Letter To Friend Michael Brown, RIT Historian: How To Universalize Civic Participation

Dear Michael,

Thanks for sending the link to your recent interview. Good work!

Here is my "turnaround": http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2017/09/video-interview-with-friend-michael.html

Your interview is both enlightening and fertile. 

It moves me to urge you to videotape all your lectures - as is now done with every lecture given at nearby Duke University and many other centers of learning as well.

Your understanding of history -- and the linchpin importance of civil discussion and informed political participation -- needs to be preserved. 

Please talk with RIT's videography department to see what might be done. 

If RIT does not offer you a videography option -- and please keep in mind that your inquiry offers opportunity to promote "the idea" -- you might ask students if "they" would be willing to perform this service.

To begin my reflection on your interview...

I love the specific phrases "aperture of experience" and "silos of expertise."

I was also struck by your reference to "the power to organize numbers" - a measure (a numeric measure) of modern capitalist domination. Ah! We gringos love numbers!

The people who "control the numbers" control the polity... and most of it component parts. 

The flip side of "the numbers" is that the actual "incarnation/enfleshment" of people-and-places "be damned."

In general, your agile review (and sustained vision) of civic engagement as "the golden mean" between tribalism and socio-economic atomization is brilliant.

I particularly enjoyed your discussion of the Erie Canal's impact on dismantling Rochester's "neighborly economics" in favor of promoting capitalism's passion for re-making "craftsmen" into interchangeable "labor units" who must "migrate" to those places "where the jobs are." 

And so, capitalism - via The Erie Canal - introduced a fundamental dislocation -- both literal and political -- in modern life. 

I am reminded ot the Aristotelian "unities" and the importance of maintaining the time-space continuum in real time and real space. 

I am also reminded of the traditional Catholic "confession" which is only deemed "efficacious" (the theological term) if it takes place in an actual, real-space encounter between confessor and confessee. 

If one is truly interested in reconciliation s/he cannot -- by canon law -- "phone it in." 

S/he has to "show up."

As is true for all human phenomena, "neighborly community" has advantages and disadvantages. 

Although you mention "the upside" and "the downside," I will also add a comment made by octogenarian friend Lonnie Coleman, a graduate engineer and a graduate lawyer who went on to found my hometown's most respected law firm, and who (in addition to serving as state senator) was for many years a district court judge until he bumped up against North Carolina's mandatory retirement age of 70. 

Lonnie's family came to America with the second wave of Jamestown settlers and his ancestors (as is the case for wife Nancy) have lived in North Carolina since the 1600s. 

A pertinent "aside..."

I am increasingly that most Southerners - even left-leaning, college-trained Southerners - hold grudges against "The North." 

And so, it is not surprising that liberal-progressive Lonnie, at least in ongoing jest, refers to me as a "Yankee" (with the unspoken suffix, "invader").

Lonnie has also observed - and I "quote" from memory - "The great strength of you Yankees is that you always knew how to establish grand visions and then deployed everyone in society to achieve Big Projects. Here in the South, we never escaped the limited - and limiting - orbit of backbiting families and clans."

The Hatfields and the McCoys.

In related context, I am also aware that marriage and widely-intermingled "family" is humankind's basic propellent of "connectedness" and "mutual aid," to such an extent that religion (whatever its downside) has become an irrepressibly powerful force by offering divine (and sectarian) validation to the central importance of family. 

It is not surprising that Mormonism is a very "together" religion even though founding prophet Joseph Smith was (in a number of ways) a charlatan and a sexual pervert/criminal. 

Even more specifically, if you want to create an incandescently-focused social force, then validate polygamy - with particular focus on re-marrying widows - so that intermarriage becomes an even greater "family glue."

Anyone who wants to motivate people with the promise of Utopia (and I believe, as you do, that utopian vision is crucial) will spotlight (as Catholicism does) "The Holy Family."

Even if a given religion's "teachings" on "family" do not escape the original zoological orbit of family's central importance, family is always an extraordinarily powerful force, only challenged by rugged individualism, a psycho-social form that came into play with the Protestant Reformation. 

Even in "protestant America," the nuclear family is still a force to be reckoned with. 

I will note in passing that all of America's current renditions of "family life" tend to be nuclear, with only a few tattered vestiges of "the three generation" extended family (in which I grew up) still "in play." 

Not surprisingly, most Americans -- even Catholic Americans -- look on "The Holy Family" as a nuclear unit although, remarkably, when Jesus was twelve years old, his parents (on a trip to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover) blithely lost track of their prepubescent boy, assuming he was "hanging out" with members of the endlessly-intermingled extended family who comprised Nazareth's caravan. 

Astonishing! 

This totally permeable membrane between nuclear family and extended family-tribe is literally inconceivable today. 

Even Catholics would consider "all-inclusive" extended family as an improper invasion of nuclear family privacy.

Although ruggedly individualistic American Christians will rankle at the suggestion, I agree with Episcopalian priest (and Jungian analyst) John Sanford that "Isolation is the breeding ground of evil." 

I also believe the corollary of Sanford's observation that capitalist-Christianity is fully complicit (albeit unconsciously) in the structural propagation of isolationist evil. 

A Mad World: Capitalism And The Rise Of Mental Illness
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2017/08/a-mad-world-capitalism-and-rise-of.html

I will conclude with two inter-related observations about the resurgence of political life at the local level -- neighborhoods, towns and cities.

I have long felt that Italian "city states" -- each specializing in its own "creative gift"... a particular cheese or wine, prosciutto, weavings, ceramics, armor, swords and other metal goods... became the launching pad between The Dark Ages (interesting revisioned by Rodney Stark) and The Renaissance which used medieval universities as the launching pad for The Scientific Method and more specifically, the need to actually observe the "incarnate" world as endowed with equally importance (if not more importance) than the "abstract" doctrines based on the discarnate "Word" of God.

"Double Take on Early Christianity." An Interview with Rodney Stark

https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/08/double-take-on-early-christianity.html

The Victory Of Reason: How Christianity Led To Freedom, Capitalism And Western Success

www.nytimes.com/2005/12/30/books/capitalism-brought-to-you-by-religion.html

Perhaps it is time to foster local skills, crafts and products (as is already taking place with craft beer) in order to launch a "new world order" based on local polities - while not overlooking the indispensable need for coordinating national-and-global polities. 

"Do not throw out the baby with the bath."

And finally, back in the 1950s when I was a boy,  my Dad already assumed that the combined efforts of "labor" and "capital" would result in universal-and-equitable distribution of co-produced fruits.

Abraham Lincoln on The Relationship Between Labor and Capital

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/08/abraham-lincoln-on-relationship-between.html

Against this backdrop, Dad saw that humankind would soon have a great deal of leisure" on its hands. He also saw imminent need to channel this leisure into creative activity so that (and this is not Dad's phrase) "idle hands would not become the devil's workshop."

It occurs to me at this moment that the centrality of the amphitheater in ancient Greece and Rome could serve as a core template for participation in "the arts" to become the central focus of humankind "going forward." 

In addition to the large amphtheater situated at "the center" of every ancient Mediterranean community, let's have ancillaray "wings" on the amphitheater in which there will be "workshops" dedicated to master-apprentice instruction in all the arts, including "the domestic arts." 

Music. Dance. Sculpture. Painting and Drawing. Movie-making. Creative Writing. 

Cooking. Brewing. Winemaking. Weaving. Ceramics. Embroidery. Knitting. Crochet. Gardening. Botanical identification and healing. 

I could go on but am sure you see the big picture.

What better way to bring "the big picture" HOME.

***

Male Answer Syndrome

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2017/09/male-answer-syndrome-reprise.html

The "Knowledge Illusion": Why The World Is Full Of Overconfident, Bumbling Know-It-Alls
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-knowledge-illusion-why-world-is.html