Monday, February 23, 2009

Ecojoy and Abortion

A clinic in Madison has announced plans to perform second-trimester abortions...

How does ecojoy help understand the issue?

Anti-abortion or pro-life thinking is influenced by binary or single-dimensional thinking - something is either back or white, right or wrong. Taking life is murder. The circumstances do not change the outcome.

Support of abortion, or pro-choice thinking is influenced by multi-dimensional thinking - things come in shades of gray, and the rightness or wrongness of a thought or act have multiple dimensions and values.

Po-life thinking is dominator thinking. With dominator thinking, the locus of control is external. Moral leaders determine the morality of abortion.

Pro-choice thinking is partnership thinking. With partnership thinking the locus of control is internal. Since the fetus is growing inside her, it is the pregnant woman's right to choose abortion based on her own life circumstances, her spouse, and information from her doctor and from moral advisers.

Pro-choice thinking involves heterarchical connections between the pregnant woman and her spouse, her doctor, and her moral advisers.

Pro-life thinking involves hierarchical connections between moral leaders, the community, her spouse , her doctor, her moral advisers and the pregnant woman.

Neither one of these ways of thinking is inherently right or wrong. They are consistent within their own way of thinking.

We are in the midst of profound cultural transformation from dominator thinking to partnership thinking. This transformation is being fostered and encouraged by the effects of communications media. The dominant medium of our time is the Internet.

Our culture is changing from a position that abortion is murder to a position that it is a woman's right to chose to end a pregnancy based on her particular circumstances.

We can help ease the negative effects of the cultural transformation by education. We can reassure dominator thinkers that individuals don't need dominator thinking to behave morally, and that partnership thinking is not chaos.

If pregnant women and mothers and their children have community support (safety, food, shelter, information), it is likely that the rate of abortion would be reduced.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

The End of Alone

The End of Alone - The Boston Globe

At our desk, on the road, or on a remote beach, the world is a tap away. It's so cool. And yet it's not. What we lose with our constant connectedness.


By Neil Swidey
February 8, 2009


Don't get me wrong. I love technology. It's magical how it makes the world closer, and more immediate. Take, for instance, the real-time way we learned about the plane that skidded off a Denver runway and burst into flames in December. One of the passengers on Continental Flight 1404 used Twitter to share everything from his initial profanity- and typo-laced reaction to making it out of the fiery jet ("Holy [bleeping bleep] I wasbjust in a plane crash!") to his lament that the airline wasn't providing drinks to the survivors who'd been penned into the airport lounge ("You have your wits scared out of you, drag your butt out of a flaming ball of wreckage and you can't even get a vodka-tonic.")
(more at link above)


This is an example of how technology is fostering and encouraging cultural transformation. The concept of alone - like a single person out on the Oregon Trail back in the 1800s - the idea itself of alone - is changing in light of the fact of handheld electronic devices and the Internet. Even if the battery goes dead and you really cut-off from communication with the outside world, your concept of alone has been forever changed.