Photo from a friend of Beth Patterson: Young bear swings his way over to suet pouch on a bird feeder.

So many great articles this week they wouldn’t all fit into Saturday’s post. Here’s the rest.

Living a Simpler Life: In another piercing essay, Joe Bageant warns us not to expect too much from Obama, and to take responsibility now to live simpler, consume less, end the occupations in the Mideast, stop accepting the lies from the politicians, corporations and media, learn how bad life is for most of the people in this world, become an agent for real change, and prepare for a grim century that will require a lot of sacrifices, struggle and compensation for the excesses of the past few decades. Vintage Joe, but with a weary eye on the future.

Do Writers Seek and Need Recognition?: Chris Lott reviews some recent articles about writing in the age of the Internet, where the attention is spread thinner and thinner among more and more writers, and adds his own two cents.

Singing in a Time of Darkness: Cassandra ruminates on seasonal affective disorder, this cold, stormy and early (in Canada, anyway) winter, and then points us to her choir’s weekly (Sunday 5pm) Internet broadcast. Music to warm your body and soul.

Google Docs as Simple Effective Real-Time Collaborative Software: Viv McWaters points us to a promo video for Google Docs that explains why this simple free application is catching on faster than all the expensive, over-engineered collaboration tools out there.

Gay Marriage is a Question of Love: Keith Olbermann, criticizing organized religion’s campaigns against gay marriage, says: “You are asked now, by your country, and perhaps by your creator, to stand on one side or another. You are asked now to stand, not on a question of politics, not on a question of religion, not on a question of gay or straight. You are asked now to stand, on a question of love. All you need do is stand, and let the tiny ember of love meet its own fate. You don’t have to help it, you don’t have it applaud it, you don’t have to fight for it. Just don’t put it out. Just don’t extinguish it. Because while it may at first look like that love is between two people you don’t know and you don’t understand and maybe you don’t even want to know. It is, in fact, the ember of your love, for your fellow person just because this is the only world we have.” Thanks to Nancy White for the link.

Thought for the Week: A poem by new US poet laureate Kay Ryan. Thanks to Sharon for the link.

The Turtle

Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
She can ill afford the chances she must take
In rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
A packing-case places, and almost any slope
Defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
She’s often stuck up to the axle on her way
To something edible. With everything optimal,
She skirts the ditch which would convert
Her shell into a serving dish. She lives
Below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
Will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
The sport of truly chastened things.

Image from Ziggy Fresh shot at Dancing Rabbit Eco-Village. Thanks to Tree for the link.

Enough Self-Change?: For the last couple of years I have been advocating “let-self-change” — adapting yourself to the world, developing new capacities, making yourself healthy and happy and effective and authentically yourself in spite of the systems that don’t work and are killing us all and are trying to make us everybody-else. Doug Rushkoff doesn’t agree. In this remarkable speech, he says we’re too apologetic about our own ideas and knowledge and capacities and not angry enough at these dysfunctional systems. He rips into “self-actualization” movements like NLP that waste our time on introspective efforts when what is needed is collective work. It’s time to stop adapting ourselves, he says, and time to start working with others to fix these dysfunctional systems before they destroy us. He argues that they are anachronisms, designed by people centuries ago for reasons that no longer apply, and now they exist only in a form that has been corrupted by those with wealth and power for their own advantage, in a culture of cheating. He goes on to argue that centralized money needs to be abandoned in favour of an abundance of local currencies that are ours, and have real value. That TV wants you “alone, and vulnerable and sad” so you will buy what they’re selling you to feel less so. That most of the energies of business and our financial systems in particular are now speculative in nature, trying to extract value instead of legitimately creating value. That we need to recognize and use the wealth of open source resources available to collectively change our society and systems, and to stop trying to change ourselves and change the world instead. Thanks to James Coughlan for the link.

Because We’re Afraid: On a similar riff, Justin Kownacki says: “Why should what you, the employee, say or do in public directly affect anyone’s perception of your company? Because everyone is afraid. Of what? Of everyone else? Despite the fact that we no longer have to fight one another for food and shelter, we still live in a constant subconscious fear of what everyone else thinks of us — and we all believe that any other person could squash our lives just byblinking. That has to stop.”

A World of Awe and Wonder: Stuart Kauffman’s new book refutes “The God Delusion” (Richard Dawkins’ fierce defence of atheism and of scientific determinism). Aligned somewhat with Stephen J Gould’s acknowledgement that evolution is a crap-shoot, but one the die have been rolled living systems are self-organizing and “a collective catalysis emerges out of the soup”. Spiritualism is defensible, he argues, not in belief of a human or omnipotent or order-imposing god, but in belief in Gaia, the capacity of all-life-on-Earth to collectively self-perpetuate towards more creative and complex and awe-some forms. God, in other words, is in all of us, in every creature who ever lived or ever will. My favourite quote: “Nobody, not scientists, not philosophers, has any idea what consciousness is.” Wonderful to hear a scientist who appreciates mystery, and that we are utterly incapable of knowing everything.

Running Out of Bail-Out Room:  The entire financial “services” industry has been rescued from their incompetence and greed by pliant governments spending obscene amounts of taxpayer money without receiving a controlling interest (and cancellations of executive bonuses and a rollback of management salaries) in return. Now manufacturers are pleading for the same welfare payments from government coffers. So it isn’t surprising that pension funds, which have lost 30-40% of their value since the market collapse began, want to be exempted from funding the deficit — the amount the value of the funds’ investments falls short of the present value of future pension payments. The assumption still seems to be that the market will rebound, and than all that is needed is a deferral in making up the deficit until the Dow is back at 14,000 again. This is reckless thinking, and we can only hope governments won’t allow it. If markets are now trading at what shares are really worth, instead of the absurd overpriced levels of the last decade or two, then these pension funds will never recover, and the companies that offered them will have to dip into operating funds to pay up the difference. We have gotten into too much trouble already allowing people and companies to incur debts they will never be able to repay. It’s time to stop it. Time for us all to live within our means.

Agenda for a New Economy: David Korten outlines five steps to move from our bankrupt and corrupted industrial growth economy to a new economy focused on the well-being of all:

• Clean up Wall Street
• Move to local market economies
• Self-finance the real economy
• Measure what we really want
• Convert to debt-free money

Let’s Cancel Daylight Time: A study done by UCal suggests that instead of saving energy, daylight savings time actually increases it. They suggest that we do away with it one and for all. I’ve suggested going further, and having every country in the world adopt GMT (UTC) as their time, year-round. Time zones, instead of specifying what time it was, would then indicate “normal business hours” in that zone. While those already using GMT (the British, mostly) would specify working hours as 09:00-17:00, for those in Eastern North America they would be 04:00-12:00, in Western North America they would be 01:00-09:00, and for East Asia and East Australia they would be 18:00-02:00. No “am” or “pm”, and “noon” would become “midday” (the midpoint of the normal business hours) and “midnight” instead of being 0:00, would be twelve hours later than “midday”. It would take some getting used to, but would avoid changing clocks even when travelling.

Bonuses Actually Worsen Performance: Dan Ariely’s research study found that the bigger the bonus at stake, the worse those offered this bonus did, if their performance required significant cognitive skills (the bonus did motivate better mechanical performance). Ariely ascribes the unexpected result to stress and fear of failure.

A Government That Admits It Is Failing in Many Areas and That It (and We All) Can Do Better: The State of Oregon publishes an annual scorecard that shows its performance in all the areas that matter to citizens (economy, education, civic engagement, health and social support, public safety, community development and environment — year-over-year change, comparison to neighbouring Washington State, and comparison to the US as a whole. It’s refreshing to see candid disclosure of areas where performance is actually declining. It’s equally refreshing to see a government that says this is a scorecard for everyone in the state, not just the government, and that every citizen has a role to play in improving the state’s performance. Thanks to my colleague Greg Turko for the link.

Gladwell and the Ecology of Success: Malcolm Gladwell’s new book suggests we are mostly made, not born, and that struggle and challenge can teach us what we need to thrive and to excel. This runs almost directly counter to the “nature not nurture” arguments in Freakonomics. Once I’ve read the book (I’m going to see Gladwell week-after-next) I’ll write more about this issue, and tell you where I stand and why.

The Secret Life of the Brain: New Scientist presents a study that shows that one understudied part of the brain is hard at work when the rest of the brain is relaxing, and that this part may be the connector and pattern-recognizer, daydreaming, sorting memories and imagining possibilities.

More Evidence That Mexico is a Failing State: I’ve been predicting the collapse of Mexico (and CitiGroup ;-) for awhile now. It looks like I might be right on both. The drug warlords essentially own the political, economic, legal and security systems in Mexico, and the middle and upper classes who can’t afford or don’t want to live in heavily-armed private refuges are fleeing in droves, joining the mass exodus of the poor.

Thought for the Week: Thomas Arthur and Ashley Cooper have made a stirring short film about last weekend’s march for marriage equality.

Image from icanhascheezburgers.com — two cultures co-existing.

I recently listened to a podcast that Viv McWaters and Geoff Brown had with Patti Digh. It made mention of the issue of privilege, diversity and dominant cultures, the prevailing worldviews, not of nations, but of communities — neighbourhoods, organizations, and communities of interest (at the level where our culture really shows itself, in what people tend to believe, do, like, and support). While much has been made in the US of ‘red states’ and ‘blue states’, the reality is that ‘red culture’ and ‘blue culture’ can be found in every state, and wherever either is found, there are a series of counter-cultures. The stronger the dominant culture in a community, at any level of aggregation, the more determined, dug in and vehement the counter-cultures seem to be.

So in a predominantly red* state we might see cities that are blue, and within them we might see universities and other communities that are predominantly green, except for the counter-culture Alex Keaton types in that university, who are uber-conservative. In Canada, this instinct to resist dominant culture has kept the Quebec separatist movement alive despite its increasing economic irrelevance and the incompetence and incoherence of its leaders. In their book Rebel Sell, Heath & Potter argue that  you can’t jam the culture — that any counter-culture that develops enough of a voice will quickly be co-opted into the dominant culture with Borg-like assimilation efficiency. But as long as it’s unthreatening, these counter-cultures actually help the dominant culture to define itself, and to portray non-believers as extremists, so these counter-cultures are tolerated as “terrible examples”. And likewise the counter-cultures need a dominant culture as their foil. Such is the dichotomous nature of the body politic.

In Canada, for example, the Western separatists thrived for decades on the basis of their collective feeling of being hard done by by “the Eastern establishment”. When the conservative wing of that establishment collapsed in the Mulroney years, the Western radicals filled the void, taking over the Conservative party and replacing its social and economic moderates with Bush-style neocons. But the only way it could win politically was to rebrand itself as a national non-extremist party. It’s now the largest bloc in the Canadian government, but the right-wing core led by minority PM Harper knows that it relies on the handful of Eastern conservatives in Parliament for its existence. It has been co-opted by its own moderate-conservative counter-culture (one that cares about winning, and about economic conservatism, more than grassroots Bush/Palin right-wing social conservatism). They lost their only chance to win a majority last month, and are destined to return to Western oblivion once the Liberals, who have occupied the centre-left position that has represented the dominant Canadian culture for a half-century or more, find a competent leader.
 
Meanwhile, the Green Party in Canada has spent all its energy and money trying to win seats in a first-past-the-post system, and until they are able to persuade enough people to support proportional representation, they, too, are doomed to remain a fringe party.

There are a variety of dominant cultures in effect in various communities in North America. Although it’s an over-simplification, here’s my list of the main ones:

Anti-government Libertarian: People-are-inherently-bad ethos. Cult of the individual. Paranoid. Gun lovers. Government haters. Conspiracy theorists. Neo-survivalists.

Social Neocons: People-are-inherently-bad ethos. Fear-and-hate driven. Uneducated and uninformed. Born-agains. Want government to regulate morality but not economy. Family is most important socio-political unit. Anti-choice. Believers in Rapture and church’s role in all human activity.

Economic Neocons: People-are-inherently-stupid ethos. Paternalistic. Believers in laissez-faire and globalization. Believe social issues are a personal matter. Like the idea of hands-off benevolent dictatorship. Nationalists. Melting-pot, cultural homogenization advocates.

Classic Conservatives: Work ethos. Distrustful of any change. Nationalists.

Nihilists: Ethos of anomie. Overwhelmed, fearful and stressed-out. Drop-outs from the political process. Uneducated and uninformed. Conspicuous consumers. Malleable. Thrill-seekers.

Neoliberals: People-are-inherently-good ethos. Believe in One World and centralization. Melting-pot, cultural homogenization advocates. Patient diplomats. Believers in mixed economy. Socially liberal and tolerant. Idealistic.

Classic Liberals: People-are-inherently-good ethos. Rabid moderates. Believers in balance, compromise and the virtues of measured progress. Socially liberal and tolerant.

Labour Socialists: People-are-inherently-corrupt ethos. Class-conscious. Politically active but suspicious of power. Believers in government as the vehicle for balance and redistribution of wealth. Anti-hierarchy. May be socially conservative or liberal.

Socialist Idealists: Power-to-the-people ethos. Class-conscious. Politically active. Believers in government as the vehicle for balance and redistribution of wealth. Anti-hierarchy. Believe in One World. Socially very liberal.

Communitarian Green Anarchist: People-are-inherently-good ethos. Community-based-society advocates. Gun haters. Central/big government haters. Environmentalists. May also be conspiracy theorists and neo-survivalists. Mainstream-media haters.

This is complex systems stuff. Individuals tend to be a mix of these cultural archetypes, and to change their views as they age and as their social and economic situation changes. Each individual tends to adopt the cultural archetypes of friends and family, dependent largely on their economic status, class background, exposure to other worldviews, personal experiences and (formal and especially informal) education.

Add up the worldviews of all the people in a community, and one or perhaps more of these cultures will generally show up as dominant. You can see this reflected in the work the majority do, where they choose to live, what they buy, what they read, who they associate with, and what they do with their leisure time.

And then the people in that community who feel threatened or isolated by that dominant culture establish their counter-cultures, which tend to gravitate around different cultural archetypes (either those in the list above, or other archetypes, or micro-cultures based on more specific or one-issue worldviews). The media like it this way, since it allows them to brand and oversimplify complex issues and reduce every issue to an A-or-B dichotomy, with each of A and B aligned with either the dominant culture or a counter-culture.

The list above refers to the political dimension of culture. In the podcast mentioned above, Patti makes the point that the dominant culture has a huge impact not only on one’s political beliefs, but on acceptance in the community, on opportunities for success (or lack thereof), on the way we relate to others and so on. The social dimension of culture relates to philosophical, religious and behavioural norms — how we think, how we communicate, how we behave, how we accommodate others’ ideas and actions. Where the dominant political culture is relatively overt (those in power, and out of power, are quite clear) the dominant social culture may be less obvious, especially for those (often male, white, relatively affluent) who are part of that culture.

It requires a lot of sensitivity to recognize the degree to which the dominant social culture can tyrannize, inhibit and undervalue those who are not a part of it. And it requires a lot of strength to appreciate that the dominant social culture is emergent and not deliberately subjugating, to force that dominant culture to accommodate ideas, knowledge, practices and perspectives from another culture, and not to capitulate to the dominant culture.

In this light, it is not hard to see culture for what it really is — a set of behaviours designed, at one level, to reduce friction and enable communication, but, at a deeper level, as a mechanism to enforce conformity, obedience, and continuation of the status quo. Culture is what enables us to know each other better and work together more effectively than we could without its trappings — codes of behaviour, shared language, signals and other shorthands of meaning, shared beliefs and understandings.

But the dark side of culture is that it can be imperialistic, tyrannical, homogenizing and relentless. It tends to make us everybody-else, when our essential humanity, and our hope for the future, rests on our ability to each be nobody-but-ourselves, a culture of one.

* It is a strange historical accident that in the US, the Republicans (and hence conservatives) use the colour red, while Democrats (and hence liberals) use the colour blue. Virtually everywhere else in the world the colour symbols for conservative and liberal are the reverse. Hence ‘better dead than Red (communist)’ and ‘Tory blue’. Confusing, isn’t it?