Vision Circle

Why Did We Go After Iraq

Why did we go after Iraq?

I think it was because of Iraq's gift of $25,000 to the family of terrorists who blew themselves to bits when attacking Israel.

Iraq supported terrorism by doing this.

It wasn't about non-compliance.

It wasn't about WMDs.

It wasn't about a direct threat to the U.S.

It was about a threat to a U.S. interest. And that interest wasn't oil.

At least that's what I think.

Meet the Buppies

The flip side of Soweto hip-hop. Probably requires a subscription to see the whole article, but as Salon is worth the loot, I'd suggest you do it. But in case you aren't moved, here's a snippet:

Tshepo Boikanyo signs his name on the dotted line and in an instant becomes the proud owner of a $70,000 BMW. The 33-year-old lawyer, dressed sharp in a black suit, glides across the floor of the BMW dealership to ogle his new car. "I considered buying a Jaguar, but I opted for the BMW after test-driving one. And this is a black dealership, so I felt I had to bring my business here," he says. Litha Nkombisa, one of the dealership's four owners, hands him a bottle of champagne and the keys to his titanium silver 525 Coupe. "You see, they take care of me here," Boikanyo says. "It's like a second home."

The entire article can be found here.

Thinking about black markets

I've been trying to wrap my thoughts around the idea that politics is marketing by other means. Around a paradigm in which we don't elect representatives so much as hire them (Bush as CEO). I can't roll with it for a number of substantive reasons, but at the same time there is something very appealing in moving the focus of black politics towards market oriented activity. My father says over and over again that if black people want to build economic power there is tons of money to be made in black spaces like Detroit. As these communities are largely underserved, this strategy makes a great deal of sense, and has single handedly propelled Magic from a million dollar man to a 700 million dollar man.

One of the benefits here is that such a strategy only requires "black consciousness" to the degree that the individuals are actually AWARE of black people. Understand the difference?

And this model is easily portable. I know both Covington and Sudarkasa from my years at Michigan. When Cobb is talking about the new black critical mass, these are the folk he's talking about.

A book to blog about!

Tom Atlee 's definition of co-intelligence is "what intelligence would look like if we took wholeness, interconnectedness, and co-creativity seriously." His book, The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All, is intelligent in that sense: it is a terrific bricolage of Tom's learnings from his own experiences and from his many friends.

In a nutshell, Tom offers us a persuasive account of what we can do, and how, to change our world -- not for the better as we as individuals might define it, but as we might define it if we listened to each other closely enough to arrived at mutual understanding.

A quote from the Introduction:

Gone are the days when the worst we could do was conquer a neighboring tribe or overgraze a local hillside. We are reaching a point where individuals and small groups will be able to create, or destroy, almost anything. We have moved beyond the scale of centimeters and miles down into the microscopic, even subatomic realms, and up into the planetary and interstellar realms, from angstroms to light years, from nanoseconds to gigabytes. We break up atoms and chromosomes. And collectively we change forests to deserts. We litter the upper atmosphere with layers of space junk zooming around earth at hundreds of miles an hour. Our inventions are transforming the lives of our grandchildren's grandchildren -- and we do not have the foggiest notion how. And we are doing all of this faster and faster, more and more, bigger and bigger.

Meanwhile, individually, we can directly comprehend only a tiny fraction of what we are collectively doing. Our individual senses, nervous systems and brains are not capable of taking in the gigantic effects, both current and potential, that our civilization's creativity is capable of generating. Our nervous systems are set to respond to what is here and now and obvious: we can not feel radiation, the population explosion, the vital information missing from our newspaper, the disappearing ozone layer. And when we are faced with any significant piece of the full information, we get overwhelmed.

Stop and think about this for a minute.

We cannot individually comprehend the range, depth and detail of the consequences we are collectively generating for ourselves.

Well, if we cannot appreciate our circumstances individually, perhaps we can do it collectively. Unfortunately, our democracy is not designed for that. Even in those rare instances when it is not being manipulated by special interests, it operates on elections and polls, on the numerical adding up of our individual opinions. Logically speaking, this cannot do the job that is required; if we can not individually comprehend our circumstances, adding all our individual incomprehensions together will not improve our understanding.

The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All was officially released July 4. You can read a sample chapter, then order it from http://www.taoofdemocracy.com/index.html.

Let's be co-intelligent about this, let's get the word out, let's blog it!

A Long View

The following passage concludes a book on the history of technology that my friend and teacher, David Hays, wrote roughly a decade ago. It embodies one man's take on the long-view.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF CIVILIZATIONS

My friend Naroll, whom I have quoted several times, planned to write a book on the evolution of culture under the title Painful Progress. Humanity has spent blood, sweat, and tears on progress, mostly in vain as it sometimes seems. One after another the civilizations of the past have risen and fallen to rise no more. In Egypt, at least until quite recently, life in farming villages was the same as it had been thousands of years ago. Of ancient Mesopotamia, only archeologists can find any trace. The Roman Empire that stretched from Spain to Palestine and beyond is gone, and so are the several Chinese empires of the past. So are the empires of America, and the kingdoms of Africa. Spengler wrote on The Decline of the West in the late 20s, and we may feel that World War II and the subsequent rise of Japan only bear out his gloomy views. Each of the Great Powers that has arisen since the Renaissance has spent its substance on military establishments and bankrupted itself.

Until 1939, humanity was confined to enclaves. The barriers of oceans, deserts, high mountains, and thick forests were not impenetrable, but expansion of empire across them was restricted. The Romans crossed the Mediterranean, and the British encircled the globe. Nevertheless, when Japan became strong enough it easily took the remote British possessions. America sent troops to Europe for World War I, where the war was fought. World War II was almost a global war, and if World War III ever comes we have to suppose that it will be fought on all continents at once.

Within each enclave, the parable of the tribes has been enacted. Political expansion by force has occurred repeatedly and, I think, inevitably. The horrors of constant fighting-- worse in [more primitive cultures] than in later ones--have been accompanied by culture contact, by enlargement of central communities where specialists can flourish, by increase in the concentration of wealth that can be tapped for philosophical and scientific study of the universe and of ourselves.

Technological evolution enlarges the effective size of the enclave. The higher the technology, the longer the reach of military power, until it can span the whole earth as it now does. If the parable of the tribes is still applicable, then all the earth will be enwrapped by one empire.

For the fall of empires, there have been many explanations, all too specific for me. Do I care whether it was disease, depletion of the soil, restlessness of the proletarians, intru- sion of barbarians, corruption of the elite? Not much. The level of abstraction appropriate to this question seems to me to be this: Every empire has grown too large for its cultural [equipment: concepts, institutions, practices]. Specifically, every empire has grown until it created for itself problems too complex for it to solve with the means of thought available to it. The substance of the problems may be unique to each empire, but the increasing complexity of problems with size of political unit is universal.

The parable of the tribes says that growth is unstoppable; the increase of complexity says that collapse is inevitable. Does this argument lead to the conclusion that we live in vain?

No, that is not my conclusion. To begin with, empires span millions of lifetimes; today, billions. Most of those lives may be satisfying, and more satisfying when the empire is approaching the point of collapse. Golden Ages seem to come shortly before the end.

More importantly, each empire leaves behind a residue of culture that provides part of the matrix from which the next rank of thought crystallizes. Has any paideia gone without a contri- bution? I think not. And we have to think of all these contri- butions as essential. Western Europe moved from [tribal culture] to [industrial nation states] in a long rush. . . Without the rediscov- ery of old ideas, the residue of Greek and Indian cultures, I think the rush could not have happened. So even in the broadest perspective, the ancients did not live in vain.

Let me improve on that: The value of each life is in the living; the material, intellectual, or spiritual legacy of a life is not the primary measure of its value. The value of each culture is in the lives it provides its members; progress within a culture should be valued by enhancement of life chances for them. Nevertheless, we have a heritage from the past. The metaphor we need is seedcorn. Even that metaphor is inadequate. Our culture is not just another generation of Greek culture; we are a hybrid.

And as for the future, it all depends. We can see evidence that we are coming to the limit of our way of thinking. Problems that we may not be able to solve are all around us: Ethnic wars, drugs, education, employment, pollution, global warming, popula- tion size. Will we be swept away? Or will [more advanced cultures emerge the future] and go on to ways of life that cope effectively with all those problems?

Remember, the contagious diseases that were catastrophic in the past are now trivial problems (AIDS is not quite trivial). We can live comfortably in ethnically homogeneous cities of a million, whereas our ancestors could scarcely manage a hundred thousand. Unfortunately, we are trying to manage ethnically mixed cities of ten million. Will our descendants do that easily? The theory of cognitive rankshift says that we cannot predict. However, the theory gives no reason for despair. On the contrary, it gives the only reasoned basis for hope that has ever come to my attention. The theory does not set a limit on rank; it may suggest a minimum of 20 to 50 years between rank- shifts, but I am not sure of that. By working to increase know- ledge, to diffuse it, to organize it, we are doing what we can to improve the matrix in which the next rank can crystallize. We can hope to get the ability to solve our problems before they overwhelm us. The hope may fail, but it is not foolish.

I want to end with a look at the past. One strain of stylish intellectual culture condemns the past and everyone in it. Look at Thomas Jefferson, who exploited a poor black woman while teaching democracy (for white males who owned land). Disgusting! Not a true saint in the whole hagiography.

No, certainly not a single saint. The world is run, and always has been run, by persons rather like ourselves. They were imperfect, as we are. Nevertheless some of them deserve respect, as we may earn respect, because they did the best they knew how and it was good enough to serve. Not having our rank of thought, they were incapable of the nicety of moral judgment that we can and should apply to political decisions. Not having our rank of thought, they were incapable of extending the protection of "human like me" as widely as we can and should. Not having our rank of thought, they could not calculate the long-term conse- quences of their actions as well as we can and should. They worked with the terrible restriction of an incapacity to think that would make them ineligible for any responsible job in an industrial country today. Hampered and hobbled as they were, they initiated the trains of events that carried us to our present condition.

Some of our ancestors, some of us, are evil. Pathological evil is not the same as cultural error. Evil takes satisfaction from doing harm; error sees no harm in what it does. Curing the sick, teaching the ignorant, and occasionally confining those who accept neither one are such familiar points in our culture's repertoire that I need not urge them on you.

We can well be aware that we, too, are hampered and hobbled by inadequate systems of thought. We deserve to be proud of ourselves if we do what we can to improve our thinking within the limits of our culture, and if we think as clearly as circumstances permit about the problems that we face.