The Right Way to Flourish

Authenticity, as I write, refers to a mode of Being. It shows up in the source of one’s everyday actions. My interpretation, as I have described in my book, rests on the work of Martin Heidegger. Most simply, the authentic mode of Being is one where the actor owns his or her actions in the sense that they spring from some domain of care. The actor is moved to take care of matters in a domain that lacks completeness or perfection in the sense of wholeness. (The taxonomy of these domains of care developed in my book is reproduced below.)… Read More

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One of my classes at Marlboro College Graduate Center had to read an article by Manfred Max-Neef , titled “Development and Human Needs.” Max-Neef is a Chilean economist who has focused on the needs of developing and underdeveloped countries. He has developed a taxonomy of human needs that I have integrated into my own work. I want to focus on one of his key points in this post. Max-Neef argues that the tradition model for improving the human conditions by eliminating poverty within the standard economic development framework is fundamentally flawed. The proposed perspective allows for a reinterpretation of the… Read More

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I’m back tanned and rested. I know travel to warm places in the middle of the winter is hardly PC for someone with my interest in sustainability, but it did feel great. Being human involves lots of contradictions. After going through the pile of accumulated stuff on the computer and otherwise, I started to catch up with long overdue reading. In the pile I found an copy of a recent NYTimes magazine with an article that created very strange overtones. Rob Walker, the author, writes about life continuing in cyberspace after the body dies. A perfect target for one of… Read More

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My most important critic, my wife, told me that the last post was too complicated. What I was trying to say is important, so here is another try. Flourishing or whatever normative end the actors are seeking are: 1. qualities, not material things. 2. not produced like widgets by machines. 3. likely to be contested or disputed because concepts like these have no fixed constitutive basis. They are subject to varying definitions by different actors or groups of actors. Sustainability, when spoken or written without reference to flourishing, well being environmental integrity or health or a similar end state is… Read More

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I will be off-line until about March 7. We are heading south to escape the still very large piles of ice and snow that surround us here in Lexington. If I have time I’ll leave something here tonight.

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Now that you have read my post claiming that sustainability has no meaning without naming what it is you want to sustain, let me move to the next step and name the thing. Well, not quite, because what we mostly talk about is not a thing at all; it is an immaterial quality. In the case of sustainability, I choose “flourishing,” But before discussing this quality further, I want to talk about other similar qualities and point out how common they are in everyone’s value set. Here’s a few that comes quickly to the forefront: Liberty, Freedom, Love, Beauty, Security,… Read More

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I certainly hope that Congress fails to cut the budget of EPA to the point where the Agency’s capability to pass and enforce environmental regulation evaporates. I know that is the intent of the current mischief. Memories are very short in DC. Some of the newbies haven’t a clue about the need for regulation. I am not a regulatory freak; I am just as opposed to “unnecessary” regulations as these folks. Regulations are essential to maintain the efficient operation of the market. Just about every free market economist, with the exception of the early Milton Friedman, accepts the need to… Read More

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I write occasionally about my classes at the Marlboro Graduate Center where I teach in a distance-learning-based MBA program in Managing for Sustainability. I am not altogether happy with the name as I tell the students and others that you cannot “manage” sustainability; you can only attain and maintain it. Manage has too much connection to control in suggesting that one can make a machine, system, or organization behave strictly according to some model. But this MBA program has, like only a handful of others, a curriculum and vision that is open to the idea of sustainability in the way… Read More

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Following my last post, David (not Brooks) commented that Brooks misses a bigger point. I had picked up only on his argument that lower material pursuits by today’s workers could be a contribution to explanations for the jobless recovery from the Great Recession. David comments that materiality is still around; even in all the communication devices that Jared (his exemplar for this demographic cohort) covets still require resources from a world that is already overstressed. These electronic devices require scarce minerals, some coming from Congo and fueling the violence there. The important message is that consumption has already reached a… Read More

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David Brooks continues to write thoughtful op-ed pieces in the NYTimes. This time he wrote about a shift in culture over a few generations from wealth seeking to looking more at the quality of experience. Using an example of a grandfather (Sam) and his grandson (Jared) and the ways they looked at the economic life, he argues that today’s young wage earners are seeking different values. First describing life early in the twentieth century, Brooks points to Sam: Sam wasn’t the most refined person, but he understood that if he wanted to create a secure life for his family he… Read More

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