Part of the 20th Century’s progress myth was an assumption that recency means improvement and therefore old age means “fixed in early developmental stage.” The argument goes that it’s unjust to measure ancients by the morality of this society rather than by the morals of their own culture. It’s wrong, some say, to judge grandparents […]
A second look at failure
One of the tools I’ve been using this week to cope with the steady stream of chaotic political news is playing with scales of distance and time: How many light-years between Earth and—oh, I don’t know—Pegasus. How long human history is. How short recorded history is in relation to the age of the Earth. How […]
Your cloud of witnesses
As many times as I’ve spoken during Black History Month, I never tire of urging people to remember that it wasn’t a single individual or two who created [the 20th Century Black freedom movement], that, as a matter of fact, it was largely women within collective contexts, Black women, poor Black women who were maids, washerwomen, and […]
Dialogue in hard times
Your intentions are great, but you have to deal with your impacts, and you have to be accountable for that. People are dying. We don’t have time for every single police officer to maybe realize that their humanity is being sacrificed. Structural changes are things we can do now. [In the meantime] raise your tolerance for discomfort: […]
Resisting conventional waste
Imagine the power of entire teams of people who know who they are and bring their whole selves into collaborative relationships. Imagine communities filled with people who reach out to other people they respect and whose work they love enough to amplify without drama, score-keeping, or the hope of extra credit. Relationships win the race! “These are counter-cultural priorities, […]
The next doable thing
I learned a new term today: the adjacent possible. This term comes from Stuart Kauffman’s 2002 theory of biological development and has run the usual distance from hard science to technology and theories of social change. (See Wired‘s 2010 feature with Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on creativity and innovation.) The adjacent possible is the space just next-door to our present […]