Category Archives: Politics

Axial myth

Fables, myths & parables, History, Politics

Axial Age as theory-myth (presented magisterially, with ascholarly recklessness):

In the period of the Axial Age, civilizational technologies (material, military and social) evolved to a point where those tribes who acquired these technologies earliest, were able, first to overwhelm their neighbors militarily, and, after, to manage and control conquered peoples, and to extract the resources of conquered territories. The Axial tribes that gained first-mover advantage transformed themselves through their own rapid spread and acquisition of power into empires of unprecedented scale.

These vast empires centrally managed peoples and resources through technocracy. The technocratic logic abstracted culture from society, two institutions that had, prior to this, been essentially identical.

The opportunity: how might an empire invest the least power and resources to conquer and control a territory, in order to extract the most power and resources, or order to accrue surplus power and resources to invest in further expansion — all resulting in exponential growth of territory, power and wealth.

The trick was to change conquered peoples as minimally as possible — to leave as much intact, especially those aspects of tribal life most valued by its members, so they would not revolt. This unchanged element became, under the abstraction of technocracy, culture. What was changed, and in fact, dominated by the empire, was society.

And this brings me to my point: Religion as cultural institution was an artifact of technocracy. Initially, tribal “cosmological” religion was a preserved remnant of tribal life under the domination of empire. But later, new self-contained, inward Axial religious forms developed. They grew out of these remainder religions, but they shed the cosmological roots, renounced all “worldly” ambitions, but compensated with universal spiritual aspirations.

Axial religions were less new limbs or outgrowths of the old plant than they were sprouted cuttings — rerooted traditional ruptures. They were born resigned to coexistence to empire.

Yet, paradoxically, these Axial religions proved ideal for empires. If an empire adopted an Axial faith, it could now replace native cosmological faiths with a state religion, which further eased technocratic burden. Conquered peoples could be dominated body and soul.

The next wave of empires were post-Axial empires, fervent to spread a universal religion as universally as possible. Islam is sometimes classified as the youngest of the Axial religions, and this is radically wrong. Islam was not an inward, unworldly Axial religion developed under dominance of an empire (later adopted by an empire) but rather a post-Axial empire fitted with its own hyper-worldly, universal, imperial religion.

Later still, in response to domination, first by Axial empires and then by post-Axial empires, the pre-Axial remnant religions evolved new depths of inwardness. They were still cosmological and tribal, but they also developed their latent esoteric universality, precisely that same heartwood life that was cut and rerooted in the Axial cuttings.

Post-Cosmological religions — Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, Advaita Vedanta, Sufism, and I will anomalously include in this series a book, the I Ching — these have a cultivated commonality. Sophia Perennis is a theology concerned with heartwood faith. I share the Perennialist faith, but reject much of the theologic of tradition.

Now, today, everything is changing rapidly. Somehow, all these layers of Axial, Post-Axial, Post Cosmological and Perennialist religion coexist in a global social order — a new form of order radically different from tribe or empire — that is no longer compatible with any existing religion.

What is truth?

Judaism, Philosophy, Politics

The Roman governor of Judea (Jew-land), Pontius Pilate, is famous for asking “What is truth?” and then for washing his hands of responsibility after being made to do something he didn’t want to do by people under his dominion.

The Romans later drove all but a few of these people out of Judea, and renamed Judea “Palestine”.

Three hundred and some years later, the Romans began to worship the man Pilate was not responsible for executing. They were very, very angry at those people who forced Pilate, against his will, to murder him. How could they have done such a thing?

Having taken the land of the Jews, they took the scripture of the Jews as their own as well. Apparently, they were so taken by this scripture they decided they wanted the covenant described in the scripture to be theirs.

Another three hundred and some years later the land was conquered by Arabs in the name of another religion that claimed to replace Judaism. They Arabs also took the scripture of the Jews as their own, and, of course, the Jewish covenant.

Since the expulsion and diaspora of the Jewish people, they have been oppressed, persecuted and murdered by those who claimed the land, scripture and covenant no longer belonged to the Jews but to them, and them alone.

The Holy Lands are now contested by three different faiths, each with an equally legitimate claim to the land.

But back to where we began: What is truth?

Who fucking knows? Go ask Michel Foucault. He’s the epistemetheologian of critical theorizing radical left — the same radically critiquing left, unsparing defenders of justice, who demand that Palestine be restored to its indigenous population, the Arab conquerors.

(Naw, it’s all just too complicated. We don’t even know what to believe, really. But surely the left consensus can’t be entirely wrongheaded, when it is so righthearted.)

Jew hatred as affirmation of Judaism

Judaism, Politics

Hatred of Am Yisrael — variously expressed throughout history as anti-Judaism, antisemitism and now, anti-Zionism — is a reliable earmark of evil.

In the 20th century we have in the lineup some of the most distinguished villains of history: Nazis , Bolsheviks and Klansmen. In the 21st century the new lineup includes Islamist theofascists, the alt-right and progressivists.

I have been unable to find any credible secular explanation for this one and only point of agreement of so many horrible people, the destination reached by so many dark, snaking, spurious paths.

What feels most credible to me is that evil instinctively hates whatever is holy. Each evil being hates according to its own contorted logic and distorted lenses, and produces novel ideologies and justification for the hatred, but invariably each seeks in its own way to do the same thing — to displace and replace the covenant.

I abduce a hidden, unconscious, occult motive. Whatever and whoever wants to be God hates whatever reminds them of what they are not.

Anomie and misnorms

Design, History, Politics

I poked around in Durkheim’s Suicide yesterday, to see what he had to say about anomie.

I do not want to discount the magnitude of his theoretical breakthrough, which was mere foreground to his deeper methodological breakthrough, but the theory does suffer a bit from retroactive obviousness. That is, his concept of anomie is more historically important than it is freshly relevant to the anomic situation we face today.

To summarize, Durkheim’s diagnosis of anomie is that, at the individual level, without external societal constraints human desires are unlimited and lacking form. Society, by imposing limits, gives us norms, goals, defined desires and milestones for assessing the progress of our lives. When society stops providing this structure, we lose our bearings, and we are lost in a horizonless chaos, where motion is just arbitrary difference without any reference point by which biographical progress can be experienced.

Though now, just in the process of writing this summary, it is starting to feel freshly relevant.

In the spirit of showing my work, I am changing the original thrust (which was to expand anomie beyond Durkheim’s conception) to seeing how much I can find within it.

For years, I have played with a term, “misnorm“. Think of misnormality as a cousin to anomie. A misnorm is more or less a social category mistake. We misunderstand the essential nature of some domain of activity, and misjudge the behaviors that sustain it. We have a false image of how things happen, and so, when things go as they should go and must go, we judge that things are going wrong. And if we are in a position to control the situation, we will force it into conformity with what we think should happen, thereby making things impossible.

(Misnorming happens to designers all the time, and most of my career has been spent battling them, in order to win conditions for good design work. Someone who expects design to work linearly, with steady progress toward a straight goal, without moments of confusion, doubt, conflict and intense anxiety, in complete and polished iterations does not know what design is. And if such person attempts to lead design projects, he literally does not know what he is doing. Such a person is likely to misrepresent design to his organization, or accept misrepresentations of design, and sets himself and his team up for a truly traumatic failure. Either the design team will insist on doing design the way design is done and fail to conform to the wrong expectations of the ignorant leader and his ignorant stakeholders. Or the design team will try to work under impossible conditions within impossible constraints and fail to deliver good design, which is, frankly the fate to which most designers are damned. Either way, the project will fail, and it will fail because, once again, the leader failed to win conditions where success is possible. No amount of demanding, or bullying, or bullshitting can change this fact. And, by the way, this failure is even more a failure of leadership as it is failure to understand design: such people also suffer from misnorms of leadership. They confuse leadership with tyranny.)

Misnorms cause us to compare the human condition to a fantasy norm, and to misjudge something normal and relatively good as something atrocious and deserving destruction, or, as today’s timid radicals put it: dismantled.

Today’s misnorms are fed by fictional images produced by our media — news, entertainment, and the blending of the two in the propagandistic missions of various political movements. This propaganda projects misnormal ideal positive images into the world, in comparison to which everything real is distorted as inadequate, and ideal negative images blamed for the inadequacies. And at the theoretical level, we have ideologies and weird theologies which purport to enlighten us to what’s really going on, but in fact dysilluminate the world with false clarity, which always “reveals” the world as hopelessly corrupt, irredeemable and irreparable, requiring nothing less than total ground-clearing and rebuilding from scratch. It is hard to avoid wondering if all this need for rebuilding from scratch doesn’t just serve as justification for sating an insatiable appetite for destruction.

And so a great many people wander around interpreting everyday, ordinary frustration as evidence of something extraordinarily bad, while misinterpreting disproportionately violent responses, and corrosive policies meant to correct nonexistent problems, as good and necessary. And it all makes conditions of normal life increasingly impossible. And it is very difficult to maintain, repair and improve something that is being undermined, bombarded, and demolished from within, so the critiques gain credibility through their own negative outcomes: the deterioration of what they critique.

And so, today, instead of experiencing lack of references, orientation and sense of progress, as with anomie, we have impossible and deeply phony references and perverse misorientations and rapid regressive velocity.

Anomie : misnorm :: nonunderstanding : misunderstanding

Karl Schwab, monopolarchist

Metaphysics, Politics

I just listened to Yascha Mounk’s abortive interview with Klaus Schwab, and it dovetailed with eery ease with the line of thought I have been pursuing this morning, which, of course, means I’m insane.

I have two comments, the first cynical and the other bizarre.

First, anyone who has been a stakeholder in “stakeholder capitalist” corporation will instantly recognize what Schwab expects of citizens in his political order.

Our role is to “buy in.”

We are to go along with what our leaders have already decided it’s going to happen, and pretend with them that we have a choice in the matter.

Schwab wants the entire world to be one massive multinational corporation and for all its citizens to be its employees. Except that we cannot quit and work for a different corporation, because WEF is the Corporation of corporations — the only meta-employer on earth. You can change jobs all you want, but you’ll always work for the Boss of bosses.

Schwab, though, is innocently, pristinely naive. His faith in his entitlement is total. He doesn’t know he is a totalitarian. He thinks technocratic rule by business elites is the natural order.

Schwab is a monopolarchist. And most “leftists” I know are just like him, except they are not on the top floor of this order.

We are to buy into the rule of our elitest elites. We are to buy into their version of history and truth. We are to buy into their value priorities. We are to buy into their selectively attentive, selectively evasive and blatantly contorted version of what is happening today, aka the news. We are to buy into the politics that naturalizes their dominance, through the management of their “selfless”, self aware deputies, the professional-managerial class.

Except a growing number of people no longer buy in.

And confrontation with this refusal to buy in makes folks like Schwab melt down: Does not compute! He genuinely perplexed and seized in anxiety. It has been decades since anyone has been in a position to make him justify himself from any position, other than the one he naively assumes is the only one. The very notion of elites negotiating power and truth with dirty, ignorant, superstitious, backwards underclass bigots? Inconceivable!

And this brings me to my second point — the bizarre one. Klaus Schwab and his zombie army of stakeholders believe that they are secular. Most of them are either atheists or “believers” whose faith serves the same ideal as Schwab’s global secularism. They think they are the vanguard of a post-religious humanity. They think they are among the first who have outgrown the religious compulsion to worship. They are deeply, deeply mistaken.

Hineini void

Judaism, Politics, Star

The irresponsible cannot be held responsible for anything but they are guilty of every neglected call to respond.

“Where are you?” . . . Nowhere, never, nobody.

Non-present.

“What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? — Seek zeros! –”

On decadence

Autobiography, Philosophy, Politics, Star

Decadence, etymologically, means state of decay. To decay, to decompose, degenerate, deteriorate, disintegrate.

The overtone in decadence is the dis-integration of subject. And subject is multiscalar.

A person, a family, a community, a nation, an international class or an international order can break down.

One faction is alienated from another, and stops associating or is set against another in conflict.

In an individual, individuum is lost, and becomes multiple individual factions inhabiting a socio-biological dividuum. Each faction does what is pleases in disregard of the others. One faction wants to be healthy and disciplined, but another faction sees a slice of chocolate cake and devours it, health be damned.

A decadent organization, large or small, shatters into mutually alienated and hostile factions that no longer care about the organization as a whole.

A subjective being is decadent when it loses its integrity — its intersubjective integration — and disintegrates into intersubjective anarchy. A We or an I is divided against itself — and often cannot stand other aspects of itself. Self-loathing, other-loathing, convulsive inter-factional alienation and conflict prevail.

A place is decadent when it loses its habitational integrity — its spatial coherence — and is chopped up into dissociated spaces. (Christopher Alexander dedicated his life to repairing places.)

Time is decadent when it is fractured into dissociated instances. Attention is on one thing for a few seconds and then another thing. Momentum is arrested in stop-start motions. Each start lurches in a different direction, in a this-that trajectory. This meeting, then that meeting. This TikTok video, then that video. This topic, then that topic. This election cycle, then that one. This great event, then that one. This mass hysteria, then that hysteria.

There is no evolving flow or development of being through time, across places. Things fall apart. Mere anarch is loosed upon the world, and all that.

There is no time or attention for a long train of thought in a decadent world.

Everything is interrupted mid-thought, mid-sentence.

Only bite-sized bits of information will be eaten. Anything bigger than a bon-bon is too much to chew and bypassed as bad communication.

Only tactic-sized strategies may be followed. The longest long-game is to decide the next move before the problem evaporates into obliviousness.

Perspective is impossible, because each eye spasms toward what is shiniest. Cubist double-vision induces double-think dysunderstandings. A person wants perfect equity and unfettered freedom under theofascist-marxist totalitarian rule… as long as whoever made you feel like something the cat dragged in feels even worse.

A conversation of interrupted sentences is interpersonal decadence.

I am interrupted and interrupted and interrupted by people who increasingly need to not understand the truth.

Just justice

Ethics, Politics

Let us not valorize impassioned overcompensation for past injustices.

Justice is not an accounts ledger, and to treat it as such is a catastrophic category mistake.

Overcorrection does not balance the books of justice.

Justice is better seen as a pendulum seeking equilibrium. Judicious action damps, slows and narrows the oscillations making them gentler, subtler and more easily directed.

Overcorrection shoves the pendulum from one extreme to another. It inevitably swings back as a counter-overcorrection, raging back with wrecking ball force.

The remedy for automatically dismissing a group’s claims is not to reverse the attitude and to believe them automatically. Justice abolishes automatic belief and disbelief. Justice listens to all people and judges their claims on the merits of the claim itself, not on who makes it.

The remedy for bigotry is not reversed bigotry. Justice abolishes bigotry.

The remedy for domination is not reversed domination. Justice abolishes domination.

The “settling of accounts” model of justice is justification for revenge. It is false justification and it produces false justice.

Anyone who thinks justice entitles the aggrieved to a proper measure of revenge knows nothing of justice.

And beware the correctors of structural injustice. The restructuring is usually a scale of justice where half the balance weights are the fingers of their own all-comprehending hand.

Me being leftist

Autobiography, Design, Ethics, Politics

A job offer should include not only salary and benefits but a service-level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing conditions conducive to effective, rewarding work.

This is especially important for “labor of love” professions, which are typically lower paying.

For such professions, the instrinsic reward of the work is more than half of the value exchange that makes the work feel worth it..

These professions often attract “empathy workers”.

Empathy workers are typically terrible at negotiating decent salaries. A person seeking a good faith win-win will fare poorly facing off against a bad faith opponent seeking a win-lose.

But tragically, empathy workers are also terrible at resisting unreasonable demands and pressures that cheat them out of the non-money half of their value exchange. They are, by nature, agreeable, flexible and accommodating. and this makes them the perpetual path of least resistance for workaday psychos looking to stampede and climb over and crush whatever is between them and the top of whatever hill they trying to be king of.

So empathy workers end up with lower salaries and depressingly impossible work conditions that burn them out and make them even less able to push back on the assholes who mercilessly squeeze, exploit and immiserate them.

Red Card

Ethics, Letterpress, Politics

There is room for disagreement on immigration policy.

As a staunch agonist, I honor even extreme, bitter conflict on such issues.

Those who disagree with current policy have every right to protest it publicly.

There should be less room around enforcement of current policy. Policies are designed to narrow possibilities into practical particulars of enforcement.

Protesting policy by actively interfering with its enforcement is a dangerous line to cross, if we wish to preserve rule of law, which is a fundamental precondition of liberal democracy.

But enforcement outside the bounds of policy is at least equally dangerous, and repugnant to any decent citizen of a liberal democracy.

Civil rights are non-negotiable and sacred.

This is why I have donated to the Red Card Campaign, and why I think every decent American liberal or conservative, ought to donate, too.

I am compelled to letterpress print Red Cards. All sacred ideas call me to the press.

Commonality

Enworldment, Hermeneutics, History, Politics

Back in 2016, stunned and demoralized by the election of Trump, I needed to get my bearings. We were in a new reality, and I felt unequipped to move around.

I read several books that helped. The most helpful was Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal. Tragically, it was even more harmful than it was helpful. What I learned from this old-school leftist made new sense of recent history, at the cost of alienating me from my own social tribe. I’ve been politically galut ever since.

Rereading Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country also helped, and has continued to help. Whenever conflict with well-graduated Professional-Managerial class supremacists (thanks, Thomas Frank!) makes me doubt my own lefty bona fides, I can reread this book to recover the truth of who is left of whom. This I believe.

Then came Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. This book presented a series of vignettes meant to help the reader understand the surreal cynicism of Putin’s Russia. It was wild and disturbing to read about a world with no trace of shared truth, that could only be passively ridden like a carnival tilt-a-whirl, or bushwhacked with individual intuition and stubborn refusal to believe anything.

At the time, I felt I was getting a preview of Trump’s America. And in hindsight, I can see I was mostly right.

For about fifteen seconds this morning, I considered rereading it.

But I am terrified I would be unable to read that book now as I read it then. I fear I would recognize that Russia is just like America, but wonder “…but as opposed to what?”

Because that firm common ground that, despite our differences, could be assumed to provide support under our feet, is no longer there. The air of freedom, equality and universal human dignity that we once breathed from birth no longer circulates among us. The compasses that once reliably pointed North, now spins erratically and stops only to point insistently atthis, then that, arbitrary direction. All of this — however hokey and fake it was — is gone now, along with the memory of what life is like when all these commonalities can be taken for granted.

This is what makes history and reading works from other times so challenging.

Objective grasping of the material is trivial. What is difficult is recovering the particular faith that enworlds that material and makes it seem given by reality itself. )O+

Much easier is to grip everything with the fingers of now, and profoundly misunderstand it all.

L. P. Hartley, whoever the hell that is, is said to have said “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

One of the great challenges of youth is to finally, for once, internalize what this means, and to outgrow the callow, hubristic omniscience that practically defines youth. Presentist accounts of past events is the furthest thing from history. It is historical Dunning-Kruger. It is literally sophomoric.

Hannah Arendt was taught by her patch of history to quip “Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them ‘children’.”

Kids these days.

The old faith and its enworldment is gone forever. We couldn’t recover it now, even if we found the world-lever that could hoist our nation back into e pluribus unum orbit around some common sensical sun. It would have to be a new sun in a new orbit.

What concerns me most right now is establishing common faith and enworldment with a new community — the chimerical and kaleidoscopic society called myself. I need my own ground of given realities and given truths. I need my own spiritus atmosphere of virtues to follow, to honor and to aspire to embody. I need my own conception and orientation to truth, by which I can navigate work, chaos and confinement.

I have at least one viable option for the future.

Sadly, everyone still knows everything.

There is no room for what I know in anyone’s head but my own.

The thing about design

ANT, Design, Philosophy, Politics

Latour, from “A Cautious Prometheus”:

Now here is the challenge: In its long history, design practice has done a marvellous job of inventing the practical skills for drawing objects, from architectural drawing, mechanic blueprints, scale models, prototyping etc. But what has always been missing from those marvellous drawings (designs in the literal sense) are an impression of the controversies and the many contradicting stake holders that are born within with these. In other words, you in design as well as we in science and technology studies may insist that objects are always assemblies, “gatherings” in Heidegger’s meaning of the word, or things and Dinge, and yet, four hundred years after the invention of perspective drawing, three hundred years after projective geometry, fifty years after the development of CAD computer screens, we are still utterly unable to draw together, to simulate, to materialize, to approximate, to fully model to scale, what a thing in all of its complexity, is.

So little design writing pays attention to the social reality on both sides of design — design-in-the-making and design-in-use.

Whenever designers wax political, they fall in line with politics-as-usual. They talk about all the ways design should serve the political goals shared by all good people, opposed by bad people.

It is as if they have never designed.

It is as if they have never aligned any diverse group of people around a goal before.

It would be so much better if, when politics comes up, people would wax designerly,

We do not need to politicize design. We need to designize politics.

Dysapparitions of material

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics

I read Bruno Latour very much as the best kind of Catholic.

I read him as a radical Marian (and the furthest thing from a “Sophiologist”).

I read Latour as the most rigorously devout disciple of Mary Mater.

And Latour knows better than anyone that, just as no woman can be reduced to what some man thinks of her, matter is not reducible to scientific fact — that is, what “the” scientific community thinks of Mother Nature.

Nietzsche, the devoted son of a Lutheran minister, once asked “Supposing truth is a woman — what then?”

But supposing truth is absolutely not a woman?

Supposing truth is a self-serving, unfaithful notion of woman?

Supposing this notion of “woman” makes relationship with any real woman — actual or metaphorical — impossible?

Now what?

Materialists are the incels of philosophy.

They are obsessed with an ideal object of thought they confuse with real being, and this confused obsession kills all possibility of relationship. The more the materialist obsesses over his object of thought, the more unreal and alienated his notions become. And she can intuit this. She feels it directly: this dude is interacting with some creepy doppelgängeress in his head, not with her. She recoils. Her devastating pronouncement: Ick.

She will open only to those who meet her as real, who converse with her as existent, who live life with her as companion, who become transformed by her, with her, in relationship with her.

She appears as herself only in relationship. She dysappears to those who grasp her as an object of hate or of infatuation or of distant worship.

Believe me, I raised two daughters, and I know an abusive profile when I see it.

The abuser’s tell: He arrives with a defined woman-role in mind, and he demands conformity to it.

“If you were a good girlfriend, you would…”

“If you really loved me, you would…”

Marxism is a collective abuser.

Marxism is an incel driven to psychosis by disappointment and resentment.

The world failed to live up to his high expectations, and he is extremely upset about it.

And he is making that disappointment her problem.

The existent real material order will not play her role, because she is a bad material order, and that is why she is unhappy.

A good material order would behave like a good material order, and then he would happy.

He would toil a little during the day, and write a little poetry in the evening. And the material order would smile sweetly and submissively. She would shelter him for free. She would cook for him for free. She would be an angel of compassionate care when he needs free healthcare. She would fetch his newspaper and slippers. She would perform her wifely duties, and not out of duty.

If she were a good material economic order, she would do all these things.

But she isn’t.

And now she will pay for it.

See what she made him do?

Ethos, ethics, mutuality

Autobiography, Design, Judaism, Politics

The highest achievements of humanity stand upon mutuality. Mutuality is for the mutual.

Ethics belong to an ethos. Ethics are the participatory norms of those who belong to some particular ethos.

When enemies of an ethos demand ethical consistency from those belonging to an ethos, even as they attempt to undermine, weaken or destroy that ethos, they use an ethic against itself.

Imagine a horde of hooligans flooding the tennis courts of Wimbledon. When the players, referees and spectators try to drive them out of the stadium, the hooligans howl accusations of hypocrisy. “If you really loved tennis, you would adhere to the rules of tennis, and drive us out with better and better tennis playing! See? You are no better than us. You are hooligans, too!”

The rest of the world agrees, but takes it further: The tennis crowd is even worse than hooligans. We expect more from elite athletes and connoisseurs of such a refined sport. Hooligans are just noble savages, doing what hooligans do. Who are we to judge them? Who are we to tell them where they can and can’t be, and what they can and can’t do? Tennis players, though, are like us, and we expect them to live up to our high moral and intellectual standards. Maybe even higher! When tennis players use their rackets as weapons, that is truly a betrayal of the ideals of tennis — and to our own.

So Wimbledon is condemned by the officials of the Olympics, and sports officials around the world. Social media goes crazy over pictures of the brutality of the eviction and on and on. Wimbledon is boycotted. Before long, tennis courts and vandalized, tennis players are threatened, assaulted and abused. Soon nobody even wants to wear tennis shoes in public anymore.

The entire world of tennis suffers because of the brutality of Wimbledon security guards. And the fact that tennis players think Wimbledon is above criticism only makes it worse.

I have no idea at all why I got so intense about this analogy.

I suppose it is because this to me is real. Very real.

Maybe it is because I am a designer who is entirely dependent on how people around me participate in the projects I work on.

When we initiate a projects, we attempt to initiate our client collaborators into a new way of working, and establish a design ethos around the project. If we succeed, we can do great work.

But if we fail at this — if our project participants refuse to participate in design processes — we are no longer able to play the game of design. We might be able to flex and contort and pivot and get some kind of work done, but we are no longer doing what we agreed to do. And this is fine if we are good at doing all these other kinds of work. If we are excellent logistics managers, business analysts, process engineers and so on, this is unpleasant but doable.

But if we are designers who approach everything as design, and this is how we cope with practical matters, we are deprived of what is needed not only to flourish but to cope at all.

And to be told, “just design harder and harder, better and better” is a demoralizing insult.

Just play tennis better and better, be extra, extra punctilious about playing by the rules, and eventually the hooligans will see what we are doing, and choose to clear off the courts. Then they might eventually even learn to love our sport. We must have enough faith in our way that we keep playing even when our courts are crowded with people who loathe tennis and tennis players.

Design is not only a set of design techniques, or a design method for effective use of techniques in concert, or a design theory upon which method is grounded, or a design praxis of reflective practice and applied theory, or a tacit design way resulting from a life of deep design praxis. It is all of these, of course, but more than that design is an ethos, which depends on a set of design ethics.

Whenever I hear designers talk about design ethics it always goes directly toward the same set of environmental and social justice concerns. I have yet to hear designs discuss the behavioral norms required for design to happen at all.

And then designers wonder why we seem unable to get the conditions we need to do the work we do.

Our work is almost automatically rejected out of hand by industrious builders with no tolerance for non-rigorous intuitive fluff. They need to very efficiently show progress toward building the next undesirable, unusable unintuitive thing in their backlog.

Design is only possible where a design ethos (at least temporarily) prevails.

Liberalism only works within a liberal ethos.

Mutuality is for the mutual.

Ecological credit and debt

Politics

One thing I can say for environmentalists — they seem to sense humankind’s debt to the natural order far more immediately than their opponents do.

I’m tempted to make an analogy. Just as conservatives fear economic collapse because (stereotypical) liberals think they (allegedly) can keep spending and spending and running up more and more debt, environmentalists see this same problem with ecology.

A liberal environmentalist might say to a (stereotypical) conservative, you can’t keep overdrawing on our natural resources this way and expect that ecological debt to accrue faster than it can be repaid. The ecology can extend us some credit, in the form of resilience and adaptation, but there is a limit, and when that credit limit is exceeded, expect collapse.

This is a very rough analogy meant only to indicate a trajectory of potential understanding. It is a newborn intuition. If someone wants to analyze it to bits — kill it in the cradle — destroying it will be like stealing candy from a baby. But I sense that it has some potential to mature and become a stronger line of argument. Or maybe it will grow up to make appeals to common understanding on ecology and economy.

Service design as a way

Design, Politics

A good service designer should be an observant connoisseur of services. This is not easy. The best designed services are unobtrusive to the point of invisibility, appearing only at carefully choreographed moments of “service evidence”. The best part of a service goes entirely unnoticed and unappreciated.

Services are most noticeable when they break down — when they are not good.

This is why, when people ask me what service design is I answer with a question: “When is the last time you were truly infuriated with an organization?”

Everyone has a story. Five to five hundred minutes later, when the story subsides, I say: “My job is to prevent that from happening.”

Answering the question “When is the last time you received truly good invisible service from an organization?” is a question only true service designers can answer with the same energy.

It almost takes prolonged exposure to absence of a service to appreciate its invisible presence.

So many little things must go well to notice little infuriating things that don’t.

We live in blessed obliviousness to innumerable luxuries, noticing only the flaws.

Not to get political, but if we ever succeed in dismantling “the system”, we will discover innumerable services we never knew were sustaining our lives and our very selves, in ways we never detected or even suspected.

Absolutism, Sarcasm and Alienation

Ethics, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Politics, Polycentrism

Sarcasm is what we do when we are forced to do the ironic work another refuses to do themselves.

As Richard Rorty taught, irony is a core virtue of citizenship in a liberal democracy.

A good citizen must both hold to their own ideals while also respecting the fact that others do the same — and that everyone egocentrically thinks their ideal is manifestly superior for what are manifestly the best reasons.

Liberal-democratic irony can be summed up in a pluricentric maxim: “I am not the only center of the universe.” It is a supplementary update to the Golden Rule.  A patch, if you will.

Liberal-democratic institutions are intended to operationalize this respect for universal egocentricity.

It is true that they rarely achieve this noble goal perfectly. But they do it far better than one group deciding that its collective egocentricity is so self-evidently superior that it can just unilaterally impose its own moral whim.

And if one egocentric person or one egocentric group loses its pluricentric irony and begins to naively assume that the noble goal of liberal-democracy is identical to the ideal it egocentrically believes… and if that group condemns liberal-democratic institutions whenever those institutions deviate from its own egocentric ideal… or worst of all, and sees such deviation as evidence that these institutions are no longer liberal-democratic!…

Well, the irony here is that it is the egocentric person or group who has lost its liberal-democratic virtue of irony. It is only because they no longer know what liberal-democracy means that they think it is lost.

They, themselves, are the enemies of what they believe they epitomize.

When a citizen of a liberal democracy lacks the virtuous irony required for participation in liberal-democratic life, and fails to exercise it, this is first, comical, then frustrating, then offensive, then alienating, then just infuriating.

You can try to explain it to them, but if they lack ironic sense, they will fail to understand.

They will object, “This doesn’t make sense.” Lacking all irony, if it makes no sense to them, they will assume the idea itself has no sense — that it is nonsense.

Ironically, I’ve known experts in irony who had no idea at all how to be ironic. They knew all about irony, but in practice they were entirely unable to think ironically.

They speak of history testifying unambiguously about moral shortcomings of this nation. Of how this history unambiguously implies their preferred forms of activism. Of how it is responsible use of power to compel those subject to one’s power — and unable to resist — to conform to one’s own socio-political and ethical ideals.

According to them, power disparities are bad only when they are abused.

Sure, people in the past thought they were using their power for good, but they were naive and wrong.

Unlike us.

Notice the sarcasm. Notice the contemptuous tone.

Respect is irony we exchange in dialogue.

Respect acknowledges that when we look at another  and see them in our world, they look back and see us in their world. It says that we each are the center of a universe in which we somehow both dwell together.

Contempt is lack of this respect — for the other, for togetherness in pluricentricity. Contempt takes one’s own naive egocentricity for reality itself, and cares nothing about what the other thinks or feels about it.

Sarcasm is contempt for another person’s contempt. It is irony frustrated to the point of alienation.

Sarcasm is what we do when we must do another’s ironic duty for him, because he will not do it himself. We say contemptuously for the other what he should have said himself with ironic self-awareness.

So all you brave defenders of democracy — with your unmatched intelligence, self-awareness, humanity, sensitivity, empathy, moral decency and courage — thank you for all you have done, or at least tried to do.

Thank you for instructing us on our unconscious prejudices, our cognitive biases, our motivated reasoning, our unearned, unjust privilege, our self-interested abuses of power.

Hopefully, you and your true-believing allies will soon get the unlimited, unopposed power you need to remake the world into a kinder, juster, more equitable and more diverse place.

Conscience warfare

Autobiography, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

I am blessed-cursed by an overactive intellectual conscience.

That intellectual conscience conducts incessant pincer attacks on my complacent certainty.

On the right flank my intellectual conscience attacks with the challenge: “But what do you really believe?” And sadly, since the late 1980s — when my future wife taught it a devastating form of feminine skepticism — it rolls its eyes at arguments, and contemptuously swats away appeals to logic, authority, and so on. It cares zero about my head, with its talkative brain and mouth: “Just because you can argue it, it doesn’t follow that you believe it.” It goes directly for the heart: “Would you bet your life on it? Would you bet a loved one’s life on it?”

This line of questioning often ends the battle. Rarely does this interrogation produce a simple “yes” or “no”.

But then on the left flank my intellectual conscience attacks with a complementary challenge: “But what are you missing?” If any simple “yes” or “no” survived the right flank attack, the left flank normally sweeps it out effortlessly. Despite its bluster, certainty is rarely the fruit of superior understanding. And it is with this indubitable truth — which has not only survived the “would you bet your life on it” test, but has been toughened and strengthened by it — that the left flank attacks and annihilates certainty.

My intellectual conscience is now attacking my most recent religious beliefs.

Wish me luck. This might get ugly-beautiful.

And all this is only for private thought.

I have a whole other intellectual conscience for public thought.

My public thought intellectual conscience is solely about arguments, adherence to principles, respect for institutions, and their formalities and rules, refusal to be the only center of the universe. It tolerates no heartfelt passion imposing itself on unconsenting recipients.

My public thought intellectual conscience demands perfect liberalism.

Overall, my intellectual conscience draws the sharpest and darkest lines it can over the blurry, slimy, hazy, fuzzy, irregular, shifting, multilayered surfaces of the lifeworld — dividing private from public, public from private.

For many “the personal is political”.

But let us not confuse descriptions and moral norms.

The personal should not be political.

And the political should not be personal.

Conflating them destroys both.

And indeed, today, because of public-private conflation, each of us and all of us are coming apart.

I respect my intellectual conscience(s) more than anything else.

I would love to be generous enough to judge only myself by it.

I live my life choking down the superior judgment of others.