(july 1:09) Another piece, Kalis, and explanation at netdynam.org.
Monthly Archives: June 2009
Elephants, and, Almost the Ivan Illich Moment
Last night Entrepreneurs For Sustainability sponsored a daring program, in their monthly series. Titled Sustainability and Poverty, it was the first program over 12 years of the series, that primarily focused on the larger political-economic and social ‘human system.’
I’d count myself as a student of the network-centric development aesthetic that grounds E4S’s vision in a truly humane and feminine (in the archetypal sense,) view about connecting and supporting the empowerment of idealistic and committed entrepreneurial activists. Each in their way, is focused on decreasing the resource and waste footprint of northeast Ohio’s material and energy consumption. E4S does a phenomenal job, and its leader, one of my closest friends Holly, is a masterful maven.
At the same time, I cannot endorse the so-called Triple Bottom Line, (planet-people-profits.) Nor do I engage easily with activism overwhelmingly disposed toward instrumentalism, i.e. doing, when this is severed from any critical culture whatsoever. To me, the wedding of idealism and instrumentalism, can’t help but be often yoked to a refusal to understand the larger scale systems. This lack of a critical culture comes with the territory of doers and doing. This makes sense as a concomitant to so much action: why bother with perilous contradictions found in, and at the scale of, the larger system(s)?
The program, when announced, surprised me, because its implicit reach into the zones of economic devastation, potentially contextualize sustainability in complicated and contradictory ways.
This reach begs intense questions.
And, with one exception, those freighted questions did not get raised. One surfaced in the Q&A. This question, about how large institutions geared primarily toward profits could come to the ‘page’ of sustainability, was circumvented by an astonishingly disingenuous answer by a panelist.
This is okay. E4S isn’t configured to bring critical consciousness to bear upon contradictions and challenges implicit in the larger system that its business development mission takes place within. Still, the excitement generated at the program likely had something to do with its moment of opening up to the larger system and its big questions.
If you’re wondering what those questions are, I’ll pose them as equivalent to elephants in the room.
1st elephant: People in poverty most often represent the failure of the political-economic system, and predatory–if you will–bottom lines.
2nd elephant: People in poverty in Cleveland live lifestyles unimaginable to the 1 billion people who live on $3/day or less. The point here is not the relative well-being of Cleveland’s economically disadvantaged, but that elephant #1, much more abject poverty elsewhere, is due to the most horrific consequences of profit motive, resource inequity and failures of sustainability.
3rd elephant: The stand alone “truth” of sustainability is different at the different and enlarged scales of socio-economics.
(If one is to regard and analyze the sociological/economic system that encompasses the elongated cycles of development and degradation, dynamicism of structural opportunities, disinvestment and mobility of capital, and the literal classes of longitudinal outcome at the level of household and neighborhood, city and region, one will be compelled to turn an unsparing critical eye toward the problem, or shadow of, profitable instrumentalities, these too merged with the voracious onslaught given by capitalism and consumerism.)
4th elephant: A world-wide consumer middle class, the implication of ending poverty granted by a commitment to a hyper-materialistic finance-capitalized economics, is not sustainable.
Which brings us to:
5th elephant: the resource inequities given by the furious consumerism of the 1st world and, nowadays, by the economic growth of asia and latin america. The economic devastation in NEO is not due to other causes. Follow the gold over long cycles of expansion and contraction!
This last elephant presents the problem of unsustainable growth in its starkest terms, even as the trend toward greater poverty, has been largely reversed. (Except on the continent of Africa.)
Implication of elephant #5: It’s hard to valorize the triple bottom line, AND, not run the damn numbers. But, to run the numbers is to realize how nonsensical the triple bottom line is in the first place, and at the scale of the system where the ill consequences smack in the face.
I don’t see how the problem of poverty can be dragged very far into the perspective given by the current sustainable business system, and its blinded triple bottom line. After all, that same business system is not structured to not drive people into poverty. So it is also: the triple bottom line is rendered uncritically as a development model with basically zero regard (in its instrumental scheme,) for its being also an implicate feature of predatory finance capitalism.
Ironically, there is a long tradition of thought leading, predating the sustainability movement, that zeroes in on these contradictions. Schumacher, Bookchin, nowadays Bill Mckibbon, others, and especially Ivan Illich, unpacked the weighty contradictions of capital, consumerism, resource equity, wastefulness, and the institutionalization, (and for Illich, professionalization,) of the materialistic trance.
Although E4S is hardly configured to deal with any of this, and the fascinating monthly meeting didn’t approach elephant or contradiction, nevertheless, this was the first time in 12+ years that this fine and important local collaborative experiment dared to step toward its own Ivan Illich moment.
I have no idea how sustainability advocates who aren’t aware of aging, albeit sophisticated social critiques, might either reckon with or begin to reconcile the contradictions found in the larger system. Hopefully, turning a blind eye toward the bigger system will become more and more untenable.
Filed under Uncategorized
The March of Capital
The Cleveland Heights Observer celebrated its first anniversary at the annual meeting of its sponsor (?) Future Heights. The journalist Charles Michener’s presentation was featured.
It’s interesting to compare the Heights Observer with The Lakewood Observer. After listening to several presentations that paid tribute to the volunteer efforts of the sizable CHOb team, I became aware of how organized the civic journalism project is over in the inner ring suburb where I was raised. It’s impressive. The paper itself has grown up over the past year. There’s always at least an article or two in each issue that pushes past the civic cheerleading.
Because my brief participation with the Lakewood project included the inception phase, my informed guess is that the CHOb didn’t go through the same sparking rough-and-tumble wilding the Lakewood Observer went through. It seems the CHOb never was wild, thus in need of being tamed. The biggest difference between the two projects is that the Cleveland Heights Observer’s forum hasn’t reached any kind of mass or gravity at all, whereas the Lakewood Observer’s deck centers Lakewood’s civic drama. The CHOb’s forum is thin, and Lakewood’s thich, long tail whips around.
Michener is writing a book on the revival of Cleveland. He’s in his late sixties and returns to Cleveland after a professional career as New Yorker and Newsweek journalist and editor. His roots are in Cleveland Heights, University School, Yale. His specialties at The New Yorker were restaurants and opera. He’s also an expert and author of a book about the east coast society bandleader Peter Duchin.
I don’t know if Cleveland is to be soon revived, but Michener’s combination of boilerplate observations, name dropping, and, offering Portland, Oregon as exemplar of urban cool, tracked aspects of many other similar presentations I’ve fidgeted through over the years. When the term ‘brain drain’ is trotted out for the umpteenth time, it’s easy enough to figure the speaker hasn’t yet done the kind of homework likely to be revelatory. Hopefully his book will subvert my initial impressions.
Still, as long as Michener mentioned it, I’d like to reveal my own take in the form of a question:
Why is it assumed that urban advancement will come upon the heels of the kind of people who have left returning to replace some of the people who have chosen to stay?
One aspect of the answer to this question I’ve smoked out over the years is that the person who offers this prescription–almost always–never has any purchase on the reasons why people stay, let alone what is the gravity of the “long” regional historical context. It strikes me as close to absurd, then, to hobnob with civic leaders, complain about their being “siloed,” prescribe variations of innovative collaboration, without driving their journalistic/research/observer’s consciousness into the ongoing urban and civic flux of the extant individual-group-neighborhood-community “creatura and pleorama.”
Top down prescriptives follow inexorably, almost as karmic consequence, from the failure to smartly go down and gather round the ripe dis-ease, and gather pearls, and firewalk through the thicket of in-the-moment reasons being here remains vital here, and, then gather why people choose to stay.
In Cleveland. What is here is the prima materia! It’s been cooking in the stew pot fired by long cycles of economic depredation. Some idealized admixture of cultural creatives and braininess doesn’t fit the bill of enlightened forces able to reverse trends not themselves the result of lack of the same.
Filed under Cleveland, Kenneth Warren
Link: Nano Nets & Lucky Machines
Nano Nets and Lucky Machines, posted by me on Netdynam 2.0
Subject matter: intelligent agents, artificial intelligence, machine-based minds
Filed under technology
Spoiled
Courtesy of Crooks and Liars. (post: Bill Moyers on the “Single Payer” plan for health care on PBS
By John Amato Sunday Jun 07, 2009.)
Arlen Specter (R-D- PA- $4,026,933)
Max Baucus (DLC- MT- $2,833,731)
Mitch McConnell (R-KY- $2,758,468)
Ben Nelson (DLC-NE- $1,196,799)
Max Baucus (DLC- MT- $1,184,113)
Joe Lieberman (DLC- CT- $1,036,302)
Arlen Specter (R-D- PA- $1,035,530)
Chuck Schumer (D-NY- $981,400)
Mitch McConnell (R-KY- $929,207)
Chuck Grassley (R-IA- $884,724)
The dollars are contributions from the medical-insurance complex to Senators charged with serving their constituents. Kind of begs some questions.
Although Explorations is not focused on politics and the political economy, in this case I can’t help myself. In truth I’m preparing a long riff on the Republican implosion. It’s not ready.
Still, in our interesting times, the US has a President elected in part due to a grassroots money-raising dynamo, and, against this is the normal spoils system. It helps that only 50-ish percent vote in National elections, and, by the way, that rate of participation is–at least–halved in most local elections. It’s a weird system that mixes a mass of citizenry with plutocrats and the corporate elite.
Many years ago a mentor told me that one often is compelled to uncover what he termed “the agenda behind the agenda” and then to discover who is holding the gold that funds this agenda behind the agenda.
Filed under Uncategorized
Why Psychologists Muddle
I can’t think of any single road here at the high reaches of consciousness trying to figure consciousness out which–eventually and practically–easily offers practical methods for improving self-development, relationships, group relations, and all the sundry modes for everyday consciousness and behavior.
More, see my post, The Mind Is Not the Brain, netdynamic.org
Filed under psychology
