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We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
T.S. Eliot
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The thing I was trying to get people to think about is how they invest their lives and their day jobs in addressing these issues. The dominant paradigm in this crowd...is business as usual in your day job...and take a small bit of that money and rescue abused amputee war refugees in Sierra Leone who have Ebola. Because of the sheer enormity of the issues, that covers up that what you do for a living adds to people’s suffering....
If you’re the kind of person who tends to succeed in what you start, changing what you start could be the most extraordinary thing you do.
Anand Giridharadas
http://fortune.com/2015/03/20/anand-giridharadas-ted-inequality/
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I feel so insignificant in my economic background, my cultural upbringing, my social circle, my sectorized work--that I cannot in all fairness understand the issue of poverty and depravity and imbalance and power and morality and ethics and society and governance. When one sees poverty or distress, what is the remedy one imagines? Raising them up to be another middle-class citizen? When did disposable income and commodity begin to define life? And how is that a solution to pain and suffering?
May 2014
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Moving from sheltered, suburban San Jose to a stark socioeconomic divide on the edge of San Francisco's commercial district, my questioning drove me to history books and economic magazines and philosophical essays to try to understand our modern society and its evolution--the emergence of a capitalist free market economy, the preeminence of contemporary materialism, the development of the socialist democratic state and its roots in humanistic enlightenment thought--hoping it would give me some clues. I began to grasp the issue more holistically, but I felt it was an understanding that would bring no change in my own surroundings (hashtag slacktivism). Neither space nor time was an adequate excuse—nowhere in my past travels did I readily encounter and befriend people who were vastly different from me in socioeconomic status, nor did I have friends in my own city who could be characterized as impoverished; rather, it was a matter of will. I wondered, too, whether the remedy to such pain and suffering was limited to economics. After all, Warren Buffet, second richest man on earth, wisely noted that there were only two things in life worth investing in, and the market was not one of them. History, too, revealed with massive consequences that economics did not rectify all things.
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Service and economic aid were indubitably important, but healing needed to reach deeper. Perhaps, I thought, I could begin by knowing someone by name.
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Through an organization called City Impact, a multi-faceted non-profit working to transform the low-income Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco on an individual level, I found an SRO hotel (single resident occupancy) located a mere three blocks from my office. I began visiting the building once a week, ostensibly to deliver food door-to-door, but really aiming to strike up conversations in hopes that they lead to friendships. With a few of the more open residents, we talked about addictions, anxieties, isolation, depression, anger, loss, and hope. We talked about parents and children and lovers, churches and gangs and bands, sickness and aging and life and death--and I began to discover that we were not so different after all, that the isolation that many of them suffered and the distance of differentiation I’d felt were not as insurmountable as they often seemed. One friend noted in a recent conversation the changes he’s begun to see in his life: endurance in a hostile environment, tenacity in the face of personal setbacks, and grace for difficult neighbors. Another friend, struggling with a lifetime of meth addiction, confessed he was finally planning to register for a drug recovery program. Yet another, a cancer survivor who just underwent her final chemotherapy treatment, asked me just last month about enrolling in classes at the local community college after more than 30 years of unfinished high school education.
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Over the past year of slowly developing friendships, I cannot really point to the differences that I've made and say that I'd wrought them by my own efforts. Claiming such would be paternalism masquerading as service--or worse, objectification under pretensions of love. Rather, genuine and long-lasting change requires deep humility and a willingness to forgo goal-oriented strategies for a much messier, process-driven attitude--also known as empowerment, equipping, or simply encouragement. Curiosity may have led me to seek an understanding of my city's stark socioeconomic boundaries, but what perpetuated their dissolution in my life was the wonder of walking alongside men and women in the midst of fierce struggles--as a human, as a neighbor, as a friend.
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This article (and the book about which it is written) seems to stick all sorts of things I love--history, contemporary consumerism, existentialism (a la Kafka), philosophy, capitalism, and modern meaninglessness--into a blender, and out it comes: a dizzying spectacle of a review of a book about man's lost soul in a maze dubbed Dubai.
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Maybe I should visit, though I'd probably hate it. I probably won't be able to take this read, either, as Kafka's short stories and Beckett's 30-page plays already crush me.
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The Church's past links with ossified social orders which harked back to the previous century are no less dangerous for the cause of Christianity than new attempts to link Christian ideas to the political ideologies of revolutionary messianism. Neither of these tendencies encourages the hope of a resurgent vitality of the Christian message; in both, one can sense the temptation to subordinate this message to temporal ends--to transform God into a tool, a potential object of human manipulation. The theocratic tendency--that vain and disastrous hope, enfeebled but still breathing, that humanity can be dragged to redemption by force--and the ostensibly opposing tendency--the attempt to embed Christian values in the framework of this or that revolutionary ideology--share one fundamental feature: both transform God into an instrument of attaining ends which from a Christian perspective, whether or not they are justified, should never be seen as ultimate ends.
Leszek Kolakowski, "Anxiety About God in an Ostensibly Godless Age" (1981)
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I know, Lord, that my life is not my own,
that you have drawn me out of slavery, death, darkness, and despair so that I can obey you, that I can act justly and love mercy and walk humbly with you. And that is what I want to do. That is what I must do. - There is so much to be done, so much harvest and few workers--I have no time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way that you love us. - And so thenceforth, those who are married should live as though they were not, and those who weep or buy things should not absorb themselves in such--for the time is short, and this world is passing away...
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"Ultimately, capitalism is human nature at work
--that is, man's greed allowed to follow its course--whereas socialism is an attempt to institutionalize and enforce fraternity. The idea of socialism as an 'alternative society' to capitalism amounts to the idea of totalitarian serfdom; the abolition of the market and overall nationalization can yield no other result.
"While acknowledging that a perfect society can never be attained and that people will always find reasons to treat each other badly, we should not discard the concept of 'social justice.' ...In its vagueness, 'social justice' resembles the concept of human dignity. ...[It] does not imply that there is such a thing as the common destiny of mankind in which everybody takes part, but it does suggest that the concept of humanity makes sense--not so much as a zoological category but as a moral one...
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The Happiness Machine. Image © Mark Lascelles Thornton
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"It is generally recognized that the market does not automatically solve all pressing human problems. The concept of social justice is needed to justify the belief that there is a 'humanity'--and that we must look on other individuals as belonging to this collectivity, toward which we have certain moral duties.
"Socialism as a social or moral philosophy was based on the ideal of human brotherhood, which can never be implemented by institutional means... Fraternity under compulsion...is a perfect path to totalitarian tyranny... There is not reason, however, to scrap the idea of human fraternity... As a statement of solidarity with the underdog and the oppressed, as a motivation to oppose Social Darwinism, as a light that keeps before our eyes something higher than competition and greed--for all these reasons, socialism--the ideal, not the system--still has its uses."
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Leszek Kołakowski
"What is Left of Socialism?" (1995)
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Humanitarian instincts grow fiercer in proportion to the distance by which their causes are removed and it is always easier to build Jerusalem in Africa than at home.
Barbara Tuchman, “The Proud Tower”
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Journalism is an excuse for shy people to ask questions.
H.D.S. Greenway, paraphrasing Harrison Salisbury; OnPoint NPR, “A Veteran Reporter On American Power and the Modern World”
11 September 2014
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Temple de la Mort - 1795
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"Indeed, the hermit...will doubt whether a philosopher is even capable of having 'final and true' opinions, whether at the back of his every cave a deeper cave is lying, is bound to lie--a wider, stranger, richer world beneath every surface, an abyss beneath his every depth, and beneath his every abyss an inmost depth. 'Every philosophy is a facade-philosophy'--such is the hermit's judgement... Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding-place; every word is also a mask."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
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Cénotaphe à Newton - 1748
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Opera House, Cross Section of Stage and Auditorium - 1781
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You know what the problem is with grace? It’s not useful. It’s not marketable. It’s also not too complicated, and oh yeah, it’s free. Can you think of anything less American?
Caleb Flores, "4 Things Jesus Didnt Die For" http://madeformore.co/4-things-jesus-didnt-die-for/#uxPiip3V8fYUvLUq.99
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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
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To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying...
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Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same...
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When I voice something, I often become more convinced if it. One hope has been verbalized aloud too many times, and now it throbs within me.
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And yet You teach me, continuously—submit, offer these to You, because when I grip them, cling onto them, I crush them as I would a butterfly in my fist. I distort them, and they turn obsessive, imbalanced, grotesque. You can hold onto these dreams, these hopes. You hold them gently, lovingly, firmly—and You know how to grow them, and how to let them die.
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We forget how much we love those we injure. We forget how much we injure those we love. In trying to assert who we are we forget, most of all, who we are. And then we forget the forgetting.
Raqs Media Collective, "Amnesia"
Atlas of Transformation
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Whenever my mind gets a little room to wander, I wonder if things would change with time and circumstance and distance. Perhaps, but perhaps not. These are shifting sands. Merely a diversion. I know there are more significant issues at hand, but this more readily captures my attention and energies…
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And perhaps in this there is beauty as well. I learn to hold things loosely. I learn to let people in my heart go. I learn independence from them and dependence on You, on the portion which You allot to me. And there are times when I am so achingly thankful for this—the providence with which You hold back the things after which I long. Because I will not be happier for having them, and I will not be more deprived for my want of them. And so I learn: Reliance. Hope. Purpose. These things continue even when desires are fulfilled, even when lack perseveres.
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In Assateague, our shadows grew long over the sand dunes; in the dark we stood swallowed by an inky whiteness while the glow of frothy waves flickered in uncertain patterns before our wide eyes; we lay still and silent under dusty galaxies arched over our wind-whipped heads, watching the red quivering disc of a moon climb up over its dim reflection cut into a hundred slivers by the surface of the waters… and I wondered if this was where I was meant to be. Because there is wonder still in the familiar, where I find myself. There is beauty here, and fullness, and laughter, and there is still heartache and uncertainty and healing. And You are here also. Just as You are elsewhere, in other peoples, in circumstances and hearts completely foreign to me. You are here also, working, breaking, changing, growing.
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In almost all large cities at present, public space has gone from being a space for meeting and socializing to one of mere transit between one point of the city and another; urban design seems to be focused more on optimizing the flows of production of a decidedly capitalist system, expanding without apparent resistance, rather than on satisfying its citizens' needs for well-being and recreation.
Jaime Iregui. “Informal Displays”
Atlas of Transformation
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How we imagine happiness is always somewhat banal. Panic and suffering is more fulfilling. The idea of getting through something, having the sense of being alive. Being able to cope. Testing one's limits. To sense, sense, sense...
Karl Holmqvist, "Black Hole" Atlas of Transformation
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