Kaizen/Smriti Part Two (continued, obviously, from part one.)

More from the third sense of 'resolution:' a resolution of what is abstract into what is practical and direct. Or: what's Eros gonna do?

Despite my natural inclination to say, 'let's wait and see' (part of the idea of Kaizen, after all, is an embrace of the possibility and reality of constantly changing vision), I do at the moment have a sense of direction/function for this, or I wouldn't be doing it.

If time is a frontier there are no more modern pioneers, except in the individual case, as one grows through that orientation of mind. I would say that our pioneers are well beyond what we call the post-modern (should you have absolutely no conception of what these terms mean, my apologies, but stay tuned, I will be elucidating the distinction I am making between the modern and post-modern much in this year), but this is not so much my interest here, as I am not on the frontier in this sense. Having left our modern settlements to those who will grow through them, a sizable edge of our culturally contemporaneous adult humanity is laying the first solid foundations of post-modern society. Men and women have been here before, but not in numbers sufficient enough to establish a city, a genuine center-of-gravity. What we have seen in the way of post-modernity up to recently has either been exclusively individual or modernity in drag.

A major conceit of this year for this blog (or until I am disabused of it) is that we are at the endpoint of our culture's process of modernity, it has nothing new or surprising for us in a collective sense; we have turned over all of its stones, and large encampments of us are headed for or have begun establishing a post-modern city and society, a place still quite wild and undefined. This, as any process of growth, will be accompanied with great pain and backsliding, much of which we are watching in front of us now, and it is far from certain that we will be able to maintain a sustainable cultural presence there. If we do, it is because we will have been able to remake what it means to be human, individually and culturally, from this level of meaning. As a microcosm of the process, a young person still pulling himself out of the traditional cultural consciousness and family embeddedness, creating for himself an individual autonomous identity, while also reaching into the realm of the post-autonomous not only intellectually but in practical everyday life, I am situated well to document this and push it along. I see in myself the potential to be a city-planner for our new culture, someone actively exploring the implications of this consciousness in this world, and my greatest culturally valuable talent is in the kind of writing I am able to achieve occasionally on this blog, as a sort of essayist and cultural critic.

Practically, that changes little about the blog; it has always been a way for me to test out ideas and present them to whomever is willing and able to sift through them. In addition, though, I plan on a greater amount of engagement (the eternal plan...) as well as using the blog in companion to what I am reading, both for school and for pleasure, allowing me to remember what arguments others are making and how they fit into my angle of attack on the world, something I am terrible at (names), while also giving me the impetus to track through reading outside of my school's curriculum.

Also, as I feel I have a pretty good working sense of a personal philosophy but few opportunities to drag it out into the light of day where it can be challenged, and the blog serves this purpose as well. Not only can this philosophy be found in the accidental, what I happen to be reading or seeing online, but it is open to reinterpretation based on this, and based on the comments and participation of you. In my perfect world everybody is so willing to throw themselves on the table, recognizing just how permeable that thin layer of pretense is that separates our outside and inside world, but as this is not the case, engage me freely as you will, knowing that what you put in in intensity I give back; it is not a demand so much as an invitation to the constant questioning that is this Kaizen/Smriti, that is so integral to the post-modern meaning-making, and so vital a weapon against complacency, one of my pet sins.

With this in mind I hope as well to write at least an entry every day, though this is not a hard and fast rule, and the effort it takes to write some of my more involved entries obviously will prevent this from happening. The idea, though, being that having this in mind constantly, starting the day by starting an entry and finishing it by finishing one will help me keep this whole shebang in mind, Smriti.

Problem, singular, and integral (theory) solutions.

I've been saying this for years!

An Op-ed from Thomas Friedman. Beyond the corniness of Friedman, this is something that really needs to be said (which I guess could be true of much of Friedman's posts.)

The point of the article:

"We’re trying to deal with a whole array of integrated problems — climate change, energy, biodiversity loss, poverty alleviation and the need to grow enough food to feed the planet — separately. The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors...

'We need to stop thinking about these issues in isolation — each with its own champion, constituency and agenda — and deal with them in an integrated way, the way they actually occur on the ground,” argued Glenn Prickett, senior vice president with Conservation International. “We tend to think about climate change as just an energy issue, but it’s also about land use: one-third of greenhouse gas emissions come from tropical deforestation and agriculture. So we need to preserve forests and other ecosystems to solve climate change, not only to save species.'"

Notice the word "integrated" above. As I struggle to explain Integral Theory to everyone, one thing I keep coming out with is that it's mostly a different way of looking at things, a different set of lenses through which to look at the world, one which tries to take into account that reality is unified.

What this means is that if there's a problem, it's most likely either one of viewpoint, or one of orientation.

How can a change of viewpoint change everything?

Well, remember when fire was magic, some random event or act of the gods? Of course not. Every advance that we make occurs because of a shift in viewpoint, a greater, deeper, or wider understanding, or a more encompassing, more connected worldview.

There are no problems in the Universe. You have problems. There are two ways to eliminate them: externally and internally. If you no longer care about something (internal) it's not a problem. If you remove the external cause of the problem, it's not a problem. Both are important. You won't be a very good human if you ignore the external reality of problems. You'll probably starve to death. But you also won't be a very good human if you don't grow past some of your problems. You'll be waiting for your mother to feed you, and you'll starve to death. Both are shifts in viewpoint: you either change your view of what you are and what your relationship to the world is, or you change the way you look at the outside world, which changes what you can do to it and in it.

The shift in perspective that Friedman is discussing is from one where each act in the universe, or process (a series of acts and reactions through time) is basically unrelated to each other (SDi 5) to one which recognizes that every act has consequences for every other ongoing process, or that every process and system is linked to each other (SDi 6). You could also view this in terms of input and output, in the movement from an understanding of inputs and outputs occurring separately to one where every output is a different process' input, creating cycles.

Much of where modernity has gone awry is in disrupting cycles between the output of one and the input of another, creating waste, which doesn't exist in the natural world.

This is not to say that man has no right to tinker with what's there: as mentioned in the end of the article, we can make nature better, or rather, better for us, which is the process of solving problems externally. (Very simply, making a roof underneath which to hide from the rain.) What we need to understand is that instead of creating a different framework to solve every problem we have, we already have been given the perfect framework within which to work, we just need to recognize it as such.