Thursday, November 18, 2004

More on yesterday's post (some repetition) Is there an alternative? I think there is. To go out on a limb I call it “Garden world”. It is realistic about the current population, technology, governance, and violence. It seeks to find a world that can evoked in people, because it is close to human nature, historical symbols, and realizable.   Here is the idea: using high tech and entrepreneurial activity in the context of highly effective guidelines on environmental impact, to push for a high education, decentralized active world working to make everything beautiful, healthy, just, fair, and interesting.   There is a valley in India where the local culture measures economic development by the increase in song birds and biomass in the valley. Fredric Olmstead, who designed Central Park in New York, and much else besides, gives us a model of remediating the environment towards biological sustainability and beauty.   Further, I believe this in the only approach that finds advantage in facing the environmental, health, fairness and justice issues. Facing those issues are more attractive with garden world. The military or one world solutions have too great an incentive to mobilize around their expertise and to continue to aroid critical issues. .   Starting in 2003 I was part of a small group consulting to one of the campaigns on the use of language, and, noticing the difficulty the “progressives” had entering imaginatively and compassionately into the possible thought process of the right, I worked up a seminar called "What is on the minds of the Republicans?" There were two core ideas.   That both progressives and the right feared bigness, but projected it on to the other, and did not take responsibility for their own ties to bigness. The right feared big government and its bureaucracy, but supported big business with its government ties, as well as military which was related to both big government and big business, and the right supports large church organizations. And the left (using right and left as token words, filled with abstraction and error) feared big business and big military, but had its own ties to government programs and the use of courts to impose community standards that could not be achieved by legislation, and was tied to government and high tech business, and much of the left was supportive of a stronger military.   The right was afraid of a government bureaucracy that could undermine family responsibility with welfare, but was happy with farm subsidies and military pensions. and the left feared big business with its concentration of wealth and ties to a media which "determined" peoples' point of view.   Each side demonized the other in order to prevent the confusion, the cognitive dissonance, that came from seeing how close left and right values were. They all believe in education, justice, security, love of nature, healthy families, and a home with access to good food, health and hope.   The divergences, of which there are many and real, were not understood for what they meant - such as gun control and abortion, or Justice and Iraq and the nature of security, and the increasing marginalization in the economy of many - to the other side.   During the later stages of the campaign, George Lakoff's work on political Language ( see his book Moral Politics) became the buzz. He saw the left as favoring a spirit of government acting like a nurturing tolerant family with care and concern for losers. The right was drawn to the image of the paternalistic one right way family building strength of character to win in a tough world.   I could see the advantages of both views. It seems to me that the two together: fear of bigness and image of the family, combined, could "explain" lots of political behavior and the use of language to appeal to voters.   I think these can reduce to fear of change and technology, increasing alienation and the destruction of the ideas around human nature. The left stresses the need for support under change and the right favors retrenchment (and reaching out to religious community) to avoid the changes.   Fundamental issues, such as corporate charters, are not present in the larger debate, but polls I’ve seen and a few informal ones I’ve done suggest that the increase in corporate power, loss of environment, and threats to children are powerful issues.   What we on the progressive side need is to honor the fears on all sides, see our own side in an alliance with corporations and communications technology (for which a major customer is military), and tell a story that is attractive, not articulated in hate or slander.   A business climate that was regulated to protect the environment, maximizing hi-tech and even biotech, with an encouragement of entrepreneurial activity on a regional bases, new forms of more expressive and creative education, mortgage deductions only for houses under say 200,000, and an international policy of fairness and multilateral efforts, making the world safe for travel of people, not just money, protect social security, and rethink medical aid for the vast majority of non exotic illnesses…plus a clear denunciation of the war in Iraq, new efforts to rethink oil so that we don’t victimize the ME by either staying or leaving, new initiatives with Latin America and China (and an interesting plan for Cuba that is humane), and election reform that is clear and transparent. Boldness would have won this election.   What are Americans likely to do to support, to lend legitimacy to?   I think we can agree that increasing population, especially for the us which is currently predicted to grow from 290 million to 360 by 2050, will be continually destabilized by immigration and birth. By destabilized I don’t mean fall apart – only that the increase will be part of a dynamic that must be coped with – or it will fall apart.   And the US is increasingly un-insulated from much of the rest of the world, which means external destabilizations and internal destabilizations tend to get link and reinforce each other’s jolts.   There seem to me two likely paths for the world, and the choice is being made now and might be clear before the end of Bush’s second term.   The first is the one implicit in “Globalization” and American hegemony within that globalization – the integration of the world into a single market system, with interlocking corporate governance boards, unified standards, technologies, and regulations. The basic tendency here is t make the world into a single system. The rub is, that the biggest game in two is, who gets to control, own and benefit from, that system. This is a fairly peaceful world, with lots of controls and restraints. Think Microsoft, Citibank, WTO, UN, Davos.   The second is the division of the world into empires, highly militarized and full of wars in struggles for power to defend arrangements and to create new ones. Think China, US, Euro, Russia, India, a united Arab republic.   Many of us sense that Bush policy is pushing us to an unnecessary world of empires in conflict, rather than the internationally regulated path.   Unspoken so far is the question: is there another way? Clinton and Blair and others talked, in the mid 90’s, about a third way, a kind of democratic, safety net, regulated commercial environment that would be viable. I think they were on to something important,. And Europe and other parts of the world are in very active dialog about what that could be. The unemployment that arises from pitting countries against each other in a drive for low cost production keeps that dialog somewhat in the background, but those who travel to Europe, or have good behind the scenes contacts in China or Japan, and probably other places, know that the discussion is deep and intelligent and well informed. (see for example the book One China: many paths, issued last year). Within Islam there is a similar discussion that is very interesting. Within the Christian churches the issue is fully alive.   But, given the current mind set of the US population, you can see how these “alternatives’ draw out the anxiety, fear, and contempt that characterized the last election.   The press plays a key role because, in the need to sell advertising it needs an audience, and the audience is got by portraying conflict and personality, blood and sex. Us as audience are drawn in by the unconscious expectation that the media present us with images that provide us with very useful education as consumers (what kind of life style), and at the same time telling us what is the emotional atmosphere we live in. To do this the media must act like half a therapist, resonating with the unconscious forces that are active in people, without doing the second part of the work: making these forces conscious so we increase our range of freedom. Every reporter is trying to script what ties into the hopes and feras o the audience, and every editor is looking at what the reporters are giving her to decide which will get the biggest draw, the biggest emotional wow and fix, from the readers or audience.   So it is my view, so far, that Americans are full of images and expectations that are deeply historical and confusing, and that each person, embedded as they are in local culture and available media, in strained economic circumstances, and are vulnerable to emotional appeals that make them less thinkers than scouts. Rove said he looked at a political commercial for how it looks with the sound off (approximating the way he thought people actually take in the ads with peripheral vision more than focused critical awareness). This means people are looking for clues as to how to move through the jungle, what to make of the person ahead of them, to the side, behind and the lay of the land and its shadows, more than they are thinking policy and systems. Our intelligence is engaged at the survivor who is with who level, the kind of intelligence that apparently gave us the edge in the ice age, rather than with the kind of thinking that characterizes the professional office or the university, and requires some focused detachment. (see for example Don Schone’s TheReflective Practitioner)   Seeing it this way, many of us (I actually think very many) are not drawn to either party and its policies. We will fight hard because the “other” party looks so bad, and we need to find an alternative that can work, and hence we identify with one party to fight the other – and forget to work out what our party really will work for.   As it is, “our party”, and I mean republicans and democrats, are working to support both the one world (globalization) and empires at war scenarios. Clinton said at the opening of the Library that he thought war was right, just he timing was wrong. Kerry said the same. Both represent open expansionist markets that have made the rich richer and marginalized much of the world’s population (details here count).   Garden world, a reach, looks to me like the alternative two a managed or a militarized world. And of course, to be successful, it will borrow from the managed and the military solutions.   I was part of a project in 1995- 1999, rethinking military health for 2025. Our final statement was "As national security moves from winning wars to preventing chaos, military health moves from supporting the front line to being the front line." above posted on Thursday, November 18, 2004, 6:39:48 PM

Korea, Iran, Judges, Economy, flat tax, ake your pick. Some good things... SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 17 - Google Inc. plans to announce on Thursday that it is adding a new search service aimed at scientists and academic researchers. Google Scholar, which was scheduled to go online Wednesday evening at scholar.google.com, is a result of the company's collaboration with a number of scientific and academic publishers and is intended as a first stop for researchers looking for scholarly literature like peer-reviewed papers, books, abstracts and technical reports. Google executives declined to say how many additional documents and books had been indexed and made searchable through the service. While the great majority of recent scholarly papers and periodicals are indexed on the Web, many have not been easily accessible to the public. The engineer who led the project, Anurag Acharya, said the company had received broad cooperation from academic, scientific and technical publishers like the Association of Computing Machinery, Nature, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Online Computer Library Center. The new Google service, which includes a listing of scientific citations as well as ways to find materials at libraries that are not online, will not initially include the text advertisements that are shown on standard pages for Google search results. above posted on Thursday, November 18, 2004, 5:57:57 PM