Rabbi Michael Lerner, speaking about Cindy Sheehan's resignation from leadership of the US Anti-War movement:

People tell me that they believe most of my generation "sold out" after the 60s because they wanted the material advantages of the society. But in my experience the most talented, caring, sensitive and creative people I met in movement activities, particularly those who were willing to take the extra personal risks involved in becoming leadership and spokespeople for peace and justice, left the Left not because of a desire for material success, but because they felt abused by others on the Left and in the liberal world who, while agreeing with their ideas, nevertheless found ways to be inhumane, insensititve, and put-downish to others in their movement.

Rumors were spread that claimed that the most idealistic of these people were "really" just out for power, fame or ego-gratification of some sort, and that undercut the effectiveness of these leaders because others responded to them not by listening to their ideas, but by treating them as suspect because of "what they had heard."

Few of those who spread these negative stories really bothered to get to know the people about whom they gossiped, and few ever bothered to acknowledge how destructive this behavior was. But for those who were the objects of this kind of abuse, the feeling of being undercut by people who should have been allies caused personal pain and eventual despair that anything really could ever change. A few of us hung in and remain involved, in my case at least sustained by a personal spiritual practice, but for each 60s activist still involved, there are thousands who are not, who could not stand this way of being treated, and who, when they stick their nose into the dynamics of the present movements of the first decade of the 21st century, quickly discover the same kind of dynamics operating in the Left and in the liberal world.

A relevant poem from the Open Spaces e-list:


this is an excerpt from a new work just completing, "Conscious Becoming".

Whether we like it or not,
Whether we approve of it or not,
whether it makes sense or not,
things are the only way they can be
given all that came before.

And if in the process we realize
that what we do right now
is what will come before next,
we discover our power, and dwell
in a calm sense of possibility.


Jack

--
Jack Ricchiuto

Facilitating learning & engagement with organizations & communities
Author of the recent "Mountain Paths: A Guide On Our Journey Toward Discovering Our Potential"
www.DesigningLife.com /

social change.... how does/can it happen?

how can activists stop being the dull noise in the background?
or the 'squeaky wheel' - that always complains when given an opportunity...

You know, I think there is a massive disconnect between the public image of activists and their self image.
And i don't even know which one is more accurate.

The self-image of activists is constructed by the urgency of the situations they find themselves in.
"I am holding the fort: I am holding the dam wall to stop if from bursting; I am the one who makes the difference."

This is the kind of motivational talk we give ourselves all the time:

"If i just do one more task, one more meeting, ten more leaflets...

And i clicked into that frame of mind again yesterday. I had been avoiding it for such a long time!!

I sat with Diana in the cafe, and she offloaded all her troubles and challenges onto me. She is organising BUSES to PERTH, and fundraising for poor students to get there! and whilst doing this, she is also grieving for her deceased father!!!

And i really felt the weight of all her troubles (I had to organise buses to Perth a few years ago). And it all came flooding back- the feelings of hopelessness (i was slightly incompetent)- and desperation that desirable social change would happen soon.

and all of a sudden i felt so tired.
i came home after being in the SRC for a few hours and mumbled something to my mum - and she got all worried about me, and gave a defensive speech to me, thinking i was annoyed at her. it's all so dysfunctional!!

Analysis by anecdote

What is reality? A lot of it is relational. I think we can gain a good understanding of everyday interactions through thinking about relationships.

This is through thinking through our interactions with others, and gaining insight through interpreting what this means about society, relationships and our place within these.

I am very interested in embodied knowledge: in the knowledge that people can gain through a thoughtful approach to everyday life, that prompts questions and deeper intellectual inquiry.

This knowledge becomes manifest through people skills: in being able to listen to and engage with other people in their difference and incompletion.

There is so much that is revealed by body language!! i just wish i knew how to enter into dialogue better with people about their beliefs, anxieties and values, based on their body language.

The closest intellectual discipline i have encountered that values this approach is phenomenology, a discipline within philosophy, that sees 'reality' as something dynamic, constituted through intersubjective interaction.

(this was prompted by speaking to Phil McShane, an Irish philosophy professor (who writes books about economics), who teaches by anecdote. Mum convinced us to go to his talks at which we were among the only people in the audience... he had some pretty hilarious anecdotes, made funny through his sharp observation skills. He spoke about the example of a man who invited a woman on a date, but conveys his disinterest through having three beers by the time she meets him. Thus, he is not sensitive to how she is : he does not listen to her: all he wants is to come across as relaxed and not to betray his anxieties- which is really a very self-centred approach, that cannot result in a deeper connection- rather it builds barriers!!)

and another thing...

Reflecting on his wonderful, very human (what a funny adjective) way of educating, It is a constant puzzle for me to understand why such large sections of the Left have such authoritarian educational methodologies, when for many decades a major project of liberatory people has been to create liberatory methodologies, such as this man. I guess some people think that commitment and discipline precludes the possibility of non-authoritarian educational practices.

Militarism and government policy

here is an ad for recruiting British Aerospace employees from The Australian newspaper that says a thousand words!

It is within the domain of military that the parameters of foreign policy debates are defined. You can see this working by comparing different policymaking institutions in the US. The US congress is underfunded. It only has around 600 employees, who deliberate on policy. The place where the bulk of policy deliberation takes place is the Pentagon, with tens of thousands (i think 30 000 employees).

BAE (British Aerospace) is one of the largest military companies in the world. It influences global geopolitics through providing military capability that supposedly stimulates economies, in a way that is beneficial to the broader big business corporate sector.

The ad depicted above implies an even more concerning dimension of the above situation of underfunded policy development: that policy innovation in 'determining the future' is in several ways 'outsourced' to military companies themselves.

US government representatives often make it clear to companies that their operation is on their behalf. For example, the Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen was quoted in the magazine Covert Action as saying "The prosperity that some companies such as Microsoft enjoy could not occur without having the strong military that we have". (see Anup Shah's article).

Noam Chomsky has a lot to say about this kind of thing, explaining the relative benefit of social spending and military spending to corporate and political elites: here in the interview on morality and humanism, Chomsky talks about war as the preferred means of stimulating economies, rather than public spending:

Social spending vs. military spending. 1998 (you can see that it's dated by the hypothetical talk of war!!!!!!!!!)

TOR WENNERBERG: Given the risk that the world economy might spin out of control completely now, and considering that last time, in the 1930s, it took a world war to overcome the depression, how worried do you think we ought to be about the prospect of war?

NOAM CHOMSKY: "The prospect of war is much less, but for other reasons. Europe is, in modern history at least, the most violent part of the world. One of the reasons why Europe conquered the world is that it created a culture of war, based on centuries of mutual massacre and slaughter -- both a culture of war and a technology of war. But that largely came to an end in 1945, and for a very simple reason. Everybody could understand that the next time we play this game, we're all dead. The techniques of destruction had reached such a point that war is simply not an option for rich and powerful countries. If they try it once more, that's the end. Now, somebody may be irrational enough to do it anyway, but within anything remotely like the domain of rationality, where you can at least begin to talk about prediction, there isn't going to be war among the powerful countries. And this is understood.
"For example, right in the middle of the Gulf War, somebody at the Pentagon leaked to the press -- which buried it -- an interesting document. When any new administration comes in, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency and so on give them a kind of intelligence assessment of the world, a strategic analysis of the world. Someone leaked part of the Bush administration strategic analysis (this would have been from early 1989), and one part of it dealt with war. Here is approximately what it said:
"In case of a conflict with "much weaker enemies" (implication: that's the only kind of conflict we're ever going to get into), we must defeat them "decisively and rapidly," because anything else will "undercut political support."
So no more bombing of South Vietnam for fifteen years, and certainly we don't go to war with any major power.
This was well before the Gulf War. In fact at that time Saddam Hussein was a great friend, so he wasn't contemplated as a target -- but that's what you can do. You can invade Panama, kidnap Noriega and get out in a couple of weeks, bomb the Sudan, bomb Libya, bomb Iraq from a distance, very fast, and don't get involved in more than a few days of fighting. That kind of thing you can do with a much weaker enemy, rapidly and decisively, but nothing else. So as long as you're within the domain of rationality, the chances of war involving major powers I think, are extremely slight, unless they're fighting a much weaker enemy. And even that's not so simple anymore.

"But to return to your other point, what actually overcame the depression was not so much the war as the semi-command economies. The British economy started to pick up in the late 1930s, when it semi-deliberalized and became a kind of semi-command economy. The U.S. was barely at war. But the wartime economy not only overcame the depression, it flourished as industrial production tripled, and so on. But that was a semi-command economy, highly coordinated from Washington, run by corporate executives, with wage and price controls, industrial policy deciding what would be produced, and so on. And that worked like a charm. Just like it worked in England -- England in fact out-produced Germany and came close to the United States.

"So the mobilization of the economy did overcome the depression. The war was taking place and that was the justification for it, but the war was not what overcame the depression in itself. This was pretty well understood. The consensus among American economists and businessmen and others in the mid-forties was that with the government-coordinated economy declining, after the war, they were going to go right back to the depression due to market failures. And so there was an interesting discussion in the late forties, quite open. It's on record in the business press, and I've quoted from it at times. There was recognition that we've got to do something to get the government to stimulate the economy again or else we'll go back to the depression.

"It was understood -- you didn't have to read Keynes to figure it out -- that you could stimulate the economy in a lot of different ways. You could stimulate it with social spending, or you could stimulate it with military spending. There was a perfectly sane discussion, in Business Week actually, of which to do. And the conclusion was: social spending is not a good idea, and military spending is a great idea. The reason is that social spending has a downside. Yes, it can pump the economy. But it also has a democratizing effect, because people are interested in social spending; they want to know where you're going to build a hospital or a road or something, and they become involved. They have no opinions about what jet plane to build. Social spending also gives people more security and better conditions, better education, more means of communicating, more ability to withstand threats of unemployment. It makes people, workers, more powerful, that is, and thereby better able to win higher wages and better conditions.

"So social spending has a democratizing, redistributive effect, and it's not a direct gift to corporations. Military spending, however, has none of those defects; it's non-democratizing -- on the contrary, people are frightened and they shelter under the umbrella of power. And while it aids corporations it doesn't directly improve the lot of workers; it rather tends to reinforce workplace discipline. So it's a direct gift to corporations. It redistributes upward. And it's easy to sell if you terrify the public. So what emerges is a Pentagon-based industrial policy program, one which is now buckling a bit, due to the excessive liberalizing of capital movements, and thus, one which has to be repaired a bit, so that it once again benefits the rich, as intended."

Ethical dimensions of climate change