I’m thinking about the sluggish US economy and trying to do the math. Seventy percent of our economy is based on consumer spending… rich seem to be getting richer and more of everyone else are falling into economic distress. Do all of us with disposable income need to go back to “shopping til’ we drop” and buying stuff we don’t need to make our economy grow again and move people out of that economic distress? There’s got to be a different path forward that leverages some sort of “less is more” principles. Can we somehow shift our economy from being based on private overconsumption and perhaps redirect it more towards building say more shared public infrastructure?
Dispatch from the Corporate Egalitarian Team Trenches
One of the key themes woven through my writing is our societal transition from hierarchical to more egalitarian institutions. I’m talking about the transition from leaders giving explicit marching orders to subordinates in an obvious “pecking order”, to something more akin to a “circle of equals”, where all members of the team are expected to make important decisions, and their managers play much more of a facilitative (how can I help you be successful) than directive role.
I have witnessed this sort of transition in family life (among the other families I interact with) and religious life (in the Unitarian-Universalist religious organizations I participate in). But what I have been most focused on lately is this transition in the work world, particularly my own place of work. I work as a business analyst for a large corporation in the insurance industry, not what you might think as the leading edge of social change. But I am pleased to report that in my team of some 20 people (and other internal teams that are our “customers”) the transition from “pecking order” to “circle of equals” is alive and well!
Continue reading →
Social Engineering and Facilitating an Enriched Environment
My first reaction to Newt Gingrich’s statement opposing both “left-wing and right-wing social engineering” was that I agree completely, but I need to be careful what I wish for here and think about what is negative “social engineering” versus what is a societal consensus on an “enriched environment” that facilitates moving our larger community forward.
My own awareness of the dark side of social engineering was catalyzed by reading radical educator John Taylor Gatto’s book, The Underground History of American Education, where he at times bluntly challenges the institutions in our society (including our public education system) dedicated to improving our behavior, for our own good whether we like it or not. Says Gatto in the book’s prologue…
The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn’t real.
Ending Mandatory Education?
I would like to see everyone finally acknowledge that the United States, though into the second decade of the 21st Century, still has basically a 19th Century education system. Alternative educators have been saying this for years, but now national Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said as much in his open letter to America’s teachers…
Working together, we can transform teaching from the factory model designed over a century ago to one built for the information age.
Issues with Educating Everybody
He sets the context in his opening paragraph…
The time has come to change the way we educate children in our public schools. There are signs that a vast majority of students are not even coming close to achieving their potential. A 27 percent national dropout rate may be but the tip of an iceberg of students whose potential for success are not being met. Many students never get an A or a B on a report card. Most students are educated at a low, C or D level of understanding. This is disastrous for those who drop out of school and too often enter the prison population. It is equally tragic for those who stay in school to acquire knowledge at a low level. Even those who get high grades may be deficient in understanding the real life application of subject matter content. They often aim for high grades rather than genuine learning and soon forget the material after the tests are given. The sad fact is that we do not have a public education system that aims to help all students master the knowledge they will need to fulfill their lives.
Mud Wrestling with McLuhan Part 3 – Youth and Education
In my previous pieces based on Playboy magazine’s extensive 1969 interview with Marshall McLuhan, I looked first at McLuhan’s ideas on how revolutions in our communication technology – particularly the inventions of phonetic literacy, later printing, and most recently electronic media – have fundamentally changed how we perceive the world and thus organize our society. Second, I focused on his idea that people who have grown up in an age using electronic media – radio, movies, television, computers and now the Internet – are becoming in his words “post-literate” and “retribalizing”, which involves moving away from individualism and back to a more collective experience of the world.
For my fellow Baby-boomers, this post-literate retribalization would be most stereotypically seen in the whole hippie subculture with its at times paradoxical conformist non-conformity, including the whole sex, drugs, rock and roll, long hair, bell-bottoms and tie dye thing, the collective focus on “peace, love, joy” and sense of solidarity, as the band The Who sang, “talkin bout my g-g-g-generation”. Think thousands of young people at an anti-war rally holding hands and singing in unison, “All we are saying is give peace a chance”.
For my kids in the Millennial generation, with their developmental milieu of computers, cell phones and the Internet, their “hive mind” of connections with each other through their ubiquitous electronic devices would seem the most obvious evidence of perhaps an even higher level of the same retribalization. A blank stare at times to their parents or other adults, masking a complicated web of virtual “kinship” with each other.
So in this third installment of my messy tussle with the ideas of this “metaphysician of media”, I want to look at the issues he raises regarding the development of retribalized youth in a culture that still has not come to grips with its post-literate zeitgeist. My fellow Baby-boomers these days cavalierly throw around the term “gone viral” like we’re still hip and all, but I don’t think we fully understand what it means when our entire culture is in the grips of such virtual infections spread by our ubiquitous electronic media.
Continue reading →
Mud Wrestling with McLuhan Part 2 – Retribalization
So following up on my first piece on the subject, I continue my metaphorical mud wrestle with the outside the box ideas of the coiner of the term “Global Village”, Marshall McLuhan. I almost had the occasion to meet the man in Toronto in 1970, since he was a collaborator and friend of my mom’s best friend Mary Jane Shoultz, one of my “Feminist Aunts”. Though I missed that opportunity, Mary Jane regaled me with his ideas over the years of my older youth, and I must say they resonated with my own emerging view of the world as a kid growing up in the age of electronic media.
What recently rekindled my intimate tangle with McLuhan’s ideas was a link shared with me to his extensive 1969 interview in Playboy Magazine, which I had never read, probably focused at that age on the magazine’s other featured content! In my first piece on the interview, I focused on his ideas on how revolutions in communication technology – particularly, phonetic literacy, printing and now electronic media – have successively transformed human culture.
My Plea to Citizen Trump
Not quite sure why Donald Trump is suddenly pushing all my buttons. I mean he’s always been ridiculously full of himself. Maybe its the whole “birther” thing, culminating in Obama revealing his long-form birth certificate and Trump saying he had never been more proud of himself for making that happen. Or maybe its the fact that he has waltzed his way into the 2012 Presidential nominating process and is sucking oxygen out of a needed political dialog about America’s path forward, particularly among the potential Republican candidates.
Just give me a ten second audience with the guy so I can convey my thought that he seems like the biggest asshole on the planet! He probably would take that as a compliment, or at least tell me so, because I don’t sense that he gives a flying fuck. Okay, sorry!… I’m done swearing, but it felt good!
Muammar Gaddafi would probably be considered by some as a contender for that title, but Gaddafi seems to at least truly believe he is the messiah of the Arab world. I’m hard pressed to identify what if any convictions Trump has, deluded or otherwise. Please let me know if I’m missing something!
Continue reading →
Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today
I was excited to see this piece titled “Why Teenagers Are Growing Up So Slowly Today”, not so much because it was new information for me, but because it was good to see this wake up call to parents and our public education establishment getting aired in the mainstream media (Newsweek magazine in this case). The article reviews a book, Escaping the Endless Adolescence, written by Dr. Claudia Worrell Allen and her partner Dr. Joe Allen, highlighting their research on human development particularly during the teenage years…
Allen has concluded that our urge to protect teenagers from real life – because we don’t think they’re ready yet – has tragically backfired. By insulating them from adult-like work, adult social relationships, and adult consequences, we have only delayed their development. We have made it harder for them to grow up. Maybe even made it impossible to grow up on time.
Ayn Rand, Left-Libertarianism, Selfishness and Freedom
Just read Michael Gerson’s piece, “Ayn Rand’s adult-onset adolescence”, from the Washington Post opinion page. I am not familiar with Ayn Rand‘s work directly, but have read some discussion of it and her foundational status among some contemporary libertarians. Short of reading her book Atlas Shrugged, I’ll at least have to watch the movie version on Netflix. I’m intrigued how much her conflation of liberty with selfishness have perhaps demeaned the former in some progressives’ view.
Article author Michael Gerson writes…
Rand is something of a cultural phenomenon — the author of potboilers who became an ethical and political philosopher, a libertarian heroine. But Rand’s distinctive mix of expressive egotism, free love and free-market metallurgy does not hold up very well on the screen. The emotional center of the movie is the success of high-speed rail — oddly similar to a proposal in Barack Obama’s last State of the Union address. All of the characters are ideological puppets. Visionary, comely capitalists are assaulted by sniveling government planners, smirking lobbyists, nagging wives, rented scientists and cynical humanitarians.