Everyday more bad news. Deaths around the world have reached into the hundreds of thousands. Economies have shut down, leaving millions unemployed. I was born in the middle of the Great Depression, and certainly never expected to see anything like that again. But here it is. One might ask of anything good can come out of this crisis. The best answer to that question that I read about is some return to normalcy. But when and how close to the old status quo is a big unknown. Fewer people are asking a related question, “Why should we return to the… Read More
Continue ReadingA Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Waste.
Not since WWII has there been such an opportunity for self-examination and behavioral change. The COVID-19 pandemic poses the same unsettling force to societies around the Globe, with one big difference, the enemy is not some other nation, but an invisible, still mysterious force. If the US is an example of what is being done in other nations, the immediate responses have been to isolate individuals to slow down the spread of the virus and pump money into the economy to soften the blow, caused by the first step. As I write this, the number of cases of COVID-19… Read More
Continue ReadingOne More Uncanny Encounter
As I was preparing to update a syllabus for a course I was considering to give at my learning-in-retirement “school,” I rediscovered a paper I had written about 10 years ago. It had the academic title of, “Reductionism and Its Cultural Fallout.” It was a polished version of a talk I had given at a conference. Most of it was taken from my first book, Sustainability by Design: A Subversive Strategy for Transforming our Consumer Culture. It was a pretty good paper, but the point of this post is that I noticed a table comparing two sets of “ideas,” which… Read More
Continue ReadingSea Change or Just a Ripple
On August 19, 2019, the Business Roundtable made waves in the business press and the media in general with this press release. The key paragraph reads: Since 1978, Business Roundtable has periodically issued Principles of Corporate Governance. Each version of the document issued since 1997 has endorsed principles of shareholder primacy – that corporations exist principally to serve shareholders. With today’s announcement, the new Statement supersedes previous statements and outlines a modern standard for corporate responsibility. The full “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation” is quoted below. Americans deserve an economy that allows each person to succeed through hard… Read More
Continue ReadingRichard Rorty and the Right-brain
I am reading some of Richard Rorty’s work this summer. I was moved to do this by a critical paper that examined his political program. The paper, by Joshua Forstenzer, is titled, “Something Has Cracked: Post-truth Politics and Richard Rorty’s Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism.” The paper in available online from the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center’s occasional papers. The title comes from an extract from Rorty’s 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, Forstenzer includes as a prefatory note. I have filled out the quote (underlined) to reflect the full impact of the original. Edward Luttwak for example, has suggested the fascism may… Read More
Continue ReadingHow to Use “Sustainability” Properly
I am patiently awaiting the arrival of my new book in August. It develops the idea of flourishing far beyond my previous works and ties both the sources of our present unsustainable state and pathways to escape from future disasters to an understanding of the way the human brain works. I do not plan to write many posts elaborating these ideas until the book is out. But I was reminded that I have two other books that have led up to the story I am now telling by seeing a quote from the first, Sustainability by Design: A Subversive Strategy… Read More
Continue ReadingFinding and Making the Right Choice
We, in the US and other so-called modern, capitalistic, market-driven nations, need a different framework for the way we discuss and decide our political choices. The traditional polarization between left and right, or liberal and conservative, or some other pair no longer enables anyone to find and examine the real issues facing everyone on the Planet. Any conversation that takes economic growth for granted, whether implicit or explicit, creates a blindness that will make whatever choices are made eventually exacerbate the problems for which the choices are believed to be the solution. The planet cannot stand any additional material growth… Read More
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