Citizen or consumer? Hildy Gottleib asks. Is the purpose of the nonprofit sector, indeed of our shared life in community with others, to get results, or is it to be full developed human beings? Do we serve the economic engine, as investors, investees, consumers, producers, managers, social venturers, and metrics driven consultants - those roles and those alone, or do we come to civic participation also as human beings, parents, children, and as citizens half formed, needing experience in leadership and in compassionate service, if we and our communities are to thrive?
Jeremy Bentham invented the felicific calculus, the relentless emphasis on results and metrics. He also envisioned the famous panopticon, a prison in which all are held in eye of Facebook and the NSA, I mean the guards, I mean managers and investors set above us to good purpose to whom we are rightly accountable. Bentham trained J.S. Mill's father, who raised John to be a superstar in the administration of English empire which brought enligthenment to the dark continent and to Inida, much as MBAs bring light now to the primitive nonprofit sector in our own times. John was on track until he broke down and fell into an endless depression, cured, as it happens by reading Wordsworth. The heart and soul reawakened within the thinker deadened by metrics, and more metrics, without meter, rhyme or rhythm.
What I think about most often, though, is Bentham's other legacy. He has himself stuffed and placed on display in a wooden cabinet at University College London. There to this day, on special occasions, you can see him in his 18the century costume. (He even attends board meetings sometimes as "present but nonvoting.") Yet in the display case the head is not there. The original mummification was botched, making the head seem macabre. So a wax head was created, and both were displayed in the case. But the real head was so often stolen and used over the years in pranks by the undergraduates, that only the wax head is now on view, and the real head is maintained under lock and key. So, in this fable, this parable, we have the invention of metrics by which we are now dominated, and a missing real head, quite grotesque, and an artful duplicate. Here we have masquerade and carnival, don't we? We have the duplication, mummification, and inversion of the established order, and the reassertion of laughter, unseriousness, and of what it means to be human, in the face of the inhuman system. Where Jeremy who famously said, "Quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good a poetry," meant to leave his own real no nonsense head as an auto-icon, identical with itself, sign and signified at one, what we now have is art, verging on, well, inadvertent self satire - much as we see today in the writing of experts about social venture philanthropy.
As for myself, as my lasting legacy, I will leave my head, shucked of brains, even more so than now, with the flesh and hide well-tanned, as a soceer ball to be used, gratis, at a first rate private school, preferably a feeder school for the Ivy League. These future, high performing, leaders of America will enjoy kicking my head, as their parents did before them. My pain will be zero; and so the greatest benefit of the greatest number will be rescued from the sorry mess I have made of my life. A duplicate head can be made, once mine gets ratty, if funding can be found.
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