The
process of understanding & action
Actual situation
Fundamental questions
Vision
Alternatives
Challenges
Commitment
The actual situation ('conventional paradigm')
“They took the bread and milk and meat from the people of their fields; they gave it to feed, and retain here in their service, this fermenting mass of unhappy human beings,—news-mongers, novel-mongers, picture-mongers, poison-drink-mongers, lust and death-mongers; the whole smoking mass of it one vast dead-marine storeshop,—accumulation of wreck of the Dead Sea, with every activity in it, a form of putrefaction.” The Genius of John Ruskin, 402
“Today’s Court majority would have difficulty understanding
Chaplinsky’s statement that an utterance could inflict an injury
to morality. Morality itself has become relativized in our constitutional
jurisprudence, so that the Court no longer has the vocabulary to say
that something is immoral and, for that reason, may be banned by the
legislature.” Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Bork, 149
The
language and sense of morality is missing.
What is degraded, manipulative, or superficial?
What is beautiful, inspirational, transformative?
It would be a culture that CALLS you to your higher nature –
in study, for example.
It would be based on the achievement of quality, not quantity.
We require a culture that takes account of us and nurtures what is essential:
care, goodness, beauty, understanding, and reverence.
Art. “The arts, as regard teachableness, differ
from the sciences also in this, that their power is founded not merely
on facts which can be communicated, but on dispositions which require
to be created. Art is neither to be achieved by effort of thinking,
nor explained by accuracy of speaking. It is the instinctive and necessary
result of power, which can only be developed through the mind of successive
generations, and which finally burst into life under social conditions
as slow of growth as the faculties they regulate. Whole eras of mighty
history are summed, and the passions of dead myriads are concentrated,
in the existence of a noble art; and if that noble art were among us,
we should feel it and rejoice; not caring in the least to heart lectures
on it; and since it is not among us, be assured we have to go back to
the root of it, or, at least, to the place where the stock of it is
yet alive, and the branches began to die.” The Genius of John
Ruskin, 343
A human touch. For example, a loudspeaker announcing the closing time of a library or other public or quasi-public space, with repeated, loud intrusions. At the Portland branch library the librarian simply walked around, informing in a quiet, gently voice.
Examine the core social relation: fathom the opposite. If the fundamental motive is self-interest, look outside of self, in the heart of other beings. If the foundation of social relations is hard-heartedness, a fitting response is radical commitment and utter connectedness.” From ‘Reformulation of institutions'
The Moral Commons:
Fighting superficiality, degradation, manipulation.
Supporting understanding, goodness, care.
Injury to morality is possible and unacceptable.
“Hollywood ensures that the planet sees what the average American
likes to see—a massive exercise in self-validation that is the
absolute enemy of clear sight.” Resurgence, Sept 2005, 9. We need
to ‘demand’ cultural products with ‘clear sight,’
by refusing to participate in those which are not, and finding and supporting
those which are.
Time Warner is ‘associated one way or another with most of the
high-profile, high-profit acts, black and white, that are pumping nihilism
into the culture....We are living through a cultural collapse, and major
corporations are presiding over that collapse and grabbing everything
they can on the way down.’ Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah,
138