Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar Schein (2004)

Basic assumptions, in the sense in which I want to define that concept, have become so taken for granted that one finds little variation within a social unit. This degree of consensus results from repeated success in implementing certain beliefs and values, as previously described. In fact, if a basic assumption comes to be strongly held in a group, members will find behavior based on any other premise inconceivable. For example, a group whose basic assumption is that the individual's rights supersede those of the group members would find it inconceivable that members would commit suicide or in some other way sacrifice themselves to the group even if they had dishonored the group. In a capitalist country, it is inconceivable that one might design a company to operate consistently at a financial loss, or that it does not matter whether or not a product works. In an occupation such as engineering, it would be inconceivable to deliberately design something that is unsafe; it is a taken-for-granted assumption that things should be safe. Basic assumptions, in this sense, are similar to what Argyris has identified as "theories-in-use" -- the implicit assumptions that actually guide behavior, that tell group members how to perceive, think about, and feel about things (Argyris, 1976; Argyris and Schon, 1974).

Basic assumptions, like theories-in-use, tend to be non-confrontable and nondebatable, and hence are extremely difficult to change. To learn something new in this realm requires us to resurrect, reexamine, and possible change some of the more stable portions of our cognitive structure -- a process that Argyris and others have called "double-loop learning," or "frame breaking" (Argyris et al., 1985; Bartunek, 1984). Such learning is intrinsically difficult because the reexamination of basic assumptions temporarily destabilizes our cognitive and interpersonal world, releasing large quantities of basic anxiety.

Rather than tolerating such anxiety levels, we tend to want to perceive the events around us as congruent without assumptions, even if that means distorting, denying, projecting, or in other ways falsifying to ourselves what may be going on around us. It is in this psychological process that culture has ultimate power. Culture as a set of basic assumptions defines for us what to pay attention to, what things mean, how to react emotionally to what is going on, and what actions to take in various kinds of situations. Once we have developed an integrated set of such assumptions -- a "thought world" or "mental map" -- we will be maximally comfortable with others who share the same set of assumptions and very uncomfortable and vulnerable in situations where different assumptions operate, because either we will not understand what is going on, or, worse, we will misperceive and misinterpret the actions of others (Douglas, 1986)

In the current capitalist culture, what are the basic assumptions that need to be confronted? It is clear that the capitalist society is in denial and distorting real life to fit its warped model but how do we need to address the culture that lies behind it in order to clear the way for a new model?

Possibilities:

1. The nature of time and space
2. The nature of human nature and human activities
3. The nature of truth and how one discovers it
4. The correct way for the individual and the group to relate to one another
5. The relative importance of work, family and self-development
6. The proper role of men and women
7. The nature of the family
8. The definitions of happiness, success, prosperity, wealth

9. None of these
10. A cocktail of some of these - 5, 6 & 8 maybe

Or 11. A two brush approach

Now that Linda has extolled the virtues of similes and metaphors when describing abtract ideas, I'd like to try out a notion I've been toying with for some time: that in the effective performance of many human tasks, two separate strategies work in harness. The first employs a broad brush, and usually deals quickly and efficiently with a large portion of the task to be achieved; the second employs a fine brush and deals slowly but very effectively with all the areas of the task that are not amenable to large brush treatment.

The effective management of any task will therefore involve decisions about the relative numbers of large brushes and fine brushes that need to be employed, bearing in mind that wherever large brushes can be used effectively, their use will speed completion of the task.

Think first of the kinds of jobs that literally use brushes. Cleaning a room, for example. (Please forget electrical gadgets). The wider the brush the quicker the room will be swept, but there will probably be a few areas of the room that are too narrow to be swept efficiently by a wide brush. A narrower brush will work much better in these situations. In conjunction with a small pan, it will also work better when dealing with piles of swept dust. Consequently there will be an optimal ratio of brushers with either a large or a fine brush.

It is similar when painting a room. Large areas can be covered efficiently by use of a large brush or roller. Door and window frames, however, will require a smaller, more specialised tool. The sequencing is again crucial. The fine brush can tidy up when the bulk of the painting is done; but if the fine brushwork is done first, there will be a danger that a clumsier brush will leave a messy finish.

Now think of almost any other human task - most will consist of a routine (broad brush) treatment that will deal with most situations and a more finely-tuned instrument (fine brush) that is better able to deal with the exceptional situations. Operation by rulebook and responding to special circumstances. The labourer and the specialist.

Now what has all this to do with capitalism?

Well, much as it goes against the grain for me to admit it, but many aspects of capitalism have much to recommend them. Free markets usually result in a good flow of goods and, in theory, cheap prices for the consumer.

But it is a broad brush that deals inadequately with people at the edges of society and lacks sensitivity in all its applications.

I've been reading The Spirit Level: this recently published book demonstrates astonishingly well the close correlation between all manner of social problems and the income gap between rich and poor within any country or portion of it. Not only do the authors' findings hold true for all the countries they looked at (they excluded developing countries, since they maintain different rules apply here), but in relation to every problem area looked at, their findings were checked against similar figures that have been published for individual American states.

The really interesting thing is that the individual US states follow exactly the same pattern as that demonstrated by the developed countries: the states where the gap between rich and poor is widest, are the ones with the highest incidence of all the problems looked at and the ones where the highest levels of seriousness are found in relation to those problems.

The answer clearly is to narrow the gap between rich and poor. Capitalism seems to work quite well in a rough and ready kind of way, but unbridled capitalism will always tend to widen the poverty gap, particularly when privileged interest groups are allowed to distort the process still further in favour of the rich and powerful. A fine brush is needed to ensure that the process is carefully regulated - perhaps by fiscal policy, perhaps by legislation - to ensure that the excesses of capitalism are kept in check. The immediate consequence of this regulation and limitation of capitalism will be a more equal, more trusting society; the knock-on consequences will be a reduction of social problems. A fine brush can also be used to facilitate the free choice of non-capitalist options for living too.

Total abandonment of capitalism for another fairer system sounds at first like an ideal solution, but utopian solutions seldom work in the long run. I suspect that this is for the simple reason that they always require a continuance of everyone's consent. And this runs counter to human nature, particularly if it also entails a loss of a sense of uniqueness. ;)

Also, we always have to start from where we are; and where we are is a largely capitalist society, riven by vested interests and an unjust distribution of power.

So, returning to Linda's question, I don't think the short-term answer is the abandonment of capitalism, but its taming, limitation and refinement. There may well be no one thing that can replace capitalism, but it does seem to need re-evaluation. If it is left to do the broad brushwork that it does best, that's fine; but rather than having to deal with the social consequences of unbridled capitalism, better to use deft brushstrokes with appropriate instruments to ensure a happier, better balanced and less problematic society.

To make a short answer, I agree with you, David. Neo-classical economics is a great broad brush and it just doesn't work at all for some things and I believe in part it is because of the model of man. But the culture we live in today is a culture pervaded by capitalism and it's ugly step-sister consumerism, and maybe the step-mother, scientific reasoning. I have just been thinking today about what basic assumptions we have that put us on the defensive and limit our ability to change our culture to something more functional for everyone.

:-) There are some juicy bits here!

"In the current capitalist culture, what are the basic assumptions that need to be confronted?"

My head is going in several directions at once and I'm not sure where to begin.

Where I started was thinking about "capitalism." I got out my handy copy of "Anti-Capitalism: A Beginner's Guide" by Simon Tormey. Tormey is a professor in Politics and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham. In the the first chapter he looks at "Capitalism" and points out there are two ways of answering the question:

"The first is to think of it in abstract terms,that is in terms of what it represents as a relationship between people. The second is to think in more historical terms, i.e. of how it is that capitalism came about, and how it developed into the system we see before us today."

I think this dual routes toward explanation is smart. Later on in the chapter Tomey writes: "Without some element of that history, we get the how, but we don't get the why, which is equally part of the case before us."

That may seem a bit far from Linda's question. And It's true I haven't read Edgar Schein. But I note from Amazon pages that Schein is interested in how the abstraction of culture can be used as a tool. And in the quotation here having to do with cultural change can happen. A dual approach is necessary: to tease meaning out of abstractions they need to be placed into living contexts.

Getting to the "basic," assumptions is no simple matter because we are confronted with a complex of interlocking assumptions so it's hard to know which of them is fundamental.

David also picks up on Linda's the anti-capitalist premise. My hunch is when we're looking for fundamentals and we confront arguments against examining certain premises ("utopian solutions seldom work") there's a clue we're close to something fundamental.

Tormey cites three abstract notions about capitalism which he calls a "pretty anodyne" definition:

Private ownership over the means of production: land, factories, businesses.

'Paid employment' or, put it another way, 'wage labour'.

Creation of goods--or the offering of services--for profit via a system of exchange, i.e. the market.

Tormey spends part of the chapter then looking at these abstract terms and connectiong them with a bit of history. Then he examines two sorts of arguments in favor of capitalism: a) from liberty and b) from utility. The final part of the chapter is "Neoliberalism and the end of the political."

This last part of the chapter is very helpful for getting a sort of map of where capitalism is today. In the introduction of the book Tormey noted that he'd been teaching a variety of 'anti-capitalist' subjects for about two decades. It was a minority subject and pretty straightforward. But that changed in 1999 with protest at the G8 in Seattle. There was an enormous output of materials, Web sites, commentary reflecting a global anti-capitalist movement. I think Tormey is really smart, so it's surprising that a scholar of anti-capitalism didn't see this 1999 coming is interesting.

I'm looking for clues for how to get to basic assumptions. Using a book on anti-capitalism may seems a bit biased. There's an article from the Finacial Times--I think--that looks at Reagan, Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping as a counter-revolution. But I can't seem to find it. However earlier this spring the FT did a series "The Future of Capitalism." Here is Martin Wolf and the first piece in the series. In the press I've seen many allusions to 2008 as the end of capitalism as we know it.

The point is that from both capitalist and anti-capitalist perspectives fingers are pointing to the rise of neoliberalism and saying the that something fundamental has changed and all sorts are asking questions.

Okay so Tormey looks back at 1999 and all of a sudden there's a burst of output of a global anti-capitalist movement. Now about ten years later it seems that capitalists know the jig is up and there seems a big increase in articles about what to do. I pointed to the FT series. A couple of weeks ago Evert Cillers posted The Capitalist Manifesto -- How to Modernize Capitalism from Feudalism to Democracy and it got lots of links to it. I can think of lots of links as evidence of an increase of activities since the 2008 meltdown questioning capitalism from a capitalist perspective.

Having put out all of this as background, it would seem reasonable to expect that I could start listing basic assumptions that Linda is questioning about. Alas, I can't. I just narrowed the territory of where to look. But what I'm pointing to corresponds to a period of reaxamination that Schein notes is so difficult. Ask me if you want me to better defend this hypothesis, otherwise I'll spare you;-)

Linda's list is very fundamental. And in a cursory look at the sort of twin territories I've laid out, i.e. the global anti-globalization movement Tormey finds significant circa 1999, and the global economic crisis circa 2008, it seems the assumptions people are looking toward aren't so distilled to the basics as Linda's list is.

I want to point to a short transcript of Tormey on a page about Teaching Citizenship in Higher Education. He contrasts two ways of thinking about global citizenship. The first way is from a pro-global state perspective. The second he calls a 'post-state' notion.

Here's what he has to say about the latter:

And it’s really what I would also call a kind of fluid, questioning, critical notion of citizenship: which is that, instead of thinking of ourselves as being highly bounded creatures – bounded by nation states, by borders, by identity, by being English or Brazilian or French – the idea of global citizenship in a sense is a way of escaping those very fixed kind of identities. So that one can say, “I’m not just English” or, “I’m not just from Nottingham”, “I’m not just subject to the obligations and duties that that set of identities imposes upon me; I’m also connected, inter-connected, I’m transnational; I’m part of a much larger entity and part of a much larger set of problems about environmental degradation, global poverty, global powerlessness, being subject to forces which are beyond our control”.

John tries to get to the point, finally!

Here's what I'd add to a list of responses to Linda's question: Many of our assumptions assume vertical relationships. But changes are happening such that more relationships are horizontal: P2P things like that.

I think this is a change in a pretty fundamental assumption.

Hum, I was thinking this was Linda's personal news page and I'm rather relieved that it's UBU; because, well, I'm thinking OT again.

What I was looking for, trying to remember was the thread where David Bale talked about cheerleaders. I found a quote I wanted to share was thinking of putting it there. Maybe it's pushing things too much, but I'm thinking about basic assumptions and this might fit.

Part of the deal about capitalism the notion that we do things for profit. But the focus on profit rather gets muddled up with how we develop a sense of self esteem. Profit just seems an inadequate frame to address matters of the heart. Indeed in classical economics matters of the heart confound the rational basis assumed by the theory.

So here's the quote from Rob Hopkins at Transition Culture:

If we think that we are going to weather the Long Emergency without any form of supporting each other emotionally, without any kind of ability to share the distress it is causing, if we think that the work of the next 10-20 years will be purely external, we are deluding ourselves.

One of the basic assumptions we must confront is where our "worth" as people comes from.

Capitalism is very competitive. Whether we look toward reform or other systems of organizing economic activity, how we value ourselves and others are basic assumptions to examine.

Exactly, John. One of the basic assumptions the culture of capitalism makes (IMHO) is that everything, including people, is valued by money. How much do you make? How much do you have?

What is the value of a mother? Nothing by neoclassical economics standards. And I don't think most people would agree with that. That is a chink in the armor. How can it be jimmied or pried to break it? What other assumptions are there that can be changed - particularly the ones that can be done most easily since we have more limited time to fix the system than it took to get us here.

Easy basic-assumptions, hum somehow when I think basic I think of drilling all the way down, and that's never easy. Proceeding from a model of assumptions built on assumptions, the easy ones are always going to be the ones at the top of the stack. Of course, I'm not at all sure that the hierarchical model I'm thinking with really reflects the way ideas are put together.

I know that I'm so noisy, or to put it another way, clutter things up. I don't mean to annoy, but on the other hand don't really know how not to.

Today's story:

My dad went out for gas and when he turned into the driveway the car froze. The tail was sticking out in the road--not a good as our driveway is a little down a steep hill and therefore kind of blind. He managed to move the gear shift to start the car and move the gear shift lever into reverse then forward again so the car is not in the road. But everything froze again shortly, so the car is stuck at the end of our long driveway--frozen unable to start and unable to shift into neutral to move it.

Car transportation is an assumption most suburban Americans find pretty basic. In fact so much so it's difficult to imagine our way out of the twin crises of peak oil and carbon in the atmosphere leading to global climate change.

So that's how my day started. I went online to see if I could find anything out about the problem. I haven't had any luck so far. So I started looking at my feeds.

Via Wirearchy got pointed to a lovely story about connections Love in the Time of Stochasticity. I was eager to read it because of the title.

A good definition for "stochastic" is a bit hard to come by. Basic to the construct is randomness. I like this definition: "A process with an indeterminate or random element as opposed to a deterministic process that has no random element." Stochasticity is a noun describing "the quality of lacking any predictable order or plan." The adjective form is useful for understanding the quality to remind there's a process involved.

I enjoyed reading the story--it's short. The blog, Devis With Babies is a "mommy blog" I guess. Devis is a lawyer and mom. The story has to do with her husband flying back to India because his grandmother went suddenly into a coma. Devis was then left with trying to deal with a technical problem with the cable company that left them without phone, Internet and cable: Are our assumptions about access to communications technologies basic?

The title caught my eye because I've often related my story of flunking out of college back in the 1970s. I was interested in going into the child development program which had a lot of requirements to get in, especially psychology courses. Back then behaviorism was the dominant school in academic psychology, so learning theories depended on operant conditioning. I probably knew something about Jerome Bruner at the time, and certainly had been exposed to Jean Piaget, both important in thinking about learning theory beyond behaviorism. But it was discovering Gregory Bateson's ideas that really turned my head. So far as I could tell Bateson's thinking had made no in roads to academic psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. Anyhow, Bateson's learning theory emphasized a stochastic process.

I'm so noisy because I always talk about me! So some more about me:

In ninth and tenth grades I lived in Charlotte, North Carolina and the schools were in the midst of an extremely contentious school-desegregation order. The late sixties and early seventies were a contentious time all together.In 10th grade I fell in with a Pentecostal movement, at the time we were called Jesus Freaks--One of those things so much a part of the times you sort of had to be there. For 11th and 12th grade we moved to a suburb of Pittsburgh, Mount Lebanon. The high school had a reputation as very good, and there's no question there were many very smart and well-educated kids there. As a Bible toting kid from the South, I was an oddity.

The two most establishment religions in Pittsburgh are Roman Catholicism and Presbyterianism. I was raised in the Anglican tradition, so wasn't really used to thinking in the Calvinist terms more common here. So far as I knew there were no collectives of speaking-in-tongues former druggies in the area. There were young Christian groups, they just spoke a very different language than I was used to ;-)

In the latter part of my 12th grade I went to England with a friend who was the son of a very big corporate executive. He was really smart, well-read and steeped in the Calvanist tradition. The trip to England upset him too much so he went home early. I didn't want to go back to school so I stayed. My social skills were bad, still are, so I was alone a lot. I read and in particular read Francis Schaeffer, a Calvinist thinker whose work has been very influential to the rise of the religious right in the USA.

On that trip I also became aware of the work of Karl Popper. I was a kid, just 17. Also for various reasons my whole approach to education was to avoid learning as much as I could possibly get away with in school. I didn't understand much about this philosophical stuff I was reading, but it did have the advantage of turning my attention to basic assumptions, attention to fundamental questions.

In one of Schaeffer's tracts he excoriated a book by biologist Jacques Monod called Chance and Necessity. Schaeffer thought the book essential heresy. But despite my religious fanaticism, I was fascinated to discover DNA and found the book engrossing.

Something clicked for me when I was in 11th grade so that I could finally finish books I was reading. I had read some literature prior to my trip, including teen classics of the time, "The Stranger," "Siddhartha," "One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich," a few books by Bernard Malamud, and D.H. Lawrence, "A Clockwork Orange," "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man." Silly to make such a list perhaps, and there were other books. I suppose I made a list to suggest the search for meaning; us hippy kids often talked about "relevance."

The combination of the words chance and necessity are really a pretty good definition of stochasticity. The focus generally turns to the random element, but the combination of random an necessity get to the nub of the processes.

I'm way out there in left field, but I'm thinking about the question about basic assumptions. Part of the reason for my meander is not really being so clear about what my basic assumptions are. So partly the story goes back to a time when I was questioning basic assumptions and remembering my crisis of faith.

Plugging in 'Chance and Necessity' into the search box, I came up with a short essay Chance, Necessity or Interdependence? that looks at the question of how we can account for the emergence of life and consciousness. The author of the essay posits two possiblilities from a non-Buddhist point of view, i.e. either invoking chance, or invoking necessity. Then the author posits a third, Buddhist way. I'm not knowledgeable enough about Buddhism to know whether or not the interpretation really jibes with Buddhism or not, but taking the premise at face value for the time. The third alternative is interdependence:

Neither the universe nor consciousness had a beginning or end. Because they are interdependent, it is not surprising that the properties of the universe are compatible with the existence of consciousness. Two interdependent entities cannot exclude each other, but must be necessarily in harmony with each other.

Something very like that notion of interdependce emerged as a basic assumption for me form my adolescence questioning. The idea of interdependence was different from academic assumptions I faced and so I felt lost. I know that many people here at Ned.com believe in God. I think that's a fine state of affairs. I also think that many people here also hold some version of interdependence a as a basic assumption. This comment is in a thread about "integral studies" for example. I'm not sure I'm point to the outlines of what I'm calling "interdependence" very well, but I' pretty sure there are some basic assumptions around the notion.

Looking at developments in learning theory since my time in college, I see a greater movement towards integration of chance and necessity in academic thought. Jacques Monod was a social humanist, not strictly a theology, but Monod's ideas about social organization and basic assumptions for them resembled one enough that Francis Schaeffer was appalled. There's are many areas of conflict not just between science and religion, but also within science and academia. Chance, necessity and interdependence are all constructs that point to some questioning about basic assumptions. I'm not enough of a philosopher to lay out the aleternatives very clearly.

Pharoah Sanders has a wonderful composition, sort of music to find the mood of teen-aged John and the flavor of the times The Creator Has a Masterplan (YouTube). Anyway, assumptions about "the masterplan" are basic. Alas, not easy to change.

Thank you for inviting me to this group Linda.

I agree with much of what David and John are saying - particularly the fine brush and interdependence.

The basic assumption to which I generally return is that life is the struggle between good and evil. That assumption is inconsistent with the idea of an interdependent universe. Capitalism is neither good nor evil. It is a word to describe with a broad brush the characteristics of many of the transactions that take place in our eco-socio-political-economic system.

Eisler is right in the sense that the only measure we employ is money - and therefor we are only conscious of those transactions that involve an exchange of money.

Do we want to monetize these other kinds of transactions or do we want to develop finer brushes so that we can be conscious of them?

OT as usual. I noticed that Robert Patterson links to Paul Krafel's Upward Spiral video.

Really off-topic I'm very disturbed by the rise of private military contractors. When Blackwater --now Xe--was in hot water in the press a year or two ago Patterson started a blog to tell Blackwater's stories. I reacted online to it in probably not a very friendly way. There is a gulf between people who are used to thinking in military terms and those that aren't. Communication across that gulf isn't always easy, but surely is possible. Being pretty much a peacenik what I've found is my presumptions and assumptions too often get in the way. I really treasure Rober Patterson's recent work.

My head is just full of holes, like Swiss cheese. For some reasons names are often hard for me to access. Internet search is a godsend because I can usually quickly locate names I'm blocking on, so it spares me much frustration.

I couldn't come up with Paul Krafel's name. It's not the first time and I know from searches that he's apparently taken some effort not to put his name out there. LOL for example at the Chrysalis School's Web site the faculty page lists their qualifications but not their names.

Anyhow from Krafel's YouTube Channel I saw a new video which is a ten minute lesson in the "What Is Possible" class he teaches. Playing the Hand Game is a beautiful lesson. An important part of the lesson is how our assumptions can prevent us from discovering what is possible.

The point of the lesson is relevant to this discussion. But I also want to add that it's a pleasure to watch a great teacher in action. Anyone who's tried to teach something quickly comes to the realization that it's hard to do, it's a complicated task. So I just love this video as an example of teaching practice.

Krafel's game is such an elegant and more simplified demonstration of the concepts behind the Prisoner's Dilemma....You can bet I will be using it.

I want to break from the direct confrontation of capitalism for a bit and ask you to consider another basic cultural assumption. I will come back with my ideas in a bit but I don't want what I say to influence how you think this thru.

Schein talks about assumptions of time.

• What are your basic assumptions about time?

My basic assumptions about time is that now is the time we have most influence over.

Generally I think of time as an arrow: past, present and future. I think what I do now influences what happens in the future and what happened in the past influences what happens in the now.

But here's where I wonder about the arrow of time: There is the "what" I do and then there is the "why" I do. When I think of the "what" the arrow of time makes good sense; that's not nearly so true about the "why." When I think in terms of "why" my present influences both past and future. That is, how I live my life is a construction or a kind of story. In my story both past and present are connected to now in a more circular way.

I think of forgiveness as a kind of repair. It doesn't change what happened but operates on the parties involved so that the meaning of the injury is quite changed. Likewise meaning is projected into the future. Now isn't isolated from either past or future, still it is the time in which we have most influence.

Thanks, John. And now I want David to comment, especially as I know he is lurking since he gave you a point for it!

Linda wrote:

Thanks, John. And now I want David to comment, especially as I know he is lurking since he gave you a point for it!

And I want David to comment too, but time's a hard thing to grasp.

Perhaps our individual experience of a time wood is from the individual standpoint of a tree growing in the middle of the wood. And of course we can't see the time wood for the trees.

But we tend to think of time as something to compete against:

• we try to cram as much as we possibly can into every day
• we want to grow up more quickly than time wants us to
• we want to beat the ageing process
• we set deadlines for achieving things
• we want to run faster than time, picturing it as some kind of flow that we can somehow outpace; rather like running up a liquid escalator
• we feel guilty if we give in to time's flow and just do nothing, even though we know that that when we do nothing, time carries on just the same as before
• we assume it has a material presence and physical qualities; it's not just an idea or metaphor for something else. So we talk of wasting time, losing time and getting up to speed.

Yet in reality many moments will never be lost; time becomes part of us. I can go through my life remembering indelible moments. Some occurred at moments of great change or significance. Others just happened and were never forgotten, even if we can never quite figure out why. I remember waiting in a bus shelter under the Sussex downs and a blackbird singing; a moment when there was no traffic at midday in a normally busy town centre; the feel of damp sand in ridges under my feet an hour or two after the tide had gone out.

Well, perhaps I remember these things because they were things I didn't habitually experience. But even so, as I remember them - even though knowing pretty well the date when each of these experiences occurred - I cannot in any meaningful sense re-experience them in the past. When I re-experience them, I experience them in the present.

In experience there is no past or future tense. But in analysis of time, it's the present that's entirely illusory.

No wonder time totally confuses me!

Everybody knows my links are very optional: right?

I thought of a couple in re this thread.

Daniel Gilbert on why it’s so hard to know what makes us happy is a post Ethan Zuckerman has up on a talk by Gilbert. Something I'd seen in his happiness research is that parenting doesn't make people happy. This always seemed a conundrum to me, but Gilbert's analogy to baseball really helped me understand.

Ah, I thought of this with David's talk about remembering things out of the ordinary. It just dawn on me that the baseball analogy might not make much sense to David. But here's Gilbert's point:

Parenting, he offers, is like this. You have a tough day with your kid, but you get a wave of love and affection when your kid tells you he loves you. “It wasn’t a great day, you had thirty really good seconds. Transcendent happiness wipes out the moment of drudgery.”

How's that for thinking about time? Apparently quantitative measures won't cut it when it comes to things like happiness.

I just read an essay by John Merryman, Between Culture and Nature on Planet Earth that "revolves around three interconnected observations about physical reality, spirituality and economics." The physics part talk about time. Some of the physics in the essay made me think I"d better check up on that--lol. That is to say there are parts of this essay I'm not so sure are exactly right, but it would take me a long while to figure out if they are or not. Nevertheless, the observations about time are very interesting.

There are natives of South America who think of the past as being in front of and the future behind the observer. That is because their frame is the event, not the observer. Something happens, is observed and then is past. We, on the other hand, are a few degrees removed from this basic reality. For us, time is that series of events recorded in our minds and history books, so the future is in front of us and the past is behind.

I tend to put things together that maybe really don't fit, so what I write is so often confusing. I'm a piker compared to this essay.

I don't know how you save bookmarks Linda, but I suggest you bookmark this and read it sometime. When Merryman gets to economics he makes a proposal for a public banking system. The three observations are truly interconnected, so I won't go into it; still it's fascinating reading.

(I bookmarked it in the folder, John Powers)

:-)

Wow I had forgotten this thread. LOL the perfect place to put my off the wall links.

An important concern for economists is to get incentives right. I often find myself at odds with the way incentives are thought about, especially as they relate to education. This post from a grad student at Berkley gave voice to some of my concerns. Oh cool a link from 3Quarks said it was to Salon--I hate the pay wall--but it is to Seed. Snip:

In a fitting metaphor, the most recent experiment with social darwinism resulted in mass extinction. Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling claimed he was inspired by Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene when he implemented a system known as “rank and yank” that sought to apply nature’s lessons to the energy industry. Skilling had all employees in the company ranked every six months. Then he offered lavish bonuses to the top 5 percent while the bottom 15 percent were relocated or fired. This system of ruthless competition advanced just the type of personalities that one would expect: crazy people.

Yes, the problem with incentives as so often thought about is that they drive people crazy! In any case the Seed article is a review of primatologist Frans de Waal's book, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society.

On a completely different subject I was thinking about Eunice. By dumb luck I had a mother who really thought there was nothing a woman or girl couldn't do. Well maybe not nothing, but still growing up like that achievements by girl's were thought the natural course of things. So when I find out about how hard it is for girls to get an education it not only makes me sad, it sets up a sort of cognitive dissonance between the way I think things ought to be and the way they are. So the issue of menstruation as a barrier to girls education spins my head around.

Somewhere I saw a better link to this invention of locally produced disposable menstrual pads, it's quite a good invention, but this link gives the outlines. Also this program Afri-Pads is quite good.

Neither is really a Butterflies Project sort of thing. But I'm convinced that the best businesses are ones that meet real needs on the ground. And girls and boys do have different needs, and too often the needs of girls are neglected; not even talked about.

In my friend Nathan's area of Busoga a student at the university did a research study on HIV education programs in the district. Like student papers everywhere there were some pretty basic flaws with the study. However it contained what seemed to me important anecdotes. Among them was that women rated HIV education--regardless of the various curricula--to be helpful much more so than the men did. My hunch is that the programs provided a venue to talk about what's never talked about ordinarily.

Among the pro-positions I favor that tend to be very controversial is that I'm pro-sex education. But it has to be done right. Years ago a correlation was made between long hair styles among boys in Britain and STDs. One proposed connection was that it was in barber shops young men learned about condoms. There are lots of aspects of sex education that benefit from being done in mixed groups of girls and boys. There are other aspects that benefit from single sex settings.

I keep mentioning Avon as a business model for thinking about businesses with my friend Nathan. LOL I don't think he thinks much of the ideas, and because I know nothing of what day to day life is like in Uganda it's hard to pin point just what the issues are. But the basic reason I bring it up is it seems to me that just as in education sometimes single sex settings work best, I think that's also true of business ideas. Nathan and I have talked because one of the local issues Nathan's group has tried hard to address is helping to improve the incomes of AIDS widows caring for dependent children.

The invention of locally produced menstrual pads is good. They are safe and sanitary--the sterilizing of the pads is the most capital intensive aspect of them. But the invention needs good marketing and my sense is that there's a business for women to women marketing of a basket of products that isn't too capital intensive. Locally produced pads and Afri-Pads see reasonable to be a part. Combs, reading glasses and other useful things seem good candidates too. But somehow the whole packaging needs the sort of upward mobility ethic that Avon has. LOL no good calling a product: hair grease, but genuinely good quality luxury products need to be in the mix too. Of course as many of the products as possible should be locally produced.

Opps, there's no perfect place for my ramblings, but anyhow I wanted to post these links.

Thanks as always, John. I particularly liked the link to Frans de Waal's book, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society.

But, what I want to write about is only a bit narrower. What got me going on it was the comment about social Darwinism.

I don't have my notes here but I am trying to describe what was written in a book that is on the interesting books worksheet about Religion, Economics, and Public Policy. He talks about the Scopes trial. William Jennings Bryan was a fundamentalist evangelical. He was interested in working on the case because of his opposition to social Darwinism more than evolution. Bryan was also a fiscal liberal. He had primary concerns about the poor. He felt that social Darwinism was heading to an un-Christian treatment of the poor where they were defined as deserving or earning what they have or have not. Bryan was a Democratic nominee for president 3 times! From Wikipedia

Bryan was a devout Presbyterian, a supporter of popular democracy, a critic of banks and railroads, a leader of the silverite movement in the 1890s, a leading figure in the Democratic Party, a peace advocate, a prohibitionist, an opponent of Darwinism, and one of the most prominent leaders of populism in the late 19th - and early 20th century. Because of his faith in the goodness and rightness of the common people, he was called "The Great Commoner."

This is not what we think of, I don't think, when we think of him. We think of an ignorant, Bible thumping imbecile. Well, he was certainly representing a lot of that type of person. And, those people stayed Democrats for a long time. The change really wasn't completed until the Moral Majority made a change with Reagan. Now, the interesting part is that by the time the change was made, these people had totally bought the social Darwinism that Bryan was so opposed to. You can read it in Gary North. You can see it in the Republican opposition to a public option. The people who are opposed to health care reform are the people who already have good access to health care.

It all ties back to community and cooperation and taking care of each other: you scratch my back and I will scratch yours. When will people get it? You get to the top by helping people not by climbing on their backs.

Oh yes, your observations really resonate with me. My really formative years were in the South in the sixties. I think in part because my mother started teaching then, when my little brother entered school, that civil rights became such a memorable part of it.

A very long time ago I was doing a paper for an American history class. The question that interested me was differences in ideas about being women in the the North and South. Obviously too big a question for a term paper;-) But in the research a factoid that I found out was that in the early days of the Republic much of the anti-slavery movement was in the South, especially upcountry Appalachia.

I really haven't been able to find too much corroboration online about this. Abolitionism really took off with the Second Great Awakening and it seems as though the sentiment against slavery among the small farmers in the South was over taken by a Southern identity which had slavery at its root. How did that happen I wonder?

In today's Wall Street Journal is a supplement "How to Rebuild Global Prosperity." In it is a piece on Labor with Wisconsin Republican representative Paul Ryan. Here's part of what Ryan said:

We're making a decision, consciously or not, as to whether or not we're going to have a European-style social-welfare state versus what I would call the American idea. The idea of America is that we embrace the principles of liberty, freedom, free-enterprise, self determination, and so there's two philosophies that are at war with one another here.

I think that's a pretty good affirmative vision of the Republican politics and mindset. But as positively stated as it is, it's significant that he sees the conflict of ideas as war.

I really enjoyed Louis Menand's book The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. It seems the book really didn't please different segments of views. Pragmatists had quibbles with the relative importance of ideas, and conservative deny that ideas ought to be relative. I found Menand's premise that the Pragmatist were motivated by the experience of the Civil War quite interesting. Menand thinks that a major motivation for the project was to create a space for opposing ideas that would not lead to war.

The United States was created in part by Europeans who emigrated in the name of religious tolerance (more precisely, in the name of opposition to religious intolerance). The various offshoots of the pragmatist conception of culture, the argument for expanded freedoms of expression--were, in a sense, translations of this individualist, Protestant ethic into social and secular terms. But the modern idea of tolerance is analogous not so much to the Proitesant belief in the freedom of each person to worship according to the dictates of his or her own conscience as it is to the idea of tolerance in engineering--the tolerance, say of a piece of steel. The pragmatists wanted a social organism that permitted a greater (though by no means unrestricted) margin for difference, but not just for the sake of difference, and not even because they thought principles of love and fairness required it. They wanted to create more social room for error because they thought this would give good outcomes a better chance to emerge. They didn't just want to keep the conversation going; they wanted to get to a better place.

...Homes, James, Peirce, and Dewey wished to bring ideas and principles down to a human level because they wished to avoid the violence they saw hidden in abstractions. This was one of the lessons the Civil War had taught them. The political system their philosophy was designed to support was democracy. And democracy, as they understood it, isn't just about letting the right people have their say; it's also about letting the wrong people have their say. It is about giving space to minority and dissenting views so that, at the end of the day, the interests of the majority may prevail. Democracy means that everyone is equally in the game, but it also means that no one can opt out. Modern American thought, the thought associated with Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey, represents the intellectual triumph of unionism.

LOL sorry for such a long excerpt. But I wanted to get it all in because Ryan is calling for war in the context of a discussion about labor. Ryan was born in 1970 and I think it's hard for him to imagine the sort of democratic vision that Menand lays out is an American idea at all. His vision of an American idea it seems begins with Ronald Reagan fused with a very peculiar and modern vision of Christianity.

War in Ryan's context is not metaphorical. People like him are cleaning their guns and stockpiling munitions--literally. I'm not sure how to respond, but what I'm sure of is that war is not the answer; war has never been the answer.

Last night trying to write a blog post--meaning that I was surfing around to avoid doing it--I came across an interesting Web page Radical Constructivism. There are so many interesting pages here. In fact I opened so many that I crashed my browser.

Among the links in people is Lloyd Fell. Even though Fell is a biologist not an attorney, and that his background is rural Australia, there was much that reminded me of David Braden in his work.

Steve Brant linked to an article Leadership By Design: How One Individual Can Change the World which distill's Buckminster Fuller's ideas. It's quite cool. Back in the day did you read anything by Fuller? My habit is to put ideas and circumstances together that really don't belong together. Fuller's "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" and "Utopia or Oblivion" were touchstones for me. But over time as I became more aware of my own tendency to put things together which don't belong, I became a bit disenchanted by Fuller's habit of doing the same thing. Fuller always credited his nearsightedness for his ability to see the outlines of things. The problem is that often God is in the details. Nevertheless it's clear that a story, a narrative was important to Fuller. And if some of the details of his story of Old Pirates aren't spot on, the general outlines of the story are.

I will see if I can't get back to talk about this more but there were two things immediately:

1. I never read Fuller when I was younger though he was certainly on my radar screen and I knew about him and what the was up to. When I was out in CO at David's I read a biography of him that was very simple but totally fascinating.
2. The older I get, the more I think that God is not in the details but rather man. God is more at the level of the overall plan and management rules. Man can handle focusing on details. The awesome part is seeing how all the details fit together or at least need to.

Aid on the Edge of Chaos is turning out to be a really great blog. Today's post on W. Brian Arthur's book "The Nature Of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves" is quite good:

Much experience in international development would appear support one of Arthur’s conclusions - you can have the best technology in the world, but ultimately, social transformation comes down to technology which speaks to and engages with the reality of peoples’ lives.

That made me think of Victor Papanek's great book from 1971 "Design for the Real World." Last time I checked it was still in print, but when I looked today the new sellers were asking $50 to $135 for the book! There are some used sales for a more normal price. It's interesting which books are valuable on the secondary market. Chances are a library will have an old copy of it. Anyhow, Papanek has some great insights about design. Sometimes when I read older books, I wonder what we were thinking, but this one still seems prescient.

I like the approach of looking at how technology evolves--reminds me of the TV show Connections. Also I added Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn" to your book list. It's very hard to come to grips with technology without looking at time. But time can be very misleading too. I've mentioned it before but Kevin Kelly's essay Bootstrapping the Industrial Age really gets to the reasons why restarting an industrial society is so hard. I think some of the opposition to outsourcing--abandoning our industrial capacity--intuitively understands Kelly's point, but few have expressed it so well.