A WEEKLY DISCUSSION SERIES

MEMBER MONDAY

THE ARCHIVE NARRATIVE:

Member Monday grew out of Highland's book club which began in May 2006 and ran sporadically through 2013. We certainly had some fine evening discussions though it became clear participants were drawn more to the respective topics than they necessarily were to the underlying books. Some were put off by the time commitment these books demanded, especially in the earlier days, when we ran one session per month.

A new format was thus instituted in mid-2016, stepping up the frequency to change it from the previous monthly evening session format into a weekly lunch discussion and to replace a full book as the discussion catalyst into a more approachable article (or two) with an introduction to help set the stage.

Member Monday held its first session on Monday July 5, 2016. The topic for that inaugural session was, in fact, a spillover from the very last session of the previous book club, centered around A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn. Instead of an article, though, a more extensive introduction was prepared to capture the essence of Zinn's book and to frame the discussion. There had been some thought given to breaking down his lengthy work into bite-size chapters as the basis for a series of future Member Monday discussions but, in the end, we decided to stick with the original plan and serve up a new topic each week…continue reading…

Looming Trump Era

It’s been almost a month now. Our upcoming Member Monday (12/12) discussion will address the looming Trump era. What does it mean?

There are a number of ways to address the topic. The analysis of David Brooks in the NYT OpEd “The Future of the American Center” (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/opinion/the-future-of-the-american-center.html) speculates on possible political realignments in the aftermath of a guy who enters the room and starts to throw all the furniture around. Nothing can be taken for granted in this environment e.g. deference to our traditional two-party system; respect for the old caucuses; and, for that matter, regard for the separation of powers.

Steve SmithDecember 12, 2016Comment

Generation Hand-Off

The end-times crowd is fond of the clunky acronym — TEOTWAWKI — but, when you think about it, every single instant is The end of the world as we know it. Per Heraclitus roughly 500 B.C., “no man steps into the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” The river of time as we know it ends with each next step. It’s this . . then this . . and now . . . .

And so it is with each rolling generation. Our next Member Monday (11/28) session will focus on the generation hand-off, from the Boomers (and before) to the GenXers to the Millennial GenYers (and later). This pass-the-torch-to-a-new-generation discussion will neither sentimentalize the past nor prejudge the future.

Steve SmithNovember 28, 2016Comment

Is the Going Still Good?

Our discussion group shares the Monday lunch slot with Marty’s travel series. It is fitting, then, to devote our next Member Monday (11/21) discussion topic to the question: why travel?

Let’s start with the observation of 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” That is the lead-in quote to our focal essay, another one plucked from the mists of time yet as fresh (with some minor reference updates) and relevant as if it were written today, “Is the Going Still Good?” article link: http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,925448,00.html?artId=925448?contType=article?chn=us

It begs the question, of course, compared to what? Were the motivation primarily education one could make the case the vast library of off- and on-line resources represents a far more efficient means to that end. The sounds and sights of the world may soon become available virtually in 360-degrees. The smell of the local cooking may not be far behind.

Dustin SimantobNovember 21, 2016Comment

On Language

The inspiration for our next Member Monday (11/14) discussion came from an off-hand remark by member Michael Kosacoff that journalistic writing today seems to have become flat, uninspiring and almost formulaic. Our discussion piece will be that classic 1946 George Orwell essay, “Politics and the English Language.” (attached below as Pdf file).

Read it and smile in recognition. Orwell’s central complaint about "modern" English i.e. the reinforcing cycle of sloppy thinking and deteriorating language, is perhaps even more evident today. Remember, of course, his reference to modern English is in the context of a piece he wrote at the time many of our club's elder statesmen were still youngsters.

Steve SmithNovember 14, 2016Comment

The Sexes

“After God cast Lucifer and his followers into darkness, all the fallen angels came straggling on the plains of hell — to recriminate, to console themselves and to discuss their new identities as devils. . . . . It may be time for men to hold a convention for the same purpose”.

Thus begins a Lance Morrow essay http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,980115,00.html?artId=980115?contType=article?chn=us written twenty-two years ago (“Men Are They Really That Bad?”, Time, Feb. 14,1994) that serves as the focal piece of our Member Monday (11/7) discussion as we eye our own convention on the subject of: The Sexes.

So be it. Let us gather in a gender-balanced forum to compare and contrast today’s environment with that of two decades ago. A good place to start would be with the smoldering sexual theater on this day before of the Presidential election as it flares with the latest accusation or leaked video, often overshadowing serious policy debate…

Steve SmithNovember 7, 2016Comment

Pleasure

Think of the word pleasure and the mind looks for context. Left to itself the word may conjure something akin to decadence, suggesting perhaps earthly excesses and sensual indulgences with all its fleshy titillations. The very term epicurean delights seems to capture it. There’s the whiff of puritanical hell fire.

Now emerging from his hiatus we have club member Dr. Jia Gottlieb to join our session and help us work through the subject. Jia, our guide at the club’s previous monthly Health and Spirit Circle, has spent more than a decade thinking about and writing on the subject. Chapter One of his forthcoming book is attached (below) as this week’s discussion article…

Steve SmithOctober 31, 2016Comment

MindBody

If today’s (10/3) Member Monday discussion involved internet disembodiment, next week’s (10/10) topic represents the polar opposite: the total fusion of mind and body. The inspiration for this was the lunch talk last week by Mark Williams, one-time F-15 fighter pilot and master of total situational awareness. Our discussion will center around any of our personal life experiences which engaged the entire body and transcended simple cognition.

By way of background here is a portion of the introduction prepared for the book discussion of “Deep Survival” some years ago:

We all know, even in relatively calm times, that many big life decisions – an investment choice, a major purchase, a love interest – are often emotionally made and later (maybe) intellectually justified.

Steve SmithOctober 10, 2016Comment

Internet Addiction

Addiction is a strong word but start with the numbers. In ten years smartphone ownership went from zero to two-thirds of all Americans, 85% if you’re just including young adults. A 2015 study showed these young adults used their phones five hours a day. Owner percentages alone don’t tell whole story but consider this: almost half of Americans told Pew surveyors they could not live without one. Unknown to indispensable in a decade.

We’re learning that this indispensability comes at a cost. Our Faustian bargain for this always-wired world — hyper-connecting, hyper-distracting, hyper-intruding, and hyper-demanding — is kind of enslavement. The gods have rendered unto us the miracles of efficiency. A part of our humanity may have been sacrificed at the altar as we interact with the world more like a piece-part. Quoting Len Barren, Boulder’s own Einstein doppelganger, “in a perfectly efficient society man is redundant.”

Steve SmithOctober 3, 2016Comment

War On Drugs

Resolved: The War on Drugs was rooted in a government need to control its citizenry. Discuss.

Boulder author Dan Baum opens his piece (“Legalize It All”) in a recent Harper’s article with this first-hand interview of John Erlichman (Nixon’s then domestic policy advisor), “You want to know what this was really all about? . . . the Nixon White House had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people . . we knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black . . . but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities . . . we could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news . . . did we know we were lying about the drugs? — of course we did.”

Of course they did. Fear mongering was good politics. Just-Say-No was the best perception management campaign since Reefer Madness. It drove legislation and powered exploding bureaucracies at both the federal and state level.

Steve SmithSeptember 26, 2016Comment

God and Science

The centerpiece of the last Member Monday lunch discussion — How the Arab World Came Apart — will be overtaken next week (9/12) by a topic even grander in scope: God and Science.

The subject matter initially gave me some pause. My honest retort to the question about belief in God goes something like, “Well, define God and let’s go on from there”. Sometimes the discussion widens and a handle appears. Sometimes the discussion narrows into what seems pre-hardened orthodoxy. That’s my confession. Pater Noster (and I was raised Presbyterian-lite).

Per Joseph Campbell let us behold religion in terms of poetry and not prose as we take on the most fundamental existential question of all — the very creation of the universe. The lead discussion piece is an essay that took my breath away when I first read it more than thirty years ago (as did so many other essays written by Lance Morrow at the time), “In the Beginning: God and Science”.

Steve SmithSeptember 12, 2016Comment

Money

Everybody has money. Everybody uses money. You all have some of it, or you wouldn’t be here, enjoying the fruits of our civilization, and of this coming City Club luncheon. But what is Money? ‘Money’ as a whole is not the product of any one man, but a society. It can be used by anyone, transferred freely to anyone, used without instruction or translation, so long as one pays the fee to convert one currency to another.

How and why do we use money? What is our relationship to money, as individuals and as a society, and how can we shift this relation in the service of the whole? Seen one way, money is like a liquid permeating civilization, irrigating the fields of individuals after their toils so that more energy can be harvested. The most efficient harvesters of energy are theoretically rewarded.

Money is also an emanation of the human creative potential, made manifest in physical form, which every person can recognize. It is desire-energy, the ability to consummate one's desires, and to weight and transfer one's desires to another without needing to share the same values.

Steve SmithAugust 15, 2016Comment

The Role of Luck (Chance) in Life

What was the chance? What was the chance that the club library would open up this Tuesday (8/9/16) for a special Member Monday session?

What was the chance that Member Monday would even get off the ground in the first place; and, indeed, that the 1979 overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty would impel some kid from Iran to find refuge in, of all places, Boulder where he would learn English, buy a broken-down building for the price of the bricks, and create a club to house it all.

Steve SmithAugust 9, 2016Comment

Goat Man

The aim of this Member Monday experiment is the establishment of an engaging discussion forum. Articles are only catalyst -- the starting point. There is no end point. It's the interaction that counts -- a way for members (and guests) to relate beyond the "good-and-you?" stage.

And such is the ambition behind tomorrow's selection of the somewhat whimsical subject of "Goat Man."

http://lithub.com/speaking-with-the-legendary-goat-man/

To paraphrase the title of the old Lance Armstrong book, It's Not About the Goat. The discussion will likely weave in and out of what it means to be human and maybe touch on the existential.

Or maybe not. I look forward to providing some structure as facilitator but that's the nature of an organic discussion. At the very least you will have enjoyed a themed social lunch and learned a bit more about the other participants.

Steve SmithAugust 1, 2016Comment

The Perils of Artificial Intelligence

This Monday's discussion topic will center around the promise and perils surrounding Artificial Intelligence . . . while there is plenty of doom porn out there on any number of subjects this transhumanist Swedish philosopher posits sentient machines will prove to (eventually) represent a greater threat to humanity than climate change . . . . at the very least we will be treated to a fascinating thought experiment . . . be very careful of what we wish for as we assign and augment more and more of our human functions to the non-human sphere…

Steve SmithJuly 25, 2016Comment

Dementia

Charles Leadbeater | Aeon | 26th March 2015

If your memory fails, are you still the same person? Dementia “raises deeply troubling issues about our obligations to care for people whose identity might have changed in the most disturbing ways”. Everyone touched by the disease “goes through a crash-course in the philosophy of mind”. And morality too. What are your duties to somebody who doesn’t know who you are? “The person I’m dealing with, the person I’m yelling at, is a stranger. He looks like my husband, but Howard’s gone” (2,800 words)

Steve SmithJuly 18, 2016Comment

How American Politics Went Insane World

Jonathan Rauch | Atlantic | 21st June 2016

Imagine the 2020 race after one “wretched” term of President Trump. Kanye West is the Democrats’ best hope, running against Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty for the GOP. “I could continue, but you get the gist”. This absurdist scenario “is a linear extrapolation of trends on vivid display right now.” Political parties are collapsing into chaos. “Trump, however, didn’t cause the chaos. The chaos caused Trump. What we are seeing is not a temporary spasm of chaos but a chaos syndrome” (8,300 words)

Steve SmithJuly 11, 2016Comment

A People's History Of the United States

My own introduction to history in the public schools came in the first grade when we were to commemorate Thanksgiving with our own special drawing. I earned a gold star for my crayon depiction of the Pilgrims and Indians as they shared a feast at the community table.

My drawing somehow missed this English account of 1610 Jamestown: “Soldiers were sent out ‘to take revenge.’ They fell upon the Indian settlement, killed fifteen or sixteen Indians, burned the houses, cut down the corn growing around the village, took the queen of the tribe and her children into boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard ‘and shoteing owt their Braynes in the water.’ The queen was later taken off and stabbed to death.”

Steve SmithJuly 5, 2016Comment