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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

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Changing course

A view of Big Ben and Parliament from the River Thames. It is night time and the sun has just set.
Photo credit: Thomas Kelley

Little is more quintessentially American than asserting the right to change course.

The Declaration of Independence hinges on this passage from lawyer, advocate, president, and slavery investor Thomas Jefferson:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” —Thomas Jefferson

The establishment of the United States changed the course of all of the peoples on this land, natives and settlers alike.

Settlers declared their right “to alter or abolish” long-distance governance from the old world on the far side of the Atlantic.

And over the generations, many indigenous people across the Americas have rejected the legitimacy of the new nation, built as it is on bad faith, broken agreements, and “civilization,” or cultural assimilation.

A few years before Jefferson wrote, another Revolutionary pamphleteer acknowledged the “fraud, force, or accident” often used to keep power in the hands of a few and away from democracy, “the government of all over all.” Fraud, force, and accident are among the tools that the new United States used to hold back the full outworking of revolution and the equality and flourishing that were embedded like yeast in Jefferson’s words.

New ideas and ways of doing things threaten the way things are. They mess with customary channels of power and influence, and it’s therefore easy for systems to disincentivize procedural or substantive change as much as possible.

“If you don’t like it, leave” becomes a common taunt of change-resisters in religious groups, social clubs, and public life, because power never likes innovation bubbling up outside of its control.

Rhetoric like that is not only rarely effective; it also struggles against this fundamental and resilient feature of the American project: the asserted right to change.

And it’s especially ironic in groups (like Seventh-day Adventism) that began on this land, were shaped in the context of the emerging United States, and affirmed the political philosophy that launched the new nation.

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For the beauty of the Earth

Without a deep, deep understanding of the sacredness of life, the fragility of each breath, we are lost. —ChrystosI haven’t lived anywhere I’m more conscious of “the fragility of each breath” than New York City.

The density of traffic fumes and tobacco clouds, and occasionally the pungent odor of marijuana, too—all of these pollutants make it easy to notice my breath and the quality of air I’ve taken for granted until now.

When I get back to Maryland and stand on the grass and breathe in deeply, fresh air means something new to me, something extraordinarily precious. We need to hold that quality of attention to the world we’re part of, and we need to do it consistently.

The US government’s latest executive orders, perversely signed today at the Environmental Protection Agency, include lowering power plant emissions targets, and continuing investment in fossil fuels: we’re going to keep burning, keep piping, and keep warming this planet for at least the next four years (likely the next eight).

And the United States’ new policies are being justified in the name of a profitable energy industry. They assume this country has only a limited impact on the ecosystem beyond its political borders. These policies are an effective denial that we have the responsibility to care and act in favor of “the sacredness of life,” that we’re not just accountable to private, corporate advantage.

I recently saw a social media post of still pictures from an un-credited documentary. In three frames, an indigenous person explains nature’s generosity:

“Nature gives us everything for free. Nature doesn’t charge us any money. All nature asks of us is that we protect it,” they say.

But it’s only partly true. Nature doesn’t charge but changing the status quo will cost us all, and it will cost us the longer we wait to start.

Read Vox’s explainer to understand the full scope of the new executive rules.

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Reader Review 12: Systems and Progress

The Reader Review series was a 2014 experiment in rounding up of some of the most thoughtful or provocative articles and videos I came across online. I’m still deciding whether to continue it in 2015, but either way, this will be the last edition of the year.

Thank you for reading along with me!

Brentin Mock draws a firm and clear connection between air pollution and state violence:
Why do Americans’ perspectives vary so much?

Grist: “Why environmentalists should support the Black Lives Matter protests” (Brentin Mock)

The Grist has a wonderful writer in environmental justice activist Brentin Mock. In his latest column, Mock reflects on his own health, the Eric Garner case, and why environmentalists should recognize their stake in the protests against police brutality and racial inequity. Mock’s point on air quality disparities is one I learned about this March thanks to a Mother Jones article on controversial research that correlated air pollutants with race and class.

What I’m pleased about it is that Brentin isn’t the only writer to draw connections between climate action and racial justice concerns. The climate coalition 350.org published a similar case earlier this year in an article titled “Why the Climate Movement Must Stand with Ferguson.” Peterson Toscano, a performance artist who has been touring the country performing his one-man play on climate action, hope, and human resilience, also highlighted Brentin’s article on his podcast site earlier this week.

By the way, if you’re not yet subscribed to Peterson’s weekly podcast, Climate Stew, you’re missing out on a real treat: vivid characters and some powerful glimpses of our collective future. “Climate Stew,” Peterson says, “takes a serious look at global warming, but won’t scare the snot out of you. I want to give people space to think about the roles we’ll play in the new world that’s coming, how we will come together and what it’ll take to keep this a safe planet for humans, coffee, and pasta, not just for polar bears.”

And how about that #TortureReport? I can’t bear to read it.

Christine Amanpour, via Twitter
Christiane Amanpour on #TortureReport, via Twitter

I’m pretty close to oversaturated with stories of abuse, state violence whether local or federal, and non-accountability for human harm. I watched the Eric Garner video once, and that was once too many for me.

Yesterday morning it struck me that the common link between public executions, town picnics at lynchings, ISIS beheading videos, the Janae/Ray Rice photographs and recording, and the Garner photographs and video is our willingness to re-witness the moment of violence over and over and over again with no higher value than objectifying fascination.

I don’t want to participate in that. And that’s why although I couldn’t help but hear about the release of the report on US torture via the CIA, I haven’t gone that step further to read the full report for myself.

But I’ll refer you to a few people who have:

“The first question I asked when I saw the Abu Ghraib pictures was, ‘My god, where were the doctors when all this was going on? How did the government turn off the protests from the medical system?’ What I discovered instead was that the doctors and psychologists were built into the interrogational abuses. So it wasn’t a matter of turning off their protests, it was a matter of a structured system of complicity.” —Dr. Stephen Miles, Doctors Who Torture

I did notice which band of activists had been more or less silent about local torture via police #BlackLivesMatter but threw itself into full outrage over federal torture via the Agency in #TortureReport. And I found that baffling given the issues and stakes were the same, just expressed at different levels of government.

CREW’s Daniel Schuman asked, “Why isn’t the debate about the damage US torture created, not the concerns about its occurring becoming public?” Good question, Daniel.

Before the report was released, I wrote about the way the United States has instrumentalized human life and bodily integrity, considering state assaults “acceptable trades” in the course of statecraft and order-keeping. The observation only became more salient once activists began posting excerpts and footnotes from the CIA record.

But on Twitter I also raised the question of addressing the federal expression of violence and dismissing its local counterpart. Who benefits, I asked, from our addressing only one level of analysis and our reticence to draw connections across the levels of our system?

My guess is that the system has adapted to cynicism about it at federal level: we easily joke about a sluggish Congress and shrug about bought-and-paid-for legislators. These jokes and shrugs do not motivate deep change. The macro level of the system expects participant distrust and accounts for it.

But local engagement is much more threatening. This is the level at which most of us live our lives; most of us don’t get to work in Congress, the executive, or the judiciary. Most of us live our lives at the level of the supermarket, the cinema, the children’s schools, the city council, and our doctor’s office. When citizens engage governance at these levels, and when activists block activity at these levels, it is much harder to pretend that life is normal and all is well.

My hope is that those who get a taste for impact at the local level will begin to shift their cynicism about whether ordinary people can influence the other levels of our society.

If you want to learn more about analyzing several levels of a complex problem at once, read these examples.

In 1967, systems scientist C. West Churchman popularized the definition of “wicked problems”: problems in social systems where definitions were “ill-formulated,” where issues were nested or consequent to other problems, where information was not well-defined, where decision-makers did not share common values, where piecemeal approaches changed the system and produced unexpected outcomes deemed worse than the initial concern, and where the problem was either difficult or impossible to solve.

If that doesn’t describe recurring social questions like immigration, economic stability, policing strategy, climate change, and asymmetrical war, I don’t know what does.

So take a look at two articles. The first, an editorial from Elsevier’s Landscape and Urban Planning Journal, reviews the literature on wicked problems, notes that we seem to be co-evolving with wickedness or complexity in our environment, and highlights the AAA approach to these kinds of problems: awareness, acceptance, and adaptation. The second, a recent conference paper, is a careful example of multi-level systemic analysis applied to Mexico’s drug trade. The author maps the problem’s precipitating factors and the result looks like a hornet’s nest. That is entirely appropriate!

This is the kind of analysis that people who intend to produce deep change need to do, do early, and do often. There’s no dodging complexity by blocking out three-fourths of the realities involved and oversimplifying the remainder.

If you want deep change, you need deep perspective.

Also read or listen to these links.

  • Henry Giroux tracing state violence over the last 60 years. (TruthDig)
  • Tony Robbins on the interview tour for his new book on priorities and investing for results – this is a 2-part interview with Tim Ferriss. Read the comments on Amazon before you buy.
  • Nafeez Ahmed describing the DOD’s Minerva Research Initiative, which includes “strategic” study of Twitter accounts and social contagion. (London Guardian)
  • Chris Bragg about one of the attorneys who used to help disclose corporate influence in government and who now helps companies cover their tracks.
  • Forbes reviews Ed Catmull’s book about building Pixar and making peace with mistakes, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. My favorite quote: “Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new… If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.”

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From Milton’s Areopagitica

Sometimes it’s the 400-year-old articles that speak most clearly.

John Milton’s Areopagitica, a treatise from the early days of the English parliament, was inspired by a 1643 law that required new books, pamphlets, and papers to be reviewed and licensed by the new English government before publication and reprinted only when approved. In this tract, Milton, argues that censorship stifles communal debate, learning, and knowledge-making, undermines a people’s search for truth, and binds them to state-authorized conclusions.

via Southern Methodist University's Bridwell Library.
First page of Areopagitica, via Southern Methodist University’s Bridwell Library

When Milton wrote, England was in the midst of its second civil war and developing the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy over the tradition of divinely appointed monarchy. Parliament was controlled by Protestants, Presbyterians specifically, and their chief antagonists were Catholic and Puritan. King Charles I, enthroned at the time, had a Catholic wife and was perceived as unsupportive of the Protestant Reformation in mainland Europe.

Milton references Catholic churchmen and rulers uncharitably throughout Areopagitica, playing to readers’ prejudices in order to increase their support (the Christian epistle to the Romans does the same). But these references also work to describe a particular kind of governance: people of all and no religious background have presided over tyranny and the non-Catholic king was accused of doing so throughout his reign until Parliament had him executed in 1649 as a traitor. The Parliament that passed the Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing was not Catholic, but Protestant, and in this pamphlet Milton describes them as grasping, controlling, and well out of their rightful lane.

In the passages below, Milton explains why open discussion is essential and why prejudging variant opinions and those who are different is both unwise policy and philosophically weak.

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. Under these fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city. What some lament of, we rather should rejoice at, should rather praise this pious forwardness among men, to reassume the ill-deputed care of their religion into their own hands again. A little generous prudence, a little forbearance of one another, and some grain of charity might win all these diligences to join and unite in one general and brotherly search after truth, could we but forego this prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences and Christian liberties into canons and precepts of men…

And if the men be erroneous who appear to be the leading schismatics, what withholds us but our sloth, our self-will, and distrust in the right cause, that we do not give them gentle meetings and gentle dismissions, that we debate not and examine the matter thoroughly with liberal and frequent audience; if not for their sakes, yet for our own? — seeing no man who hath tasted learning but will confess the many ways of profiting by those who, not contented with stale receipts, are able to manage, and set forth new positions to the world. And were they but as the dust and cinders of our feet, so long as in that notion they may yet serve to polish and brighten the armoury of Truth, even for that respect they were not utterly to be cast away. But if they be of those whom God hath fitted for the special use of these times with eminent and ample gifts, and those perhaps neither among the priests nor among the pharisees, and we in the haste of a precipitant zeal shall make no distinction, but resolve to stop their mouths, because we fear they come with new and dangerous opinions, as we commonly forejudge them ere we understand them; no less than woe to us, while thinking thus to defend the Gospel, we are found the persecutors. —John Milton

Howard Chandler Christy's "Scene at Signing of the Constitution of the United States" (1940)
“Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States” (1940) by Howard Chandler Christy

History is recursive when we fail to learn its lessons. The British aren’t the only people to have faced state censorship; they are again today, and so is the United States. But the United States was born more than a century after the English Civil Wars and the 1643 ordinance to “regulate” publishing. The US’ founders were no stranger to English history or the religious, political and ideological persecutions that run through it.

So it was no accident that the Western hemisphere’s newest republic diverged from England on its definition of “treason,” provided that “no religious test” could qualify a person for state office, and ranked as fundamental the rights of free speech, free exercise of religion, free assembly, and a free press.

In England, the principle of a free press was not secured until 50 years after Areopagitica, yet there are questions about both individual censorship and press freedom in the UK today. (Also see this summary of the UK’s reach from AP.) And these questions are not just for professional commentators and specialists, but also for every ordinary person who values liberty—their nation’s and their own.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. —John Milton

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Revised Govt Classification System Proposed

Proposed: 14 updates to the Freedom of Information procedures that keep “too many documents classified.” #FOIA

The current classification and declassification systems are outdated and incapable of dealing adequately with the large volumes of classified information generated in an era of digital communications and information. — Nancy Soderburg