Social Equity and Civilization Collapse

A research team at Princeton has statistically verified something we already knew intuitively: that American politics today is controlled by elites and business interests, and average citizens have little or no say in the outcome. There are two names for the type of political system we appear to have -- the broader term "oligarchy" (rule by elites) and the narrower and more controversial term "fascism" (as defined by Mussolini: rule by corporations, or by corporate interest groups.) In the way it actually functions, our political system is not a "democracy" (rule by average citizens, or by public interest groups.)

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens

I suspect we've all already seen the graphs which depict the rapidly increasing social inequity that has gone hand-in-hand with this shift from democratic rule to oligarchy. Another recent study describes a model of human population dynamics, and attempts to tease apart the factors which determine the outcome of civilizations. Many different factors have been invoked to explain specific examples of civilization collapse, but in studying the historic record the research team identified two factors -- resource depletion and social inequity -- that have been prominent across many different civilizations just prior to collapse. Their model incorporates these factors into a simulation of predator-prey dynamics in an attempt to define the "carrying capacity" of a civilization and predict when collapse will occur. In the simulation results (and also in the historical record) either resource depletion or social inequity can independently lead to collapse: both must be addressed in order to create a sustainable society.

Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY): Modeling Inequality and Use of Resources in the Collapse or Sustainability of Societies

Social equity has been part of the sustainability picture all along, but I had always imagined this to be primarily an ethical stance. If we take this study seriously, the obvious conclusion is that it's also a basic requirement for survival. (In the context of predator-prey dynamics, "collapse" means "population collapse".) Which means that it's just as crucial to address our political imbalance of power as it is to address our resource usage, if we want our civilization to survive.

There are at least two obvious explanations for why social inequity might be destabilizing. One is that the elites lose touch with the reality "on the ground" and fail to notice and take action on resource depletion (or other impending crises) until it's too late. That's a relatively benign interpretation of the problem. However, having recently watched the first episode of that Dangerously Alarmist Documentary with this question in mind, I suspect there's another, more dangerous, explanation. When elites lose touch with the circumstances the masses are living under, it creates tensions that destabilize society. Once that happens, even a moderate crisis (which would be easily weathered by a more equitable society) can become a flash point for social unrest and violence. Social equity determines whether people come together in a crisis, or fall apart.

We're currently facing a whole string of global crises, from climate change to peak oil to overpopulation at a level which strains our global food supply. Those crises will inevitably bring loss and hardship in their wake. We can choose to create a society which is resilient -- one whose members take care of each other -- or one which is poised to self-destruct when hard times come.

Can Science and Technology Save Us?

This is the title of a salon I've been asked to help facilitate next month. My designated position on the panel is that of middle ground, between the optimist (yes it can) and the pessimist (we need to reclaim the commons, is how I think his position was described to me.) I was surprised to be invited; I had no idea I was perceived as any kind of authority on this topic. Perhaps there's some value to being outspoken after all; often I feel as if it just gets me mired in controversy.

But how do I actually feel about it? I'm not sure if middle of the road is the right place for me or not. I strongly suspect we're doomed, and that the effect our technology is having right now is to dig a deeper hole to bury ourselves in. To quote Einstein, "You can't solve a problem on the same level you created it." We need to move to a higher level of thinking to find a solution to our problem (if in fact a solution exists.)

One thing I know to be true: if you devote resources to solving a problem, you make progress toward a solution. If you devote a lot of resources, you make rapid progress. That is why we have a telephone system, an interstate system, an internet. It's why we have the most advanced military in the world.

It's also the case that a failure to devote *enough* resources can doom us to failure, and can be used as a strategy to destroy an otherwise promising option. If a project is funded on a shoestring long enough, its opponents can use the lack of progress to justify shutting it down entirely. Wind and solar and the electric car have all been adversely affected by this type of funding strategy. It's also a common strategy for holding women back in traditionally male careers (I used to have a research reference for this, back when I was still at MIT, but it would take some serious digging to find it any more.) One might think of it as a variation on "damning with faint praise."

But even more true is the fact that we are facing what reporters are beginning to refer to as a "perfect storm" of crises, and the one of the things we know to be true is that we can't fund every kind of research at once. In the Limits to Growth studies, the cause of collapse was never an unsolvable crisis -- it was too many crises happening all that the same time. So if we want to survive this "perfect storm" we have to be extremely careful about where we put our limited resources.

One of the problems with our current business-as-usual approach is that all the most promising possibilities are competing for a small and relatively fixed-size pool of research dollars. To pursue more options in parallel, we need to free up resources from other, wasteful enterprises to increase the size of the funding pool. But a lot of that wasteful spending is happening in the private sector, under corporate control -- whether it's advertising, marketing, media propaganda, packaging, political campaigns, global shipping, lights burning in empty buildings, or further enriching the uber-rich. Some of it is in government, mostly in the form of extravagant military spending, but even the government is increasingly falling under corporate control. Most of that spending is simply making our problems worse, so if we redirected it toward solving global problems, it would certainly make a difference.

But to get all our resources on board we will have to refocus our economy, instead of letting it run without a head, churning out short-term amusements and trash at the expense of our long-term viability as a species. And even if we did refocus we would have to think very carefully about where to place our bets. Because gambling is what it comes down to. High stakes gambling, with the world in the balance. If we back the wrong horse, we may not get another chance. And the likelihood that we're going to have the opportunity to place a bet at all is growing slimmer with each passing year.

Kant and and the Rise of Amorality

Okay, I'll be the first to say I'm not the expert here, but in reading over the Wikipedia entries on Immanuel Kant and his writings and ideas, I find that I am feeling extremely irritated with him. I'm going to give a short synopsis of his contributions to philosophy, and then I'm going on a little rant.

Immanuel Kant -- 1724-1804 -- According to Wikipedia, Kant believed one ought to think autonomously, free of the dictates of outside authorities. If we live that way, then our beliefs, conclusions, and the moral code we live by are personal and internally generated, rather than being dictated by society or the church. Off the bat I have to say that I'm inclined to approve of this idea, but  I fear it may, in combination with his other ideas, have had a detrimental impact on Western civilization.

On Pure Reason

Kant's work in Epistemology reconciles and integrates the Empiricist and Rationalist schools of thought, and thereby unifies the experimental and theoretical sciences. Empiricism is characterized by the scientific method. One of its core beliefs is that knowledge can be derived only through the evidence of our senses, using a process of forming and testing hypotheses against the world, and rejecting those which prove contradictory to our experience.  In Empiricism, absolute knowledge of reality is impossible, and truth is inherently uncertain and limited by our experience. In Rationalism -- characterized by the development of mathematics -- reason, not experience, is used to distinguish truth from falsehood. The evidence of our senses is considered unreliable at best, and it's the inner world of our mind which is seen as the ultimate source of knowledge. These two schools of thought developed in parallel in the century prior to Kant's arrival on the scene.

Pure reason refers to the mental process by which we perceive and understand reality. Kant put forward the idea that our experiences are structured by essential mental constructs -- in particular, the concepts of space and time, and cause and effect -- which make it possible for us to process and understand our sensory experience. These concepts cannot be experimentally verified, but without them we cannot make sense of the phenomena of our senses. So we must rely on reason to understand our experience, and reason in turn must be grounded in experience to avoid spinning off into theoretical illusions. In his view, all our knowledge of reality comes through our senses, and the process of converting raw sensory phenomena into a mental model of reality is inherently shaped and limited by the internal structure of our minds. We cannot directly perceive reality: our knowledge is limited both by what we are capable of sensing, and by our mental capacity for understanding. If a reality exists outside of space and time, or beyond the limits of our senses, we'll never know, because we would be unable to perceive it. This is the essence of his most famous work, the Critique of Pure Reason.

On Practical Reason

Practical reason, as distinct from pure reason, refers to the mental processes by which we decide how to act. According to Kant, there are two reasonable motivations for choosing how to behave: we may act out of self-interest to bring about a desired end, which is inherently subjective and relative to our individual situation, or we may act according to a universal moral law (which, to be valid, must be objective and independent of the empirical world.) The second choice he refers to as pure practical reason. According to Kant's view, there is only one valid universal moral law, which he refers to as the categorical imperative. This law is to act according to those maxims which we can, at the same time, will that they should be universally applied. (You could think of this as a generalization of "do unto others...") He believed that all other moral laws which can be formulated fail the test of universality by making reference to desired ends in the empirical world. 

So far so good, but brace yourselves: here comes the "proof of God" part. At the end of Kant's first book, one might have concluded that God is ultimately unknowable -- and from the standpoint of pure reason that is the case. Kant, however, was unwilling to leave things in that state. He did believe it was impossible to prove God's existence through empirical means, due to the limitations of our minds and senses (and we mustn't forget the lack of empirical evidence.) However, for the same reason, it is also impossible to *disprove* the existence of God.

You might think he would end up an agnostic after that statement, but no.

Kant believed that moral law is superior to self-interest as a motivation, and so there must be a valid reason for choosing it. He also believed that, in order to be superior to self-interest, such a law must provide for the highest good. In his view, that is the only reasonable justification for choosing pure practical reason over one's own self-interest. But this statement gives rise to a contradiction. A reality in which morality prevails *and* people are happy is better than a reality in which morality prevails and happiness is not achieved (or not reliably achieved.) So the highest good must include both the highest virtue *and* the greatest happiness. However, we can readily observe in the empirical world that virtue does not necessarily lead to happiness, and that we ourselves have not achieved the highest virtue (and are not likely to achieve it any time soon.)

So Kant concludes that we must be immortal, so that we can have a *really* *long* time to overcome our human self-interestedness and achieve the highest virtue, and there must be an afterlife outside the empirical world in which we can achieve whatever measure of happiness we deserve which does not come to us in this life, and there must be an omniscient God to make it so.

Say what?

So the promise of a reward in heaven is the only reasonable justification for moral behavior? And we ought to believe in God because we can't get a reward in heaven unless God exists to give it to us? Holy limburger, Batman! This argument is so full of holes I could strain spaghetti with it!

Kant was one of the greatest thinkers in Western history -- the man who finally reconciled the philosophical divide between the theoretical and experimental sciences -- and this is the best justification he could come up with for morality?! No wonder Karl Marx came out so vehemently in opposition to religion, just fifty years later!

I wonder if Kant realized how easily his argument could be used to support the opposite conclusion. The juxtaposition of: we cannot prove God exists, with: God is the only justification for morality, leads directly to a highly undesirable conclusion: namely, that a belief system in which God does not exist, and morality is irrelevant, is equally valid. At which point the obvious thing to do is to use other people's belief in God as a tool to manipulate their behavior, and get the goodies in this life instead of waiting for the next. Sure, there's some risk involved -- there might be a hell, after all -- but Christianity quite handily filled that gap with an insurance policy that says Faith is all that's needed to avoid that fate, and Good Works are unnecessary. And, to clinch the deal, you have until you're on your deathbed to attain your Faith. I wonder who originated *that* idea?

It seems clear to me that the empirical world does not function according to Kant's views on morality. There are a great many non-theists who follow a moral code, and (unfortunately) a great many theists who act primarily in their own self-interest. So I think the compelling scientific conclusion is that either Kant is wrong, or the world is full of fools. I find myself wondering who it was that substituted the concept of "Greater Good" for "Highest Good" in this argument, and when that substitution was made, since it seems to me that's one of its fundamental flaws. Does that count as a cliff-hanger? ... read on, my dear, read on ...

Critique of Religion and Philosophy, section 1, part 1, first installment

Notes on philosophers & schools of philosophy that are name-dropped in the Critique of Religion and Philosophy, by Walter Kaufmann. Most of this material is extracted from Wikipedia entries.

Section 1 (pages 1-3)

Bacon, Francis -- 1561-1626 -- Creator of Empiricism; established and popularized the scientific method and inductive reasoning. In inductive reasoning, knowledge is derived from the evidence of our senses, and our theories are not absolutely true, but rather are conditional on the evidence. Any theory may be falsified if new evidence is gathered which contradicts it (though the term theory is not properly applied to any hypothesis until it has been quite thoroughly tested.) He is also credited with bringing in the industrial age through his belief that innovation, informed by scientific knowledge, was capable of solving the problems of mankind.

Descartes, René -- 1596-1650 -- "The Father of Modern Philosophy" -- Laid the foundations for Rationalism. First champion of the use of reason (or logic) to determine truth; considered a well-informed reason to be the proper basis of morality. Used a method called methodological skepticism, which involved rejecting all hypotheses that "can be doubted" and then attempting to re-establish them. In doing so he shifted the emphasis in philosophy from "What is true?" to "Of what can I be certain?" "Cogito, ergo sum" -- "I think, therefore I am" -- was his first, and most famous, example of a self-evident truth. He felt confident that thought (specifically, conscious thought) existed, and trusted logical deduction as a method of proof, but doubted the evidence of his senses. Later in life, he put forward an ontological proof of a benevolent God, and used that proof to justify the conclusion that his senses could in fact be trusted (at least to a limited extent,) and that the external world of which his senses informed him did in fact exist, because a benevolent God would not choose to deceive him. (Yikes! Surely there must be a better reason than *that*!) Originated the concept of a dualism between a non-material mind and a material body, connected through the pineal gland as the seat of the soul (So that's where that idea comes from!) Believed in free will. Also a mathematician; the Cartesian coordinate system was named after him, and he laid the groundwork for the development of calculus. Influenced by Aristotle, Stoicism, Augustine.

Rationalism -- opposed by Empiricism. Originated in the work of Descartes; championed by Spinoza and Leibniz (all of whom were mathematicians.) The idea that reason, not evidence (i.e. logic, not experimentation) is the proper source of knowledge.

Empiricism -- opposed by Rationalism. Originated in the work of Bacon; championed by Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Rousseau, and Hume. The idea that sensory evidence, not reason, is the proper source of knowledge.

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Socrates -- circa 469-399 BC -- primarily known through the writings of Plato; his beliefs cannot be readily distinguished from Plato's. Championed the Socratic method (a.k.a. dialectics,) in which a series of questions is used to elucidate a subject. In this method, beliefs are broken down and examined, and rejected if they can be contradicted. He applied this technique primarily in the field of ethics, but it is also one of the bases of the scientific method, in which a large unknown is broken down into smaller unknowns until one arrives at a hypothesis which can be tested. Made lasting contributions to epistemology; famous quote: "What I do not know, I do not think I know," often paraphrased/intepreted as "I know that I know nothing." He believed in the innate goodness of humanity, and that people only do wrong out of ignorance.

Epistemology -- the philosophy of knowledge. What is it, how can it be acquired, to what extent is it possible to know?

Sophism -- root word means "wisdom." An ancient Greek educational system, whose members taught philosophy and rhetoric to children of the nobility. They were condemned by Socrates for withholding wisdom from those who could not afford to pay for it.

Stoicism -- "Virtue is sufficient for happiness." Destructive emotions are a result of errors in judgement; a sage (perfect person) is free from such emotions. Actions, not words, are the true measure of a man. This school of thought originated in ancient Greece, a century or so after Socrates and Plato.

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Spinoza, Baruch -- 1632-1677 -- Laid the groundwork for the Enlightenment. He rejected Descartes's mind-body dualism, and believed instead in the essential unity of all things. In his view, God is immanent in Nature, and all of reality is made up of a single substance, governed by a single set of rules. "Human experience is but a single drop of water in an infinite ocean which constitutes existence." (Cool; I love this conception of reality, but I never knew where it came from before.) He rejected free will in favor of determinism, believing that the course of history is entirely predetermined by an infinite chain of cause and effect. He imagined, however, that it is possible to achieve a more enlightened state of enslavement to our impulses, by becoming rationally aware, or conscious, of the reasons behind them (an idea that was fleshed out in Freud's psychoanalytic method.) In his view, good and evil are only meaningful in relation to a situation or set of interests: all that exists is part of the perfect underlying substance of God. Knowledge is divided into opinion, reason, and intuition; Spinoza preferred intuition.

Enlightenment -- An intellectual movement that favored reason and individualism over faith and tradition, and promoted scientific thought, skepticism, and intellectual exchange. 

Individualism -- The idea that individual rights take precedence over collective goals and interests.

Leibniz, Gottfried -- 1646-1716 -- Admired Spinoza's intellect, and was accused of appropriating some of his ideas, but was dismayed by his conclusions where they departed from Christianity. His ideas laid the foundations for logic, and anticipated analytic and linguistic philosophy. Believed that this is the best of all possible worlds God could have created, and that everything exists in harmony and for a reason. (This must be the philosophy that was caricatured in the person of Pangloss, in Candide.) Developed a theory of monads, which he conceived as individual, independent, eternal and decomposable "elementary particles" of being, which could be as simple as an atom or as complex as a human being. This was a departure both from Decartes's dualism and Spinoza's essential unity of being. He believed that reason and faith are ultimately compatible, and must be reconciled; to do so, he softened Spinoza's absolute determinism to a relative determinism in which spontaneous action is possible. God is infinite and perfect, in his view, but humans have limited understanding, and evil comes into the world through human error when we exercise our capacity for spontaneous action. Leibniz was too busy being a scientist to pull his philosophy together into a coherent body of work, so it's mostly been inferred from a collection of short articles and letters. 

------------ Okay, my brain is full. Here's a placeholder for the rest of them.....

Metaphysics

Kant (Immanuel)

Continental Philosophy

Hegel

Pragmatism

Positivism

Analysis

Existentialism

Romanticism

Plato

Aristotle

Hume (John)

Utilitarianism

Nietzche

William James

John Dewey

Linguistic Analysis

British Idealism

T.H. Green

Language Philosophy

Bradley

G.E. Moore

Bentham

Heidegger

Ack! That's it for section 1 (the first three pages)

Section 2.

Mill (John Stuart)

Russell (Bertrand)

Hobbes

Berkeley

My Dad, an Agent of Change

So what does an Agent of Change actually do?

I'm going to use my father as an example. He received a highly prestigious award, the "other" most prestigious Public Health award in the State of Minnesota, three days before he died. He had received the first most prestigious award more than thirty years previously. Both were given to him for the same achievement. He had worked first to document a problem and then to design and implement a system to address it. He had acted as an Agent of Change.

The problem he addressed was that people living in small towns and rural areas had many more adverse health outcomes than people living in the city. They, and their physicians, had no access to the cutting edge facilities, tools, and knowledge that were available in the urban research hospitals. At the time there were two independent health systems operating in the state, a network of small-town health clinics, and a network of city hospitals. The two did not communicate, and there was significant rivalry between them.

Dad spent years traveling around to every small town clinic in the state, meeting and talking to the leaders, and convincing them they would benefit from working together, instead of in competition, with the big city hospitals. At the same time he was speaking to the leaders in the hospitals, telling them about people who were dying in rural areas for lack of specialty services that were readily available in their facilities, and convincing them their services would be more effective if they worked together with small town doctors, instead of looking down on them. Eventually he convinced enough people to get a group together to discuss how they might form an alliance. When they came up with a plan he took it to the State Health Department, where he worked, and convinced them to fund it. Then back to the hospitals he went, and the small town clinics, to convince them to use the system. And he monitored -- and documented -- how it was working.

Minnesota was the first state to forge such an alliance, and the system my dad developed became a model for the rest of the nation, implemented state by state over the years between his first prestigious award and his second. Meanwhile, dad's life fell apart and then, slowly, came together again. The work (and the dissolution of his marriage) had taken a toll on him, and he developed stress-related health problems. Then a regime change took place in the state's political system, and he was reorganized out of his position as Assistant Commissioner of the State Health Department into what he considered to be a dead-end desk job. I believe he blamed himself for the reassignment: in any case, he abandoned his attempts to reform public health and turned his attention to becoming an Agent of Change for himself. He went into medical treatment, took up yoga, took up jogging, learned to cook, and transformed himself and many of his relationships in the process. But he hated his job until the day he retired.

Shortly before my dad went into hospice care, his former colleagues approached him about nominating him for that second award. He was incredulous at first, but they convinced him to let them do it. And so, many years of bitterness were healed -- at least in part -- during those final months of his life.

I suppose you might be able to map this onto the classic tale of a hero saving the world -- there is a central actor, an agent of change, in any case -- but the process was dramatically different from that action-packed adventure. There's no arch nemesis, no object of desire, no happily-ever-after, and very little dramatic tension. What I see in this story (most of which I've fabricated, or inferred, from the bits and pieces I observed and discussed with him over the years,) is a vast amount of legwork, persistence, problem solving, networking, organizing, documenting and justifying and estimating and measuring, and a heart that made him care enough to keep it up until he was done.

God is Watching You

This is a reflection on self-awareness. There's something my mind does, on a regular basis, that really bothers me. I imagine someone noticing and admiring whatever I happen to be doing in the moment. I think when I was very young, I imagined that someone to be my mother. It certainly would have been a Good Thing, at that age, if she'd been watching me, and even better if she had felt admiring as she did so. So I imagine that I must, over time, have internalized my memories of the moments in which she actually was paying attention, and admiring me. And I must have merged those memories over time into a persistent 'other' who could watch me when she wasn't around to do so.

I suspect that Christians do the same thing, but imagine that 'other' to be God. I vaguely recall that I tried to imagine it that way in the days when I was trying on Christianity for size. These days, however, my tendency is to imagine the 'other' to be a romantic partner (one that is a good bit more attentive than any romantic partner I've ever actually had.)

But as a person who's entering the second half of my life, I find it embarrassing that I still have this habit of mind. It may feel satisfying when it's operating pre-consciously, but when I become aware of it I wince: it makes me seem so childish and self-absorbed.

In reality, this 'other' that I'm imagining is simply me, another part of my own mind, that is watching me from the outside while I act. Or, more accurate but more convoluted, it's simply me -- another part of my own mind -- imagining an 'other' watching me from the outside, while the me that I usually call me is doing whatever I happen to be doing in the moment. A self-conscious me, imagining me watching me. And then yet another me notices me imagining an 'other' watching me, and feels embarrassed. It leaves me wondering how many me's there are, sharing space in this mind of mine.

Even now, as I write this self-reflection, I'm imagining a reader reading it. Probably not admiringly, because it's pretty silly, but I can always hope....

Saving the World

What does it mean to "save the world," and how would one go about it? The phrase is used a lot in the sustainability community, but in an automatic, unreflective way. Some people take it as a given that saving the world is both well-defined and possible, and debate at length whether particular technologies or policy changes will accomplish that purpose, while others rail against the idea and call it an illusion, and say instead that we all are doomed. I've even been asked to be a panelist on a discussion of just this subject -- the title is "Can Science and Technology Save The World?"

But when I reflect on the phrase itself, what immediately comes to mind is the genre of super-hero fantasies, and their adult equivalents. King Kong rampages through Manhattan, our object of desire clutched in one fist while the other shoves skyscrapers out of the way, and our hero rushes to the rescue wearing spandex tights. Or, in a more mature version of the story (I'm thinking of Avatar as an example) the Evil Corporation rampages through the sky, destroying our object of desire's home and demolishing the Primeval Forest to make room for a mining operation, and our hero rushes to the rescue wearing a virtual reality machine.

Not very realistic, but such is the stuff our metaphors are made of. We are a species that spins stories, after all, to make meaning of our lives. But what does saving the world look like in the real world, when you strip it of the trappings of fantasy? Is the concept meaningful at all? And what about that business of imagining that we might be the heroes, the ones to accomplish it?

What does it mean to save the world?

I'm going to leave this question as a placeholder for now, and expand it later.

What role might I play?

I got onto this topic, this time around, through a comment thread on Ryan Bell's Year Without God blog. Ryan mentioned that he attributes the phrase "saving the world" more to white male privilege than anything else. I understood this to mean that he perceives it as a conceit, originating in the sense of entitlement that a white male God-child (to borrow a term from Robert Bly) is raised to consider his birthright.

As a person who carries two X chromosomes, I am positioned in these fantasies as the helpless object of desire, rather than the hero. And (as you might expect) one of my instinctive reactions to the thought of saving the world is to view it as utter hubris: How could I, one person among seven billion, hope to have any impact at all, let alone save the world? That sense of absurdity immediately pushes me toward skepticism.

At the same time, I'm entirely capable of identifying with the hero instead. I, too, was raised to imagine that it is possible for one person to save the world through heroic action, even if it's a stretch to imagine myself to be that person. And I was born into the dominant race in the most privileged nation on earth, at a time when feminism was a prominent social force, which made it possible for me to study at the most prestigious Institute of Technology in the world despite my chromosomal affiliation. It's not entirely inconceivable that I might be able to influence *something*, *somewhere*, even if it's not so grandiose as to single-handedly save the world. So I'm not ready to jump immediately to the opposite extreme, and declare the whole enterprise to be doomed.

How does change actually happen in the world?

The question then becomes, how *does* change happen? What can I do, realistically, to influence the course of events in the world? Write; teach; send letters to Congress; attend rallies; donate to non-profits? Live my own life as an example? I do all these things, and imagine them to be worth doing, but they do little to satisfy my sense of urgency around this question.

In his comment, Ryan lists a collection of potentially world-changing institutions. Although he perceives it as limited, his list is wide-ranging. He lists everything from business to art to politics to religion, and more. Note that he's thinking in terms of institutions -- the collective actions of organized groups -- rather than individual heroes. That clearly moves us a step away from Batman and toward a more realistic understanding of how the real world operates. Even when change is initiated by a single individual, it's mediated by many people acting together. So Ryan is contemplating not how to be a hero, but rather how he can plug into an existing organizational structure and either influence its direction or further its goals.

Another idea about change has become popular in my surroundings, though I'm not certain where it originates. This is the idea of becoming an Agent of Change. I've seen this described as an educational goal in schools that are pioneering a sustainability curriculum. The underlying assumption is that if we, as educators, are able to both teach our students about the challenges facing us, and teach them how to become effective Change Agents, they will then go out and transform the world. So the mythology of change is transformed, in this line of reasoning, from one of a solitary hero to one of an educational institution that turns ordinary people into Agents of Change.

What other ideas are out there? What does change look like, when you strip away the metaphors and examine it directly? I suspect that we might be more effective at it if we actually understood what we were doing.  This is another placeholder.

Space to Expand

*Whew* I'm having a storm in my brain, and there's no place to put it. So I'm creating a space for my thoughts to expand. I've been wanting to start an ongoing blog for awhile, but haven't known what to call it. Minerva's Musings? (too vacuous) Working Class Intellectual? (too limiting) Some other catchy title? It's much easier to manage a blog on a specific topic for a specific time period. The amorphous quality of "ongoing" stumps me -- it means I have to find a name that somehow sums up the whole of what I think about from day to day or year to year. But right now all I really need is space. And the title, after all, is not all that important.