That which you do for me….

Well, that's another 90 TED talks wrapped up in Vancouver last week. Sitting back and trying to sift through there are a few sharp pointy rocks which stick out of the sand dunes.

The one I keep going back to is "That which you do for me…. which you do without me…. you do to me." Those were the words of Pastor Jeffrey Brown http://www.recapevents.org He was the last speaker in the "Just and Unjust" session which started with Monica Lewinsky. Sure it was a talk about rebuilding a community devastated by gang violence but leave off the last part of that and what you have is "rebuilding a community" that's the heart and something which touches all of us.

Which brings me back to how the week started- at the Aspen Institute with "Athens to Aspen" Our readings were Willa Cather's "Death Comes for the Archbishop" and Robert Frost's poems for the Kennedy inaugural "Dedication" and "A Gift Outright". The obvious question : what do any of these have to do with each other?

Simple answer, hubris.

Frost is full of it  from Dedication:

" They are our wards we think to some extent 

For the time being and with their consent, 

To teach them how Democracy is meant."

To "The Gift Outright."

"The land was ours before we were the land's"

Manifest Destiny from Vietnam to land management, hubris pure and simple.  (Yeah, want to talk about "entitlement"?)

Follow this with Willa Cather's languid poem to the Southwest with it's oh so easy benevolent Catholicism and you're digging at a  deeper root. There is our Archbishop being very Sun Tzu like,  water taking the easiest path.

His mission is to convert, ever so gently to convert … The wide New Mexico sky seduces you into forgetting and blood disappears beneath the sand.  (Man, do I want breakfast at Tia Sophia's after reading this)

These are both poems in praise of  the will of the Western mind. 

Do we choose stillness and patience sitting quietly in a Pascalian empty room where you wait for the answers to fall like gentle rain? Or do we choose the more active path and insert ourselves into the story? Obviously, the Darwinian answer is "both". 

But, and this is a big but, the endgames between active and passive are quite different.  The core of that difference I believe is  what his holiness the Dalai Lama expresses so well. It is "us and them". 

How do we get beyond something as basic as our tribal tendency to separate into groups?  That's pretty deep in our reptile brains- how many seasons of Suvivor now? Just sayin' 

So, let's forget about trying to become one big group which strives towards the blissfully undefined common good because that ain't gonna happen. Even when we come together because of an exterior threat it's not long before we drift apart again (witness the US Congressional Kumbaya moment after 9/11 and look at it now).  Let's start with the little things- like inclusion.  Let's start with the little things- like listening. Acknowledge the difference. Don't try and change it. Learn from it. 

 "That which you do for me…. which you do without me…. you do to me."

Brain Candy

What does James Madison have to do with Richard II? Let's do a little stretching without a yoga matt.

The Aspen Institute has a local community seminar series called "Athens to Aspen". This year's offering is The Enlightenment, Shakespeare and the American Democratic Experiment.

Leaping right into the deep end with Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments… and then plunging right into the mother lode "Wealth of Nations" ... followed by Benjamin Franklin's Principles of Trade "It is in vain imagination that we exist only for ourselves…. "

Which led me straight to Matt Ridley's TED talk "When Ideas Have Sex"

What a tempting thought, the Darwinian Free Market … turning Adam Smith's trickle down into a global bottoms up with the aid of the internet. It's still elitist- you just need a smart phone.

...but is prosperity Justice and is Justice something which humans need to survive? How enlightened is Self Interest?  Can you legislate morality? Do we ever legislate anything other than morality? Does our moral compass change over time? The morality of 17th century Europe would have burned me as a witch. Does the moral compass change due to Culture? The morality of ISIL wouldn't be great for me either.

We're snapped back with reading #3 The Angostura Address by Simón Bolivar and the timeless "A corrupt people can indeed attain freedom but lose it at once." followed by Rousseau's "Freedom is a succulent food but hard to digest" How well Rousseau would have recognized the Arab Spring and how well Robespierre would have recognized ISIL.  Bolivar sets his sights on "the practice of justice is the practice of freedom" and how exactly do we insure Justice? Is Bolivar's Hereditary Senate a college of Cardinals? Do we put Jesuits in charge?  Is an educated bureaucrat the salvation of our souls?  Pope Francis seems to be doing a better job than many of his predecessors. That's a whole different take on "laissez-faire" it's let the synod argue but make the debate transparent- publish the names and let them stand up in a strong wind.

Which leads us nicely into Madison and the Federalist Papers where Madison outlines how to keep Justice in the Republic by distributing power into the hands of the many. The more power is chopped up into small bits and in different hands the more those hands will have to cooperate to achieve a common goal.  It's a nice turn on a core principle of monarchy- keep the Barons poor and occupied and you'll keep the power. It's great until those Barons cooperate and write up a Magna Carta.

Madison is a fascinating character. Jeff Rosen gave a great lecture on the Constitutional Convention at this year's Aspen Ideas:

Back to divide and conquer…a more modern riff on this is Elizabeth Pisani's Indonesia where local "democratic sultanates" keep their autonomy. They keep autonomy because, according to Pisani, they don't have constant oversight from "big government" in Jakarta.  This also echoes back to Bolivar's caution about culture our virtues may be cross cultural but the way we get there certainly has a distinct flavor. 

Can the altruism at the core of Eastern philosophy translate into localized democracy? Damn, that's about as Utopian as you can get in 2014. 

What does Laissez-Faire have to do with Justice? Who's willing to run that experiment .. wait… maybe we are in the middle of that experiment right now.

What does Madison have to do with Richard II? Oh, so much, so very very much. For desert we have a treat.

This is definitely more fun than washing dishes.


The seminar is moderated by Todd Breyfogle, Alexis Diaz, and Stephen Holley.