Learning Something about Social Entrepreneurship

What do I like about social entrepreneurship? A great line from the book Mission Inc.: "you won't be good at social enterprise unless you're passionately in love with the very idea of it." Well I was never in love with business. To put it mildly, words like cash flow, generated revenue, return on social capital, or my favorite word so far is one universities use to describe their students: “revenue generating units”, ranged from incomprehensible to repugnant. But the social part, that was my true passion. See I never really got why money was so interesting to people, when they are much more interesting than money. And like most people that didn’t understand money, I spent many a university night in my apartment with friends talking about The Man/Architect (in the clouds and counting the world’s till of money) and the end of days over macaroni and cheese. We talked about more, well normal things like: Do we have a purpose? Why Nietzsche got it right or horribly wrong? Where are we going tonight, and who’s this new hottie?

Being around people is great, but being an activist was where it was at, the passion, the conversations, the heat and fury, sometimes the self-righteousness, but always the purpose. I strongly believed that I had a purpose, that everyone on this planet was born to contribute to something much larger than themselves. It was easy to believe in purpose when you believed in greatness, and I believed in greatness because I saw greatness from a very young age. I was lucky enough to experience both fulfillment and pleasure and got hooked on fulfillment. I found fulfillment in being a human rights activist. They spoke of the conscience in humanity. I learned much later, during my student union year, that a social enterprise does the work of humanity, with humanity.

In our student union, we wanted more accessible student-directed public space, from classrooms, to hallways, to our campus pubs. To organize in any space, students had to go through volumes of paperwork, application deadlines, dos and don'ts. Space was expensive; it took long to book; it was too small, too big, too inconvenient, and with too many rules like: "you ought to have half the attendees be university students"; “you have to have university catering" .... etc.

Those challenges made the difficult job of mobilizing students on campus, off campus, and across clubs, faculties, and campuses much more difficult. Our major campus pub was a nightmare to book. It cost around 3,000 a night and had to be booked 3 months in advance. I sincerely believed that if the university heard the concerns of enough students, things would be different, and with that belief, I believed they were the problem. As much as I would have liked for it to be the case, the problem was much deeper than this. The problem was not only space; it was in our operations. We were amateurs fumbling with a half a million dollars worth of student levy.

I then stumbled across the gold mine of opportunities. I was introduced to a guy who had connections to a huge bar owner who was willing to give us his space for free, with the shuttle busses going to and from campus on a regular basis. The bar was close enough to our campus to be appealing, much larger than our campus pub, had a lounge with pool tables, cheaper drinks, better and more affordable food. It dawned on me. You create competition; you provide a better service more equitably... you stop whining about it and get to work! The space itself held possibilities: what if we could bring our campus artists and musicians and have graffiti jamming nights? What if we could host events across clubs? With minimal overhead expenses, lesser restrictions and a place with potential, a lot of good things can happen.

They didn’t happen, partly because the student union did not have time, and in part because they were suspicious of businesses. I rethought my ideas about the evils of business, because for once I saw the potential of using an enterprise model to create the space for students to connect, mobilize and create more effective change. With the enterprise model, the enterprise itself is the vehicle and you, with your community, are the drivers of the design, content, and purpose of this vehicle. The enterprise model gives you this imaginary plot of land and forces you to rethink and recreate the way in which you use it for the public good. I started to fall in love with the enterprise model because it promised more successful social engagement and change. I wouldn’t want to be a business without a mission, and wouldn’t want to compromise my mission and miss out on a golden opportunity simply because I do not trust anything business.

Hence I learned social enterprise without ever hearing about the phrase itself. "Enterprising" something or other would have been a word I associated with a socially awkward telemarketer. I was told about it much later and figured: maybe it is not so lame a word; it holds the promise of making you an effective dreamer. I think the world of social entrepreneurship is the world of human opportunity and potential.

What’s on your mind? What’s your story? I hope you talk about it, blog about it and share it with us.

Courtney Campbell: Faith or Dogma?

I haven’t had much time to do my blogs lately, so I will try to keep it short and to the point with this one. We often think that faith is reserved for those who are religious, for after all, all we rational people need proof or reasons to believe in something. It is simply nonsensical to believe without seeing. “The most important statement believers and scientists alike start with is: I don’t know.” (Bill Moyers) Now many say that science starts with a hunch but aims towards truth in the successful forming of hypotheses (and then theories) based on the observation of empirical evidence that can predict how matter will behave with incredible precision. Faith however stops at what we don’t know and has no way to uncover that which we don’t know. Science in other words deals with the natural and what we can know about it and faith is the realm of supernatural.

Of what significance is this supernatural if it does not make predictions about the natural? Faith is the push that allows us to move from that which we know that we do not know, to that which we can know just as science starts with that which we do not know to that which we can know. Why is faith necessary to make that move or in other words what is the purpose of faith? It is because the realm that we do not know is the realm of possibilities. Each possibility has benefits and drawbacks that we cannot fully understand the ramifications of (the effects of what we know we do not know and what we don’t know that we don’t know). It is either faith or ignorance that can push us towards action. For the less we know about the dangers, the easier it is to make that leap but the more random our actions are. Faith brings awareness and action together. Faith is the involvement in the process of revealing and concealing (which I have spoken about in previous blogs) which requires engagement, posing questions, and being mindful of how we and the object of our engagement are affected in this process.

An important question to ask then: how is dogma any different than faith? Faith is concerned with the process of moving from that which we know we do not know to that which we know. Dogma is concerned with affirming its own position despite any observations that show the falsity of this position. Faith is open to questioning, dogma refuses to be questioned. It is precisely here that I disagree with Courtney Campbell on the value of absolutism in science or in religion for that matter. For if dogma is silencing the fears of the unknown in holding certain views to be certain despite any observation, then it has forgotten faith altogether. How so? Faith is necessary precisely because it deals with that which we do not know or that which is uncertain. If dogma is affirming that there are no alternatives, no unknowns then there is no need for faith. If faith has no purpose then it is obsolete.

This notion of faith is more important than the observations that we make and than the principles religion holds to be true. It is this notion of faith that allows for dialogue and modifications and constant altering and modifying. This common conception of we can agree to disagree is nothing but a copping out of the question…. How can we reach a common ground? We never agree to disagree unless we are not affected by our disagreements. Most of the times we are, and if we agree to disagree, we in other words, agree that he who can dominate will win. So the next time you say: let’s agree to disagree, think of what is at stake and what will result of agreeing to disagree.

Bronislaw Szerszynski: Is the Sacred Dead?

“Where is God gone? I mean to tell you! We have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened the earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? – for even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife,- who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise?” (Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, The madman).

I thought this passage would be really interesting to help in assessing the notion of disenchantment or secularization of nature. I find claims that religion has disappeared unfounded as in our age, we find that the further technologies advance in their mode of unfolding, the louder the religious voices of protest can be heard and the more radical they become. As I also find Noble’s claim of the religious roots of technological discoveries and scientific endeavours also very valid. So if religion has not disappeared, then is it as Bryan Wilson would say that “religion is not so much disappearing as simply losing its former role in maintaining and steering the social system, being replaced in this by secular, rational, bureaucratic and technical means? (Modernity, Nature, and the Sacred, 13) I think that this statement is partially true, but in the sense of religion as an ideology and practice that unifies by creating concrete moral systems for evaluating people and governing them by instilling practices that organize people and rally them towards a common horizon, and religion as a hegemonic structure of control. If we strip religion of that then what are we left with?

To say that religion became an individual quest is partially true, but it is more than that for belonging to a religious sect is belonging to that community that is one of many other pockets of communities that in their own rite are semi-autonomous. “The confrontation between modern technology and its critics is a confrontation that is very much internal to Western sacral history, and one in which opposing positions turn out to be internally related in complex ways.” (The Future of the Sacred, 174) It is not simply that religiosity and secularization coexist as two separate but harmonious entities but rather religion drives and shapes our notions of secularization, and in turn secularization fragments, diffuses, and proliferates the sacred. The sacred can be God in the traditional sense of institutionalized religion, but the sacred is also our notions of humanity, the sublime is in nature as a “self-sufficient material order obeying immanent causal laws” (The Future of the Sacred, 171), life becomes sacred because it is valued in its own rite not as a preparation for eternal life, the image of the globe is the sacred, and most importantly reason as the human virtue and technology as a by-product of that virtue becomes the sacred.

“Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event,- and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto! I come too early; I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still on its way, and is travelling- it has not yet reached men’s ears. Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard. This deed is as yet further from them than the furthest star,- and yet they have done it!” (Nietzche, The Joyful Wisdom, The Madman)

If the sacred has not so much disappeared as been diffused, proliferated, and fragmented then how has the sacred lost its mystery? It is because the sacred has become iconic. It is not governed by a structure that is entrenched in our routine. We are made to believe that mysteries are solvable, that we are the masters that govern our globe and unlock its mysteries. We are too busy inventing that which is new and original and accumulating information, tidbits, images, and less concerned with reorganizing this information, understanding it within different structures and different contexts. It is not so much that we need to engage and question the truth (or lack of) in information but we need to assess how an image, or a tidbit of information contributes and relates to other images and pieces of information. In other words, what we need is to understand the “relationship between reason, history, and the sacred” (The Future of the Sacred, 177). Engaging with “technology simply on its own technological terms through evaluating specific technical effects and consequences” is not sufficient(The Future of the Sacred, 178). “Instead technologies need to be engaged with more fully in terms of what relationships they bear to our past trajectory, how they might be harnessed to non-technological goals in the present, and upon what future trajectory they might set us.” (The Future of the Sacred, 178)

Examples of that:

• Supplemental Instruction Model of Post-Secondary Education: This model draws from several educational models (behavioural learning, cognitive developmental, social interdependence, interpretive critical, dialectical behavioural, as well as an applied understanding of left brain – right brain ways of processing information). The main premise of this model is that students are active participants in their learning process. Students have to take responsibility of their learning and voluntarily attend the sessions supplied by Supplemental Instructors. This model focuses more on how to learn than what information should be attained. New information is built on old information and the way to learning is building on good behaviour that leads to good education (good study habits, planning course work, gradual accumulation of information, maintaining a healthy life style of eating and sleep habits, learning to cope with stress, etc.) Information should be produced not disseminated and the best way to achieve that is through constant dialogue. Students learn more from discussing ideas with each other than from memorizing and waiting on professors to give them knowledge. Cognitive development is stimulated when conflict arises during social interaction. The educational goal is liberation not domination. This goal should overcome the learner’s “culture of silence”. If knowledge is produced through dialogue with others, then what learners learn today through team-work (knowledge that is more thorough) they will be able to apply on their own tomorrow. Finally information should be diverse (visual, theoretical, practical) and its study should be equally diverse (studying patterns, chronological chains of events and sequences, comparative, applied in daily life, applied in educational institutions, styles of management, modes of design and architecture, art… etc.) This constant reformulating of information produces the most thorough knowledge.

• Decentralized management: This model of management depends more on creating specialized committees that brainstorm cases and produce case studies. Those specialized committees then meet with other specialized committees in the company and cross-reference their case studies. The principles that this style of management holds are: society and its technologies are changing at a rapid pace (knowledge has a diminishing half-life) so that learning is no longer the acquisition of information by individuals but rather that each individual constitutes a part in a larger network of connections. Individuals need to rely on technology and networks to store information and knowledge. Information is produced through specialized nodes coming in contact with other specialized nodes. Learning does not happen outside of life in a separate isolated environment but is rather embedded in the work-related process. Content is not filtered in advance of the learning process but rather in the network itself. Such understanding and application of the network has to be dynamic and uses modern technologies to filter information and reassign it as a process of network reformation. A process tool that is required is one that captures knowledge and permits co-content creation. It should be decentralized and permits diverse and divergent opinions, cultures, and experiences. The process tool should capture the elements of culture and context; it aggregates distributed elements; it filters and adapts to information needs and climate; it builds learner competence to function in environment; it is a space that allows self-expression, dialogue, debate, brainstorming and connections; it is also personalized and learner-controlled.

• The post-modern age in its focus on theory, structure, the play between silence and word over content. The new philosophies that place a high emphasis on developing inter-relations and attempt to identify the boundaries that are crossed and ways to understand and engage with a world of fuzzy boundaries.

• Art and music that focuses on fusing different cultures and elements seeking to show the inter-connectedness of content and the ability to reformulate it to an “other” form that carries different content, is dynamic, interactive, participatory, and customizable.

If lightening and thunder take time, then our current modes of investigation will take time to unfold. Our age carries with it the supreme danger of ultimate fragmentation and disenchantment but also holds within it those new practices and ways of engagement that synthesize, cross reference, place responsibility on the individual to engage with the world as part of a globe that cannot be separated into neat categories. Maybe we are heading towards the greatest danger and are making sense of the greatest saving power that is part and parcel of this greatest danger. The greatest fear and the most breath-taking hope and wonder is that the ripple effects of our current engagements and modes of understanding, our hegemonic culture and its counter-cultures are still not fully seen and understood but are already in the past, the present and the future all at once.

conversation on change

This notion of living and I are in a constant struggle. It seems so basic on so many levels but so completely elusive.

“Do you know that pure intent has a direct impact on changing sub-particles? This Japanese monk/scientist would focus on a molecule of frozen water and make its shape more intricate simply by focusing on the intention of changing the molecule. It is really crazy when we think about all the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics and what that means about the world and our relation to it; our identity in accordance. We still operate as if it is the age of Classical Physics and haven’t really changed our fundamental views about reality to match the new science.”

“What do you mean? Science has become a major part of who we are. We are parts TV, parts computer games and video games and congested city life, crowded clubs and sky rise buildings. We store parts of us in computers, in cell-phones, in pom-pilots and GPS tracking devices. We depend on our elevators, cars, kitchenware, stereos and CDs. Like people, we love certain technologies, are indifferent about many, and dislike some. We quote TV show lines and have a ready to hand comedy; we become the music through our proclaimed musicians because it is easier, and we do not have to take what seems to be a long time when music is right there beckoning us to stay away from the early stages of squeaking disjointed attempts at making music…. or practicing any skill for that matter because patience in a fast-paced world is difficult to come by.”

“But that is because we use science in what it gives us, but we are less responsive to how it can change us. If we are living the age of all that… an age that in many ways Quantum Mechanics made possible from the silicon chips to our neuro-brain physiology studies, to Aero-Space Engineering ; if Quantum Mechanics is the most valid option today, what does it really say about us, about the kind of world we live in? It seems like an outlandish question to ask but not when we think about what entanglement means. Entanglement allows two particles to be at the same spot at the same time; it allows a sub-particle to be in different places at the same time; it allows certain sub-particles to exist timelessly. So what you might say, but then are we really separate? If the gist of the theory is that we are part of a living universe in which everything fundamentally is the same and changes that happen to you affect your spread out sub-particles that exist on the same frequency or wave function, then we change the world by changing ourselves, and the world changes us by changing. We change who we are by changing our attitude…. We are no-longer bound in reconfirming who we were from memory but by thinking of who we can be…. What we would like to be and let that simmer… let it grow slowly till the desire for an unknown can over-come our practical disposition to draw from our preset patterns that assume: if it is working, don’t fix it. This desire made it possible to experience creating something new by thinking of a different way, a non-precedent. It is the thrill, the excitement, the over-whelming rush of being…. being alive.”

“So to allow science to change you, you allow yourself to believe that you are not separate; that objects never really touch; that we are part of a living organism and what we think sends changes through this organism’s network; that matter is not nearly as full of energy as vacuum. The latent energy in a Hydrogen atom is more than the stars and planets and matter in our galaxy up to 20 billion light-years. We know that emotions are real. They are carried are different combinations of neuro-peptides and our bodies and minds are not so separate, we are not so separate from everything else so we are never alone. We can feel alone when we are with people and feel most revived when we are alone.”

“Yeah yeah….. and?”

I couldn’t help but chuckle …. True so? So what really does that mean?

“So if we are never really separate, then we intrinsically find greater meaning in connecting with people through understanding them; observing them; feeling them out. It is the desire to let who you believe you are down for a moment and let yourself be open to who they are. When you get a glimmer and you go for more you will gradually understand something new…. Feel something new … when you do you see then you really have the free-will to choose between what you know and what is new. In crowds we generally harmonize over issues of the moment but that only means that we have an ability to harmonize with others if we choose to be open to them. It is most difficult when others want drastically different things than we do and I see it happen all the time in negotiation but if you are ready to sit on the table of negotiations again with a new proposal that fits the criteria then you have got a deal. That demands that we constantly think up of new ways and speculate on new possibilities.”

“Good…. if we are part of a living organism then we have always owned our past, present, and future but really haven’t owned any of them at all.”

“That is simply non-sense… you completely lost me here!”

“The past, present and future create a way for us to view this world. We are part living in it being caught up in its moments… the beautiful and the mundane but we are also the watchers, the thinkers-in-retrospect, the dreamers of possibilities, the actors in the reenactment of our favorite fantasies. We want to make sand castles our permanent homes for that is what we are … that is what time is, what we are, what our universe is: an imprint of reality in which we are allowed to observe and create. With time as another construct, this moment has happened today and yesterday and tomorrow, during creation, and with quanta, it also never happened. Our attachment to the need to define, the need to own, limits our possibilities. We limit those possibilities to what we think we can handle. All I am saying is that I think that we should raise the bar of possibilities on ourselves and others.”

“If emotions are grounded in reality, then they are as valid as reason, as revealing and concealing as reason. Understanding the function of an emotion does not stop us from feeling it, but it allows us to feel it bare, without the baggage of past associations. Maybe when certain emotions assert their presence; when they withdraw they show us that they are still there but have “nothing to offer us”, maybe then they are telling us to allow the withdrawal to sink in because we know that the passage of possibility echoes from nothing. And maybe when we feel so calm yet with a latent energy that is bubbling right under the surface, maybe then we are feeling the “presence” of harmony; maybe that in itself is an emotion.”

“Emotions are grounded in history, in our associations, our patterns and our ways of interacting with it in blocking all that is negative till it drones us or letting it overwhelm us is a product of a history of the suppressing, rendering as secondary or irrelevant."

“If the world is more vacuum than stuff, then it is it is the way of the world to show through offsetting against the empty. If from profound boredom comes all that we can conceive of as pure possibility and energy in pure possibility is what drives its carrier to engage with it, and in engaging a mode of its being to a processor(s) in which we know it. From the re-stirring what is already there comes “newness”. Our experience in a moment of the “unfamiliar” tells us that there is an unfamiliar. The newness comes from the capability of our minds, and our bodies to engage in different modes and acquire content. It comes from the potentiality in wood to burn, to break, to pump nutrition or the trees to lean towards the sun. So a question is what are we capable of? And what is our environment capable of?”

“It seems that in all this possibility, when we engage with what we know in how we know (familiarity); it gives us what we know or allows us to forget the “object” of our engagement and to us it is “not there”. In so it is not a possibility but a certainty. To forget what we know through familiar ways forgets that it is forgetting (and in so we are constantly jolted back, we remember and associate.) But if we allow the tension in remembering that we are forgetting passage like we do through engaging with what we remember to forget, then maybe we will forget what we know through our expectation of an “unfamiliar”. Our history tells us that we find it easier to draw from the “familiar”; our mind’s tendency to bring from the left brain (security) hinders our (right brain) in its drive to take risks, our body’s awkwardness with unfamiliar motion or different ways of breathing makes it easier to fall back onto what we know.”

“In ritualism, we can forget that which we engage with and can forget captivation in the ritual and carry it on as a monotonous task and institutional routines in our insistence on the routine in ritual. But in a world of technology where change is fast-coming and ever-present we can forget that which we engage with in the whirlwind of change to meet change’s demands that we have set to meet that change.”

“If we only allow sand castles to inspire us, to leave an imprint in us that motivates us and holds us captive in its awe for however long the sand castle wishes to stay and allow them to get washed away by the waves when it is time for them to go…. To make room for a new home, a new sand castle. Then some sand castles stay forever and others wash away before they form. I love to float in the possibility of a new discovery. What I get a kick out of most though is learning something new about what I thought I knew. Now that is a challenge! At that moment the sand-castle changes form…. And that moment of transformation is intense. What is beautiful about you is that I saw in you something so familiar… I felt that I have known you all my life, yet I felt the novelty of all that is new and exciting about you. I felt that I will always think of you and felt the possibility that I will never see you again to the possibility that we will plan a trip together or randomly meet somewhere again.”

“So let all possibilities grow…. Live in all the possibilities and when you do, you are less afraid of the chronology of time because you have lived the countless possibilities. To let go of our obsession with definites and tangibles, only then does timing become as important as content.”

conversation in the open

“You know, the treatment of animals in parts like the middle-east seems inhumane. I mean they kill them by chopping their heads off; they make dogs live outside in the cold and offer them left-over food.”

“Partially, but I would say that for quite different reasons. It is because if the dog in your backyard is poisoned by your neighbour, and you go to file a lawsuit against them, they will dismiss you with a shrug and say: we are too busy with people dying; what a dog to that? But relative to what… is it humane to trap poultry in cement warehouses where they have no space to move, no stimulus, nothing to engage with but the overwhelming noise of their clucking? Isn’t it more inhumane to deny an animal its purpose in life, engaging with its environment than to kill it in a manner that invokes “human” disgust of gore, for after all it is less painful for the animal to die executed than it is to die electrocuted? (The major nerve is severed almost instantly and the blood drains in a few minutes.) It might even be befitting to kill the animal a violent death, an awakening of a function and a portrayal of the kind of life it led, for a subdued death is simply a forgetting of “man” of the violent detachment the animal was subjected to. But if by humane you mean, most appealing the modern human notion of refinement then yeah.”

“Then why would you say that poisoning a dog is inhumane.”

“I think the word inhumane isn’t really befitting. It is an allowance for beings to engage in their world and accepting them as part of a major portion of our environment that create for us an avenue to view the world and understand it. To kill a dog because it activating its function (barking) is a denial of that principle.”

“Then why can we kill an animal to begin with? How can we eat?”

“Animals kill each other, animals die after mating and animals don’t fear death, or in other words the future of being attacked resulting in death; they respond to the function of fear in protection. In other words, they activate the “carriers of significance” to their function in protecting.”

“They fear nevertheless; they feel pain.”

“To recognize that which is animal is to recognize that death for nutrition is a fundamental aspect in all that defines a living being. It is Aristotle’s definition of bare life. We are bare life (not only) and in so we find nutrition in the same way.”

“If we agreed on the broadest parameters: to live is to recognize that living is in engaging and to kill for nutrition is bare life; wouldn’t that say: that human beings live through engaging; we engage through hunting animals as a sport; we engage through making and buying leather couches and fur coats; we engage with technology and live in overpopulation and a mode of our engagement is mass-production, mass-consumption. How can we mass-produce food if we don’t alter it, accelerate its rate of growth, prolong its lifespan, if we don’t trap chickens in caged spaces. Our engagement with animals alters them and their environment. It might seem like a defeatist statement in either saying: let’s engage and damn the environment since we alter it anyway or in saying: let’s not eat animals but I think it is more complicated than that. I would say that we have to err on the side of preserving the environment.”

“It is true that our engagement, even in observation, alters the world but I don’t think the solution is in looking at man and animal and leaning towards one or the other. In other words, I don’t think the problem is in our lack of looking at end results and encountered objects (or living beings), but in understanding engagement. We are not different than animals in distinct criteria but rather in our ability to conceive ourselves as the something other. See I don’t believe that this something other is that which is not-animal, but a possibility other than our current engagement, our present self. When we speak of shunning the animal in us, we forget the care animals give their new-borns, the unconditional loyalty that dogs display towards their owners (while they own them), and the complete captivation that drives them incessantly to engage with their “perception” of the environment as the only thing there is. Humans have the ability to condition, to define and remember, and to contemplate pure possibility. Pure possibility comes from profound boredom (the beings that refuse themselves and as such present themselves as “nothing to offer” but in a way in which we cannot escape because they show in their respective beings that which is boring, as an offering of no further possibility of acting or letting anything act). This profound boredom points to the possibilities of being-thrown-in-the-world (other ways of engaging, other ways of picking up and attuning to beings through different ways of activating our inhibitor in its disactivation). The pointing to pure possibilities is unequivocal and indifferent, present and perfectly inaccessible. The process of revelation begins with calling to possibility in profound boredom and unequivocal indifference. It seems to me that we have skipped that stage.”

“What’s the significance of such process in helping us?”

“To begin with that which is the closest to the animal in us as profound boredom is to captivation is not to side with the animal, but to be in closest proximity to it.”

“It seems to me that we are in the closest proximity to that which is animal in our captivation, our abandonment of consequences outside our current mode of living.”

“The danger lies in the fact that if we simply live in the mode of lending ourselves over to our animal captivity offers no possibilities but the present engaging. It is not that it offers no words, no experiences and no logic but it offers us nothing that not already given in captivation… the current mode of logic, the pattern of experience and the conventional stringing of words. It wouldn’t be a danger if in rendering to captivation, we abandon our acting on our capability for language, logic and social interaction, but we do not; we simply render those to captivation, animal captivation. (I would say Heidegger missed that end of proximity but only because he doesn’t show how we move from pure possibility to engaging but asserted that it is the historical-collective’s great task to unravel that.)”

“Would the cement cages and zoos be the new mode of our engaging with technology, a necessary by product of the age of over-population, mass-production, revolutionary technologies, and mass consumption?”

“Again the problem isn’t in the by-products. It is not in what we allow and what we do not allow. It begins with holding possibilities in a state of profound boredom, in absolute indifference. Any question can be asked, any inquiry made. In so we find many questions that we are missing in our current debates and pondering. Moreover the media’s structure is de-contextualized, biased, framed and filtered with only enough time to state and reaffirm common conceived notions, because to speak of anything that is unconventional needs more air-time than is in the interest of such companies. The spectrum of discussion has parameters of proper and improper. The questioning of such parameters and speculating of what ifs is very minimal. We have to ask ourselves what are we enabling in the world (mass consumption, mass production, comfort, ready to hand, efficient, schedules, finance log books, junk food, individuality in a lack of non-virtual community, incredible technologies, possibilities of ultimate body functionality, any-time-any-place to state a few)”

“But wouldn’t you say we have a choice in all that in eating or not eating junk food, choosing mass consumption or not, and having or lacking a non-virtual community.”

“Enabled does not mean lack of choice, but means a choice that is not structurally offered by the hegemonic structure or system (in our case the play between governments and private corporations in creating common avenues to experience our world). To eat healthier is more expensive or more time consuming if not both, to have a community is to seek one or slowly create your own. It is because that which is disabled is not easily accessible in a world that runs on easily accessible that the difficulty arises.”

“In so we ask what are we disabling with our enabling (and vice versa)? We ask what do objects, people and the world reveal to us of its nature through different associations? Water and surfing is not water in the shower, or in puddles of rain, or a thundering storm. To engage in a debate to prove a point is not the same as to put your idea to the world to alter and modify. We ask of functions (the function of anger in pointing to a threat, the function of sadness in pointing to an emptiness or joy in displaying a fullness and energetic calm) Through functions we ask of benefits and drawbacks of different ways of engaging and we ask of what is effective. I don’t think Heidegger would point to any questions precisely because it is the asking of all questions, but rather a point that is crucial is that our world is made by the anthropological machine which is a historical production. In so history in its contextualization, in its sequence, in its discernable patterns is ultimately the vessel in which possibilities are placed within. It can be revealed as such: as patterns, as sequences, as benefits and setbacks, as potential risks and securities.”

“But Heidegger did not saw how pure possibility leads to concrete questions or patterns?

“Pure possibility does not ask; it only points to, but history can ask, the ontology of words can ask (preserve as pre-serve, belong as be-long) and observed functions (of emotions for example) can ask. If we can make asking more important than framing than maybe we move from defining to understanding. Understanding such as that contextualizes and gives a clearer picture that although it has less judgements of good and bad, it has more reasons to why, how come, what possibilities, what risks and solutions.”

“Do you know that when we acknowledge the pain, sadness or disappointment in certain situations, we feel the pain, sadness and disappointment but when we refuse to acknowledge such emotions, when we block them we experience that emotion heightened. See an emotional wave lasts only minutes but a predisposition of our thoughts to wallow in an emotion or block it only amplifies it. It is like what we were taught in self-defence classes: when you are held against the walk in a choke-lock, your initial reaction is to push back instantly; if you let yourself relax and melt into the wall, you loosen the grip of your capturer, but also gain a force much more powerful than resisting instantly. Our most heightened fears and pains are the ones that appear as unaddressed phantoms that have been rehashed or blocked over and over. See this is not to say that to acknowledge is to see as the only possibility, but rather to change, we must begin in acceptance. ”

“The main difference I think is that we think about things… stuff and their respective characteristics in what they are, but Heidegger would look at what the relationship is telling us and in its telling what is it is being concealed. We look at binaries in opposition, but what binaries lead to one another, are chasing one another and in so are a process. It not the acceptance or rejection of technology, but rather what it tells us about how we should relate to it; guide it and be led by it. It is not that I am, but that I am becoming and catching up with myself at the same time.”

“We think in the moment; we meditate through clearing thoughts; we think patterns and chronological chains of events; we think from memory and in retrospect; we think through analysing, through conceptualizing and speculating. How can we use those processes to work with our emotions and intuition and guide us?”

“The simplest and vaguest answer is openness to questioning, reorganizing, reformulating, and receiving those signals of our disinhibitors, a conceiving of something new. It is in drill, practice and repetition. To meditate, we practice meditating over and over again until it becomes second nature. In a way it is old material reformulated in new processes and new content processed through old processes. So long as we find the new in the old and the old in the new we are chasing the binaries towards each other.”

“If technology shows us our ultimate potential in unity and functionality; it also shows us the destruction and terrors that are ever-present in its possibilities. We are undertaking a reorganizing of our biology, our environment and more than ever yielding them to show us offerings that are most tailored to our conception of perfection. Do you think we are heading towards the ultimate perfection and infinite potentiality or are we heading like the Black Widow’s male in our exuberant excitement towards that which stimulates us, towards death and our ultimate destruction? A more important question is can we reach either?

Unfuzzying the Fuzzy

Although it seems that there is a “drop in public confidence in religion and religious leadership” as “American religious life has shifted to include more elements defined as spiritual”, the percentage of people that are self rated spiritual and religious in the Forced Sample is 74% and those who are spiritual but not religious is 19% (majority are still S+R). So what really changed? Were people before religious and not spiritual? Probably not, but then spirituality did not differ from religiosity (and if it did, then not as much). As spirituality detached from religion, the definition of what is religious grew narrower: “As spirituality has become differentiated from religiousness, however, it has taken with it some of the elements formally included within religiousness. Therefore, recent definitions of religiousness have become more narrow and less inclusive.” Spirituality became about the individual quest for this “higher”, and religion became the institutional, ritualistic, formalized structure of “goodness”.

What is really interesting though is that those spiritual but not religious place a high emphasis on group experience related to spiritual growth and those who are spiritual and religious consider themselves more spiritual than religious precisely because spirituality is the end that the “personal” has to aspire to and work towards and religiosity as a way to obtain that “higher”. The interdependence of “personal” and “organized” or “collective” is not resolved in either and they don’t differ in their view of the nature of the Divine. They have differed in the spiritual’s unease with the practicalities of religion (or practice) and the nature of the institutional, and the religious apprehension of a “personal” that defies a collective decisive structure and set of rules and in application fails to meet its purpose.

Yet such practicalities (such as: feeling a desirable inner affective state such as comfort, anxiety reduction, security, problem solving, concern for others aimed at obtaining a better world) that illustrate the function of spirituality or religiosity, took a back seat to their common goal of “higher connectedness” or closeness to a “higher being”. So if it takes a back-seat in questionnaires, then why does it not take a back-seat in life? It is because spirituality and religion are thrown into reality in which they have to find their niche and in so become applicable and in so attainable. Is the function of religion or spirituality less important than their goal? If anything, I would say that it is our hope in resolving some of the tension surrounding the meaning of both “religion” + “spirituality”.

thoughts on technology and our world today

I watched this movie lately that I found to be unbelievably interesting, especially for our course. I think it is the movie Prof. Kitzmann was talking about. It is called: “What the Bleep Do We Know, Down the Rabbit Hole”. So I guess my blog this week is going to have many references to the movie as well as Religion and Technology by Noble.

I get often trapped in my intense dislike for technology, and the kind of world that is built around technology today. I often hear myself saying, as many of us do, that technology is all about instant gratification, glorifying image and fragmenting reality. It creates a world driven by materialism and consumption and within such a world, the community takes a back seat.

What really is the ultimate dream that technology allegedly caters to? One is the ultimate perfection of body. Now some might say as I often do that it is the image of a perfect body that we are driven by, and that is true to some extent; but what this statement omits is the ultimate functionality of our bodies that this dream also promises. In other words, it is not as simple as having a zero size hour-glass figure but it is the core-strength, the agility, the balance and the focus of a body that is ultimately tamed to do what we want, when we want it. Also, it is not simply the good looks that this dream sells us; it is the allure of confidence, careful carelessness, quick and witty attitude. In other words, it goes beyond an image to traits that we wish to acquire. It goes as far as providing those who have the means and money the ability to modify their skill-set through altering their genetic code, a painful process, but one that takes less time and self-discipline than attempting to reprogram our habits.

Technology also offers the means to speed up what we view as mundane tasks with the hope of freeing up our time to live, to observe, to create, to master and to build. If it is not the kitchen appliances, and not the washing machine, computers, then it is the cars, the pre-chopped, pre-cooked food, the products, tap water, lights, and heaters. I tried once to eliminate all technological devices from my life and aside from the fact that I don’t think I was successful in doing that, I had no time left for anything else! Preparing everything from scratch is very time consuming, I tell ya that! This work-load in a pre-technological (industrial revolution) age was divided differently throughout a community so to simply say that today we can do all that is unrealistic.

Technology feeds on the dream of engaging with other worlds, seeing other universes and communicating oversees and across distances almost instantly. Now this might sound like something that we are willing to give up in fear of the dangers of technology, however, I would not be here had it not been for planes. I would not be able to communicate with my parents had it not been for the phone and internet; and we would not be able to have access to the wide range of information that we have today. Technology in many ways penetrated the natural homogeneity of a community that lives together to incorporate many different communities and ways of living. It has not gone the whole nine yards but it helped us take a step in that direction.

Finally, one of the most important aspects of technology, the one I view as most problematic and a reason for many of our misfortunes is entertainment. Technology gives us the ability to be entertained on levels we did not believe possible through television, video games (if they are still called that!), i-pods, entertainment parks, ice-rinks around the season to name just a few. In such, we can be entertained at any time of the day or night. The problem with entertainment is that it takes less effort than building skill-set does and when we habitually engage in the easiest, most accessible entertainment options, they are often the ones that require no thought and no effort. Even if they offer learning opportunities, we do not seek them to learn and hence we often forget about the learning for the sake of mindless entertainment. If we would only plan our free time mindfully and spend it with the intention of growing, of learning, and of acquiring new skill-sets, talents and new ways of thinking critically, would we be different? Would our dislike for technology lessen?

Now to tie this to the course, if the purpose of technology is transcendence, is it transcending our bodies and our world altogether or is it transcending the limitations to reach other possibilities that our bodies and our world already offer? If it is the first, then I believe that we are on a very dangerous track but if it is the second then how does technology achieve its ultimate goal? The movie was brilliant in pointing out that part of our problem is that although we have progressed to use new technologies we still view our identity, our purpose, our possibilities as well as our limitations within the old classical Newtonian science. We believe that we are separate beings when in fact the universe is a living organism in which we are all connected. We believe that the world is stuff (matter) when in fact it is mostly empty. We believe that energy can only be generated through matter when in fact the vacuum in a hydrogen atom is more than the latent energy in all the matter in this world up to 20 billion light-years. We believe that intention does not matter as much as action when in fact intention has a direct way of changing that which we place our intention on. And finally, we believe that things are the same whether we observe them or not, when in fact observation is what allows particles to exist, as otherwise they are simply waves of infinite possibilities and the reason why we all see the same thing is again because we are all connected on a fundamental level. So is it technology or is it the conflict between current technologies and our perception of ourselves and the world that is the problem? My blog is getting too long, as usual, so I will leave you here and hope to hear comments from you in class or via email or blog