The Idea Camp

Lately I've been starting things. Acholi Beads, WikiChoice, the Children's Book Project - things that didn't exist until I played some role in creating them.

This has been a strange experience.

I was never a 'start things' sort of person. In fact, I have long looked with a fair amount of envy at people with that magic for making something new, for envisioning and executing. So my recent exploration of creation has given me a chance to study from the inside what I've long watched from the sidelines. I still feel like quite a novice.

This is one of the reasons I'm excited to be at The Idea Camp in February of this coming year. This new conference/roundtable aims to bring together social innovators - people with the knack for coming up with new, important ideas and making them into world changing realities. I stand to learn a ton.

Another reason I'm excited is to reconnect with Charles Lee, The Idea Camp's organizer, who I met briefly this summer in North Carolina. Charles is using ideas of open source activism to move people from complacency to compassion, and from compassion to proactivity. I draw a lot of inspiration and guidance from his work.

Another reason I'm excited is because you're invited. The Idea Camp is February 27 and 28, 2009 in Irvine, CA, and it's free. Follow the links and register on the website and you're in. And drop me a comment if you plan to come. I'll look forward to seeing you there.

Acholi Beads: The New Luxury

I just posted some thoughts over at the Acholi Beads blog about The New Luxury.  A quick excerpt is below; go here for the full post.

The New Luxury acknowledges that value cannot be bought, but that we can buy based on values.  It asserts that meaning is broader than a slogan, more attractive than a photo, and deeper than any pockets.  It assures us that beauty created in a studio pales when compared to the faintest reflection of real love.  And the new luxury insists that we will not be blinded by advertisements or manipulated by marketing; we are too smart and passionate to allow our dollars to be tempted away by false promises of happiness.

TOMORROW: an experiment

A Past Quickly Gone

For thousands of years people farmed as much land as they and their families could acquire and manage. Acres and acres, but small by today's standards of industrial farms. They plowed, planted, tended and harvested. Over and over. Every season. Perhaps they had livestock as well, and knew which part of the year their herds would mate, and when the young would be born. Every year.

Before that they hunted for their food and found wild, edible plants. Food was a daily struggle and a daily accomplishment. Each day brought new hunger and new satisfaction. Perhaps some plants would last a week, maybe two, but planning ahead was of little use. Those that survived had to focus on their present.

Those days were simple. Minimal planning, some hard work, and your family would eat. And that was, for the vast majority, the best that could be done. For thousands upon thousands of years the human species has lived this simple, predictable life. But today something new is happening. It started with the Industrial Revolution and was accelerated by World War II. Suddenly we could do better than eating. Suddenly we could have comfort, even luxury. And we got them through a manufacturing boom.

Coal and oil provided cheap power, and technology improved upon itself at a surprising rate. Long distance freight leveraged these two advances and suddenly the whole world's resources were at the fingertips of those with the aptitude to take them. And the resources proved more abundant than we could have hoped. Manufacturing soared.

Like Grabbing a Passing Rocket

Fast forward to today.

In the last sixty years we have used more of the earth's resources than in all of human history before that. If you can spare a moment, please read that again. Things are so different now that we use in one year what used to take thousands of years to deplete. And the pace of our resource consumption is increasing.

Our lives look very different now, and nowhere more different then in how we interact with the planet. We are separated from the earth in every way possible. We pave it over and dam it up. We filter it and gate it off. We don't grow, hunt, harvest, or gather anything from the earth. We get it from the store.

But for the first time in the history of our species we are having a lasting impact on the earth as a whole, and it's not a good one. Deforestation, strip mining, species extinction, and polluted air and water are some of the signs of our impact. Other more controversial consequences of our collective lifestyle like global warming seem more probable each day. And most of these have become serious problems in the same 60 years during which we've drained our world's resources.

As we pull back and see this picture as a whole - the long, steady ascent through stone, bronze, and iron ages, all conducted with relatively little impact on the planet as a whole; then the short, frenetic burst of the last 200 years, and the staggering trajectory of the last 60 years - we start to see a compelling picture. The pace of change is like going for a long jog and then grabbing hold of a passing rocket.

If that long, steady ascent was a line the length of a football field, whose height represents the use of resources, it would slowly, from one goal line to the other, rise to about a foot off the ground. The last sixty years is so small in comparison to human history that it would not reach a single inch into the end zone, but our resource consumption is so rapid it would soar a mile into the sky! Being able to visualize history in this way, and to see the staggering ways we're changing our own lives and the environments around us in such a short time, leads me to a rather unnerving conclusion.

A Triple Blind Experiment

In the scope of history, our current way of life is no more than an experiment - one that might succeed, but might fail. The unnerving part is that almost no one is thinking about it this way. Instead we are reshaping the world and our interaction with it such that we depend on the success of the experiment for our survival. It seems that we are all running as rats in the maze and no one has stood up to act as scientist.

There is, I believe, reason for such myopia. Humans are not built for the long view. The many millennia of seasonal and annual repetition selected for those people who were able to focus their attention best on the short term. Hunt today, plant tomorrow, harvest in the summer. There was little thought of next year, none of next century.

But now as a race of hunters, gatherers and farmers we are facing problems of centuries. Resource depletion, environmental destruction, even national debts are not problems that the changing of the seasons will solve, but we seem to keep waiting for them to just go away, like the snow in spring.

I am not suggesting the imminent doom of mankind. I believe as much as anyone in our ability to learn and adapt. What I am suggesting is that this is a new epoch in which a more focused vision for what we must learn and how we must adapt is needed, because the world is changing a thousand times faster than it ever has.

We are building Western society on a hypothesis. That hypothesis is that all of this cataclysmic change in the ways we live and how we use the precious resources we have will be sustainable: for the next generation, for their children, and beyond. We seem to assume that since it has worked for the last sixty years, it will work for the next thousand. But there are precious few if any voices that are able to tell us if our gamble is paying off, if the experiment is working. Or not.

The 10,000 Year Clock

Two days ago I watched a TEDtalk by Stewart Brand. He showed a project that he and some friends are working on: a clock that will run for 10,000 years. The clock is a project of The Long Now Foundation, a non-profit designed to encourage long-term thinking, and when it is done it will ring a different tune with its 10 bells every day for 10,000 years.

They chose 10,000 years because it's "about how long humans have had a stable climate and technological progression." They start by looking to the past because we can see it - there are books and pictures and artifacts. But then they did the brave and difficult thing of engaging with the future. They dared to ask what the world might be like in 10,000 years, and if they could build something to survive the interim. And now they are building it.

The execution of the project is astounding; it captured my imagination for the last two days. They are building a monument-sized clock that uses only bronze-age materials - the world's largest binary computer - and embedding it inside a mountain in Nevada. They are making it into a site of pilgrimage, trying to inspire people to think 10,000 years ahead, or at least a couple hundred. In shaping the experience, one of the designers outlined the "7 Stages of a Mythic Journey" and they are creating the journey with myth in mind. It's a broad, synthetic, creative, idealistic endeavor, and I'm all for it.

Voices from 29,000 ft, and Beyond

The 10,000 year clock and The Long Now Foundation reminded me of something I've been thinking about for the last year or so. We need someone, a number of people, to monitor the experiment that is modern Western society. The difficulty is that the experiment is not happening in one university, or one field of study, or on one continent. The experiment is messy amalgamation of millions of different players and ideas, building upon each other in real time on all sides of the globe.

What we need is a new field of study that is purely synthetic - a discipline that is a mixing pot for all other disciplines, so that they might be stirred together and the temperature of the whole can be taken. This is the one that must guide us.

Bristish Economist E. F. Schumacher, in his book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, argues that society has become far too dependent on Economics for guidance, bowing before the almighty dollar in hopes that if everyone acts selfishly, everyone will gain and eventually find comfort, and then, peace. But he states rather intuitively that no system built upon greed will ever lead to peace, for where is the rich man who says, 'I have enough'?

Schumacher also critiques education, stating that we have built institutions that teach us the tools to create anything, but fail to teach the values that ought to guide creation. This, I think, gets to the point. There is no vision for societal progress, only a thousands mashups of technological innovations, all drawing from and competing for the limited resources of the world.

With our newfound ability to affect the world as a whole, there must be some attempt at synthetic vision and guidance. It must take into account human need and equality, enviornmental sustainability, resource renewability, economics, politics, faith and religion, even, as the 10,000-year clock shows, storytelling and myth. It's practitioners must take a higher, broader view of the world, standing as if on Everest's 29,000 ft. peak, looking out across the whole of the world. And they must look at the long-term, understanding that we do care about the longevity of our planet and its eventual sustenance of our children and their children and beyond, though often we don't think, act, or even vote that way.

In Herman Hesse's Demian the title character talks about the changing of the age, saying that most people will not be ready for the tumult. But that some will step forward, selected by the chance of nature, "Not as leaders and lawgivers - we won't be there to see the new laws - but rather as those who are willing, as men who are ready to go forth and stand prepared wherever fate may need them."

The age is certainly changing, and we need those few that nature has endowed with the unique ability to see the long view. These voices must be cultivated and amplified, speaking from their lofty perspective to guide us in this grand experiment.

Those who sweat together...

I'm on may way out to Phoenix for the weekend for my friend J-Sad's bachelor party. Ironically I'm also on a parasite-killer medication that forbids me alcohol. So it'll be a fun weekend of drunk-watching.

Following on the Dear American Christian Church post and discussion, I'm working on a post about "the hard work of community." Community, in my mind, ties together a lot of the truth that I've learned about God, love, and humanity, and is a key to making some necessary changes in how we live faithful lives. I'm looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts!

Subscribe to my feed to the right to keep up to date.

Phone for the Homeless

My good friend Aaron sent me this story about Google giving free permanent phone numbers to homeless people in San Francisco. They operate like standard voicemail boxes, accessible from any phone, and will allow these people to include their callback numbers on job applications and the like. If it works in San Francisco Google plans to scale it to other major cities.

Great idea.

I was thinking about how to capitalize on this. Why not offer these newly-phone-numbered folks the chance to sign up for a call list. Or several lists. Then aggregate the most applicable job openings and send them out via voicemail to each person. It's practically no marginal cost once the infrastructure is developed. You can do this with health information, housing opportunities, etc.

One thing I learned while traversing skid row in Los Angeles is that, more than money, hope is often the greatest need among homeless people. What better way to start rebuilding hope than by presenting opportunities directly to people over and over again.

It's a new era in addressing homelessness, because never have homeless people been so easily addressable.

Any other ideas?

Outliving Yourself

Changing the world.

It’s about changing people, right? It’s about millions, even billions of people changing the way they treat each other. But then, all of them are going to die. And the world will be left with the next rebellious upstart generation that wants to change the world.

Maybe that’s the significance of the Biblical story where God knocks down the life expectancy from 900 to 90. Whether you take it as history or myth the meaning is the same: any changes that we make are erased in 100 years. We live in perpetual cultural upheaval.

So how do you change the world for generations? What lives on after people pass away? Two things come to mind – ideas and organizations.

There’s a lot of talk these days about viral ideas – ideas that spread from mind to mind the way that a virus spreads from body to body. Once it plants itself in a host, the host spreads the idea to others, almost involuntarily. The idea takes on a life of its own. Some even have the power to jump generations.

Organizations can also last – look at The Red Cross, Ford, the Mormon church. And it seems to me that the stronger the commitment to an organization’s ideas, the more likely it is to last. (And its ability to make money. That helps too, for a time.)

The collision of ideas and organizations is what gives religions their amazing longevity. They are organizations built completely on ideas, or perhaps they are ideas that people perpetually build organizations on. Either way, they have staying power.

The ideas that Jesus talked about were archetypically viral. Viral ideas have spreading mechanisms built in. Like an email forward that promises you a new iPod if you send it to enough people. The idea is spread by virtue of its contents.

Jesus’s ideas had a different spreading mechanism. His ideas were about life change, and his life was their first showcase. When they spread to a new host, I mean really took root in her like a virus, her life changed. And when people saw the life change they were introduced to the ideas in a powerful form. If actions speak louder than words, then a new way of life is a sustained shout. Jesus’s ideas were shouted from his and his followers’ lives.

The reason his ideas spread so powerfully in the years immediately after his death was that the change they created in his followers was overwhelmingly attractive. These hosts of Jesus’s ideas loved each other, provided for each other, transcended extreme difficulties with joy and patience. Who wouldn’t want to know more? The virus multiplied.

I wonder about today’s Christian church, though. Is it founded on Jesus’s viral, life changing ideas? Or are there new ideas at its core? Or is it more like an organization (or group of organizations) that propagates because it has learned how to make money? Perhaps, like one of my last posts, it's a mix.

The Mixing Pan

Random train of thought this morning on my way to catch a bus to Gulu: According to a new billboard the PAM Awards are back in Kampala soon. They are annual music awards, and this is the second round since I've been in Uganda. It's strange that annual events here are no longer new.

The PAM in PAM Awards stands for Pan-African Music. I was wondering if that meant all-African so I thought about other words with the prefix 'pan.' The first that came to mind was pantheism. The belief that God is everything, or everything is God. So, yes, 'pan' means all, and well done Uganda on hosting such broad music awards.

Then back to pantheism, and its close relation panentheism - the belief that God is in everything. Then I wondered at the distinction, what it actually meant. If God is in everything then isn't everything, in a sense, God? And if God is everything, then isn't God de facto in everything? And so I wondered if the distinction held any relevance in the actual beliefs of people. Hindus might say that God, or Brahman, is in everything, as might Buddhists. But they might also say that everything is Brahman, everything is a working out of God, and everything will eventually settle into its eternal state as Brahman. It seems that Hinduism and and the Buddhism that it spawned are mixtures or overlaps of the theoretical distinctions of pan- and panentheism.

And then I wondered about monotheism, the belief that God is unique and separate, and perhaps even personal. Could there possibly be overlap with the broad, transcendent God of Hinduism? I think there may be some, especially when Christians speak of being created in the image of God. If you listen to Christians talk about that heritage, you'll often find that it holds deeper meaning to many than just a family resemblance. You'll find that it imparts value, significance, unalienable rights, even glory. It's almost as if they believe that there's a little bit of God inside them, like the Buddhists.

So then I thought about all the theoretical distinctions that we make to order our existence, to make sense of the ceaseless variety of our experiences, thoughts, beliefs and wonderings, and I wondered whether many of those might mix and overlap as well. I thought they probably did.

Then on the bus, waiting for it to leave the hot, noisy Kampala bus park, I was reading Barack Obama's book The Audacity of Hope. He wrote in the first chapter about how the distinctions between Republican and Democrat are often more blurred than not in the minds of individual voters. Like the Christian mother who pays for her teen daughter's abortion, or the midwestern factory worker who favors tax cuts for the rich, because that's what he plans to be someday. My politics are similar. I haven't been able to work out which party most closely aligns with my own ideas, mostly because their polarized rhetoric doesn't seem to apply to daily decision making. There is no room in their politics for overlap.

As I write I'm reminded of Christian denominations - theoretical constructs with thin differences to which adherents align their beliefs. But I would guess that the actual (as opposed to rhetorical) faith of individual believers across denominations blurs as much as not, and is more similar than different.

I bet it's like that with a lot of beliefs - evolutionists who pray, Christians who sit cross-legged and meditate, republicans who don't mind same sex marriage, individuals whose ideas are more nuanced than the labels that they're stuck with.