Re: [Futurework] From memes to viruses?
Oh, dear. I got the exact opposite impression about Tuchman's mirror when I read that book. I thought the 1300s were a time of coming out of a stagnant social order into the modern age, with a kick from the black death. What happened with the famines and epidemics was that Europe's peasant population suddenly declined. Yet the lords still expected the same incomes as before. The Great Peasant revolt in France was viciously put down by the knights, but they could not get the peasants back on the estates. The lords had to start offering rented land at reasonable rates to get anybody to work the land. The age of Serfdom ended. It had begun eight centuries previously when the conquering Franks set up a military government after destroying the Gallo-Roman kingdom that existed for a short while after the fall of the western Roman empire. They made the Gallo- Romans serfs. Far from the church developing more authority in this time, its power collapsed. This was the time of the great schism, when there were two, sometimes three popes around, all claiming to be the real pope. I get puzzled about somebody who thinks these medieval monks like Abelard and Anselm were examples of enlightened thinking. The idea of 'reason' has been the biggest problem with western civilization down to the present. In the present, we are also struggling to come out of an outmoded form of social organization and those who benefit from this organization are resisting fiercely. But they are steadily losing authority. Good sense eventually overcomes rationalism, but it usually takes a disaster like the black death, or an environmental collapse. Rationalists are people who can not get it that there is no such thing as 'objectivity'. Everyone's thought is conditioned by experience and what they have been told and believed are 'laws of nature'. Good sense is the innate human ability to get outside of self and preconditioned thinking , and ask what is actually happening. Education is mostly about neutralizing this ability and conditioning people to think in the 'rational' framework hammered into them. When people who have been taught to be 'reasonable' encounter something that contradicts 'reason' they cannot understand it and think some 'forces of darkness' are gathering. Actually, the forces of good sense and peacefulness are gathering. The dark forces that have prevailed are now frantically trying to make everything 'rational' again. tr On 26-Apr-08, at 3:47 PM, Ed Weick wrote: I've been looking through stuff I've written during the past few years and found the following, which seems relevant to the discussion of memes that has been a dominant feature of the Dissenters list recently. It may be of interest to some of you. Ed A Short Essay on Viruses Some recent postings have raised the fascinating topic of the effect of disease on history. Recurrent pandemics such as bubonic plague, cholera, typhus and influenza have played an enormous role in defining the course taken by peoples for several centuries thereafter. Syphilis has brought dynasties to ruin. The viruses or bacteria which were at issue affected physical health. I would suggest that another type of virus, a intellectual one, has been at least equally potent in shaping human history. As an entity, we can think of it as something like a computer virus - as something which does not take the shape of an organism, but which is transmittable from person to person nevertheless. What does this intellectual virus do? Just as biophysical viruses sicken the body, it sickens and immobilizes the mind. It numbs and dulls human potential, and plunges people into states of pessimism, meanness and despair. The impact of this virus varies from civilization to civilization, and from era to era. The Aztecs have recently been mentioned on this list. Some years ago I did some reading on the Aztecs, and one of the things I recall is that, for many years before the coming of Cortez, the Aztecs were in a state of deep pessimism. They felt their world to be ending. I believe it had something to do with their calendar, a human invention which they invested with cosmic powers. When Cortez finally came along, they were immobilized to the point of not being able to do anything about him and his small army. However, the facts of smallpox and rebellion by peoples the Aztecs had subjugated did not help. Another example of the virus comes from the 11th to 14th Century Europe. Led by activist thinkers such as Peter Abelard, and fed by the accessibility of Arabic and Classical material, the 11th Century witnessed an increasing secularization of the Christian world, and an explosion of initiatives toward a more rational theology, which laid the foundations for the development of science. Heretical
Re: [Futurework] From memes to viruses?
I am wondering how many people within range of this have read Jared Diamond's Collapse; how civilizations choose to succeed or fail. There are plenty of examples of how societies chose to survive. Usually it was by eliminating class structures and going to a peasant, egalitarian type of society. The prime example of this is the Maya of around 900 A.D. The archeological record shows that once all these palaces were smashed and the human sacrificing priests were thrown off of their step pyramids, the standard of living for the peasantry improved. They were much better off for about 600 years until the guys with the guns and crucifixes showed up from across the sea. As Marx said, history is written by the ruling classes who do not like to believe that they might not be essential to society and do not want the inferior classes to get the idea either. I think the evidence from archeology to contemporary observations show that people are best off when you have a society of free holding peasants with no ruler class. Alas, most Marxists do not get that idea. They think all land should be held in common. In many places it is and it works well, but only if the critical level of government is the village. Of course we now have industrialism and most people are now living in cities. That is a problem humanity has never faced before. The good part of urbanization is that when people move from the country side into the cities, their birth rate drops drastically. The bad side is that, first, the environment gets destroyed, and second, agriculture gets taken over by the urban economy. Both of these cause food production to drop. So, I think too that there will be change, but I do not think it will be all that unpleasant if the class war gets managed right. I am especially much more optimistic about peasant revolts. When the peasants are clear about what they are trying to achieve, and do not let themselves be lead by fanatics and charlatans, they usually create a great improvement in their lot. Besides the Maya, another good example is the slave revolt on Haiti. The slaves took over the plantations, drove off several French armies sent to re-enslave them, and were a lot better off than they were before. However, the great powers of the time persistently boycotted them and over time this wore them down. After Saint Patrick overcame the druids, the Irish developed a very peaceful, prosperous and egalitiaran society for about four centuries until the guys with the horns on their helmet showed up from across the sea. Notice a pattern about peaceful agrarian societies? Almost all caste or class oriented societies, the historians tell us, originated in a military conquest in which a technically superior or just more aggressive people found they could use a weaker people for their own benefit. The thing is, when societies start to fall apart because of the greed and idiocy of an elite, it goes one of two ways. Either it collapses into a dark age, or else the rulers are overcome and you have an age of peace and freedom. This is what is going to be decided over the next 50 or so years. It looks pretty good that the latter will happen, because the underdogs all over the world are developing pretty good leadership and are sensible about what they are trying to achieve. This is what usually leads to success for peasant and slave revolts. The underdogs fail when they do not know what they want, only that they are unhappy with what they have. That is why the Jacquerie failed at first, and why Watt Tyler screwed up his rebellion in 1381, and why the Hussites failed in Germany. In about the same time frame the Swiss freemen were spectacularly successful in defeating the armies of the feudal warlords, Wallace and Bruce got the English out of Scotland for four centuries, and the Latvians fought off waves of crusaders to remain a pagan and classless society. Another thing happened in France, which was well discussed by Tuchman, but otherwise not well recorded in history. After the black death and the failed peasant revolt, and the hundred years war, most of the nobility of northern France allied with the English to kept the French peasants down. King Charles the Wise of France did something amazing for those times; he allied himself with the peasants against his nobles and the English, to regain control of his kingdom. His constable, Du Geusclin, organized a very effective guerilla war, with a small professional army supporting the armed peasants. But enough of my ramblings. My aim is to demonstrate that there is no reason to be pessimistic that the species cannot get through the present crisis and achieve a better way of life for all the world's people. tr On 27-Apr-08, at 4:52 PM, Ed Weick wrote: It is a long time since
Re: [Futurework] Fw: English will be the official language
Check out these sites. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unifon http://www.unifon.org/htm/unifon%20alphabet.htm Then, ask me why we continue to use such a ridiculous system of writing English. As the article says, no other language except french and english are impaired by this idea some batty academics have that the spelling of words is supposed to reflect its history, instead of how it is pronounced. The only problem I find with UNIFON is that it is done using a midwest American accent. Even in unifon, 'zebra' ends with an A not a U, and 'ark' still starts with A not O. But at least I can fix the problems myself and write with a proper Canadian, er, Kanajan, accent. I can stop fighting with my spell checker over spelling 'labor' as 'labour'. By the way, it does not look like anyone has designed an optimal unifon keyboard yet. tr On 11-Apr-08, at 4:41 PM, Ed Weick wrote: Subject: English will be the official language The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as Euro-English. In the first year, s will replace the soft c. Sertainly , this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard c will be dropped in favour of k. This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome ph will be replaced with f. This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter. In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent e in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away. By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing th with z and w with v. During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary o kan be dropd from vords kontaining ou and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru. Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas. If zis mad you smil , pleas pas on to oza pepl. ___ Futurework mailing list Futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework ___ Futurework mailing list Futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
[Futurework] responses
Following up on my “why we call it Citizen’s Income” piece and reactions to it and other ideas people have put across; I don’t have any specific problem with anything anyone is saying. But I do not think much is going to come of these discussions. It is as I said; the people interested in a guaranteed income do not know enough yet. Therefore, a nation wide organisation to promote a Citizen’s Income is not going to happen just yet. There is a lot of educating which has to be done, as well as some researching as to how best to promote to the public a new type of society. And, sorry folks, talking about a guaranteed income or basic income in isolation from everything else is not going to go anywhere. I think I have had more experience than most people on this list at talking up the concept with various kinds of people. I also know a little about framing. I would like to know a lot more. Any kind of guaranteed income is a direct contradiction to the frame or paradigm most North Americans have had rammed into their heads from a very early age. There simply are no answers to the objections to be raised about a BI-GAI within that frame. You have to break the frame. For example, you cannot argue for a demogrant from fairness. What you get back is that a bigai will be very unfair to the people who will have to work harder to support the people who are ‘not pulling their weight’. Some people with a philosophic bent are calling this the ‘lazy versus crazy’ or ‘free rider’ problem. It is unanswerable on its own terms. The answer to all this is; “Nobody has any ‘weight’ to pull. There is enough of every necessity for everybody. People who are working harder are doing so because they want to or believe they have to. There is no sense at all to keeping everybody working 40-60 hour weeks when all material needs can be satisfied with less than a twenty hour work week. In the ‘lazy versus crazy’ parable, crazy is crazy not because she is working twice as hard to carry lazy, but because she is wasting the limited resources on their little desert island. But the real world is not one of these little castaway islands beloved by economics debaters. We left the neolithic age behind long ago. We live in a sophisticated technological society with finished goods several stages removed from the resources extracted in making them. The technological machine has made it possible for us to produce everything we need with little effort but we cannot make the mental adjustment to a world of leisure and abundance. We still act like neolithic people. We have about fifty years to make the mental changeover. Then we go back into a dark age for who knows how long. The climate change and environmental contamination all around us is not going to be solved by some modifications to the existing economic structure. Talking about sustainable development is nonsense, there is nothing which can be ‘developed’ indefinitely. The breakdown of the natural environment is happening because we are trying to take out of it more than it can give. The solution is to take less. That means an end to the present economic system which depends on constant growth and the reification of money. Reification is the fallacy of making a thing out of an abstract idea. Money is an abstract idea. We are going to organise a steady state economy, in which production is limited to what we can reasonably get from the natural world given our technological level. This is going to happen one way or another. We are going back to the middle ages or we are going to develop a kind of very big co-operative. Now, what are you nattering at me about communism for? Who told you what communism is? Who told you what anarchism means? Who told you what libertarianism means? Who told you what democracy is? The government of China still calls itself communist. It is a totalitarian state running a system of state capitalism and beating the hell out of the private capitalists on this continent. It has as much to do with communism as the United States has to do with free markets or the vatican has to do with christianity; nothing. Any time communism, or cooperativism because it means the same thing in effect, has had a chance to work, it has worked very well. So well in fact, that extreme efforts are always made to stop it; for example, in the old Soviet Union under Stalin. Yes, capitalism has worked very well for awhile, or corporatism, a much better word for it; the control of society by and for large interests. Then it destroys the base on which it depends, because it requires constant growth in a finite world. However the world is going to be run in the future, it will not be by a system requiring interest on money which must be repaid with wealth that does not exist when
[Futurework] why we call it Citizen's Income
There has never been a social policy without a social movement capable of imposing it - Pierre Bourdieu, acclaimed French sociologist ‘Citizen’s Income Toronto’ was founded in 2007 to make a start at building a new social movement. The idea of ending poverty by simply ending it, by ensuring everybody has enough money to live on without condition, is old. It has been simmering away for centuries but has been coming to the boil in this century. There is a growing realisation around the world that the capitalist/ imperialist/corporatist age is coming to a close. For the first time, there is a world wide consensus about what the alternative is. It is not a Marxist, anarchist, socialist, pacifist, or libertarian utopia, but takes ideas from all of these. There appear to be three arms or basic principles to this evolving order. One is participatory democracy. One is an ecologically balanced, co-operative, and steady state economy. The other is a guaranteed, basic, adequate, unconditional income for everyone. None of these will work without the others. To have a participatory democracy, everyone must have the time and material well-being to be able to participate. People will never consent to an end to growth and to the overuse of the natural resource base, unless they can be guaranteed an equitable sharing out of the limited wealth available from the natural world and our existing technology. The only way to negotiate an equitable distribution is through a true democracy, in which everyone can really participate. Canadians are starting to understand that there cannot be infinite economic growth in a finite world. We also have a movement for democratic reform in Canada. Several attempts have now been made to establish a proportional representation voting system in provincial government. Canadians are starting to be aware of the concept of participatory government. A few of our municipal governments have experimented with it. The model for it is the system of Porto Allegre in Brazil. There, the entire population is allowed to participate in local planning councils which decide the city budgets and many planning issues. What people from places where participatory democracy is in use notice when they observe political meetings in Canada is that we rush decisions through, without taking time to hear all points of view. What these people tell us is that true democracy takes time and we have to give ourselves time. But Canadians are among the most overworked people on earth. Our civil society, community groups, neighbourhood associations, have largely collapsed because there is no one to keep them going. The command of our economic masters to work, work, work, or be thrown literally into the gutter, is as much about social control as it is about productivity. There are many reasons for the voting reform and economic/ environmental movements to support each other and the citizen’s income movement. When everyone who wants to can participate, these movements will become unstoppable forces. People must win for themselves the time to be active citizens in a participatory democracy, as well as to enjoy more time for themselves. And a shortened work week is the solution for over production and depletion of the environment. In the next fifty years humanity will either transform into a new kind of society and economy based on co-operation rather than competition, or will collapse into a dark age. In western civilisation, we have had examples of free citizens managing their communities; the Greek city states, the free cities of the middle ages. They failed because of outside pressure but also because the need for productivity forced some people into subordination to others. Now technology gives us a global world and frees us from most of the need for work. The idea of active citizenship in a participatory democracy gives us the principle for managing this new kind of society. ‘Citizenship’ still seems absurd to those Canadians in precarious employment. But if our situation is going to improve, we need to become active citizens. A guaranteed income will not be graciously bestowed upon us. We need to learn the self organising skills that will enable us to gain it, and then to maintain it. naming the rose Right now the great debate is on over what exactly to name the concept of giving everybody enough money to either survive or to live adequately. The terms ‘Basic Income’ and Guaranteed Income’ and ‘Guaranteed Adequate Income’ and even ‘Guaranteed Annual Income’ are now popular. ‘Mincome’ and ‘Guaranteed Minimum Income’ are falling into disuse. There is also debate about the amount to be ‘guaranteed’ and how often the amount should be given and how. People try to drag in various ‘philosophic’ problems which are not serious and show
