Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Letter to Barack 21: The Need for Fundamental Paradigm and Culture Shifts

Dear President Obama,

Hopefully the failure of the Obama Administration will make it easier to communicate the need for fundamental paradigm and culture shifts.

Your failure is especially instructive because you have done everything right, or at least almost everything right. You have been a rational president. You have based policy on facts and not on unsupported opinions. You have sought the informed advice of acknowledged experts and by and large followed it. You have invited all parties to come to the table to share ideas for solving problems. You have not rushed to judgment, but have carefully weighed pros and cons and the views of others before arriving at a decision.

If you had been a crackpot, it would have been harder to see that rationality in its dominant forms is inherently unworkable.

A major qualification must be made to the thesis that you have done virtually everything right. You have intelligently administered the status quo, but you have not attempted to deliver the change you promised. In your campaign you spoke of “changing the rules of the game” and “change from the bottom up.” In your books you write of your anthropologist mother and of your visits with relatives in Kenya who practice different basic rules. You were moderately credible as a leader who might actually initiate change in America.

Although you disappointed us, it remains an encouraging fact that your message touched hearts and minds. People gave you money. They voted for you. Your campaign provided evidence that there are many people who realize that fundamental change is needed.

Today you are desperately trying to trim the deficit. You are keenly aware –although there are some liberal savants who deny it—that the nation cannot continue to go deeper and deeper into debt. A few months ago I heard you say on television that the point of your policy was to spend more money. Then you were desperately trying to revive a sagging economy. Today unemployment is not going away. Turning off the cash spigot can only make it worse. Turning on the cash spigot can only make the deficit worse.

You are checkmated. The problem has no solution under the rules of the game as it is currently played.

Further, even if you could do the impossible; even if you could get the economy onto a path of steady growth with declining debt and declining joblessness at the same time, you would still be checkmated. Sure we can support green technology to some extent without a paradigm shift, but to really get humanity off its collision course with nature we must get off the growth dynamic that has driven capitalism for the past 400 years. (See for example Ted Trainer, Towards a Sustainable Economy, the need for fundamental change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.) Now you are desperately trying to get the USA on the growth dynamic.

I am not the only one proposing paradigm shifts today. (See for example any issue of Resurgence magazine.) There are many books with concrete proposals, some of which I have written. There are many on-the-ground experiences, some of which I have participated in and/or evaluated.

Let me close with just one point about culture change. (See my and Joanna Swanger´s chapter on this topic in Handbook for Building Cultures of Peace. NY: Springer, 2008.)
Culture shifts do not come out of thin air. They come out of potential transformations of existing cultures.

Applying this principle to the USA here and now suggests renewed emphasis on volunteering, a practice that is already widespread. Bypass the economy. Mobilize resources to meet needs directly. You could start in your own neighborhood, in the slums near the White House, and you could take a few tips from The Church of the Savior, which is just down the street from you.

A renewed emphasis on volunteering is not just an emergency push to house the homeless and to provide useful and dignified activities for the unemployed during a short period until the recession is over. It is a strategy for beginning a sustainable future now.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Letter to Barack #20: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Dear President Obama,

Now we have celebrated yet another Christmas with millions on the outside looking in. They are outsiders excluded from our annual fête de la prosperité. They are selling knick-knacks on the sidewalks, washing the windshields of cars stopped at intersections hoping for a tip, panhandling, stealing, cooling their heals in prisons, surviving on pittances in dilapidated apartments, working long hours for pay so low that they are poor in spite of being employed, telling complicated lies to con somebody out of a few simple dollars, and so on and so forth.Meanwhile hundreds of think tanks and university departments and international organizations are grinding out more professional literature than anybody has time to read about how to end poverty. At a world level it is about how to achieve “development.”

It is the New Year, the first day of the new decade. It is a time to renew our minds.

“Be not conformed to this world, but be renewed by the transformation of your mind,” wrote Christianity’s first intellectual in his letter to the Romans.

What Saint Paul called “transformation” we epigones of Thomas Kuhn today call “paradigm shift.” (Read shifts, the singular always including the plural.)

You may remember President Obama that a year ago I predicted in a letter to you that your own experience would demonstrate the need for a paradigm shift. If you as a very popular president, advised by the leading lights of the mainstream economics profession, supported by majorities in the House and the Senate, could not get the economy humming along smoothly and successfully within a year, your frustration would demonstrate that there is something wrong with mainstream thinking. The year is up. The demonstration is, however, redundant. Even without current frustrations there are many anomalies that demonstrate the need to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.

Bucky Fuller wrote, “What they do not want you to know is that there is enough for everybody. There is enough to meet the needs of 100% of humanity without ecological damage.” Bucky spoke as a scientist, as one of the many scientists who know that appropriate technologies equitably applied could meet the needs of all the world’s people, although probably not the needs of the larger populations that would result from unchecked population growth.

Unfortunately, what Bucky Fuller attests is physically possible is not at this point in time socially possible. Accumulated anomalies that call for a paradigm shift are embedded in the curricula of the universities, in the minds of the experts, in the minds of the general public, and in our institutions.

Except for a few pioneers such as Genevieve Vaughan (none of whom were invited to your Jobs Summit) minds are not moving. Nevertheless reality is moving. Without consciously intending to do so, society is slouching toward a paradigm shift.

Evidence to prove my point: Millions of Americans are now newly on the government payroll, living from check to check as Congress passes successive extensions of unemployment benefits. The benefits are extended not because the reigning economic paradigm calls for them but because reality calls for them.

Crime rates have fallen in the USA as millions are less tempted to steal because the government gives them money, because houses formerly vacant during the day are now occupied by their unemployed owners, and probably also because law enforcement authorities have improved their techniques.

I believe we are slouching toward the realizations that unemployment is permanent; that millions more would be unemployed if they were not warehoused in jails, schools, and barracks; and that other millions more would be unemployed were they not employed in the security business keeping down the unrest partly caused by unemployment in the inner cities and in the outer periphery. Unemployment patent and disguised is structural. (Not just “structural” in the narrow sense of the economists, but also in the broader sense of the sociologists.)
Every day we realize more and more that for-profit employers will offer the millions just mentioned jobs only when the fifth derivative intersects the sixth integral in n-space. In other words, never. Every day we realize more and more that those millions should be doing something useful while waiting for that non-event to un-happen. And …

….for example, they could be planting trees. Here I have to congratulate you President Obama because you are taking a step in the right direction putting many people to work installing green technologies …

…and, to finish my thought with questions: Are we getting to the point where we will put our money where our mouth is by treating human beings as ends not as means? As the very purpose of the economic apparatus? Not just as human resources? If so, then all those millions could be supported not just to be useful, but to develop their own personalities. They could, for example, be in school studying massage or poetry or bass guitar or pole vaulting or astronomy or religion, or philosophy, or the history of algebra, or organic gardening, or whatever fulfills their dreams. We would always factor in also going back to school periodically to keep up with the skills required by the job market. Retooling is part but not all of lifelong learning.

Signs already point toward a silent transformation and paradigm shift in education. Throughout the world enrollments in tertiary education and in adult education mushroom. Public policy in every nation endorses the UNESCO goal of lifelong learning for all.

Another question: Are we backing our way into fulfilling the prophecy of Karl Marx that at some point in time pre-history (the epoch of domination of human beings by the economy) would end, and the history of humanity (the epoch of the full and free development of all) would begin ?

In practice if not in theory we are breaking the sales barrier. Even though if you listen to people talk, or if you listen to the justifications for micro-lending programs or for job training programs, you will hear that most people still believe the fish story (“Give a man a fish, and …”), in practice more and more people are able to achieve a livelihood without producing anything for sale. The market is losing its grip, becoming more docile, acting more like a servant and less like a master.

There is a catch.We are funding the greening of America; the groceries of the unemployed; ever greater military, police, and private security expenditures; and highly subsidized education for more and more students of all ages by borrowing ever more astronomical sums of money. The national debt, state and local debt, corporate debt, family debt, and individual debt are tending on the whole to go higher and higher without limit. World society is ever more polarized into a rentier class of lenders and a déclassé multitude of borrowers. The masses and the taxpayers owe the rentier class periodic payments from now to eternity.

Laboring under a steadily-mounting burden of public and private debt, with employment opportunities scarce and often low-paying, the majority somehow gets by. The majority works some of the time, goes to school some of the time, sometimes neither works nor goes to school, and sometimes manages to get by while simultaneously both working and studying. Living from check to check, bill to bill, stress to stress, in their ripe old age the majority finally finds economic security as the government picks up the tab for elder care. Life for the rentiers is sweet, while life for the majority is stressful but tolerable. But can a system based on steadily-mounting debt last?

There are ways to continue the present positive trends toward a society that is ever greener, ever more inclusive, and ever more highly educated. I will not list the negative trends that must be discontinued since I have already mentioned some of them and everybody knows what the others are. I will assert, echoing Bucky Fuller, that in principle they can be discontinued.

It can be done. We and our descendants can enjoy future Christmases without millions selling knick-knacks on the sidewalks, washing the windshields of cars stopped at intersections hoping for a tip, panhandling, stealing, cooling their heals in prisons, surviving on pittances in dilapidated apartments, working long hours for pay so low that they are poor in spite of being employed, and telling complicated lies to con somebody out of a few simple dollars, and so on and so forth. Christmases in the future can be fêtes de la liberté, de l´égalité, et de la fraternité.

Obviously the paradigm shift needed to keep the good trends going and erase the bad ones does not consist of prolonging indefinitely the present practice of going ever more deeply into greater and greater debt until finally the creditors realize that they will never be paid and the bubbles burst.

I will not give details of the needed theoretical and practical transformations here. Anybody who wants them can easily find my other writings, those of Pierre Calame, those of Charles K. Wilber, those of José Luis Coraggio, those of Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi, and those of feminist economists.

Peace and all good,

Howard R.