Connecting the past with the present

I had underlined these sentences in Robert Graves’ introduction to The Greek Myths, when I was a freshman at Columbia College in 1964-65. Graves’ book was a secondary resource for making sense of ancient stories studied in the Humanities course that was required to be taken by every College student. I’m not sure Graves’ narrative has stood the test of time among anthropologists, even mythologists–it may be, in itself, myth not science. But for an eighteen year old (boy) from a small town in mid-America, this speculation certainly opened my mind to wondering about gender and culture in a way I never imagined. Here I am today wondering whether or not an epochal transformation is once again going to happen in the cultural/social relations of the sexes. Fortunately for me, too, I had enjoyed a wondrous summer of sexual play with the first woman I ever loved before I encountered university studies about the matter. I recalled, when I read these sentences, the power of the female over me, the male.

“Ancient Europe had no gods. The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought. She took lovers, but for pleasure, not to provide her children with a father. Men feared, adored and obeyed the matriarch: the hearth which she tended in a cave or hut being their earliest social centre, and motherhood their prime mystery…. There is however, no evidence that, even when women were sovereign in religious matters, men were denied fields in which they might act without female supervision, though it may well be thought that they adopted many of the ‘weaker-sex’ characteristics hitherto thought to be entrusted to man. They could be trusted to hunt, fish, gather certain foods, mind flocks and herds, and help defend the tribal territory against intruders, so long as they did not transgress matriarchal law.”

My intention is to live the remainder of my life as a loving man who wants nothing more than to witness the world become more sustainable and justly inclusive because wonderful, powerful, and loving women lead in transforming it.

Bill Moyers talks with Parker Palmer

Tonight’s (2/20/2009) broadcast of Bill Moyers Journal features a wonderful interview of Parker Palmer. Here’s a link to the PBS page where a video of the interview can be found. I suspect that you’re going to appreciate listening to what Palmer has to say about himself and how to recover from the various kinds of “brokenness” Americans are experiencing in their lives and from the various cultural illusions that have diminished us personally and socially.

Turning Learning Right Side Up

What happens when you mix:
an American organizational theorist, consultant, and Anheuser-Busch Professor Emeritus of Management Science at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, who is a pioneer in the field of operations research, systems thinking and management science,
and
the founder in 1968 of a place where people decide for themselves how to spend their days; where students of all ages determine what they will do, as well as when, how, and where they will do it; which belongs to the students as their right, not to be violated?

They write a book collaboratively in 2008 which is titled Turning Learning Right Side Up.

Russell L. Ackoff and Daniel Greenberg are the volatile mix of exceptionally non-conforming, playfully democratic, and value-driven minds.

Both of these “wild and crazy guys” have been intellectual-activist heroes of mine for a long time–separately in his own field. Each of them has remarkable organizational and personal development results to show for their unconventional professional thinking and efforts.

Thanks very much to a friend of mine Mike for pointing out the book. I just ordered a copy of it.

Radical Enlightenment

Have you read Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House by Ken Goffman (a.k.a. R. U. Sirius)? Great fun in telling the story of the culturally verboten and politically incorrect! (For example, Goffman sees the insurrectionist Boston Tea Party as the epitome of playful outrageousness–the kind, however, that gets the American revolutionary spirit through to the political mind of the populace.)

While I liked Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, her Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism better celebrates the most cherished and legitimately historical Enlightenment tradition in the U.S. republic which has been challenged from the beginning by Counter-Enlightenment cultural “pushbacks” of various kinds–religiously/culturally antidemocratic (socially hierarchical) at base and narrowly opportunistic in their effects on social and economic development.

Last month over about a week’s time, I read Jonathan I. Israel’s (tome) Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752. First, it makes the case that revolutionary ideas in elites’ and peoples’ heads matter more than a mere marxian-like ripeness of socioeconomic dysfunctions in whether or not people act to overthrow ancien regimes and assume popular sovereignty. Also, Israel argues cogently that what actually is the contention between two Enlightenment traditions, one Radical, the other moderate–not their contention (as though they were seemingly one) against a persistent Counter-Enlightenment–is key to understanding modernity. Those who find their philosophical/moral roots in Spinoza and Bayle (monist radicals who welcome today’s “embodied” philosophers like Lakeoff and Rorty and the overwhelming majority of today’s neuroscientists) continue to contend with moderate dualists who find Leibniz, Newton, Locke, Voltaire, and others who are quite comfortable with Descartes’ accommodating split of the natural and the supernatural. Perhaps my favorite book on this contention between the radically and the moderately enlightened is Matthew Stewart’s The Courtier and Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World. Stewart has written several great reads about modernity, but this one tops them all in cutting to the heart of what’s at issue in democratically re-forming our minds, moral direction, and political-cultural world. (Besides, it’s half about Baruch de Spinoza, whom I consider the most misunderstood, underestimated, and important thinker of all time. But then, that’s my opinion, not gospel.)

The Necessary Revolution

Just got to a book last night which has been on my “anti-library” shelf for several months–Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution (2008)–which I highly recommend. Here’s an article from Business Week’s “Innovation” section which reviewed the book last summer and spurred me to acquire a copy of it.

The following paragraphs from the book’s first chapter, “A Future Awaiting Our Choices,” provide a good introduction to the nature and scope of Senge’s recent work.

The Industrial Age has often been called the “machine age” because the rise of machines and the way they operated transformed the way people thought and worked. It wasn’t long before people were expected to work like machines and the assembly line became the icon of efficiency and standardization for all organizations. Gradually, machine thinking shaped much more than manufacturing: Economic progress became synonymous with increases in efficiency and productivity; cultural advance became equated with dazzling new technologies; and nature, including the other creatures with whom we share the earth, was reduced to ‘natural resources,’ inputs to the economic machine.

A sustainable world, too, will only be possible by thinking differently. With nature and not machines as their inspiration, today’s innovators are showing how to create a different future by learning how to see the larger systems of which they are a part and to foster collaboration across every imaginable boundary. These core capabilities–seeing systems, collaborating across boundaries, and creating versus problem solving–form the underpinnings, and ultimately the tools and methods, for this shift in thinking.

For over a quarter of a century our work, first at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then through the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) global network, has involved helping organizations of all sorts to “learn how to learn”–which naturally leads to the question, “Learning for what?” For many years, precedent provided the answer: learning so that companies could be more innovative and profitable, so that schools could help students learn, so that governmental organizations could better serve their constituencies. For the past decade, however, we have begun to also see a larger answer: shaping a sustainable, flourishing world for life beyond the Industrial Age. This represents perhaps the greatest learning challenge humans have ever faced, and it will require extraordinary leadership from institutions of all sorts.

This is not pie-in-the-sky rhetoric or intellectual idealism, but in fact is reflected in ways organizations and individuals are already working together. The organizations and people you will meet in the pages that follow are starting to enact new ways of managing, leading, and ultimately creating value, not just for today’s real needs but for tomorrow’s, and their practices are spreading to hundreds of businesses and non-business organizations of all sizes around the world. There is no silver-bullet formula for putting these ideas into practice widely, but there are principles, practices, and ways of getting started.

I once was guided professionally by Senge’s idea of the “learning organization” in my own organizational development / knowledge management work. I’m guided again by him, this time by his idea that the environmental and social challenges we face create an unprecedented opportunity for us to bring about real, sustainable (and “revolutionary”) change in the ways we work and live.

GlobalPost.com

GlobalPost.com is a start-up organization attempting to fill the lack of first-hand, first-class, international reporting in American news media in the digital age. Here are two paragraphs excerpted from GlobalPost’s mission statement:

We, the Founders of GlobalPost, are also acutely aware of the fact that quality journalism in America is threatened more profoundly today than at any time in our history from an unprecedented combination of forces: the transformational power of technology and the internet, the dramatic erosion in the economic underpinnings of the traditional media, and a steady migration of the most devoted consumers of news as well as younger people to new content platforms, most importantly the web.

GlobalPost is a direct response to these forces. Our mission is to provide Americans, and all English-language readers around the world, with a depth, breadth and quality of original international reporting that has been steadily diminished in too many American newspapers and television networks. GlobalPost is at the leading edge of what we hope and believe will become a new flowering of journalism in the digital age, built around new models of financial support.

Perhaps students can model their digital journalism projects on what GlobalPost.com attempts to do. The re-emphasis on original reporting is propitious for actually getting the news.

Creativity in common

James Boyle is a hero of mine! His newest book The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind has gained the attention and praise of all those in the free culture movement. Here’s a sample:

“Boyle is one of the world’’s major thinkers on the centrality of the public domain to the production of knowledge and culture. He offers a comprehensive and biting critique of where our copyright and patent policy has gone, and prescriptions for how we can begin to rebalance our law and practice. It is the first book I would give to anyone who wants to understand the causes, consequences, and solutions in the debates over copyrights, patents, and the public domain of the past decade and a half.” -Yochai Benkler, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard Law School

This YouTube video speaks to the matter of the Creative Commons, which Boyle champions:

Best Green Blogs

This link to Best Green Blogs came to me in a tweet from humanvillage on Twitter this morning. Few who declare themselves to be “green” these days, especially many of the money-rich, large corporate advertisers, are ready to communicate how difficult it is (will be) for most folks to change their habitual economic behaviors to collectively create more environmentally sustainable local communities embedded in “green” societies globally. Here are some blogs communicating the challenges and opportunities.