 OK,so you are talking to your neighbour, someone you trust very much. She tells you that she has undeniable evidence that one of your other neighbours regularly beats his wife and child, and asks for your advice what to do. What do you do:
Now, a week later, you happen to find yourself at a meeting attended by a large group of people including the abusive neighbour, where a major local rezoning proposal is being discussed. After the meeting, several of you get together on an impromptu basis for coffee to talk further. During this discussion, the man admits freely that according to his religion, God chose men to lead the family, and to dispense “firm justice” to their family members in any way blessed by their religion that they saw fit, to keep them on “God’s path”, and that this was men’s right and sacred duty as leaders of the family unit. Now what do you do:
The discussion continues. One of your neighbours is a homosexual, but few of your neighbours know this. The abusive neighbour continues to discuss his fundamentalist beliefs, and states that he thinks homosexuality is a grievous sin, an offense against God. Where he comes from, he says, homosexuals are rightfully jailed or sent to indoctrination centres to have such depraved behaviour beaten out of them. “It is God’s will that we act. These people cause great harm to others. Even death is too good for them”, he says. Now what do you do:
An article called The Dutch Model in this week’s (April 3/06) New Yorker (not online), written by Jane Kramer, explains that the people of the Netherlands are facing these kind of questions with increasing frequency, and are extremely uncomfortable trying to come up with workable answers. The article concludes (emphasis mine): Perhaps it isn’t surprising that the country remains preoccupied by what happened to [radical filmmaker] Theo van Gogh [he was assassinated by a fundamentalist fanatic] and what the politically correct position toward people who live in your midst but feel free to kill you should be. Friends who a few years earlier would walk you through a neighbourhood like the [multicultural] Baarsjes, with its shrouded women and its state-funded Islamic school and its defiantly secretive mosque, and call this a “multicultural success” or a “model of tolerance” have begun to suspect that that peculiarly Dutch myth of a democracy integrated but not assimilated might be not only a contradiction in terms, but a dangerous fiction. But, like everybody else in Europe, they have no adequate answer to the question What now?
I want to try to rise above the issue of Islamic fundamentalism and get to the larger issue of how to cope with fundamentalist belief systems (a) that believers in principles of democracy and social liberalism find repugnant, and (b) whose adherents believe they have the authority and imperative to impose, by any means at their disposal, their belief systems on others. Think about that. There are ‘quaint’ tolerated religions in North America where physical beating and subjugation of women and children, and even child marriage and bigamy (by men only) are accepted and sometimes even mandated. The McCarthyism era in the US was a sustained, nation-wide reign of terror perpetrated by a gang of ideological fundamentalists who, for a long time, had the levers of power at their beck and call. The white supremacist movement in both North America and Europe is very much alive and well despite its sordid history and reputation. Many Christian fundamentalists today believe it is their right and duty to convert or subvert opponents and unbelievers by whatever means is necessary — such as assassinating the elected president of Venezuela, murdering abortion doctors and gays, and imposing Christian fundamentalist law (which some might see as the Christian equivalent of sharia) on the women of South Dakota. There is a compelling (and disturbing to us liberals) argument put forward by some anthropologists that says humans, like our chimpanzee cousins, evolved to be basically tribal and to interact minimally with other tribes, for two simple, Darwinian reasons:
I put this argument forward not as a defense of racial, religious or ideological intolerance, but as an explanation of its deep-rootedness. Things are the way they are for a reason, and they have been that way for millions of years. Until recently, when we ran out of inhabitable frontiers, those who were different were generally cast out, and ‘encouraged’ to become pioneers in a faraway uninhabited land. Even then we have demonstrated our inability to get along: The Europeans who were cast out because their beliefs were unwelcome in crowded Europe had no compunction about genocidal slaughter of the native peoples in the ‘new’ lands ‘they’ discovered in the Americas. I continue to be astonished, everywhere I travel, by the continuing de facto segregation of races, cultures, and social classes within seemingly cosmopolitan areas. There are invisible lines in most cities (especially noticeable in the US) where the predominant ethnicity seems to immediately and sharply change from block to block. In business and social activities, the observable lack of interaction between those of different cultures, religions, and political beliefs in cities that are so utterly multicultural is astonishing. It does not surprise me at all that America’s ‘red’ states and ‘blue’ states both seem to be becoming decidedly more so, or that the balkanization of nations seems to have no end. In fact those who are truly blind to physical, religious and ideological differences seem to be a special class unto themselves, not really accepted by left or right, black or white, orthodox or secular. It is almost as if their very tolerance is intolerable, as if they have become their own ‘metro culture’, distinguishable by its very lack of distinguishability. Meanwhile, everyone else seems to end up, sooner or later, seeking to be “among their own.” It seems to me, therefore, that neither the assimilation approach that the US has taken, nor the ‘integration without assimilation’ approach that other affluent nations have taken, is working. So as Jane Kramer says, What now? Regular readers know I’m a big fan of intentional communities, a modern imitation of ancient tribes. The advantage of such communities is that they are truly self-selecting, and by virtue of that their members are much more likely to get along than communities created by happenstance factors like proximity to favoured schools, housing prices, or even thinly-veiled exclusionary zoning practices. Even if we could get around all the legal, logistic and zoning obstacles to intentional communities, however, and get everyone living in small, self-selected neighbourhoods, we would still have to deal with three complex problems that such communities would not solve, and might even exacerbate:
These problems were much less pervasive in the pioneering intentional communities of previous centuries, because population, space and the disparity of economic wealth and opportunity were not such a problem, and because knowledge of what was going on elsewhere was much scarcer. Overpopulation, obscene disparities in wealth and opportunity, and the ‘global village’-creating information explosion have made the option of ‘getting along by staying away from those we can’t get along with’, non-viable. I know there are those who believe that, with education, time and practice, and perhaps a little well-intentioned hegemony, we will all become culturally homogeneous and/or tolerant, that like those in the ‘metro culture’ we will get past our religious, cultural and ideological differences. I’m not so sure. While a homomemeous (to coin a new word: “sharing the same worldview”) community may make sense, and a homomemeous world might well be peaceful and tolerant, such a world would also probably be uncreative, boring, and vulnerable to perilous memetic overreaction and groupthink. Homomemeity is, in fact, a desired end of both the assimilation (”give us enough time and you’ll think like us”) and integration (”give us enough time and our thinking will converge”) models. It’s not happening, however, because there is a Darwinian force within each of us pushing in the opposite direction (”that thinking threatens our thinking; we must get together to resist this threat to our beliefs”). You see this resistance in every separatist movement, every minority group, and everywhere in the blogosphere. Diversity, of every kind, is selected for as an evolutionary essential. It’s good for us. So I would argue that the reason we haven’t found a model that works, that balances the tension between affinity and diversity and lets us all get along, is that there isn’t one. We will only find one when we create the conditions necessary for one to emerge: A much, much lower human population, without waste, pollution, and overconsumption, in a world with lots of space for us to create community and define our boundaries, a world of abundance instead of scarcity where there is more than enough of everything to go around. A world where information, not armies, will liberate the few of us suffering from oppression, and where we will be so busy delighting in our chosen community, making a living with those we love, we will not have the time or inclination to meddle with other communities who choose to see the world differently. I’m sorry I don’t have an easier answer. Complex problems rarely have simple solutions. No matter how much we may wish to, or see the logic and even the morality of doing so, we cannot be what we are not. Photo: From the BBC a year ago. One-year old hippo Owen, rescued from the Asian tsunami, has befriended100-plus-year-old tortoise Mzee, and the two are now inseparable. |
March 31, 2006
What Do We Do When We Can’t Get Along? The Pros and Cons of Homomemeity
March 30, 2006
The Precautionary Principle, and Treating Polluters as Murderers
 Cartoon by Barry Deutsch of Alas, A Blog fame, in ZMag. The mega-polluters, companies like ExxonMobil and Monsanto, and other corporatist plunderers, continue to wage their physical and chemical war on the environment, but lately their propaganda war on the environment has taken a few twists. The NYT has recently declared the Lomborgian denials that irresponsible human activity is the primary cause of global warming, ‘dead’. The evidence is just too overwhelming, and there just aren’t enough scientists with any credibility left still willing to lie about it, no matter how much they’re paid. A second twist has been to label anyone an ‘ecoterrorist’ who challenges environmental irresponsibility with anything more aggressive than a timid letter to the local paper. Hence, Sir Paul & Heather McCartney, and the IFAW animal rights group are ‘ecoterrorists’ for protesting the barbaric and unnecessary slaughter of 300,000 helpless seals per year, which is going on again right now. Greenpeace are ‘ecoterrorists’ for publicly embarrassing mega-polluters, drift-net fishermen, strip-miners, clear-cut loggers, and leg-hold trappers. Even the Humane Society and the SPCA are ‘ecoterrorists’ for daring to speak out about the horrific cruelty suffered by animals in corporatist factory farms and laboratories. The reason for this stepped up rhetoric is strictly economic: Big business is beginning to understand that their reputation (good or bad) can impact the bottom line, and their shareholders don’t want these radical do-gooders sullying their investments’ ‘good name’, so it is necessary to try to discredit the critics — and what better way these days than slapping that handy ‘terrorist’ label on them. Greenwashing ads are also a booming business — if you wanted to create a list of the worst polluters on the planet, you could find worse ways to start than leafing through the full-page ads in magazines catering to the more informed segments of our populace, and picking out the corporations proclaiming themselves to be doing wonderful things for the environment. These companies have a ton of money to spend on propaganda, and a ton more for lawyers to sue anyone who dares call it that. The latest target of the mega-polluters, and their conservative handmaidens, is something called The Precautionary Principle. This principle has various and sometimes contradictory definitions and interpretations, but when it comes to human and environmental health it is simple: No action should be taken unless there is evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that it will not cause ill health or environmental harm. The principle has been more formally promulgated by the multi-disciplinary Science & Environmental Health Network as follows (emphasis mine): The release and use of toxic substances, the exploitation of resources, and physical alterations of the environment have had substantial unintended consequences affecting human health and the environment. Some of these concerns are high rates of learning deficiencies, asthma, cancer, birth defects and species extinctions; along with global climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion and worldwide contamination with toxic substances and nuclear materials.
We believe existing environmental regulations and other decisions, particularly those based on risk assessment, have failed to protect adequately human health and the environment – the larger system of which humans are but a part. We believe there is compelling evidence that damage to humans and the worldwide environment is of such magnitude and seriousness that new principles for conducting human activities are necessary. While we realize that human activities may involve hazards, people must proceed more carefully than has been the case in recent history. Corporations, government entities, organizations, communities, scientists and other individuals must adopt a precautionary approach to all human endeavors. Therefore, it is necessary to implement the Precautionary Principle: When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof. The process of applying the Precautionary Principle must be open, informed and democratic and must include potentially affected parties. It must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action. On the surface, this doesn’t look too controversial, but in fact it is enough to lead mega-polluters (and their shareholders) to apoplexy. It means that, to the extent there is reasonable evidence that a significant proportion of human illness, death and environmental damage is due to human activities that poison (I don’t think that’s an unreasonable term to use) the water, the air, the land, and the food chain, those human activities should immediately cease, and it means that new activities should not be undertaken unless it can be established beyond a reasonable doubt that they would not cause such harm. Very few business activities would meet this standard. A complete and staggeringly expensive overhaul of most commercial activities and processes, to make them waste-free, pollution-free, and toxin-free, would be required. Most larger corporations would be bankrupted, to the dismay of their shareholders and their overpaid and exploitative executives. And what if the principle is ignored — there would presumably have to be some laws to mandate compliance with the principle and prosecute non-compliance. As soon as we stop fooling ourselves that industry, mining, oil & gas, agriculture and transportation isn’t massively damaging human health and the environment, then we start looking for compensation from the wrong-doers: Huge fines, and prison terms for executives and directors who condoned it. No wonder the mega-polluters equate adoption of this perfectly reasonable principle with Armageddon. None of this, of course, is going to happen. As Adam Smith cynically put it, “the real purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens.” We are not about to bite the hand that feeds us, even if it is feeding us poisons. Not using the usual legal methods anyway. Just as the attempts of some countries to indict Cheney and Bush for international war crimes are purely symbolic (or if they aren’t, they’re naive and foolish), we need to find some non-futile, social means of bringing those who flaunt the precautionary principle to account. So here’s an idea that will probably strike you as strange, even preposterous, but please hear me out: What we could do is socially treat mega-polluters as criminals. That would mean:
All of this would essentially amount to accepting and applying the Precautionary Principle as a social principle, since it would be naive to believe that, at least in our lifetimes, it could become a legal principle. Would any of this do any good? I think you’d be surprised. As I mentioned above, reputation is important to these companies, and anything that deservedly tarnishes their reputation will make them stand up and take notice. There is, of course, the risk of retribution from these organizations and their armies of lawyers. But just as the heavily-financed corporatist propaganda about global warming being a myth has petered out because it just could not bear close scrutiny, eventually the truth will out, and organizations fighting the truth with lies will eventually discover that constant defensive protestations and aggressive litigation against people who have no axe to grind does not reflect well on them, and will ultimately prove self-defeating. We may be living in an age when the law and the truth have seemingly ceased to matter, and the law may be an instrument of “those who run the economy”, but the truth, so far at least, belongs to no one.
A couple of plugs: Barry Deutsch, who penned the cartoon above, is an articulate and unwavering champion of the rights of women and minorities. His blog, Alas a Blog, is a must-read. Check out his reporting on the outrageous Duke University gang-rape, a story he recently broke nationally. And talking of must-reads, Steve Hannaford’s Oligopoly Watch is a unique, incredibly valuable source of information about corporate wrongdoing and how cozy oligopolies make it so much easier. Steve has taken over key public information parts of the job the US DOJ Anti-Trust Division, and equivalent Anti-Combines agencies in other countries, should be doing but are not. His RSS feed is http://www.oligopolywatch.com/rss.xml |
March 29, 2006
Feeling Unbearable Grief for Gaia
 Since I began this weblog three years ago, I’ve been trying to come to grips personally, and explain to others, the enormous feelings of sorrow, helplessness and anxiety that pervade most of my waking hours. As Einstein would have predicted, the more I’ve studied and learned about the state of our world, the more pessimistic I have become, and the more these disquieting, haunting feelings have grown. Last year, after reading philosopher John Gray’s extraordinary Straw Dogs, I felt for awhile as if the weight of the world had been lifted from my shoulders. Gray explained that, yes, human overpopulation, overconsumption and emotional detachment from Gaia, the Earth-organism that comprises and connects all life on our planet, were destroying life at a rate not seen since the last Extinction Event 65 million years ago, but we humans are programmed to be who we are and do what we do, and no individual or collective human action can possibly hope to change that or forestall this extinction. He wrote: The mass of mankind is ruled not by its own intermittent moral sensations, still less by self-interest, but by the needs of the moment. It seems fated to wreck the balance of life on Earth — and thereby to be the agent of its own destruction… Humans use what they know to meet their most urgent needs — even if the result is ruin. When times are desperate they act to protect their offspring, to revenge themselves on enemies, or simply to give vent to their feelings. These are not flaws that can be remedied. Science cannot be used to reshape humankind in a more rational mould. The upshot of scientific inquiry is that humans cannot be other than irrational.
If we want to give full expression to our environmental sensibility, he said, we should be honest and admit that: The humanist sense of a gulf between ourselves and other animals is an aberration. Feeble as it is today, the feeling of sharing a common destiny with other living things is embedded in the human psyche. Those who struggle to conserve what is left of the natural environment are moved by the love of living things, biophilia, the frail bond of feeling that ties humankind to the Earth…It is not of becoming the planet’s wise stewards that Earth-lovers dream, but of a time when humans have ceased to matter.
Gray is not arguing for nihilism, or for revolution, but for acceptance. He has caused me to accept that we are responsible, collectively, for the dreadful destruction we have caused and are causing to this planet and the life on it, but we are not guilty (since we do what we are genetically designed to do, and can do nothing else) and should not feel guilty for not dedicating our lives to preventing the inevitable. This has been difficult for many of my readers to understand: What we must do, if we really care for this planet, is put guilt and anger and shame behind us and work to make the world better for those we live with and love, and those who will inherit our doomed planet when we die. And we must also give ourselves time and space to become more truly human personally, to reconnect as much as we can with Gaia and with our instincts, and relearn what our species forgot when it chose to become separate from the rest of life on Earth. This is not futile or grim or burdensome work — it is the responsibility of those who understand where we are and where we are going, it is the only thing we can do that makes sense, and it can be a joyous responsibility, and one of rediscovery of who we are and what is really important. As difficult as this has been to explain to others, I was alarmed to discover that, only a few months after reading Gray, some of the feelings of anxiety and sorrow returned, and I have been unable to shake them. There is clearly something else weighing on me, something that Gray did not address. I am, alas, a slow learner and not very perceptive, so until yesterday I was unable to grasp what this “something else” was. And then, in reading the remarkable Dave Smith’s To Be Of Use website as part of some current research I am doing, I stumbled across six words at the very bottom of some of his web pages: in an age of unbearable grief. That was the ’something else’ that was weighing on me! It was the same feeling that overwhelmed me last year when we lost our beloved Chelsea, but subtler, less intense, but more relentless. It was the reason I could not bear to read the environmental news every day, one step forward, ten steps back, a story of hopeless and relentless decline, rearguard action, loss and death. And then I clicked on the link for Dave’s six words and was blown away to discover this brief, articulate and powerful essay from the 2001 LA Times by environmentalist, voluntary simplicity consultant and For the Future think tank founder Richard Bruce Anderson: At the heart of the modern age is a core of grief.
At some level, weíre aware that something terrible is happening, that we humans are laying waste to our natural inheritance. A great sorrow arises as we witness the changes in the atmosphere, the waste of resources and the consequent pollution, the ongoing deforestation and destruction of fisheries, the rapidly spreading deserts and the mass extinction of species. All these changes signal a turning point in human history, and the outlook is not particularly bright. The anger, irritability, frustration and intolerance that increasingly pervade our common life are symptoms associated with grief. The pervasive sense of helplessness and numbness that surrounds us, and the frantic search for meaning and questioning of religion and philosophy of life, are likewise often seen among those who must deal with overwhelming sorrow. Grief is a natural reaction to calamity, and the stages of grief are visible in our reaction to the rapid decline of the natural world. There are a number of steps that people go through in the grief process. The first stage is often denial: ìThis canít really be happening,î a feeling common among millions of Americans. Eighty percent of American adults say they are concerned about the environment, and there is some awareness of the gravity of our situation, yet a widespread awareness has yet to be felt in practical terms. We know the facts, but weíre ignoring them in the interests of emotional survival. The second stage of grief is often anger. We go into the ìIíll fight itî mode. Many environmental thinkers and activists put a lot of grief energy into constructive work. That energy is a factor in the undeniable successes of environmentalism, yet it is a sign of suffering and is probably a constraint on the intellectual vitality of the movement. The third stage in the grief process is often despair. We feel that ìno matter what I do, itís still happening.î Because the planetary future seems so grim, itís likely that many Americans have despaired, turning away from the quest for a meaningful solution. The final stage of the grieving process, for those who can achieve it, often brings a more hopeful state of acceptance, even serenity. When we emerge from the bottom of despair, we may find the inner strength for a peaceful accommodation to reality. We can continue to take positive actions, but we are no longer in denial, rage or despair. Even if we face the consequences of our assault on the natural environment, we may still find that the problems are too big, that thereís not much we can do. Yet those of us who feel this sorrow cannot forever deny it without suffering inexplicable disturbances in our own lives. Itís necessary to face our fear and our pain and to go through the process of grieving because the alternative is a sorrow deeper still: the loss of meaning. To live authentically in this time, we must allow ourselves to feel the magnitude of our human predicament. Last night I walked about in a daze, astonished that I had, for most of my life, been ’stuck’ in the third, ‘despair’ stage of unbearable grief for Gaia, and had, despite all my studying and thinking about the environment and How to Save the World, and even the revelations from John Gray, been unaware that this grief was the cause of the relentless anxiety and sorrow that have oppressed my life since the heady environmental optimism of the 1960s gave way to the grim realism that succeeded it, and which has been reinforced since then by an interminable ocean of terrible knowledge. I cannot help but think, having read and talked with so many others who care about our planet and its thin, fragile biosphere, that I am far from alone in this suspended state of unbearable grief for Gaia. Now, at last, thanks to Dave and Richard, I know that I must get past this and move on, at last, to the fourth, ‘acceptance’ stage. I’m not sure how to move on after forty years stuck in the same place, but at least now I knowwhere I am, and why, and where I’m trying to get to. I hope Richard’s essay is as valuable to others as it has been, already, to me. |
March 28, 2006
When the Law and the Truth Cease to Matter
 At some point in the last fifty years, while we were all focused on day-to-day events in our own parts of the world, something important and unexpected happened that we didn’t notice. This was a half-century, for those lucky enough to live in the right part of the right part of the world at least, of unprecedented affluence. It saw a groundswell of at least nominal democracy in parts of the world that could not remember or imagine what democracy was. It was a time when technology morphed from being a tool of industrial efficiency to a new theology. But for every action there is a reaction, and the reaction was what we missed in the details and minutiae of our daily lives. That reaction was a steady erosion of our belief in and respect for the law and the truth, to the point that today they have almost ceased to matter. Take a look around: In the US we have the Cheney-Bush regime, in power because we don’t really know the truth about who won either of the last two elections, and have no way of ever knowing that truth. This regime has nothing but contempt for the law, and consider themselves above it, not bound by it. They are quite overt and unapologetic about continuing their illegal wiretapping of citizens. Now that the end has justified (in their minds, anyway) the means, they no longer care about concealing their deliberate distortion and lies to Congress and to the people about their reasons for invading, destroying and occupying Iraq. It’s done, it’s history. The fact that they broke, and plan to continue to break, their own country’s laws does not matter. The fact that they have publicly repudiated international law because it is not under their control is a trifle. The fact that they lied egregiously to the parts of the government that are supposed to keep them in check, and to the people who allegedly elected them, is of no consequence. Finished. Nothing more to talk about here, folks, move along. Take a look, too, at the behaviour of the corporatist oligopolies that dominate and run our global economy. To them, any amount of socially and environmentally immoral behaviour is acceptable provided it is in the interest of “maximizing shareholder value”. If such behaviour is illegal, the corporatists will buy their way out of jail by lobbying politicians to change the law, or, even easier, lobbying them to simply not enforce it. They will threaten uncooperative politicians with bankrolling of their political opponents (they always ensure there are two corporatist-friendly parties firmly in their pockets in each political jurisdiction so they can do this, and if an corporatist-unfriendly government should somehow get into power, they will bribe their government friends in other countries to quietly, illegally overthrow it). If that doesn’t work, they will simply threaten to take their ‘business’ elsewhere, to a country where their immoral behaviour is legal, or at least tolerated because they have stolen and pillaged all that country’s resources so the people have no choice left but to do what they’re told, or starve. Having bypassed the law, the corporatists are now busy rewriting the truth, suing in court for the right to lie to customers (’advertising’ is hence redefined as the right of corporatists to blanket the media, which they mostly own, with lies and propaganda). I sat here last night watching an ‘advertisement’ for Shell Canada featuring an actor pretending to be a scientist who cared about remediating (”for the people”) the Alberta Tar Sands, Canada’s most disgraceful and accelerating environmental plundering, and shook my head in shame, anger and disbelief. The actor was careful to stress that this ‘development’ was essential to protect the economic security and energy independence of Canada and its allies. Massive lies bought with massive amounts of money, blanketing the media. As Goebbels said, “If you say something often enough, the people will believe it.” Or take a look at the media, which are mostly owned by corporatist oligopolies and which, to save money for their ’shareholders’, increasingly rely on governments to spoon-feed them the ‘news’. At one time the press prided itself on its independence, and its relentless search for the truth, but now it has new marching orders. It turns out that searching for the truth is not only expensive, it is risky, because if you say something counter to the ‘new truth’ spouted by those with power and wealth, they will sue you and force you to recant the real truth. Shareholders don’t like lawsuits. So the media found a way around barefaced lying to the citizens (corporatist advertising can look after the barefaced lying, and the media are actually paid for that advertising): They have mostly stopped being information media and morphed to become entertainment media. This has the advantage of citizen complicity: If the citizens no longer believe what the media are saying, they will stop relying on the media for information, and will only watch them for entertainment. Presto, Fox ‘News’. No pretense of telling the truth, so you can’t be accused by those with moral scruples of lying. You’re just giving the people what they want. An opinion is merely an opinion, devoid of information, so it can’t be ‘untruthful’. Problem solved. If people really want to know the truth they can seek alternative media (and we know most of them don’t — compare their ratings to ours). What has moved into the vacuum where law and truth once held sway is naked power and wealth. Might makes right, and money defines truth. If those with power say this is the way it will be, that is the way it will be, and the law does not matter. If those with wealth spend it to blanket the airwaves and the media with their message of what is happening and what happened, then that is what is happening and what happened, and the truth does not matter. And if you dare mourn the death of law or truth, the cynics and spin doctors will shut you down and shut you up by telling you it’s always been that way, that power has always trumped the law and wealth has always exerted its influence to obscure and restate the truth.
But it hasn’t always been that way. It is too easy, and dishonest, to shrug off as mere illusion the prevalence of rule by democratic law that applies to all, and truth as something pervasive that is kept alive by people despite the volume and ubiquity of propaganda. Of course there have been people who have been able to get away with murder, even mass murder, at various times in our history. Of course Orwellian deceptions have been promulgated to lead masses of people to acts of madness and atrocity, and to rewrite history to cover up these deceptions. But our civilization rests absolutely on law and truth as two of its cornerstones, and without belief in at least the possibility and ultimate prevalence of law and truth, civilization cannot be sustained. As soon as the bully imposes his rule over the sandlot baseball game, changing the rules so his team cannot lose, and changing the reported score so that his team is declared to be winning when they are losing, the other team will simply cease to play and walk away. Civilization is nothing more than an elaborate game we have all agreed to play because the rules appear to be mostly fair, and the scorekeeping mostly truthful. Those of us on the pessimistic side of the blogosphere have been predicting the collapse of civilization in this century, brought about by some combination of overpopulation, overconsumption, global warming, the end of oil, epidemic disease, cascading natural disasters and universal access to recipes for weapons of mass destruction. What we may not have noticed, like those in the Great Depression who didn’t call it that until it had been in full swing for four years, is that civilizational collapse has already begun. Not with any of the aforementioned ‘bangs’ but with a whimper: the loss of importance of law and truth, as the belief and respect of many for them has slowly eroded to nothing. No surprise, then, that most people don’t vote, and instinctively believe that what they do as individual citizens and consumers doesn’t matter, doesn’t make any difference. On one side you have conservatives calling for de-regulation and the libertarians calling for dismantling of government, so that power will shift from the corporatists in government to the corporatists in industry. On the other side you have the liberals calling for tighter regulation, so that the power will shift from the corporatists in industry to the corporatists in government that are beholden to the corporatists in industry for their campaign financing. So why should the citizen care, when it really doesn’t matter? The law doesn’t matter, because if you’re rich and powerful you can get away with anything, and if you’re poor and disenfranchised they’ll execute you on trumped-up charges without a second thought. The truth doesn’t matter, because those with wealth and power will use all their resources to drown it out and replace it with what they want you to believe. And if you’re too adamant about telling the truth, they’ll use their money and power to sue you, force you to recant, label you a ‘terrorist’, make you their whipping-boy, or even have you killed or overthrown. So soon the people without wealth or power also start to realize that the law and the truth have ceased to matter. Now civilization is in trouble. It is OK for the rich and powerful to lie and cheat, but when everyone starts to do it the whole society starts to break down. Just as the stock market is a Ponzi scheme, a ‘confidence game’ that can only be sustained as long as the majority believe there is somehow value there, our society can only continue if the vast majority have confidence that it ‘works’ for them, that its advantages outweigh its disadvantages. Goebbels maxim notwithstanding, people will only take so much propaganda when the evidence all around them contradicts it. Eventually, they will realize that they are being ‘had’. When reported GDP keeps rising but real income for 90% keeps falling, when the majority are working two or three menial, meaningless jobs to make ends meet while a handful hoard obscene wealth, when people get chronically sick and die and the only possible culprit left is the poisons the rich and powerful have thoughtlessly pumped into the food, water and air, when the Lomborgian denials of global warming become ludicrous in the face of wild, devastating swings in weather — the people, whose acceptance and participation in this unfair con game are needed to continue it, will just throw down their mitts and bats and walk away, refuse to play any more. They will do what those who have walked away from past collapsing civilizations have done — they will build a newcivilization, a new society, from the bottom up. One where the law and the truth matter. The bullies from the old game will not be invited to play. |
March 27, 2006
A Field Mouse Story
 Dave tries his hand again at children’s literature. A little heavy-handed, perhaps, for children. And it definitely needs an illustrator.Alfi, Beti, Gema and Del didn’t know quite what to do. They had always relied on their mother (’always’ being the three weeks since they had been born) for food, warmth and protection. And now, shortly after their father had been eaten by a house cat, they had watched in horror as an owl had swooped down and carried off their mother just as she was returning with some seeds and insects for them. At first, they just howled, at least as much as baby field mice can do that, in the remote hope that perhaps some other parent would happen along and take care of them. Then, when it became clear that that wasn’t going to happen, Gema and Del looked at Alfi and Beti to take charge and tell them what to do. “We know how to find grass, and water down by the pond, but that’s not enough — we need other stuff to eat”, said Alfi. “I’ll be the guinea pig, and try out various foods first, and if I survive and my breath smells like Mom’s did when she fed us, we’ll know they’re OK.” Alfi’s siblings laughed at the thought of Alfi as a guinea pig — guinea pigs are much bigger than field mice. “And I think we should move our nest deeper into the brush”, said Beti. “It’s too exposed out here with no adults to protect us, and it will be warmer, because we’ll have to huddle together to keep warm now since Mom can’t do it.” Gema and Del seemed unconvinced. “We need to look for another Mom”, said Gema. “We’re not old enough to look after ourselves.” “Well we’ll stay here and keep the nest, and you two go and look for new parents”, said Alfi. “If you find some, come back and tell us and we’ll join you. If not, come back and we’ll try to take care of ourselves together.” So that’s what they did. Gema and Del timidly rushed through the underbrush sniffing and searching for some new parents. They saw some spring peeper frogs, and some rabbits, and even a pair of scary raccoons, but none of them seemed to be suitable parents. Finally they gave up and returned to their nest. Beti had pulled the nest deeper into the brush, and Alfi had lined up many strange things beside the nest, and was nibbling each one in turn. After he did so, Beti would sniff his breath, announce “good” or “no good”, and haul the rest of the “good” foods to the edge of the nest. Then they all went down to the pond for a drink, came back and finished off the “good” foods and settled into the nest for a sleep — it would soon be daylight, with many dangers for little field mice, so that’s when field mice go to their nests and rest, building up strength for the next night’s work and adventures. When they woke that night, they immediately went to work making a cache of “good” foods. It was hard work, and half way through the night Alfi announced “Dad told me that the house where the people live, with their cat and their dog, has all kinds of delicious food just waiting to be taken. There are bags of nuts bigger than our nest, and it’s easy to avoid the traps. And Squirrel told me that they have a bag of seeds in there as big as two raccoons! I’m going to get some of that food and bring it back here.” Beti was alarmed. “The people’s cat ate our Dad. It’s far too dangerous”, she said. “We’re getting good at finding our own food, here, where it’s safe. This is what field mice do.” But Alfi was could not be talked out of his plan. As his brother and sisters watched, Alfi sniffed out the trail to the people’s house and disappeared from sight. Two hours later there was a great commotion. One of the people from the house was carrying Alfi down to the pond! He was stuck fast to some glue on a piece of cardboard the human was carrying, and crying piteously. As his siblings watched in horror, the human began to pour oil over poor Alfi. With the oil, the glue lost its hold and Alfi fell into the brush beside the pond and scurried out of sight. The human made complaining noises and returned to the house. When it was safe, Alfi returned to the nest, shaking and crying. “Well, that was embarrassing”, he said. “Help me get this glue and oil off me. I’m still sticking to everything”. His siblings helped clean him up. “Let that be a lesson to you”, said Beti. “That house and the people in it are dangerous. They are apart from us. We are not meant to be where they are, and they aren’t meant to be where we are.” A week later, they met another family of mice, their own age, who told them about a great Eden for mice that was only a day’s scurry from the pond. “It’s called a wheat field“, said Maxi mouse, the biggest mouse in that family. “Nothing but food as far as you can see, all planted neatly in rows for us to harvest easily.” But Beti would not hear of moving to the wheat field. “It’s another human creation, and it will be another trap”, she said. And she was right. A short time later Maxi mouse and his sister Noni mouse came by with a sad story. “A giant machine came and cut down the wheat field, dug up all the soil, and crushed all the mice and other creatures living there. We two were down at the pond, so we were the only survivors. Can we come and live with you?” And so life went on for the field mice family. One night a fox came down to the pond where they were drinking and washing, and Beti bravely drew the fox away from the rest of her family, and gave her life as a sacrifice to save the others. And shortly after that, poor Del was chasing a moving piece of grass that turned out to be a snake, and which turned around and ate him in one gulp! Maxi and Gema decided to become mates, as did Alfi and Noni, and soon there were two new families of baby field mice to look after. One night, as the new parents were foraging for food while the babies slept nearby, they were talking about life, and how short it was. “It almost seems pointless”, said Gema. “All these babies, and chances are a year from now our family of field mice living by this pond won’t be any bigger than it is now. Most of us, or our babies, will be eaten by larger animals or caught as food for their babies. What is the purpose of it all?” “You just explained the purpose”, said Noni. “Except for the humans, who do not understand or follow the rules, we are all one. The foxes, the snakes, the owls, the raccoons, the frogs, the squirrels, the rabbits, the little bugs we eat, even the grasses and the trees. The deaths of some of each of us are necessary for the life of the rest. It keeps our place in balance, and healthy, and at peace. When we are born we are part of this whole amazing community of life, and when we die we are still a part of it, like a giant circle that just goes around and around and never ends.” “Very wise”, said Alfi. “Just look, and listen, and smell, and taste, and touch, and feel the buzz of life everywhere, even here in the dark with many creatures sleeping! It’s magical. This is our Eden, our perfect place. How foolish we were when we were younger not to realize it!” “Enough chatter”, said Maxi. “Back to work. These babies will be waking soon, and complaining that they’re hungry.” The four adults looked at the two nests of babies, huddled together andsquirming, smiled, and continued gathering a breakfast for twelve. |
March 26, 2006
Men Offer Appreciation; Women Offer Attention
 Caution: Outrageous generalizations ahead (but interesting, and perhaps useful). One of the things I’ve learned about the human animal (that I neglected to include in my last list) is: What people seek from others, more than anything else, is attention and appreciation.
I’ve observed that to be true in boardrooms, bedrooms and barrooms. You want to win over your boss, give him or her your full attention, and acknowledge his or her successes, without being a suck-up about it. You want to win over your audience in a presentation, make lots of eye contact, show empathy for their situation (which means doing your homework in advance) and thank them more than once for their attention and their awesome questions. You want to win over that attractive person next to you, make lots of eye contact, listen and feed back, and give lots of compliments (but sincerely — don’t try to fake it). Now lately I’ve discovered a corollary to this maxim: Men tend to offer more appreciation than attention (though sporadically); women tend to offer more attention than appreciation.
This may be a Darwinian thing, or it may be merely a cultural evolution, but it is now reinforced by our society to the point that, I think, it is more pronounced and culturally expected. A bunch of guys together are often focused on something other than themselves, but they are a ‘mutual admiration society’ — the ‘high five’ is a guy thing. By contrast, a bunch of women together are often focused on matters personal to them, and comprise a ‘mutual attention society’ — the ’support group’ is a woman thing. Watch a little girl performing dance or gymnastic moves in front of her parents: What she is looking for from Mom is attention (”Mom, you’re not watching!“); what she is looking for from Dad is appreciation (”Didn’t you like it, Dad?”). She (like all of us) is confused if she gets the opposite: If Mom is effusive in praise but doesn’t notice the small fall and suggest how to improve it, she’s not behaving in an accepted, expected way for a Mom; if Dad does notice the fall and suggests how to improve it, and fails to beam with unqualified pride, he’ll get the scowl for behaving ‘inappropriately’. To some extent this ’specialization’ in providing our deepest social needs makes sense. Generally, men are not very observant, so it’s not surprising they get selected to provide praise. Women are generally more muted and balanced in their expression of emotions, and more observant, so they get selected to provide attention. Couples (traditional couples anyway) seem to follow the same pattern of expectations from others. Men look to their wives to pay attention to them (”Dear, your tie is crooked and it doesn’t go with that suit”), and while their wives (at least early in the relationship) are demonstrably appreciative, as the relationship matures men tend to get more and more of their needed appreciation from other guys (in sports, in bragging about a promotion at work, in card games and drinking competitions etc.) Women, by contrast, look to their husbands for appreciation (there is only one correct answer when a woman asks a man “How do I look in this?”), and don’t expect a lot of undivided attention from men (learned from experience). When they want attention, they get it from other women, who actually notice things and sympathize. At one point we might have argued that this behaviour was situational (until two generations ago, the social roles of men and women were markedly different), but now that many men and women fill identical social roles, the perseverance of this ’specialized’ behaviour suggests it may have a deeper, genetically-based cause. Why are the majority of women more observant, more perceptive, more attentive than most men? This might be because, since women have had the dominant role in child-rearing, unattentive mothers lost their children to predators and hence selected themselves out of the gene pool. Or perhaps the explanation is more cultural than genetic — none of us can be good at everything, so it makes more sense to divide up the critical work of paying attention and giving appreciation, and at some point the culture evolved so that women were expected to do the former and men the latter. Whatever the origin, this system of specialization works, and we depend heavily on it for our psychological health. What happens when a child is starved for both attention and appreciation? They start acting out, in aggressive ways. In serious cases it can lead to a psychosis — committing violent acts like arson or animal abuse to get attention, lying and cheating to get appreciation. What happens when a whole generation of children is starved for both attention and appreciation, when their parents are too busy looking after their own selfish needs (perhaps because they themselves are starved for attention and appreciation) to provide psychologically for those of their children? You get an epidemic of bored, anti-social people suffering from “low self-esteem”, and thrill-seeking to get the attention of others. You get what Michael Adams described as the newly-prevalent (and growing dominant) behaviours in the lower right quadrant of the matrix above, to the chagrin of both liberals (whose nurturing/perceiving style, in Lakoffian terms, is more focused on matriarchal attention) and conservatives (whose strict/judging style, in Lakoffian terms, is more focused on patriarchal appreciation). Perhaps what lies behind a lot of this bizarre and inexplicable (to liberals and conservatives) behaviour, this anomie, especially of today’s young people, is a desperate cry for attention and appreciation, followed (when that cry is ignored by us self-centred baby boomers) by an angry and resigned determination to wean themselves off the need for attention and appreciation (”Well fuck you, then, I’ll just look after myself”). Please note: I’m not saying we neglected our children or that two-income families are a bad thing — baby boomers so outnumber other generations that it’s not surprising we have always received the lion’s share of attention from everyone. I don’t think the cause is that important — I just want to know what we can do about it now. Well, that’s all I have to say on this. All generalizations are annoying, including this one, but there is something important at work here, and it affects our psychological health at a time we all need to be healthy to face the great challenges ahead. Please jump in to the discussion –you have my attention and appreciation. |
March 25, 2006
Links for the Week – March 25/06
The New Economy The Economist Doesn’t Get Open Source: I know the Economist is conservative, but sometimes their inability to grasp new concepts astounds me. Here they attempt to shrug off Open Source as inherently limited and fatally flawed. Thanks to Hugh Macleod for the link. …But Chip Morningstar Gets Complexity: Chip says: “This is the nature of big complicated plans: they have lots of details (that’s what makes them big and complicated) and they leave lots out (because, the world being the complex thing that it is, no matter how much detail you give, it’s never enough to completely describe everything relevant). Plus, the more details and complexities there are, the more opportunities you have to make mistakes. As the number of elements you are juggling grows large, the probability of significant errors approaches certainty.” His answer is resilience, rather than a lot of planning and forecasting. To which I would add, improvisation, rather than the folly of attempting to preempt risk. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link. Whole Foods Not Telling the Whole Story: Although there is no question Whole Foods products are better for your health, Field Maloney at Slate points out that a few large organic suppliers, often far away, dominate the market, and the prices you pay are out of reach of many who would like to eat better. If you really want to buy local, healthy, organic products from small sustainable farms, you’ll likely have to do your own research and set up your own community network. Hints for Living Sustainably: Eartheasy, by an American now living on Vancouver Island, is packed with great ideas for sustainable living, shopping, growing food and recreation. Thanks to Jon Husband for the link. This Week’s North American Disasters Dust Bowl Coming: Meteorologists at Accuweather say the conditions that produced the 1930s dust bowl appear to be in place again. Do It Yourself Abortions for South Dakota Women: Hopefully it won’t come to this, but it’s interesting to note that blogging and the Internet are even finding workarounds for lunatic politicians: Here’s a blog that contains all the instructions for performing your own abortion. Thanks to Ran Prieur (whose Fall Down Six Times scenarios of future civilizational collapse are also worth a read). Techie Stuff Google Earth — From the Driver’s Seat: Microsoft’s new beta Virtual Earth allows you to steer your own route and see Seattle or San Francisco from the perspective of a driver (or walker). The shots are jerky rather than continuous, but it’s an intriguing start. Thanks to David Gurteen for the link. Software That Helps You Visualize Hunches and Mutations: If you’ve ever tried Google’s or Picasa’s “I feel lucky” buttons for your searches or photo enhancements, you appreciate that the iteration that leads to improvement is a combination of hunches (based on instinct, but largely incremental) and mutations (trying something wacky, which usually fails, but sometimes succeeds spectacularly). Wired reports on new software that may one day make this combination of approaches easier to do. Thanks to Innovation Weekly for the link. Fun and Inspiration Imagining Your Ancestors in a Room: Chris also asks us to imagine if all 128 of our seventh-generation ancestors were together in a room together, asked to solve a problem — could they imagine us? Beautiful Photos from China: Although its environment is under siege from reckless human activity, China still boasts some astonishing beauty as these photos by Feng Jiang of University of York attest. Photo above is from this site. Thanks to Jeremy Heigh for the link. Jeremy also points us to this week’s quote of the week, an old Akan proverb: A good soup attracts chairs. Jeremy adds: Want attention? Focus on your recipe. Bonus quote for the week, via Kathy at Creating Passionate Users, from Jason Fried of 37Signals at the SXSW conference, on how to develop software (or any other product): “Learn to do the development yourself. You’ll be forced to build something simple because you don’t know how to do the complex stuff…Make it up as you go along. You’re in a much better place to make a decision whenyou’re in it, than when you’re planning…We don’t use functional specs…we use stories.”
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March 24, 2006
Dreaming in Petrocolour: The End of Oil Dependency?
 Fig. 1: Projected global production of petroleum and natural gas.
If you don’t know who to believe about the End of Oil, you’re not alone. On the one hand, we have terrifying scenarios about civil unrest and civilizational collapse like that in James Kunstler’s The Long Emergency. On the other hand, we have scenarios of quick and profitable transition to alternative fuels like that in Amory Lovins’ free e-book Winning the Oil Endgame. This week, Salon’s Katharine Mieszkowski provides a scorecard of the players, while carefully avoiding taking sides. Just as well. Both sides have teams of geologists and economists arguing their position, and the differences are technical, speculative, and dramatic. The technophiles, like Lovins, tend to believe that the End of Oil is wishful thinking by those opposed to the existing power structure, the market economy, and civilization’s excesses in general — a neosurvivalist, secular version of the Rapture for socialists and environmentalists wanting to reboot human endeavor in a more responsible way. The alarmists, like Kunstler, tend to think the technophiles have adopted the ‘free’ market and technology innovation as their own, man-made theology to will save us from ourselves, and are denying the terrible realities of our economic and political systems, humanity’s resistance to and inability to change, and even the laws of thermodynamics. I have enormous respect for both perspectives, and specifically for Kunstler and Lovins. I don’t claim to be an expert in any of the subjects that support either scenario, or might support a third alternative somewhere in the middle. I know a little bit about a lot of subjects, I read a lot, including the lessons of history, and I trust my instincts. As a result, my sense is that Kunstler’s scenario is much more likely than Lovins’, for these reasons:
So, ideally, Lovins’ prescription is a good one. So are many other suggestions for reinventing the economic, social, political, legal and educational systems, to make them more efficient and to achieve the greater human good. But, for the above reasons, ain’t gonna happen. That’s not pessimism or defeatism, it’s understanding the lessons of history, the way human systems work, and human nature. What really tilts the balance of credibility in favour of Kunstler, in my view, is Kunstler’s willingness to address the contrary arguments. Kunstler painstakingly deconstructs the arguments that energy salvation could come from natural gas, tar sands, hydrogen, coal, hydroelectricity, solar and wind power, biomass, nuclear, and six other forms of energy I hadn’t even heard of, raising some serious questions about the technical viability of some of the alternatives Lovins proposes. Lovins’ model would be more persuasive if he had addressed some of Kunstler’s arguments with comparable thoroughness. If you want to prepare for the End of Oil, no matter which scenario prevails, as I’ve said before, you don’t need to buy farmland and hand tools (though your grandchildren might): Instead, get out of debt, spend less, learn to be more self-sufficient (including not depending on The Man for an income), buy local and renewable, eat and live healthier, be informed, acquire practical skills, build good networks and intentional communities, and have contingency plans that will work when infrastructure breaks down. And be good to yourself and those you love. And take everything you read with a grain of salt. |
March 23, 2006
Try Not To (Try Not To (Try Too Hard))
 Some things I’ve learned about the human animal: We are who we are. We each have our addictions, good and bad. The poet ee cummings said*
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
But we cannot be everybody else. While our individuality is constantly under siege, and while many of us spend our whole lives acting and talking and trying to think like everybody else, deep inside we are, alone, uniquely and unchangeably ourselves. We have not the faintest idea what others are really thinking and feeling — (Shaw: “The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred.”) Most of the time we’re pathetically unconscious of what we ourselves are thinking and feeling. Our bodies, far more than our minds, tell us what to do, and what not to do. We plan, but we eagerly throw those plans over in favour of whatever appeals to us on the spur of the moment — we are by nature improvisational, not anticipatory or methodical. That’s why the most successful products are ‘iterated’ with customers, getting it right eventually, and not designed by creative geniuses in the lab. Some of us are morning people; others, no matter how they might try to change, are not. We have short attention spans (Neil Young: “I am a child; I last a while”), and that is not a new phenomenon — ‘broad and shallow’ has Darwinian advantage over ‘narrow and deep’. While we have different talents and strengths, we are not designed to be specialists. Most of us have short memories, because that helps us to cope — we need to put both good and bad memories behind us. (Neil Young again: “It’s easy to get buried in the past, when you try to make a good thing last.”) On any issue we are at first open-minded, but once we’ve made up our mind (and we do so quickly and emotionally, more than rationally) any subsequent idea that does not ‘fit’ with this belief will bounce off and not even be heard. The more we know about things that affect the future, and about ourselves, personally and collectively, the more pessimistic we become. (Einstein noted the same thing.) We learn best by doing and by direct observation. That is why the education system and the information media teach us so little. We care about things that are personal, actionable, here and now, far more than things that are conceptual, ideological, far away, in the past or future (Frederick Barthelme on advice to writers: “We can’t care about sand mutants; if you do, or think you do, kill yourself”.) We are designed to be motivated by fun, not by duty — whether we’re gathering berries, deciding who we want to make a living with, or assessing who and where and what we love, when it becomes work instead of fun, everything inside us tells us it’s time to move on. By nature, by metabolism, I am a sprinter (200m in 23s flat, no training, on a lark), not a marathoner (10km in 37m5s, best time after two years of daily training). I work best in fits and starts, not at a steady, consistent pace. I get up and move around a lot. I change my mind. I start over. I like to finish things, like to check them off the list, but I often abandon them instead. I give up easily (”more trouble than it’s worth”). I have little patience or stamina. Also I’m not very observant: That is probably my coping mechanism, because much of what I do observe distresses me enormously. And I’m intense. That’s probably a consequence of the fits and starts thing — always trying to make up for lost time. I try too hard. People find that unnerving: It comes across as desperate, uncontrolled, un-self-confident, untrustworthy. In this terrible world we are always constantly ’selling’ ourselves to others, and trying too hard repels ‘buyers’ — they want the ’sales pitch’ to be effortless, so the ‘product’ sells itself. And ironically, intense people who try not to try too hard come across as disengaged. So those of us who are intense need to get past this, and learn to try not to try not to try too hard, if you can follow that. Trying too hard is pushing yourself or your idea on someone at a bar or at a proposal meeting. Trying not to try too hard is endeavouring to come off casual, acting like you’re having fun with an interesting idea without being overly serious or pressing about it — relaxed, comfortable, self-confident. Doing this successfully is an acting job — being what you are not. You can, of course, make this easier by practicing a lot, so that each of your ‘lines’, your sales pitch, is so well rehearsed it becomes effortless. Paradoxically, when you do this, your intensity gets out of the way and allows your enthusiasm to show through, so you come across as more engaged — whereas if you’re merely intense acting like you’re not, you come across as less engaged, careless, seemingly indifferent. A shrug when what is called for is a laugh. But what if your enthusiasm can’t show through because, at heart, you’re really not that enthusiastic about what it is you’re trying to do (sell a project you don’t really care about but need to pay the rent; pick up someone in the bar who would actually fall for your act)? Maybe this is why you’re so intense about it in the first place. So now you have to fake not only comfort and casualness but also genuine interest. I’ve observed lots of sales pitches, of all different kinds, and I’ve never seen such an act succeed. Your facial expressions and your body language and your tone of voice will always give you away, no matter how well you rehearse your lines. Humans, and all animals, are very good at picking up on this. So the only answer is to try not to try not to try too hard. In other words, be yourself. Be authentic, genuine. Throw away the script and express what you feel, here, now. Others may not like that, but they will respect it. If they do like it, they will ‘buy’ your sales pitch. If they don’t like it, they weren’t going to buy anyway. I think that’s why blogs have it all over video gaming and most other social networking tools. These other tools involve making up or disguising or exaggerating who you are. That may be fun for awhile, but you just can’t keep up that pretense through thousands of posts over years on a weblog — you have to be authentic. That’s why business blogs that exist to sell you something by pretending to be personal and casual come across so badly, and are a terrible idea. So suppose you are looking to meet someone, and happen to find yourself alone in a restaurant near someone, also alone, you are overwhelmingly attracted to. If you were a non-human animal in such a situation, you would initiate a simple approach, and mutual sniffing and body language would immediately signal to you, politely and without fanfare or embarrassment, whether the object of your affection was interested or not. As a human, when you approach, your body and face are already signaling your interest, and the body and face of the object of your affection are signaling a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ right back. Before you say a word, the decision is already made. So, assuming that (thanks to our dulled human senses and the miracles of modern perfumery) you can’t ‘read’ that decision, it really doesn’t matter what you say. You don’t have to try hard, or try not to try too hard, you don’t have to try at all. Just be yourself and do what you want to do — it won’t change the outcome. In the years before AIDS, many of us learned this astonishing lesson, and it wasn’t because people were more promiscuous then. We just learned that not trying worked, night after night. Same with your sales pitch to a co-worker or customer. Communicate the idea as clearly as you can, as simply as you can. Your use of media doesn’t matter, the arguments don’t matter. The listener will have decided ‘yes’ or ‘no’ within a couple of minutes, maybe even less, based on ancient baggage in their brain that you have absolutely no impact on. You don’t have to try at all — it won’t make any difference. If you lie brilliantly, you might dishonestly get a ‘yes’, but how long before it gets found out and turns into a no, leaving you to pick up the mess behind the bridge you’ve now burned? So trying not to try not to try too hard gets reduced to just not trying and being yourself. You can’t keep up the pretense of being anyone else for long, and, unless you work on a stage for a living, it won’t get you anywhere anyway.
* Here’s cummings’ entire, extraordinary advice to poets; thanks to Michael Herman for this extract: A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.
This may sound easy, but it isn’t. A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking. Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time – and whenever we do it, we are not poets. If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed. And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die. Does this sound dismal? It isn’t. It’s the most wonderful life on earth. Or so I feel. |
March 22, 2006
Getting Things Done — in Meetings
 Fig. 1: GTD Process for Meetings I‘ve written before about David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. I’m still using the GTD process fifteen months after I started, and it has significantly improved my productivity and organization, freed up my mind from worrying about what I have to do next, helped my prioritization of tasks, and reduced my personal anxiety level. I’m flattered that my graphic of the GTD process has popped up all over the Internet, and my articles on GTD have been among this weblog’s most popular. I continue to use this abbreviated HTML table format to track my GTD ‘to dos’:
Fig. 2: Dave’s GTD Table I had a meeting last week with friend and KM colleague Howard Deane, and at one point we got to talking about meetings and how unproductive they often are. He showed me a simple three-column sheet he uses to ensure he gets what he needs out of each meeting:
Fig. 3: Howard’s Meeting GTD Table Before we can integrate this into the overall GTD process, however, we need to think a bit about how meetings actually transpire (especially if they’re not under our control). I think there are actually three ‘kinds’ of meetings:
There are exceptions and hybrids, of course. Sometimes participants in ‘committee’ meetings are asked to submit items for the agenda, and the result is that some sections of the meeting may be collaborative while others may be hierarchical, with the person suggesting each agenda item ‘managing’ that part of the meeting. Some meetings are information-seeking and persuasion events, where people looking for information can ask presenters to make presentations (these are hierarchical, ‘managed’ by the information-seekers), or where people with ideas can offer (or be ordered) to make a presentation to potential approvers (these, too, are hierarchical, ‘managed’ by the approvers). Some ‘management committees’ are genuinely collaborative; most are hierarchical, with members yielding to the executive who is de facto managing the session. It is important to know which type of meeting it is because one’s personal expectations of what one can get done during, or as a result of, a meeting, depend on whose objectives the meeting is designed to address. There is no point going into a meeting armed with a Meeting GTD table full of needs and objectives if the true purpose of the session is to address the needs and objectives of someone else. Figure 1 at the top of this page suggests an approach that I think could fit well with the overall GTD methodology, and which is suited to all three different types of meetings. Here is how it would work:
I’ve been looking for a way to integrate my Meeting Mindmaps into my GTD process, and also for a way to get more out of small-group conversations by setting my specific purpose and objectives for them in advance. Howard’s table does both very elegantly, and also allows us to apply the principles of Getting Things Done to meetings (where they are often sorely needed). Bravo! What do you think? Are their other situations where the ideas of GTD might be adapted to help us become more productive? How about GTD On the Road? Or GTD when you’re away from your computer? And what about GTD through more effective use of research, information andtechnology? |
