 Fareed Zacharia describes two distinct qualities, constitutional liberalism (”the rule of law and basic human rights”), and democracy (”selection of government through free and fair, competitive, multiparty elections”) as the cornerstones of a healthy, peaceful and sustainable state. He laments the rise of “illiberal democracies”, where democratic governments have deemed their ballot victory to put them above the law, eroding basic constitutional freedoms and corrupting the democratic process. As the result of an horrendous double blow yesterday, the U.S. has lost its credibility as either a democracy or a constitutionally liberal state. First, the arch-conservative and deeply partisan U.S. Supreme Court ruled, by its now standard 5-4 margin, that gerrymandering is not unconstitutional. Ruling on the outrageous redistricting plan in Pennsylvania, which essentially guarantees incumbent Republicans two thirds of the state’s seats in Congress although they have a minority of the registered voters, the Chief Justice threw it back to the executive and legislative branches, saying, incredibly, “Our legislators have reached the point of declaring that, when it comes to apportionment, ‘We are in the business of rigging elections.’”
The Court made it clear that there is not really any point in anyone in the U.S. bothering to vote in future Congressional elections because gerrymandering has already determined the results in all but a handful of districts. But in abrogating its responsibility in a baldly partisan manner, the Court also said that it is up to the ‘legislators’ to fix the system, and that even though, under Zacharia’s definition above, the U.S. can no longer call itself a democracy, they will not declare this completely fraudulent practice unconstitutional. The NYT calls on both parties to introduce “nonpartisan redistricting”, as is done in Iowa, Canada, and just about every true Western democracy, a process that the thoroughly corrupt judge Scalia denied, in his argument for the majority supporting the continuation of gerrymandering, was reasonably possible. But asking the legislators to regulate themselves is like asking the fox to run the hen-house. The judiciary, not the legislature, is responsible for protecting the country against laws that are undemocratic and unconstitutional, and it has utterly and disgracefully failed to do so in this ruling. The second blow came in an announcement from the ACLU that its constitutional challenge of the Patriot Act cannot be publicized because the Justice Department has put a ‘gag order’ on the challenge while the Presnit campaigns around the country for renewal and expansion of this outrageous law. So, first, we have a law that allows the arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention, denial of constitutional rights and freedoms, and unlimited rights of search and seizure of anyone by the paramilitary FBI/Homeland Security brownshirts, with no need for demonstration of reasonable cause, just the issuance of a vaguely worded “national security letter”. And the perpetrators can hide behind “national security” to deprive the victims of this law, their families and their lawyers, of any information about why they have been victimized, and who authorized it. And now, to muffle any criticism of the law, the Justice Department is prohibiting opponents of the law from even talking to the public about challenges to it. So, again, under Zacharia’s definition, the U.S. is now no longer a constitutionally liberal state — the rule of law, and basic human rights and freedoms, are both abrogated, and in no small way, by the Patriot Act. There is no longer freedom of speech, freedom of dissent, freedom of assembly, right to a speedy and fair trial, or right to information about government actions. Rule of law has been subverted to the absolute authority of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to do whatever, in its discretion, limited only by the whim of the government of the day, it wants to do. To someone living in a democracy and a constitutional liberal country, as I do, where gerrymandering and laws like the Patriot Act are unthinkable, the fact that these two rulings occurred in one day, in an election year, with hardly a peep from the mainstream press or the candidates, is absolutely terrifying. Although, to be sure, these outrages have not yet been used in the U.S. to the extent that similarly undemocratic and constitutionally illiberal processes and laws have been used in Cuba, China, Iraq, North Korea and others of the most “unfree” states in the world, there is no reason to believe, after yesterday’s double blow, that they couldn’t be, and won’t be in the future. Especially when (not if) the next terrorist attack on U.S. soil occurs. History is replete with examples showing that the decline from liberal democracy to ruthless and tyrannical dictatorship can occur quickly, and begins with a single step. Yesterday, the U.S. took two giant leaps along that path. The rest of the world can only watch, and shudder, at how easily and quietly the fall of a once-great country is beginning. |
April 30, 2004
APRIL 2004: U.S. NO LONGER FREE, NOR A DEMOCRACY
April 29, 2004
REPORT FROM BAGHDAD
 I‘m out of town all day teaching new and prospective entrepreneurs about Community Based Enterprises (what I’ve called NCEs), and specifically about Innnovation & Entrepreneurship. I’ll be back tomorrow. In the meantime, here is an extraordinary telephone conversation (requires Flash Player) between Jon Lee Anderson in Baghdad and Amy Davidson back at the home office of The New Yorker. In this article, and in the phone conversation, Anderson describes an Iraqi people that is increasingly cynical that anything can come from continued military occupation of their country, except the continued dysfunction of basic services, increasing anarchy, corruption, power struggles among ever-more-radical Islamic factions, and crisis levels of violence and insecurity. He explains that even the most ardent advocates of American presence have given up trying to win the “hearts and minds” of Iraqis, and describes the danger of ramping up military action against well-entrenched, widely-supported insurgents.
What is most frightening, and disheartening, is that the well-intentioned but grossly inadequate and under-resourced allies trying to rebuild Iraq have essentially accomplished nothing in the year since the ouster of Saddam — Anderson describes streets buried a foot deep in raw sewage, ineptly trained police, and American troops holed up behind tanks and barbed wire, in a seige mentality, totally hidden away from, and inaccessible and invisible to, the people they supposedly liberated. Meanwhile, the infrastructure and the institutions of the country remain broken, lawlessness prevails, and the militias and movements ready to fight each other and the Americans for political control grow bolder, readier, and more impatient, and they are now starting to work together to oust the Americans before they resume their war with each other. As one of the US advisors put it bluntly, “it’s a powder keg”. |
April 28, 2004
THAT’S NOT WHAT I MEANT
 My last important learning before I left Ernst & Young was the astonishing discovery that almost none of what business presenters say gets ‘correctly’ understood, internalized, or learned by their audience. By ‘correctly’ I mean what the audience thought the message was, is almost always radically different from what the presenter intended the message to be. I base this conclusion on entirely anecdotal evidence: Throughout 2003, as a result of consternation about how so little of my presentations was sinking in, out of curiousity I began systematically debriefing with a few audience participants in each presentation I attended (whether or not I had been one of the presenters), as soon as possible after the presentations, and then fed back to the presenters what the audience said. The result was usually anger or stunned disbelief. Here are my totally unscientific findings from this ‘research’:
The good people at E&Y are very intelligent, motivated individuals, and some of them are quite good at making presentations clear, articulate and interesting. So I confess I was amazed to discover the almost complete lack of communication that occurs in most presentations. Given what I’ve read by Nancy Dixon and George Lakoff on the importance of adapting your message to each listener’s ‘frames’ if you want to be understood, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Lately most of my meetings have been one-on-one, so I’ve started to look at conversations with the same skeptical eye as presentations. How much do we get out of them really, and are they truly about communicating or actually about something else? So far I’m just listening to others’ conversations, whenever I get the opportunity. Since I’m male, you will appreciate that this is very difficult for me to do! But I’m also finding out (as most women already know well) that it can be very entertaining, if you pay attention to the whole conversation and not just to the words being said. I’m starting to think conversations are as useless a medium for effective intellectual communication as presentations. It’s too early for me to present any unscientific conclusions, but here’s what I’ve observed so far — I’d love to hear what you think about all this:
What have you observed from watching and listening to conversations? Is it just me, or do most of us seem to be remarkably inept and awkward at doing something that is crucially important, something we spend so much time doing? What’s the one thing (besides improving our listening skills, of course) we could do to improve the quality and value of our conversations? |
April 27, 2004
A PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION – PART THREE
| Four years ago I wrote a well-received paper entitled A Prescription for Business Innovation: Creating Technologies that Solve Basic Human Needs. I’ve updated it, broken it into three manageable pieces, and present the third part below. The first part, which reviewed the history of human innovation and technology, is here, the second part, which described the current environment for innovation, is here.
Six: Prescription for an Innovative Organization
At the same time, recent surveys indicate a growing corporate awareness that “you cannot cut (or offshore) your way to greatness”, that the limit to improving profitability by reducing costs and margins has now more or less been reached, and that innovation must again move to the forefront if corporations are to have any hope of sustaining that profitability. So corporations are looking for low-cost, effective ways to develop new products, new processes, new delivery channels and new technologies that will meet important human needs, provide real value to customers, and be affordable by those customers. This challenge occurs at a time when the distribution of wealth among customers is massively skewed, both within and between nations, towards a tiny elite, when many governments and most corporations and individuals are buried under a crushing debt load, and when the need for innovation to solve critical environmental, social and political problems has never been higher. Simply put, we are living in an age when we cannot afford innovation, and cannot afford to be without it. Perhaps the most critical innovation need therefore is for creative mechanisms to finance, price and pay for the costs of innovation itself. Funding, pricing, and cost management are now inseparable parts of the innovation process. The prescription I propose draws on a wide variety of innovation processes that have been advanced by thought leaders on the subject, especially during the 1990s when the appetite for investment in innovation peaked, including Peter Drucker’s, Cap Gemini’s, Credit Suisse’s, Gary Hamel’s, and others listed in the bibliography below. This prescription draws as well from several innovation processes that I am personally aware of from my years working with Ernst & Young and its clients, and some lessons from how nature, which has been innovating since long before we appeared on the planet, goes about it. This prescription has eighteen steps in eight stages illustrated in the chart above: Listen, Understand, Organize, Create, Experiment, Listen Again, Design, and Implement. The three stages shown in blue — Understanding, Organizing and Implementing — are analytical processes, well-suited to the left-brained deductive thinkers who predominate in most organizations. The three stages shown in green — Creating, Experimenting, and Designing — are creative processes, better suited to right-brained inductive thinkers who are relatively scarce in most organizations. The two Listening stages shown in red are communication processes, that need to involve customers and other stakeholders, and everyone in the organization involved in the innovation process. Assigning (or contracting) the right people for each stage in the process is essential to its effectiveness, and to its affordability. If it’s done well, it can draw on the strengths of everyone inside and outside the organization who has a stake in a successful innovation effort. Here are the eighteen steps. They are in reasonably sequential order, but are somewhat recursive: For example, as part of creating alternative solutions (step 12) it may be necessary to go back and scan for some additional ideas (step 1). Who should do each step depends to some extent on the industry and size of your organization: Large organizations may benefit from having a dedicated Innovation Team responsible for this, while in a very small organization it may be a scheduled part-time task of the whole management team, drawing as well on the diverse backgrounds and ideas of an informal Advisory Board. Listen 1. Listen broadly for ideas: Appoint your Innovation Team and have them set up an ‘environmental scan’ that systematically looks for innovations and connections not only in your industry but also outside it, outside your country, outside of business entirely. Have the Team read about, learn about, and meet with people from the broadest possible spectrum of human enterprise and natural discovery. Subscribe to journals like Innovation, and the RSS feeds of periodicals and websites that report ideas and new technologies from a wide range of disciplines. Reward members of the Team for serendipitous readings and meetings, debrief with them promptly and regularly, filter, refine and inventory their ideas and learnings for consideration at the Understand, Create and Design stages of the innovation process. Inputs: readings, newsfeeds, conferences, interviews, meetings. Outputs: a manageable inventory of ideas and insights (categorized and contextualized appropriately so that they can be simply understood and practically applied). 2. Listen to ‘pathfinder’ customers, competitors, and colleagues: Plug yourself in to the ‘voice of the customer’. Set a minimum time quota for everyone in your organization to spend face-to-face with business customers, or with customers’ customers or end consumers. Identify ‘pathfinder’ customers — those who are most attuned to their organization’s future direction and its need to change. Employ a ‘Think the Customer Ahead’ program that engenders effective listening, elicitation skills, story-telling skills, and creative thinking skills , a capacity explained in Imparato & Harari’s book Jumping the Curve. Often the customer isn’t able to articulate his or her needs in a way that lends itself to quick technology solution development. Listening to the customer is an iterative process, that entails learning about the customer’s business, understanding the things that keep them awake at night, suggesting a lot of ‘what if’s’, proffering opportunities, points-of-view and possibilities, not just asking baldly about needs and offering off-the-shelf solutions. Connect with customers indirectly as well, using all the media at your disposal — phone surveys, e-mail, website surveys, customer satisfaction surveys (with lots of open-ended questions), self-diagnostic tools, videoconferences, etc., to capture as much information as you can about your customers, their customers, and their markets. Inputs: conversations, interviews, surveys. Outputs: needs, ideas, stories, industry future state visions, five-forces and SWOT analyses. 3. Listen to the front lines: Talk with the people who hear directly from customers and other stakeholders every day — people in sales, customer service, even delivery and reception staff. Ask them what they’re hearing, and what they think most needs improvement or rethinking. Create ’space’ — physical and electronic — where everyone in the organization can surface, discuss and advance problems, needs and ideas collaboratively. Let anyone ’subscribe’ to the inventory of news and ideas created in step 1 above. Consider maintaining a running list of the company’s Top 10 Challenges to encourage focus and creative thought from everyone in the organization. Make sure top-level executive sponsorship for innovation is visible to everyone on the front lines. Give people time off their ‘regular work’ to focus on organized innovation projects, and tools and process guidance to use that time effectively. Reward front-line people for new product and other innovative ideas that they surface from their conversations with customers and others. Inputs: conversations, idea & collaboration spaces, interviews. Outputs: needs, ideas, stories. Understand 4. Understand who your actual and potential customers are: Study companies like The Body Shop that know their customers, their needs, their buying preferences and criteria intimately. These are companies that spend a lot of face time with customers and have rigorous processes in place to capture what they learn, probe what they need, and explore the potential market for new innovations. And identify and get out and meet with potential customers as well, to understand why they’re not already customers and what could change that. And then have your Innovation Team cast a wider net and ask who might be customers that are currently not served by either your company or your competitors. Learn the lessons of Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution — how disruptive innovations can (sometimes inadvertently) transform whole industries, and how that presents your company with both threats and opportunities that could completely change the profile or even definition of your customers. Inputs/Outputs: list of actual and potential customers and what they currently buy, could be buying, and will and won’t be buying in the future, and why. 5. Understand and respect what end-consumers want and need: and based on that 7. Understand why these wants and needs aren’t already met: Here’s the hard part. Things are usually the way they are for a reason. You know there are wants and needs that aren’t being met. The challenge is not to throw in the towel when you find out why. The technology doesn’t exist? The solution would be very costly or risky to develop? The solution is not affordable to customers? The solution is too radical for customers to accept or too complex for them to understand? The organization currently lacks the capacity or competencies to produce the solution? That’s what innovation is about. Take up the challenge with your eyes open about what must be overcome, but take up the challenge. If it was easy someone else would have already done it. Inputs/Outputs: list of challenges. Organize 8. Organize those with a stake in solving the problem: Now you know what needs to be done, the next step is to organize the troops. Who can help solve the problem, assess the alternatives, provide the needed resources? Outputs: project team member list, including ‘pathfinder’ customers and other outsiders. (Note that the project team is responsible for solving a specific problem or need, while the Innovation Team has oversight over the entire innovation effort of the organization — they aren’t the same group). 9. Organize the program for solving the problem: There are a lot of techniques and methods that you can use to break through a problem and come up with solutions. The bibliography below is replete with them. In my experience, creative minds need a very broad framework (schedule, budget, high-level process) and a lot of freedom to figure out how to solve the problem within that framework. Self-organizing, self-managed innovation project teams seem to work well in some organizations but not in others. If you insist on imposing more discipline on the process, more hoops to jump through, control points and early-stage go/no-go filters, make sure the people you’re imposing it on see the value in these constraints, and that they don’t squeeze the boldest and potentially most successful ideas out in the process. Outputs: project schedule, budget, program. 10. Organize the resources needed to solve the problem: The project team needs sufficient tools and knowledge to be able to understand the problem, the customer need, and the variables that could impact the potential solutions. Inputs: all the Outputs from steps 1-7 above, redrafted into a cogent and digestible form. Create 11. Create an environment and capability for innovation: Give the Innovation Team and the project teams permission to fail, and teach them how to fail early and inexpensively. Prevent executives from pushing their ‘pet’ projects to the detriment of others. Don’t let the ‘black hats’ deep-six good, hairy, audacious ideas prematurely, and ensure that ‘black hat’ behaviours are not rewarded by senior management. Help the team avoid slipping into excessive caution or incrementalism. Keep the marketing group from unduly influencing the process with antiquated ideas for ‘creating market demand’ and launching products with press releases and self-serving promotional and advertising campaigns — In the emerging customer-driven market these techniques will no longer make a mediocre product a success. Provide rewards and incentives for team members, and for other contributors to the innovation effort. Don’t tolerate hoarding of ideas and knowledge, or inter-department ‘charges’ that block knowledge transfer and cross-functional collaboration. Share credit for good ideas and successes, and don’t make innovation an area of internal competition. Help bright, creative, quiet people find their voice, and let people promote ‘crazy’ ideas without fear of ridicule. Teach the Innovation Team and the project teams (and others in the organization who show interest) techniques that will enhance their creativity and improve the innovation process, and give them time and resources to discover other techniques and try them out. Invest adequate, patient capital and resources for innovation. Give ideas sufficient time to find their market but don’t throw good money after bad, no matter how well-intentioned. Understand sunk costs and learn from failures. Consider letting those involved in the innovation ‘invest’ personally in return for a share of the ultimate revenues or profits: Having some ’skin in the game’ can be very motivating and empowering. Inputs: time, training, tools, space, sponsorship, leadership and resources. Outputs: people who are inspired, capable and encouraged to contribute productively to the innovation effort. Experiment 13. Experiment: Try many things, learn fast from failures, tinker, iterate, combine, transfer: Try several alternatives simultaneously in different markets to speed up the assessment process. Use rapid prototyping and other iteration techniques to expose as many alternatives to the market as possible. Outputs: test results. Listen Again 14. Listen to potential customers and help them imagine: Use prototypes and stories to make the innovative product, service, channel or technology as concrete as possible. Beware customers’ propensity to say ‘yes’ at this stage when there’s no required commitment. Go back to what you learned from customers in steps 1-7 and recite what you heard back to the customers for confirmation, explaining how the innovation addresses the need articulated by the customers. Listen objectively for confirmation or dissonance. Outputs: customer evaluations 15. Listen to acceptance criteria — the ëifís: If the product appears to meet the need, the next task is to assess the customers’ buying criteria: price and affordability, convenience, options, delivery time, upgradability etc. Some of these criteria may be show-stoppers that will require re-invention or other creative brainstorming, while others may be able to be addressed in the design stage below. Outputs: customer buying criteria 16. Listen to ëwhat could go wrongí: Here’s where you let the ‘black hats’ say their piece: What competitive threats exist or could arise? Is the innovation vulnerable to disruptive innovation from unexpected sources? Are there unforeseen production, quality control, political, regulatory, financial, marketing, or servicing landmines? What’s the shelf-life? Could it become a commodity prematurely? Will it be prohibitively expensive to produce or to buy? Will it cannibalize existing product sales? Is it a strategic fit for the organization? Some of these ‘what could go wrongs’ may require re-invention or other creative resolution by the project team, while others may be able to be addressed in the design stage below. Outputs: list of threats and risks, and resolution plan. Design 17. Design: consider customer-valued attributes, cost, intuitive ease of use, ease of change, ease of enhancement: The greatest idea in the world can still be torpedoed by bad design. The designer has to be told, in no uncertain terms, what attributes are important to the customer, how much at most the solution can cost, and the trade-off between ease-of-use and power. Technology products especially are often over-engineered because additional functions and features are easy and inexpensive to add, but they add complexity disproportionate to the benefits of the additional functionality, often to the point of turning off potential customers. And in this age of constant upgrades and inter-operability requirements, the solution must be easy to change, redesign and enhance. Inputs: specifications based on Outputs from steps 12-16 above. Outputs: completed designs. Implement 18. Make the final go/no-go decision, then implement: If there are still several alternatives on the drawing board, whittle them down to a manageable number. If necessary, send the idea back for reinvention (step 11), re-testing (step 13) or redesign (step 17). If the previous steps have been done properly, this step should be the easiest. Once the decision has been made to go, the set-up, production, viral marketing, sales, distribution, employee and user training, partnering, after-sales service, success measurement and continuous improvement should be problem-free, since the ‘what could go wrong’ possibilities have already been considered and addressed, and people from all functional areas of the organization should have been involved and consulted during the Create and Design stages. Seven: Applying the Prescription: Some Examples To give you a flavour for how this prescription could work in practice, here are eight fundamental business problems from different industries, and some innovations that have recently been (or are currently being) successfully commercialized to solve them. In each case, the solution shown could reasonably have been derived using the principles and process in the prescription above:
This presentation was itself the result of addressing an unmet need: After reading dozens of books on innovation, I was unable to find one source that explained in clear terms what innovation is, in a business context, conveyed the urgent need for businesses to become more innovative, and provided an actionable prescription for doing so. This paper was initially developed to provide the Core Innovation Team of Ernst & Young with background on the history, current state and leading practices in business innovation, and I am now using it to develop part of a core curriculum on entrepreneurship, of which innovation is a critical element. I hope this analysis has given you a better understanding of the subject and its importance, and some useful tools and ideas that you can use to make your organization more innovative as well. I would welcome the opportunity to continue the discussion on this subject, by e-mail or through the comments thread below. You can find more of my writings on business innovation in this index. While I’m optimistic that this prescription will work within business and other organizations, large and small, I am less convinced that it will work to solve some of the more deep-seated human needs and inexorable problems that plague us today, such as global warming, pollution, the energy crisis, biodegradation, endemic war, violence, mental illness and disease, animal cruelty, urban sprawl and decay, crime, unemployment, and the inequitable distribution of resources, income, wealth and power. While the process should work in principle, it is unlikely that this process can be followed with sufficient rigour or resources without (a) a willingness by governments to spend much more money (paid for by taxes) to solve these problems, (b) a political will to solve such problems creatively and by consensus, rather than leaving it to private interests to address them or dealing with them by brute force, and (c) a much greater awareness, commitment and sense of responsibility by the body politic of the urgency and opportunity to solve these problems. But just as business will be driven once again to invest in innovation in the search to sustain profitability, it is likely that private citizens and public institutions will ultimately be driven to invest together in innovation in the search for a liveable, sustainable world. The process they then use will probably look a lot like this prescription. Bibliography
|
The first four years of the century have seen some serious setbacks in business innovation. The corporatist-backed Bush administration has introduced legislation to reduce corporate liability to consumers, and has been extremely lax in enforcing social and environmental laws. Organizations like the RIAA and Nike have showed that the courts will allow large corporations great latitude to sue customers (including infringing on their privacy rights) and to lie to customers in their advertising (about sweatshop operations, offshoring etc.) Corporations like Enron have abused public trust and destroyed thousands of families’ livelihoods and life savings. And massive defense and security expenditures have siphoned off funds that might have been invested in innovation, and have made corporations and lenders nervous about any investment while governments and corporations are so seriously overextended and exposed to interest rate fluctuations. The result is a climate of great animosity between corporations and customers, and unprecedented risk aversion.April 26, 2004
LOVE POLITICS, BY GLENN PARTON
|
All great ideas are dangerous, wrote Oscar Wilde. And someone else said that every great idea is initially ridiculed as absurd or reviled as heresy. Philosopher Glenn Parton, whose essay The Machine In Our Heads I recommended recently, has a new, great and dangerous idea. It builds somewhat on the ideas in James W. Prescott’s paper I wrote about earlier, that human violence stems from a combination of childhood neglect and adolescent sexual repression. Glenn has given me the honour of allowing me to publish his essay on it first on this blog. Although this may be hard to believe, Glenn’s idea is more radical than anything I have ever written, perhaps even more radical than anything I have ever dared think. It will probably trouble you, as it did me.
Please take the time to read this essay in its entirety — it will requre an hour’s investment. The first two sections are below, and the link at the bottom will take you to the whole essay. If it seems overly long, bear with it — it has a lot of well-entrenched preconceptions about our culture to challenge before what he proposes will seem at all acceptable to most readers. And if it seems overly preoccupied with the sexual aspect of relationships, substitute the words ‘love’ and ‘emotional’ for ’sex’ and ’sexual’ respectively, and plug on. You may have some deep misgivings about what Glenn has to say, but if this article affects you as it did me, you will not be the same person when you finish reading it as when you began. Please let me know what you think. I’ll add my own comments either in the comments thread below or in a follow-up article. I’m sure Glenn will be interested as well. Let’s shift the focus from the question, what is to be done? to the question, Why can’t people see the obvious? If people could see what is self-evident to the rational mind, then appropriate action would soon follow. That Americans do not see the obvious truth is amply demonstrated by the popularity of George W. Bush. Outline of a strategy for human renewal: One: Americans cannot think deeply because the heart is closed. When the heart is closed, then Reason, the mind, becomes a calculator, an instrument, a machine that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. It is hard-hearted people who are unknowingly supporting world-disaster. True knowledge, wisdom, must be informed by sympathy, feelings, and heart. Two: The American heart has turned to stone due to sexual repression, stretching back to our Puritan beginning. Everyone in this culture is, as a manner of upbringing, sexually wounded, resulting in fear, shame, guilt, and resentment. The wound festers; self-doubt and self-hatred prevent us from loving others. Generosity, the opening of the heart, begins with the ability to experience sex as a gift. If you cannot do this, then all your good deeds will be wrapped in resentment. The Christian concept of love, which desexualizes it (Agape instead of Eros), leaves the person sick and suffering at the core. Three: To open the heart so we can think deeply it is necessary to search and find our erotic nature, accept it, and freely express it. This is not something that can be done alone — through Yoga, Tantra, for example — but requires a new man/woman relationship. The old relationship — namely, monogamy (whose first historical form was patriarchy, but which is now co-dependency or co-ownership) is unnecessarily restrictive, a bedrock value, an unquestioned premise, the ideological basis of State Monopoly Capitalism which is destroying this planet. In short, we will not think deeply unless we love, and we will not love unless we practice a free sexuality. Dare to love more than one person! It’s a simple idea that’s hard to do. Consult your daydreams! Beginning
The integration of politics and sexuality is the best way to build a social movement for resolving the ecological crisis which is threatening to bring Life on this planet to a crash in probably one or two generations, perhaps sooner? Traditional politics, party-politics, and protest-politics, are necessary for postponing world disaster, for providing time and space for fundamental lifestyle changes, but is not sufficient to heal us from the ground up, according to the original-natural order of things. For this task we need to mobilize a different kind of energy, not negative energy, but positive energy, the energy of Eros. Sexual love is the prototype of all human happiness. If we let this joy, instead of conscience or duty or protest be the source of our community building, it would bring together and hold together aware people. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, even the primary work of saving the planet and ourselves, will not hold us together because the psychological damage in America is too great. Americans have a defensive ego-structure — a system of self-deceptions, projections and prejudices that distort our perception of the world — the cost of survival in this harsh and grossly unfair society. This makes us, ìas we areî, incapable of forming enduring political communities for social transformation, which is precisely what we must do in order to avoid eco-catastrophe. We cannot get along well enough with one another for long enough to do the things that must be done. All our sincere and noble efforts self-destruct, but we can no longer afford to fail, for now the planet as a whole is in jeopardy. What will bring us and hold us together for world transformation? Erotic love is the last remaining force in the modern world capable of mobilizing, sustaining, and perfecting us for this long and difficult task. But not if the erotic life-force is damned by monogamy. A transforming political community of monogamous couples is impossible because monogamous love places itself first and everyone else second; it produces separation and tension between lovers and everyone else, couples and society. However, by refusing monogamy in favor of a highly discerning free love, there is a chance of knitting a community that will not easily unravel. The pairing process, as far as I can see, will remain the basis of the social structure, but we could all work more easily and much better in a network of loving relationships, pairing without exclusivity, opening lines of deep communication that are presently jammed by jealousy, competition, mistrust, fear and arrogance. The key is not to abolish one-to-one love, but to multiply it. There is already a manifest hostility between the sexes, which is going to get worse. Much of it is a result of a false morality that prohibits us from knowing one another. Each man is “allowed” to intimately know only one woman, and vice versa. How can we expect to find and work out answers to the critical problems we face, if a vital point of discovery, wisdom and sustainability — love between men and women — is so limited! The age of discovery and togetherness between the sexes has not yet begun, so let it begin now with a few individuals who defy the sacred cow of conventional morality — namely, monogamy– in favor of political love, which means loving the ìhighestî in oneself and others, making one’s political destiny with a lover clear and binding, creating diverse relationships, loving communities, in which women draw out the best in men (infusing men’s minds with love), and men draw out the best in women (inspiring them with intellectual theory and global political priorities). Real love is transcendence, beyond the mutual validation of empirical egos, toward a shared commitment or vow, not just between two people, but to a new commonwealth. The function of these erotic-political inter-relationships is to accelerate evolution, nature’s effort to become aware of itself as a whole, before an eco-catastrophe resets it back to the stage of the cockroach. Why not affirm sexual love as a vehicle for progressive social change; it is presently misused for every moneymaking purpose imaginable — with great success. That should tell us something. This retail culture would collapse if people tasted real happiness, instead of being locked in monogamous relationships that cannot satisfy the mass of humanity for a lifetime (even if a few simpletons stick to a single spouse), driving people elsewhere for satisfaction, finding everything but the real thing. When material circumstances are ripe, an idea, Learn to love more than one person, can be a decisive force in history. It depends on a handful of living examples that prove the reality of the concept, and then thousands and tens of thousands will spontaneously respond to it. Today, the information and organs of communication for world transformation are in place: it is the inner readiness for widening the domain of love that is lacking, as Lewis Mumford said. That is our challenge, for without a positive concentration on love, understood as the integration of sexual desire and political awareness, we will not be able to rescue the planet and its creatures from the growing forces of hate and violence. Did everyone who is dissatisfied with his or her love life make the wrong choice, or could there be something inherently wrong with monogamy? The American way is to always want to solve every problem with a new and improved technique, rather than consider a bold, new reorganization of life. The solution of the sexual problem, however, takes us to the core of human nature, and demands that we come to terms with the human role in the greater scheme of reality, our place in the cosmos. According to the German philosopher, Maik Hosang, the logos of love can save us: evolution occurs through qualitative leaps, from matter to life to human life. Love among the parts sets the stage for the emergence of higher reality. The gravitational order of the celestial bodies generated life, and the balance and harmony of living beings gave rise to humankind. A just and peaceful world-order is the next step forward, but we need to untie the knot of monogamy and let the whole of evolution flow through a new and free man/woman relationship, creating loving and lasting human communities, which will rationally regulate our relations with nature. Frederick Engels’ book, The Origin Of The Family, Private Property And The State, argues that “group marriage” is characteristic of hunter-gatherers, whereas horticultural people prefer “pairing marriage.” The later is more hedged around with restrictions, but is not based on any assumption of sexual exclusiveness for either partner. Pre-European America, according to Lewis Morgan on whose empirical research Engels based his theory, is the classic soil of the pairing family. The Iroquois, for example, simply dissolved relationships at will by going back home, and held festivals every year when tribes came together for the purpose of wider sexual enjoyment and cultural enrichment. According to Engels, ìmonogamous marriageî, the third historical stage of the man/woman relationship, results from the influence of private property (beginning with the domestication of animals). Its express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity (so women cannot be permitted to have sex with other men), which later come into their father’s property as his natural heirs. Engels shows what a small part individual sex love played in the rise of monogamy. It has an economic origin. And along with permanent monogamy there soon appeared prostitution (for men) and adultery (for women), with no cure for either one. According to Engels, women brought about the transition from group marriage to pairing marriage, with its greater equality and joy, but men introduced strict monogamy — though indeed only for women. In her introduction to Engelsí great book, Eleanor Leacock argues that it is crucial for women to understand that the monogamous family as an economic unit is basic to their subjugation, calling it, quoting Engels, ìthe world historical defeat of the female sex.î Monogamous marriage, characteristic of modern people, imposes too heavy a weight on human beings. It is not the natural form of human association that corresponds best to human nature; it was a wrong turn, a historical mistake, perhaps facilitated by natural selfishness, but the important point is that it is not irreversible. We need to recapture the freedom and happiness of pre-monogamous tribal love relationships. L. Morgan, after studying the American Indians, came to the conclusion in his book, Ancient Society, that the advanced forms of civilization ìwill be a repetition, but on a higher level of the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity which characterized the ancient gens.î Love Politics is the idea that sex, the oldest force in the world for building community, when linked throughout to emancipatory consciousness, is still the basis for building a political community that puts us on the path towards a good society. The way to make us strong enough, wide enough, and deep enough to carry out the required socio-economic changes is to make the entire process an erotic adventure. A group of monogamous couples is a boring place, dead spirit, because you cannot stifle the erotic basis of community and hope to keep it alive and well. Gatherings and meetings of any kind do not work. Politics is bleak in America; we have come down to the primal energy of Eros as the source for a genuine political revival. Only by allowing sexual energy to flow more openly, as in aboriginal societies, can aware people create and sustain enough human cohesiveness and solidarity to make a true beginning… Read the whole essay (includes the above extract; scroll to the third section of the essay, entitled “Family”, to continue reading where the above extract leaves off). ©2004 Glenn Parton |
April 25, 2004
FOR THE BIRDS
 I had the chance to see Winged Migration last night on cable, and ended up sitting about two feet away from a 60 inch screen absolutely entranced. This stunningly creative and lavishly photographed film, made by a talented European film crew over three years, turned out to be highly controversial for two reasons. First, it was labelled a documentary, which it is not — there is almost no dialogue or information provided. It is in fact simply a story — the story of the incredible struggle that migrating birds face, due to a combination of natural and man-made dangers, during long, breathtaking journeys that take them up to half way around the world in non-stop legs of three days at a time, during which they lose more than half their body weight before bulking up for the next leg. Secondly, the film-makers were charged with ’staging’ some of the perils the birds faced, and then rescuing them just before their apparent on-screen demise. To this charge the crew pleads guilty — they raised some of the birds themselves, accustoming them to the proximity of men and the gliders and drones that were used for much of the filming, and they became close to them. Nevertheless, the ‘enacted’ dangers are very real for migrating birds. The film is currently touring some IMAX theatres. If the prospect of watching some of the most amazing cinematography in the history of film intrigues you, and if having non-human ‘heroes’ of an adventure that needs and has no words doesn’t strike you as boring, check it out. Caution: some scenes are troubling for children and those that can’t bear to watch animals suffer. Also for bird-lovers, there are two excellent sites with bird song extracts to help you if the strange visual and mnemonic representations of bird songs just don’t work for you. Tony Phillips’ award-winning site has hundreds of samples and links to many other sample sites for other parts of the world. And Doug at NatureSongs has an even larger selection, with some interesting commentary. Another great resource for birders, though a little commercial for my tastes, is birdwatching.com. And two excellent birdwatching blogs are 10,000 Birds and Salon Blogs’ own Ted Ritzer. |
April 24, 2004
FLUFF
| Three diversions for your weekend relaxation: Vegetarian alligators, music with spoons, and pirate talk.
The Artistic Wizardry of Nina Paley The Musical Magic of Matapat Talk Like a Pirate Day |
April 23, 2004
THINK GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL: PETER SINGER’S ONE WORLD
 If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I’m opposed to unregulated ‘free’ trade, very worried about the extraterritoriality of the WTO, NAFTA, Davos and other corporatist captives, strongly opposed to domestic corporations ‘offshoring’ jobs, using influence with the Bush regime and other right-wing governments to circumvent social and environmental laws and responsibilities, and a great believer in taking the pledge to buy local, and in community self-sufficiency.
At the same time, I’m a strong supporter of the UN and other multi-lateral NGOs, and I believe that we each have a responsibility for the well-being of all the people and creatures of this world. Some readers have said this view is inconsistent, and I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to such charges. Fortunately, Peter Singer, in his recent book on global ethics, One World: The Ethics of Globalization, has come to my rescue. Singer sees no inconsistency between strong local autonomy, community, and self-sufficient economies on the one hand, and global responsibility on the other. The book is based on the Dwight Terry lectures at Yale in 2000, but has been updated to incorporate reflection on the events of 9/11 and the appalling Bush social, environmental and economic record. I’ll have more to say next week about Bush’s fraudulent and despicable Earth Day media blitz, and the major media’s shameless lack of critical evaluation of the utter nonsense that his propaganda machine has been churning out this week on the environment — newspeak of Orwellian proportions. The first part of Singer’s book deals with environmental responsibility, and his prescription for increasing it — immediate ratification of Kyoto by the US and other holdout countries, and introduction of an emissions trading mechanism to make the realization of Kyoto feasible (subject to the need for some oversight on the disposition of the proceeds of such trading when it involves autocratic governments). The second part of the book deals with the global economy, and Singer adroitly tears apart the Economist’s (and other neocons’) naive assertion that economic globalization somehow benefits both rich and poor countries. He then goes on to prescribe a substantial reform of the WTO and the GATT, which could actually lead to more equitable distribution of wealth and more efficient production of economic goods, while safeguarding human rights, labour and the environment. Unfortunately, the multi-national corporations and corporatists who hold sway in the WTO would never tolerate Singer’s prescription, since it would entirely divert the benefits of economic globalization from their pockets to those of the world’s poor. The third part of the book deals with international law, and Singer lashes out at Bush for his unconscionable refusal to ratify the International Court of Justice, and for the UN’s continued hesitancy to accept a duty (not a right) to intervene in situations of genocide and other humanitarian crises, even within a single nation. Singer is sanguine about the limitations and dangers of ‘global government’, but supports strengthening the UN to enable it to act as a ‘protector of last resort’, and including in its mandate the responsibility to supervise elections in all member nations. The fourth and final part goes back to ethical principles and proposes that countries must, in this world where national boundaries no longer have any logistic meaning, set aside national interest and embrace, once and for all, global interest, impartially. That does not mean cultural homogenization, but imposes a responsibility for the reduction of inequality, both of economic resources and personal rights and freedoms. Always the pragmatist, Singer concludes by worrying out loud about how the responsibility for a global ethic could be managed: It is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that would make the bureaucracy of the EU look lean and efficient. At worst, it would become a global tyranny, unchecked and unchallengeable. These thoughts have to be taken seriously. How to prevent global bodies becoming either dangerous tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies, and instead make them effective and responsive to the people whose lives they affect? It is a challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration.
I’d like to believe that this was possible, because if it isn’t, we’re in serious trouble. We cannot expect national governments to set aside parochial interests, especially when this entails accepting a responsibility that would, for the richer nations, inevitably lead to a drastic redistribution of wealth to poorer nations and hence a sudden and sharp reduction in, at least, economic living standards (if not necessarily well-being). But as John Ralston Saul has so eloquently argued, larger organizations and institutions, whether public or private, are almost always, and inherently, less efficient, less agile, more resistant to change, more hierarchic, and less transparent than smaller organizations. So the challenge is to achieve the best of both worlds, having organizations of global scope and authority and responsibility, but broken up into sufficiently small, autonomous and dynamic units that they are sensitive, resilient, responsible and responsive to the people and communities they serve. We can only hope that “the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration”, wherever they are, are up to the task. |
April 22, 2004
THE CHALLENGE OF NIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY
 I‘ve been taking digital photos now for about a year, and what I’ve learned more than anything else is awe for those that really know the art — the combination of aesthetic sense and technological know-how that together produce a great picture. I’ve had to settle for photos that are serendipitous and fortuitous — the result of being in the right place at the right time, such as my crow and blue jay pictures.
I’m a night person. I love to walk at night — my senses seem to sharpen and I see more and feel more than I do during the day. But I’ve found night photography extremely frustrating. The only three night photos I’ve taken that have been at all successful are this one and the two shown here. I have no idea why they worked relatively well, while most of my night shots are indistinct, overly red-shifted and lacking in clarity and accuracy. I can’t get the detail of tree leaves and fronds in the lamplight at all. Here are the details of what I use and how I take my night shots:
Any hints would be welcome. I’ve read the manual and it’s not very helpful. And if you’ve taken a night photo you’re especially proud of, please link to it in the comments below and tell me how you did it! |
Camera: Fujifilm Finepix 3800 (3.2 Mpx, 6x zoom) April 21, 2004
MORE ON ‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS’
 Last week I wrote rhapsodically about David Abram’s wonderful book The Spell of the Sensuous, though at that time I had only worked one third the way through its pages. I’ve now completed the book, and confess to a certain disappointment, though that is due in no part to Abram’s efforts, which are startlingly original, or his arguments, which are brilliantly articulated and scrupulously supported. Ultimately it was I, as the reader, who failed to do my part, and fell short in the thorny, tangled journey to rediscover what we civilized humans have so obviously lost. Perhaps it is my own imaginative poverty that precluded me from completing this important journey, despite my best intentions, or perhaps I am just too far gone down civilization’s lonely, separate, sterile path, to be able to find my way back home, to fall again under the spell of the sensuous.
As I mentioned in the earlier article, Abram presents a thorough explanation of the history of phenomenological thought, applying in particular the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger to explain how tribal cultures and other creatures appear to see, feel, and perceive the world in a fundamentally different, and more profound way, than we do in our modern Western culture. He goes on to explain why this is, by describing how the invention of the written alphabet, and through it the invention of the concepts of absolute space and separate, linear time, and our conception of the air which surrounds us as merely empty space — allowed Western man to create a separate, thoroughly plausible, abstract reality, that, in the civilized world, with its need for hierarchy, laws, instructions, rules, and restrictions, was (and is) a more useful reality than the ‘real’ one. Over time, this abstracted reality and its artefacts have dulled our sensitivity, our awareness of and ability to reconnect with the ‘real’ world, the sensual world of which we are inextricably a part, and upon which our survival utterly depends, but which we are ever more unaware of, indifferent to, and detached from. Abram describes the following exercise for reconnecting with the sensuous, for sublimating the abstractions that interfere with our ability to relate to the Earth: I locate myself in a relatively open space — a low hill is particularly good, or a wide field. I relax a bit, take a few breaths, gaze around. Then I close my eyes, and let myself begin to feel the whole bulk of my past — the whole mass of events leading up to this very moment. And I call into awareness as well my whole future — all those projects and possibilities that lie waiting to be realized. I imagine this past and this future as two vast balloons of time, separated from each other like the bulbs of an hourglass, yet linked together at the single moment where I stand pondering them. And then, very slowly, I allow both of these immense bulbs of time to begin leaking their substance into this minute moment between them, into the present. Slowly, imperceptibly at first, the present moment begins to grow. Nourished by the leakage from the past and the future, the present moment swells in proportion as those other dimensions shrink. Soon it is very large, and the past and the future have dwindled down to mere knots on the edge of this huge expanse. At this point, I let the past and the future dissolve entirely. And I open my eyes…
Abram finds this exercise immensely increases his awareness, his ability to perceive the here and now. Indeed, this exercise seems to me not unlike many meditation, relaxation, hallucinogenic and spiritual ‘stand still and look until you really see‘ exercises I have tried before, always, as this time, alas, without success. If this works for you I am envious. Abram paints some lovely pictures of what he senses after this awakening: A butterfly glides by, golden wings navigating delicate air currents with a few momentary flutters before they settle on a white flower. The seedstalks of the grasses bounce in the breeze, while clustered wildflowers tremble on their stems, awaiting the humming insects that motor haphazardly from one to the other. Fragrant whiffs from new blossoms in the overgrown orchard by the creek stir not only the winged beings, but my own flaring nostrils as they reach me from afar, drifting like spiderwebs on the faint winds.
As much as I appreciate the beauty of this poetry, it describes to me only another person’s experience, one somehow inaccessible to me. “Today the speaking self looks out at a purely ‘exterior’ nature from a purely ‘interior’ zone, presumably located somewhere inside the physical body or brain,” Abram writes. “Within alphabetic civilization, virtually every human psyche construes itself as just such an individual ‘interior’, a private mind or consciousness unrelated to the other minds that surround it, or to the environing earth. For there is no longer any common medium, no reciprocity, no respiration between the inside and the outside. There is no longer any flow between the self-reflexive domain of alphabetized awareness, and all that exceeds or subtends this determinate realm. Between consciousness and the unconscious. Between civilization and wilderness.” So here we are, unable to remember the way home, unable to escape the prison, the solitary confinement into which our minds have been so seductively and systematically lured by the culture and language of civilization that now forms and informs the very neural structures of our brain. Only in art, in poetry, in wilderness, in music, and in the rare book that attempts to liberate us with those very abstract words and text-images that carried us away in the first place, those clumsy tools that are simply not up to the task, can we even hear the echoes of the world we have left behind: An alder leaf, loosened by wind, is drifting out with the tide. As it drifts, it bumps into the slender leg of a great blue heron staring intently through the rippled surface, then drifts on. The heron raises one leg out of the water and replaces it, a single step. As I watch, I, too, am drawn into the spread of silence. Slowly a bank of cloud approaches, slipping its bulged and billowing texture over the earth, folding the heron and the alder trees and my gazing body into the depths of a vast breathing being, enfolding us all within a common flesh, a common story now bursting with rain.
|
