Perspective followup

Another in an ongoing dialogue with my readers and commenters.

From the Perspective blog, my friend Sean commented:
"Another well written post - congratulations. I have no answers just a deluge of questions for us as a society interested in looking after each other. And yes that is a gross assumption because there are many who only like the words but are not really interested in that walk. Nevertheless here are the questions:
~ How do we solve horse and water problems?
~ In an age of fragmented information silos how do we get to a place where key facts are accepted and acted upon?
~ Given that there are hand jobs and mind jobs, how do we support those with hand jobs?
~ Given our social core how do we maintain and grow deep connections with others that matter? If we are more physically distant from each how can we avoid egocentric perspectives and establish less fragmented communities?
~ Can we agree on some common goods and how do we get there?
I have more but that will do for now. Cheers, Sean"


What a wonderful comment! Thank you. Of course, given questions, I provide answers.

I focussed on the words "social core". For all that there is a Great Man theory of history, driving the masses to their will, I look at what people can accomplish when they band together. Way back in the day it might have been as simple as taking turns so that someone was awake all night to watch for predators.

More recently, people would pool their resources to build a church or a community centre. People helped their neighbours through a tough time. It might  have been because it was the right thing to do, but more practically it might be a realization next time the help might need to go the other way. Whenever a disaster happens, emergency response teams show up, but so do volunteers, eager to help out. In fact, volunteers can be so eager to help out the professional teams have to account for them in their response plans, if only to get them out of the way while they use heavy equipment.

More currently, people are breaking quarantine in the middle of a global pandemic because they get lonely. They want to see their family and friends. Not just see on screen. See in person, to be able to hug them. We have more ways to reach out to other people than were dreamed of a generation ago. We can exchange photos or videos with trivial ease. Our mobile phones aren't quite like Dick Tracy's watch, they're better. Somehow, it isn't enough.

Many people complain that social media have widened their reach, at the cost of making each contact much shallower. This ought not to be a surprise. Smaller groups are more cohesive, and have higher conformity standards. When the only people you knew were the people you lived near, you darn well had to go along to get along. You kept your sex fetishes and weird political beliefs to yourself.

Now, you can let your freak flag fly, and consort with fellow freaks over social media. You don't need your prudish neighbours anymore.

Or do you? How deeply connected are you REALLY with blackleatherboots586@aol.com? How do you know the person responding isn't an FBI agent cat fishing you?

Over my lifetime I've seen society slowly moving on various issues. In the 1950's Alan Turing was hounded to death for being gay. When I was in high school, Toronto was raiding gay bathhouses. I had one teacher that appeared to be completely serious when he said that anyone found in such a place should be shot in the street, cremated, and their ashes scattered on Lake Ontario. Now gay people can get married. Smoking used to be common. Even indoors, imagine that! Now tobacco use is dwindling and there are few places it is socially acceptable to smoke. Seat belts are another example. However, it should be said there are still people (lets be polite) who have yet to get with the program.

So how do we establish less fragmented communities? This is related to the common goods question. Our obstacles are fear of the other, and demonization of the other by those who hope to gain. Our formative stories are full of Great Men, and Lesser Men who go forth and ACHIEVE. There isn't so much celebration of a team that does something worthwhile. Probably the leader of that team gets recognized, but that's it. Naturally those leaders want to keep things like they are.

So part of the solution is to recognize those teams. Celebrate team accomplishments. Within the team recognize the influence and contribution from all the team players. Your friends are a team, part of a web of connections. Look at your Facebook friends list, how many of them you have mutual friends with.  I have 39 mutual friends with one person, who is a social media expert, and part of his business success is a network of friendships. Next, I have 29 mutual friends with one person, but then she's a social butterfly, we worked together, and were involved in triathlon together.  Some people don't let Facebook show their friendships so it isn't definitive list. You are more connected than you think. It might be your choice that the connections are shallow.

But much as some people like to think it, we are not isolated people working in a vacuum, with all our accomplishments attributable to our hard work, skill, blah blah blah. We're part of a web, a network, and we all need to do our part to recognize and maintain those connections. Yes, the grocery store staff stocking shelves are part of that web. So are all the invisible people like lab techs that make our health care system work. That person you're dissing in line might be the person doing your mom's lab tests or figuring out the chemo dosage.

And maybe, to be blunt, we need to trim the connections that aren't so connected anymore. My friends list has some people I went to high school with. I haven't seen or talked directly to them in over 40 years. There hasn't been much connection via commenting on posts, or even a like. Remind me why we're still connected?

Key facts. Once upon a time there was an established curriculum of courses that an educated person would take. One would assume they knew Latin and Greek, would be familiar with bible quotes, and would have read from a canon of literary works. They were almost certainly part of the old boys network, a club of wealthy white men who essentially ran the world, and are desperately trying to hang onto that control. One of their key facts isn't just that some people are more equal that others, it's that some people are certainly less equal and deserve to be treated that way.

Now it seems like anytime someone runs into a fact they don't like, they call it fake news. Or the patriarchy. Or propaganda. Or terrorists. Anything to dismiss something that upsets their world view. And yet there really are key facts. There really is enough food to feed everyone, the problem is recognizing the shortfall early and organizing transportation. Educating women, especially about reproductive health, is a key to national prosperity.

The world used to be much harder on stupidity. Now we let people wander around spouting harmless nonsense like the moon landings were faked, more serious nonsense like the various flat earth theories but as long as they aren't in charge of plotting spaceship courses to other planets who cares, and deadly nonsense like the anti-vaxx idiots. Even worse, some of them vote, and their ballots make as much sense as their opinions. Worst of all is that they say that nothing can change their minds. We used to call such people religious fanatics and the church used them to torture heretics.

There has to be some middle ground there, yet I'm reminded of the phrase, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who shall watch the watchers? Who are to be the guardians of the middle ground, and who keeps them from being the new old boys club?

The only answer is, of course, all of us. We all have to pay attention to what our representatives and neighbours are doing. Not in the sense of the prurient details, but look at the expense accounts, and calling bullshit where necessary. James Mill had much to say on this. He had great faith in the free press and broad public education. Except that now the free press is being bought up by right wing corporations and media power concentrated. Public education is being hollowed out by private schools, which ought not to be allowed. Not one thin dime of taxpayer money should go to private schools, and that includes the property tax of those wishing to send their kids to such a school. They should pay the full public school freight, and then whatever the fee is for the private school. The private school should pay the public school system to administer the same exams as the public school.

I have this vision of a societal time out box. A form of Twitter jail. A way where those people who have anti-society tendencies can be marked and shunned. Not the flat earth kooks, but certainly the anti-vaxxers. Not sure where all the other nut job beliefs fall, and I'm not sure who I'd trust to decide.

Our judicial system makes much of 'a reasonable person' standard. I like the idea, but the standard hearkens back to the old boys club. At certain times they would have said that of course slavery was ok, or that allowing women to vote was a bad idea. Who is a reasonable person?

All of us. Any one person might make a poor choice on a ballot out of frustration. Yet the foundation of our democracy is that when taken together we get the government and elected representatives that we vote for. Except not all of us vote. I'd like to think that on balance, requiring all people to vote, like in Australia, would get more ballots from reasonable people, than from nut jobs. I really would like to think that. One of my related thoughts being explored in a draft blog is the idea that people getting CERB, or EI, or a UBI ought to be required to become an informed voter, but I'm not sure what that looks like.

Which gets us to the tragedy of the commons. We need to manage our common property better. Otherwise everyone will graze their sheep and kill the grass. Someone on Rapa Nui (Isla de Pascua) cut down the last palm trees. We let corporations pollute our air and drinking water. We don't seem to recognize that billionaires and corporations got that way by using common property to their advantage, privatizing the profit, and outsourcing the costs wherever possible. Most recent example I know of? Kenney selling off a bunch of Alberta Provincial parks so his buddies can use them to strip mine for coal. Because after you give away billions of tax dollar revenue, it's too expensive to run parks.

Anyways, that was a lot of words, and not one beer consumed during the formation. Which is a great pity.

And now the photos. I was reading Of Love & War by Lynsey Addario. It's a collection of photos and commentary by a well known photojournalist. One of her comments about publishing a book was that she hadn't sat with any of her photos long enough to know if they were good enough to put in a  book. That made me think of some of my earlier photos.

So this fence, and my comments above about the tragedy of the commons. On the other side of that fence used to be a working farm. Then for years there was a barn with horses grazing. People, especially children, loved stopping to look at the horses or feed them grass. I've seen some people bring apples.

The horses were taken away during the floods a few years ago, I think 2013, but it might have been 2005, and they've never come back. The barn gradually decayed and was torn down. Just recently the fence was removed by a crew with chainsaws. A pity, I posed a family against the fence not far from where this photo was taken, and I had it in mind for other family shots. I wonder now what is going to become of that patch of land.

This was one of my earliest 5 star photos, and I'm still quite liking it.

Of the Day
Michelle

Curtis and Celina from Christmas 2016

Flowers

White Peony

Driftwood

Ribbon Creek
And that's the last from my Ribbon Creek photo hike with Sean. It was a wonderful day. There are a few other post hike photos of our waiter and her beautiful long red hair, but I didn't ask permission to publish them.

This is not part of the hike proper, it's the kind of banal view from a golf course restaurant.