MEMBER MONDAY

“In a perfectly efficient society man is redundant”

 Len Barron, quoted at an audience talk-back at the World Affairs Conference some decades ago

The man behind that quote will join us for Member Monday (1/15). Many of you know Len Barron as Boulder’s own educator, playwright, director, writer, and dancer, whom most recognize for that one-man Einstein performance -- the one celebrating that physicist's deep sense of humanity marked by fairness, beauty, and playfulness. Those are words not commonly associated with efficiency.

So let us then reflect back on that quote as we discuss man’s standing in a world increasingly seduced by efficiencies, the efficiencies of technology that is. We are accorded a front row seat to such spectacle by way of  “Inside China’s Vast New Experiment In Social Engineering” (link: https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit/). The venue may be overseas but the phenomenon most assuredly is not. It’s America’s embrace as well.

In a quote attributed to Bismarck, "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made." Well, fair enough, but how about watching the making of one who makes the laws?

We are honored this next Member Monday (1/8) to welcome Mark Williams, candidate for the second Congressional District district seat (includes Boulder County), the one vacated by Jared Polis who, in turn, is running for the governorship. The winner of the democratic primary to be held this June will most assuredly win the seat in November….

One remembers that some primitive peoples feared being photographed because they thought the camera would make off with their souls. That notion may have prefigured dating in today’s social media world: soulless images uploaded to interact with other soulless images as the real souls are left out to dry, becoming mere residue in this virtual carnival world of the contemporary mating dance.

The idea of a character becomes imprisoned in an image, whether in the form of a picture or of a calculated narrative. The root power at play is one of projection. The mind needs its illusions. Applied to the dating world, a projected image hangs out there awaiting judgment, often rendered by way of an instantaneous left/right swipe reflex. Nothing personal. It’s not you, it’s your facade. You know, it’s just a numbers game….

For those of you who anticipated the topic for Member Monday (12/11) to be Social Media please note that this session has been rescheduled to take place the following Monday (12/18). In its place the topic for this Monday shall be The Middle East: 

In a perfect follow-on to last week's discussion of "The Fate of Empires" we'll contemplate the dynamics at work for new alignments and new empires. This coming Member Monday will, in a sense, be a continuation of last week as we address current affairs in the Middle East in the context of the formation and reformation of empires that have made up world history…

Invest even a modest amount of time and effort in this remarkable twenty-four page essay (Click here to read “The Fate of Empires and the Search For Survival,” by Sir John Glubb) and you will be rewarded with a renewed appreciation of history, presented not as discrete and disconnected segments but as the sweeping, interconnected story of the dynamics powering the rise and fall of empires over the last four thousand years. This wide-angle lens captures ten such representative empires -- Assyria, Persia, Greece, Roman (pre- and post-Augustus), Arab, Mameluke (Egypt, Syria), Ottoman, Spain, Romanov Russia, Britain -- each served up not so much for individual analysis but as exemplars of the organic flow characterizing human development…

“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-three years ago (“Men Are They Really That Bad?”, Time, Feb. 14,1994)….

Gaslighting is the somewhat clunky gerund verb form of Gaslight -- a 1940s movie depicting a man set out to drive his wife into thinking she was going insane by means of manipulating her through the creation of a false reality. The term has slowly seeped from the psychological circles into the mainstream. It can describe any manipulation through willfully-induced disorientation. 
(It is a state depicted in the wonderful novel Catch-22  -- itself less of a coherent story than a kaleidoscope: a disorienting collection of character introductions, sleight-of-hand logic, tricks, and paradoxes all mixed together and flushed down the rabbit hole. The book was such an assault forty years ago on my own painfully linear background -- born and bred linear; at a linear time; in a linear place; with a linear education; and a (later) linear profession  -- that I recall throwing the book across the room: the reflex of a linear soul beholding a mobius world.) 
It may be applied at the wholesale level in the form of fake news. What is it that you can hold onto in the political world these days? Gaslighting would suggest an active perpetrator(s) with a private agenda and an unwary victim. Might the victim be an entire country? Of course it might. The means to do so looms large and promises to explode…

Boulder will be treated this Friday (10/27) @7:30 to a free concert at C.U.'s Grusin Music Hall which features C.U. Doctoral candidate Maria Kurchevskaya, together with Ekaterina Kotcherguina, soprano, and Maria Wietrzynska, piano, presenting "four cycles of songs for voice and piano . . . . (evoking) a variety of moods, from mysterious yearnings and sensitive feelings of love to childish innocence and sarcastic fun . . " But that's not all. The real treat is that Maria will be joining us the following Member Monday as we discuss the very subject of music's evocative power…

It's a mass shooting that gets all the attention, of course, as it abruptly shatters the natural order of things. It arrives like a cannibal joining the picnic and calmly starting to eat the children.

Then comes the tabloid kabuki: the images; the statistics; the "Ts&Ps"; the whys; maybe the fatuous talk of closure as the horror eases into policy discussion. And, finally, the debate. The same damn debate.

Let's don't shout but let's discuss. Why is a term like bump stocks even in our vocabulary? The whole subject will itself strain our capacity for empathy, a topic we entertained a few sessions ago. 

Brenda Lafferty and her fifteen-month-old daughter Erica were murdered on July 24, 1984. Did someone say murder? Actually it was, ahem, a "revelatory removal." Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven chronicled a world which compelled such an act. God's human mask bared its fangs that particular day.

The Church of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism) is American-born and pretty young as religions go -- a bit more than two centuries old. That makes it far more amenable to examination. The events, the people, and even the thought processes are more open to the corroboration of eyewitness and other objective accounts than are the millennia religions, shrouded in the mists of mystical happenings and mumbo-jumbo vernacular.

Owning a home — that most lyrical of American symbols — has become the great divide among citizens: some of the older have done handsomely in the housing bazaar; many of the younger are face-to-face with harsh economic realities. Yet it is through the youth that we reimagine America. 

Member Monday (10/9) will focus on the push-pull dynamics underlying housing e.g. affordability, building regulation, gentrification, sustainability and, for that matter, growth itself. So many factors so little time, perhaps like trying to solve for four unknowns with only three simultaneous equations in your algebra class. Can’t be done but we’ll go crazy just trying…

His fragmented letters seem to reach across twenty-three centuries to grant a kind of forward-looking absolution i.e. granting the opportunity for individual happiness without its achievement being considered as some guilty indulgence. Our Member Monday (10/2) discussion centers around Epicurus, that most approachable yet mischaracterized Greek philosopher. 

The eponymous term epicurean delight might suggest a world of gluttony and fleshly titillation. A  five-minute peek at the man and his teachings will convince you to take a second look (link: PHILOSOPHY - Epicurus - YouTube). We will discuss and may even discover among those fragmented letters the essence of our very own Securus Locus…

“Merely an Empire” (link: Merely An Empire) reviews and captures a remarkable ten-part, $30 million Ken Burns film The Vietnam War unfolding this and next week on PBS. It’s a compelling series. It’s compelling discussion subject. 

Perhaps the psychological timelock on Vietnam has finally expired. Maybe enough heat has finally dissipated such that those old enough to have lived through our national hallucination now have the opportunity for some moral and political clarity. 

Maybe you millennials, having been spared a front row seat to the national nervous breakdown, can begin to appreciate the echoes of that experience reverberating even today — polarization, distrust of the institutional mindset, even perhaps the root of the anti-intellectual reflex. And, no, the question of humanism is not age-specific…

An honest discussion of empathy begins with defining the word itself. Empathy is the ability to fundamentally understand and share the feelings of others. So defined, it is far greater than (an expression of) sympathy. It suggests a feeling and not a thought. It is a transcendent quality, bordering on the sacred. 

Our own Jhana Gottlieb, through Mediation Without Borders, sees power of empathy as the basis to effect resolution, whether at the individual level or on the world stage. She will share many of the techniques and communication skills that couch the dialogue within such a world of empathy as the disputants inch toward reconciliation (see link: xxx). To what extent is empathy a learned skill, rather than an art? What would an empathic world look like?…

This is the "normal" human physiological response when one, without a trained mind, confronts an imminent threat: the amygdala detects danger; the adrenal glands kick in; catecholamines constrict blood vessels and alter the firing of nerve cells; the adrenal cortex releases cortisol, invading the hippocampus, amping up fear and affecting the memory system; heart rate rises; breathing speeds up; sugar is dumped into the metabolic system; the oxygen and nutrients distribution shifts for immediate strength. You’re on afterburner and all this occurs before you can even “think.” In fact, the hormonal stress release interferes with the functioning of the neo-cortex itself….

There is a moment in one of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels (“The Gift”) when the narrator sees a mirror being unloaded from a van on a street in Berlin. Suddenly the mirror, by a tilt of grace, becomes “a white parallelogram of sky.” Nabokov notes the sun's flash to be consciousness that is sometimes reflected in the Everyday.

Let us be open to such a tilt of grace in Member Monday (8/28)/From Russia With Love as we probe the so-called "Russian Soul" through the eyes of three extraordinary native Russian women (native defined here more in terms of cultural identity than political boundary).  Maria, Lina, and Alice will share their lives, their values, their perspectives. Their "gift" is the authenticity of their formative experience and their openness to share it….

Were it not for the existential implications of the unfolding North Korea drama this would make for fun game theory.

Thought experiment: despot leader, sporting a bad haircut and a massive insecurity complex, calculates that his tenuous hold over the half-starved population rests on totalitarian control and abiding fear. An even more hostile outside world is thus conjured as theater. Only the Supreme Leader, his magic bullet, and the threat of its use staves off a fate worse than the “life” currently experienced.

Contemporary culture and its relationship to Nature is of a Goethean allegory. Faust (culture) seeks a pact the the Devil: grant the unlimited knowledge, power, and efficiency afforded by Technology and, in return, take our collective natural-born spirit. Nature now faces foreclosure time.

Our next Member Monday (8/7/17)/Nature Calls (Biophilia) discussion is all about the so-called biophilia hypothesis i.e. the human innate need for a (re)connection to nature and the consequences for failure to do so. Ret Taylor, fellow Highland member, has thought a lot about the subject and will co-host this session.

The enduring landscape of nostalgia was on full display in our last presidential campaign with its slogan: Make America Great Again. Americans seem wistful now for some long-ago idea of themselves -- you know, when wars were just, manners were exquisite, marriages endured, honor mattered, and people answered their own damn land-line. An element of elegy often haunts discussions of excellence, quality, and righteousness.

The campaign tapped into a sentiment as old as the ages i.e. the longing for a lost past, the past even of another country or another era. Per the subject article (click: Look Back With Danger), Nietzsche’s eighteenth century teutonic lament was “to go home” to ancient Greece. Homer’s heroic world was that of gods, not of men. One watches “Chariots of Fire” with a nostalgic pang, taken in by the pursuit of excellence and the unambiguous moral lines of 1924 England. The viewer then nods and says, “Just look around, will ya’, nothing but dreck.”