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Chiasmus as Thickening Agent in Verbal Porridge

"In rhetoric, chiasmus (from the Greek: χιάζω, chiázō, "to shape like the letter Χ") is the figure of speech in which two or more clauses are related to each other through a reversal of structures in order to make a larger point; that is, the clauses display inverted parallelism. Chiasmus was particularly popular both in Greek and in Latin literature, where it was used to articulate balance or order within a text. As a popular example, many long and complex chiasmi have been found in Shakespeare and the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible.[1][2] It is also found throughout the Book of Mormon.[3] - Wikepedia

Wikipeda gives as an examle: "He blindly led and we blindly followed."

Another excellent example is this, from the Rockefeller Foundation at Davos: "We must avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable."

You might try coining a chiasmus or two your own, if you are ever in a pinch for content while facing an imminent deadline. It will make you sound wise, balanced, and literate at little expense of logic or thought. Mostly people will have no idea what you are saying, and this a good thing when, as it happens, you are saying almost nothing. "Look who is talking," you might say, and you would be right. Even a good chiasmus will not cover my nakedness. And now I have probably blown my chance for that Rockefeller Peace and Justice grant.

Building Resilient Communities at Davos

"We must avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable," says Rockefeller Foundation to Davos.  For leaders to avoid me as unmanageable is my best case scenario. When they manage me as unavoidable, it only gets worse.

Shrinking to the Scale of One Fragile Planet

Philanthrogeek may be very early in following an emerging area that will prove important, perhaps mission critical, to our common wealth.  Much of Gifthub, sponsored as it is by Wealth Bondage: The Future of Good and Evil, is about the fatal but inevitable downside of assimilating the commons and charity to business methods and the business mind or sensibility. Generally when Wall Street or Havard Business School, or Stanford Social Enterprise Review, or FSG, or Bridgespan, or Jed Emerson, or Markets for Good, creates a blend of forprofit and nonprofit forms, they err on the side of business logic, management systems, and benefit to investors. They are part of the ecosystem of schools, business minded funders, and thinkers who have grown up to service, extrapolate, and justify (not even excuse but glorify) financial wealth feeding on whatever it takes to build more financial wealth. Now it is feeding on the social. Soon it will brand God, assuming Jobs was not god. They insist on growing to scale, cashing in and cashing out - that is their vision of moral heroism. That is their validation of who and what they are or would become. That is what their heros have done. They aspire to that, maybe pine for it. They see one who sacrifies for others, whether mother, martyr, solidier, or saint, to build or preserve a social good, even at the cost of his or her own comfort, or even his or her own life, as a putz. Such a moral hero, is a fool in their view, who has failed to learn the most basic lessons of a balanced scorecard or double bottom line business. The putz simply fails to see that he or she can have it all! They can have wealth, power, prestige, celebrity, love, and acclaim. And they can do good! What moron would voluntarily follow the way of the Cross? Or of Thoreau? Without wisdom, or a certain sort of civic virtue, without self mastery of the boundless desire for more, much is invisible. And what is not seen for what it is then becomes another mine to be stripped, packaged and sold - why not the social? We can be like Zuckerberg. And who better might one ever be?

Thinkers like Jon Husband, Dave Pollard, and Jean Russell are coming from a far more robust sense of community and common interest. They have not yet prospered materially - more fools they!  

Crowdfunding of new ventures disintermediates Wall Street and the entire mindset that must measure, manage, optimize and control on the way to accelerating planetary eco-suicide. Crowdfunding, as it may emerge from the Jobs Act, is a huge, indeed, tectonic shift in the play of forces around money, meaning, community, reciprocity, and resiliency. Perhaps now we can evolve new forms in which stakeholder interests, those of ordinary citizens, are baked into a venture at inception, with funding not only from family and friends but from the affected community. Such small ventures need not grow to scale, in order to go public on Wall Street, and thereby access the ruthless and morally insane, the planet destroying, capital markets as we have come to know and love them in Wealth Bondage, the distribition power, wealth, information and close supervision, that makes us the stunted, obedient, demented, addicted, creatures we have become. These crowd funded ventures could start small and stay small accessing capital through the crowd sourced market which would be more low key, more human scale, and satisfied with a different balance between investment return and the community interest, including the long term interests of the ecosystems on which we depend for, among other public goods, air. Without air, where would we be? We could not even pitch one another without air!

Read by contrast what it takes to pitch Omidyar network. Tell me what kind of world you prefer. What tone. What moral sensibility. What degree of self knowledge. What compunction. What polity. Do you want to live in a world dominated by pumped up voices like these, calling endlessly for More, and Bigger? Or would you settle for smaller and sustainable, for reflective and quiet, for unique and unscaleable, funded in community with your fellow sufferers?

Yale Philanthropy Conference

Yale Philanthropy Conference on Feb 1. Learn more here.

Philanthrogeek

Looking for a way to learn about, participate in, or follow the crowfunding of philanthropy and civic ventures? Check out Philanthrogeek.

Destroy the earth? I could not help myself....

After spending more than a day in a convening with social impact investors, social entrepreneurs, eco-scientists, alternative currency people, hip hop artists, a cinematographer, a college student who has created a socially conscious endowment fund at her college, a woman working on an Indian Reservation, and a cadre of investment bankers, in a lovely bank conference room, in NYC, I came away recalling a fable by Aesop about collaboration among two species, the well-meaning, quite reasonable frog and the scorpion who knows his own long term best interest but....  Have you read it?

"My Leadership becomes me," saith the Fool, adjusting his cap and bells

I have a good friend, a fine man, and Harvard MBA. He has served at a high level in financial services organizations, written a fine book on businesslike philanthropy, and has been a force for the good in organizing philanthropic networks. His current focus is on leadership. He has called me a couple of times to discuss my leadership. I find myself feeling very uncomfortable with the topic and my own emotions about it. To be called a leader or deemed worthy of being coached as a leader by a highly qualified and well-regarded professional leadership coach, is very flattering - and that is why I distrust it. If I at my age, knowing better, straighten up, smile into the mirror, and adjust my tie, when addressed as a leader, how much more dangerous would it be for a straight A student, a never-has-failed-at-anything child of the American success mill to be addressed by revered business professors, within a hallowed business school, as a leader and future decider? Such conversations of leader to be and leadership expert are (potentially) mutually corrupting. Either flatters the other, in the tradition of the emperors and their tailors.

What we are asking of the new social entrepreneurs is the moral balance to weigh (without much external accountability or checks and balances) their own personal gain, the benefits to other employees, the benefits to investors, and the benefits to society. Such wisdom and character, such resistance to temptation and the delusions that undergird self serving choices is beyond the reach of our frail human nature. No one on this earth has ever had such character. (Jesus flunked the wordly leadership test on the Mount, but he was not an American with high SATs.) The history of literature, let alone history itself, is the record of our insufficiency as frail human clay to such godlike tasks. Those called leaders are at best wounded healers, blind guides, solemn and humorless fools.

When my good friend offers to help me in my leadership, I experience this as a temptation to take myself seriously. That would, for a world class fool, be fatal - career suicide. "Hold the crown," saith the fool, "it is cap and bells for me. On you, though, Boss, that new suit looks great." When business school graduates are offended by my critique, as they seem sometimes to be, when they feel it is somehow an affront to their dignity, as leaders, or leaders to be, I do not think that shows me to be wrong, in diagnosing pride, only a sorry failure as a Fool. If I were better at my noble trade, I would cure them with the only medicine that works, laughter at ourselves, including me, if not thee. Why then, in b-school are the true fools afraid to claim their proper place, as leaders of the leaders' leaders?  It is time we Fools came out of hiding. Seldom since Rome fell have our services been needed more.

The Quest for the One True Taxonomy of Good

A King (some say it was Midas, after making his fortune, and getting into grantmaking) declared that anyone who could construct for him the one true Taxonomy of Good, so he could make Wise Decisions, as to Scarce Resources, would receive the King's daughter, Beauty, in marriage. Each of his Trusted Advisors, and endless suitors, brought forward their Taxonomies. Some were built from magnets, others had birds in cages, some had clockwork, some were built with circuits, some were driven by spinning wheels. But  none agreed with the others. The King then decreed that his daughter's hand would go to the Taxonomy of Taxonomies that would measure the Accuracy of each of the proferred Taxonomies of Good. Again each suitor and advisor returned with his best shot, but like faulty clocks measuring each other's accuracy, none agreed except with themselves. The cuckoo of Truth rang at all hours. As to the Princess, Beauty, she had long since ridden off with her true love, the Fool.

The Taxonomy of Good to be Housed in an Aircooled Tower

The end of art is the beautiful, as the end of philosophy is truth, and the end of ethical action is the good. To insure that art is not only a business proposition, we must measure both the price of the painting and it beauty. Before investing in a painting for $100,000 we would want to know how much beauty it contains. We might do better to buy another painting that contains more beauty for the same price, or maybe buy two for half as much both containing 60% as much beauty as the $100,000 painting. That would yield more beauty per dollar.  So too in philosophy, we must measure the cost of the philosopher's time and training and the truth he or she creates, adjusted for the time taken and the present value of future truth. And we must then compare that cost to truth created per dollar invested in any other philosopher. Likewise with nonprofits, we must measure the good done, the cost of doing it, and the time taken. Then we will have the linked comparable data we need to make decisions.

In a pluralist society we do not agree on the good, or the true, or the beautiful; that is why we have so many religious traditions, so many schools of thought, and political parties, and even so many brands. For example, one might value, as do the Amish, a traditional way of life, and another might prefer a community more technologically advanced. How can we then measure the good or the harm of inserting into a traditional society a low cost way to advance technology? Such as treadle operated generators for cell phones, or a generator that is operated by a pulley? A dung fired smokeless generator? Will we in imposing our western ways do more harm than good? How will we know? Who should we ask? And if we think we already know, might we read, or might we teach the rising generation of social entrepreneurs, The Heart of Darkness, about one like us, Kurtz, from the best schools, a rising star, who was to bring the great torch of Enlightenment to the dark world of the Congo, while also extracting ivory and becoming a rich man? We who have not learned such lessons from those who have gone before will now construct as trusted intermediaries a great Taxonomy of Good? Is that ambition not so blind as to disqualify not only us but our teachers, and the administration of the elite schools fostering such moral insanity? I am asking, as a Morals Tutor myself; and one much in need of a job, who has a great deal of time on his hands.  Surely at some business school I could be set to work microtuning the Database of Good, insuring it is sufficiently subtle to handle what we might have learned from Plutarch, or Conrad, or Blake, or Dickens. It would be a shame if we built the Taxonomy of Good and left out light and shadow, the Tree of Knowlege, the apple, and the snake.  As to which religion does the most good, that is something I will settle once given the authority to manage the metrics. It really doesn't matter that much to me, what matters to me is having the power, really. Whatever I say is the most good, no matter how benighted I am, will be operative when it comes to funding, and the Pope can kiss my ring.

A Night with My Grandma

In creating a database to measure impact, and so to insure that we do the most good, it only makes sense to measure both goods and harms, so the two can be netted. In addtion, to trusted intermediaries, and a taxonomy of good, and a market for good, and social entrepeneurs doing good and harm, we also need a council of elders, particularly of grandmothers, lest our interventions do more good than harm, and we be none the wiser for it. Susheel Nair:

I am learning from my own life that its far more easier to be a
financially successful entrepreneur than to sustain a Gandhi in every little moment of our life. But nothing comes without conscious practice and inspired action, does it? I remember my late grandmother....