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Idleness as revolutionary crucible

November 23, 2004 By Uncategorized

From a fantastic essay in the November issue of Harpers magazine called Quitting the Paint Factory: On the virtues of idleness:

Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, req�uisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idle�ness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had “too much time on our hands.” They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something, “Quick, look busy.”

Mother knew instinctively what the keepers of the castles have always known: that trouble – the kind that might threaten the symmetry of a well-ordered garden – needs time to take root. Take away the time, therefore, and you choke off the problem before it begins. Obedience reigns, the plow stays in the furrow; things proceed as they must. Which raises an uncomfortable question: Could the Church of Work – which today has Americans aspir�ing to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God – be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well, yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it all up quite neatly: “There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and sav�ing it from all risk of crankiness, than business.”

Quite so. The mind, however, particularly the mind of a citizen in a de�mocratic society, is not a boat. Ballast is not what it needs, and steadiness, alas, can be a synonym for stupidity, as our current administration has so am�ply demonstrated. No, what the democratic mind requires, above all, is time; time to consider its options. Time to develop the democratic virtues of independence, orneriness, objectivity, and fairness. Time, perhaps (to sail along with Lowell’s leaky metaphor for a moment), to ponder the course our unelected captains have so generously set for us, and to consider mutiny when the iceberg looms.

Which is precisely why we need to be kept busy. If we have no time to think, to mull, if we have no time to piece together the sudden associations and unexpected, mid-shower insights that are the stuff of independent opinion, then we are less citizens than cursors, easily manipulated, vulnerable to the currents of power.

I think that in totalitarian societies there must actually be a lot of sitting around waiting for someone to tell you what to do next. I can imagine Solidarity getting started in the ship building factor in Gdansk one afternoon when the supply chain broke again.

Building containers

November 22, 2004 By Uncategorized


Frog Feast Bowl by Dale Faustich

Recently on the OSLIST we have been discussing “givens” the boundairies within which group work happens.

Both Harrison Owen and Paul Everett, an American consultant, talked about the universal givens, like the laws of self-organization and gravity. Paul wrote about the boundary conditions that tip chaos into order:

Chaos Theory, et. al. deals with ‘bounded instability’. There is a container, an edge. OS is certainly Chaos Theory in action, imho, where something will emerge but you don’t know what or where, just that form will emerge from the primordial soup. A person I met once, name long gone from my memory, unfortunately, once said there are only two rules needed to build an ant hill.

1. When an ant carrying a stick comes to another stick, it puts its stick down.
2. When an ant not carrying a stick comes to a stick, it picks the stick up (and carries it until rule 1 occurs).

That will build an ant hill within the space of the travel abilities of the ants (the container) but you cannot say where it will emerge, but emerge it will.

IMHO, just so with OS, the minimum needed conditions having been set (by the structure Harrison developed), potentially useful form will emerge.

I concur with that statement. What strikes me here is Paul’s use of the word “container” and I resonate with that. When I hold space, I do often have a sense that I am holding a container. Some First Nations Elders here on the west coast of North America talk about it using the metaphor of the feast bowl, an ornately carved dish in which food is served at feasts. The expression “the common bowl” is often used to refer to the collection of people and resources available for a task at hand: “What is in the common bowl?”

I have recently been reading about Bohmian dialogue again, especially as it was explicated by Peter Senge et. al. in The Fifth Discipline and especially the new book, Presence. They use the term “container” as well. In Presence, there is a lovely quote from John Cottrell, the president of local 13 of the the United Steelworkers of America who used dialogue in labour relations. He likened dialogue to the craft of steelmaking:

“We work with energies that can kill you, The essence of our craft lies in containing these energies. If we fail, people die. The same is true for human beings: we generate energies that can kill one another. The question is, can we hold these energies, or will they destroy us? Just as the cauldron contains the energies of molten steel, dialogue involves creating a container that can hold human energy, so that it can be transformative rather than destructive.”

I think when we work with groups as facilitators we do hold these energies. Those of you in very conflicted parts of the world will know better than I the tremendous strength needed to create and sustain a container for these energies that is transformative. My father in law called us toxin handlers: those who held those energies in a way that allow groups of people to function in a healthy way.

Sometimes I think we need explicitly stated givens to do this. In most cases though I think that the universal givens of self-organization are the ones we need to invoke, invite and hold space for. This is huge, huge work. But when we fashion the containers well, the results speak for them selves. Peace, as Harrison has noted, requires space and self-organization to emerge. These are givens, and they are worth holding.

Supporting the youth

November 22, 2004 By Uncategorized

Taiaike Alfred is a Mohawk academic who teaches at the University of Victoria. He is an uncompromising champion of declonization here at home and in the wider world. Recently he took part in a two-part dialogue at the Musqueam First Nation with some guests, community members and Elders. A transcript of the dialogues can be found on his home page. Here is one of the many interesting quotes, from a conversatio between Taiaike and Sakej Ward from the Burnt Church First Nation:

Sakej Ward :…As colonized people, our typical reaction is to feel ashamed of ourselves. So we must bring back standards of what it means to be a warrior. Like, if you’re calling yourself a warrior, these are our standards� We take you in and help you decolonize and be who you were meant to be. People in warrior societies are all at different stages of this process of decolonization, but when they come in, we tell them, �This is what it means to be a warrior.� For example, no alcohol or drugs. We have to cleanse that out of our systems. We don’t need to deal these inner demons; we’re busy dealing with other things.

Taiaiake : It’s also important to remember that we as adults need to give our children a culture they can believe in. Rites of passage, ceremonies and so on are very important in this kind of movement. The youth need to have a culture they want to be part of . You know the Zapatistas in Mexico? A lot of people think of their struggle as the struggle against the Mexican government, but I think they’d say their main accomplishment was attacking violence against women and drug and alcohol abuse. And then they were strong enough to fight against the other things.

Sakej Ward : Before we talk about a political revolution we need a social revolution. We must bring back a value system that stresses community and people, because the Western value system is about the individual, greed and self-centredness. We have the ability to start thinking about building community again, and we have a social responsibility to do it too.

I will say it for as long as I live that the origins of true freedom and transformation, whether in the service of decolonization or healing or some other arena, lie within the personal and collective realms. Without this inner transformation of people and cultures, the external changes won’t occur. We remain complicit in our own imprisonment.

Blogs and bloggers in person

November 18, 2004 By Uncategorized

Another Open Space blog joins the world. Lucas Gonzales produces CoPensar. I have no idea where he is, but he mentions Tenerife and South America a lot. He is a nice recent contributer to OSLIST as well.

I had a blogger-in-person once removed experience today as Ranger Tim, made famous in the Canadian adventures of Dervala came over to Bowen Island for a walk in the forest and a peek at the storm surge crashing on the rocks of Cape Roger Curtis.

I love meeting bloggers (and their friends) in person. They have always turned out to be just the kind of people I thought they would be from reading their publishing. The list is getting pretty long too, with Rob Paterson, The Happy Tutor, AKMA, Tom Munnecke, Gerry and Debbie Gleason, Lenore Ealy among others. And that doesn’t include the people I knew BEFORE they were bloggers, or the bloggers I have spoken to on the phone…

It’s neat when faces and blogs go together and one realizes that there are many real people out there in the community that one always perceives as real. It helps to ground this stuff and these connections.

Decolonization through education

November 15, 2004 By Uncategorized

For our weekly look at practical decolonization in the Aboriginal world, we turn to a nice article in The Tyee, a regional online magazine here in British Columbia fosucing on the vision of Graham Hingangaroa Smith. He is a Maori academic educator who is visiting BC and throwing up some nice challenges to the community here with respect to academic success.

And he knows what he’s talking about. Maori education, in Maori schools has saved the Maori language, and created a huge shift in the identity of a whole new generation of Maori. When I was in New Zealand in March, I was struck by how much language was used in daily life. Having some nice kai at a hui on the marae is something easily understood by Maori and Pakeha (non-Maori) alike. In fact, I think I learned more Maori in a week than I have learned Coast Salish in the ten years I have lived here in Squamish territory.

Smith credits this amazing resurgence in Maori identity to a deep change in thinking:

The revolution that occurred, the essence of it, was actually a change of mindset. It was a shift from Maori being reactive to what’s happening to us-and always being on the defensive-to being proactive about what we wanted and being assertive about going after it and doing it.

Here in Canada, I have to say that we tend to suffer somewhat from being defensive, and reacting to government. The proactive initiatives I blog about here are a welcome sea change in that respect. I’m glad Smith is here spreading his gospel, because indigenous folks around the world need to hear from each other, especially about things that work so well.

Thanks to Marja-Leena for the pointer.