaching them as dynamic forces always in relationship, influencing one another, we saw them as separate things and tried to define an human nature separate and isolated from culture. What a colossal waste of time and money. I put The Scientist in the Crib down on the bedside table, turned out the light, and stared into the dark night wondering, "Just what do I want this young man to know? What do I want him to learn?"

Land-Locked Blues

2010-08-29T22:12:00.000-07:00

As we crested the rise outside of Kamloops, I looked down and saw a black horse in a September yellow field with mountain mist mixing with forest fire smoke in the dark green trees of the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. After seven hours behind the wheel, I was now in the passenger side, dizzy, disoriented, and feeling a bit sick from my A&W Chubby Chicken and root beer. I should have stopped sooner, but sometimes the intoxication of propelling motion possesses me and I am driven by the thought of “Just keep driving.” “Just keep driving.” I left Seattle one time to pick up Joe and Chad in Los Angeles before heading to Fort Wayne, Indiana for Brian’s wedding. After we packed up the car and took off, I could not relinquish the wheel even though Chad and Joe were both willing to take turns driving. I was in a bad state, and I drove like a madman until we reached Colorado just after sunset. We were road weary, and I stopped my purple, unconditioned, Ford Escort wagon in a mountain pullout, completely frazzled and exhausted. I don’t know what I was trying to get away from, but I didn’t want to stop driving. I was 23 and having a nervous breakdown, and I wasn't yet far enough away from civilization. I needed to get away from what was irritating me, but there didn't seem to be any real escape, especially when the "root cause" of my anxiety couldn't be identified. I wanted to get to the end of crowded human streets, to the end of history, to the end of civilization, to Atlantis, to a place where inequality, injustice, genocide, and the idea of income had not yet to be invented or had finally been transcended. I couldn't decide. I thought this feeling originated in my work with Seattle's homeless over the past two years; I had seen human beings sniffing aerosol paints and drinking fortified wine with little to eat other than a bologna and cheese sandwich. I watched Blue Tailfeathers eat sardines and Ritz in the chair next to my desk, and I felt then like I did now - whatever I had inside me refused to be digested. It did not want to go through from end to end. It could not be processed; there was something inside me I needed either to vomit or swallow once and for all, but I couldn't come close to it, no matter how far or fast I drove.

I had that same feeling now, over a decade later, when I thought I had gotten far enough away from that younger me. As the miles and seconds slipped further and further away, I wondered if I was trying to get away from the irritations of a beautiful life. Thanks to my wife and stepdaughter, I had finally grown to love my life, and I would certainly come back to it. But as I watched that black horse stare towards the sun as summer came to an end, I wanted to drop down somewhere in between the Rockies and the Coast Range. I wanted to go tame that horse. I wanted to tame my fear of poverty and perhaps my greater fear of wealth and being unprepared for the Damnation Alley days I can see in the distance. I wanted to win the confidence held only by those who know how to survive in the harshest parts of life, so perhaps I should drive until the wheels are bare tread and the oil turns to thick sludge and the gears of invention grind to a stop in the middle of the badlands and forage for rattlesnake and cacti until my senses awaken and I rediscover the animal sensibility that lies at the heart of being truly human. Otherwise, what do I really have to offer in conversation at a dinner party? What do I have to teach my son that will be of any real use? I want to stop by every still pond and dive in and fill my mouth with a wild freshness. I want to carve out highway from mountain with precision explosives and pick up a banjo at night. My life of limited luxury and its attendant, devouring envy has me trapped in the right lane. “Slower traffic keep right except to pass.” Except I can’t pass. When we finally stopped in Colorado all those years ago, we took that mountain turn out, locked the car, and went for a walk into the woods looking for a place to set up camp. We had to jump a small creek about five feet across. Joe and Chad leaped like gazelles and crossed the creek easily. I ran and leaped and did not land well. I was slipping into the creek. I wouldn't have drowned or die of hypothermia. No, it would have been like everything else - a graceless inconvenience, so to catch myself, I impaled my right hand on a sharp boulder and did not get wet. Pain shot through every part of my body, but I held on, embarrassed. “Slower traffic, keep right.” Student loans and dozens of nights lost to pitchers of cheap beer. Sometimes, I would rather be anyone else, but then I look at my pregnant wife and my stepdaughter, and I will go into the bathroom where I can splash some cold water on my face and stare into my hazel eyes surrounded now by crow’s feet. I am searching for some kind of answer, but there is no answer inside. Inside, there are only steep runaway lanes of inadequacy, and the only emergency brakes I have are their loving hearts.

I look at them sometimes the same way I look at a valley filled with boulders and sky and a black horse walking across a September yellow field. Because they exist in the world, so can I. But they love me back, and this is the single most impossible aspect of my existence, and as we descend, twelve hours later, down towards the sea wall of Stanley Park, I am embraced again by those limitless shades of gray - clouds, sky, mist, smoke, tree trunks, and pavement, and in this world of ambiguous colour, I stop and fall asleep with the salty sea air in my nostrils. Oh Ocean! I missed you!

The Tea Party's False History

2010-07-26T19:45:00.000-07:00

The “Boston Tea Party” was “the chief turning point in the progression towards toward revolution,” but the Boston Tea Party was not a revolt against Socialism or “taxation without representation” as the Tea Party claims. The Boston Tea Party was not even about taxation, per se. The Boston Tea Party was born from the fear of renewed taxation “coupled with the expansion of monopolies such as had been granted to the East India Tea Company.” [emphasis mine] (1). This is the truly important part. The Founding Fathers had difficulties with corporations during the American Revolution, primarily with the East India Company and the Hudson Bay Company, and they were left out of the Constitution. The Boston Tea Party was a revolt against monopolistic trade practices and the unfair cooperation provided by government to assist multinational corporations in such a way that it threatened the livelihood of the "little people."

From the British perspective, the Tea Act was a win-win situation for everybody.

“In London, when the outrage was reported there, the British decided that they had at last had enough. Here they had devised a scheme that should have made everyone happy; it would have bailed out the East India Company out of serious financial difficulties, provided the government with considerable revenues, and still given the Americans cheaper tea than they had had before – and look at the result. There was simply no satisfying these people.” (2).

The Tea Act of 1773 allowed the practically bankrupt East India Company to ship tea directly to North America, eliminating English and American middlemen (aka merchants), thus putting their livelihood at risk in favor of Big Business. What followed the revolt were the Coercive Acts, where local courts were barred from “trying British soldiers and officials for acts committed while suppressing civil disturbances.” (3). What followed was exactly what we have come to suspect from most governments, such as the British at the time at the Tea Party in Arizona – the crackdown of a totalitarian state and the suspension of civil liberties (which had yet to be fully codified into law and incorporated into man’s self-definition of what it meant to be human - inalienable rights did not exist at this point). "In 1776," wrote historian David Hackett Fischer in Washington's Crossing, "American leaders believed it was not enough to win the war. They also had to win in a way that was consistent with the values of their society and the principles of their cause. One of their greatest achievements. . . . was to manage the war in a manner that was true to the expanding humanitarian ideals of the American Revolution." (4)

According to the Tea Party, they are for Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government, and Free Markets. "A free market is the economic consequence of personal liberty. The founders believed that personal and economic freedom were indivisible, as do we. Our current government's interference distorts the free market and inhibits the pursuit of individual and economic liberty. Therefore, we support a return to the free market principles on which this nation was founded and oppose government intervention into the operations of private business." But, setting aside for the moment that the establishment of corporations as legal persons can also be taken as "intervention," the founders did not believe in this type of free market, and to say so is a bold- faced lie. Thomas Jefferson once wrote, "If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." And this is exactly what is happening. No matter how you run the numbers, this is exactly what is happening.

The Tea Party of today is not interested in protecting the Constitution or engaging in a revolution against government collusion with multinational corporations who establish unfair economic practices that hurt the "little people." It is interested in capitalizing on the legitimate anger of Middle America in order to take over the mechanisms of power so that it can wield them to its own advantage. (5) The Tea Party's adoption of the past is more symbolic than it is historically accurate. The first estate tax, for example, was enacted in 1797 in order to pay for war. Whether or not you believe the Estate Tax is an inefficient tax or a tax that protects democracy by preventing the establishment of a permanent oligarchy, the estate tax was enacted in 1797 when George Washington was President, and Washington is almost always considered a Founding Father.

The Tea Party has taken this seminal American incident and corrupted it by obfuscating its meaning and changing the enduring inspiration for discontent and revolution, which is Government and Businesses’ propensity for rigging the rules of the game in their favor, just as Jefferson predicted. (see the Financial Bailout of 2007 – 2010 (6) and the 2010 BP Oil Spill (7), also see Ted Rall’s recent characterization of the Tea Party as America’s first protofascist movement).

1. Fredriksen, John C. Revolutionary War Almanac. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

2. Stokesbury, James L. A Short History of the American Revolution. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1991.

3. Nash, Gary B. The Unknown American Revolution. New York: Viking Penguin, 2005.

4. Fisher, David Hackett. Washington's Crossing. Oxford. Oxford University Press. 2006. Taken from Robert F. Kennedy's "America's Anti-Torture Tradition" Los Angeles Times, December 17, 2005.

5. Reich, Robert, "The Root of Economic Fragility and Political Anger" Published on Tuesday, July 13, 2010 by Talking Points Memo

6. Roubini, Nouriel, “Not so much bail-out as rip-off” “Thus the claim by the Fed and Treasury that spending $700bn of public money is the best way to recapitalise banks has absolutely no factual basis or justification. It is a total rip-off that will mostly benefit – at a huge expense for the US taxpayer – the common and preferred shareholders and even the unsecured creditors of the banks. . . . . the treasury plan is a disgrace: a bail-out of reckless bankers, lenders and investors that provides little direct debt relief to borrowers and financially stressed households and that will come at a very high cost to the US taxpayer.” Guardian, Monday 29 September 2008 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/29/wallstreet.useconomy

7. Democracy Now, “Gulf Coast Residents Outraged that Money Earned on Cleanup Might Be Subtracted from $20 Billion Claim Fund” July 20, 2010 “Gulf Coast residents are outraged by a recent announcement that the $20 billion government-administered claim fund will subtract money cleanup workers earn by working for the cleanup effort from any future claims. Fund administrator Kenneth Feinberg says the ruling will apply to anyone who participates in the Vessels of Opportunity program, which has employed hundreds of Gulf Coast residents left out of work because of the spill. It’s seen as an effort to limit the number of lawsuits against BP.” http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/20/gulf_coast_residents_outraged_that_money

JASON Time

2010-07-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

The July temperatures soar along with the fireworks, and that means the beginning of Summer and the beginning of JASON time. My personal time of freedom and independence begins with the whole of North America shooting off a staggering amount of fireworks (after about 30 minutes into the Macy's fireworks this year, my stepdaughter opined, "The United States sure has a lot of songs for war).

When the sun shines until 11PM, it's officially My Personal New Year. First, as someone born at this time in the Zodiac, the Point of Cancer is an auspicious occasion. I am a crab whose moods swing with the tides, who every summer craves nothing more than to lay on the beach with his legs in the water and his torso on the sand, straddling Now and Forever.

Secondly, my name is Jason, and only people with the name of Jason who are born in the month of July can appreciate this - my name is written in the calendar. Some people will allude to "Jason and the Argonauts", but to me, Jason is interwoven in Time with the passing of the seasons. My identity is bound in two seasons, and I have always thought of my throat as the thin part of the hour glass between my head and my heart, and no other English name experiences this connection with fleeting seconds. Maybe if your name is Summer or Winter or April you get something close, but it's not the same. If you look at any twelve month calendar and your name is Jason, you see only one thing:

JFMAMJJASOND
JulyAugustSeptemberOctoberNovember

July through November is my season. Summer and Fall feel entirely different to me than Winter and Spring. Winter is long and depressing, and Spring is too tempestuous and unpredictable. Spring is too passionate. But Summer is the high time of growth and Autumn the season of bountiful harvests and melancholy. Summer and Autumn are the seasons of LIFE. It is difficult to define the difference in how I feel, but essentially it comes down to feeling like I belong here--like I belong to this Earth, like I belong to the Sun, like I belong to Creation. On the off time of the year, I feel like a foreigner, like I was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. During the JASON Time, I am not alienated from myself, from others or from life. If winter is my season of doubt, then summer is my season of certainty - when I know God exists, when I know life is Good, when everything feels like it has a purpose. In this time, the JASON-Time, my mind thinks more clearly. My lungs breathe more deeply. My legs feel stronger. It is as if I gain a certain superhuman strength these months, and the closer I get to November, the more I feel this power wane.

July through November - suncreen, chlorine, mowing the lawn, football season, going back to school, long, mosquito-filled bike rides . . . LIFE, and the losing of life in five short months as the days lose light and the darkness ascends, as the green disappears and the leaves fall . . . . . I can remember each summer more vividly than I can remember individual Christmases, and this summer, this summer that I turn 37, this is the most momentous of them all. I won't have time to write. I won't have time to reflect. Now is the time to swing the bat. To run the bases. To pedal the bike. And much like the way some people say good-bye to the old year, every July I say good-bye to a year of my life and try to assess it because I want to honour the inexorable march of time, just as I love to walk through the irresistible melancholy of a gray Autumn day. "Did I do the most with the Time God gave me? Did I Love? Did I adventure?"

This year, I became a teacher at the University and volunteered as Program Chair for Leadership Edmonton, hopefully helping people to understand the complex world in which they live. Now, the most amazing thing ever has happened to me, and I hope I can pass on any valuable lessons I have learned to a new life. This year, I have found out that my wife and I will be giving birth to a baby boy come November. As my time of the calendar wanes, a new life will enter the world, and he will be my son. I will have another companion to chart Time with, and I will begin by hibernating with my little boy asleep on my chest. I will hunker down and wait for the occasion when he grabs my finger and smiles at me for the first time.

Yes! This is LIFE in capital letters!

Pecha Kucha 7

2010-06-04T10:47:00.000-07:00

Last night, I was part of an outstanding lineup at Pecha Kucha 7. This was my first time presenting in this intimidating format. Large crowd, brilliant presenters, and the 20 slides for 20 second format puts the pressure on. The greatest pressure came from knowing most of the audience was on Twitter. But, I survived. Here is the transcript of my presentation (I will post images later).

1. In the beginning - From what physicists can tell us, approximately 13.8 billion years ago, there was absolutely Nothing. Out of this Nothingness arose Matter, and out of this Matter arose Life, and out of this Life arose Mind - human beings endowed with the cognitive ability to understand their unlikely becoming.

2. Perhaps the strangest part of this odd journey is that almost as soon as we acquired that powerful human brain, we began to master our environment, building tools of production and tools of destruction, and engaging in activities and behaviours that could ensure our extinction. (Slides 1 & 2 abbreviate from the beginning of Ken Wilber's Sex, Ecology & Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution)

3. The ancient city of Ur, in what is now Iraq, was once situated in a place once called the Fertile Crescent - the birthplace of civilization. Overgrazing, deforestation, and poor irrigation practices turned this once fertile land into a largely uninhabitable desert through the dual processes of erosion and salinization.

4. Easter Island remains one of the spookier examples of a failed culture. To move the moai into place, the islanders needed to use trees as rollers or sleds. Easter Island was completely forested until 1200AD when humans arrived, but by 1650AD, all record of tree pollen had ceased, leading one to wonder, "What were they thinking when they cut the last tree down?"

5. We have also constructed idols that threaten our future. Seattle photographer Chris Jordan has documented the death of albatross chicks on Midway Island. The parents feed the chicks plastic floating on the ocean's surface. These eerie corpses signify an ecosystem in trouble, but they are also symbolic of the far-flung and often invisible consequences of modern Convenience.

6. Our idols are the result of Progress itself. Nitrogen based fertilizers have enabled us to feed more people a higher calorie diet than ever before. This is a good thing. The long-term outcome is Creeping Dead Zones - where marine environments become oxygen poor and unable to sustain life. Mix in a huge oil spill, and you have the recipe for the large scale destruction of an entire ecosystem.

7. The unintended consequence of super-trawlers was the collapse of an entire fishing industry, and the effects of greed and a lack of foresight on the community of Newfoundland have been profound. This graphic illustrates the rapidity with which failure can follow success, and why success is often nothing more than a short-lived illusion.

8. Last year, I got a chance to tour U of A's Poultry Research Centre. The average chick today matures to its full size in less than 60 days and is more than twice the size of the chicken grown in 1957. This is a good thing. It has been a holy grail of humanity to secure a steady supply of protein, and chicken is an incredibly efficient form of protein production.

9. As a result of the speed of their growth and the massive size of their breast muscles, however, some chickens can grow gangrene. Egg laying hens face a similar dilemma. Each egg requires three grams of calcium, so high producing hens can suffer from osteoporosis.

10. The moral of all these stories is that today's success often hides tomorrow's failure. Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress documents failed civilizations the way investigators examine an airplane's black box after a crash. When we try to determine what has caused large scale human failure in the past, we unfortunately see a lot of similarities to today.

11. But there is always room for hope in your backpack. There are pioneers at work (and we have seen some of them tonight), people who are working to figure out how we can take conscious control of our evolution so that we can give ourselves, and Tomorrow's Child the best chance to enjoy this great gift of Life and Awareness.

12. It is easy to see a plant in crisis. What is harder to see are the dynamics of how we got here and how we can change course. Figuring out what steps we can take in our daily lives, when the problems confronting us have become so specialized, so complex, and so intertwined, can be daunting and overwhelming.

13. In Leadership Edmonton, we plunge into the "blue water" to understand the dynamics between human nature and human culture. Blue water is a metaphor to illustrate that most people have only a surface level understanding of most things in their lives - whether it's their car, or their computer, or they way food gets to their table, most of us have only a surface level understanding of how these tools of progress operate. The costs of our ignorance are often hidden until its too late.

14. Most people associate progress with technological progress - such as axes to chainsaws, or arrows to unmanned drones, or oil to solar energy. But what does moral progress and moral leadership look like?

15. By most conventional definitions of leadership - possessing a vision, possessing the ability to motivate and inspire others, to take risks and achieve goals without letting others stand in your way - Adolf Hitler was an incredibly successful leader. The odd thing about leadership is that leadership is actually incredibly easy because it is easy to motivate the worst in people by activating their fears and aggressive passions.

16. Other leaders appeal to the best in humanity. What separates Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from Adolf Hitler is not primarily one of means. The nonviolent activist will always be at a strategic disadvantage against an evil willing to slaughter all opposition. The difference is their Horizon of Caring. Hitler believed the people were stupid and wanted to be deceived. King believed the poor and ignorant around the world could be uplifted.

17. Towards the end of his life, King opposed the War in Vietnam, saying, "Justice is indivisible . . . . it would be rather absurd to work passionately and unrelentingly for the integrated schools and not be concerned about the survival of a world in which to be integrated. In this quote, we evidence of broad caring for the two communities of life to which we ultimately belong - the community of humanity and the community of life.

18. Ken Low is the Founder of the Action Studies Institute, and he facilitates both the Leadership Calgary and Leadership Edmonton programs. He has built these programs around the idea of "adaptive leadership."

19. The oddest thing about Life is that, from what biologists can determine, 99% of all the life forms that have ever lived on planet Earth are now extinct. The heart of Leadership Edmonton is recognizing this biological reality. The truly wise leaders are those who help communities to identify the most significant challenges, especially the ones we don't see yet, in order to effectively meet those challenges.

20. Leadership Edmonton is having a recruitment luncheon for its 2010-2011 class on June 17 at the Enterprise Square Gallery.

Thank you for the generosity of your time and ears.

Every Word a Battleground

2010-05-25T20:18:00.000-07:00

Who are You, exactly?

There are a couple different ways to answer that question. Actually, there are probably 6.6 billion ways to answer that question, but for simplicity's sake, let's say that there are two.

The first is that you are an incredibly short-lived creature with a finite life span who will soon be dead. In a competitive world with a million dangers you look out for number one and enjoy the fruits of this Earth while you are here. You take advantage of the gifts of good fortune and intelligence in order to mitigate your exposure to threats. You work hard, certainly, but you work hard with a narrow focus - making sure you and yours have the best chance to move up the socioeconomic ladder. In many small ways, you do what you can to make the world a better place for others, but your highest priority is to make sure your child can go to the best school. You want to make sure you have a comfortable retirement. You want respect, safety, and enough material prosperity to move you as far away from the real prospects of starvation, poverty, and violence as possible. You do not want to end up like Doctor Zhivago.

The second way to answer that question is that you are a part of a much larger landscape - You are a A Child of the Universe; the progeny of forces beyond your experience, (Dark Matter, Time, Evolution, Distance, Black Holes). It never feels like you are traveling 66,000 miles per second through Emptiness, but you know it matters to you in some way you cannot really define. You are not you because you were endowed with an infinite imagination, and you know that some part of you might have once been part of a dinosaur. You can imagine times before you were born and times after you will be dead; you can see and envision stars you will never visit. But most of all, you can imagine a world very much like this one, but different in key aspects - one where the world is not in trouble, where millions of people aren't starving every day; a world without war.

This is the gulf between the world as it is, and the world as we would want it to be. For much of human life, the goals are shared - a stable government, food, shelter, the ability to pursue our dreams. This is what Aristotle called The Good Life. "The good life is the chief end, both for the community as a whole and for each of us individually. But people also come together, and form and maintain political associations, merely for the sake of life; for perhaps there is some element of the good even in the simple fact of living, so long as the evils of existence do not preponderate too heavily." The "happy man" has both the "goods of the soul and the goods of the body." "No one would call a man happy who had no particle of fortitude, temperance, justice, or wisdom [i.e. none of the goods of the soul]: who feared the flies buzzing about his head; who abstained from none of the extremest forms of extravagance whenever he felt hungry or thirsty; who would ruin his dearest friends for the sake of a farthing; whose mind was senseless, and as much astray, as that of a child or a madman. These are the propositions which would be accepted by nearly everybody as soon as they were stated. But differences begin to rise when we ask, 'How much of each good should men have? And what is the relative superiority of one good over another?'" (The Politics of Aristotle, page 280).

Modern culture embraces the extremest forms of extravagance and relishes in the downfall of the mighty, and for many, the evils of existence preponderate very heavily indeed. The goods of the body have been deemed of highest importance, and their disproportionate distribution has corrupted the good of the soul. Even though the good life is common aim for almost everyone, there is wide divergence in means - Taxes, Round-Up Ready Soy Beans, Fertilizers, Oil, Land Use. For each and every one of these, and a million more, there is a battleground, and there is a battleground in every word. Compassion - a battleground. Equality - a battleground. Rational - a battleground. We are engaged in a Great War for Meaning.

In Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley wrote: "There are two kinds of propaganda - rational propaganda in favour of action that is consonant with the enlightened self-interest of those who make it and those to whom it is addressed, and non-rational propaganda that is not consonant with anybody's enlightened self-interest, but is dictated by, and appeals to, passions, blind impulses, unconscious cravings or fears. . . . . If politicians and their constituents always acted to promote their own or their country's long-range self-interest, this world would be an earthly paradise. . . . Propaganda in favour of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest, offers false, garbled, or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities are perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of realpolitik becomes a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty."

One of the key indicators in Huxley's discrimination between rational and non-rational propaganda is the Time Horizon. Are we making decisions that are not just good for us, but good for our children, and our childrens' children? The Gulf Oil Spill not only proves how dangerous our car addiction is, but how ineffectual and irresponsible our corporations and governments and media are (see Glenn Beck's hypocritical apology for mocking an 11 year old girl). You do not see, in mainstream media, anyone calling for fundamental change to the way society is organized or operates. This spill should be a wake up call to local governments around North America. "Let's stop using oil before we're the ones with a spill that can't be cleaned up." Let's create oil-free communities. Stop drilling. Everywhere. Another key discriminating guide in Huxley's discussion between good and bad propaganda, is an appeal to passions, blind impulses and unconscious cravings or fears. This is where it gets really difficult. Any move away from an oil-based economy and oil-based convenience would force us to give up what has become incredibly comfortable, and the fear involved here would be tremendous.

My compost is going in the backyard. When this rain spell passes, I'll get back on my bike. It's not much of a start. I realize that. But it's a start.

The Disasters of War - A short reflection

2010-04-19T20:14:00.000-07:00

Francisco Goya's The Disasters of War represent a revolutionary turning point in the artistic depiction of war. For the first time, the subject of war is no longer glamorous, and the soldiers are no longer valiant heroes. While all of the characters in the aquatints are "human" (#31 This is too much, #33 What more can one do?, #37 - This is worse), Goya's images express that the act of war - for both the victims and the soldiers - reduces us to a state where our humanity is grotesque and barely recognizable. In war, we become inhuman.

Still, it is a common cultural belief that war brings out the best in man - that in the heat of battle, man becomes his most brave, his most courageous, and that the soldier gives the most altruistic sacrifice to glory and freedom.

Without talking to Goya, it is impossible to know the exact intent of the The Disasters of War. Why did he choose not to release them during the course of his lifetime? If they were not published, they could not raise the disgust, horror, anger, sadness, and righteous indignation they still arouse. So did he create them to remember, like Elie Wiesel, that it happened. I don't know. But I don't think they can be considered anti-war propaganda in the truest sense. Propaganda is designed to persuade people to act for a cause or to influence the attitude of a community. But these images were published 35 years after Goya's death, and a half century after the conflict that inspired their creation. Were they made for us, the descendants of this tragedy, as a testimony for the nameless? Because I can't answer this question, I think that even though they were created during a single historical conflict, they are detached from a specific historical conflict and represent the atrocities and horror of any war. If Goya was hoping to convince anyone of anything, it has to be that "This always happens" (Plate #8). Bernard Berenson is quoted as saying of the The Disasters of War, "Here in Goya is the root of our modern anarchy" and after reading Survial in Aushwitz and Machete Season, one is left asking the question Goya asks, "Por Que?" (Plate 32)

Barbara Coloroso, in her book Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide, chronicles the rest of our modern anarchy, from Armenia to Auschwitz to Rwanda - some 60 million dead. It is not quite anarchy, because anarchy connotes a sense of disorder, and genocide and war is anything but disordered. Genocide is all about order. Mechanical. Calculated. Soul-less. Coloroso asks if genocide is inevitable, and she answers "yes." Genocide is inevitable because there is still no widely shared sense of humanity. She quotes Nobel Peace Prize winning Archbishop Desmond Tutu, saying, "I am me only because you are you; my humanity is caught up in your humanity. If I dehumanize you, I am inexorably dehumanized . . . .[C]oncern for others is the best form of self-interest." (page 212)

In our recent Leadership Edmonton class, we viewed several sections of Love, Hate, and Propaganda, and I cannot help but think that the United States is primed for a similar kind of mad hate that took over the populace in Nazi Germany. The Germans were largely uneducated. The numbers of the functionally illiterate in the United States is well documented. Pre-war Nazi Germany was in the midst of an economic collapse (direct comparison readily available). And the Nazis were lead by a man who did not have a particular affection for those he was leading. Hitler is quoted as saying, "The masses are stupid." "The people want to be bamboozled." While this cannot be universally said of American politicians, Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck are pretty analogous examples to Goebbels. The next wave of massacres may happen against no race, but a race of thinkers - the Liberals and the Progressives. As Coloroso writes, "The highest-ranking genocidaire in Rwandan custody - and the first to be extradited from abroad - Frouduald Karamira, was convicted of genocide and sentenced to death. He was an instigator, using vile and impassioned propaganda speeches to rally the masses of Hutus to kill." Coulter and Beck are not calling for their followers to kill people. Yet. But Coulter has suggested that torturing all Arabs would be a spectator sport and Beck is on record saying that we should "be lining up to shoot bad Muslims in the head" without clearly describing how to tell the difference between good and bad Muslims.

The recent Frontline on Obama's Deal, Part 4, documents the animosity towards the development of the recently passed Health Care bill. It is difficult for me to understand how extending health care coverage to people like my mother is in any way equivalent to Nazi Germany (where Hitler put to death 200,000 invalids before he even started on the Jews), but this is the level of intelligence for a large number of people in the United States who happen to listen to and love Beck and Coulter. Free speech for the Republicans has come to mean nothing more than figuring out how to push the boundaries of bad taste under the guise of the highest freedom and the highest responsibility- the freedom of speech.

And I am too tired to even talk about what's wrong with the "Open Carry" initiatives creeping across the United States. Seriously, my beloved country - the United States of America - is starting to scare the shit out of me.

Things I loved as a child

2010-03-27T10:25:00.000-07:00

While walking the dog, my stepdaughter asked me, "What did you love most when you were a kid?"

Building sandbox volcanoes with my brother Kyle,
Playing Match-Box cars under the large leaf maple in our backyard.

Or playing:
rummy five million because I couldn't stand to lose
multiverse crossbows and catapults where GI Joe, Transformers, and Lego collided in wall denting mayhem,
Wiffle ball,
football,
basketball,
baseball,
Dungeons & Dragons with Shane, the best Dungeon Master there ever was.

Or playing a game of pool in grandmother's basement, who would line up a shot and say,
"Watch closely boys, you may never see anything like this again," only to miss another easy shot.

I loved riding my blue Schwinn Scrambler with yellow mags all over Bay City picking up ten cent refund cans so we could go to the corner store and play Tron or Xenophobe with a couple continues,

Or playing funeral with Steve Butler and my brothers on a hot summer day because the holy water always quickly turned into a hell-raising water fight.

I also loved going to church, early mornings as an altar boy and watching the sun rise through the stained glass window and cast their wondrous patterns onto the arched white walls. I felt holy then,
in my red cassock, with the white rope ties,
lighting the candles,
bowing,
preparing the incense,
wearing my solemn and somber face for all the congregation to see.

I loved planting impatiens for my mom by the garage in Spring,
and mowing my grandfather's lawn,
and shoveling his walks,
and working with him as the Detroit Tigers game was called out by Ernie Harwell and Al Kaline,
watching Barry Sanders on Thanksgiving Day,
and diving in the waves of Tawas Bay that seemed so much bigger then.

I loved raking leaves and playing King of the Hill on the large snow hill at the end of St. Hyacinth parking lot.
I loved it when mom and dad would order Kryzsiak's honey-fried chicken and a batch of chicken noodle soup.
I loved it when my dad would ask me to go to the corner store and buy him a pack of cigarettes. I loved the smell of a freshly lit cigarette,
and the smell of Bay Lanes, which smells like every bowling alley I have ever been to since,
and I loved it when my brothers and I would cuddle in the back of the the black Oldsmobile under our warm yellow blanket and fall asleep on the ride home.

I loved these things, and a million more. There were things I didn't love about my childhood, but when I look back, now, I would gladly live it again if the chance were offered to me.

The Grand Illusion

2010-03-17T21:17:00.000-07:00

In Empire of Illusion, Chris Hedges is angry! And he's angry about the grossest aspects of modern American culture - the triumph of anti-intellectualism and the conquest of stupidity; the dominance and destructiveness of porn; and the corporate take-over of higher education. In a highly stratified society, the wealthy and the powerful have managed to create several methods to reinforce and protect their privilege, and these methods include: pseudo-events that provide a constant distraction from Reality; endless consumption of new and improved yet still unnecessary products; the growing cultural belief in positive psychology that asserts poverty, injustice, inequality, and environmental degradation aren't really all that bad if you think positively about them; and government bailouts that protect the already massive and unsustainable distribution of wealth.

For those will intellect and conscience, Hedges' rant will cause one to yell "Hallelujah!" Hedges summarizes that this way of doing things is not just and cannot be justified. Our educational system is currently creating a bunch of satisfied slaughterhouse pigs, rather than creating a bunch of dissatisfied Socrates who refuse to believe iPods, unlimited internet porn, and the power of positivity will save us from the trajectory of a decaying society. America has lost its soul and its direction. In 2000, after working with homeless families for a number of years, I watched with horror as Al Gore "lost" the election. For a lot of people I knew, this was when the Empire of Illusion came crashing down. We felt betrayed by that decision, and I remember thinking, "If democracy rests on the consent of the governed, I hereby withdraw mine." But that statement was ultimately an ineffectual one; it was the acknowledgment of the illusion that voting creates democracy, and I realized the full extent of my own powerlessness. On September 11, 2001, I watched with horror, along with the rest of the world, when the Twin Towers came down, and I decided in my heart to give Bush the benefit of the doubt, only to watch in greater horror as America plunged unprepared into an unpopular war based on false pretenses. This is when I emerged from the World of Shadows to see the painful light, and I don't think I have ever recovered.

The psychological pain was profound and at the time, debilitating. There is no way one could think positively about these developments, and it would have been wrong and unconscionable to do so. It is time for thinking men and women with conscience to protest against such an irreligious state of affairs. And they are. Unfortunately, as Hedges points out, to become a New York Times Bestseller, you have to sell 45,000 copies in a country of 320 million. The weight of illiteracy and the scale of ignorance will be difficult to lift and move in a different direction when because the political will is not there, and the political will is not there because government, as James Madison made clear in Federalist #10, is designed to control the ill effects of faction. The faction in this case is the overbearing majority of poor people. So keep them distracted. Keep them afraid. Keep them stupid.

My criticisms of Hedges book are these:

(1) There are times when Hedges' righteous indignation leads him dangerously close to dehumanizing the elite. Any level of dehumanization gets one closer to the guillotine of every revolution, and while I might agree that the sheltered elite have limited experience with, and no appreciation for, "the masses," I must object to painting them with such broad and potentially dangerous generalizations. Perhaps there are things that can be said in broad terms, but I have worked with too many people not to appreciate the uniqueness of every human being, whether they be part of "the mass" or part of "the elite." (2) My other criticism is one where I think Hedges has missed the mark a little bit. His chapter, The Illusion of Love, focuses on the violent, disturbing, and disgusting world of modern day porn. It's a brilliant analysis, but as he clearly points out, there is no illusion in porn - especially the porn being made today. The makers and users of porn who enjoy ATM and torturous gang bangs make it clear that they do not think of women as worthy of being loved; they are to be fucked and destroyed. This is an incredibly important chapter, but a more powerful illusion, in my mind, would be the world of eHarmony, Tru, Facebook, and Match.com. I am happy for anyone who has found love through those sites, but they have helped create an unrealistic expectation for love. "Soul Mates" cannot be shopped for as easily as a new camera or a new dress. The whole idea of "Soul Mates" is relatively new and it carries with it an unrealistic expectation of happiness. The luster will always wear off on even the most passionate and committed love without attention, energy, and effort, but these sites lead us to believe that when this happens, it might just be easier to go back online. If it's not working, the garbage men take it away and dump it in a landfill so you never have to think about it again. And so it has become with most of our relationships.

But these are small criticisms. We are being commodified. We are being fooled. And we are deliberately being turned into fools by psychologists with a detailed knowledge of how to do most effectively and efficiently. Isn't it great to be living at the End of History?

Freedom Ball - 2010

2010-03-12T12:35:00.000-08:00

Recently, I was part of the most exciting work project of my life - EPL's Freedom Ball. It happened on February 27, 2010 at the new Art Gallery of Alberta, and two weeks later, I am still feeling good about how the team brought focus to one of the public library's core values - Intellectual Freedom. We engaged over 500 Edmontonians in a conversation about what freedom meant to them; I had the honour of introducing a professional hero and icon of our profession, Toni Samek; I also produced a film from interviews our community librarians did that tell some very powerful stories about what freedom actually means.

Here were my opening remarks:

Tonight is a celebration of Freedom. While everyone would agree that freedom is a good thing, freedom is inherently dangerous and controversial. Shortly after World War I, mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote of freedom: 'Should the workingman think freely about property? What then will become of us, the rich? Should young men and women think freely about sex? What then will become of morality? Should soldiers think freely about war? What then will become of military discipline?'

Freedom of expression poses a threat. Sometimes that threat is to the existing social structures, but sometimes that threat is to what we consider to be right and proper. There is a very common sentence we hear in library circles from Jo Godwin, “A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.” Our Freedom to Read posters have rattled' and offended some. Here is a comment I received, and in the spirit of freedom of expression, I want to share it with all of you: 'The Freedom to Read campaign is beyond ridiculous; it is insanely bad. Especially in our multicultural society the librarian serves non-English speakers who may not understand irony. You should be ashamed. If you were a business I would go elsewhere. I am so offended. Don’t read this book – awful! Terrible. Shame on you.'

But I am not ashamed of our work. We wanted, with this campaign, to not only reaffirm our commitment to freedom, but to remind everyone just how rare, precious, and fragile freedom really is. The first postcard we received shows that some in our multicultural community did understand that we were not being entirely ironic. We were consciously aware that freedom is not a state everyone on this beautiful planet enjoys. 'I come to Canada four years now with my family. In my old country, government tells me what we can read and listen and talk. My children to now to school here. They learn everything. We come to library read anything. I see happy smile from my children when they read. They life very good here.'

I am not ashamed of this thought-provoking campaign. Between the postcards, our Facebook page, the interviews we conducted to put together the Freedom Film, our Banned Books cafes, and our displays, we have engaged hundreds of Edmontonians in a conversation about Freedom. And it would be fair to say, I think, when we look at the history of human affairs and the present state of global society, that freedom has not been our natural state.

Because we are here in the Art Gallery of Alberta, I want to read to you a passage about what Freedom means to me. It is from Vincent van Gogh, who was one of the most prolific painters of self-portraits. In this verbal self-portrait, he describes himself as a trapped bird, but he also indicates what can free us from bondage:

“A caged bird in spring knows quite well that he might serve some end; he feels well enough that there is something for him to do, but he cannot do it. What is it? He does not remember too well. Then he has some vague ideas and says to himself, 'The others make there nests and lay their eggs and bring up their little ones,' and so he knocks his head against the bars of the cage. But the cage remains and the bird is maddened by anguish. 'Look at that lazy animal,' says another bird that passes by, 'he seems to be living at his ease.' Yes the prisoner lives, he does not die, there are no outward signs of what passes within him; his health is good, he is more or less gay when the sun shines. But then comes the season of migration, bringing attacks of melancholia. 'But he has got everything he wants,' say the children that tend him in his cage, while he looks through the bars at the overcast sky, where a thunderstorm is gathering, and he inwardly rebels against his fate. 'I am caged, I am caged, and you tell me I do not want anything, fools! You think I have everything I need! Oh! I beseech you, liberty, so that I can be a bird like other birds!'

"A certain idle man resembles this idle bird.

"And men are often prevented by circumstances from doing things, imprisoned in I do not know what horrible, horrible, most horrible cage. . . . One cannot always tell what it is that keeps us shut in, confines us seems to bury us, but still one feels certain barriers. . . . . Do you know what frees one from this captivity? it is very deep, serious affection.”

I hope you can see in all of our efforts to celebration this nationwide initiative, a very deep serious affection for our community. I hope you can see in the music of the People’s Poets, and in the stories that we have heard, a deep and serious affection for human relationships, and for ideas. As one of the young girls will say in the film to conclude the evening, “I love freedom.” This project is an expression of that love for our neighbors, for our city, for our country, and for our freedom.

Whisperings of the Herd

2010-02-22T08:53:00.000-08:00

Peter Vaill invented the term “permanent white water” to describe the constant state of discomforting change in his book, Learning as a Way of Being in 1996. Vaill begins Learning as a Way of Being by discussing some of the current struggles of education, stating, “In a curious and rather tragic way, our learned images of learning prepare us to have a tough time. Our images of learning do not reinforce learning! . . . . . Because so much of our conscious experience with learning is in activity that someone else has assigned to us – a parent, a teacher, an employer, someone we’re competing against – learning for many of us is a means to an end that is not of our choosing [emphasis in the original]. We go through a learning process in pursuit of a goal we have been told is important. As beginners, we are goaded with reasons for beginning, and these reasons are the learning goals that have been given to us.” (page 31). Most of our education is something given to us, and it is given to us for very specific purposes.

James Harvey Robinson outlines these specific purposes in his 1921 title, The Mind in the Making: The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform. The various traditional aims of education are outlined by Robinson to be the following:

“The arts of reading and writing and figuring all would concede are basal in a world of newspapers and business. Then there is technical information and the training that prepares one to earn a livelihood in some more or less standardized guild or profession. Both these aims are reached fairly well by our present educational system, subject to various economies and improvements in detail. Then there are the studies which it is assumed contribute to general culture and to ‘training the mind’, with the hope of cultivating our tastes, stimulating the imagination, and mayhap improving our reasoning powers.”

1. Acquiring the skills necessary to participate in the systems of communication and world understanding
2. Vocational
3. Cultivation of taste, so we can leisurely talk about wine, literature, etc.

Robinson’s major critique of these traditional aims of education is that “they are all directed toward an enhancement of the chances of personal worldly success, or to the increase of our personal culture and intellectual and literary enjoyment. Their purpose is not primarily to fit us to play a part in social or political betterment.”

The fourth traditional function of education is training for citizenship; “education for citizenship would seem to consist in gaining a knowledge of the actual workings of our social organization, with some illuminating notions of its origin, together with a full realization of its defects and their apparent sources.”

The major obstacle to conducting this fourth aim of education, however, is that education always proves problematic to the existing power structure and is an inherent threat to the status quo. Consequently, “the aim of education for citizenship as now conceived is a preparation for the same old citizenship which has so far failed to eliminate the shocking hazards and crying injustices of our social and political life.” Robinson quotes Bertrand Russell to highlight the inherent threat to the existing arrangement of society:

“"It is fear that holds men back; fear that their cherished beliefs should prove harmful, fear lest they themselves should prove less worthy of respect than they have supposed themselves to be. 'Should the workingman think freely about property? What then will become of us, the rich? Should young men and women think freely about sex? What then will become of morality? Should soldiers think freely about war? What then will become of military discipline?'"

And because a true education would prove to be threatening to the existing social structure, education largely remains unchanged since Robinson founded the New School for Social Research. It is largely focused on improving the changes of personal economic success without larger consideration for social and political betterment. It remains difficult to teach the shortcomings and limitations of capitalism in its present state, and so the education that is given to us is given to us as a pacifier.

“The cow asks no questions as to how it happens to have a dry stall and a supply of hay. The kitten laps its warm milk from a china saucer, without knowing anything about porcelain; the dog nestles in the corner of a divan with no sense of obligation to the inventors of upholstery and the manufacturers of down pillows. So we humans accept our breakfasts, our trains and telephones and orchestras and movies, our national Constitution, or moral code and standards of manners, with the simplicity and innocence of a pet rabbit.”

This is why learning as a way of being is difficult. Our traditional models of education are designed, consciously or unconsciously, to prevent us from seeking to deeply. It would disturb the “whisperings of the herd.”

Freedom and Forgetfulness

2010-02-05T12:07:00.000-08:00

The other day, I went to the Native Healing Centre in order to interview some folks about a film I'm putting together about freedom. I am asking as many people as I can, "What does freedom mean to you?" and "What in your life makes you feel 'un-free?'" I joined the group gathered at the Native Healing Centre for lunch. It was beyond my comfort zone, and I was transported back in time to when I was 21, reporting for my first day of work at the Seattle Indian Centre in the June of 1995. I graciously accepted my styrofoam bowl containing one of the pea soups I have had, and as I went to take my bannock, the woman behind the counter asked me, "White or brown?"

"Could I try one of each?"

"Not yet. Seconds are served at 12:30."

It took a second for this to sink in. A long, deep, and profound second about the meaning of seconds . . . . "How could I have forgotten? Has that much time passed?" The rules were exactly the same at the Seattle Indian Centre soup kitchen, where I worked for two years. Seconds are always served at 12:30 because you never know if you are going to have enough to feed everyone. You can't give anyone seconds until you make sure everyone had firsts. These are the rules, and this is the knowledge and behaviour one has to have to belong to this culture. I felt like an idiot. I felt like an outsider. But most of all, I was mad at myself because I should have known better.

I had forgotten what it was work at the soup kitchen every day. I had forgotten what it was like to not have to wonder whether or not I could have an extra piece of bannock. It was then that I realized, "This is largely what freedom means to me - the ability to forget the little things." I like to think that I do not take my Time upon this Earth or my fortune for granted.

This was a good reminder, but I wonder how long it will be before I forget this lesson again.

Cosmological Vertigo

2010-01-21T09:20:00.000-08:00

Naomi Klein's speech ast the Joint American Library Association/Canadian Library Association Conference was what I was reading last night.

"This is the essence of free trade: making sure that absolutely nothing, whether books or water or ideas, is offered for free."

I have been reading her website regularly for the best reporting on the situation in Haiti.

I also just finished Toni Samek's excellent history, Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility in American Librarianship, 1967-1974. Brilliant! This is going to be absolutely essential when we have a discussion about the role of libraries in promoting social progress at the CLA conference in Edmonton later this year.

Tomorrow, I am leading a book discussion on Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress for the opening Leadership Edmotnon retreat. Wright uses the phrase "cosmological vertigo" in the beginning of A Short History of Progress, and that's the best description for the feeling I have been having since 2010 began.

I love his book, and here are some of the questions I developed for the discussion:

On Page 4, Wright states that “Progress has become a myth in the ‘anthropological’ sense. . . . Successful myths are powerful and partly true. . . . . Myths are so fraught with meaning that we live and die by them.” How would you define what the belief systems of this Myth of Progress are?

On Pages 32 and 33, Wright introduces definitions to the word culture and civilization, and he states, “From ancient times until today, civilized people have believed they behave better, and are better, than so-called savages. But the moral values attached to civilization are specious: too often used to justify attacking and dominating other, less powerful societies?” Can you see signs of moral progress in the world around you? If so, where? Can you see ways where we have not progressed morally?

How would you answer Wright’s question on page 63: “The last tree. The last mammoth. The last dodo. And soon perhaps the last fish and the last gorilla. On the basis of what police call ‘form,’ we are serial killers beyond reason. But has this always been, and must it always be, the case? Are all human systems doomed to stagger along under the mounting weight of their internal logic until it crushes them?” When you look at the future, do you think we are doomed to stagger along until the mounting weight of our civilization crushes us?

On Page 79, Wright says of Ur, “The short-lived Empire of Ur exhibits the same behavior we saw on Easter Island: sticking to entrenched beliefs and practices, robbing the future to pay the present, spending the last reserves on natural capital on a reckless binge of excessive wealth and glory.” What are our civilization’s entrenched beliefs and practices? Who is robbing the future to pay for the present?

On Page 123, Wright quotes Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake, when one of her characters asks, “’As a species, we’re doomed by hope, then?’ By hope? Well yes, Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create ever more dangerous messes. Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over a prudent and predictable frugality.” Do you agree that hope is dangerous? Why do you think people are more apt to choose a slim hope than a prudent frugality?

Goodbye 2009

2009-12-04T08:34:00.000-08:00

I gave this speech last night at the Telus World of Science for the Leadership Edmonton alumni celebration and recruitment event. I always feel a bit foolish and vulnerable after a speaking engagement, and I know I am going to feel this way no matter what I do. They introduced me as the "Human Thesaurus" and mentioned my penchant for bringing up obscure quotes, which I do - not to sound erudite - but because these quotations are the verbal incarnation of my soul. If I was going to be the personification of any standard reference item, I would prefer to be called "The Walking Bartlett's." The occasions where I get to share all of the things I have come across in my journey are rare, and when I get asked to discuss what it means to be alive and human, I tend to go overboard. I really want to know why I am here, and to figure out the answer to that question, I have dug down into some dark places. If what I have found can help anyone else make sense of this strange land in which we find ourselves, then perhaps knowledge isn't useless after all.

It is an honour and a privilege to have the opportunity to speak to you tonight about something of great importance to me – my experience with Leadership Edmonton. Leadership Edmonton has profoundly changed how I see the world, and I want to explain exactly what I mean by that. My life priorities haven’t changed. I haven’t changed my profession. It hasn’t been that kind of transformative change. It is the kind of transformative change that is made by a good pair of glasses. I have a very strong prescription, and without corrective lenses, I can only see in general terms. I see fuzzy outlines and the broad patterns of the world, but I don’t see well enough to drive. When I put the glasses on, however, everything comes into clearer focus. And so it is with Leadership Edmonton – it is like a pair of corrective lenses that allows me to see the world more clearly.

This is an appropriate metaphor because 2009 marks the anniversary of some truly auspicious scientific achievements, and we are still figuring out how these discoveries affect our answer to one of the major questions posed by Leadership Edmonton, which is "What does it mean to be alive and human?"

Over four hundred years ago, a novel optical device from Holland made its way to Italy and came into the hands of a free-thinking mathematician named Galileo Galilei. Much like the rest of human technology, Galileo first improved the telescope's power for military application. With Galileo's improved design, the more powerful telescope was able to see a ship's flags two hours before it would arrive in harbour. For Renaissance Florentines, this was the equivalent of real-time satellite imagery. Its immediate application was obvious, and it earned Galileo a more prestigious and lucrative position with the Duke of Tuscany.

Soon afterwards, in the Autumn of 1609 - four hundred years ago from right now - Galileo aimed the instrument skyward – and our universe changed forever. 2009 has been UNESCO's International Year of Astronomy, and it is not an understatement to say that Galileo changed the universe forever, for it was Galileo's observation of the moons around Jupiter, now named the Galilean moons, that would usher in one of the most profound changes of how we thought of ourselves as human beings. Up until that point, as you are all probably aware, the dominant cosmology was geocentric - the Earth was the center of the universe - and the sun, just like the moon and the rest of the planets, moved around the Earth. In this cosmology - where the Earth is the center of the Universe - the unavoidable corollary of this worldview is that humans are the center of the universe.

Galileo was mocked by skeptical Aristotelian professors, but mockery was not the most threatening enemy Galileo would face. Galileo's assertion in A Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems that "The Bible teaches how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens go" would force him to stand before the Holy Office of the Inquisition and adjure – or solemnly repudiate – his position that faith ought to be independent from science, that the positions of stars and planets should not have any bearing on the issue of salvation.

Galileo would recount his position on his knees, and he would spend his remaining years under house arrest in his villa, which is not as bad as it sounds, but his abjuration must still have been painful. And it must have been painful because a larger part of Galileo's argument was also ignored. According to Dan Falk's excellent documentary "Looking Up," Galileo had argued that if the Catholic Church rejected or censored the Copernican view, it would not only be a tragedy for him personally, it would also be a tragedy for the Church. Galileo did not want the Catholic Church to embarrass itself. At the time, the 30 Years War raged in the Alps, the Protestant Reformation was gaining strength, and Galileo reasoned that if the Catholic Church censored Copernicus's work and the denied the existence of the heliocentric model of the universe, the Protestants would figure it out, and the Catholic Church would be embarrassed. Galileo’s prediction, much like his observations of the heavens, turned out to be correct.

Leadership Edmonton is about pioneer leadership, and Galileo is an example of a pioneer leader. He was one of those individuals who had a firm ability to see the world as it actually worked. He strove for depth of understanding, valuing truth above all things. He actively tested his knowledge, both in the realm of the heavens, and in the realm of human affairs. The Galileo Affair also demonstrates another one of the major themes of Leadership Edmonton – that leadership is a battleground, and we must be equipped to do battle. And Leadership Edmonton helps to build a new arsenal.

Einstein called Galileo the "Father of Modern Science," and Dava Sobel, author of Galileo's Daughter, describes Galileo by saying, "Galileo always had a sense of the future, of not falling into the attitude of having discovered everything. Whatever he learned, he felt that other people would continue his work by building a deeper understanding and see the farther distances. That is a really great attitude to have." This is also a beautiful way to define the main topic of study of Leadership Edmonton, what Ken Low has defined as the Human Venture. The Human Venture is a great admiration for the best of human life and human progress, and the humility to know we haven't learned everything. If you have gone through Leadership Edmonton, you know that at some point during each learning day, Ken will inevitably say, "We're always more ignorant than we are wise." The first time he said it, I thought, "Yeah, that's so true." And I know it’s true, intellectually. But only after hearing it several times has the full impact of this truth really begun to sink in. It has now become a mantra for me, a reminder to shift my focus from what I think I know to what I don’t know.

The Galileo Affair has become the archetypal battle between faith and reason, but it was much more than that. What was at stake was our place in the universe, and I don’t think we have completely come to terms with this, yet. Our status in the universe is much less secure. Since Galileo’s time, we have learned that we exist in one of countless galaxies in what might possibly be a multi-verse. We are, right now, traveling at 64,000 thousand miles per hour on a fragile rock that is about 14 billion years old and has given rise to many forms of life and, also, six major periods of extinction. As the ramifications of these vast horizons of space and time seeped into our consciousness, they would give rise to a fatal malaise, expressed best by the mad philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:

"In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of 'world history' - yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die."

Similar to his statement that God is dead, Nietszche paints a bleak and gloomy picture that is, from a certain perspective, largely accurate. God may not actually be dead, but a fatal blow was delivered to a literal God by Galileo’s telescope.

If we time travel ahead 250 years, we reach 1859, and the other event gaining much notoriety this year is the sesquicentennial of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. This is the second great displacement. First, we were dislodged from our privileged place in the Heavens, and now Darwin displaced us from our place on Earth. Paul Hawken, in his latest book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World, recounts the scene, back in 1860, in the wake of the publication of On the Origin of Species.

"At that time, many naturalists were clergymen, who had the leisure time to ponder texts and explore woodlands. They understandably overlaid the biblical account of the fifth day of Genesis onto the world they saw: winged creatures and everything that creepeth were immutable, permanently in the form the Creator fashioned them. . . . On the Origin of Species could not have been less welcome to the Church and was famously challenged by Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, known as "Soapy Sam" for his slippery cunning in debates. Inviting Darwinian proponent Thomas Huxley to a three-day British Association debate in 1860 at Oxford, Wilberforce, with ridicule in mind, pointedly demanded to know which side of Huxley's family had descended from a monkey. As the sarcasm seeped through the chamber, Huxley slowly rose and reflected that he would rather be descended from an ape than from a man of intelligence who would use his position and gifts to obscure the truth. Legend has it that devout women fainted while aspiring scientists cheered. For the faithful, it was deicide – (aka, God is dead). For the scientists, it was liberation." (Blessed Unrest, pages 31-32)

I believe that our displacement from the center of the universe, and the proposition that we are descendents of monkeys are explosions that, like the Big Bang itself, are still visible in the cultural static surrounding us. We are still trying to come to grips with the radical alteration of our significance. Now, 150 years later, we live in an age where Intelligent Design is still fighting for credibility in the classroom, even though evolution has become the dominant scientific paradigm. In Alberta this year, there was a great debate surrounding Bill 44 about whether or not evolution would become “optional,” even though the fossil record and observation of real animals highlight the validity of Darwin’s theory. Again, the issues of evolution is cast as a battle between faith and science, but it is about more than that – it is about how we can make meaning out of our human lives.

One of the interesting things, I think, about the progress of scientific discovery, is that through our intellect and mastery of Nature, we have been able to reclaim our displaced throne a little bit. If the Scientific Discoveries of Mankind have served to minimize us, the Scientific Achievements of Mankind have served to ennoble us. In the words of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!”

How like a God, indeed! On Monday of this week, November 30, 2009, the Large Hadron Collider pushed the energy of its particle beams beyond one trillion electron volts, making it the world's highest-energy particle accelerator. In setting the world record, the Large Hadron Collider has begun getting ready for the big smash next year, when scientists will hunt for evidence of the Higgs boson, which has been named the “God particle.” The Large Hadron Collider, according to the CERN website, may reveal the "fundamental laws of Nature," "the workings of the Universe," "the origins of matter,” and it might do that. And if we can understand the fundamental laws of nature, the origins of matter and the workings of the Universe, then we have become like Gods.

And yet, we are gods in the mold of the Greek gods – gods who possess tremendous powers coupled with outrageous tempers, who are vengeful, vain, jealous and prone to self-destructive acts of hubris. Much like Achilles, the greatest warrior of them all, we also have our Achilles heel. The Large Hadron Collider has been plagued with problems, including spilling a ton of liquid cooled helium, and in October of this year, an employee of CERN was one of two brothers arrested in France for suspected Al-Qaeda links. In these two setbacks, we see human fallibility and the specter of terrorism. But the problem I find most amusing is that, most recently, a power outage on the Collider was blamed on a piece of bread dropped by a passing bird.

A bird dropping a piece of bread disrupted the whole 27 km ring capable of smashing atoms together. There is something deeply symbolic about that – about our utter susceptibility to random acts of Nature. This small crumb, just like hurricanes and earthquakes, is the kind of event that reminds one to be humble. But it is also a story about a bird. When I was an altar boy in Bay City, Michigan, Father Fron, who spoke eight languages and had built 12 churches, gave me two small little birds for my dedicated and faithful service. They are not the works of a master carver, but they hold a tremendous amount of meaning for me. They link me, like no other gift I have ever received, to my boyhood, to a faith I have lost and regained, and they have come to take on a completely different totemic quality as of late. They now remind me of the future, as much as they remind me of the past.

In Blessed Unrest, which I mentioned earlier, Paul Hawken includes the story of Peter and Rosemary Grant, who traveled to the Galapagos islands to study something that Darwin never actually addressed - the origin of a species. The Grants mist-netted and banded almost every finch on the island, and for 20 years they catalogued rainfall, food production, mating and birthing. As they sent their results to Princeton with all of the data, starting in 1973, they were captivated primarily by what they observed in the different beak types. Depending on rainfall and the available food sources, they discovered that Darwin had no idea how right he was about evolution, but Darwin also had no idea how wrong he was that evolution occurred over "long lapses of ages." Evolution, the Grants discovered, was occurring constantly, the rate of change in the Galapagos finch population, based on available diet, was rapid, if not feverish. Hawken writes that "As additional scientists study organisms more painstakingly and over longer periods, a structuralist view of biological organization (where an organism is fixed in form) is giving way to an image of an adaptive nature defined by process and flow." (Blessed Unrest, pages 32-33)

Lost in the current cultural war between Evolution and Creationism is a sense of tense. Whenever we speak about evolution, it is in terms of “we evolved," in the past tense, implying the journey has already happened. In a conversation I had with Jeff Bisanz while going through Leadership Edmonton, this realization hit me full force. Evolution has not just happened, it is happening. The finches are one example. Here is another. I moved from Oregon two years ago, and while living there, I was actively involved in helping to repair a salmon bearing stream – which largely meant I hacked Himalayan blackberry bushes away from the stream’s edge every weekend with a machete I called Sisyphus. Improving the riparian zones, however, was only one part of a much larger problem, namely dammed rivers that prevented the Salmon from reaching their spawning grounds. On October 15, 2009, the Oregon Environmental News published a story showing that salmon are adapting their behavior to ensure survival.

The story of salmon is well known in the Northwest. Traditionally, fall chinook hatch in the spring from eggs embedded in gravel. They enter the ocean as smolts, just a few inches in length, a matter of months later. Then, at sea, they grow up before returning years later to their home rivers, swimming upstream past dams and hundreds of miles inland to spawn in the waters of their birth. Researchers are now finding that as many as a quarter of these chinook are staying put in the river for at least a year -- either at the mouth of the Clearwater River near Lewiston, Idaho, or further downstream as far as the Columbia River's estuary -- before heading to sea. These fish are now being called yearling migrants or reservoir types, and if they survive to be yearlings, they are about eight times as likely to make it back to the river as adults, dams and all, than their counterparts.

If finches and fish can respond quickly to environmental stress and strain, the implication for us is quite clear. Our situation is not hopeless. We are still evolving, and as conscious animals with free will and intelligence - the main point of the Leadership Edmonton curriculum is to equip us with the Tools of Wisdom and Judgment so that we can take an active control of our own evolution. Charles Darwin never said, “survival of the fittest.” In fact, he said something remarkably different: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is most responsive to change.”

Human Nature is not fixed and unalterable, but something that is in the process of emerging and becoming. The Leadership Edmonton curriculum is built around this newer version of evolution as adaptive process and flow. Evolution is a process that is still happening, and in this way, the Genesis statement that we are made in God's image begins to make perfect sense and take on a deeper and more profound meaning. The forces at work that have created the universe and our world, and us, are also still working on us. We are not the center of the universe, but we are not separate from the universe, either, and we are like these Divine and Mysterious forces because we have the power and opportunity to recreate the world that has created us - and this is primarily through our culture. And culture is something that can and does change, dramatically and radically.

Human beings have not always existed, and they don’t have to exist. The culture of Western Civilization has not always existed in its present form, and it does not have to exist. Indeed, it cannot continue to exist in its present form. No matter what the Large Hadron Collider tells us about the nature of the universe, that discovery will not be able to help us feed the poor, repair war-torn economies, or rebuild ecosystems. Whatever the Large Hadron Collider has to tell us about the origin of matter, it will have nothing to say on the actions of conscience.

Adaptability has become a moral imperative as well as a matter of survival. We have progressed technologically, but our technological progress has outpaced our moral progress. In Dr. Martin Luther King’s Massey Lectures from 1967, which begins with him saying that “Heaven was the code word for Canada,” he states:

“Mammoth productive facilities with computer minds, cities that engulf the landscape and pierce the clouds, planes that almost outrace time: these are awesome, but they cannot be spiritually inspiring. Nothing in our glittering technology can raise man to new heights, because material growth has been made an end in itself, and in the absence of moral purpose, man himself becomes smaller as the works of man become bigger. Another distortion in the technological revolution is that instead of strengthening democracy at home, it has helped to eviscerate it. Gargantuan industry and government, woven into an intricate computerized mechanism, leaves the person outside. The sense of participation is lost, the feeling that ordinary individuals influence important decisions vanishes, and man becomes separate and diminished. Alienation is a form of living death. It is the acid of despair that dissolves society.”

I have often suffered from this form of living death. The despair of feeling disconnected, coupled with a crushing powerlessness that I could do anything to improve the situation. According to Bread for the World, 16,000 children die from hunger every day. 11.6 million children in Africa are AIDS orphans. According to the United Nations, there are some 9.9 million refugees worldwide who have been displaced by war. The scale of human suffering, and the feeling of my own insignificance, paralyzed me and brought me to a painful state of inaction. My experiences with my classmates from Leadership Edmonton, and my interactions with Ken, have provided a great remedy for this illness.

As we unravel the mysteries of the universe, I feel like we are like a detective in a movie investigating a serial killer. We’re putting together clues, assembling all of the puzzle pieces, and then, when the final clue fits into place and we know who the killer is, we turn around only to find the killer standing right behind us with a gun to our heads. Ignorance. Alienation. Arrogance. Apathy. These are the great enemies to further human progress. We know that. They may seem overwhelming and intractable, but the Human Venture framework that Ken has developed, along with exposure to a greater network of individuals anxious to move us into a more adaptive position, are the two main reasons I am thankful I have had a chance to go through the program. If you are here tonight, considering enrolling in Leadership Edmonton, I heartily recommend it.

Thank you for the generosity of your ears.

The Evolution of Intellectual Freedom

2009-11-13T23:10:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, David Wright (a classmate of mine at the University of Washington’s iSchool, Fiction Librarian at Seattle Public Library, and a frequent contributor to Novelist), recommended a book to me entitled Questioning Library Neutrality. Since reading that book, I have been doing some research in order to map the evolution of the idea of Intellectual Freedom - one of the core philosophies that inspired me to become a public librarian.

BIF - Before Intellectual Freedom

"in 1896, The American Library Association sponsored a roundtable discussion on contemporary fiction. Controversy centered around several contemporary authors of the naturalist school. More than half the librarians present agreed that Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage and The Damnation of Theron Ware should not be included in the next ALA Catalog supplement. In keeping with this attitude, authors like Zola, Daudet, and de Maupassant were not cited in either the 1893 Catalog or its 1904 Supplement.
Because the ideology of reading dictated the exclusion of bad reading as well as the inclusion of good reading, turn-of-the-century public librarians willingly assumed the role of censor as a part of their professional credo. St. Louis Public Library Director Arthur Bostwick had no reservations about using the word censor in the title of his presidential address before the American Library Association in 1908. The values and attitudes that gave rise to adoption of a 'Library Bill of Rights' by ALA in 1939 had not yet evolved in the first decade of the twentieth century." Wiegand, Wayne. An Active Instrument for Propaganda: The American Public Library During World War I, 1989, p. 4.

Librarians Emerge as Freedom Fighters

It is an interesting background note that David K. Berninghausen was an intellectual freedom fighter in 1948, when censorship was rampant. As time would move on, Berninghausen would find his position as radical had shifted to one of conservative.

“Berninghausen shared Higgins’s judgment that librarians did not embrace intellectual freedom as a tenet of the profession. If pressures to censor occurred in their libraries, most librarians quietly acquiesced. . . . Librarians, Berninghausen stated, ‘must protest against all attempts at censorship and all legislation or acts of government which could threaten intellectual freedom . . . The time for deliberate, well-directed, constructive action by the American Library Association has come.’” Robbins, Louise S. Censorship and the American Library: The American Library Association’s Response to Threats to Intellectual Freedom, 1939-1969. 1996, pp.29-33

The Battle Over Neutrality: The Berninghausen debate revisited

“In the November 1972 issue of Library Journal, he (David K. Berninghausen) published ‘Social responsibility vs. the Library Bill of Rights,’ which was immediately followed up by nineteen rejoinders gathered together as ‘The Berninghausen debate’ in January 1973. Berninghausen advanced his first major premise by stating that the raison d’etre of ALA is, among other things, not any of the following:

1. To eradicate racial injustice and inequities and to promote human brotherhood
2. To stop the pollution of air, earth, and sea
3. To build a United Nations capable of preventing all wars

“’Vital as these issues are, it is not the purpose of ALA to take positions as to how men must resolve them [emphasis in the original].’ Interestingly, Berninghausen failed to explain the actual purpose of ALA, and, given the nature of the debate, the purpose of the ALA did not go without saying. Further, Berninghausen’s assertion begged the question: if it were not the purpose of ALA to take a stand on social issues such as those mentioned above, then just whose purpose was it? As Betty-Carol Sellen, one of the rejoinder authors, explained: ‘if librarians decide that the issues vital to society are irrelevant to librarians as librarians, then society may find that librarians are irrelevant to it.’” Joyce, Steven. “A Few Gates Redux: An examination of the Social Responsibilities Debate in the Early 1970s and 1990s.” Questioning Library Neutrality, 2008, pp. 42-43.

"From 1970 to 1980, urban library economic fortunes have tended to decline in spite of hortatory rhetoric, inviting the reasonable hypothesis that there may be an inverse relationship between the social activism of the library and the public support it receives [all emphasis mine]. Social intervention did not open the public purse. Libraries were not exempted from budget cuts, particularly in those cities afflicted by falling revenue. Libraries simply did not make a convincing case for their utility. . . .We are still approached frequently by outsiders with requests for library involvement in social outreach and services. To the degree that the library can convincingly catalog its own deficiencies as a candidate for social service intervention, it reduces outside political pressure without arousing antagonism [all emphasis mine]. It is not always a painless experience to resist involvement in social reform, but persistence is ultimately respected. Expectations by reformers are not easily put off, but we obstinately explain that we have no skills for saving the world." Gaines, E.J. "Let's Return to Traditional Library Service: Facing the Failure of Social Experimentation." Wilson Library Bulletin, 1980, v.55(1), 50-53.

“First, librarians must become actively engaged in society they serve. Librarianship concerns itself with literacy, intellectual freedom, and equity of information access. By holding such values, they ask, how can librarians ignore issues concerning basic human dignity and the social conditions in which human culture develops? Second, rather than eliminating debate on social issues, such debate should be seen as a sign of a healthy intellectual community. Third, who is to decide what is and is not of primary concern to librarianship?” Joyce, Steven. “A Few Gates Redux: An examination of the Social Responsibilities Debate in the Early 1970s and 1990s.” Questioning Library Neutrality, 2008, p. 43, taken from a 1994 Buschman, Rosenwieg and Harger article

Neutrality as Avoidance When Life is on the Brink

“For me, the activist, social responsibility argument has great potency, because slavishness to neutrality can often simply be a mask to support the status quo. But the status quo has, can, and does deprive millions of Americans of the kind of rights that are required for intellectual freedom [emphasis mine]. . . . So librarians have to be involved in the process to make those rights realities. . . .Socially responsible librarianship is librarianship that is part of – not dissociated from – society and its needs, problems, and concerns. Intellectual freedom is not the only ethic of the profession and it is not a purist value, separated from other democratic principles and human rights.” Sparanese, Ann. “Activist Librarianship: Heritage or Heresy.” Questioning Library Neutrality, 2008, p77.

The Questions in My Mind:

What is the greatest threat to Libraries as we move forward?

People are free to read whatever is published, but what does Intellectual Freedom look like in a highly corporatized information environment where what is available and accessible is largely produced and disseminated by corporations who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo?

Is a “slavishness to neutrality”, as Ann Sparanese intimates, a quiet acceptance of poverty, war, and social conditions that prohibit individuals from enjoying the basic means of existence, which are required for intellectual freedom to have any real meaning?

Can libraries remain neutral, and even if they can, should they? Is neutrality, as Betty-Carol Sellen suggests, one of the big idols we have erected that will eventually doom us (see Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress for allusion to Easter Island)?

What are the risks involved with remaining neutral?

Does overt activism to create a more equitable and just society, as E.J. Gaines suggests, endanger the library’s public support?

Is the library capable of social service intervention, or do we truly have “no skills for saving the world”?

What are the risks involved with actively working to establish the rights required for Intellectual Freedom?

If greater activism is a threat to the library’s support and survival, is it better to die working for improvement if survival comes at the cost of sitting idly by and watching your community suffer?

Minus Something or Other

2009-10-24T10:07:00.000-07:00

Very little of human life is lived at the margins of existence, on the brink of life and death. Without the ever-present knowledge of death, however, everything would become trivial. When the thought of death enters our mind (when our airplane shakes in turbulence at 36,000 feet, for example), our loved ones become more important and we think of all the times when we should have given more of ourselves in terms of time and attention. Unfortunately, when you have that realization, it is almost always too late.

This has been the dominant thought on my mind since the end of October when we attended a fundraiser for the Children's Wish Foundation in honour of my wife's cousin, who passed away earlier this year at the far too young age of 27. She "battled" cancer for over a decade, and succumbed to a brain tumor.

I have worked in libraries for over a decade, and I cannot recall the number of times when I have heard a colleague say, essentially, "I mean, why are they getting so worked up about this? No one's gonna die." And this is largely true, even though I think it downplays the importance of what we do on a daily basis. In a recession, when our usage goes through the roof as people look for ways to cut costs and look for other jobs, the library often faces cuts because the library is not considered an "essential service." Essential-ness is a higher state reserved for police and fire. But most people will live their whole lives without requiring the police or the fire department. Fire departments have increasingly moved towards emergency medical services because houses (and whole cities) don't burn down like they used to. Our lives are lived, by and large, with the thought of death banished towards the hinterland.

But I could very well be wrong. I have heard it said that "Life isn't fragile. Human life is fragile," and maybe most of human life is lived at the margin of life and death. My friend's young son fought for his life for the better part of a year. In the past year, the employees I work with have experienced several bereavements, cared for spouses who have had heart attacks, cancer, and transplants. Perhaps, if I was to describe my Western privilege in one way, it would be this - that I am able to drive my car to a fulfilling library job, put in my time and effort, and then return to my spacious home and my lovely wife and stepdaughter with the justifiable illusion that I will live peacefully until a ripe old age.

The Children's Wish Foundation of Alberta will be able to fill three wishes for this year, and granting wishes is a powerful and awesome thing. According to Bread for the World, 16,000 children die from hunger every day. 11.6 million children in Africa are AIDS orphans. According to the United Nations, there are some 9.9 million refugees worldwide who have been displaced by war.

If I had a wish, I'd wish that there were enough wishes to go around.

Human, Only Human

2009-10-12T20:27:00.000-07:00

When I hopped on a Greyhound bus headed west less than a week after graduating from college, I carried with me a copy of Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits. I was a bit pretentious back then (and probably still am), but I found in Nietzsche a snide humor, an uncompromising willingness to question everything, and one of the most inspirational pieces of writing I had ever encountered. I couldn't understand everything he wrote, but the quarter that I could understand had a profound impact on how I viewed the flat, vast plains outside the bus window.

I wanted my spirit to be free, and Nietzsche was the first "free spirit" I met, and I hoped with all my heart to meet others like him, in the flesh, so that I could "be of good cheer in the midst of bad things." I had a much darker temperament, then. The world was all wrong and headed in the wrong direction, but perhaps the fateful conditions Nietzsche alluded to had given rise to me. Perhaps I was a free spirit, and Nietzsches's hope for a grander emergence of the free spirit, encapsulated in the Preface, became like a chant to me as I moved across the endless plains of Time.

My mom had cried when I boarded the bus, saying her final words, "I know you need to do this. There's nothing for you here." I started a three thousand mile and thirteen year journey that was my great separation, and Nietzsche, perhaps only Nietzsche, knew what I was going through:

"The great separation comes suddenly, like the shock of an earthquake: all at once the young soul is devastated, torn loose, torn out - it itself does not know what is happening. An urge, a pressure governs it, mastering the soul like a command: the will and wish awaken to go away anywhere, at any cost: a violent, dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world flames up and flickers in all the senses."

Stylistically, Nietzsche's short sections were perfect for the bus. I have never been able to read for very long in the car without getting sick, and the diesel smell, the lolling shocks, and the frequent stops required something without a clear beginning, middle, and/or end. The short, dense thoughts were like a gum I chewed on hour after monotonous hour. I savoured the language, even after the flavour was gone, and I would fade in and out of consciousness asking myself, "Why so apart, so alone?"

In my mind, Eduardo Galeano's Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, is a sequel to this work. Galeano has made a stylistic leap of genius. His writing is poetry, prose, history, philosophy, agony, economics, and pure heartache. This book is a beautiful, heartbreaking history of everything - of those who have been long forgotten, and those who are just mostly forgotten. To read him has been to be of good cheer despite being in the midst of bad things. Of the many passages I want to share with everyone, here is a short summation:

"Darwin told us we are cousins of the apes, not the angels. Later on, we learned we emerged from Africa's jungle and that no stork ever carried us from Paris. And not long ago we discovered that our genes are almost identical to those of mice.

Now we can't tell if we are God's masterpiece or the devil's bad joke.

We puny humans:
exterminators of everything,
hunters of our own,
creators of the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb, and the neutron bomb, which is the healthiest of all bombs since it vaporizes people and leaves objects intact,
we, the only animals who invent machines,
the only ones who live at the service of the machines they invent,
the only ones who devour their own home,
the only ones who poison the water they drink and the earth that feeds them,
the only ones capable of renting or selling themselves, or renting or selling their fellow humans,
the only ones who kill for fun,
the only ones who torture,
the only ones who rape.

And also
the only ones who laugh,
the only ones who daydream,
the ones who make silk from the spit of a worm,
the ones who find beauty in rubbish,
the ones who discover colors beyond the rainbow,
the ones who furnish the voices of the world with new music,
and who create words so that
neither reality nor memory will be mute." (page 228.)

Galeano helps us to remember things we would rather leave in the dark. But the free spirit has to grasp the necessary injustice that is inseparable from life, so that he might grasp what is higher, and richer, and just. Galeano will guide you how to grasp the necessary injustice of this life. And he will inspire the spirit to long for justice.

The Long Legacy of Human Heartache, One

2009-09-30T20:37:00.000-07:00

Since my birthday, I have been reading the most amazing book, Eduardo Galeano's Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone. It is unlike anything I have ever read before, and it has highjacked my thinking. For over two months now, I have been sitting in bed reading this poetic history of humanity over and over, digesting the words slowly. Some nights, if I read ten pages, I feel I have read too much, have tried to digest too fast. I need to savour this because something is coalescing inside my soul. I have not yet been able to grasp the higher pattern of thought and resistance expressed in the book, but I feel like I am getting close.

Galeano gives voice to the voiceless, and resurrects the martyrs who have failed to make it into the official account of history. And in so doing, he has damned any idea of progress we might hold. Humanity has managed to get where it is today in spite of its barbarity, cruelty, hypocrisy, pride, and ignorance. Galeano has the most amazing ability to write a biography of a great man in a paragraph, but the book is largely a biography of the forgotten millions and billions who have suffered through war and torture at the hands of those who have achieved power - not because they were right or just, but because they were willing to be the most inhumane. But he has also given voice to those who, along the way, have stood in futile opposition to the butchers of truth, and because these individuals exist, he has managed to provide me inspiration, even if he has not provided me any hope.

The story of humanity is a long legacy of heartache. While reading this book, I have been thinking again and again of two quotations that speak to the Nature of God and His Creation.

"Epicurus said: 'God either wishes to prevent evil and cannot, or can and does not wish to, or cannot and does not wish to, or wishes to and can. If He wishes to and cannot, He is impotent; if He can and does not wish to, He is perverse; if He cannot and does not wish to, He is impotent and perverse; if He does wish to and can, then why doesn't He?'" Anatole France, The Gods Will Have Blood

"He . . . thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank - is a vast ignorance . . . . And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man." H.G. Wells, The Time Machine.

The first passage is a short expression of the problem of theodicy. How can we reconcile innocent suffering in the world with an omnipotent and benevolent deity? Epicurus might have been the first to express this problem succinctly, but this problem has reached an important magnitude and growing numbers people cannot make this reconciliation between knowledge and faith. And Mankind has not only begun to doubt in the Goodness of God, he has has grown to doubt the Goodness of himself. We know intimately, through the records that remain to us, the darkness that lurks within the hearts of Man. We have been the most savage beast. Co-existing with this savage journey of one damn war after another, has also been the lighter and softer elements. Compassion, affection, appreciation and resistance are almost always at a disadvantage, and in that, they like the flower - delicate and easily destroyed by weather, time, and trench warfare. But they are there.

So we must look the horrible future in the face and live as if the end were not predetermined, even though the odds, as Galeano so beautifully makes clear, are stacked against us, and they always have been.

The Price of an Olive

2009-09-03T20:12:00.000-07:00

She was found alone in a ditch, dreadfully underweight for a two year old lab (42 pounds), and this was her weight with a full belly of new life inside her. Of her litter of eight pups, only three would survive, and those three survived only because of the hard and compassionate work of people who cannot stand to see animals suffer. The mother had no milk, and so her caretakers fed the pups and resuscitated the mother on a seven acre farm filled with rescue dogs, rescue horses, and rolling hills of canola fields.

Because she was small and black and would constantly remind us of our favourite little cafe in Vieux Montreal, my wife chose Olive to be her name.

Her new names include:

Double O Trouble, and
Olive Dumbledog,

She is truly a powerful wizard to have cast such a strong spell convincing us to keep her after what she has done since becoming part of our family. While we do not know her entire story, we do know she was found alone, and if she equates being alone with feeling hungry and vulnerable, it could explain why - in the first hour she was left alone - she managed to take down all our curtains. It could explain how - in five minutes - she chewed through both of the back seat belts in our car. Add in the adoption fees, the kennel we had to buy to make sure she didn't kill herself on some sharp corner, two pairs of my wife's sandals (one was her Birkenstocks), three leashes (so far), and a couple different bags of "long lasting" chew toys, and she has easily cost $1,000 in two weeks.

Consequently, I have been spending a lot of my time lately thinking about my relationship to the material world. There are those traditions that renounce the trappings of the physical world, and Jesus is a prime example of this, who renounce all of the trappings of wealth and power and abide - not in the realm of matter - but in the realm of the Spirit. The Buddha - a Prince with wealth and power and a lovely wife and child - decided to give it all up and travel into the woods, and this moment is called the Great Renunciation. Plato wrote that this world was a collection of shadows - that this world was not the real world. The Japanese revere the cherry blossom precisely because of its fleeting beauty. Because all the world is in a state of decay, the beauty of this world cannot be grasped without a corresponding sadness.

Joy plus the omnipresent knowledge of death is the human equation for suffering. And so it is for owning a dog.

On the opposite spectrum are those that wildly embrace the material world. Madonna's anthem I Am a Material Girl includes the line, "cause the boy with the cold hard cash is always Mister Right." In the West, it is a frequent insult to call someone "materialistic" because it is synonymous with shallow, but "Every girl's crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man."

Somewhere above the complete renunciation of the pleasures of the material world and a hedonistic embrace of the Pleasure Principle, is a sacred materialism. It is not uncommon in the Bible to come across references to being called to a banquet as a metaphor for religious awareness. In the Catholic celebration of the Eucharist (and trying to understand this is like trying to dig through seven feet of concrete with your toenails), transubstantiation means that a small wafer of bread is transformed - through prayer, through ritual, and through faith - into the body of Jesus Christ - the Bread of Life. According to an Egyptian Papyrus roll, one of the sayings attributed to Christ is "Cleave the wood and you will find me, lift the stone and I am there." This is another expression of this omnipresent divinity that exists in and between and under the physical stuff we call matter. This is frequently referred to as pantheism, but to live and walk with insight means to be able to see God in all Its forms, and to be thankful for the banquet. It means far more than this, but it starts with a significantly different orientation to all of the different forms of matter in this world - the beans and carrots my neighbor gave me, and the neighbor himself. The chocolate I have in my dessert, and the West African who grew the cocoa. As Joseph Campbell put it, “At such moments, you realize that you and the other are, in fact, one. It’s a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.”

I believe it is this interconnectedness and underlying unity that is truly worthy of awe, reverence, and praise. The material world is not here to be scorned and rejected. Neither is it to be used for our utilitarian purposes. It is here to be loved. The material world is an avenue whereby we can praise God by enjoying the many forms of matter and connect out individual lives to the greater substance (meaning the essence of the thing) of the Universe. The essence of all that is also our essence, this divine pulse beating through everything.

So this is what I have been thinking about as I repair Olive's damage: "In the spackle, you will find me, tear the seatbelt, and I am there."

Alan Watts, whom I have long revered, also speaks eloquently of the sacred relationship to the material world:

"I would point to bad cuisine as the main sign that American culture is not only post-Christian but anti-Christian. Proper cooking can be done only in the spirit of sacrament and a ritual. It is an act of worship and thanksgiving, a celebration of the glory of life, and no one can cook well who does not love and respect the raw materials he handles: the egg and onions, the herbs and salts, the mushrooms and beans, and, above all, the living animals - fish, foul and flesh - whose lives we take to live. Ritual is not just a symbolism of formal gestures. Ritual is, basically, anything done with loving awareness and reverence - whether cooking, carpentry, fishing, writing a letter, performing surgery, or making love. The everyday life of the modern West is quite startlingly lacking in ritual, as in all the style and color that goes with it. . . . all the wheat ground and the grapes crushed for us, all the steaks broiled and the fish grilled for us are - along with the human corpse offered for worms and vultures - the innumerable disguises in which the Lord gives himself away." Alan Watts, Supreme Identity

Watching Ourselves at Our Worst

2009-08-08T11:04:00.000-07:00

The invention of Fox Television's More to Love has made me remember a short editorial I had published in the Spring/Summer 2005 issue of Oregon Humanities.

"From Elvis to Eminem, each new wave of popular culture has been seen by established society as heralding the decline of civilization. One of the essential roles of art is to disturb - what Robert Hughes dubbed "The Shock of the New." As society absorbs each shock, a new generation is forced to expand the boundaries to achieve the same effect of shock.

Having accepted the nature of this repetitive dance, I vowed never to be shocked by Pop Culture. Then, I watched Survivor for the first time and proclaimed, 'The End of Civilization is at hand!' All I needed for confirmation was American Idol, Joe Millionaire, Fear Factor, The Swan, and Who's Your Daddy? - doses of contrived reality each more grotesque than the last.

Andy Warhol, the pioneer of 'reality television' prophesized 'The day will come when everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.' That day is upon us. People don't have to accomplish anything to be famous. For entertainment, all we need is an endless stream of freaks willing to gobble a gross amout of worms or be hacked up and recreated by plastic surgeons. Our cultural hunger to watch people suffer failure and humiliation seems insatiable. Perhaps we may yet reach the day where the #1 rated show will be Death Factor.

Warhol once said, 'The acquisition of my tape recorder finished whatever emotional life I might have had, but I was glad to see it go. Nothing was ever a problem again, because a problem just meant a good tape. The people telling you the problems couldn't decide anymore if they were really having the problems or if they were just performing. During the 60s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered.'

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states than an observed object changes in the process of observation. So, do reality television shows tell us something meaningful about the essence of human nature? Or are they superficial environments where reality and performance comingle to the degree that the viewer nor the viewed can tell the difference? In our identification with the protagonists and their struggles, do we confuse our own dramas with theirs and begin to lose touch with real emotion?

The anti-establishment poet-rapper Michael Franti called TV 'the Drug of the Nation, feeding ignorance and bleeding radiation.' Television has already eroded something crucial from human discourse. Now, reality television encourages us to watch ourselves at our worst. Yet we cannot get enough. As Warhol put it, 'Most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different. But I'm just the opposite: if I am going to sit and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don't want it to be essentially the same. I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.'

As we collectively empty ourselves into reality television, our growing tolerance demands that any new show be more grotesque and more outlandish to generate the shock that seems to be the only authentic feeling we have anymore. The Onion once ran a headline, Lowest Common Denominator Continues to Plummet.

But is it really worse? Or is this just the same revulsion felt by every ascending generation as they mature? Is my disgust merely a desperate bid to separate myself from the masses in an act of ego-feeding, self-protective elitism? Or is our culture really messed up?"

My Graduation Address to Leadership Edmonton

2009-07-08T08:40:00.000-07:00

Leadership Edmonton
Valedictorian Address
Delivered at Stanley A. Milner's Centre for Reading and the Arts
June 26, 2009

The great poet Percy Bysshe Shelley once wrote a powerful passage On Love that begins:

“I know not the internal constitution of other men, nor even thine whom I now address. I see that in some external attributes they resemble me, but when, misled by that appearance, I have thought to appeal to something in common and unburthen my inmost soul to them, I have found my language misunderstood, like one in a distant and savage land.”

I was thinking about this quote this morning for two reasons. The first is that Leadership Edmonton has been a place where I could unburden my inmost soul and have it understood. This has been an incredibly rare experience for me, and one that I have deeply appreciated. I know that I can sound erudite and pretentious, but I do not throw quotes around to sound learned, but because I have a deep appreciation and reverence for the Human Venture.

The second reason is because I hope, in my remarks today, that I am able to represent some of the sentiments of my fellow participants. It is a false assumption that we often make to think that our individual experience is an universal experience, but I hope my thoughts this afternoon will shed some light – like a broad beam flashlight (to use one of Ken's metaphors) – on what Leadership Edmonton has meant to all of us.

Just before my Senior year in high school, Bay City Central and Bay City Handy consolidated because the population of Bay City, Michigan had decreased from about 55,000 people to around 36,000 in the wake of the first auto-industry crisis of 1980s. Consolidation of these two high schools was a traumatic event. Central and Handy had been bitter cross town rivals for decades, and in my twelfth grade year, for the first time since 1950, the football season would not end with our equivalent of Michigan versus Ohio State (even in Canada, you must know, this is a pretty big deal). The East Side and the West Side of Bay City were now on the same team, and our perfectly comfortable Us vs. Them world had been turned upside down.

It was also personally traumatic for me because for three years, I had been number 1 in my class. I wanted to be number one in my class, but when we consolidated, Jennifer Broadfoot, from Handy, took over the valedictorian position, and in the final year, I graduated #2, salutatorian of my class.

#2. It still hurts.

And the worst part of that was that I couldn't even look across the river and think, "well, at least we beat them in football." I had no bragging rights whatsoever. So, when I was asked to give this valedictorian address to you today, it scabbed over a wound that is close to 20 years old. Take that, Jennifer!

I tell this story because it is important for another reason, and that reason is simply this: I have an ego problem, and I have always had an ego-problem. When I was selected to participate in Leadership Edmonton, it was a great honour, not because I was particularly interested in contributing to the Human Venture, but because I was interested in furthering the Jason Openo Venture. By participating in Leadership Edmonton, I would be joining the elite company leaders of the Edmonton Public Library ,and I would have something else on my resume. Leadership Edmonton would be an important step in my personal progress.

Not all of you may share this motivation, but I want to speak about it openly because the thing I have learned several times throughout the course of Leadership Edmonton is that I am the first enemy I must overcome. Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote “the worst enemy you can encounter will always be you, yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caves and woods,” and this is absolutely true for me. As we studied how our thoughts are constructed, we learned that our minds remember events in ways that benefit us. We are born with the ability to justify just about anything we do. And everyone is like this. Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) is a book I have recommended at least 100 times since reading it for this class.

And we fabricate these false realities largely unconsciously and automatically without ever thinking about how we think. The Buddha once said, "More than those who hate you, more than all your enemies, an undisciplined mind does greater harm." Ken’s maps and meta-framework have helped to explain how these undisciplined minds work, and how to keep our minds disciplined. Throughout the past year, we have investigated our own thoughts as a way to unravel the larger question of how we can help stop humanity from doing the same dumb things over and over again.

And so the best part (and the worst part) about being part of the Human Venture is understanding that my dilemma is widely shared. The dilemma is good because it helps to keep me light-hearted and see all of my self-deceptions and justifications as a great part of what it means to be alive and human. One of my favourite parts of Leadership Edmonton is when I admitted to myself that I can’t be a leader because I can’t even get me to follow me, but it is bad because I know how difficult I can be to live with, and how difficult it is to overcome myself sometimes. Now, if I multiply that by six point six billion, plus the time spent getting into this mess and the irreversible damage we have done to some our key ecosystems, and you begin to have some appreciation for just how difficult it will be to get out of this mess.

But would we really want it any other way? Would we want to take the easy way out? Because that’s the big choice.

In October 2007, Dennis Overbye wrote a piece for the New York Times called, “Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t.” This article investigated the topic of free will and tackled that famous philosophical question, is free will an illusion? As Rene Descartes asked it, how do we know we’re not just a brain in a vat controlled by an evil genius? The evil genius, in this case, are the instincts and emotions that evolved with us when we lived a very different lifestyle but still reside in us as the much older foundation of the human animal. In the article, Overbye writes:

"A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.”

I just love that image. Instead of imagining a conscious little man in my head making rational decisions, there’s a monkey trying to ride a tiger, and all the while the monkey is thinking he is in control of the tiger. We are constantly deluding ourselves if we simply assume that we are in control of the circus. But this is not to say we don’t have free will or are a helpless slave to our unconscious. It is merely a useful image in describing, at a very basic level, the difficulties we have in constructing accurate thoughts that see the world as it truly is. But choice is still there.

This article closes with a quote from the 1978 Nobel Prize winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who once said in an interview with the Paris Review, “The greatest gift which humanity has received is free choice. It is true that we are limited in our use of free choice. But the little free choice we have is such a great gift and is potentially worth so much that for this itself, life is worthwhile living.”

I.B. Singer was born a Jew in Poland in 1904. The limited freedom of choice he speaks of would be constrained in 1917 by World War I. After World War I, Singer would be forced to leave Poland, his common law wife, and his newly born son in 1935 in order to escape Nazi persecution. He would later meet his son again in 1955. The freedom he speaks of is limited by the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and the only choice remaining is whether or not we are going to choose to commit ourselves, heart and soul, to finding a way out of this mess.

And “the mess” is both individual and institutional.

Huston Smith, author of The World’s Religions—the standard textbook on comparative religions used in university campuses across North America for close to two decades—also wrote Beyond the Post-Modern Mind. In his discussion of the human dilemma, Huston Smith writes that one of the most important things to consider about being human is that we are, for the most part, invisible people:

"The terms 'visible' and 'invisible' refer here not to the ocular sense but to all of our senses of outward observation. The powers of life, consciousness, and self awareness are entirely invisible (meaning they are without color, sound, taste, or smell) while being –and this is important—what we are mainly interested in. All our thoughts, emotions, feelings, imaginations, reveries, dreams, fantasies, are invisible, and this has implications that are more startling than we normally realize. As it is these interior features we identify with most – take ourselves at heart to be – we are invisible; we live in a world of invisible people. I have not chosen that way of putting the matter for its shock value; only the insistence that we face the implications of the way we actually, workingly, think of ourselves. It would be an oversimplification to say that we are completely invisible, for we do have bodies; but as between oversimplifications, it is literally more accurate to say that we are more invisible than visible.”

As I mentioned, we are often largely invisible to ourselves. But we are also invisible to other people, and through the maps, Ken is working to make these powers of consciousness visible. And I think this idea that we are largely invisible is an incredibly important one because the situation of being invisible has gotten worse. As the State becomes more powerful and the individual becomes less significant, the idea that we are invisible is an explanation for why people share so much on Facebook and Twitter. They are attempts to make their souls visible.

Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization begins with an interesting passage related to this idea of invisibility:

“Among the tribes of northern Natal in South Africa, the most common greeting, equivalent to ‘hello’ in English, is the expression: Sawu bona. It literally means, ‘I see you.’ If you are a member of the tribe, you might reply by saying Sikhona, or ‘I am here.’ The order of this exchange is important: until you see me, I do not exist. It’s as if, when you see me, you bring me into existence. This meaning, implicit in the language, is part of the spirit of ubuntu, a frame of mind prevalent among native people in Africa . . . . which, from Zulu, literally translates as ‘A person is a person because of other people'. . . . . your identity is based upon the fact that you are seen – that the people around you respect and acknowledge you as a person.” (Fieldbook, page 3)

This idea that we are invisible people until we are seen stresses the most important aspect of human relationship - that our own becoming is a result of our interactions with other people. Because of my interactions with my stepdaughter over the past year and a half, I am not the same person I was a year and a half ago. She has awakened in me new levels of caring and concern about the Human Venture. And to the members of my Leadership Edmonton class, I want to say thank you. For all of your sharing and all of your thoughts, thank you. I have gotten as much as I have gotten from this program as result of you. I have a greater understanding of what it means to be alive and human. You have made me living proof that “A person is a person because of other people.”

But, while it is important to say we must see other people, I think it is equally important to recognize the forces at work in our lives that prevent us from seeing other people.

In The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm, he writes of the modern crisis of Love. I recommend this book to everyone. It’s called The Art of Loving, and I recommend it even though there are no pictures. The Art of Loving is not the Kama Sutra; it is a heavily philosophical and psychological look at human love, and because I love my job and the people I work with, I am going to read a short section from Fromm’s chapter entitled, “Love’s Disintegration in Western Society.”

“Modern capitalism needs men who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, willing to be commanded, to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction; who can be guided without force, led without leaders, promptedwithout aim. Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity and human relations are essentially those of alienated automatons, each basing his security on staying close to the herd, and not being different in thought, feeling or action. While everybody tries to be as close as possible to the rest, everybody remains utterly alone, pervaded by the deep sense of insecurity, anxiety, and guilt which always results when human separateness cannot be overcome.” (Art of Loving, page 79)

When we, as leaders, bring our human love to our workplace, to our families, and to all our activities, we are bringing the only real weapon we have to conquer the counter-venture forces that seek to reduce the human individual to a negligible quantity.

I have increasingly come to see, throughout Leadership Edmonton, that this small band of people offers a small revolt against this separateness because we possess a deep-seated need for human community – a word that is at the heart of what we do and why we are here. I often think of Leadership Edmonton as re-humanizing what has been de-humanized. The people in this program did not always seem to fit smoothly into the mold, and they were more likely to be a monkey wrench in the works than a gear helping the machine to run silently on.

We have to admit, I think, the great forces at work in the world that want individuals to feel like isolated, alienated, powerless individuals. Individuals who live on empty hopes or leave hope to someone else. Love is our primary weapon. As Erich Fromm puts it, love is the only refuge from this fairly bleak capitalistic existence. I have no desire to rail against capitalism as mode of economics – it has been incredibly successful and one cannot criticize it without saying a deep and profound thank you for all that it has given to us. But we can say, without a doubt, that there has been a tremendous cost in the way it has reduced human relations to a form of exchange and negated the importance of the individual human being. The individual has been reduced to a consumer, a market to be penetrated, and if he does not have the requisite level of disposable income, he is of questionable value. Compassion is just one of the Tools of Wisdom and Judgment that we are in dire
need of.

Bob Dylan once sang, “if there’s an original thought out there, I could sure use it right now,” and I feel the same way about closing this address, so I would like to close by stealing something profound from Paul Hawken. Paul Hawken’s recent commencement address at the University of Portland on May 3 has gone viral and has been reposted all over the place, and it has already become famous because Hawken has made the choice, and he helps us make the choice, and the best way for me to close with a profound thought is to share the wisdom of a true pioneer leader.

“When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, 'So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.' There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.”

I think Leadership Edmonton is also a place where humanity is coalescing. One of my most important moments in this program came in May when Ken said, “It’s not about your hope any more.” It hurt to hear that, but it’s true. What it is all about is whether or not we are going to cast our lot with those who are working to reconstitute the world.

Gratitude is a fundamentally religious experience, and I want to close by saying thank you, once again, to all of you. Thank you to Duna, Virginia, Jayne, Sherry, Wendy, and Jeff. Thank you for helping to develop our understanding of this meta-framework. And finally, I want to say thank you to Ken Low. Thank you for introducing me to Ronald Wright, Carol Tavris, Laurence Gonzales, Jeffrey Sachs, and all of the other pioneers that are showing us how to save the world.

A Monster Shot

2009-06-23T20:19:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, I did something I have never done before - I hit two home runs in my only two at-bats for my softball team. The second was so deep it hit the top of the backstop on the next field over. It was an absolute monster home run. I know, I know! It's rec league. It doesn't matter. It's not on film. It won't be on ESPN. No will ever remember it. You can almost hear The Boss' "Glory Days" in the background.

On top of all that, we lost 26-5.

But that home run. . . . .wow. . . . .did I mention it hit the top of the backstop on the next field?

It's Solstice time. When the sun shines until 11PM. It's officially summer, and I think of this as the My Personal New Year for a lot of reasons. First, as someone born at this time in the Zodiac, the Point of Cancer is an auspicious occasion. I am a crab whose moods swing with the tides, who every summer craves nothing more than to lay on the beach with his legs in the water and his torso on the sand, straddling Now and Forever.

Secondly, my name is Jason, and only people with the name of Jason can appreciate this. Your name is written in the calendar. Some people will allude to "Jason and the Argonauts", but to me, Jason is interwoven in Time with the passing of the seasons. My identity is bound up with Time; I think of my throat as the thin part of the hour glass between my head and my heart, and no other English name experiences this. Maybe if your name is Summer you get something close, but it's not the same. If you look at any twelve month calendar and your name is Jason, you really only see one thing:

JFMAMJJASOND

JulyAugustSeptemberOctoberNovember

July through November is my season. Summer and Fall feel entirely different to me than Winter and Spring. Winter is long and depressing, and Spring is too tempestuous and unpredictable. But Summer is the high time of life and Autumn the season of melancholy and migration. It is difficult to define the difference, but essentially it comes down to feeling like I belong here--like I belong to the Earth, like I belong to the Sun, like I belong to Creation. I am not alienated from myself, from others or from life. If winter is my season of doubt, then summer is my season of certainty - when I know God exists, when I know life is Good, when everything feels like it has a purpose. Much of my life is spent feeling foreign despite my deep desire for community. In this time, the JASON-Time, my mind thinks more clearly. My lungs breathe more deeply. My legs feel stronger.

It is as if I gain a certain superhuman strength these months, and the closer I get to November, the more I feel this power wane. July through November - suncreen, chlorine, mowing the lawn, football season, going back to school, long, mosquito-filled bike rides . . . LIFE, and the losing of life in five short months as the days lose light and the darkness ascends, as the green disappears and the leaves fall . . . . . I can remember each summer more vividly than I can remember individual Christmases, and this summer, this summer before I turn 36, this is the most momentous of them all.

I won't have time to write. I won't have time to reflect. Now is the time to swing the bat. To run the bases. To pedal the bike! And much like the way some people say good-bye to the old year, every July I say good-bye to a year of my life and try to assess it because I want to honour the inexorable march of time, just like I love to walk through the irresistible melancholy of a gray Autumn day. "Did I do the most with the Time God gave me? Did I Love? Did I adventure?"

This year, I got married to the woman who has shown me how wonderful life can be. This year, I went to Montreal (twice) and Quebec City, and Michigan. I explored the Human Venture in Leadership Edmonton and gave a lot of my best self at work. This year, this year was too much to describe. This year, I can truly say I lived Life. Not a half-life or a would be Life. This year, I lived LIFE in capital letters.

Apportez Votre Vin

2009-06-03T21:13:00.000-07:00

"The hardest thing is facing yourself. It's easier to shout 'Revolution' and 'Power to the People' than it is to look at yourself and try to find out what's real inside you and what isn't, when you're pulling the wool over your own eyes. That's the hardest one." - John Lennon

While I was in Montreal attending the 2009 Canadian Library Association conference, I had two of the best museum experiences of my life. The first was the Imagine installation at the Musee des Beaux Arts. In the film Imagine (1971), there is a scene where John and Yoko are doing something just about every one of us has done; they are writing in the sand, "John Loves Yoko," and 'Yoko Loves John,' but, as you would suspect, the message is never completed because a wave invariably rolls in and erases the message. After 'Yoko' disappears into the sea, the camera lingers upon the word 'Loves' -

Loves, in the present tense, the only tense we've got.

John's name disappears in the sand and surf, and it is not only a grim foreshadowing of his untimely passage, it is a reminder how little time we have with those we love.

But the exhibit made me want to scream on occasion. There is a sense of hero worship in the crowded gallery. But is John Lennon a hero? This is the question I am struggling with: Is John Lennon anything more than The Rock Star?

After John Lennon left The Beatles, he became a conceptual musician and part of the avant-garde. This conceptual music was to be completed in one's own recording studio. This is a complete rejection of the 50s, Modernist reliance and insistence upon a perfectly ordered and rational universe. I'm fine with that. But, as one of the markers indicates, "The record serves only to stimulate what is inside in order to bring it out." And this is where I start to get critical. What if 'what is inside' isn't all that good? What if what comes out is fairly dangerous? The implied idea is that introspection will lead to a positive insight, and I am pretty sure this isn't the case. As we enter the room, I get a little frustrated with Hair Peace and Bed Peace and the idea that "War is Over (if we want it)." It's really not that simple because if I put down my gun, you might see that as a sign of weakness and an invitation to pull the trigger because you want what I have (fresh water, farmland, oil, etc.). In his letter to Coventry Church, John says that Jesus "stood for people." Did he? Really? Can Jesus' message be simplified to such a trite expression? And there is a tremendous arrogance in equating Lennon's hotel activism with the front line nonviolent protests of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the end, I think, yes, Lennon is a hero. It takes a lot of balls to live publicly, and John showed his to the world (literally). But it is more than a stupid courage. Lennon can be painfully simple, but as the opening quote of this entry states (a quote which appears towards the end of the exhibit), John Lennon was trying to outgrow his own iconic status, and he was doing so. He was maturing. And, along the way, he created some anthems that stir the heart and make the soul long for peace, harmony, and all of the naive but beautiful ideals we have created as human beings.

The fact that peace can be pretty complex business is best seen in the most amazing show I saw at the Musee d'Art Contemporain de Montreal. Robert Polidori's photographs possess a tremendous emptiness. Because of their size and clarity, Polidori is able to take me to places I might never go - Havana, Beirut, Versailles, as well as a place I know I will never go - Chernobyl. In the maternity ward and control room from Chernobyl, I can feel the radiation affecting my eyes and making me sick. The peeling paint and rusted cribs. The luminescent purple stains on the control panel. It is the ruin of the civilization that is my civilization, and the sunlight and trees outside the broken window speak of a life-force that runs completely counter to the Human endeavor.

In a similar vein, Polidori's pictures of Versailles possess no human presence, but as I stare at the enchantingly beautiful scenes, believing I have never been more deeply disturbed by beauty, I can't help but think of the Treaty of Versailles and the untold human agony that "peace treaty" has brought with it. In the bombed out buildings of Beirut and the eerie rooms of New Orleans, there is also a profound peacefulness that exists, a peacefulness that can only exist after a savage encounter with the brute force of Nature or Humanity. The kind of peacefulness where the only life around is a black mold and saplings.

There is a more noticeable human presence in Cuba. But I was struck with the same feeling when I looked at Polidori's pictures from Cuba, such as the power meters. I felt as if I was looking at Roman ruins- not at a place that was 'civilized' 50 years ago. In these pictures from Cuba, one photo has a smiling little boy with a red plastic bow and arrow, communicating an ominous message. Then there's the ghastly green light of a building with a lone woman in the second floor window. There's a pay phone on the left side of the picture, and if you could be transported to that spot, and if the phone worked, and if you had the chance to call someone, you would dial their number and say, "Please come get me out of here! I am going to die!"

At the end of the exhibit, Polidori takes me to Amman, Jordan and Varanasi, India. I arrive at these after the catastrophes and spaces of human abyss, and my vision is clouded by what I have seen. Are these densely populated areas foreshadowing another catastrophe, or is this already a catastrophe of human existence?

The same thing happens when I see Spring Hurlbut's Le Jardin du Sommeil. It's a room full of empty cribs - all individual, and yet all the same - empty. This whole room speaks of the most profound emptiness, the kind of emptiness leaving me speechless and wanting to cry. The cribs and beds look like little prisons, and they remind me of the pictures of a Russian cemetery my friend Susan once sent me. Spring Hurlbut builds "mnemonic structures in which the certain impermanence of things assumes a relative permanence," and it is an engaging installation similar to a vanitas still life, where I must reflect on the vanity of worldly possessions, the prison of this body, and the vast rusted emptiness of human civilization.

And by now, the greatest emptiness I feel is in my stomach. It's time to get stop thinking and find a quaint little restaurant on The Plateau or in Petite Italie where I can "apportez votre vin." I absolutely love Montreal!

A Burst of Inspiration from Paul Hawken

2009-05-26T10:21:00.000-07:00

In 1994, Paul Hawken authored The Ecology of Commerce. He was one of the first to sound the alarm and send out the call for sustainable business practices. Hawken's book would inspire Ray Anderson, author of Mid-Course Correction and "CEO of Interface, Inc., a company he founded that is the world's largest producer of commercial floorcoverings and other interior products." In Ray Anderson's own words, in the Summer of 1994, he started to hear from customers who were concered for the environment and wanted to hear his company's environmental vision. At that point, Anderson didn't have one. Paul Hawken's book provided a starting point.

Paul Hawken gave the Commencement Address to the Class of 2009 at the University of Portland on May 3rd, 2009. This following passage fires me up:

"Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don't be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

"When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, 'So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.' There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums."

The entire address is worth reading, and I love this passage because, for a long time, friends and family have called me a pessimist. But I'm not. I just think it is important not to sugarcoat the truth, and Paul Hawken is a master of maintaining positivity in the face of our grim realities.

Creating the Path

2009-05-14T16:13:00.000-07:00

In my educational life, there have been several men who have helped deepen my understanding of myself and the human condition. James J. Fieldbrandt, the Principal at St. Hyacinth School, was a very caring and patient man who reacted with compassion rather than rage when I called Sister Lucy a "F*^!ing Freak." Johann Stohl, a very wise man and teacher of Religious Studies, introduced me to the saving concepts of "false nirvanas" and the work of Ken Wilber. Ken Low, Director of the Action Studies Institute, Leadership Calgary, and Leadership Edmonton, sent me this letter, and I read it whenever I start to feel lost. It is one of those talismans I hold onto in order to bring me back to a proper sense of self.

Jason

Aye.

Thanks for the note. Rage and sadness are old friends of mine too. Frustrating impotence as well, but I have developed a discriminating approach to feelings of personal inadequacy in the face of the brutal realities. I deeply want humanity to be wiser, more just and caring, and it bothers me immensely that there are so many active and passive barriers in our way, but I know that while I can play a part, the human venture is a long and complicated story. My role is brief and limited – all the more reason to take care in deciding where and how to engage.

To find effective solutions you must understand the problem, simple enough, but there is always a more basic principle. The way understanding is created and tested varies dramatically, and people are generally unaware of the standards they are using and the differences in explanatory / predictive power that come with these standards. To move forward we must understand the limits and possibilities of different levels of understanding – and how they are created. Every achievement, insightful breakthrough, act of kindness, or injustice corrected is a clue, as is every instance of thoughtless judgment, uncritical acceptance, or simplistic partial truths. [The wisdom of crowds being an example of the latter.]

Everything that humanity thinks and does can contribute something to an understanding of understanding, if we take the time and trouble to search for the patterns. I have spent my life searching out and mapping these patterns. It is just a beginning, but several things about the emerging meta-framework give me hope and direction. One is that while complex, the patterns and disciplines required for wisdom, caring and justice are real and discoverable. Two is that functionally there is no way to break out of the groundhog day of repeated follies and failures of humanity without an increasingly comprehensive meta framework for adaptive thoughtscape construction. Three, this is a frontier of human and social development that hasn’t been attempted in adaptively disciplined ways before.

There is no more reason to despair about humanity’s resistance to becoming wiser, more caring and just than there is to despair over our ability to progressively understand, prevent and treat disease. In the battle with ignorance we are still in the early stages, but we are beginning to understand it. There is much work to be done on this frontier, and we are not well organized yet, but we, and others, are moving. Your thoughtful participation, care and concern is greatly welcome. How this will unfold is not clear yet. That’s the nature of pioneering. We have to create the path, and we will.

See you soon.

Cheers!

Ken

The Will of the Future

2009-05-06T21:03:00.000-07:00

Dear K,

Thank you for sending along the articles by Chris Hedges, as well as the set of articles on the financial meltdown. I have read through them all and am fighting back those familiar feelings of rage, sadness, but the most pernicious feeling of them all has to be impotence. The implications from this set of resources are clear; we (pardon me if I speak in universal terms as an American; this belies my ethnocentrism, but is also indicative of one of our most obvious and worst traits) are in the state of cultural decline. The US is rapidly becoming a militaristic state in order to reinforce its grossly unjust levels of inequality because that is its only remaining option. Perhaps as a result of the US decline, other countries, such as Canada, will be able to define themselves in opposition to these forces and chart a better and more constructive path for human civilization. Or, they will be caught up in the maelstrom of a dying empire because collapses are no longer localized events.

As I was reading the article from Hedges regarding the need for a moral bailout, I thought of two books. The first is The Undiscovered Self by C.G. Jung. It is a short, thoughtful essay investigating the plight of modern man in societies that are growing ever more hostile and intolerant of the individual.

"Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason's having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic. In this state all those elements whose existence is merely tolerated as asocial under the rule of reason come to the top. Such individuals are by no means rare curiosities to be met with only in prisons and lunatic asylums. For every manifest case of insanity there are, in my estimation, at least ten latent cases who seldom get to the point of breaking out openly but whose views and behavior, for all their appearance of normality, are influenced by unconsciously morbid and perverse factors." (page 13)

I don't know when it happened, exactly, but I think we have passed the possibility of reason having any real affect on our present dilemma. I have not given up, but I often wonder, "When does a difference in degree create a fundamentally different problem?" In our case, when will the global strain of six billion souls create an unbearable pressure, both externally on the environment and internally - on our existential landscape? In the most recently published Leadership Edmonton newsletter, it begins with two quotations discussing two divergent natures of crowds. Do crowds have a positive collective intelligence (e.g., James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds) or are they, as Jung intimates, mobs just waiting for the right moment to riot? I attended a seminar one time when we were supposed to figure out how to survive a crash on the moon by ranking 15 items. First individually, then collectively in small groups. In all cases save one, the group score was better than the individual score, proving that none of us is as smart as all of us. But one individual, who had experience and training in wilderness survival, actually had a better score when on her own. When she listened to the wisdom of the group, she actually decreased her chances of survival in this hypothetical exercise.

I wish to believe in collective intelligence, but many of the signs I see suggest the powder keg is about to blow. I do not want this happen. I do not wish for this to happen. But I would be truncating my intellect if I didn't admit the odds of this occurring. And the second book that came to mind was a personal favourite of mine, Hermann Hesse’s Demian. It came to mind because of the following passage that occurs right before the climax of the book - the outbreak of the First World War. And in this passage, Hesse seems to suggest that something positive will come out of this apocalypse.

"'The community spirit at present is only a manifestation of the herd instinct. Men fly into each other's arms because they are afraid of each other - the owners are for themselves, the workers for themselves, the scholars for themselves! And why are they afraid? You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them! They all sense that the rules they live by are no longer valid, that they live according to archaic laws - neither their religion nor their morality is in any way suited to the needs of the present. For a hundred years or more Europe has done nothing but study and build factories! They know exactly how many ounces of power it takes to kill a man but they don't know how to pray to God, they don't even know how to be happy for a single contented hour. Just take a look at a student dive! Or a resort where the rich congregate. It's hopeless. Dear Sinclair, nothing good can come of all this. These people who huddle together in fear are filled with dread and malice, no one trusts the other. They hanker after ideals that are ideals no longer but they will hound the man to death who sets up a new one. I can feel the approaching conflict. It's coming, believe me, and soon. Of course it will not 'improve' the world. Whether the workers kill the manufacturers or whether Germany makes war on Russia will merely mean a change of ownership. But it won't have been entirely in vain. It will reveal the bankruptcy of present-day ideals, there will be a sweeping away of Stone Age gods. The world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish - and it will.'

"'And what will happen to us during this conflict?'

"'To us? Oh, perhaps we'll perish in it. Our kind can be shot, too. Only we aren't done away with as easily as all that. Around what remains of us, around those of us who survive, the will of the future will gather. The will of humanity, which our Europe has shouted down for a time with its frenzy of technology, will come to the fore again. And then it will become clear that the will of humanity is nowhere - and never was - identical with the will of present-day societies, states and peoples, clubs and churches. No, what Nature wants of man stands indelibly written in the individual, in you, in me. It stood written in Jesus, it stood written in Nietzsche. These tendencies - which are the only important ones and which, of course, can assume different forms every day - will have room to breathe once the present societies have collapsed.'"

In this beautiful passage, one can see the ugly idea that European intellectuals saw something positive would rise from the outbreak of the First World War - that the world would be cleansed somehow. "It won't have been entirely in vain" is a phrase that particularly haunts me for some reason I cannot yet define. All of this is a long introduction to say that I am presently feeling a bit lost. I believe what I do is important, but that this importance is constantly bogged down by lousy machines and human resource policies, and perhaps that I am meant for greater things. This could, however, just as likely be arrogance. I want to help develop in individuals competencies to face the challenges ahead, and I want to figure out how to increase understanding and useful feelings of self-transcendence that do honour (but do not obsessively aggrandize) the individual. I'm not really sure what my next step will be, but I want to say thank you, again, for all of the wisdom you have shared with me over the past year. I believe public libraries and what you have assembled are two of the places around which "the will of the future will gather." The mob may self-destruct in collective madness, but around what remains of us, perhaps someday we will once again have room to breathe.

Sometimes, I Need a Pep Talk

2009-04-26T20:41:00.000-07:00

"We refuse to despair of mankind. Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve them." Dr. Rieux, in Albert Camus' The Plague.

It is not always easy to refuse to despair of mankind. This evening, as I was re-watching Who Killed the Electric Car after my drive home from the Alberta Library Conference in Jasper, I had to fight back my typical reactions of rage and sadness. And it was even harder to listen to my stepdaughter ask some of the same questions I have. "Why did they do it? Why don't we have electric cars? Why don't they care about me and my future?" The anger and tears on her face were exciting to see in one way. I was watching her mind come alive, and it was magical. I know that soul. I know that experience. But it wasn't all that exciting to see her reaction in another way. There's no easy answers. At some point, we need to confront human weakness, greed, and ignorance, and it's never easy to do so. And, as we grow and mature, it doesn't get any easier. You just learn to live with a broken heart and throw yourself into the melee like Dr. Rieux and do what you can to reduce human suffering wherever you are.

At our April Leadership Edmonton Learning Day a couple of weeks ago, we explored consumption and the economic collapse of the past year. Our required reading materials were the following articles:

Bill Moyer’s interview with William Black: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/watch.html

The Quiet Coup by Simon Johnson: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice

Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Wall Street's Ownership of Government by Glenn Greenwald: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/04-9

The Ones Who Got It Right by Ralph Nader: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/04-0

Resist or Become Serfs by Chris Hedges: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/06-0

America is in Need of a Moral Bailout by Chris Hedges: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/23-0

Global Crime Wave? A Syndrome of Crime, Violence, and Repression on the Way by Michael T. Klare: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/06-1

After reading all of these articles, I was in a dark place I used to get lost in called Pointlessness. It's the biggest Hollywood heist in history, and we'll never get the bastards! Even now, after much training and effort, I still find this melancholic quick sand hard to get out of.

At Jasper, I stared at the Rockies surrounding the pristine waters of Lac Beauvert with my love, and I felt deeply that "happy sadness" where I am both liberated and crushed by the fact that the world doesn't need me. The mountains, thrust out of the Earth eons ago, dwarfed this mighty desire in my heart. Earlier in the day I had given a session where I tried, within the confines of an hour, to explain what I saw as the human dilemma, perhaps offer a starting point for how to maneuver around some of these intractable human obstacles, and talk about why I do what I do. It was too long. I wasn't polished as I would have liked, and I am sure I was a bit pretentious at times. Despite its flaws, it was well received. It was an attempt to serve my colleagues and my profession because I refuse to succumb to despair.

Succumbing to despair is taking the easy way out, and if the silent Lodgepole Pines and Doug Firs in the cold and windy snowstorm spoke to me anything True, it's that life and growth is rarely easy. Like my stepdaughter's anguish, or standing in front of a crowd, or wrapping your roots around a glacier rock at the edge of a lake, to grow you need to be uncomfortable. The only way to conquer the despair is to meet it head on.

A Moment of Transcendence on Good Friday

2009-04-10T19:59:00.000-07:00

"What's mistake but a kind of take?
What's nausea but a kind of -usea?
Sober, drunk, -unk, astonishment.
Everything can become the subject of criticism --
How criticise without something to criticise?
Agreement -- disagreement!!
Emotion -- motion!!!!
By God, how that hurts!
By God, how it doesn't hurt!
Reconciliation of two extremes.
By George, nothing but othing!
That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure onsense!
Thought deeper than speech...!
Medical school; divinity school, school! SCHOOL!
Oh my God, oh God; oh God!"
- William James, written during a personal experiment with nitrous oxide.

Much like most people's writings when under the influence of drugs, the preceding passage doesn't make a lot of sense unless unless the reader happens to be familiar with that particular state of mind. In the cold mind of sobriety, however, William James reached a conclusion in The Varieties of Religious Experience that can, perhaps, make a bit more sense to us.

"Our ordinary waking consciousness...is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are all there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness."

In this quotation, William James points out that our ordinary waking consciousness - the consciousness we are all enjoying right now - is a special type of consciousness, but not the only one. There are entirely different forms of consciousness we may live our whole life without suspecting, and hence they aren't "real" to us. "Apply the requisite stimulus, however, and BOOM! Our whole identity and conception of "reality" can transform and expand in the blink of an eye.

This happened to me today when I went to mass for Good Friday. I was approaching for the Veneration of the Cross and was feeling self-conscious and silly. I didn't want to kiss a cross, a cross that a thousand other people have kissed before me. Lord, protect me from the germs, I was praying as I ambled foward, feeling like a sheep. But as I got close, sunlight from one of the stained glass windows fell upon my face. The air was still heavy from the incense, and the light possessed a material weight. It put a light upon my soul. I smiled uncontrollably and kissed the cross - my cross - our cross - His cross - and I felt humble and courageous enough to pick up my burdens and do what I could do to work for peace and reconciliation. My first step in this process is, of course, trying to deepen my understanding of what those concepts mean.

In our common vernacular, we often say we are not religious, but we describe ourselves as spiritual. And this common linguistic device is one that has been used, by Abraham Maslow amongst others, as a way to elaborate upon a phenomenon. "Maslow was the first to tackle the problem of measuring spirituality aside from religiousness, and it is interesting to note the Maslow was an avowed atheist. Still, looking at the self-actualizers he identified, including Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt, who worked on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Nobel Peace Prize winning Albert Schweitzer, Maslow noticed some similarities.

These individuals looked at even ordinary things afresh, as if for the first time, and had the ability to see things as they truly are, regardless of other people's opinions. They were highly ethical but not always conventional. Self-actualizers were also empathetic. They identified and sympathized with people from all walks of life. Many of them extended their compassion to other living things and to nature generally. And, as Maslow continued to study these individuals, he realized that they shared one other key feature. They underwent periodic spiritual experiences. Maslow compared a belief in God to 'the childish looking for a big Daddy in the sky,' so he called these spiritual episodes, "peak experiences." Peak experiences are times when a person is overcome with a sense of wholeness and unity with the universe, with everything and everyone. He called this 'being-cognition' and he maintained that organized religion hindered rather than helped people to become self-actualizers. This may have been, however, a prejudice and part of his confirmation bias." (Much of this is taken directly from Dean Hamer's excellent book, The God Gene)

Maslow was the first person to really "prove" that spirituality and religiousness are fundamentally different. Religiousness - as measuring by church attendance, is learned in the classical sense - from parents, teachers, religious leaders, and peers. People go to church because that's what they've been told to do, or because they love the community aspect, or because it helps awaken the spirit within. Spirituality, as measured by self-transcendence, comes from within rather than without.

In The God Gene by Dean Hamer, he conducted studies with thousands of pairs of twins and siblings in order to find out if there was a genetic link to spirituality, and it appears this is the case. The Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI), invented by Robert Cloninger, is a 240 question true-false quiz that assesses seven dimensions of personality, one of which can be used to assess a person's innate orientation towards spirituality. I won't go into all the details of the experiments, but several studies with thousands of people were able to show that some people are simply more prone to experiencing higher rates of self-transcendence than others. Self-transcendence can be described only in terms of an individual's interior feeling, so it is the most difficult feeling to describe scientifically, but it is characterized by the following three descriptions.

The first characteristic of self-transcendence is Self-Forgetfulness, where one becomes so absorbed in an activity that they "lose themselves" in it. This might be the act of painting, or music, or where place and time become completely unimportant. Mihaly Csikszentmihaly describes this self-forgetfulness as "flow state." Athletes describe it as being "in the zone." I remember watching Michael Jordan drop six three pointers in a row and turn to the crowd with his hands up to say, "I don't know what's happening. I'm as amazed as you are." In Zen and the Art of Archery, the ego's desire to hit the target becomes the largest obstacle to overcome. To be successful, the archer needs to forget that he is shooting at a target.

The second feeling in self-transcendence is Transpersonal Identification, where one feels a sense of unity with all the things. The hallmark of Transpersonal Identification is a feeling of connectedness to the universe and everything in it, what Maslow described as a peak experience. People who score high for transpersonal identification can easily become deeply, emotionally attached to other people, animals, trees, flowers, streams, or mountains. They are likely to see the world as one living organism. Ken Wilber describes this as Nature Mysticism, and Wilber uses Ralph Waldo Emerson as a good example of this type of mysticism. Albert Schweitzer described this feeling as an instinctual "reverence for life." "All life is valuable" he said, "and we are united to all this life. From this knowledge comes our spiritual relationship with the universe." This last quotation gets us close to the highest state of awareness in self-transcendence. The third feeling of self-transcendence of this experience is Mysticism, or Mystical Union. The quote from Albert Einstein that opened the introduction of my last post is a very good description of this mystical union.

Another good description of this feeling is by Sallie McFague. She is the author of Super, Natural Christians, How We Should Love Nature, and she writes of a God that transcends the world but is immanent in it.

"God is not primarily the orderer and controller of the universe, but its source and empowerment, the breath that enlivens and energizes it. . . . the divine mind is the cause of what evolutionary theory tells us can have only local causes; rather, it suggests that we think of these local causes as enlivened and and empowered by the breath of God."

This breath is what enlivened and energized me today as I approached the cross. As I contemplate the decay of my own body, the eventual loss of everything I love, and the tremendous challenges of our times, it is only when I am breathing in this air - this air that empowers all and unites everyone in suffering - that I can find the courage to go on.

The Illimitable Superior Spirit

2009-03-24T19:48:00.000-07:00

"The most beautiful and most profound religious emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. And this mysticality is the power of all true science. If there is any such concept as a God, it is a subtle spirit, not an image of a man that so many have fixed in their minds. In essence, my religion consists of a humble admiration for this illimitable superior spirit that reveals itself in the slight details that we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds." -Albert Einstein

Karen Armstrong asks the question, at the end of A History of God, "Does God has a future?" Throughout Leadership Edmonton, I have been asking myself that same question because I have also been asking myself, since reading Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress, "Do we have a future?" The corollary question to this is, "Can we have a future without God?" As we try to mould our culture in such a way that it promotes human continuation and moves us towards adaptive space, the other way to ask this question is this, "Does God (or the concept of God) help us adapt?" That's the next big question I have been trying to answer.

In November 2006, Time Magazine ran this cover: God versus Science. On the cover, of course, we see the intersection of media (which is the ether in which we breathe), politics, religion, education, and of course, marketing. Here is where it is all at, and of course, in the most gripping style, it is done using the metaphor of a boxing match and the message is clear - there has to be a winner. Some things have changed in the way this issue is discussed in the February 2009 cover article, The Biology of Belief, but I think this is the way the issue is being framed in several debates: God versus Science. Which one is going to win? And as we ask that question, now is the time to raise the idea of a dominant thoughtscape. The dominant thoughtscape, as Ken Wilber would define it, is "the average mode of consciousness achieved at a particular time in evolution." The dominant thoughtscape is the "center of gravity" around which the society as a whole is constructed. As human culture has moved from Magic to Mythic to Rational societies, our personal identity has evolved, our collective identity has evolved, and the identity of God has evolved. "In any given epoch, some individuals will fall below the norm in their own development, and others will reach beyond it," but there is a dominant way of seeing the world. There are conflicts between Magic and Mythic, and Mythic and Rational, but there is a dominant thoughtscape. While there is no 'average' person, the dominant thoughtscape is that with the greatest weight, the thoughtscape around which social institutions are constructed. In the West, the dominant thoughtscape is the idea that we are morally, religiously, and politically free subjects who have the ability to choose the God we wish to believe in, or to not believe in God at all.

And this is where the battleground is being waged in terms of religion. In the Time debate of God versus Science, the debate takes place between Richard Dawkins - the athiest, bestselling biologist and author of The God Delusion, and Francis Collins. Francis Collins is not just a geneticist, he has been the Director of National Human Genome Research Institute since 1993 and is the author of The Language of God. There is an excerpt from this debate that asks a crucial questions about our "center of gravity," our average mode of consciousness.

"COLLINS: There is a whole field of inquiry that has come up in the last 30 or 40 years--some call it sociobiology or evolutionary psychology--relating to where we get our moral sense and why we value the idea of altruism, and locating both answers in behavioral adaptations for the preservation of our genes. But if you believe, and Richard has been articulate in this, that natural selection operates on the individual, not on a group, then why would the individual risk his own DNA doing something selfless to help somebody in a way that might diminish his chance of reproducing?. . . . . An extreme example might be Oskar Schindler risking his life to save more than a thousand Jews from the gas chambers. That's the opposite of saving his genes. We see less dramatic versions every day. Many of us think these qualities may come from God--especially since justice and morality are two of the attributes we most readily identify with God.

DAWKINS: Can I begin with an analogy? Most people understand that sexual lust has to do with propagating genes. Copulation in nature tends to lead to reproduction and so to more genetic copies. But in modern society, most copulations involve contraception, designed precisely to avoid reproduction. Altruism probably has origins like those of lust. In our prehistoric past, we would have lived in extended families, surrounded by kin whose interests we might have wanted to promote because they shared our genes. Now we live in big cities. We are not among kin nor people who will ever reciprocate our good deeds. It doesn't matter. Just as people engaged in sex with contraception are not aware of being motivated by a drive to have babies, it doesn't cross our mind that the reason for do-gooding is based in the fact that our primitive ancestors lived in small groups. But that seems to me to be a highly plausible account for where the desire for morality, the desire for goodness, comes from.

COLLINS: For you to argue that our noblest acts are a misfiring of Darwinian behavior does not do justice to the sense we all have about the absolutes that are involved here of good and evil. If it is solely an evolutionary convenience, there is really no such thing as good or evil. But for me, it is much more than that. The moral law is a reason to think of God as plausible--not just a God who sets the universe in motion but a God who cares about human beings, because we seem uniquely amongst creatures on the planet to have this far-developed sense of morality. What you've said implies that outside of the human mind, tuned by evolutionary processes, good and evil have no meaning. Do you agree with that?

DAWKINS: Even the question you're asking has no meaning to me. Good and evil--I don't believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil. I think that there are good things that happen and bad things that happen."

In this debate, Richard Dawkins is showing one version of the idea that religion is an adaptive behaviour. But in Dawkins perspective, this idea is that God is archaic and anachronistic. But the implications of Dawkins' "biological point of view" should be taken seriously. The Holocaust was not evil - it was a bad thing that happened. The genocide in Rwanda wasn't evil. It was a bad thing that happened. Much like the coccyx is the remnant of a vestigial tail, a belief in God is a holdover from a time when we lived in small groups and our very survival required some form of altruism. God is a holdover from that time, but it is now a delusion, an infantile fantasy that needs to be outgrown. Oskar Schindler's nobility is an extreme example of this formerly useful biological adaptation. But it is not Good, it is only a good thing that happened. And, inferred from his own words, I do not think this is a particularly harsh reading of Richard Dawkins, either.

In the next few posts, I am going to elaborate upon a definition of a Living God, a definition that takes into account our scientific awareness of how the universe works; a God that is in our genes, our brain chemistry, the ground underneath our feet. A God that may somehow still be able to save us as we move forward into our unknown future.

A March Blizzard With Nowhere Left to Place the Snow

2009-03-08T20:26:00.000-07:00

“All those men of whom you speak have long since mouldered away with their bones. Only their words remain. When a capable man's time comes, he rises; if it does not, then he wanders wearily around. I have heard that good merchants keep their goods buried deeply to make it look as if they had none, and that a superior man whose character is perfected will feign stupidity. Give up, sir, your proud airs, your many wishes, mannerisms and extravagant claims. They won't do you any good, sir! That's all I have to tell you." Lao Tzu

I don’t really know where or how it all began, and when I say I don’t really know how or where it all began, I am not even sure what beginning I'm referring to exactly. Mine? The Universe's? And if I am referring to something as vast and as incomprehensible as the Universe, am I looking to towards the Origin because I want to uncover The Why of the Universe, or The How of the Universe? Or IS the How of It the Why of It? If I am seeking, am I seeking God the Mechanic or God the Moralist? Can we even say “it” “started” “anywhere”? What was before me; what was before IN THE BEGINNING? Will the Large Hadron Collider figure that out? And if it does, will I know what shoes I should wear today?

These were my useless thoughts the other morning after I opened my eyes in Edmonton, Alberta in 2009 on a blizzarding March morning that didn’t feel at all like Spring. The vast, panoramic terrain of my fumbling missteps stretched behind me like a gorgeous sunset in the rearview mirror as I drove a million miles an hour down a deserted highway with a majestic mountain range full of forested hills on the horizon. I was driving, helplessly and enthusiastically, towards my future while the Present took my breath away.

I was at Peace – a fragrant, feel every hemoglobin reach the tip of my fingertips peace. As my love took in a deep breath of sleep, I could feel the future coming in through my own nose, filling my lungs, and disappearing into the past. And I was at peace. Complete and total peace. The kind of peace you would sing softly about on Sunday morning. And it’s so rare that I feel this way that when it happens, I don’t want to move. I don’t want to breathe, or get out of bed and into the shower and into my work clothes and into the car. All I want is to do is savor this feeling because the second I move, it will tingle in my toes and fade away beyond my touch--the minute my feet hit the floor I will become a conscious agent of being, and my identity will coalesce into someone who needs something. By breakfast, I will start to feel a bit disoriented. And by lunch, I will forget, despite every effort to remember, what it’s like to feel like that, and I will feel disappointment and an all-consuming craving for one more touch of that fuzzy blanket.

As soon as I got out of bed, things went rapidly downhill. A four foot drift was blocking the driveway. It was back down to -30C, in March, and it looked like my immediate future would be spending a couple of hours rearranging matter so we could get to the grocery store. There are times when you try to sum up your life; when you try to make sense of it all. You attempt to factor in every little thing you have done right, and every big thing you have done wrong, so you can assess where you are and take that next step towards where you want to go. With every shovel full aging and aching my back, I tried to make sense of my life.

And, as I put the last shovel full of snow upon the seven foot mountain at the corner of my backyard, I looked around with a smile on my face and a joy in my heart. If I had known, from the beginning, that I would ever feel this way, I would have been able to suffer it all with so much more poise and grace than I have. I've wasted a lot of time. But I will no longer waste the privilege of being here.

I went back inside to bake bread and work on my Leadership Edmonton presentation.

What is America?

2009-02-26T20:41:00.000-08:00

When I was completing my Political Science degree as an undergraduate, I thought about writing a book entitled American Myths. It would look at the Horatio Alger "rags to riches" mythology that permeates American society so thoroughly that it prevents class awareness and leaves poor people believing they are just temporarily embarassed millionaires. It would tackle the myth of the "free press" and show that your media cannot be free when the big and powerful media companies are controlled by a handful of companies who have a vested interest in maintainig their position of power and dominance. This book would tackle the myth of 'democracy' and the illusion that we live in a government by the people rather than a government of corporations.

It would have been a magnificent work of detailed scholarship and immense scope. It would have been a lot of work, which is why I am glad Ronald Wright wrote the book for me. His follow up to A Short History of Progress is What is America: A Short History of the New World Order. In this work, Wright tackles both the myth of America and the reality, and it is incredibly easy to see why most people embrace the myth of the rugged individualist carving out a country from wilderness, rather than a country built by genocide and greedy men who exploited God to cover their baser motives.

A year and a half ago, I left the United States. My home. A country I love deeply. I have often said that one cannot criticize the US without saying "Thank you" for the privilege and freedom to criticize. Standing upon a foundation of gratitude then, the US has some serious problems. In the United States, there is no universal health; there is the greatest gap between wealthy and poor, only 1 in 8 has a passport (which means it is very easy to believe the USA is the 'greatest country on Earth' because there is no possibility for comparison), 5 out of 10 think the Creation myth is literal truth, the highest percentage of the population is in jail, and automatic weapons are still on sale (page 221).

I recently mailed off my fingerprints to the FBI in order to obtain a police certificate that will enable me to become a permanent resident of Canada. Seriously, if it wasn't for December, January, February, March, and April, this would be the greatest place on Earth. I sometimes call Alberta the 51st State. Because of its connections to Texas through oil and ranching, moving to Edmonton has been extremely easy, and I have suffered absolutely no culture shock. It is only when I take time to think about how little crime there is, about the different attitudes people hold towards government and taxes, about how much investment is being made in civil infrastructure like light rail and libraries, that I truly fall in love with my new city and my new country.

"'Since 1975,' says the CIA Factbook on the United States (a source that can hardly be accused of leftist bias), 'practically all gains in household income have gone to the top 20% of households.'" (page 203)

It's going on a year and a half. I miss the coast of Oregon and the wine country. I miss my condo. I miss the sound and the smell of rain. But I'm growing to notice the profound differences between here and there. And not just notice them - love them. Truly and deeply. I can't wait to feel permanent here. Canada's just a lot less stressed out. No place is perfect, but I am one step closer to calling this "my country." Not from birth or inheritance. But by choice.

Reading Machete Season in Canada

2009-02-06T21:54:00.000-08:00

"Anyone who had the idea of not killing for a day could get out of it, no problem. But anyone with the idea of not killing at all could not let on, or he himself would be killed while others watched. Voicing disagreement out loud was fatal on the spot. So we don't know if people had that idea. Of course, you could pretend, you could dawdle, make excuses, pay--but above all you could not object in words. It would be fatal if you refused outright, even hush-hush with your neighbor. Your position and your fortune could not save you from death if you showed a kindness to a Tutsi before unfamiliar eyes. For us, kind words for Tutsis were more fatal than evil deeds." (page 76)

For Leadership Edmonton this month, I chose to read Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, by Jean Hatzfeld.

I owned a machete once, back when I was much younger man. I called it Sisyphus, and before starting out on my project to eradicate the Himalayan blackberries that were choking a salmon-bearing stream on the North fork of the Stillaguamish, my blacksmith friend sharpened my blade. With Sisyphus in hand, I would go out for whole weekends and beat the shit out of fifty year old blackberry brambles, all the while thinking about the juxtapositions between the farm and Seattle; cattle and culture, blackberries and concrete.

I am reading Machete Season because our assignment this month is to try to undertand how genocide happens. The assigned reading is Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide by Barbara Coloroso. I heard her speak, and while she is entertaining and insightful, she is overly simplistic. Machete Season caught my attention because I am no longer interested in having the Rwandan genocide explained to me in white terms. Primo Levi's Survival in Aushwitz is an incredibly profound work that I appreciate because it is in first person. The Holocaust has become a symbol for the worst in humanity (despite what certain moronic Cardinals welcomed back into the Catholic Church might say about it).

While I really have no interest to get close to these events in any way by traveling to Rwanda, I don't want anyone else to interpret them for me or make sense of them for me.

In the paragraph above, the elimination and intolerance of dissent is a crucial step. This is why I say that, in the West, we can only criticize our governments from a position of profound gratitude. I am thankful that I have the Freedom of Speech to say the system is messed up. The freedom of speech, which so few have enjoyed, is a gift which should be able to mitigate some of the anger we happen to feel over any policy, no matter how misguided.

"Francoise Kalinganire was an influential civil servant in Kanzenze. He had even been burgomaster of Nyamata in the 1980s but was deposed in 1991 because he joined a moderate political organization when Rwanda's multiparty system was created. His tenure as director of the youth vocational center in Mayange had been without incident, although his adversaries still held a grudge against him.

On April 12, the second day of the slaughter, some of them appeared at his home, accompanied by interahamwe (meaning, "those who kill together"). Knowing he was married to a Tutsi, they ordered him to kill her to show support for the genocide. He refused stoically and forbade them to enter his house. Terrified by the confrontation, his neighbors urged him to obey by sacrificing his wife. He was murdered in his courtyard and buried on his property.

He is the Just Man of Kenzenze." (p. 115-116)

As a new layer of snow falls on the icy streets outside, the hardest things for me to understand are why NATO forces pulled out all of the nurses from the maternity hospital the day before the slaughter would begin. Why were both the Hutus and the Tutsis were Roman Catholic? I know this last question may sound strange, but most of the other conflicts in the world can be explained by a difference of opinion about the nature of the Divine, and at least that provides some kind of rationale. In this case, they were both praying to the same God, but "no bond of friendship or love survived from a church choir or an agricultural cooperative."

As the snow falls outside my window, I think of all that is most dear to me - my wife and daughter. And I know it's wrong to be selfish and scared and place my head in the ground, but I want our perfect little Canadian snow globe to go undisturbed. But when I look outside on this peaceful scene, with this book in my hand, there is an internal tremor. I know it could all come apart at the seams. All it would take is a certain incident, the assassination of a certain someone, perhaps, and the powder keg would light on fire.

"All wars generate savage temptations that are more or less murderous. . . . . panic or explosive fury and the desire to crush the enemy once and for all lead to massacres of civilians and prisoners, campaigns of rape and torture, deadly deportations, pure devastation in all directions. Sometimes nonmilitary actions result as well: the poisoning of rice fields with pesticies, the slaughter of buffalo herds, the forced conversion to foreign religions and cultures. But to confuse these war crimes - even when they tend, in their collective insanity, to destroy a civilian community - with an explicit and organized plan of extermination is a political and intellectual mistake, symptomatic of culture of sensationalism.

"Is this distinction rhetorical claptrap? Is it even possible to distinguish a genocide amid the chaos of war? The answer to both questions lies in another question, a simple and decisive one: who are the victims of choice?

"In war, men are killed first, because they are the most apt to fight back; the next targets are women liable to help them, and boys because they try to continue the conflict, and then odler men who offer wise counsel. But in a genocide, the killers track down everyone, in particular babies, girls, and women, because they represent the future." (105-106)

The explanation of bullies is too simple. The explanation of racial hatred is too simple. Reading the interviews with these men, it is hard to tell them apart from anyone I have met in my day-to-day life, and that's the scary part. They make it all sound so logical, so reasonable, so inescapable. Jared Diamond's chapter "Malthus in Africa" that appears in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is also worth reading because it depicts what happens when there are too many people, not enough food, and unsustainable farming practices.

I can't get away from this heavy dread that we are continuing to mix up one hell of a recipe for disaster.

A Letter to an Old Friend

2009-01-27T06:55:00.001-08:00

Facebook allows you to become friends with people you may never have been friends with in the first place. It's a shallow substitute relationship, which is just about the most you can hope for these days.

JT:

Good to hear from you. I hope you have been successful in your attempts to avoid a life of quiet desperation. I believe I have mainly avoided a life of quiet desperation by being loudly desperate, but desperate nonetheless. Now I lead a quiet life that is neither desperate nor content, and I wouldn't want it any other way.

First, let me say that it looks as if you have done well for yourself. Your firm looks like it is successful and doing well, and while I have nothing to do with it, I would like to say I am very proud of you.

Because it is inauguration day and you have alluded to one of Henry David Thoreau's most famous quotes, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation," I thought I would share with you the quotation that I have spent the better part of my adult life trying to understand.

“It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.” Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

I thought of this quote many times as I worked with homeless families in Seattle, or as a librarian in Oregon, and I think about it now from the cold northern perspective of Alberta. How can we, in our rich Western lives, make sure we are not enjoying our riches and privilege from atop someone else's shoulders? Especially when we work our asses off and feel we've earned every damn thing we have. I don't know the complete answer to this, but it is an incredibly rewarding question to think about, and because of Barack Obama's ascendency, I think it is a question we will all be grappling with in the years ahead.

While you may have avoided a life of quiet desperation, you still seem afflicted by the universal illness of our times, cynicism, saying it is only a matter of time before we are disappointed in Barack. We will only be disappointed if we continue to look to our President to solve all of the problems we allow to happen. As the United States becomes an even scarier and scarier military dictatorship (where only 1 in 8 has a passport, where handguns are still legal, where the average educational attainment is amongst the lowest of the post-industrialist nations because poor schools get almost no help from the State or Federal govts, and where 47 million people are one accident away from permanent poverty because they have no health insurance), how can we hope one person can provide the leadership necessary to solve all that shit? As he said, this is nothing more than an opportunity to make change.

He is a man, I think, who speaks for all those wishing to avoid a life of quiet desperation, and all of the quietly desperate. I am excited to see what I can do, in my small way, to help humanity evolve in the years ahead.

J

What is Human Nature? An exchange of letters

2009-01-13T19:26:00.000-08:00

Good afternoon Dr B.,

Thank you for sending me the articles in your last email. Dense as they are, they have been enlightening to me and have helped me comprehend the current paradigm of genetics and its relation to human behaviour. The two articles have also helped me on the path of understanding the goal of Leadership Edmonton, and (possibly) the hopes I have for my own life.

“the range of possibilities of behavioral development always exceeds the range of behavior that is actualized during the course of individual development.” (Gilbert Gottlieb,
Experiential Canalization of Behavioral Development: Theory, 1991)

This is the heart of the matter, isn't it? The range of possibilities (for an individual human life, and human culture in general) exceeds what can be actualized. Out of a wide range of potentialities, one will form and come into being as a result of the unique combination of environmental forces. The other potentials, at that point, disappear from possible existence. So the questions that become important are "How do we identify and actualize the "best" possibilities; How do we create the conditions that take most advantage of all this potential?"

We are formed through relationship to the environment, and if we are formed in a dynamic relationship between internal and external, one cannot define and depict human nature as “fixed.” Chris Hedges, in the book I was reading when we first had this discussion, reiterates this point in I Don’t Believe in Atheists.

"Epigenomics, the study of DNA string, for example, illustrates that there is no rigid template for the morphological 'fate' of an organism. The DNA string is a complex, highly interactive switchboard that makes possible an array of fates for an organism. These outcomes are influenced by the environment. They are affected by the way genes interact within the genome. Epigenomics confirms that DNA does not predetermine human behaviour. Human genes always lay out an array of possibilities. Biology is not a prison. It has given us freedom of choice. It is not absolute freedom, and there are moments of overpowering instincts such as fear, along with what we have been taught and how we have grown up, that predetermine our reactions. But a tempered freedom does exist. The moral and ethical heights human beings are capable of attaining are a testament to the reality of this tempered version of free will. They are also a testament to the glory, not the bondage, of human biology.” (page 55)

My thinking on the question of human nature has undergone a dramatic shift as a result of these articles. Genes do play a role in what we are capable of, and we cannot transcend our genes. We are “hard-wired” to a large extent. In the second study, for example, there is a more adaptable genotype within the range of young men who experience maltreatment in their early years. For two young men put in identical circumstances, the same environmental insult could prove devastating to one and not devastating to the other, as a result of their genetic composition. My five year old autistic nephew, for example, has a painful vista ahead of him because of his composition (which most likely can be blamed on genetics).

But I am coming to understand that genes can be both a limitation OR a liberator, a disability OR an asset (and probably function as both at the same time). “Genes are assumed to create vulnerability to disease, but from an evolutionary perspective they are equally likely to protect against environmental insult.” (Avshalom Caspi, et.al, Role of Genotype in the Cycle of Violence in Maltreated Children, 2002).

So then, at the end of a long train of thought, I am working to express a human nature that “might reveal” itself - a human nature that we have not yet seen. I don’t want to fall into the trap of moral perfectibility, but at this point in time, I want to say that we have never seen human nature in its full glory; we have never seen humans exist in their highest possible stage. I am not sure how to define this exactly, or what a civilization might look like at this high possible stage, but at least I have something engaging and worthwhile to think about it.

Again, thank you remembering my request and sending those articles. I very much appreciated it.

J
____________________

J:

Thanks for the note. I'm glad the articles were useful for you. You hit the nail on the head when you wrote "we are formed in a dynamic relationship between internal and external." Understanding what interaction, or coaction, means is the trick. It's not easy. Just to stretch things a bit more, realize that everything you wrote about genes (e.g., "Genes do play a role in what we are capable of, and we cannot transcend our genes. We are “hard-wired” to a large extent.") applies in equal measure to environments. That is, the environments in which we participate also provide for a range of potential outcomes, and shape and put limits on our phenotypic capacities. Your nephew is limited not only by his genotype, but by the fact that he is growing up in an environment that doesn't compensate or capitalize on that genotype. There are other "genetic" disorders that we now understand, and we can provide interventions (environments) that compensate effectively so that the phenotype is affected minimally or not at all. We haven't cracked that nut for autism. But if we adopt a truly interactionist view, then we recognize that the disorder we observe is caused not only by the genotype and not only by the environment but by their interaction, and that in an interaction the contributions of the components are not strictly separable. To take an analogy, area is determined by height and width together; one is not more important or fundamental than the other.

So, you might see why I balked when you commented to the effect that war is part of human nature, the evidence being that we keep doing it. We may be predisposed in that direction, by genes or environment or both, but to say that a phenotypic characteristic is inevitable (which is what some people mean when they refer to human nature) is quite another thing.

See you soon.

Technopoly, by Neil Postman

2009-01-10T13:31:00.001-08:00

I read Technolopy (Knopf, 1992) by Neil Postman my first year of graduate school. Postman is both hilarious and profound, and I recommend this book highly. It tackles many of the big questions we are dealing with in Leadership Edmonton - the dark side of technological progress, determining truth in a flood of disinformation, and the difficulty of influencing the current political landscape. This is one of my favourite quotations from this book, and it gives a taste of the wit and wisdom of this recommendation:

"It is possible that, some day soon, an advertising man who must create a television commercial for a new California Chardonnay will have the following inspiration: Jesus is standing alone in a desert oasis. A gentle breeze flutters the leaves of the stately palms behind him. Soft, Mideastern music caresses the air. Jesus holds in his hand a bottle of wine at which he gazes adoringly. Turning toward the camera, he says, 'When I transformed water into wine at Cana, this is what I had in mind. Try it today. You'll become a believer.'

If you think such a commercial is not possible in your lifetime, then consider this: As I write, there is an oft-seen commercial for Hebrew National frankfurters. It features a dapper-looking Uncle Sam in his traditional red, white, and blue outfit. While Uncle Sam assumes appropriate facial expressions, a voice-over describes the delicious and healthful frankfurters produced by Hebrew National. Toward the end of the commercial, the voice stresses that Hebrew National frankfurters surpass federal standards for such products. Why? Because, the voice says as the camera shifts our point of view upward toward heaven, 'We have to answer to a Higher Authority.'

I will leave it to the reader to decide which is more incredible--Jesus being used to sell wine or God being used to sell frankfurters. Whichever you decide, you must keep in mind that neither the hypothetical commercial nor the real one is an example of blasphemy. They are much worse than that. Blasphemy is, after all, among the highest tributes that can be paid to the power of a symbol. The blasphemer takes symbols as seriously as the idolater, which is why the President of the United States (circa 1991) wishes to punish, through a constitutional amendment, desecrators of the American flag.

What we are talking about here is not blasphemy but trivialization, against which there can be laws. In Technopoly, the trivialization of significant cultural symbols is largely conducted by commercial enterprise. This occurs not because corporate America is greedy but because the adoration of technology pre-empts the adoration of anything else. Symbols that draw their meaning from traditional religious or national contexts must therefore be made impotent as quickly as possible--that is, drained of sacred or even serious connotations. The elevation of one god requires the demotion of another. 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me' applies as well to a technological divinity as any other."

Art Left Out in the Cold

2008-12-20T10:07:00.000-08:00

On Thursday night, I was headed to my Leadership Edmonton book discussion on Margaret Atwood's Payback. On my way to the discussion, I took advantage of free Thursday at the Edmonton Art Gallery in order to follow up on a friend's comment that the two exhibits installed there were some of the stupidest art exhibits he had ever seen.

I was generally, unimpressed, but I wanted to highlight the truly profound part of the Art of Hockey exhibit, Jim Logan's National Pastimes. These paintings, done in a King of the Hill cartoonish style, at once appear whimsical with their joyous pink and blue skies and vibrant tones. But a closer look reveals a young man hanging in suicide from a playground swing set, a drunken brawl, guns slung over shoulder, and a police car hugging close by the rink in order to keep an eye on this large group of young Aboriginal men. The most haunting piece is the one with the priest looming over three young boys, with a large white collar dominating the center of the painting and a large white cross dominating the skyline behind. The telephone poles echo the crucifix and look like large crosses that these young men must carry, the martyrs of a dark "Christianity" that has forgotten the commandment: "Love one another." The barred windows, the Budweiser bottle cap wallpaper, and the lone violinist playing a sad and solemn song in this brutal world is a far more touching and painful statement than a bunch of large plastic Bic lighters, a Styrofoam Zamboni, and a pair of beeswax skates. In Jim Logan's paintings, the violence on the ice moves out to the greater violence in the world and brings to life the true losers of this "game." I thought it was brilliant.

The Imagining Science exhibit had no such gems. It was an incomprehensible collection of stuff with no point or clear direction of inquiry. Learning can be harmful if you are not learning the right things - a statement which forces the question, "What are the right things?" The right things are those things that will be helpful, and this exhibit doesn't even have the daring to ask hard questions. Art cannot and should not be limited to an educational function without the risk of becoming obnoxiously didactic, but we learn absolutely nothing from this exhibit. In The Tent, the question is asked, "Is the laboratory a studio?" Because I make wine in my basement, is my basement a vineyard? Because I pray in my basement sometimes, is my basement a temple? This idiotic question doesn't dare tackle the function of science OR the "function" of art. The questions that need to be asked are not, "If you could create a new creature, would you?" The question is "If you could create a new creature, should you?" The moral dilemmas involved with biotechnology are rarely asked in this exhibit, and when they are, they are asked poorly. Genetically modified grass grown by Monsanto and Scott's in Oregon that is resistant to pesticides and herbicides, which could used to make greener golf courses, threatens to destroy ecosystems. A genetically modified goat that produce silk in its milk is a disturbing development only if it is not put in the context of its function. One advantage of the spider silk is that it is "compatible with the human body" and could be used to make Biosteel, to repair tendons, ligaments or limbs, or to create "super thin, biodegradable sutures for eye or neurosurgery." Imagining Science fails to capture either the darkness or the light of future scientific development. The entry material says that one of the roles of artists is to be provocateurs. I agree with this, but when all you provoke is disgust at how badly this vital role is handled, you have not been successful.

One of the most dangerous separations is the separation of philosophy from science. This lead to this home we currently inhabit, where philosophers have a poor understanding of science, and science has a poor understanding of philosophy. Science studies "What is" without frequently asking "What ought to be?" And because we live in this morally ambiguous, relativistic world where people are afraid to make any moral judgments, we just give up and accept all answers as equally valid. If we blend science and philosophy together (as many people are working hard to do, see Richard Grigg's Beyond The God Delusion), we can ask more meaningful questions. We can look at the probable outcomes of an experiment and ask, "If we choose to do this, this is likely to follow." We actively imagine, upon the foundation of our knowledge, the likely human benefits or consequences of any particular course of action in order to ask the most important question, "Should we do this? Will this help us or hurt us?" Imagining Science failes to do this and is largely uninspiring as a result. The exhibit, as a whole, has a poor understanding of science, and the art isn't even interesting. It is the endpoint of a path that some artists have chosen to walk since it embraced "Art for Art's sake" - a purposeless and irrelevant art that is unintelligible to all but the initiated few who take pride in their own marginalization.

A Fairy Tale about Ants

2008-12-10T20:06:00.000-08:00

“Be a lamp unto yourself. Nothing—no statement—must be taken on trust because it has authoritative backing. The Buddha laid down certain principles, which you can test by every test of reason; there must be doubt, induction, and comparison before one of them is to be accepted. This indeed is the true scientific spirit. Reaching across more than two millenniums it connects the Buddha with such men as Newton and Einstein.” L. Adams Beck, The Story of Oriental Philosophy, c. 1928

Once upon a time, an ant in the colony decided to take a rest by an old tree, beneath the slowly rolling clouds. The minute he began to rest, he wondered, "Why in the hell am I working so hard?" Another one of the busy ants passed by and the reclining ant asked him, "Why are you working so hard?" The ant looked at him coldly and replied, "Because its the law, you lazy dog," and continued marching.

As the clouds morped and transformed into celestial shapes, the contemplative ant realized he had never seen any other ants take the time to rest and question the purpose of their chores. They were always busy collecting food, building mounds, and moving eggs.

Just then, another ant carrying a large bee carcass passed by, and the dozing ant beneath the old tree asked him, "Why don't you take a short break from your chores? That bee must be very heavy. Come sit with me. There are some questions I would like to ask you." The sweating and weary ant indignantly replied, "Well I would certainly like to, but this is food for the good of all. If you would like to make the burden lighter so that I might take your advice, I would be most pleased, but this bee has got to keep moving. If we work hard enough, we might be able to double the size of the colony before winter."

"I would help you," replied the relaxed ant, "but I am looking at the rolling clouds. Have you ever noticed how mesmerizing they are? Where do you think they come from? Where do you think they . . . . go?” Disgusted, the sweating ant picked up the heavy bee and proceeded home.

The shade of the old tree made the wondering ant sleepy. Drifting in his dreams like the clouds in the sky, he wondered why he existed, what his work was supposed to get him, the goal of the colony, and whether or not the endless ant wars would ever end. He yawned, resolving to go back to his chores in a little bit. But for now, he wanted to sleep beneath the warm sky, praise the sun, and look into the blackness of his eyelids.

As he was falling asleep, he was violently roused awake by ten of his very angry brothers. "GET BACK TO WORK!!!" They shouted. "Why don't you rest for a minute, simply rest," the yawning, happy ant replied. “And perhaps you can answer a question of mine: Do you think the clouds are beautiful?” Without a word of response, the brothers beat him senseless and left him for dead beneath the clouds he loved so much. Then they hurriedly went back to their business of building bigger mounds and moving the growing supply of eggs.

"The Stark Limitations of Human Nature"

2008-11-26T21:12:00.000-08:00

"I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours." John F. Kennedy

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change." Charles Darwin

Leadership Edmonton is challenging everything I think about the world. I often say I don't believe in anything, but that's not quite true. I often say I am an optimist because they live longer, but that's not quite true either. I am not sure, at this point in time, if a long life is going to be enjoyable or well-deserved. I got lucky. I happen to be on the winningest side in history, but I have never been able to hold onto an optimistic thought because it feels like a betrayal of the truth. As I have said before, laughter makes me feel guilty.

There is a chasm between how I want the world to be and the way the world actually is. I want to believe in moral progress, in the moral perfectibility of mankind, in the hope that our collective self-knowledge and technical intelligence can create new ways of living that will ensure the survival of our species and simultaneously control the destructive effects of greed, selfishness, fear, and hate. But I am ashamed of these thoughts and chide myself for being naive. Right now, I just finished reading Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things and I am just about to finish Chris Hedges' I Don't Believe In Atheists. Everybody has to read these! They're incredible. Laurence Gonzales' description of the "vacation state of mind" is a profound metaphor for life of the so-called better classes in the West and the costs this state of mind imposes on the rest of the world. And Chris Hedges' fear and rejection of secular fundamentalism is an important call to alarm for a large and growing movement that prides itself on rationality and science, and a willingness to exterminate large numbers of people it deems "barbarians."

Here are some big thoughts from these two books:

"War is a another very good man-made way to produce entropy. If you think of money as a proxy for the accumulation of human work, which represents our human effort in creating order, then spending that money to produce nothing other but heat is certainly an effective way to increase entropy. And war is a way to turn money into heat at a rate that no other human activity can equal. From this point of view, we seem to be doing exactly what we're supposed to be doing. . . . . .We seem to have individual free will, in that we can choose trivial things in our lives, like whether or not we exercise or put money in the bank. But can we save ourselves from the fate of being agents of entropy? . . . . .We may hear it said that life is fragile. Life is not fragile. Your life is fragile. My life is fragile. But life occurs everywhere that the right conditions and chemicals happen to be. The planet will do fine without me. But most of us would nevertheless like to safeguard our own lives and those of our loved ones. Our kind are hoping to live on this planet for a very long time. Can we use free will to contravene the second law of thermodynamics in order to leave something for our children? We know we have the technical means to do it and even to make a profit doing it. But will we?" Laurence Gonzales, Everyday Survival, p.207-209

"Human history is steeped in blood. Millions died at the hands of imperialist powers in Africa. The genocide of Native Americans, the genocide of the Armenians by the Turks, the Nanking massacre, during which tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Chinese were slaughtered by Japanese troops, and the extermination campaigns of Hitler, Stalin and Mao speak to our incessant capacity for evil. These cycles of killing are part of human existence. They are ageless. All were justified by high ideals and all set loose human depravity. . . . .These totalitarian regimes were aided by the well-meaning but naive pacifists who appeared in large numbers throughout Europe and the United States following the First World War. The pacifists argued that human beings could be educated and molded to reject war and live in universal harmony. These pacifists, while not succumbing to the disease of militarism, were just as deluded as the militarists were by a Utopian belief in human perfectibility. They failed to build an ethic from the stark limitations of human nature. In the ensuing crisis and war they became ineffectual and impotent. These pacifists rejected all acts of violence, even those that could have stopped a resurgent Nazi Germany. " Chris Hedges, I Don't Believe in Atheists, p106-119

What is human nature? Is the only difference in the progression of human history the method and scale by which people die? Is war inevitable? If so, when should we support it? Can we be non-violent in a violent world, where Martin Luther King, Jr., JFK, and Abraham Lincoln were all struck down by the baser elements of human nature? Should I buy a gun, some land in northern Michigan, and built one helluva root cellar?

I used to think watching the news was bad. Now, I have to stop reading.

Alive in the Great Autumn

2008-11-19T20:01:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, a couple of worker bees were collecting pollen from late summer blooms when one said to the other, "This harvest is killing me. I've been up since five-thirty this morning lugging pollen back and forth, and then dancing my tail off to let everybody know where I struck it rich. I haven't had my lunch break, and I'm totally ready to collapse. And you know what the worst part is? All I have to look forward to for the next month is more of the same. Day after day. Find pollen. Gather pollen. Lug pollen back to the hive. Let others know where I found pollen and get back on the job. And at then end of the season, I die. A lifetime of pointless labour. No drive-ins. No hanky-panky. I don't even get Saturdays off to take a nap. What kind of life is that? It's bad luck being a worker bee, I say. I mean, answer me this: what did I do in my past life to deserve this? I don't remember being a pedophile or a serial killer. That's the only thing that can warrant this kind of torture."

The bee's partner didn't even give him a glance, and so he continued, "I've been thinking lately of stinging that beer-drinking slob over there on the barbecue. Just stab him in the middle of the back and just get it over with. Huh? What do you think of that? Rip out my abdomen and cause that poor slob to burn his burger. Maybe he's allergic. Now that would be the way to go out! With a bang. This stinger, it's a waste if you don't use it, that's what I think. I WANT SOME EXCITEMENT. Because what's the alternative: work my tail off until the frosts come and make me slow. One day you're feeling good--the sun's out and the flowers are popping, and then all of a sudden, the next time you load up with pollen you get all dizzy and you can't get back to the hive. And that's when someone's gonna crush you on the sidewalk with a shoe. And they may not even mean to. I've seen it happen plenty of times, and I can't get over it."

"It's terrible. I mean, where’s the meaning? But by the time the late season comes around, your wings are all ratty, your lower thorax aches, and it's all just a mattter of days before you go in the dustbin or the compost pile anyway. Do you want to go out like that? Does anyone want to go out like that? Why are we doing this, man?"

"The hive must survive," his partner replied, sagging with heavy sacs of yellow. "Look, I can't hold much more. I gotta go back and unload. If I hurry, I might even get one more run in before dark. Your sacs, on the other hand, are half filled, so you better get a move on."

For a while, the disillusioned bee went back to collecting pollen on a large purple dishpan dahlia. Buzzing with discontent, he flew over to another bee and said, "You ever thought about starting your own hive? With shorter hours? Seriously, let's get out of here and try to find one of those nice farms where you don't have to fly very far for food or build your own home. Doesn't acres of clover right outside your rain-covered front porch sound delicious? Or blackberries? Yum! Those big hairy oafs like that blackberry honey. Damn! We should do it! I mean, take a look at our hive. Just look at us! We've been scraping by for years at the whim of the seasons. It's time to incorporate. I have heard of colonies collapsing all around us from poor leadership. To tell you the truth, I never liked our queen. She's never once said 'Hi' to me, no matter how much pollen I bring back. I bet those capitalist queens treat their workers with a little more respect. What do you think? Let's head out to one of those sustainable societies of surplus honey?"

"What could be better than this?!" the grinning bee giggled with his head full of stamen, "This is the best nectar of the season!"

The Theology of Depeche Mode

2008-11-05T20:43:00.001-08:00

I first encountered the idea of a "Divine Comedy" (referred to in the quote by Czeslaw Milosz) in the song Blasphemous Rumours by Depeche Mode. If you are unfamiliar with this 80s emo-classic, it is about a 16 year-old girl who fails to commit suicide, finds "new life in Jesus Christ"- only to die in a tragic car accident two years later. The refrain, well known to anyone who rode in my 1981 Oldsmobile Toronado in High School is:

"I don't want to start any blasphemous rumours,
But I think that God's got a sick sense of humour,
And when I die, I expect to find him laughing."

This divinely sick sense of humour is what I have been thinking about lately because I just finished Laurence Gonzales' Deep Survival. One of the hallmarks of high-risk professions, such as fighter pilots landing on aircraft carriers, is a dark sense of humour. One of the chapters is entitled "Here Comes Ray Charles!" which means - a pilot is about to land with his mind shut off. His stress level has reached the point where he can't see, can't take in more information, and because he is in a state of panic, he will cause precisely what he is trying to avoid - his death (according to Gonzales, 90% of people can't process information when under stress, leading me to the conclusion that I'd be dead if I was in a higher risk profession than librarianship). One of my favourite quotes in the book is a placard inside a pilot base that reads, I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather: Not kicking and screaming like his passenger.

One of the more remarkable things about this world is how decidedly unfunny it can be. I had an aunt who died at 35 from cystic fibrosis, and an 40 year old uncle die from a brain tumour. One of my next door neighbors put a shotgun in his mouth at age 16, and my other neighbor was born with his umbilical cord tied around this throat - which lead to a life of mental and physical disabilities. Then there are the people I don't know, like the millions of people in my home country who share my parents' dilemma - no acces to health insurance. Sometimes, I lose my sense of humour because laughter makes me feel guilty. How can one laugh in the midst of all this suffering?

This is the question I am thought long and hard about while I sat in the airport for five hours drinking overpriced bourbon. And every time the news would come on, my thoughts would change to Barack Obama, and how his election has made me hope again. How he has enabled me to laugh again. How he has lightened my heart and gotten me excited to work hard again. How he has me missing my country like I haven't missed it since I left. How he makes me love my country like I haven't loved it since I was a little kid. But I worry about him. In addition to the carrying the burden of being the President in the most difficult circumstances and cleaning up the mess Bush has left him, I hope he can carry the cross of being a lot of people's Personal Jesus. And as he invoked the language of Abraham Lincoln, and the talking heads remembered the Kennedys, I prayed like I haven't prayed in a long time. Lord, please protect him. He's no God. He's no Savior. But we need him. We really, really need him.

Road-Side Dog

2008-10-29T20:58:00.000-07:00

For sheer pleasure, see if your local library has a copy of Czeslaw Milosz's Road-Side Dog. I kept this book by my night stand a couple of years ago and read a passage or two every night before going to sleep. Going through my collection of quotes again tonight, I found the one passage I'd scribbled down from this strange little collection of thoughts.

"Had you been given the power to create the world anew, you would have thought and thought, only to come at last to the conclusion that it would be impossible to conceive anything better than what exists. Take a seat in a café and look at the men and women passing by. Agreed, they could have been beings with immaterial bodies, not subject to the passing of time, to illness and death. Yet precisely the infinite richness, complexity, many shadedness of earthly things comes from their being self-contradictory. The mind would have been without grace had it not been anchored in matter: slaughterhouses, hospitals, cemeteries, pornographic films. And our physiological necessities would have stifled us with their animal dullness, if not for the playful mind, cut loose, frolicking above. And the guide of consciousness, irony, could not have exercised in its beloved occupation, spying on the flesh. It looks as if the Creator, whose ethical motives people have learned to doubt, was prompted primarily by his desire to make everything as interesting as possible, and as comic."

Teenagers in a Coma

2008-10-28T17:12:00.000-07:00

Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) convinced me that I may not be the completely calm, rational, reasonable man I think I am. The stories I remember from my childhood - giving Jennifer Little daffodils in kindergarten and receiving three standing ovations for my adaptation of Les Miserables for our high school musical - probably didn't happen and serve my self-conception in ways I don't fully understand. But that's ok, because the upside is that it is true that "Time heals all wounds." Over Time, the mind heals itself by fabricating a comfortable and cozy reality, a cozy reality that may not be what you expect.

When my biological father left when I was seven years old, I adopted a "victim" narrative that I clung to tightly for years. "Look what I've accomplished. Look what I've had to overcome. Unlike so many of my friends and the kids I went to university with, nobody gave me anything - not a cent of tuition. Not a graduation present for a mortgage. Nothing. I earned everything I have." When my father re-entered my life as an adult, I had to re-assess this narrative and ask myself why I needed to hold onto this story as tightly as I did. I was fairly successful, after all. Sure, I'd been to therapy a few times, but who hasn't? I was well-adjusted and happy. I wouldn't say I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but I have been given every possible blessing and opportunity in my life, and thinking I had to overcome some tremendous adversity makes me feel less guilty, less lucky, less privileged.

I saw the victim narrative's self-justification at work about a month ago at work, when I had to had to talk to three teenage boys after one of them told a female customer to suck his you-know-what. Boys. . . . sheesh. But I understand these boys. I really do. In the sixth grade, I told Sister Lucy she was a "F*!$ing freak." I had a rough home life, too. I understand the anger. The one boy who said it didn't try to justify his actions. He left quickly. The other two, however, tried to escape culpability and claimed they had no role in the affair. One of them told me, "I'm living on the streets." I have called his house in the past, and I know he does not have a wonderful home life. And I might forgiven him and let it pass if this had been the first time I'd heard it. But I have heard this tale several times over the past year, and the pattern I hear again and again from him is that he is a victim of circumstance and not responsible for smashing a chair into my desk, using the f-bomb, and storming out of the branch. He's not responsible for those things because he's the victim.

After he stormed out the last time, I was very disappointed. I have tried to reach out to this young man because I know life isn't good for him. He's a smart kid, but not smart enough to see that, despite the bad hand he's been dealt, he has free will and his choices place him in the circumstances that lead to Trouble. It was at this point that I thought:

"Teenagers are like coma patients: you're not always sure if they can hear you, but it doesn't do any harm pretending they can."

As evidence that I might have reached him when I thought he wasn't listening, Mr. Mouth came into my office today and said he was sorry. I said, "You really shouldn't apologize to me. You should apologize to the woman you told to suck your you-know-what.” After we sat in silence of a couple minutes, he asked, “Should I write a note or something?” I replied with a question: “Are you really sorry, or are you just trying to get something?” “I don’t know.” “When you do know, come back and talk to me.” He left again.

I do not know if this is the right thing to do. I would love to have the Wisdom of Solomon, but I am not sure I could do anything to make this young man admit what he did was inappropriate. If possible, I would like him to admit it was wrong, and believe it. I want him to admit he made a mistake. Without that assurance, I can’t let him back in to insult another customer.

I repeated my clever new phrase again as I grabbed my coat and left for the day.

"Teenagers are like coma patients: you're not always sure if they can hear you, but it doesn't do any harm pretending they can."

I Am Not Who I Think I Am

2008-10-18T11:52:00.000-07:00

Our October assignment was reading Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) by Carol Tarvis and Elliot Aronson. This book documents how we construct reality through impenetrable self-justifications and a reconstructive memory. Most of the processes that take place are unconscious and instinctive, and this book terrified me more than A Short History of Progress. Where A Short History of Progress documents how societies fail, Mistakes Were Made highlights how everyday individuals fail, on a regular and consistent basis, to bring their conceptions in line with reality. Key memories may not be accurate. Many people I think are liars might actually be telling the truth - their truth - and the cozy prospect we tell ourselves (that those who are in error can be educated to see a different truth), is a total lie. Most people are actually totally unreachable by logic, reason, and all evidence contrary to their position. Once an individual has fabricated their own reality, they are "like turning a steamship around in a narrow river" (p.95), unable to change their course and accept a story that corresponds more faithfully to actual events because it would be too damaging to their self-conception. Classic examples of this are people who are convinced they have been abducted by aliens and George W. Bush.

Ignac Semmelweiss was a doctor who realized that washing his hands when helping a woman give birth improved both the mother's mortality rate and that of the child. When he shared this information with other doctors, however, they refused to adopt the practice of washing hands because "they would have had to admit that they had been the cause of the deaths of all those women in their care." This would have caused too much cognitive dissonance and destroyed the doctors' self-concept as wise healers.

Other horrifying examples cited in the book are the number of innocent people whose lives have been destroyed by repressed-memory-recovery therapy or by the police. Despite the evidence from Holocaust concentration camps that "Truly traumatic events--terrifying, life-threatening experiences--are never forgotten," "clinicians who believe in repression see it everywhere" (p.112-113). And so therapists coerced adults and children into believing they had been raped when no rape had actually occurred. Innocent daycare establishments were destroyed. But even when confronted with "the facts," susceptible individuals will probably come to think these episodes really did happen in order to keep their self-conception undisturbed. The sad case of Holly Ramona will stay with me for a long time.

The interviews with children related in the book are strikingly similar to the interrogations of police. If you express displeasure with someone's responses (or torture them with sleep deprivation as documented in the "frequent flyer program"), given enough time, a person will confess to anything to please the interrogator or make the punishment cease. Confessions gained from torture are unreliable, but once the person has confessed, the therapist or the police officer now has all the justification they need to proceed with their pre-ordained view of the world because this confirms their bias. The case of Stephanie Crowe (related on pages 133-137) is an example where police used bad interrogation techniques to get the interrogation result they wanted, and then used the bad interrogation results to prove what they already believed.

"The most powerful piece of evidence a detective can produce in an investigation is a confession, because it is the one thing most likely to convince a prosecutor, jury, and judge of a person's guilt. Accordingly, police interrogators are trained to get it, even if that means lying to the suspect and using, as one detective proudly to a reporter, 'trickery and deceit.' Most people are surprised to learn this is entirely legal. . . . Inducing an innocent person to confess is obviously one of the most dangerous mistakes that can occur in police interrogation, but most detectives, prosecutors, and judges don't think it is possible."

The individual is prone to see reality in a comfortable, self-serving way. And then there are systems in place that will reinforce this individual propensity. This book is a very scary look at human psychology and human systems, and I can't recommend it enough. The web of self-justifications that entangles us is truly terrifying, and the book causes us to question experts and authorities who close the loop of their thoughts and refuse to entertain the possibility they might be wrong.

But what scares me most about this book and the incredible evidence used to show that we (in this case we meaning I) can justify any hurtful act, unknowingly remember the past in a self-serving way, and create self-fulfilling prophecies where "believing is seeing." At the end of reading this book, I was left with the disturbing thought that I may not be who I think I am.

When Hope Dies, Courage Rises

2008-09-29T19:40:00.000-07:00

"You need faith for the same reasons that it's so hard to find." Josh Ritter, Thin Blue Flame, The Animal Years

Last week, I visited the Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City installation exhibit created by Doctors Without Borders. "Guided by MSF aid workers, visitors are asked to imagine that they are among the millions of people fleeing violence and persecution in, for example, Somalia, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Sudan." You leave the exhibit with a mixture of profound sadness and profound gratitude - thankful that you are not one of 42 million people, but depressed that you can do very little to help them.

I started Leadership Edmonton this weekend, and I began to see the full scope of the challenges facing mankind. Humanity is a an abstract however, and even though the Refugee Camp did a good job of making the lives of these people real, it was not as effective as a letter from my friend Susan, who recently spend some time volunteering in Africa setting up some mobile AIDS testing units, teaching English, and observing conditions. I am excerpting her letter below without her permission, but I doubt she will mind because she hopes to reach as many people as possible with her dispatches.

“After our session (of English), she (one of the students) began breastfeeding her 1.5 year-old Hope. She pulled her blouse down further to show me a thick, bumpy scar in a rainbow arc between her breasts. She began telling me something about it in Acholi, so I called in their group leader to translate. I then got Margaret's entire story. Margaret is missing her left forearm. It was shot off 2 years into her abduction. She already had her first child by that point to her assigned commander 'husband.' Once she became lame, he discarded her to a lower commander who then of course repeatedly raped her, quite brutally at times, over the next few years. The scar on her chest was from being gored and sawed by a panga (something like sharp-edged golf club machete) during combat. In a later skirmish with government forces, Margaret was captured with another group of LRA (Lord's Republican Army) women and their children and brought to a convent here in Gulu for rescue and rehabilitation. Two months into her stay there, Margaret went mad. She would wander around town without clothes and dig through garbage. (I actually saw a man like this yesterday in the center of town.) She is told that she was this way for about two months, an obvious trauma event, until she suddenly snapped out of it. During this time, she was raped - again - which forced upon her a third child, little Hope who was now suckling from her breast.

Luckily, there is an American couple who is paying her children's school fees. She still shows signs of mental illness; she processes things very slowly. But she is spirited and has faith that God will somehow provide for her. One might think that a woman like this would shun God for what he has put her through. Yet she gives God credit for the strength she has to endure. Slander all you want against Christianity, but this woman has little but her spiritual beliefs and they serve her well.

As I spend more time with these women, I am learning their stories. Each one has been forced to kill, some many, many times and in the most unimaginable ways. They each say that it is the images of these killings that haunt them most. Even more than the rapes and beatings and combat wounds they themselves suffered; it was the harm they caused others that they cannot seem to forget or forgive themselves for."

As I read Susan's dispatches, there is, beyond this description of agony, an optimism. After all, she is there doing what she can to help, which implies that the situation can be made better. At Leadership Edmonton this weekend, I acknowledged to myself that there is no defense for the pessimistic position. None. The evidence is against us and there is little chance that it won't crack, but we simply can't live like that.

The first book we discussed in Leadership Edmonton was Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress. Anyone who knows me knows that I have been thinking about this stuff for years. But I finally feel like I have a context to comprehend what is going on.

Whether it is Ur in 2500 BC or modern day, the greatest threat to civilization is population increase, which is, either ironically or paradoxically, the result of civilization. Population increase causes environmental strain and vast wealth/power imbalances that work in tandem to undermine cultures. It was the population increase resulting from agricultural developments (irrigation) that fueled both the rise in population and subsequently, the destruction of fertile soil into salt pans into what was the Fertile Crescent. Rome was able to become such a power because of its agriculture, but as the saying goes, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall." The industrialized countries are harder on the environment because of manufacturing and the use of the automobile, but one of the things that Ronald Wright and Jared Diamond do a good job of pointing out is that it does not take mechanization to destroy one's environment. Right now, we are facing a problem of scale, not an entirely new problem (though I often wonder if the sheer magnitude of scale can make something fundamentally different). One of the interesting things I learned when reading Mark Kurlansky's Salt: A World History is that large parts of the world were deforested, not to heat homes, but to evaporate salt water in order to collect salt, a necessary ingredient in human digestion. The need for salt was once like the need for oil.

Sumerians, Romans, Incas, the Anasazi of the American Southwest - all provide evidence that this is a pattern not unique to modern civilization. What I find most fascinating about all of this is that the early Greek philosophers seemed to be able to see that all this would happen. Plato first developed the "Theory of Recurrent Catastrophes" in fifth century BC. But if you could sum up Ronald Wright's book in one phrase, it would be this one by Aristotle, "In all likelihood every skill and every philosophy has been discovered many times over and again perished." (Metaphysica 1074b 10 https://mail.epl.ca/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://etext.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv3-75).

I found this quote from Aristotle in the History of the Dictionary of Ideas. I am concluding this post with the final paragraph of an incredibly thoughtful essay.

"The immediate task is to rid the world of the now palpable irrationality of war. Once freed from the fear of war, the problem of world unity will assume a different character. Cultural diversity will be seen to constitute no danger. Peoples will feel free to develop each in its own way and to cooperate in the problems of common concern—the conquest of disease and poverty and the removal of the barriers that divide men. It may then become possible to work out more fully the practical implications of the conception of a self-directing humanity, to deepen our knowledge of the causes making for conflict, or one-sidedness and discrepancies in development, and to use the knowledge thus gained in guiding future developments."
http://etext.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv3-76

This is where we seem to be stuck. Where we aren't making any progress. The Iraq War was a mistake, both in its inception and its execution. We need to start spending $1.7 trillion to stop war. It's that simple. It's not naive or silly or all "love, peace, and harmony." As long as we support war (either directly or indirectly), we are letting a part of ourselves die.

Hurtling Towards Oblivion

2008-09-23T09:54:00.000-07:00

"As we end the twentieth century, after two world wars and fifty years of potential nuclear conflict, the concept of progress has come into ill repute. The conservative philosopher Friedrich von Hayek bemoans the fact that confidence in progress has now become a mark of 'a shallow mind.' But even those who see history as 'just one damn thing after another' (in the eloquent phrase of poet John Masefield) tend to insist that we can nevertheless learn from history, improve ourselves, and progress beyond it." R.C.Sol. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, p. 722

I used to get excited about The End Times. Seriously, I wanted the Apocalypse to happen. I wanted the Four Horseman to come riding down my street, and I would be waiting with milk and cookies. I wanted to be present when the shit hit the fan. I wanted To Witness The Reckoning.

This is how little I thought of God's Creation; how little I thought of myself; how little I thought of the human enterprise.

I am not proud of these days, but the Apocalypse still holds a fascination for me. Edward Edinger, a leading Jungian scholar, is the author of a posthumously published collection of lectures entitled Archetype of the Apocalypse. In this insightful and disturbing book, Edinger postulates that the weight of the collective (and mostly unconscious) belief in the Apocalypse will most surely bring it about; that the world as we know it will surely end because it has been preordained by the dominant mythos underlying all our conscious striving. Archetype, in Jungian terms, is "a pattern: a primordial psychic order." We can't escape this pattern. In Edinger's analysis, The Book of Revelation is really a map of individual awakening, but it has rarely been seen in that way. Some people see AIDS as the literal proof of God's vengeance on Sodom, or the tsunamis, or the predictable prospect of a pandemic, or nuclear fallout, or dead oceans and the destruction of the rainforest, but whatever it is, the collective belief that the Beast will rise might just have the power to conjure Him into existence.

This seems to me to be the unavoidable trajectory of Progress. One of the problems with the the whole idea of Progress is that it is, as my friend Jeff once said, "an ego-feeding, self-protective arrogance." Not only are we "more advanced" than our forebears, but there is implied the assurance that we are ingenious enough to get out the mess we are presently in.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra, "As yet, humanity has no goal." This is not accurate. Humanity has several goals, none of which we have consensus upon. Sustainable communities who live off organically grown, locally produced food. That's a goal. The end of terrorism. That's a goal. Alan Watts, in one of my favourite quotations, said something like "Humanity will never work together to achieve an ultimate good; only to avoid a desperate evil." This is an incredibly funny truism stating people will be more likely to unite out of fear. This is why global warming and the threat of environmental destruction may finally have a chance to bring people together. In the nuclear standoff of my childhood, the major reason to stockpile more nuclear weapons was "mutually assured destruction." MAD philosophy is based on the Beautiful Mind game theory that both sides will work to avoid their worst possible outcome. The worst possible outcome, whether you are in Japan, Singapore, Sudan, or Canada, is the mutually assured destruction of the biosphere.

With a wonderful wife and daughter, I no longer wish for the Apocalypse. And it is strange that now, as I start a new life, I should find myself in a program forcing me to think dark future ahead. Ronald Wright's Short History of Progress and Jane Jacobs' Dark Age Ahead are not the most uplifting things to read when you are thinking about the world your daughter will inherit, the world you hope to retire into, the world you hope to give to your grandchildren. But there's no turning away from the future.

Unfortunately, we're playing a deadly game of chicken, and I don't think anyone's going to blink.

Going Nowhere Fast

2008-09-04T21:44:00.000-07:00

"What experience and history teach is this - that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it." Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

This Autumn, I return to school as a participant in Leadership Edmonton .

The first required reading is A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright. We are asked to ponder the question: What is Progress?

After reading A Short History of Progress, it is hard not to see the human journey as a runaway train toward Oblivion. Progress, for me, is a will-o-the-wisp, (an absolutely fascinating phrase with a relation to Halloween) meaning it gets farther and farther away despite the fact that it seems within your grasp. Friedrich Nietzsche once said that "Humanity has no goal," and I think that is another way of saying the same thing. Having already read Jared Diamond’s Collapse and reading regularly about the growing number of ocean deadzones, the extinction of of cod and bird populations, I am skeptical of any definition of Progress. Progress is a Myth-not myth as in lie, but big Myth, meaning a great story of unknown age and origin which helps explain who we are, what we are doing, and the relationship of our individual lives with the greater Purpose of Existence. Progress can be seen as the lie of Capitalism or the false promise of the Industrial Revolution (are we working less? are we less stressed?), but Progress is a powerful, alluring tale that states we are somehow smarter, wiser, and more capable than our forefathers; that life is somehow "better." Progress has, in many ways, become inextricably bound to Evolution - that more complex and adaptive organisms grow out of more simpler forms; that things are better now than they were and will get better in the future; that we are clever enough to find solutions to the problems we create.

I think about three types of progress:

1. Technological progress – Technological progress results in more complex devices capable of performing more complex tasks (an escalator versus the stairs, vacuum versus broom). Technological progress is, perhaps, most visibly symbolized in weapons of destruction. Much like 2001: A Space Odyssey, technological progress is the march from bone club to nuclear bomb. Scientific progress corresponds to technological progress, and the two greatest trajectories of human understanding are cosmic and atomic. Our understanding of the unfathomable bigness of the universe is the result of our ability to put Hubble in space through our understanding of physics. The earth used to be the center of the universe, but we now realize that we live in an expanding universe comprised of countless galaxies just like our own, and some scientists even postulate the possibility of multi-verse. But in this universe, we share space with novas, supernovas, blackholes, the birth and death of solar systems, and anti-matter. This understanding of the incredibly big is coupled with a growing understanding of the incredibly small. Just as a telescope gives us a greater understanding how small we are in Space, our atomic understanding has lead to some of the most profound shifts in our understanding of how small we are in Time. Carbon dating confirms how little Time we take up, and our ability to manipulate atoms and molecules has lead to some of the most profound technological developments in the medical sciences, which has prolonged our lives. And these longer, healthier lives are, quite possibly, the most powerful scientific evidence supporting the idea of and fueling the belief in Progress. (At the time of writing this, the Large Haldron Collider is gearing up to smash some atoms, creating a "new fundamental understanding of the universe.")

2. Political progress - Alexis de Tocqueville wrote one of the most impressive summations of political progress in Democracy in America, where he likens the progress of democracy with the irresistible force of God's Will. “Everywhere a diversity of historical incident has redounded to democracy’s benefit. Everyone played a part: those who strove to ensure democracy’s success as well as those who never dreamt of serving it; those who fought for it as well as those who declared themselves its enemies. Driven pell-mell down a single path, all worked toward a single goal, some in spite of themselves, some unwittingly – blind instruments in the hands of God. The gradual development of the equality of conditions is a therefore a providential fact.” This divine believe in democracy can be seen in political speeches today and may ring falsely in our ears or strike us as crass hypocrisy. But is it possible to look back from our historical vista and view the landscape of the U.S. Civil War, Brown vs. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Movement, and Barack Obama's presidential candidacy and not see some level of political progress? Not see the spreading of equality of conditions to more and more people? The progress of political standing, the progress of human rights, the progress of the rule of law -- anyone who fights to spread these wonderful things to those who lack them seeks to extend these providential bounties to all and is, whether they admit it or not, a firm believer in Progress.

3. Spiritual progress - The idea of spiritual progress is the most complicated to talk about, especially now. In this day and age, with the popularity of books such as Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great, and Sam Farris' The End of Faith, it is become vogue to see a belief in God as an infantile fantasy that needs to be outgrown. A godless rationality is the next step in our spiritual progress. An antithetical comparison might be the ideas and writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit geologist who saw Christ as the Omega Point where humanity is on a long journey moving towards a universal consciousness of Love. This is one moving expression of spiritual progress. A sustainable economy where humanity lives in harmony with the environment (God’s Creation) is also an appealing and powerful idea of spiritual progress because Matter is treated reverentially. A corresponding expression of spiritual progress would be the popular vegetarian quotation attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, "The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men." This is to say, of course, that eventually man will progress to the point where the murder of animals is unacceptable. Or, as Paul McCartney said it, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.” All of the ideas of spiritual progress revolve around the idea that Man is not yet what he could Become, that he has not yet reached his full potential.

It is much too simplistic to say we are apes with bombs, but it is also difficult to say just how far we have come as a species from when we stood up and began to walk. Whatever form it takes, the gripping idea of Progress includes all of our best hopes and aspirations and striving for something better, but it also contains a dangerous rejection of the Present. This idea that we are marching triumphantly into a better age clouds our sight enough that we may walk right off the cliff into the Abyss below. It's all very strange, but incredibly fun to think about.

My Birthday

2008-07-21T22:50:00.000-07:00

"Art Is Not Eternal." - Ken Kesey, as quoted in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

When I was working with the homeless in Seattle, our office assistant turned me on to Mary Oliver, and I have been a devoted fan ever since. Mary Oliver is a penetrating poet of immediate experience. Her poem "August"—the lead poem in American Primitive—is about picking blackberries, and it makes me long for Minto-Brown and morning walks with Moose along the berry-laden paths that lined the Willamette River. Even as her poems conjure up the most wonderful memories of my life and lead me to wonder about when I will ever return to Oregon, Oliver's poetry also brings me into the Now like no one else. A friend once asked me if I would rather live a poem or write one, and since he asked the question, I have been trying to live one, to live something beautiful and only occasionally write one. For my birthday, my love gave me a bookmark she made in her silversmithing class, along with Oliver's latest collection of poems, Thirst.

My love's bookmark is the most amazing and beautiful present I have ever received because it was hand-crafted by the mind, eyes, and hands that love me completely with a love I can fall into, and in the falling, simultaneously feel very secure and very vulnerable. The bookmark contains two lines from our favourite Oliver poem, "Egrets," which appears in American Primitive. The whole line reads, "by the laws of their faith not logic, they opened their wings softly and stepped over every dark thing."

Every dark thing, in our human lives, includes doubt, disillusionment, past heartbreaks, the vast collection of our mistakes, the worry about dangerous times as our young bird prepares to leave the nest, and the looming anxiety of future illness. Thirst was written in a time of grief and sorrow after Oliver lost her beloved partner of 40 years. Even when thinking of the inevitable end, however, Mary Oliver invariably comes back to cherishing right where we stand for what it is, not what we want it to be. In her poem "When Death Comes," she writes:

"When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited the world."

As I am about to become a bridegroom, I also want to take the world into my arms, along with the woman who has shown for me a pure and invigorating love, and unbind the love that I have kept locked in my heart. When it's over, I want to be able to say I loved her as no one had ever loved her, and I loved as I never thought myself capable of loving - without hestiation, without restriction, without condition. In a couple weeks, we will step over all of the dark things that stand in our path by faith. Faith does not come naturally to me, but for me, my life really started with an unshakeable faith in her.