Reason or faith? Darwin expert reflects

Darwin's birthday is coming up on February 12. This just came to me in Wisconsin Week: Reason or faith? Darwin expert reflects
I first became of Professor Numbers was when my daughter and his daughter were childhood friends. I really value living in a community where there is such stimulating thought and discussion.

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

from Dr. Michael Wesch:

presented at the Library of Congress, June 23rd 2008. This was tons of fun to present. I decided to forgo the PowerPoint and instead worked with students to prepare over 40 minutes of video for the 55 minute presentation. This is the result.
more info: Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University

A Change to Ecology of Joy

I had an insight this morning about the Ecology of Joy web page. I changed the third point from Media and Technology to Cultural Transformation.

Media and Technology foster and encourage the transformation, but transformation is the outcome.

Ecojoy and Objectivism

The current economic crisis is due in part to a failure of the philosophy of Objectivism to accurately reflect the world.

Alan Greenspan, strongly influenced by Objectivism, now concedes his error on regulation

Ecojoy recognizes we are all linked together. Our individual success has little effect in isolation, but a community working together in harmony benefits everyone.

The Prison Ministry Project

For some years, the phrase law and order has been used as a keyword to denote an emphasis on fear and to frame political discussion in dominator thinking. There is binary thinking that people can be divided into good and evil, or honest citizens and criminals. From a partnership analysis, people break laws when they believe the risk of consequences is low, or when they believe they have no other viable alternatives.

Rev. Jerry Hancock started The Prison Ministry Project at the First Congregational United Church of Christ to help prison inmates gain insight and knowledge that can help them transform themselves, and can help victims come to terms with their losses.

The Rise of Open-Source Politics

This is from way back in 2005.

The Rise of Open-Source Politics | | AlterNet

Thanks to web-savvy agitators, insiderism and elitism are under heavy attack. The era of top-down politics is over.

Putting this in Ecojoy framing, the medium of the Internet (the web) is fostering and encouraging a change in politics from hierarchical linking to heterarchical linking.

Study: Tolerance Can Lower Gay Kids' Suicide Risk : NPR

Study: Tolerance Can Lower Gay Kids' Suicide Risk : NPR

"All Things Considered, December 29, 2008 · Gay, lesbian and bisexual teens and young adults have one of the highest rates of suicide attempts — and some other health and mental health problems, including substance abuse. A new study suggests that parental acceptance, and even neutrality, with regard to a child's sexual orientation could have a big impact in reducing this rate.

The study, published in the journal Pediatrics, found that the gay, lesbian and bisexual young adults and teens at the highest risk of attempting suicide and having some other health problems are ones who reported a high level of rejection by their families as a result of their sexual orientation."

Family Acceptance Center at San Francisco State University

What's in a Word?

What's in a Word? Plenty, if the word is "marriage." By George Lakoff, AlterNet. Posted February 18, 2004: "The gay marriage issue is not just about same-sex couples. It is about which values will dominate in our society"

Excerpt:

When conservatives speak of the "defense of marriage," liberals are baffled. After all, no individual's marriage is being threatened. It's just that more marriages are being allowed. But conservatives see the strict father family, and with it, their political values as under attack. They are right. This is a serious matter for their politics and moral values as a whole. Even civil unions are threatening, since they create families that cannot be traditional strict father families.

This gets back to one of the important points of Ecojoy: How can we change people' thinking from dominator thinking to partnership thinking? The gay marriage movement has the same question: How can we change voters to vote down marriage amendments and support gay marriage? The answer is we can't. We can only create an environment where conservatives or dominator thinkers have the room to grow and adopt partnership thinking.

Added 1/1/09:
Lakoff explains things very clearly. The strict father family model describes hierarchical linking.

"Marriage amendment strategy backfires on GOP"

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Posted: Nov. 9, 2006: Marriage amendment strategy backfires on GOP - JSOnline:

It sounded like a good idea at the time.

Get the proposed same-sex marriage constitutional amendment on the November ballot to drive up the Republican vote while driving Democrats out of office. The plan worked for President Bush two years ago, particularly in Ohio. So why wouldn't it do the same in Wisconsin this year, the GOP brass reasoned.

Welcome to the real world.

'The timing ended up backfiring,' said U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Menomonee Falls Republican. 'I think the opposite worked out this time.'

The controversial amendment easily passed Tuesday, with Wisconsin voters approving the ban by 59% to 41%.

[more at Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]

So, to make this perfectly clear, the main reason that Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature passed this measure was to draw conservatives out to vote, in hopes of getting more Republicans elected.

Wisconsin Marriage Amendment

I'm starting a series of posts about the Wisconsin Marriage Amendment, passed in November 2006. I'll put together background, and then give an Ecojoy perspective. I'll put Wisconsin Marriage Amendment in the labels, to make it easier to pull these posts together.

Ecojoy, Obama and the Pastor Rick Warren Controversy

There is a controversy about Barack Obama's choice of Pastor Rick Warren to give the Invocation to the Inauguration. And this helps to better understand Ecojoy.

There are many dominator thinkers in the world. We can't change them but we can foster and encourage change. First, establish a heterarchical relationship with the person in question. That means avoiding ranking. Also, avoid binary thinking (blue state/red state, liberal/conservative). Another way of thinking about this is creating a space which people feel safe from personal attacks. Note that a vigorous debate on issues is not a personal attack.

By inviting Pastor Warren to give the Inaugural Invocation, President Elect Obama is establishing a heterarchical relationship with Warren, bringing religious conservatives into a more mainstream discussion. Some on the left (yes, binary thinking on my part) decry Warren's involvement, but true change can't happen if that point of view is ignored.

Disruptive Change

Technologies like the Internet foster and encourage disruptive change. Disruptive change is happening now. It is no longer cost-effective to do business the old, pre-Internet way.

Ray Kurzweil has talked about this change as a result of technological change, and he uses the term singularity to describe the effect on society. As digital technology ascends, the current media (newspapers, radio and television) decline. And the concept of value changes.

George Soros has also been predicting this financial melt-down. See his book "The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means" ad articles in the financial Times: "Worst financial crisis in 60 years marks end of an era" "How gamblers broke the banks"

How does this connect with Ecojoy?

The technological changes involved in the financial crisis are also changing the way we think about our connections with others. In this new world, partnership is a better fit than dominator thinking, and joy is a more effective motivation than fear.

Steven Johnson's "The Invention of Air" -- how an eclectic minister/scientist/politician shows that history is a web - Boing Boing

Steven Johnson's "The Invention of Air" -- how an eclectic minister/scientist/politician shows that history is a web

Johnson uses the life of Priestley to illuminate a theory of history that holds that great people are neither an inevitable product of their times, nor luminous, supernatural geniuses -- rather, they are the product of an ecosystem of influences, technologies, climate, and energy

Win Ben Stein's mind - Roger Ebert's Journal

This is a post on movie reviewer Roger Ebert's blog. Note that it is Ebert's response to an accusation:

I've been accused of refusing to review Ben Stein's documentary "Expelled," a defense of Creationism, because of my belief in the theory of evolution. Here is my response.

Win Ben Stein's mind - Roger Ebert's Journal

The blog entry is getting more responses than anything Ebert has ever written.

Why do creationists feel the need to discredit evolution? I think it is because they feel that their concept of morality would break down if people exist because of a so-called random process of evolution. They feel that morality is imposed from outside ourselves by God (external locus of control).

If evolution breaks the concept that people were created by God, then everything else in religion -morality included- breaks too.

But the concepts of evolution and a belief in God are not mutually exclusive. Mutually exclusive thinking is binary thinking.

Evolution is independent of belief in God. If you are a believer in God, evolution can be seen as the wonderfully complex method by which God created the world of living creatures.

With ecojoy, thinking is not binary but has many options of varying value.

With ecojoy, the locus of control is internal. When people use ecojoy to guide their actions, they have and act on an understanding of benefit and harm to themselves and others - a sense of morality.

Fear: The great de-motivator for IT professionals

Fear: The great de-motivator for IT professionals

This is an opinion column in Computerworld Magazine. This supports the ecojoy idea that joy is the most powerful human motivator.

Author Paul Glen says

But just because fear may be effective when demanding higher productivity from people doing physical labor, that doesn't mean it works on people doing intellectual work, especially those doing creative intellectual work.

I contend that fear is not as effective as joy even in physical labor.

Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network

This study from the BMJ (British Medical Journal): Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study is about the ecology of joy

Conclusions People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon.

So, as you experience joy, and you exhibit the signs of joy, people around you feel more joyful.

The Election of Obama

Obama understands partnership intrinsically. He worked hard to have the discipline to focus on the goal, and to respect others. He keeps relationships in a heterarchical mode. At a time of two wars and an economic crisis, he realizes we all need to work together to resolve the crises.

Adam and Eve and Partnership

Examine the Adam and Eve story in the Bible. There are several version online, like here. The Adam and Eve story is in the book of Genesis, Chapters 2-3.

There are several Ecojoy issues in the Adam and Eve story.

The time before was the garden of Eden - paradise. There was no shame ( fear) (Genesis 2:25).

After the apple was consumed, fear was introduced (Genesis 3:10). The Old Testament frames the relationship between God and man as God fearing (fear of God introduced in Genesis 22:12)


Marshall McLuhan's theory is that media themselves - not the content they convey - change culture. The Ecojoy extension of McLuhan's theory is that the change wrought by media are due to the way media model interpersonal linkage of heterarchy and hierarchy.

The Bible is one of the major sacred texts that emerged around the world as the medium of the written word emerged. In the Bible, the people who possessed knowledge of writing were referred to with the (sometimes pejorative) term scribe.

Is one of the effects of sacred texts due to the effects of writing?

Playing for Change: Peace Through Music

I just saw a segment on Bill Moyers Journal on PBS. It was about Mark Johnson and Playing for Change. It is a movie that Johnson made over ten years, with many musicians, knitting together voices and instruments from around the world. It is also a movement to build music schools around the worl to help others learn to make music.

Music is a rich medium for communicating ideas, culture and emotions. Music gives us metaphor for understanding the world around us, and the ways in which we connect to others.

I am especially fond of the song Stand by Me, because it sings of supporting others by our presence.

at 15:37 in to the interview...

BILL MOYERS: Did anybody ever say to you, "Mark, don't be naïve"?

MARK JOHNSON: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. But to me, naïve is thinking that there's any other choice. You know? The only choice we have is to come together. And to inspire each other because that's the way that we'll create a better world for us now and for the kids tomorrow.

And the other truth is, I mean, you know, a lot of people are living in a world of fear. But we don't even know how long we're going to be in this world. So there's really no reason to fear anything. The most important thing is while we're here, let's make a difference together. That's what Playing for Change is trying to represent.

Click over to the sites, and listen and watch.

Mourning Michael

My good friend Michael Wellings passed away on August 28. There is a memorium page at the University of Washington. He and I were the same age. He was a person I looked up to for his technical knowledge and his love of sharing his knowledge to help make the world a better place. I'm coming out of a depression about it, and am finally able to talk more about it. He will be missed.