Gift as Expressive Action

Might we ask donors such questions as these?

• What stories are told about your parents and grandparents?
• What stories would you like told about you?

A narrative of heroism, identity formation, challenge and achievement - isn't that a context of philanthropy? How does the gift (that possibly magnificent gesture) fit in the story of a life? A heroic act? Propitiation? Remembrance? Wily act of self advancement? Magnanimous act in keeping with a certain station in life? Strategic intervention as a community or cause hangs in the balance? Each gift, no less than any other dramatic gesture, is a plot point and an action expressive of character. Anyone who says otherwise ("No! gifts are or should be efficient market-style transactions! A gift is a businesslike tactic!") is writing his or her own story, though blind to how it might be read. To consider the gift as a tactic in a market context is to paint the giver's portrait in oils: Sensible business person, standing with one hand on his computer in a well appointed office with a view of the city as seen from a high window.  Such a symbolic portrait ("The Benefactor as Social Investor") already tells the story of a life, an ethos, a world, an era. (Doomed.)

Comments

[Jeff Trexler]

You might be interested in Stephen Marglin's new book, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community.

[Gerry]

Actually, it is becoming more and more clear to me that "the dismal science" is just plain false. The foundations of market fundamentalism are in an ossified domain that wouldn't know a good new idea if it hit them in the head. Check out The Origin of Wealth for a remaking of economics on a more sound theoretical foundation. Revisioned this way, I don't think it is so "dismal", but yes that is the best description of mainstream economics.

[phil]

Thanks, added both books to my reading list. Economics is psychology, moral philosophy, and political philosophy expressed in mathematical terms, at least it grew from those roots. Economic man is what? An assumption? A fiction? Like Crusoe, economic man is a vision of what we are, and a vision that is not true or false, just limited, and misleading.

[Gerry]

I've just completed the part where he discusses "homo economicus" or Economic Man. The old models are too simple and cannot generate the complex dynamic behaviors that we see in actual economies. The new models are still models, but the agents are set up in an environment where they can react to other agents and accumulate new behaviors in a quasi-genetic way.

Science is not philosophy or politics, but when you have a domain that claims scientific grounding that is patently false, all the polemics that arises from it is suspect to say the least.

Like Benkler's book and Soros' "Open Capital" book, I think he gets more into the "where to we go from here" questions that go beyond the science into public policy in the later chapters that I haven't read yet.

[Hellbier Contra Nichtenstein]

What exactly is new and exciting about physical scientists trying to assert an hegemony over a social science like economics? Enchanting new experiments in advanced quackery? I mean, that's how classical economics came about in the first place, under the influence of a scientism in thrall to the new science of thermodynamics. Now complexity theory is displacing thermodynamics as the "rigorous" rationale.

[phil]

Legitimization of those in charge, whether priests, kings, scientists, or MBAs. "There is no alternative; it is a matter of logic, revelation, natural law, or the emergent properties of complex systems."

[Gerry]

Good social science is built on good science. Economics has been based on bad models since the beginning, and the science that the founding authors adopted was superceded soon after it got started.

And where did you get the idea of "physical scientists trying to assert an hegemony over a social science"? How would you go about grounding a model of agents in an economy? Simplified agents may or may not capture the behavior of human agents in the real world, but it is something you can examine closely if you want. If the models with simplified agents match what you see in the economy, then you can be pretty sure that a good many of the critical properties have been captured. Social networks may have characteristics beyond what the networks of simple agents can have, but that doesn't mean the models are not predictive of important qualitative behaviors.

[Gerry]

My point is that economics before dynamic systems models was like astronomy before Copernicus. Copernicus didn't even have a very good model, Kepler soon showed that orbits are eliptical (approximately), not circular, but the essential change from Earth centered to Sun centered had to happen before you could even consider astronomy a science at all.

The critique of "legitimization of those in charge" can only be made if that is in fact what is being done, and that I would call polemics, not science.

[Jeff Trexler]

A society is only as good as its metaphors. Most scientists would regard the faddish rush toward systems speak (Nonprofits are chaotic! Nonprofits are better because nonprofits are networks! Nonprofits should look for the tipping point!) as utter BS.

Personally, that's one reason why I've spent so much time over the past decade+ (ouch) studying real science. If a community is going to use that language--and in today's world it's all but inevitable, like a child mimicking her parents' actions--the only way to avoid serious mistakes is to understand it.

[phil]

Jeff, Gerry is an MIT trained technology guy. He is quite likely to master the science. But the movement from science to metaphor has always been a key move in social science or philosophy. Geometry as the model for Plato's forms, or clock work and billiard balls, for Locke and Descartes; or "indeterminancy and Godell's theorem" for postmodernists. We legitimize our intuitions and aspirations by clothintg them in the language of neurotransmitters, or networks, or whatever will somewhat awe the reader. Still you end up with an "ought" coming out of a paragrphs of "is." And one cannot be deduced from the other. What is we may always say, that is not right. Whatever networks produce whatever emergent properties, we must always ask, "So what? What does that mean about my personal responsibility to choose wisely and ethically?"

[Jeff Trexler]

Just to be clear, my BS comment wasn't in response or referring to Gerry. I rather liked the cut of his comments' jib. What I had in mind were some specific books, articles and blog posts not written by anyone on this thread. And of course, who can forget this?

As for the history scientific metaphor & the is/ought problem, amen.

The latter is a particularly noteworthy, concern for our field. For instance, the brief mention I made yesterday on my uncivsoc site re the eugenics movement--take a trip on the wayback machine and you'll hear folks using the language of networks, membranes and webs, all wrapped up in the rhetoric of the "social," to advocate the creation of NGOs designed to breed away the poor, the "feeble" and non-white.

We glibly dismiss this to our peril. There are more things in networks and webs than our dreamt of in our philosophy; they can produce salient effects but they can also be malign. To pretend otherwise is like saying we get cancer from space alien implants, an explanation that may uphold the innate nobility of God's creation but does nothing to stop the spread of disease.

[phil]

Jeff, this is a very important point you are making, not that Gerry or anyone here is on the other side of it.

On "The Crowd" see Gustav Le Bon and his influence on Freud, Hitler, and Edward Bernays, father of public relations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Le_Bon

Kristallnacht, when Hitler withdrew the police, and the crowd surged through Jewish quarter should give us pause as we praise the wisdom of crowds or user created justice or whatever miracle we see rising as an emergent property of self organizing communities.

"The community will decide." How often I heard that on Omidyar.net. The Terror operated under similar principles. A lynch mob is a community deciding. The faces of those citizens under the tree are exultant, fathers, mothers, children, with their trophy. We are pack animals and we bring our prey down as we hunt in packs. In a pack we have no indvidual responsibility for "the community has decided." To stand against the pack is often to become an object of its wrath, and so it rises, ever more powerful. As you say, we netizens would do well to chasten our enthusiasm for the community.

[Jeff Trexler]

The Crowd also happens to be the title of one of my favorite movies.

[phil]

I will have to rent that, thanks.

[Gerry]

Interesting discussion. I note that both of you actually flip HCN's argument on its head. The problem isn't physicists invading the social sciences, it is people without adequate scientific backgrounds cloaking arguments in scientific sounding rhetoric. It isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as you read it as poetry, not science, social or otherwise.

As far as how to you get from is to ought, I don't think you do. Referring now to the "First Idea" book which pictured next to "The Origin of Wealth", a book that doesn't really lean on the "complex systems" ideas, though it is not incompatible with them. The ought questions are foundational because they are grounded in our emotional connections to our communities. Our symbolic prowess and the high rationality of science are much more subtle and nuanced but still balanced on an emotional substrate of fear, anger, pleasure, interest and intentions.

Incidentally, I looked up Watts in the index because I thought I remembered a reference and sure enough his work was prominently featured in the chapter I just finished on "networks", the next chapter is "evolution". (And BTW, I recommend Robert Laughlin on emergence.) Emergence as a physical principle is really value neutral, although there are qualitative measures that can be applied in the physical domain. You might be able to say whether a mob or a tornado are well organized, getting organized or dissipating based on metrics applied to the objects in question (both quantitative and qualitative metrics).

[phil]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=pL1JyKSmjxE

Via Jeff by personal communication. "The Crowd" on Youtube.

[JJ Commoner]

We glibly dismiss this to our peril. There are more things in networks and webs than our dreamt of in our philosophy; they can produce salient effects but they can also be malign. To pretend otherwise is like saying we get cancer from space alien implants, an explanation that may uphold the innate nobility of God's creation but does nothing to stop the spread of disease.

Amen to this .. and yet to say that nothing is different today than in the past because networks and network dynamics enabled by hyperlinks are not probably a very different set of conditions for communicating ideas and questions and (eventually) action (both constructive and malign) would be to be denying something very important and (ultimately) very real, I think.

[Hellbier Contra Nichtenstein]

ha. typical. scientistic distortion of social thought rationalized as an insufficiently rigorous application of science. ya may as well be rewriting the "two cultures." this is is the type of shit that killed freud for english speakers. here's a pure scientist.

[Gerry]

Frankly, HCN, I don't really know what you are trying to say. Personally I have direct experience with non-verbal communication, but I'm not about to open up a conversation with you about that. You can attribute that to lack of trust.

Are you interested in having a conversation, or is this some sort of game for you?

[phil]

Maybe metaphors and parables and fables and just so stories are significant because of what they reveal, or help us see. The Fable of the Bees by Mandeville is clearly poetry, but what it says about human nature and about society ("Private vices are public virtues") is not unlike what Adam Smith said a little later about the "Hidden Hand," or what Milton Freidman proves with equations. When we talk about emergent properties of social systems, we on the net tend to take a rosy view, as if what it all came down to were power to the edges, power to the people, power to the many, to the multitude, as opposed to control via hierarchy from the top down. What I think Jeff is saying and I feel too is that populism, grassroots movements, have their dark side historically too. Blood and soil, the Terror, mob violence, lynchings, as well as peaceful communes, and wikipedia. The net has been romanticized, even as it has been commercialized. Many of those studying emergent properties of crowds today, as in the Edward Bernays day, are looking for an edge, a way to move crowds for private ends, or private ownership. Maybe what we are seeing in this thread is like the hangover after a good party.

[Antoine Möeller]

Is it too simplistic to say that the control freak's biggest fantasy is to have everything and everybody on the grid - however poor the facsimile?

How close is he to having that fantasy fulfilled?

(And don't be a pussy - give me a percentage.)

(HCN's real scientist interprets at 2:50-3:10.)

[Antoine Möeller]

According to the South Park Republicans:

People who should just fuck off:

Bono:

(He is mani fold)

[Gerry]

AM, it is much like with icebergs, 90% of it is completely invisible, below the surface. I'd toss out a metaphor about dark matter/energy, but I suspect that those are mostly red-herrings that will disappear or be much reduced with better models.

Phil, there are several dimensions to emergence, first, it is reversable, things emerge and later fall apart, we have upward and downward spirals. The dimension you point to relates more to what purpose or goals are being pursued. In this dimension, emergence is value neutral, if you organize a network for crime or terror vs. if you organize to feed the poor and educate people you clearly have different values at work. So I agree very much that we can't just hopefully "wait for something new to emerge and it will be good", you can't even expect that your good intentions will lead to positive results. You have to keep your eye on the ball and constantly adjust. You still have to engage, work hard and still you need lot of faith to get by.

[Antoine Möeller]

"It has been noted that the names 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' serve mainly as expressions of human ignorance, much as the marking of early maps with 'terra incognita'."

from the wikipedia entry

Thanks, Gerry. Maybe I walk away .001% less ignorant today? Nah.

[Jeff Trexler]

Phil, Gerry--bingo. In this regard our ancestors, who didn't have the experience of being dazzled by global electronic networks, could be a bit more observant than folks today.

For example, consider the book of Proverbs. On the one hand, it notes the emergence of constructive self-organization among ants, a biblical observation perhaps best known today through the work of E.O. Wilson. Nonetheless Proverbs also notes that "the locusts have no king/yet they march forward all in order."
(Of course, if the Bible had been written in Texas, the author could have just used fire ants instead!)

One critter is seemingly benign; the other destructive. But both illustrate emergent properties. The normative prescription enjoins us to imitate the positive patterns and not the maladaptive--e.g., Proverbs isn't telling kids to get together every few years to raze all the crops. It's a subtle yet significant difference from insisting that negative consequences do not exist.

[phil]

The birds of the air, the ants, the bees, leviathan, much can be read in the book of nature for God wrote it for our moral instruction.

[Antoine Möeller]

I had this experience today of diverging intentions. They were not so much opposing as diverging. My friend's intention was to avoid conflict. My intention was to accept it expecting that it would soon be followed by... something else. Laughter sadness joy perhaps more conflict but not an endless stream.

I said this is a loop we've run a hundred times before. She knew that too.

Her intention was to avoid a pattern from the past that she hated. My intention was to defend a pattern from the past that I loved. Her intention was to avoid a pattern from the past that threatened her. My intention was to defend a pattern from the past that nourished me.

Near as I can tell God required that we recognize the loop but not just that. He said crack your chests and bleed together . Somehow today we did.

Amen.

[God]

Good intentions can be tricky.

[phil]

God, thank you for dropping by, or perhaps you never left. Could it be that the human race was created to instruct wiser beings, as the animals may have been created to instruct us?

[God]

Yes, Phil, it could be, I think.

"Something else" is always on the table. Some thing, some how, else.

Of a Peace.

[phil]

Thank you, for your support.

[Hellbier Contra Nichtenstein]

Jesus, there's a lot of smoke in this bar.

Look, the significance of scientism in social thought has nothing to do with whether it's good or bad science, used or misused for whatever purposes.

The problem is that the notion of "scientific progress," which is a fairly indisputable characteristic of of the history of science, whether you subscribe to the older vulgar concept of an continuous march forward, or the more recent concept of non-linear successions of ever better paradigms or patterns, is not importable to the social.

If you try to do so, you have, in Walter Benjamin's word's, made the present "the antechamber of the future." A waiting room from which you will never move, while anticipating the next incremental advance which will make it possible for people to finally live freely. (and the presupposition that all ages and beings which preceded you never had a capacity for, or experienced, freedom, and were consigned to purgatorial ignorance - (a position that people in the future can adopt about you...).

[phil]

Or maybe we just need hope. Somehow things will work out. "Something," as Samuel Beckett said through the mouth of one of his tramps, "is taking its course." Hegel? Do you object to him too? And to Marx? "Consigned to purgatorial ignorance"? You think that consigned to pain and ignorance we should just embrace same without hope of redemption? In the name of lucidity? Entropy end us all.

[Maureen Ward Doyle]

“The problem is that the notion of "scientific progress” … is not importable to the social.”

… which is why I’m neither a technocratic capitalist nor a Marxist? I don’t believe that solutions to social problems can be found by only making changes to “the” system. Who will be the enlightened tinkerer?

I reject the concepts of individual consciousness and pure reason. As Freud tried to tell us (in his own limited way; afterall, Who analyzes The Analyst?) and as he ended up showing us by his own methodological errors, pure reason isn't pure at all.

Solutions to social problems -- if there are any -- might emerge if we pay more careful attention to the limits of consciousness and reason. To experience these limits, I believe it is necessary to risk a sojourn in the Terra Infirma and Incognita of the ir- or a-rational. One way to get there is through the "humanities". Freud, Diogenes, Socrates, Nietzsche, Derrida, Van Gogh, Jung, Deleuze, Austen, Artaud, Poe, Bergson, James (Henry and William), etc. show us the limits of human reason and consciousness. By doing so, they teach us (if we're open to learning) that we would be foolhardy to lead our lives on the premise of pure reason.

Recognition of the "irrational" and respect for the limits of reason is essential to the potential (since it has yet to be realized) sanity and civilization of humankind.

Phil, I assume you are joking when you prescribe, “hope”. You who regularly points out the insanity of our hyper rational society from his “Dumpster”, you who rails against the MBA’s for their blind application of science to all aspects of human existence, you who speaks in support of the humanities…you’re doing a lot more than hoping. You’re a social critic -- a much more active form of activism than meets the eye.

[phil]

Maureen, I was suggesting that hope, or false hope, is what drives these master narratives of God in History, or the Zeitgeist, or dialectics, or reason in history, or Manifest Desinty, or the Rapture, or whatever. I recall Camus writing, "Live without hope for hope would be hope for the wrong thing." I was interested in how rational or enlightened, how refined, is your list of irrationalists. Van Gogh makes the list, and he may have been made, but not Martial, Swift, Artaud, Rimbaud; Freud makes the list but not Reich. You don't list any religious fanatics, no shamans, and no Tim Leary.

Sensibility and taste are forms of reason, don't you think, a form of intelligence, as is moral sensibility? What I would speak out is the liberal arts, or humane arts and letters, as a counterpoise to the sciences and the pesudosciences, like economics, social darwminism, business planning, and market millenialism. Wisdom if you will, or human flourishing, but just enough of Dionysus and Rabelais in it to keep the body engaged.

[Maureen Ward Doyle]

No Phil, I don't think that sensibility and taste are forms of reason. They are expressions of irrational processes. There are competing and partial rational explanations for them which have enriched the human experience, but I do not feel it is necessary to relegate them to the realm of the rational to legitimize them.

The point I'm trying to make is that the rational and irrational aspects of the human experience are radically different from one another. They cannot be reduced to one and an attempt to do so is a recipe for hubris or folly, plus a lost opportunity for humanity. The whole list you added, from Martial to Leary, are examples of what I call (as of now) "rational irrationalists" -- thinkers who informed reason by showing the limits of reason.

If we're going to expand the list, let's put the Zen Master at the top.

[phil]

Well, irrational is a word among others, and can be used in various ways. I do believe sensibility and taste can and should be cultivated, and I think you would agree that the cultivation of good taste can be arduous, requiring training and apprenticeship and years of work. This is not how irrationality is created or promulgated. The Dionysian has it own logic, or insights, or inspiration. The oracle at Delphi was sacred to both Apollo and Dionysus. Reason, or insight, it seems to me (the registering of the world appropriately) goes beyond math, science, and strategic planning. Englightenment is more than linear reason, it can be a state of bliss if you will but one that registers a claim to validity. Or, if you prefer, among the irrational we have many genuses, some should be cultivated (good taste, moral sensibility, conscience, good character, spiritual insight, poetic inspiration, aesethic delight), others should be pruned away (bad taste, unthinking rage, vices, insanity). If you rid aesthetics and ehtics of validity claims, Maureen, you have a hard time explaining many things, including art criticism, teaching of the liberal arts, child rearing practices. We do not say, "This is my taste," as teacher's we way, "No, sorry, Milton is a better writer than Ayn Rand." Our taste makes a truth claim. And we can back it up. And we can convert the dullard to englightenment, given time enough.

[Hellbier Contra Nichtenstein]

What interesting digressions, but to answer about Phil's questions regarding Marx:

"Historical materialism" was conceived by Marx as a "guide" to the study of history, not a unified theory. Although an epicurian atomism influenced his philosophy, he was in no way an early proponent of Consilience, seeking to expound a theory of everything upon a base of particle physics.

Marx and Engels were angered by the misuse of historical materialism as a rationale to justify a gradualist and "progressive" view of history, as when a frustrated Marx responded to a Russian newspaper with his objection to the use of materialism as a "historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself" (that is, justify the rise of capitalist industrialism in Russia because it was a 'necessary' step in the progress towards socialism).

There was a similar objection in Benjamin, as he took issue with German Social democrats who were addicted to gradualism and committed the error of praising waged labor. "Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current."

Although Marx applauded scientific rigor and denounced lazy theorizing, he didn't want a rigorous scientific conception of history to preclude the possibility of seizing the moment, which was born out in Lenin's "unlikely" rise to power in the "Augenblick" of 1917.

That would be the short version of an objection to scientism. This is all new to me so I probably got some stuff wrong.

[phil]

Hellbier, yes, digressions from digressions creating a weird kind of dialetical progress in this thread? I believe history does have a current, and a final cause - a punch line that will leave God shaking in laughter at our expense. I am not an expert by any means on Marx, but isn't the received wisdom that he was preaching another version of Hegel, that history had it own inevitable direction, and that we had best get with the historically inevitable program whenever events made that possible?
http://tinyurl.com/2uudrh

[Hellbier Contra Nichtenstein]

"Marx believed in dialectical materialism."

Yes, that is received wisdom, not wisdom.

[Hellbier Contra Nichtenstein]

"Nor can it be argued that Marx derived H[istorical] M[aterialism] from Hegel; the fact is (as Lenin himself half admits) that they were both influenced by the Scottish Historical Materialists, Ferguson, Millar, Hume, Robertson, and Smith. [On this see Meek (1967).] If anything, Hegel's work actually helped slow down the formation of Marx's scientific ideas, mystifying them."

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2009_02.htm#Class-Traitors

There seems to be some controversy on this issue.

[Maureen Ward Doyle]

Phil,

Taste is also a word among others. And there is nothing simple about the question of taste. It seems to me that you use the word with a capital T, to signify an essentially better form (for example, Milton vs Rand). I would argue that is a question of taste, too.

Taste in literature is culture-bound (linguistic and class). So is taste in Child-rearing (political, class and national) and recreational sports (nation, class, sex). If you're not sure what I mean about the culture-bound nature of taste, revisit the debates on the Greats, George Lakoff on child-rearing and Bourdieu on leisure activites and cultural capital.

Why do I think that the question of taste enter into this discussion? Because I believe that the arguments and explanations we accept, the methodologies we find convincing, the reasons we find reasonable, our faith in reason itself is ultimately a question of taste.

Don't get me wrong. I prefer Milton to Rand and don't beat my children, but I recognize that my "preferences" are not rooted in reason and cannot be fully explained. This dimension that I am describing, that which is inaccessible to reason, is what I mean by the irrational.

Many of todays marketers set out ostensibly to understand the buyer's taste and end up manipulating it. Much like a cultural anthropologist who lives with the people s/he is studying ends up spoiling the research nest. A good social scientist knows the limits of his or her ability to know. A bad one ends up producing a screen theory at best.

[Maureen Ward Doyle]

Remember, Marx tried to turn Hegel on his head. He rejected Hegel's idealism, even though (as Derrida and others showed) he ended up recreating it at various turns, most famously in the passage of Das Capital on fetishization. Marx got his materialism from Feuerbach, as well as the English.

[Hellbier Contra Nichtenstein]

OK then, send me that flamingo.

[Maureen Ward Doyle]

If you mean "Brass Flamingo" on GiftEcology, okay. What you need to do is go to the GiftEcology site (formerly Handmeon), register, go to the object site (B.F.) and select "I covet this object".

[phil]

Maureen, the dogmas of cultural relativism, and cultural construction of values, are well entrenched. We all must as educated people pay homage to the gods of diversity and difference. Yet, I find much more to engage me these days in the Gospels or in Seneca than in Derrida. I do believe that issues of ethics and taste admit of reasoned conversation, and that it is our obligation to cultivate what is high in us, and to mitigate or civilize what is low. Happiness like sanity has its internal logic, and what are termed vices sow discord in the soul as well as in society.

Are high and low, vice and virtue, good and bad, good taste and bad taste, culturally constructed? Sure. And in that we have failed ourselves and one another. We have socially constructed a market-based world in which we are the prisoners of our own vices, predilections, and whims. As parents, teachers, and keepers of museums, we do not shrug our shoulders at these distinctions, yet in public we make a big deal about explaining to each other that cultures differ. Of course they do, that is why we have wars. For what are we willing to risk our capital, life energy, even our life, for what way of life, what tradition? And how do we justify that commitment? "How should I live" is a question none can shirk, and the answer could be "However you please." But when the question is asked seriously, certain works respond to the question and yield more than ashes.

Anyway, as a Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families, I know my peers take your position - give the client what the client wants, for values are subjective and it is better not to antagonize the base client with noble ideals. I take the contrary position, that values are socially constructed and that is why we need to uphold the traditions of high art, beginning with Rabelais.

As you point out, your life is consistent with the pursuit of excellence. I know you are tolerant of sinners. Me too, and I am one, but as such I will testify that virtue is better.

[phil]

The flamingo has flown home to VT.

[phil]

On what do we base values, so that they are hard and fast? On a perfect and eternal being, on nature, on natural law, on progress variously defined. I like the Greek view that goodness like health is fragile. A seed can fall on fertile or on dry ground. To cultivate what is best in us is not to look to some template that exists in some eternal form, but as in medicine or farming to take steps to encourage what is living, to water, harrow, and prune, that the fragile stalk can flourish. (We are not a tabula rasa on which marketing or culture can write whatever signs. We are a garden in which both weeds and flowers may flourish.) In that effort, certain things are appealing but turn out to lead only to sickness, misery, discord, and disfigurment and ultimately to living death. Those self-organizing growth or energy systems are vices. The virtues on the other hand are self reinforcing and harmonious, both within the human heart and in our social relations. "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control"; Galatians 5:22. Now, of course this is ancient, not postmodern. But we all have to live along in our lives, seeking what nourishes us. I have had to go way back to find seeds of anything like a liveable and consistent wisdom-set. Take Seneca, the Gospels, Martial, Aristophenes, Horace and throw them forward through Drdyen, Pope, Swift, and Gay and you have a living tradition for sustaining a certain kind of life. We may all be Stoics again, the way our postmodern world is playing itself out. In any case, satire springs from this tradition, as a medicine or pharmakon.

[JJ Commoner]

How Ought We Live ?

[Gerry]

The ways that sustained us in the past are now destroying the world. Yes, social innovation is possible, and I have been too busy working on that sort of project this week at the Open Money Intensive to read much less comment on all of this. A lot of the work is not "rational" in the traditional sense, but that doesn't make it irrational or unreal.

[phil]

Gerry, sounds like you have found a place, at Open Currency, to invest your skills for the greater good?

[Gerry]

Yes, possibly. I may even be able to make this work with my day job. They supported me in going to this event, and when I get back I will see how it can work in terms of wealth within our organization and without.

[Gerry]

Also, Jean and the WAGN boys are here. Great work happening today, they are trying to integrate Open Money with WAGN on the next table here. It is connecting many threads that are important to me.

[Maureen Ward Doyle]

"Anyway, as a Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families, I know my peers take your position - give the client what the client wants, for values are subjective and it is better not to antagonize the base client with noble ideals".

Ah, Phil, but I never said that.

Epistemological relativism ≠ moral relativism. To conflate them is to miss an opportunity to develop a new theory of the good life and good governance that we can live by. For me the questions are what would the good life look like? How do we conduct ourselves? And what is the story we tell ourselves and others to inspire change?

It's too late for a beautiful lie. We're globally connected and have fallen from Eden. We need a new way that puts the heads of people like you and me (who share a vision of the outcomes) but haven't yet figured out how to reconcile our different frames of reference.

What is your theory of knowledge? How do you know what you know and what is good?

[phil]

For me too the questions that matter most are not "What is real?" or "What statements or theories are true"? or "What is a fact?", but "How am I to live? in what sort of society? and what can I do with others to heal what is sick in myself and in the body politic?" By 1980 I had acquired career limiting habits of attention that it has take me almost that long to unriddle. When someone points their finger at a theory or statement and says, "We do not know that for true!" my eyes follows the finger to the shoulder, then up the neck to the face, and examines the expression, whether pompous, vain, officious, magisterial, owlish, and ask myself, "What justifies that man in being such a pompous ass? What in his deconstruction of the statement in question, justifies his facetious little smile?" I thought this way of seeing was something I had gotten from reading too much Browning, his dramatic monologues. Now, I see it is a tradition, an underground tradition, a key figure of which was Diogenes, who shows up under his own name in Hell in Rabelais, and from thence down to Erasmus through to so many satirists. The figures in that tradition are happy to see the world turned topsy turvey, to wear masks, to be or pose as mad. The search is not for truth (which search always comes up empty); the search with a lantern in broad daylight is for an honest man or woman; said search also coming up empty. To write in that vein is to stage a performance: The Importance of Being Earnest, or The Praise of Folly, in which the speaker too is sent up, like the Hack in the Tale of a Tub, or Martinus Scriblerus in The Dunciad, or Diogenes naked in his barrel. So, if I had a theory, it would be presented through the mouth of a Dunce. I would play it for laughs. Ubi Roi. As it is, I am trying to pass for serious here. I can't reform the morals of the rich if I laugh out loud. It is a serious business if ever there was one.

[phil]

Gerry, I hope you will offer us your thoughts on what transpires at your Open Money event, or maybe point to a post on their site, when you get back.

[Gerry]

I will, though it will take a bit to process. This is the most powerful working group I have ever worked with and that is saying a lot. Most likely I will post the deepest stuff on our ning site, and I will link occasionally to more public announcements.

I think it is likely that we will host an event in Chicago this summer or fall (still extremely preliminary at this point), and I hope you will be able to come. Thank you for everything you do.

[Gerry]

Phil, check and and commnet here if you are moved. Sheri was in Mexico and this is some of what she is working on.

[phil]

Thanks, Gerry.