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Organization: Green Innovations Inc
From: "Philip Sutton" <Philip.Sutton@green-innovations.asn.au>
Date sent: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 04:10:20 +1100
Subject: [Civic-Courage] A contribution on what the project should be doing
Dear CCers,
This is from me in my personal capacity...........
I reckon we need lots and lots of courageous heroes who are prepared to stand up for the public good (benefiting the commuity of life across the globe).
We need people to do daring things required to change bad trends and to move us out of status quos we'd rather not be in.
We need these heroes to give us hope.
And we need them as role models.
To get as many heroes as we need I think we should encourage a culture of courageous engagement for the public good.
We could do this by:
- encouraging existing heroes and giving them recognition
- widely spreading stories about role models in the community
- getting as many people as possible ("everyone") engaged in thinking about the need for and what it takes to be a couragous hero
I don't think that focusing on courageous heroes will be a straight forward task.
While lots of people will be able to agree that we need courageous heroes, it willl often be difficult to get agreement on who is a hero and who is an eccentric trouble maker.
A limitation of an award system is that, while it gives a higher profile to a few people for a limited amount of time, it doesn't expose people to lots of heroes and tends not to stimulate in-depth discussion.
Also, unless it is designed carefullly, an award system can be a closed affair with few people involved in flushing out the candidates.
Perhaps some desirable design features for a cultural change program that generates enough heroes to deal with our problems would be:
an active public participation process for finding heroes (all sorts of NGOs and other organisations could be partners in this0
an active public process for discussing the heroes that have been identified and for encouraging other people to be active.
A website with a large database of heroes could be a very good thing - if it is connected to a public enagagement process.
It might also be a good idea to have a process for collecting issues that need heroes and to have a discussion around how to generate more heroes for these issues. (The more I think about this idea the more interesting it seems.)
I think we also need to have a process that is open and tolerant in terms of letting people onto the register of heroes. But as well as providing praise and support to heroes, we could also have discussion about how effective and sensible the heroes are (because one person's hero is another persons ratbag).
Maybe we could have a process like the Wikipedia for collecting and assessing heroes.
People or groups with a strong issue focus could select relevant heroes from a much bigger database - and then devise their own specialist of focused program.
Cheers, Philip
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------- Forwarded message follows -------
Organization: Green Innovations Inc
To: Civic-Courage@yahoogroups.com
Priority: normal
From: "Philip Sutton" <Philip.Sutton@green-innovations.asn.au>
Date sent: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 03:27:56 +1100
Subject: [Civic-Courage] The courage of all people - women and men
Send reply to: Civic-Courage@yahoogroups.com
Dear CCers,
The first list of heroes that I made up were all men! That left out half the population.
What did my first list demonstrate?
- my bias?
- the bias of the media?
- a differential tendency for males and females to operate in certains
spheres or in certain modes?
- all of the above.
Probably all of the above is a good answer.
What should we do about it then? We could also make a conscious effort to search out the courage that exists in the areas where we normally habitually don't look. We could give recognition to the courage of women within the current pattern, and we could help make it possible for more women to be seen and recognised in the public sphere?
Cheers, Philip
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From: Philip Sutton <Philip.Sutton@green-innovations.asn.au>
To: Civic-Courage@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Lao Tzu: has he got it right?
Date sent: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 16:20:31 +1100
Hi Daryl/everyone,
> Lao Tzu said - "facilitating what is happening is more potent than
> pushing for what you wish were happening.
I presume Lao Tzu meant what is happing in a desirable direction. In which case this is saying something like:
"Start with where you are rather than trying to jump immediately to where you want to be"?
This has a common sense appeal to it and indeed it is a good strategy. But I also think that, like most aphorisms, it shouldn't be taken too literally. Because, especially, if the change that is needed is big and the time is short then it is very sensible to use backcasting methods where you iamgine yourself where you would like to be and then figure how to get there, in a timely way, starting from where you are. The business methods people who work on Lean Thinking (www.leanuk.org) have demonstrated many, many times the practical value of being able to envisage 'ideal' situtations as a focus for current action.
I think relating where we are (and building on the good aspects of that) and linking to a preferred future is what we need to do - for the me the Lao Tzu aphorism doesn't capture that desirable two-way dynamic.
Cheers, Philip
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------- Forwarded message follows -------
Organization: Green Innovations Inc
To: Civic-Courage@yahoogroups.com
Priority: normal
From: "Philip Sutton" <Philip.Sutton@green-innovations.asn.au>
Date sent: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 15:51:50 +1100
Subject: Re: [Civic-Courage] Re: Question: change the economic system or not?
Send reply to: Civic-Courage@yahoogroups.com
Hi Tim/everyone,
> However I don't support the view that we should call for society to
> adopt sustainable development regardless of the economic impact - this
> would be unachievable
You've raised a really interesting question here. I like to approach these issues from a perspective of practical idealism and double-practicality.
For me practical idealism is a way of pursuing idealism that can actually work in the real world. And double-practicality is an approach whereby you not only get things done but that what is done is equal to the challenges we face. To take an extreme rather caricatured example, if a large meteor is approaching the Earth and it would destroy most life if it hit - the doubly practical thing to do would be to aim to (a) take action (not just go into ineffective panicked anguish) and (b) also set out to actually solve the problem - ie try to deflect the meteor not just build bunkers in the hope that a few people might survive the impact.
Another principle I try to use is the notion of no major trade-offs. That is, most people have a number of top priority goals and requirerments - so the aim should be to satisy each of those top priority goals/requirements simultaneously.
The inrelationship between sustainable development and economic impact could be analysed with these principles in mind.
Sustainable development is development (change) intended to be for the better (genuine progress) that does not undermine society or the environment and that also creates the means to sustain society and the environment.
Economic impact, as you've used it, probably is shorthand for changes in the economy and in people's personal economic circumstances that people, governments and businesses feel ought to be avoided if at all possible.
If the community wants to sustain society and other species locally and globally and through time - then what they are saying is that if at all possible they don't want to trade off these concerns.
And people and governments and businesses also have a preference not to trade off economic viability either.
So I would rephrase what you said above as follows:
We shouldn't call for society to pursue sustainability or economic development in ways that generate major trade-offs
But that then shift the debate to how to frame both the pursuit of sustainability and economic development so that they are achievable without major trade-offs - and it directs people to loook really hard at what is in fact a major trade off.
For well-off people a little loss of economic wealth might be OK if that enabled human sustainability and more of the rest of life to be sustained. The practical issue here is not "could rich people manage with less wealth" but rather could the political system deliver such a result. Skilled political campaigning/culture chage can change what is practical and also detgeriorating environmental and social conditions can also be quite pursuasive over time! :)
But as it turns out I am now sure that there are ways to generate signficant economic wealth without leaving people and the rest of Nature in an unsustainable position. The Dutch Sustainable Technology Development program has demonstrated the application of an innovation program that delivers such a result.
Weaver, P., Jansen, L., van Grootveld, G., van Spiegel, E. & Vergragt, P. (2000). Sustainable technology development. Greenleaf Publishing: Sheffield, UK.
Cheers, Philip
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------- Forwarded message follows -------
Organization: Green Innovations Inc
To: Civic-Courage@yahoogroups.com
Priority: normal
From: "Philip Sutton" <Philip.Sutton@green-innovations.asn.au>
Date sent: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 16:50:46 +1100
Subject: Re: [Civic-Courage] Re: Question: change the economic system or not?
Send reply to: Civic-Courage@yahoogroups.com
Hi Tim/everyone,
> 2. Those that invent and cause adoption of new sustainable
> technology. This task is surprisingly difficult and far less glorious
> then it appears.
I agree with this.
It can be generalised a bit further though.
When I'm not doing the work on the Civic Courage project, I'm working
(should be working!) on a paid project for the CSIRO to take critical ideas
for sustainability from the present, and then see when was the earliest time
in history that the ideas could have feasibly been implemented. Then I'm
modelling the world (very crudely!) on a spreadsheet to see what difference
the change would have made to key physical indicators (social and
environmental). I'm using a variation of the old Paul Ehrlich equation IPAT
(Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology. But I've changed T to
'technique' so that it covers social/cultural arrangements/management etc.
as well as what we normallly understand as 'technology'.
I reckon Tim's second category could be extended to cover the full gamut of
'technique'. In a way this picks up Daryl's point about the apparently low key
work that needs to go into social capacity building.
Cheers, Philip
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------- Forwarded message follows -------
To: Civic-Courage@yahoogroups.com
From: "Philip Sutton" <Philip.Sutton@green-innovations.asn.au>
Date sent: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 01:56:46 +1100
Subject: [Civic-Courage] Crikey.com article: Why terror is so terrifying
Dear CCers,
This article is very interesting as it raises a different dimension of the civic
courage idea - not the courage of leaders so much as the courage of the
average person. Maybe we need to address both.
If we use an award for cvic courage model, as our only mode of operation,
we might end up focusing all attention on leaders' courage and not on
citizens' courage. Maybe one way to do the latter could be to find - not only
'the best' people from a civic courage perspective, but exemplars of truly
average people being courageous - so they are selected at random out of a
pool of average people who have demonstrated civic courage. How would
we find peple like this though? It almost requires some sort of social
science style sampling technique??
Cheers, Philip
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>From the Crikey free email : Friday, 18 November, 2005
Why terror is so terrifying
Guy Rundle writes:
The responses to your story by Ross Gittins regarding the mammo
Advertisement
th difference in risk between dying from smoking or similar and dying from a
terrorist incident went someway to revealing the irrationality that lies at the
heart of our thinking about terror. Gittins et al argue on a purely statistical
basis, while most of the correspondents argued on a moral basis ? that
terror requires special measures because it is an immoral act, rather than
an accident. Both sides strike me as half right, yet missing the point. The
key question is one of neither morality nor statistics per se, but of fear, and
the particular cultural character of fear.
Consider this ? most of us, on a late Saturday night, after a party or some
such, are reasonably happy to climb into a car with a group of people and
drive home ? although we know, in the back of our heads, that even if the
driver is stone cold sober, we are committing to a relatively higher-risk
situation in our lives. If we are going to be erased by a drunk P-plater,
Saturday night is when it's likely to happen. Yet we usually accept that
slightly elevated risk with a rueful "what the hell" feel.
Terrorism, by contrast, works off an entirely different set of motivations ? it
is not the fear of being killed, but the fear of being murdered that haunts
people. What makes it so terrifying is the intimacy of it ? that someone out
there is out to get us. Terror combines both the impersonality of modern life
(anyone could get blown up) with the particularity of the encounter (it was
you I blew up).
It's that bottomless fear of being murdered ? rather than of simply dying ?
that seems to fuel much of the legislative over-reaction to terror. That the
risk of a terrorist incident is higher than it has been is obvious. It also seems
clear that security provisions which do not abolish habeas corpus, free
speech and other core features of an open society, are sufficient to keep the
risk at an acceptably low level. What strikes one about so many of the
proponents of the new terror laws ? politicians and pundits alike ? is their
cowardice, their willingness to throw such provisions overboard at the first
sign of elevated risk. Whether this is an expression of their natural
character, or a side-effect of their sycophancy to power remains to be seen.
I'd suggest that those of us who oppose the new legislation do so from a
more forthright position of saying that such slightly elevated risk is worth
taking in order to retain one's self-respect as a human being ? rather than
suggesting it might never happen. Terrorism, like car crashes, are simply
part of contemporary life, and to try and reduce their occurrence to zero
(rather than sensibly minimising them) simply wipes out everything ? a
sense of freedom, of living life, of self-possession ? that such futile laws
purport to protect. Better we face down our fears than they us.
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