Category Archives: Context

Strong Parenting Is Key to America’s Future

My eye caught the above title in an Education Week magazine on-line teaser and couldn’t resist reading the article, by Joseph Gauld, the founder of the Hyde Schools. I certainly wasn’t comfortable with his Cold War “us and them” framing of the need for good parenting…

Not so long ago, we vigorously opposed Russian Communism’s threat to our American beliefs. Now China is projected to replace us as the world’s economic leader… To reaffirm democratic principles for ourselves and other nations, we must meet China’s economic challenge to our leadership… Today, we need the leadership of American mothers, fathers, and all surrogate parents. We need them to begin to develop a standard of excellence in parenting and family, now and for future generations.

Classic hierarchical patriarchal stuff here, framing everything in terms of a high stakes competition between adversaries to determine superiors and inferiors, good and evil, within the pecking order. That rather than a more egalitarian view of China as a problematic peer and partner.

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Left-Libertarianism and a Broader Political Spectrum

George Will’s piece, “A Recoil Against Liberalism”, from the November 4 Washington Post seems to me mostly an attempt to add insult to injury to progressives, now that conservatives are in political ascendancy (at least for the moment) based on our recent election. But when Will gets beyond his own “your mother wears army boots” rant and quotes maybe a more thoughtful conservative, now we’re talking some real ideas worth wrestling with. Will quotes George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux who is reacting to Obama’s quote that progressives failed to successfully communicate their ideas in the recent election… Continue reading →

Shopped ’til we Dropped

I can’t say I was one of those prescient people who saw the Great Recession coming, but I will tell you that ever since the 1980s, whenever I walked into a mall or shared the freeway with a zillion other cars with just a driver in them (and no passengers), I felt like our culture (at least the urban version in Los Angeles) was profoundly out of balance. It seemed like in the mall ninety percent of the money being spent was for stuff that the buyers did not really need, and on the freeway the same percentage of the gasoline being consumed was beyond what was needed to move all these people from their points A to points B. We were like addicts trying to maintain a high, taking yet another dose at the expense of our health, ever pushing back and even attempting to deny any day of reckoning.

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A Secular Humanist Coming to Grips with the Bible

Just finished reading the second chapter of Karen Armstrong’s new book, The Case for God. This chapter looks at the historical development of the first five books of the Bible (constituting the Jewish Torah) where Armstrong presents her premise that this document is perhaps the first great compendium of mythology and historical fiction, drawing its content from the history of the tribes of Israel and their relationship with their God. Far from being either factual history or a consistent theological treatise, Armstrong (based on reference to archeology and biblical scholarship) sees this work as a set of stories that were told and retold over hundreds of years and compiled in written form by four groups of “editors”, each in succession adding to and reworking the various stories.

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Moving Towards Circles of Equals

In my previous piece, “Defining the Circle of Equals”, I laid out what I see as the basic principles that define this more progressive and highly-evolved (at least in my opinion) than the hierarchical model for organizing institutions in our society. A model based on the the respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person (which also happens to be a key foundational principle of Unitarian-Universalism). As a follow-up I feel it is important to call out some of the ways we can work to support and facilitate our historic transition from a more hierarchical society to one based on egalitarianism and partnership between people.

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Defining the Circle of Equals

For most of recorded history (with some notable exceptions) human societies and the institutions within those societies – political, economic, religious, educational, family, etc. – have been structured on a hierarchical model of governance and control with men ranked above women in status, a structure I refer to often as “patriarchy”. But in the last five centuries of the “Modern Era”, with its focus on the emancipation of the individual, there has been a clear historic trend away from these hierarchical structures toward more egalitarian ones (see “The Long Road to Agency”). These egalitarian structures I like to call “circles of equals”.

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Some Thoughts on the Evolution of Consciousness

Fundamental to who I am and what I write about is my belief in the inexorable (or perhaps even irresistible) development of human consciousness from what I would call a “less evolved” to a “more evolved” state. I understand that this is not a universally held position, even among the progressive community that I consider myself a part of. But I think it is the basis of my generally positive outlook for the future and my push to acknowledge individual liberty, self-direction in a context of a circle of equals rather than hierarchical structures of control.

In my writing I talk a lot about “evolution” in terms of the development of and individual human consciousness and of the human species as a whole. The word can be used in a neutral context of adaptive change that is not necessarily for the better, but I generally use it intending a positive connotation of a perhaps slow but profound and irreversible advancement and progress. (Maybe someone can share with me a better word for this concept since this one has such a range of meaning and baggage and does not quite have the precision of language that I would look for in my “day job” doing technical writing.)

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Thoughts about “Emerging Adulthood” as a New Developmental Phase

My 21-year-old daughter Emma alerted me and her mom last week about this New York Times article, “What is it about 20-Somethings?” by Robin Henig. Emma had heard about it from her brother Eric’s girlfriend Sarah (another 20-something), who apparently has seen it in the New York Times. Emma said in her email to her mom and me…

Not sure if either of you caught Sarah posting a link to this on Facebook. It’s a long article but its well worth the read, absolutely along the lines of your philosophies around youth, and undoubtedly a great subject for a new blog piece!

Emma’s words gave the article a positive spin, and I had the article in my queue to read when my 30-something friend Emily emailed my yesterday to say…

I’m curious to know what you think about this article and the case for “emerging adulthood.” Let me know.

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Five Themes of American Conventional Wisdom Part 5: Nationalism

So in the fifth installment of this series, based on my friend Ron Miller’s parsing of American culture in the first chapter of his great book, What Are Schools For?, I’m plunging into his thoughts on American nationalism, which weaves together the first four themes. When I reread his words on this topic, it seems apropos to what’s going on in Washington this week with the Beck/Palin rally. According to a CNN dispatch on that event…

In what resembled more a revival than a political rally, conservative talk show host Glenn Beck urged the large crowds at his “Restoring Honor” event Saturday to “turn back to God” and return America to the values on which it was founded.

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Five Themes of American Conventional Wisdom Part 4: Capitalism

So the fourth installment of this series, based on my friend Ron Miller’s take on American cultural conventions, I’m going to look at his thoughts on Capitalism and how it plays out in American conventional thinking, based on the first chapter of his very insightful book, What Are Schools For?

Ah “capitalism”… a word that to me connotes a big driving machine. A word that is loaded with so much baggage from the last 200 years of Western (and world) history, including all the robber barons, all the strife between workers and management and the competing ideologies of socialism and communism. A term that emphasizes the people, the “capitalists”, with the big bucks to finance business projects, rather than “free enterprise” which connotes more the entrepreneurs who start those small businesses (like my son and his friends did).

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