We have been seeing a lot of editorializing about political talk lately, most of it scolding the left for letting the right speak to the heart, not the mind. The argument here is that conventional understanding of rationality, the way the left argues, is not correct. Rationality, the new theory goes, evolved as a means to prevail in argumentation, not to discover the truth. I think there is a lot of guidance here that the left should heed in order to level the playing field. The level will be much lower than that of an old fashioned “rational” debate, but… Read More
Continue ReadingSustainability and the Serious Side of Humor
Getting back to work in Lexington after a great summer in mine is turning out to be a challenge for my attention neurons. I find it hard to get serious about this blog and the rest of my regular activities. I have begun the fall semester at my retiree’s institute of learning in retirement taking two courses: one on comedy in film; the other on contemporary American poetry. Neither requires reflecting deeply on into the dismal state of the immediate world. The film course began with Chaplin’s wonderful *Modern Times*, followed by *Duck Soup*, one of the Marx Brothers’s masterpieces.… Read More
Continue ReadingPrelude to an American Spring?
The NYTimes reported a story, “Wall Street Protests Continue, With at Least 6 Arrested,” in its blog a few days ago that reminded me of several past posts on this blog warning that the current social system was showing signs of strain. The protesters were demonstrating against “Wall Street,” as a symbol of the unhealthy dominance of corporate America–“Big Corporations.” > It was the third day of anticorporate protests that were promoted by a range of groups including AdbustersMedia Foundation, an advocacy group based in Canada, as well as a New York City group that called itself the General Assembly.… Read More
Continue ReadingLost in Transaction
Morality has several meanings. The one most often invoked is a set of rules about right and wrong; what actions are the right ones to take according to the rules of one’s society, family, business or whatever institution in which the actions are situated. Philosophers have forever struggled to ground these rules in universal terms, but without success. Short of universality, moral rules provide structure and security in these institutions. Without these rules to guide behavior, societies exhibit anarchistic patterns ruled by dominating forces. A recent [oped piece](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/opinion/if-it-feels-right.html?_r=2&ref=opinion) by David Brooks discussed a study of the place of morals in… Read More
Continue ReadingTennis and the Tea Party
Today is September 12th. The tenth anniversary of 9/11 has come and gone. Both the moving and the maudlin tributes to those who died and to those who were affected by those deaths have been quickly replaced overnight by the mostly mundane concerns of the present moment. I collected a sampling of the paragraphs that the New York Times puts under each headline on all of their topics pages. I make no apology in picking these specific items. This was the NYTimes, not the NY Post. > In a new CW series called “H8R,” athletes and entertainment stars learn that… Read More
Continue ReadingHeading Back to Lexington
We’re getting ready to go back to Lexington for the long season until Spring starts to bring back the anticipation of returning. It has been a good season with plenty of sun and warmth once the very cold and wet early weeks passed. The hurricanes brought lots of rain but little wind. We were more fortunate than many friends in central New England. All we lost was power for about a day. Our freezer made it through, but another few hours would have trashed its contents. Fishing, my constant thought during the season, was nothing less than awful. It’s little… Read More
Continue ReadingListening, Care, and Political Rants
One of the cornerstones of my approach to understanding and creating sustainability is a model of human being based on care, not need. I am trying to make sense of the political speech that we all are increasingly being bombarded with. In listening to this as in all listening, what I hear depends on me, and on how the words and sentences my ears gather in and send to my nervous system get filtered through my already present cognitive structure. Sense comes when the message triggers a response that produces a set of bodily sensations I assess as positive and… Read More
Continue ReadingMissing the Point
I’m not sure which political stance is more precarious: the know-nothings or the rationalists. Anti-science, that is the refusal to accept the findings of bona fide scientists, is a cornerstone of the leading Republican Presidential candidates. The debates among those vieing for the nomination have trashed evolution and climate science. The Democrats miss out on this early process, expecting to nominate Obama for another term. Obama epitomizes the cool, rational leader. The danger is that the problems we face are not tractable by either framing. The policies that would emerge from either are constrained by ideologies, although very different ones.… Read More
Continue ReadingOn the Merits of Fishing
Andrew Revkin has a couple of posts in his NYTimes blog that resonate strongly with me. Responding to an earlier [post](http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/the-role-of-values-in-driving-climate-disputes/) on the role of values in environmental debates, Revkin [posted](http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/on-outdoor-experience-and-environmental-values/) a part of a colloquy with Richard Louv, who writes about nature, pointing out the importance of direct experience in what Louv calls the “non-built” world, meaning nature to most of us. Louv highlights the disconnection from nature that children exhibit as a result of the lack of direct contact. As adults, the disconnect is exacerbated by the instrumental context so dominant in our modernist culture. Objects found in… Read More
Continue ReadingClosing Loops Is Almost as Old as Life Itself
The concepts behind the cradle-to-cradle brand (C2C) come straight from nature. McDonough and Braungart have brilliantly taken credit for what nature has always done. I admire their success in finding powerful language for these natural processes, but am affronted when I hear them say or imply that they invented them. The environmental media are frequent accessories in propagating this misconception. This paragraph showed up a few days ago in a [story](http://www.greenbiz.com/news/2011/08/25/how-chemical-regulations-can-boost-cradle-cradle-thinking?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Greenbuzz+%28GreenBiz+Feed%29) in GreenBiz news: McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart developed the C2C philosophy, which espouses material health, reutilization, renewable energy, water stewardship and social responsibility. Companies can have their goods… Read More
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