My 21-year-old daughter Emma alerted me and her mom last week about this New York Times article, “What is it about 20-Somethings?” by Robin Henig. Emma had heard about it from her brother Eric’s girlfriend Sarah (another 20-something), who apparently has seen it in the New York Times. Emma said in her email to her mom and me…

Not sure if either of you caught Sarah posting a link to this on Facebook. It’s a long article but its well worth the read, absolutely along the lines of your philosophies around youth, and undoubtedly a great subject for a new blog piece!

Emma’s words gave the article a positive spin, and I had the article in my queue to read when my 30-something friend Emily emailed my yesterday to say…

I’m curious to know what you think about this article and the case for “emerging adulthood.” Let me know.

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So in the fifth installment of this series, based on my friend Ron Miller’s parsing of American culture in the first chapter of his great book, What Are Schools For?, I’m plunging into his thoughts on American nationalism, which weaves together the first four themes. When I reread his words on this topic, it seems apropos to what’s going on in Washington this week with the Beck/Palin rally. According to a CNN dispatch on that event…

In what resembled more a revival than a political rally, conservative talk show host Glenn Beck urged the large crowds at his “Restoring Honor” event Saturday to “turn back to God” and return America to the values on which it was founded.

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So the fourth installment of this series, based on my friend Ron Miller’s take on American cultural conventions, I’m going to look at his thoughts on Capitalism and how it plays out in American conventional thinking, based on the first chapter of his very insightful book, What Are Schools For?

Ah “capitalism”… a word that to me connotes a big driving machine. A word that is loaded with so much baggage from the last 200 years of Western (and world) history, including all the robber barons, all the strife between workers and management and the competing ideologies of socialism and communism. A term that emphasizes the people, the “capitalists”, with the big bucks to finance business projects, rather than “free enterprise” which connotes more the entrepreneurs who start those small businesses (like my son and his friends did).

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Continuing to look at the first section of his wonderful book, What Are Schools For?, where author (and friend) Ron Miller calls out five dominant cultural assumptions that he believes are at the root of conventional American thinking, particularly conventional American thinking about education…

1. Puritan (Calvinist/Protestant) Theology
2. Scientism & the Culture of Professionalism
3. Restrained Democratic Ideology
4. Capitalism & Free Enterprise
5. Self-Righteous Nationalism

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Following up on yesterday’s post, “Five Themes of American Conventional Wisdom”, I continue the thread by looking at my friend Ron Miller’s second theme (from his book, What Are Schools For?) which he labels as “Scientific Reductionism”. What intrigues me most in his text is his description of science as a belief system or “ism” (scientism) and the “culture of professionalism” that emerged in America from that belief system.

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In the first section of his wonderful book, What Are Schools For?, (looking at the history of education in America and the possibilities for a more holistic educational view) author (and my friend) Ron Miller calls out five dominant cultural assumptions that he believes are at the root of conventional American thinking, particularly conventional American thinking about education.

The five are…

1. Puritan (Calvinist/Protestant) Theology
2. Scientific Reductionism (& the Cult of Professionalism)
3. Restrained Democratic Ideology
4. Capitalism & Free Enterprise
5. Self-Righteous Nationalism

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Forgive me this rant… but I need to get it out of my system!

We are coming up in four years on the hundred year anniversary of an event that represents the absolute climax of patriarchal power politics, a world-wide doctrine of “us and them”, and the crashing failure of Western Culture, an event I think the world is still recovering from. I’m such a student of history and a lover of humankind and our cultural narrative of evolution that when I ponder this stupidly self-inflicted apocalypse, I am always deeply saddened.

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I find our human history a fascinating narrative, an evolutionary adventure that appears often to unfold as an exciting three steps forward followed by a frustrating two steps back. Particularly from my reading of Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade, Karen Armstrong’s A History of God and The Battle for God, Allan Johnson’s The Gender Knot, and Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence, I have come to this admittedly provocative framing of the last five millennia of our tenure on planet Earth. “Who’s your daddy?” has been the operative organizing principle of human society, but it is past time that we move beyond this obsession with parental figures to a question more like, “Who’re your peers?”

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More and more each day I am convinced that the Internet represents a profound new technology that will transform human society and give us the opportunity to make a quantum leap in the evolution of our species. Just as the printing press and movable type helped transform the Medieval world into the Modern world, and catalyzed the Protestant Revolution (implementing Christianity 2.0 the home edition), the Internet seems to be catalyzing something equally profound, though perhaps only beginning to take shape.

Just as printing technology had a major impact on the practice on the Christian religion, the Internet seems very likely to have an equally game-changing affect on contemporary religious and spiritual practice. Simplistically the Reformation was all about creating new denominations of Christianity that featured (from an information infrastructure point of view) removal of gatekeepers (priests) and direct access to the underlying information (the now ubiquitously available printed Bible). A person need only own or have access to and read that Bible to have all the wisdom they needed to live an ethical life.

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Conventional wisdom of many on the progressive side of politics and social change is that religion, particularly Christianity, is a key source of our culture’s problems if not evil in general. John Lennon’s classic song “Imagine” conjures a utopian world that would be free of this supposed source of division and strife. Many people more on the conservative side of things do not share that concern about the Christian faith and its practice, but see Islam in that same sort of negative light. My take is that neither (nor religion in general) is a source of hate, war and oppression, actually came into being to promote love and humanistic ideals, but have been manipulated as tools of a much older ideology of domination and “us and them” thinking that some would call “Patriarchy”.

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