Bono received the TED Prize in 2005, and this year he returned to offer an update on the project to eradicate extreme poverty. This blog discusses his presentation - there is no video yet.

Eradicating extreme poverty doesn’t have to be a dream: Bono at TED2013

Posted by: Helen Walters
February 26, 2013

In 2005, the TED Prize was given to Bono. Eight years later, Chris Anderson asks, has there been any progress? The U2 frontman is here to tell us. But first, some good-natured Anglo-Irish joshing. “Chris Anderson asked me if I could put the last 25 years of of anti-poverty campaigning into 10 minutes. That’s an Englishman asking an Irishman to be succinct?” Bono is incredulous; the audience seems happy to laugh at both nations.

Bono’s passion: countering what Nelson Mandela refers to as “that most awful offense to humanity, extreme poverty.” His weapon of choice? Facts. “Forget the rock opera, forget the bombast, my usual tricks,” he says. “The only thing singing today will be the facts. I have truly embraced my inner nerd. Exit the rock star.” He removes his trademark sunglasses. “Enter the evidence-based activist.” He puts his glasses back on upside down. Bono is now a “factivist.” And he has the infographic-filled slides to prove it.

Here’s the surprise: there’s a lot of good news. Since 2000, eight million AIDS patients have been receiving retroviral drugs; malaria deaths have been cut by 75%; child mortality rate of kids under 5 is down by 2.65 million deaths a day. “Let’s think about that,” he says. “Have you read anything, anywhere in the last week that is as remotely as important as that number? It’s great news, and it drives me nuts most people don’t know this.”

More stats. Bono clearly has good graphic designers on staff. The number of people living in soul-crushing poverty declined from 43% in 1990 to 33% in 2000 to 21% by 2010. The audience approves and yet, he acknowledges, the rate is still too high. “If you live on less than $1.25 a day, this is not just data. This is everything. If you’re a parent who wants the best for your kids, and I am, this rapid transition is a route out of despair and into hope.”

Can the trajectory continue? Bono has tracked it forward. “If the trajectory continues, look at the number of people living on a dollar a day by 2030: zero. That can’t be true, can it?” But it is. The Zero Zone is possible, even for troubled countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Think of the benefits if this actually transpires, Bono challenges. For one thing, he jokes, “you won’t have to listen to an insufferable jumped-up Jesus like myself.” And 2030 is just around the corner. “That’s only three Rolling Stones farewell concerts away.” The audience laughs, even more when the singer adds drily, “I’m hoping. They make us look really young.”

Here’s the rub. We can’t take any of this for granted. “The opportunity is real, but so is the jeopardy. We can’t get this done until we accept that we can get this done. Inertia is how we screw this up. Momentum is how we bend the arc of history down towards zero.” But fighting those who would stand in the way of positive progress is a responsibility for everyone. Fighting corruption is easier by means of transparency and openness, and it’s critical that we all play our part. He cites a report from Uganda, where millennials are reporting and exposing government corruption by means of 2G phones and SMS messages.

“Once you have these tools, you can’t not use them. You can’t delete this data from your brain,” says Bono. “You can delete the cliché image from your brain of supplicant impoverished people not having control of their own lives. That’s not true.”

So can everyone here at TED also take up the cause, become so-called “factivists”? Bono’s on the hard sell. “We’re here to try and infect you with this virtuous database virus, the one we call factivism. It’s not going to kill you; it could save countless lives. We in the One campaign would love you to be contagious, spread it, share it, pass it on. By doing so, you will join us and countless others in what I truly believe is the greatest adventure ever taken. The ever-demanding journey of equality. Could we answer that clarion call of Nelson Mandela with science, reason, facts and dare I say it, emotion?”

In conclusion, Bono quotes Wael Ghonim, the former Googler who used social networking and technology tools with such effect in the Egyptian uprising. “I have his words tattooed on my brain,” says Bono. “We’re going to win because we don’t understand politics. We’re going to win because we don’t play their dirty games. We’re going to win because we don’t have an agenda. We’re going to win because the tears that comes from our eyes actually come from our hearts. We’re going to win because we have dreams. We’re going to win because we are willing to stand up for our dreams.”

“He’s right,” Bono reminds us. “We’ll win if we work together as one, the people. The power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power.” And, for the man who earlier confessed that applause was his weakness, a standing ovation.

Awareness-in-Action: Daniel O'Connor - A Critical Integralism for the Challenges of Our Time

Daniel O'Connor is the mastermind behind Catallaxis! - one of the first generation of integral blogs still around on the web. In his most recent post, A Critical Integralism for the Challenges of Our Time, Daniel (also of Integral Ventures, LLC)is making available a free, creative commons licensed, e-book on critical integral theory.

Awareness-in-Action: A Critical Integralism for the Challenges of Our Time

Daniel O'Connor | Integral Ventures, LLC
This work represents an inquiry into the essential nature of human action in all its forms and fields. By human action, I mean to suggest a rather comprehensive scope of inquiry into anything and everything people do, regardless of how conscious or subconscious, purposeful or spontaneous, independent or interdependent these actions might seem. The myriad forms of this human doing—from writing, speaking, and conversing to giving, taking, and trading, to working, playing, and creating to learning, developing, and evolving—serve as creative expressions of, and logical complements to, the equally comprehensive notion of human being. In short, human action encompasses what we do, how we do, why we do, and ultimately who we are as we do.

My approach to the philosophy of human action, or praxiology, might be best described as a process of integral reconstruction. As a reconstruction, my intent is to clarify and formalize the tacit knowledge and intuitive competencies that must, logically, be presupposed by all people in order for them to act in any situation. To whatever extent such universal presuppositions might be validated, these would, logically, serve as necessary premises for all subsequent inquiries into, and hypotheses about, the many fields of human action, from economics and business to politics and governance to sociology and social work to journalism and activism. Thus, my focus of inquiry is that intuitive knowledge without which people could not act as they really do and, correspondingly, those essential premises without which we cannot know what human action really is.

As a distinctively integral reconstruction, my intent is to emphasize those essential premises necessary for a philosophy of human action that honors the full potential and variety of the human experience, which necessarily includes our experience of the worlds beyond humanity. Just as the adjective integral offers us two complementary definitions—comprehensive or essential—so too does the process of integral theorizing offer us two complementary approaches with two corresponding results.  In contrast to a comprehensivist approach to integralism characterized by the construction of an inspiring, encyclopedic meta-narrative, I prefer an essentialist approach characterized by the distillation of a compelling, universal meta-paradigm. Nevertheless, by focusing deeply on the quintessential features of all human action in real-world contexts, I propose in this work the broad contours of a meta-paradigm—an integral aperspectival-apractical meta-paradigm, to be precise—with the potential to enact a seemingly infinite plurality of differential perspectival-practical narratives at least suggestive of a meta-narrative, the specifics of which are by definition beyond anyone’s sole capacity to articulate. It is therefore so much the better that I, at least, won’t be enticed to try.

Therefore, this work actually represents two interdependent lines of inquiry into the possibility of an integral philosophy of human action and an action-oriented integral philosophy. In pursuing these lines of inquiry, I gratefully incorporate and, where necessary, reformulate the extraordinary insights of three primary theorists—Chris Argyris, Jürgen Habermas, and Ken Wilber—whose collective body of work already contains much of the content needed for such a reconstructive inquiry. Having engaged with this collective body of work since 1994, both in theory and in practice, I bring to this effort a commitment to help fulfill what I see as the latent potential in each of their brilliant philosophical programs. Granted, in my preliminary effort to articulate a form of integralism that is as realistic as it is idealistic and as fallibilistic as it is humanistic, with a pragmatic focus on the way people can, should, and already do act in the world, my contribution may be little more than a clarification of my own novel vision of the nexus between Argyris’s action science, Habermas’s critical theory, and Wilber’s integral theory. Nevertheless, the logic of this vision and its demonstrated capacity to reconstruct established views within these fields should justify the effort required of you, the reader. More to the point, the real promise of the critical integral praxis I call Awareness-in-Action is in its potential to define the common core of all the various forms and fields of human action, so that those of us concerned with such matters might learn how to respond more effectively to the interdependent economic, political, social, and ecological challenges of our time.

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Awareness-in-Action

This copyrighted work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Mind and Life XXIII - Session 9: The Skillful Means of Activism

Here is session 9 - The Skillful Means of Activism - of "Ecology, Ethics and Interdependence", the Mind and Life XXIII conference with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in dialogue with contemplative scholars, activists and ecological scientists who discuss the interconnection between individual choices and environmental consequences. The conference was held at His Holiness's office in Dharamsala, India, from October 17-21, 2011.

#OWS Teach-In with Douglas Rushkoff

Rushkoff seems to be transforming from a popular author to an activism leader - a Gen X Ralph Nader, only smarter and more aware. Glad to see it, we need someone like him.

OWS Teach-In with Douglas Rushkoff
by Douglas Rushkoff



 OWS Teach-In with Douglas Rushkoff from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

Footage by the Life Inc. media crew.

Slavoj Zizek Interviewed (sort of) by Charlie Rose

Charlie Rose did the right thing for the most part and allowed the Slavoj Zizek to engage in his usual monologue - it would have been better if Rose would have simply allowed him to go - the few times Rose interrupted seemed like an effort to show his own intelligence or knowledge, which is always a bad thing in an interviewer.

Slovenian philosopher and critical theorist Slavoj Zizek on Occupy Wall Street, capitalism, Western culture and global politics - [Click the image above to go to the interview at Charlie Rose's site]

Slavoj Žižek - Occupy first. Demands come later

In The Guardian UK, philosopher and social critic Slavoj Žižek offers some advice for the #occupywallstreet movement - he advises them (us) not to fall into some quick definition of purpose, citing Bill Clinton's suggestion that the #OWS movement get behind Obama's job plan so as to be for something rather than against the system as it currently operates.

He also addresses and refutes the conservative attacks on the protesters as un-American, as violent, as communists, as dreamers, as losers - all simple-minded ways to discredit the sense of fairness that gave rise to the cause.

And returning to the main point, they should also be wary of false friends who will try to dilute their motives and energy:

What one should resist at this stage is precisely such a quick translation of the energy of the protest into a set of concrete pragmatic demands. Yes, the protests did create a vacuum – a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and time is needed to fill this vacuum in a proper way, as it is a pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly new.

Here is the whole article:

Occupy first. Demands come later

Critics say the Occupy cause is nebulous. Protesters will need to address what comes next – but beware a debate on enemy turf

• 
• • Slavoj Žižek
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 26 October 2011 15.15 EDT
  • 
    

'The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end.' Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images

What to do after the occupations of Wall Street and beyond – the protests that started far away, reached the centre and are now, reinforced, rolling back around the world? One of the great dangers the protesters face is that they will fall in love with themselves. In a San Francisco echo of the Wall Street occupation this week, a man addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate as if it was a happening in the hippy style of the 60s: "They are asking us what is our programme. We have no programme. We are here to have a good time."

Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken; we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after abandoning the so-called "class struggle essentialism" for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist, and other struggles, capitalism is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem. So the first lesson to be taken is: do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not "Main Street, not Wall Street", but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions – not questions of what we do not want, but about what we do want. What social organisation can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders do we need? What organs, including those of control and repression? The 20th-century alternatives obviously did not work.

While it is thrilling to enjoy the pleasures of the "horizontal organisation" of protesting crowds with egalitarian solidarity and open-ended free debates, we should also bear in mind what GK Chesterton wrote: "Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid." This holds also for politics in times of uncertainty: the open-ended debates will have to coalesce not only in some new master-signifiers, but also in concrete answers to the old Leninist question, "What is to be done?"

The direct conservative attacks are easy to answer. Are the protests un-American? When conservative fundamentalists claim that America is a Christian nation, one should remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. It is the protesters who are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street pagans worship false idols.

Are the protesters violent? True, their very language may appear violent (occupation, and so on), but they are violent only in the sense in which Mahatma Gandhi was violent. They are violent because they want to put a stop to the way things are – but what is this violence compared with the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?

They are called losers – but are the true losers not there on Wall Street, who received massive bailouts? They are called socialists – but in the US, there already is socialism for the rich. They are accused of not respecting private property – but the Wall Street speculations that led to the crash of 2008 erased more hard-earned private property than if the protesters were to be destroying it night and day – just think of thousands of homes repossessed.

They are not communists, if communism means the system that deservedly collapsed in 1990 – and remember that communists who are still in power run today the most ruthless capitalism. The success of Chinese communist-run capitalism is an ominous sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce. The only sense in which the protesters are communists is that they care for the commons – the commons of nature, of knowledge – which are threatened by the system.

They are dismissed as dreamers, but the true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are, just with some cosmetic changes. They are not dreamers; they are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare. They are not destroying anything, but reacting to how the system is gradually destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice but goes on walking; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. The protesters are just reminding those in power to look down.

This is the easy part. The protesters should beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support them but are already working hard to dilute the protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, those in power will try to make the protests into a harmless moralistic gesture.

In boxing, to clinch means to hold the opponent's body with one or both arms in order to prevent or hinder punches. Bill Clinton's reaction to the Wall Street protests is a perfect case of political clinching. Clinton thinks that the protests are "on balance … a positive thing", but he is worried about the nebulousness of the cause: "They need to be for something specific, and not just against something because if you're just against something, someone else will fill the vacuum you create," he said. Clinton suggested the protesters get behind President Obama's jobs plan, which he claimed would create "a couple million jobs in the next year and a half".

What one should resist at this stage is precisely such a quick translation of the energy of the protest into a set of concrete pragmatic demands. Yes, the protests did create a vacuum – a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and time is needed to fill this vacuum in a proper way, as it is a pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly new.

The reason protesters went out is that they had enough of the world where recycling your Coke cans, giving a couple of dollars to charity, or buying a cappuccino where 1% goes towards developing world troubles, is enough to make them feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies started to outsource even our dating, they saw that for a long time they were also allowing their political engagements to be outsourced – and they want them back.

The art of politics is also to insist on a particular demand that, while thoroughly "realist", disturbs the very core of the hegemonic ideology: ie one that, while definitely feasible and legitimate, is de facto impossible (universal healthcare in the US was such a case). In the aftermath of the Wall Street protests, we should definitely mobilise people to make such demands – however, it is no less important to simultaneously remain subtracted from the pragmatic field of negotiations and "realist" proposals.

What one should always bear in mind is that any debate here and now necessarily remains a debate on enemy's turf; time is needed to deploy the new content. All we say now can be taken from us – everything except our silence. This silence, this rejection of dialogue, of all forms of clinching, is our "terror", ominous and threatening as it should be.

WTF Is Going on in Oakland? Police Violence at #occupyoakland

An Iraq war veteran who survived two tours of duty in combat has been seriously injured by a police projectile (likely a teargas canister) that fractured his skull. He is in critical condition and under sedation as doctors monitor the damage he has suffered.

The situation around the #occupyoakland protests have gotten WAY out of hand - the police seem to be overreacting in very violent ways.

Democracy Now! has the coverage.

Iraq War Vet Hospitalized with Fractured Skull After Being Shot by Police at Occupy Oakland Protest

Thousands of people reclaimed the Occupy Oakland encampment in front of City Hall Wednesday after police dispersed them twice on Tuesday — first in a pre-dawn raid on the camp and 12 hours later at night when protesters attempted to retake the park — using beanbag projectiles and tear gas. Many protesters expressed outrage over of the injury of Oakland protester Scott Olsen, a 24-year-old Iraq War veteran whose skull was fractured by a projectile fired by police Tuesday night. He is hospitalized in critical condition and is reportedly under sedation by doctors monitoring his injury. We speak to Jesse Palmer, an Occupy Oakland protester who helped move Olsen to safety, and to Aaron Hinde, a close friend of Scott Olsen and a fellow member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. One of Olsen’s other friends, Adele Carpenter, told Reuters, "The irony is not lost on anyone here that this is someone who survived two tours in Iraq and is now seriously injured by the Oakland police force." Aaron Hinde talked about why Olsen joined the Occupy Oakland movement: "He was a very motivated and dedicated individual. And he believed in the Occupy movement, because it’s very obvious what’s happening in this country, especially as veterans. We’ve had our eyes opened by serving and going to war overseas." [includes rush transcript]

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Guests:

Aaron Hinde, close friend of Scott Olsen and a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. He has slept at Occupy San Francisco for several nights.

Jesse Palmer, participant in Occupy Oakland since its inception. He helped carry Scott Olsen to safety after a police projectile hit Olsen in the head.

Related stories

• Police Fire Tear Gas, Flash Grenades as Protesters Try to Retake Occupy Oakland After Predawn Raid
• Dozens Arrested at Occupy Oakland as Police Raid Encampment, Tear Down Tents
• Dr. Cornel West: "We Are in a Magnificent Moment of Democratic Awakening"
• Freed U.S. Hikers Speak at Occupy Oakland, Express Support for California Prisoners on Hunger Strike
• Times Square Taken Over as Occupy Wall Street Enters Second Month, Hundreds Arrested Across Country

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
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RELATED LINKS

• See video documenting Scott Olsen being injured at Occupy Oakland by police force (1 of 2)
• See video documenting Scott Olsen being injured at Occupy Oakland by police force (2 of 2)
• See Democracy Now!’s Archive of Video Reports on Occupy Wall Street and the Global Occupy Movement
• Occupy Oakland

AMY GOODMAN: As we broadcast, protesters with the Occupy San Francisco encampment are preparing for possible eviction by police, but reports just now coming in say police may have called off their raid.


Meanwhile, across the Bay last night, thousands of people reclaimed the Occupy Oakland encampment in front of City Hall after police dispersed them Tuesday night using bean bag projectiles and tear gas. At last night’s general assembly, the Occupy Oakland encampment voted almost unanimously to call for a general strike on November 2nd, saying, quote, "Instead of workers going to work and students going to school, the people will converge on downtown Oakland to shut down the city. All banks and corporations should close down for the day or we will march on them," the statement said.


Also in Oakland, an independent police review body will examine the clashes between riot police and protesters Tuesday that left an Iraq war veteran in critical condition. Scott Olsen is a 24-year-old Iraq war vet. He was struck in the head by a police projectile. Video footage posted to YouTube shows a man identified as Scott Olsen lying motionless and unresponsive in front of a police line after apparently having been hit by a tear gas canister. Several protesters gather around him, but a police officer can be seen throwing a device close to the group which then explodes with a bright flash and loud bang, dispersing the protesters. The video then cuts to footage of protesters carrying Olsen away as blood streams down his face.


A spokesperson for Highland Hospital in East Oakland has confirmed that Scott Olsen remains in critical condition. He suffered from a fractured skull and brain swelling. One of Olsen’s friends, Adele Carpenter, told Reuters, "The irony is not lost on anyone here that this is someone who survived two tours in Iraq and is now seriously injured by the Oakland police force." Olsen served in Iraq from 2006 to 2010 with the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment.


Acting Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan told a news conference his department is investigating the injury to Olsen as a "level one" incident, the highest level for an internal police inquiry. He declined to confirm whether Olsen was struck with a projectile fired by police.


Well, for more on what happened to Iraq war veteran, to Marine Corporal Scott Olsen, and the broader role that veterans play in the Occupy movement across the country, we’re joined by two guests in Berkeley, California. Aaron Hinde is a close friend of Scott Olsen, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, as Scott was. He has slept at Occupy San Francisco for several nights. We’re also joined by Jesse Palmer, who participated in Occupy Oakland since its inception. He helped carry Scott to safety after the police projectile hit Olsen in the head. Aaron Hinde, Jesse Palmer are joining us from the studios of the University of California, Berkeley School of Journalism.


We welcome you both to Democracy Now! I want to begin with Jesse, because you were on the scene on Tuesday night. Can you describe what time it was that Scott was hit and exactly what happened when you came upon him?

 Read the whole transcript.

Duane Elgin - Occupy the Airwaves!

Duane Elgin adds his perspective to the #occupy movement, arguing that we - the citizens - need to consider the power of televised media to shape ideas. Here is one of his main points:

The future of our civilization depends upon employing the mainstream media -- our primary public space -- to cultivate an informed and engaged public. It is now our responsibility as citizens in the communications era to stand up for the conversation of democracy, including those we disagree with.

We are so losing this battle. Mainstream media is the domain vacuous talking heads pontificating on the manufactured crisis of the day, from worthless Congressional battles or elections to which movie star is sleeping with some other movie star/musician/athlete.

As the message at the top of this post makes clear, the mainstream media has no desire to tell us the truth or to keep us informed - rather, they rely on keeping us numb, sleep-walking, and ignorant.

Occupy the Airwaves!

Duane Elgin, Speaker, Author, Non-Partisan Media Activist

"Occupy Wall St." is a spontaneous uprising of citizens. It is both a protest against corruption, poverty, homelessness, and greed as well as a call for citizens to come together to build a better world. For many, this is a '100 percent movement' that recognizes we are all in this time of change together and no one can be excluded from a respectful contribution to the conversation of democracy.


Emphasizing that the 'Occupy' gatherings are an attempt to reclaim citizen participation in our democracy, the Los Angeles City council passed a resolution that, "...the 'Occupy' demonstrations are a rapidly growing movement with the shared goal of urging U.S. citizens to peaceably assemble and occupy public space in order to create a shared dialogue by which to address the problems and generate solutions..." Former president Bill Clinton commented: "The Occupy Wall Street crowd basically is saying, '...There's something wrong with this country. This is not working for me. So I think it can be a good positive debate."


How can citizens express their frustrations, disappointments, and anger, as well as a sense of promise and untapped potential? Virtually all of the issues facing our democracy issues are fundamentally communication issues. Not surprisingly, at the foundation of much unrest and frustration is the inability of citizens to communicate, both with one another and with our elected leaders.


Power in a democracy is the power to communicate and mass communication in the United States and most of the world is dominated by one medium -- television. To put the power of television in perspective, the average person in the United States watches roughly 4 hours per day.

Read the whole post.

Duane Elgin is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and non-partisan media activist. Previous blogs on media themes include, "Take Back the Airwaves," "The Last Taboo on Television," and "Can Television Help Awaken a Healthy World?" His website is: http://www.DuaneElgin.com

TED - It’s World Peace Day! What will you do this Sept. 21?

From the good folks at TED Talks.

It’s World Peace Day! What will you do this Sept. 21?

September 21, 2011, is World Peace Day — dreamed up by Jeremy Gilley, as he explains above, as a day when combatants take a day off. It seems a simple, crazy idea, but on this past World Peace Day, in regions of Afghanistan, more than a million children were able to be immunized during the lull in fighting.

Today, Gilley is kicking off a yearlong runup to Global Truce 2012 — “a day of ceasefire and nonviolence observed by all sectors of society globally.” Not just countries at war, but neighborhoods, communities. Sign up to show your support.

Stewart Brand - "Look At the World Through the Eyes Of A Fool"

This is a cool interview with Stewart Brand from The European - if nothing else, you gotta love the title of the interview. Stewart Brand is the founder of the Long Now Foundation, the Global Business Network, and of the internet platform The WELL. From 1968 to 1998, he was editor of the Whole Earth Catalogue. Brand was the original founder of the Haight-Ashbury Trip Festival and, in the 1960s, persuaded NASA to release the first pictures of the whole earth from space after studying biology at Stanford University and serving in the US Army.

I disagree with Brand on nuclear power and some other things, but it's an interesting article with an interesting man.

"Look At the World Through the Eyes Of A Fool"

by Stewart Brand — 30.05.2011

Stewart Brand has been active in politics since the 1960s, when he persuaded NASA to release the first images of the earth from space. The biologist, author and environmental activist sat down with Martin Eiermann to talk about the importance of discoursive frames, nuclear power and the benefits of technological innovation.

The European: You are currently involved in the Rosetta Project which aims to preserve the world’s dying languages. Has society become too eager to discard things and ideas?
Brand: Interesting, I never thought of it that way. I think we have become too shortsighted. Everything is moving faster, everybody is multitasking. Investments are made for short-term returns, democracies run on short-term election cycles. Speedy progress is great, but it is also chancy. When everything is moving fast, the future looks like it is next week. But what really counts is the future ten or hundred years from now. And we should also bear in mind that the history that matters is not only yesterday’s news but events from a decade or a century or a millennium ago. To balance that, we want to look at the long term: the last ten thousand years, the next ten thousand years.

The European: A big picture approach to issues like climate change and cultural transformation?
Brand: We’re bearing in mind the big picture. Let me give you an example of how that approach might play out: When NASA released the first photographs of the earth from space in the 1960s, people changed their frame of reference. We began to think differently about the earth, about our environment, about humanity.

The European: Did the idea of the “Blue Planet” even exist before those photographs became public?
Brand: There had been many drawings of the earth from space, just like people made images of cities from above before we had hot-air balloons. But they were all wrong. Usually, images of the earth did not include any clouds, no weather, no climate. They also tended to neglect the shadow that much of the earth is usually in. From most angles, the earth appears as a crescent. Only when the sun is directly behind you would you see the whole planet brightly illuminated against the blackness of space.

The European: So the arguments we make about politics or about the environment are very intimately tied to our perceptions, and to our emotional reactions to those perceptions?
Brand: I think there is always the question of framing: How do we look at things? The first photos of the earth changed the frame. We began to talk more about “humans” and less about Germans or Americans. We began to start talking about the planet as a whole. That, in a way, gave us the ability to think about global problems like climate change. We did not have the idea of a global solution before. Climate Change is a century-sized problem. Never before has humanity tried to tackle something on such a long temporal scale. Both the large scale and the long timeframe have to be taken seriously.

The European: Do you belief in something like a human identity?
Brand: In a way, the ideal breakthrough would be to discover alien life. That would give us a clear sense of our humanity. But even without that, we have done pretty well in stepping outside our usual frame of reference and looking at the planet and at the human race from the outside. That’s nice. I would prefer if we didn’t encounter alien intelligence for a while.

The European: One framing issue that comes to mind is the question of the extinction of species. The current rate of extinction is many times higher than the evolutionary average. Yet few people would probably argue that we are living through a critical period of the earth’s history.
Brand: Geologists are making very persuasive arguments about the effects that our behavior has on the scale of tens of thousands of years. We have become part of the geological record. As a biologist, I would say that the rate of extinction is problematic but not as bad as we used to think. But what I am more interested in is the recreation of extinct species using DNA samples. If we can bring back the mammoth, it could replace the Tundra with the old Mammoth grasslands, which fixes much more carbon.

The European: What is the value of reviving extinct species? Evolution progresses, species die and new ones arise. Why do you want to tamper with that process?
Brand: It sends a message of hope. We can rectify past mistakes, we can undo damage and harm. It would give people the sense that if we can fix something as profound as the extinction of a species, what else could we do for biodiversity? Instead of just complaining about problems, we would move towards fixing problems.

There is much more - read the whole post.

Tags: Look At the World Through the Eyes Of A Fool, Stewart Brand, The European, activist, 1960s, NASA, first images, earth, from space, biologist, author, environmental activist, Martin Eiermann, interview, discursive frames, nuclear power, benefits, technological innovation, human identity, culture, Politics, society, Environment, Philosophy, activism

Joel Kovel - No Greater Responsibility for Intellectuals

From Adbusters, a call to critical thinking and action. The status quo is not the only option . . .

No Greater Responsibility for Intellectuals

Relentless criticism can delegitimize the system and release people into struggle.

Joel Kovel | 28 Dec 2010

Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download

Beaten down by the great defeats of utopian and social ideals, few today even bother to think about the kinds of society that could replace the present one, and most of that speculation is within a green paradigm limited by an insufficient appreciation of the regime of capital and of the depths needed for real change. Instead, Greens tend to imagine an orderly extension of community accompanied by the use of instruments that have been specifically created to keep the present system going, such as parliamentary elections and various tax policies. Such measures make transformative sense, however, only if seen as prefigurations of something more radical – something by definition not immediately on the horizon.

The first two steps on that path are clearly laid out and are within the reach of every conscientious person. These are that people ruthlessly criticize the capitalist system “from top to bottom,” and that they include in this a consistent attack on the widespread belief that there can be no alternative to it. If one believes that capital is not only basically unjust but radically unsustainable as well, the prime obligation is to spread news.

The belief that there can be no alternative to capital is ubiquitous – and no wonder, given how wonderfully convenient the idea is to the ruling ideology. That, however, does not keep it from being nonsense and a failure of vision and political will. Nothing lasts forever and what is humanly made can theoretically be unmade. Of course it could be the case that the job of changing it is too hard and capital is as far as humanity can go, in which instance we must simply accept our fate stoically and try to palliate the results. But we don’t know this and cannot know this. There is no proving it one way or the other and only inertia, fear of change or opportunism can explain the belief in so shabby an idea as that there can be no alternative to capital for organizing society.

At some point the realization will dawn that all the sound ideas for, say, regulating the chemical industries or preserving forest ecosystems or doing something serious about species-extinctions or global warming or whatever point of ecosystem disintegration is of concern are not going to be realized by appealing to local changes in themselves or to the Democratic Party, to the Environmental Protection Agency, to the courts, to the foundations, to ecophilosophies or to changes in consciousness. For the overriding reason is that we are living under a regime that controls both the state and the economy and that regime will have to be overcome at its root if we are to save the future.

Relentless criticism can delegitimize the system and release people into struggle. And as struggle develops, victories that are no more than incremental on their own terms – stopping a meeting of the IMF, stirring hopes with a campaign such as Ralph Nader’s in 2000 – can have a symbolic effect far greater than their external result and can constitute points of rupture with capital. This rupture is not a set of facts added to our knowledge of the world but a change in our relation to the world. Its effects are dynamic, not incremental, and like all genuine insights it changes the balance of forces and can propagate very swiftly. Thus the release from inertia can trigger a rapid cascade of changes, so that it could be said that the forces pressing toward radical change need not be linear and incremental, but can be exponential. In this way, conscientious and radical criticism of the given, even in advance of blueprints for an alternative, can be a material force because it can seize the mind of the masses of the people. There is no greater responsibility for intellectuals.

From Joel Kovel’s Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? Joel Kovel is the editor of Capitalism Nature Socialism, a journal of ecosocialism.

Tags: Adbusters, No Greater Responsibility for Intellectuals, Relentless criticism, delegitimize the system, release people, struggle, Joel Kovel, Politics, economics, government, criticism, culture, activism, Enemy of Nature, The End of Capitalism, End of the World, Capitalism Nature Socialism, ecosocialism

Upaya Dharma Podcasts - The Groundless Ground of Social Action

[image source]

Excellent - Buddhism must be a socially engaged way of life, in my opinion. There is a story from the Pali cannon in which the Buddha berates a group of monks for not taking care of a sick fellow monk.

Once the Buddha and Ananda visited a monastery where a monk was suffering from a contagious disease. The poor man lay in a mess with no one looking after him. The Buddha himself washed the sick monk and placed him on a new bed. Afterwards, he admonished the other monks. "Monks, you have neither mother nor father to look after you. If you do not look after each other, who will look after you? Whoever serves the sick and suffering, serves me."

[Emphasis added.] This is the kind of Buddhism we need in the world.

The Groundless Ground of Social Action

Speaker: Laurie Leitch & Elaine Miller-Karas

Laurie Leitch and Elaine Miller-Karas begin by telling their respective stories of how they were each led to their work of helping trauma survivors across the globe.
They move on to speak about the dialectic nature of life, elaborating on how there is a resilience that can emerge when someone experiences trauma. Laurie and Elaine also speak about the ’state of grace’ of ‘being present’ in the midst of uncertainty, and how they apply this principle to their lives. They conclude with a detailed discussion of the nature of their work, sharing stories about their recent experiences working in Haiti with survivors of the earthquake.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tags: Upaya Zen Center, Dharma Podcasts, The Groundless Ground of Social Action, Laurie Leitch, Elaine Miller-Karas, trauma survivors, volunteer, dialectic nature of life, Buddhism, service, activism, Haiti

Senator Eric Schneiderman - Integral Activism

Senator Eric Schneiderman (D-NY) wrote a memo on integral activism that you can upload - the word doc is here: http://www.theidproject.com/integral_activism.doc.

He's basically arguing that a progressive agenda is based in the view that our basic nature is characterized by connection, compassion, and courage (Our 3 C’s) - which stands in opposition to the conservative outlook, resting on Their 3 S's: human beings are separate, selfish, and scared.

Very cool. Here's some of the text.

Memo

To: ID Project Participants
From: Eric Schneiderman
Date: April 19, 2009
Re: Integral Activism

I. The Problem

Contemporary conservatives have built an extraordinary political, social and cultural movement on the powerful view of human nature most famously promoted by Thomas Hobbes. Human beings, according to this resonant analysis, are naturally inclined to a “war of all against all.” If you listen to the speeches of the conservatives, and if you review their political ads, it is clear that, at the root of their programs, policies and principles is a core view of human beings as separate, selfish and scared—the three S’s of the contemporary conservative moment. All of their programmatic themes—from the irrational worship of neo-classical economic theory to the promotion of a patriarchal, imperial presidency—are based on this “darker view of human nature.” [1]

Many people sense that the conservative view of humanity as irrevocably separate, selfish, and scared is leading us down the wrong path as a nation. They also sense that this Hobbesian vision condemns each of us to a pretty miserable, anxiety-filled personal life. But few people see any real alternative being offered by Democratic public officials, or by the issue-oriented activists that dominate what passes for the left in America.

Progressives, by definition reject the conservative vision of human nature. After all, we cannot truly believe that mankind is capable of fundamental progress if we think that our basic nature inclines us to a “war of all against all”.[2] Yet very few progressive activists are willing to engage on this issue. It is time for some honesty about the reason for this failure to challenge the conservative movement at its core.

The ugly secret of the American left is that millions of moderates, liberals and even “progressives” -- in their most private moments -- believe that Hobbes was right. Their own personal experience of life tells them that human beings are naturally separate, selfish and scared.

---

[1] For a remarkably candid admission that Hobbes’ “darker if more realistic view of human nature” provides the philosophical platform for contemporary conservatism, see “Human Nature Redux” by David Brooks in The New York Times on February 18^th, 2007.

[2] The modern idea of societal “progress,” defined as the “greatest good for the greatest number” emerged in Europe in the wake of the enlightenment. It evolved to form the core of the political movements in the early 20^th century that came to be identified as “progressive.”

Read the whole memo.

Tags: Integral, Politics, activism, culture, Philosophy, Senator Eric Schneiderman, Integral Activism