Blessed Unrest, the book

A summary of:
Hawken, P. (2004). Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World. Penguin Books: New York.

I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed with this book. It's very optimistic, which is nice; but it didn't sell the optimism to me. For the most part, it seemed like wishful thinking. I'm not entirely convinced of this great social movement; though I wish I could believe like Hawken. I wish, specifically, that I could believe that "the shared activity of hundreds of thousands of nonprofit organizations can be seen as humanity's immune response to toxins like political corruption, economic disease, and ecological degradation" (141-2) and that this movement had any chance of succeeding in healing the world; or even better, if the "underlying values of the movement," which I happen to really sympathize with, "are beginning to permeate global society" (186). In some areas of my life, I'm an optimist; but in this case, I tend to think that things are just getting worse and worse.

There were, however, some interesting points to consider. And there were some fabulous quotes within and from it, worth capturing.

One of the main unifying beliefs of this so-called movement has to do with the perversity of our economy, which in turns justifies and necessitates all sorts of human horrors: "If there is a pervasive criticism of global capitalism that is shared by the actors in the movement, it is this observation: goods seem to have become more important, and are treated better, than people" (14). Interestingly, Hawken later writes the following:

John Maynard Keynes cautioned that we live our lives under the illusion of freedom but are likely to be 'slaves to some defunct economist.' Even that description understates the problem. The world may be caged by a defect of the entire economic profession - namely, the idea that we can assess value in banknotes, or that we can undertand our relationship to the material world using an absttract metric rather than a biological one. The extraordinary advances made by Western societies will, in the end, be subservient to the land and what it can provide and teach. There are no economies of scale; there is only nature's economy. We cannot turn back the clock, or return to any propr state on the planet, but we will never know ourselves until we know where we are on this land. There is no reason that we cannot build an exquisitely designed economy that matches biology in its diversity, and integrates complexity rather than extinguishing it. In accomplishing this, there is much to be fained from those who have not forgotten the land (100).

I think there are two lessons to be taken from this quote. The first is that there is something undeniably broken about our relationship to our abstract metrics of value. How did money become the only thing we value? What has happened to social values, to spiritual values? As Hawken says, "A free market, so lovely in theory, is no more feasible in practice than a soceity without laws" (132). It is so important that there are people fighting against this disease (...though unfortunately, I am not as optimistic as Hawken, and I think that this is a case of David and Goliath, one in which I'd be shocked if David prevailed). Why are we not sickened by the fact that all our activity on the Internet, from using Google to posting on Facebook has a commoditized value to those companies? How is one to disengage from this sick relationship with money?

And the second is that it may apply in some respects to the Internet as well. Yes, there is no way to return to a time when we had not yet imagined the Internet. The world is forever changed. But that does not mean that it must always exist in its current form. It can become more resolutely a vehicle for social justice, for spirituality, for humanity. The key is to never forget where we came from.

Here's just a small point worth considering: "Language is nothing less than the living expression of a culture, part of what [anthropologist Wade Davis] calls an ethnosphere, 'the sum total of all the thoughts, dreams, ideals, myths, intuitions, and inspirations brought into being by the imagination since the dawn of consciousness'" (94). Bearing this in mind, I wonder what it means for us culturally that our language is morphing into text-speak, punctuated by emoticons. I'm sure it at the very least reflects our subordination to technology and our sick ambitions to become like the machines.

I found it surprising that Hawken described Wikipedia as one of the manifestations of this supposed social movement. His justification is that it demonstrates a committment to collective activity, dependence, and "the rise of the amateur" (158). I do wonder whether the promotion of the amateur is part of what's not so great about the Internet, as I mentioned in a previous post. But the message from this to me is that much of this is a matter of interpretation: Two people can look at the same thing, say Wikipedia, and one can see it as a wonderful thing embodying what's best about humanity, while another person can look at it and see it as a symptom of the great illness our age. I'm beginning to realize that this is going to be one of the major struggles of my PhD, i.e. making a case for why things need to change when some people see the Internet as it is as one of (if not the) greatest liberators of humanity.

Hawken sees ideologies as harmful, and makes no bones about this:

• "This is the first time in history that a large social movement is not bound together by an 'ism'" (15-6).
• "Ideologies prey on these weaknesses and pervert them into blind loyalties, preventing diversity rather than nurturing natural evolution and the flourishing of ideas" (16).
• "In contrast to the ideological struggles currently dominating global events and personal identity, a broad nonideological movement has come into being that does not invoke the masses' fantasized will but rather engages citizens' localized needs. This movement's key contribution is the rejection of one big idea in order to offer in its place thousands of practical and useful ones. Instead of isms it offers processes, concerns, and compassion" (18).
• "Ideologies exclude openness, diversity, resiliency, and multiplicity, the very qualities that nourish life in any system, be it ecosystem, immune system, or social system" (162).
• "History demonstrates all too eloquently that no ideology has ever amounted to more than a palliative for any dire condition" (163).

I do see his point. And I am leery of building a case or designing something based upon a given ism, hence part of my aversion to religion. But I think the line between ism and worldview or morality is blurred. After all, he later goes on to describe a shift in worldview that Karen Armstrong had termed The Axial Age, and suggests that what we are seeing now is the latest manifestation, the latest flare of this moral shift. First of all, it's important to understand what the first Axial Age is all about, in the words of Karen Armstrong:

"The Axial sages were not interested in providing their disciples with a little edifying uplift, after which they could return with renewed vigor to their ordinary self-centered lives. Their objective was to create an entirely different kind of human being. All the sages preached a spirituality of empathy and compassion; they insisted that people must abandon their egotism and greed, their violence and unkindness. Not only was it wrong to kill another human being; you must not even speak a hostile word or make an irritable gesture. Further, nearly all of the Axial sages realized that you could not confine your benevolence to our own people: your concern must somehow extend to the entire world.... If people behaved with kindness and generosity to their fellows, they could save the world" (185 - from The Great Transformation).

This was the time of Socrates, Plato, Lao-tzu, Confucius, Mencius, Buddha, Jeremiah, Isaiah... and it later saw a "second flowering" (184) in Christianity, Islam, and Rabbinical Judaism. Hawken's point is that this represents a movement recognized best in hindsight: a movement for spirituality and humanity. But further, he thinks that the same is happening now, though it is similarly difficult to see without the benefit of hindsight. "Just as today, the Axial sages lived in a time of war. Their aim was to understand the source of violence, not to combat it. All roads led to self, psyche, thought, and mind. The spiritual practices that evolved were varied, but all concentrated on focusing and guiding the mind with simple precepts and practices whose repitition in daily life would gradually and truly change the heart. Enlightenment was not an end - equanimity, kindess, and compassion were" (185).

There is much to absorb from this above quote. I think it really highlights what is universal about spiritual practice, which is helpful for my purposes as it will be necessary to distill the essence from these if I am to propose a spiritual technological alternative. How can a new Internet be designed to cultivate the self (in an egoless way), psyche, thought (deep thought), and mind? How grand this ambition is, if it is really an effort to create an entirely new kind of human being! Dream big, eh?

Consider these two quotes:

• "Friedrich Hayek, Novel Prize-winning economist... was one of the first to recognize the dispersed nature of knowledge and the effectiveness of localization and of combining individual understanding. Since one person's knowledge can only represent a fragment of the totality of what is known, wisdom can be achieved when people combine what they have learned" (21).
• "Not suprisingly, people don't know that they count in such a malordered, destabilized world, don't know that they are of value. A healthy global civilization cannot be constructed without building blocks of meaning, which are hewn of reights and respect. What constitutes meaning for human beings are events, memories, and small dignities - gifts that rarely emerge from institutions, and never from theory. As the smaller parts of the world are knitted into one globalized unit, the one thing we can no longer afford is bigness. This means dismantling the big bombs, dams, ideologies, contradictions, wars, and mistakes" (23).
  

What I wonder is whether we need to design a localized alternative to the Internet, i.e. a space where people can feel important and create meaning and forge real friendships. This would be, as Wendell Berry (quoted by Hawken) describes it, an instance of "solving for pattern... a solution that addresses multiple problems instead of one.... Solving for pattern is the de facto approach of the movement because it is resource constrained. It cannot afford 'fixes,' only solutions" (178).

The real question this book has made me ask is whether the Internet as it is now is really the appropriate tool to support such a movement (assuming it exists). Perhaps it is worth considering whether there are ways to design a new Internet that could better support people fighting for humanity. How do we support compassion and cooperation, for example?:

We are surfeited with metaphors of war, such that when we hear the word defense, we think attack, but the defence of the world can truly be accomplished only by cooperation and compassion. Science now knows that while still in diapers, virtually all children exhibit altruistic behavior. Concern for the well-being of others is bred in the bone, endemic and hardwired. We became human by working together and helping one another. According to immunologist Gerald Callahan, faith and love are literally buried in our genes and lymphocyte, and what it takes to arrest our descent into chaos is one person after another remembering who and where they really are (165).

I think this is where the immune system (as network, i.e. Internet) metaphor falls down. We seem to presume that because we are interconnected on the web, this fosters greater communication and cooperation (I don't think we can pretend it supports compassion). Does it? Or does it just support the illusion of these? We need to consider how it is we can genuinely design for this so that we can do great things as a species.

Some brilliant quotes from others found in this book:

• How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsiliby for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light. - Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams
• What we call Man's power of Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument. - C.S. Lewis
• There is an answer from every corner of the globe... the enslaved, the sick, the disappointed, the poor, the unfortunate, the dying, the surviving cry out, it is here. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals
• Let no man pull you own so low as to make you hate him. - Booker T. Washington
• The modern conservative... is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. - John Kenneth Galbraith
  
• But limits nonetheless exist and we know it. In our wildest madness we dream of an equilibrium we have lost, and which in our simplicity we think we shall discover once again when our errors cease - an infantile presumption, which justifies the fact that childish peoples, inheriting our madness, are managing our history today.... We turn our back on nature, we are ashamed of beauty. Our miserable tragedies have the smell of an office, and their blood is the color of dirty ink. - Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays
• I rejoice to live in such a splendidly disturbing time! - Helen Keller