Sean's Tumblelog

"This man beside us also has a hard fight with an unfavouring world, with strong temptations, with..."

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 10:14:05 +1000

“This man beside us also has a hard fight with an unfavouring world, with strong temptations, with doubts and fears, with wounds of the past which have skinned over, but which smart when they are touched. It is a fact, however surprising. And when this occurs to us we are moved to deal kindly with him, to bid him be of good cheer, to let him understand that we are also fighting a battle; we are bound not to irritate him, nor press hardly upon him nor help his lower self.”

- John Watson (Ian MacLaren), Courtesy in 1903. (via wabi-sabi-hygge)

"Once the monopoly of “artists” over “creativity” and “culture”..."

Fri, 18 May 2012 12:34:45 +1000

“

Once the monopoly of “artists” over “creativity” and “culture” is broken, it becomes possible for people to create real history and real change from their own personal experience. This is what “art” really is, and for obvious reasons it cannot be found in “art ” galleries nor in exhibitions nor in books; only by discarding the concept altogether and then, acting on our own awareness, changing our lives, does the concept gain meaning.

To break through our alienation is to act creatively, and to break through our alienation right now in Australian society means changing our everyday life, altering our relationships with others, with society as a whole, with the city and country; means, in other words, political change. If real culture lies in the total of all our everyday lives then it is possible for any of us to change cultural values by changing the way we live.

”

- Ian Milliss (1973)

Human beings will develop, and they will also develop the...

Fri, 18 May 2012 08:56:19 +1000

Human beings will develop, and they will also develop the capacity to overcome the forces that keep them from being themselves - and society changes. - Orland Bishop

via steelemaley

"Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn’t have to experience it."

Fri, 11 May 2012 05:59:16 +1000

“Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn’t have to experience it.”

- Max Frisch

"Most of us learn by doing: we are more likely to act our way into new ways of thinking than to think..."

Thu, 03 May 2012 10:07:06 +1000

“Most of us learn by doing: we are more likely to act our way into new ways of thinking than to think ourselves into new ways of acting.”

- Dr William C. Spohn

"If we combine our individual efforts wisely, enough of the right know-how could add up to a more..."

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 06:24:17 +1000

“If we combine our individual efforts wisely, enough of the right know-how could add up to a more thoughtful society as well as enhance those individuals who master digital network skills. Web 2.0 impresario Tim O’Reilly claims that the secret sauce behind Google, Wikipedia, and the Web itself is the “architecture of participation” which enables countless small acts of self-interest like publishing a web page or sharing a link to add up to a public good that enriches everybody.”

- Howard Rheingold

"Since it is not for us to create a plan for the future that will hold for all time, all the more..."

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 10:38:53 +1000

“Since it is not for us to create a plan for the future that will hold for all time, all the more surely what we contemporaries have to do is the uncompromising critical evaluation of all that exists, uncompromising in the sense that our criticism fears neither its own results nor the conflict with the powers that be.”

- Karl Marx

An Interview with George Scialabba - The New Inquiry

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 19:12:46 +1100

This was a really fascinating interview with George Scialabba, an author I am unfamiliar with. I am tempted to buy his book “The Modern Predicament”.

An Interview with George Scialabba - The New Inquiry

(Hat-tip to @jimrhiz)

Here are a few juicy tidbits that stood out for me:

On the loss of traditional binding narratives and the downsides and costs of individualism:

Modernity is the ensemble of changes – intellectual, political, economic, social, cultural, technological, aesthetic – that have altered the world drastically since roughly the 17th century, until which time the world was, in the above respects, far less different from the world of any previous epoch of recorded history than it is from the world of today. The modern predicament is the set of problems these changes have bequeathed us.

One problem is our loss of ontological, social, and psychological embeddedness. Formerly, the meaning and purposes of life were, to a far greater extent, simply given for most people by the religious, family, and societal structures in which they were born and grew up. Very few people, and even those people to a limited extent, were expected or encouraged to become individuals, free to make fundamental choices about love, religion, occupation, political allegiance, even location. Only a tiny elite could aspire to an individual identity and an individual history.

Nowadays everyone, or at least most people in the rich countries – I realize that this still leaves out most of humankind – can be an individual. But that turns out to be difficult. Over millions of years, we evolved characters and psyches that needed to be held in and held up by intense bonds, usually provided by strong families and local communities. For many reasons – economic development, geographical mobility, religious tolerance, the rise of nation-states, the emancipation of women – those bonds have weakened over the last few centuries. The resulting freedom obviously has enormous benefits for the previously unindividuated. But for many people it also has costs: isolation, loneliness, purposelessness, powerlessness, and hyperstimulation.

The modern predicament, then, is the difficulty of finding a sane, harmonious balance among all the vast and various consequences of science, technology, democracy, mass literacy, feminism, and the other forms of modern progress.

On the need for a sense of limits and creating a human-scale society:

When the modern world was being born, the supposedly inescapable limitations of human nature was a conservative theme. Inherited traditional beliefs and forms of authority were held to be all that most people could understand or live by. To convince a wide public to reject these a priori limits and trust themselves morally and politically was the first, heroic task of Enlightenment intellectuals. Faith in progress was once a precondition of progress. It still is, to the extent that contemporary right-wing libertarianism insists that democratically controlled enterprises must always be less efficient than hierarchical ones like corporations.

But entwined with democratic self-confidence, there grew up a less reflective faith in unlimited material progress, based partly on a belief that human wants and needs would grow to match increases in productive capacity. This may have seemed plausible before the environmental limits to growth became obvious in the mid-twentieth century; but more important, it was also convenient for those who wished to deflect attention from the gradual and many-sided loss of autonomy that industrial mass production and bureaucratically organized medical/educational/psychotherapeutic expertise imposed on nearly everyone. As the state, the economy, and the institutions regulating everyday life all grew in scale, the only sphere of autonomy left to ordinary people was consumption. And so an entire ideology and technology of consumption arose, on the premise that happiness consisted primarily in consumption, which could apparently be increased without limit. And if that’s true, then our powerlessness doesn’t matter.

But it’s not true. Powerlessness and lack of autonomy do matter to our psychic health: they produce weak, immature selves and a culture of narcissism – the latter a psychoanalytic concept that has little to do with the popular notion of “narcissism” as mere self-absorption or self-importance. We can’t grow to psychic maturity through social relations on just any scale – they have to be on a scale that allows us at least a modest sense of mastery in work and community life and imposes personal, not purely impersonal, obligations. That scale may not be achievable in a mass society.

The people who understand this best at the moment seem to be conservatives of the “paleo” or religious variety, like those around The American Conservative, a very interesting (and quirky) magazine for which I’ve been writing occasionally in the past couple of years. But paleoconservatives often seem to think that the state is the primary agent of massification. Radicals know better (as Lasch did): the modern state is a creature of corporate capitalism, which can only be controlled through what Lasch called “completing the democratic revolution of the 18th century.”

I don’t have any clear idea (and neither did Lasch) how to combine modern technology, sexual equality, and democratic nationhood with a sense of limits, rootedness, and human scale. The most successful attempt I’ve seen to imagine such a society is Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia. But it’s only the beginning of a beginning.

On the Occupy Movement:

I bless it and am grateful for it. But as they know perfectly well, it’s only a beginning. And occupations, like demonstrations, are an inherently limited tactic. It seems to me that any successful long-range strategy for fundamental democratic change, in America or anywhere, must be built around activities that take place in homes, workplaces, municipal buildings, public libraries, church halls, colleges, and similar places, outside of working hours, with child care provided. In other words, they have to be activities everybody can take part in, every week, for years on end, without bending their lives out of shape. Most people’s lives are already too insecure and overstressed for them to do much politically, which is how the ruling class likes it.

I’m off to explore Ernest Callenbach’s “Ecotopia”. And who’da thunk I’d relate to some of the ideas of a philosophy called “paleoconservatism”?!

"There is nothing like a dream to create the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood tomorrow."

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 04:18:00 +1100

“There is nothing like a dream to create the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood tomorrow.”

- Victor Hugo

"Many non-authoritarian organizations have foundered on the dubious principle of open membership,..."

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:27:20 +1100

“Many non-authoritarian organizations have foundered on the dubious principle of open membership, which frequently leads to a preponderance of assholes, yahoos, spoilers, whining neurotics, & police agents.”

- Reprint from the booklet “Radio Sermonettes” by Hakim Bey

"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He..."

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 04:53:14 +1100

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

- Albert Einstein

"Hope has nothing to do with optimism. I am in no way optimistic about America, nor am I optimistic..."

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 16:46:53 +1100

“Hope has nothing to do with optimism. I am in no way optimistic about America, nor am I optimistic about the plight of the human species on the globe. There is simply not enough evidence to infer that things are going to get better. That has been the perennial state and condition of not simply black people in America, but all self-conscious human beings who are sensitive to the forms of evil around them. We can be prisoners of hope even as we call optimism into question.”

- Martin Luther King

"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known..."

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 11:58:42 +1100

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”

- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation on the #Occupy Movement

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:37:40 +1100

You describe #Occupy as an example of peer producing political commons. In what way is this different from historical ‘anarchist’ or ‘communist’ movements like the Paris Commune, Barcelona 1937, or perhaps even the Russian Revolution?

Michel Bauwens: If you observe an occupation, you see a community that is producing its politics autonomously, not following hierarchical or authoritarian political movements with a pre-ordained program; you see for-benefit institutions in charge of the provisioning of the occupiers (food, healthcare), and the creation of an ethical economy around it (such as Occupy’s Street Vendor Project). This is prefigurative of a new form of society in which the commons is at the core of value creation; these commons’ are maintained by non-profit institutions, and the livelihoods are guaranteed through an ethical economy. Of course there are historical precedents, but what is new is the extraordinary organisational, mobilization and co-learning potential of their networks. Occupy works as an open API with modules, such as ‘protest camping’, ‘general assemblies’, which can be used as templates and modified by all, without the need for central leadership. We can now have global coordination and mutual alignment of a multitude of small-group dynamics, and this requires a new type of leadership. The realization of historical moment of Peak Hierarchy, the moment in which distributed networks asymmetrically challenge vertical institutions in a way they could not do before, forces social movements to look for new ways of governance… but these are not given, and have to be discovered experimentally, and of course, there will be valuable lessons to learn from predecessor movements!

And the Debate Begins… Peer-to-Peer and Marxism: analogies and differences | Jean Lievens interviewed with Michel Bauwens

"Those who do not move, do not notice their chains."

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 06:58:20 +1100

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”

- Rosa Luxemburg

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but..."

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:42:53 +1100

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.”

- Bertrand Russell

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life,” wrote Bertrand Russell in..."

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:38:00 +1100

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life,” wrote Bertrand Russell in the prologue to his autobiography: “the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.”

- Bertrand Russell - Three Passions of Bertrand Russell (and a Collection of Free Texts) | Open Culture

"The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the..."

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 10:43:28 +1100

“The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.”

- Martin Luther King Jr.

"Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion,..."

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:31:26 +1100

“Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, ‘My current model’ — or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel — ‘contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised.’ In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.”

- Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger

"The greatest of all human delusions is that there is a tangible goal, and not just direction towards..."

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:31:09 +1100

“The greatest of all human delusions is that there is a tangible goal, and not just direction towards an ideal aim. The idea that a goal can be attained perpetually frustrates human beings, who are disappointed at never getting there, never being able to stop.”

- Stephen Spender, World Within World