In his much-discussed new book, Community: The Structure of Belonging, Peter Block makes a point of not trying to define a healthy and well-functioning community. The idea isn’t to create a visionary ideal for people to try to live up to, he says. Rather, it’s to encourage a shift in our way of thinking about community so we can bring about the qualities of an authentic sense of belonging. That, after all, is what community is really about.

Block’s approach sets this book apart from so many other works in the genre which try to map “best practices” or enumerate the essential features of a robust community. He understands that creating and sustaining a sense of belonging is fundamentally about the experience of community, not about it’s formal structures and mechanisms.

According to Block, the first and most pressing challenge is to transform people’s sense of isolation and self-interest into an experience of connectedness and caring for the whole. Creating that transformation requires a shift from seeing problems that need to be solved in the community to seeing possibilities that can be lived into. He writes at some length about “our love of problems,” saying that they run deeper than simply the joy of being right or escaping responsibility.

The problem is that we harbor a deeply ingrained belief that defining, analyzing, and studying problems is the way to make a better world. But what few of us realize, Block says, is that this notion — that life is a set of problems to be solved — “may actually limit any chance of the future being different from the past. The interest we have in problems is so intense that at some point we take our identity from those problems. Without them, it seems like we would not know who we are as a community. Many of the strongest advocates for change would lose their sense of identity if the change they desired ever occurred.”

Block says that the key task for leaders in bringing about this shift is to create structures for authentic engagement. This means 1) creating a context that nurtures an alternative future, one based on gifts, generosity, accountability, and commitment; 2) initiating and convening conversations that shift people’s experience, which occurs through the way people are brought together and the nature of the questions used to engage them; and 3) listening and paying attention.

Block is especially adamant about convening conversations in small-group settings. The small group is “the unit of transformation,” he says, because it creates a sense of intimacy. “The intimacy makes the process personal. It provides the structure where people overcome isolation and where the experience of belonging is created.”

Once the groups are brought together in a space that is conducive to genuine dialogue, it’s important to ask the right questions. Some examples include: What’s the commitment you hold that brought you into this room? What’s the crossroads you face at this stage of the game? And, what’s your contribution to the very thing you complain about? These questions, Block says, have the capacity to move something forward. By exploring them we become more accountable, more committed, more vulnerable; and when we voice our answers to one another, we grow more intimate and connected.

While this is an eminently practical book, one full of hands-on strategies for transforming groups, organizations, and communities at large, it’s not a handbook. It’s really about how those of us who care about building and strengthening communities think about that challenge — the basic assumptions and conceptual models we bring to it. Community: The Structure of Belonging says, in effect, don’t worry too much about formal structures and mechanisms of community and consider instead what it would mean to create change from the inside out — the sort rooted in an authentic sense of connectedness and belonging.

See also:

• Reflections on Peter Block’s Stewardship
• My review of Daniel Kemmis’s The Good City and the Good Life
• My review of Benjamin Barber’s A Place for Us
• My review of Robert Wuthnow’s Sharing the Journey
• The City of Tomorrow: An interview with Peter Calthorpe

Some thirty years ago, historian and presidential biographer James MacGregor Burns introduced the concept of “transformative leadership.” It was a powerful idea, one that continues to shape how I think about great leaders — in politics, certainly, but also in organizations, in communities, and even in small and informal groups. Burns observed that most leaders approach followers with an eye toward exchanging one thing for another — a swap of goods for money, for example, or a trading of votes between candidate and citizen. He called these leaders “transactional.” But there was a more complex and at the same time more powerful kind of leader that was “transformative,” he said. These individuals engage the full person of the follower and strive to satisfy some higher need on his or her part. The result of transformative leadership is a relationship of mutual stimulation and elevation, one that converts followers into leaders and often convert leaders into moral agents. At its best, Burns observed, transformative leadership advances the common good while at the same time appealing to the highest good of both leaders and followers.

Here is an excerpt from Burns’s 1978 book, Leadership:

Transforming leadership … occurs when one or more persons engage with each other in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality…. Their purposes, which might have started out as separate but related, as in the case of transactional leadership, become fused. Power bases are linked not as counterweights but as mutual support for common purpose.

Various names are used for such leadership, some of them derisory: elevating, mobilizing, inspiring, exalting, uplifting, preaching, exhorting, evangelizing. The relationship can be moralistic, of course. But transforming leadership ultimately becomes moral in that it raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspiration of both leader and led, and thus it has a transforming effect on both.

Perhaps the best modern example is Gandhi, who aroused and elevated the hopes and demands of millions of Indians and whose life and personality were enhanced in the process. Transcending leadership is dynamic leadership in the sense that the leaders throw themselves into a relationship with followers who will feel “elevated” by it and often become more active themselves, thereby creating new cadres of leaders. Transcending leadership is leadership engagé. Naked power-wielding can be neither transactional nor transforming; only leadership can be. [...]

Woodrow Wilson called for leaders who, by boldly interpreting the nation’s conscience, could lift a people out of their everyday selves. That people can be lifted into their better selves is the secret of transforming leadership.

For more, please see my book review of James MacGregor Burns’s Leadership.

World Scientific has just published the latest in a series of volumes of Nobel Peace Prize lectures, which I co-edited together with Irwin Abrams. These are the acceptance speeches of the laureates as they were given at the annual award ceremony in Oslo. The latest volume includes some brilliant and remarkable lectures from people like Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, Shirin Ebadi, and Wangari Maathai, along with presentation speeches, biographical information, notes, bibliographies, and extensive editorial commentary. The work was commissioned by the Nobel Foundation and represents the closest thing we have to an authoritative reference work on the prestigious lectures.

Read more

After almost six years, I moved my office out of the old Lobero Building last week. I was astonished by the amount of stuff I’d accumulated during that time — the papers, yes, but especially the books. I receive a lot of review copies, but I’m also guilty of buying too many titles. It’s a tough habit to break.

As I was disassembling the bookshelves and moving the volumes out to the car, box by box, I was reminded of a time I had done the same thing two decades ago, only then it was vinyl records, not books. That record collection used to take up a small room, but today I can fit all my music on a single hard drive. In the same way, the arrival of the Kindle and other electronic readers, coupled with incredible search technology like Google Scholar, have rendered much of my book collection dead weight.

It’s not just that books are going digital. Used bookstores have now migrated online, which makes it possible to track down and order an out-of-print book in a matter of minutes. And if that’s too expensive a proposition, your local public library can quickly scan the holdings of other collections across the nation and have a copy in your hands in a matter of days via inter-library loan.

What this means is that it no longer makes sense to own a lot of books. If anything, it becomes a real burden, as I discovered in the course of this last move.

It seems I’m not the only one contemplating the future of books. As we know, the publishing world is in deep turmoil right now partly as a result of our changing reading habits. Publishers are “feeling the same chronic pain as other media businesses,” writes Brad Stone in the New York Times, “with layoffs, corporate restructurings and a general sense of gloom, doom and kaboom settling over name-brand giants like Random House and Simon & Schuster.” 

But amid all the anxiety, there is also a sense of optimism about the arrival of the Kindle and other readers that offer a glimpse of the future. “Just this year,” Stone says, “new electronic reading devices have emerged from Amazon, Samsung and Fujitsu, while mobile phones like iPhone from Apple have flowered seemingly overnight into acceptable reading devices for many bookworms.” (See Is This the Future of the Digital Book?)

The question is whether this represents a gradual shift or a watershed event for the publishing industry. Many have been asking this question with a mixture of dread and fascination in recent months. Bestselling author Paulo Coelho put this question to the readers of his blog recently and it stimulated a flurry of interesting responses. See Your Opinion: Will Books Survive?

Another valuable series called “The Future of Reading” appeared in the New York Times last summer. It took up the question of how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read. See, for example, Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?

What we’re all wondering is how this shift will it affect the way we do our reading and, more broadly, the way we make sense of information?

This morning, I ran across yet another interesting quote about the demise of the book: “The book, the most traditional means of preserving and communicating thought, has been for a long time destined to disappear, just like cathedrals, walled battlements, museums, and the ideal of pacifism.”

What’s remarkable about this quote is that it was penned not this year, or even this century. Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote these words in 1919. Museums are mostly doing fine, and the ideal of pacifism seems, thankfully, to be enjoying a renaissance. But it’s true, the book does seem to be on its way out. 

Obviously, Marinetti couldn’t have predicted the rise of computers and the wonders of Google, but he saw that the arrival of cinema as a powerful new art form was already beginning to transform the way we present and take in information.

I ran across Marinetti’s words in Richard Lanham’s fascinating and prescient essay collection, The Electronic Word. In the book, Lanham looks at the ways electronic text is changing the structure of communication. Unlike printed text which is fixed and authoritative, digitized text is interactive, dynamic, and capable of blending word with image and sound, he explains. The electronic word challenges the traditional concept of “text” derived from the printed book, and since printed books are still the cornerstone of Western culture, it also prompts a basic reassessment of the liberal arts and how they should be taught.

Lanham makes many important points in the book. He says, for example, that the most precious commodity is no longer information itself but rather the attention required to cope with it. In today’s digital society, we are confronted daily with a deluge of information. “Dealing with this superabundant flow,” he writes, is like “drinking from a firehose.” It means that how information is presented is critical. Digital text makes this point clear in a way that printed text does not. 

What Lanham does in the book is help us to get beyond the old argument of which is better — printed books or their digital equivalents — which is irrelevant in any case. He takes us a level deeper by asking a series of provocative follow up-questions. (More about Lanham’s book in my review of it here.)

And that’s the conversation we need to be having. The question, as I see it, is how to preserve and enhance the best of both printed books and electronic texts and make sure that we retain the essential qualities that make reading such an valuable — and, at its best, deeply fulfilling — activity.

The history of science shows that breakthrough lies not in discovering new facts so much as discovering new ways of thinking about and making sense of them.

More:

• Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is still the best work on the subject
• Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers is another favorite because of its forceful argument and gorgeous prose.

What motivates people to work on behalf of the common good? In a study I’m leading for the Harwood Institute, I’ve been exploring this question with community leaders from across the country — civic entrepreneurs working to reduce homelessness, address poverty, work with inmates, clean up the environment, and generally strengthen our communities. A word that comes up again and again in our conversations is stewardship. They tell me that a sense of caring and responsibility for the commons is at the center of what they do.

This was an unexpected finding. To better understand this idea, I turned to Peter Block’s valuable 1993 book, Stewardship, still one of the best management books I’ve seen on enlightened leadership practices. The book is aimed primarily at business leaders, but it also applies directly to those working to improve our neighborhoods and communities.

Stewardship, as Block defines, means to hold something in trust for another. Traditionally, it was a way of protecting a kingdom in the absence of its ruler, or a way of governing for the sake of an underage king. According to Block, stewardship serves as a metaphor for a different way of thinking about leadership, organizations and communities. It suggests that people are most effective when they participate as caretakers or stewards, when they put service before self-interest, and when they operate from a sense of ownership and accountability.

It’s a bold vision, one that contrasts sharply with the conventional view of leadership. “The governance system we have inherited and continue to create is based on sovereignty and a form of intimate colonialism,” Block writes. “We govern our organizations by valuing, above all else, consistency, control, and predictability.” But this top-driven, patriarchal approach to management comes at a high price. Without the spirit of democracy, organizations become places of helplessness and compliance, places that stifle creative expression and ultimately fail to create product, guarantee quality or serve customers.

According to Block, the best hope for reforming our organizations lies in reshaping the politics of our work lives — how we each define purpose, hold power, and balance wealth. In practical terms, this involves nine principles:

1. Maximizing the choices for those closest to the work
2. Eliminating management classes by reintegrating the managing and the doing of the work — ”no one would be able to make a living simply planning, watching, controlling, or evaluating the actions of others”
3. Allowing measurements and controls to serve the core workers by means of, among other things, team and peer agreements
4. Yielding on consistency across groups and supporting local solutions
5. Making service the highest priority
6. Deglorifying management job titles and demystifying staff functions
7. Eliminating secrecy in the organization
8. Demanding a firm commitment from each participant with the recognition that freedom and accountability “are in every case joined at the hip”
9. Redistributing wealth since “reward systems need to tie everyone’s fortunes to the success of the team, unit, and larger organization”

Block explores the challenges standing in the way of reform at some length. Much of the difficulty, he points out, stems from our deep-seated assumptions about the role of leadership. Leaders maintain that they are needed to “set the vision” and to assume ultimate responsibility, while followers often look to superiors to take care of them. “We cannot be leaders without followers, and we cannot be good parents unless we have good children,” he observes. “This dependent mindset justifies and rationalizes patriarchy and keeps it breathing.”

Shifting away from patriarchy must begin with an understanding of how we have helped to create it in the first place. Therefore it requires not only structural and policy changes but also a new way of thinking for each member of the organization. Reform efforts implemented from the top down are guaranteed to fail. “We do not need common vision, least of all one articulated by a small group at the top. We need common mission, a common membership contract, but not a process to induce common values.”

At bottom, Block says, stewardship and self-governance go hand-in-hand. Our workplace is a microcosm of democracy. What we do there “makes a difference. This is where democracy will revive itself, not in the voting booth. Our own unit becomes the place where the economic war will be won and democracy rediscovered.”

It’s been almost a half-century since the publication of Thomas S. Kuhn’sThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a slim little book that introduced the word “paradigm” into common parlance and shattered our conventional way of looking at change. Fifty years on, it still represents perhaps the best thinking on how transformation happens, who drives it, why it’s so vehemently resisted, and what it really asks of people.

The book explores the psychology of belief that governs the acceptance of new concepts and innovations in science. Kuhn showed that the history of science is not one of linear, rational progress moving toward ever more accurate and complete knowledge of an objective reality. Rather, it’s one of radical shifts of vision in which a multitude of nonrational and nonempirical factors come into play.

Kuhn showed that the theories of Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein were all self-contained and “incommensurable” with one another. There was no steady accumulation of truth in the form of objective knowledge about the physical universe. Instead each theory was a revolutionary break from the previous theory, resulting in the arbitrary replacement of one conceptual matrix, or worldview, by another. Once the matrix changed, the way science was done and applied was fundamentally different.

Kuhn used the word “paradigm” to describe this conceptual matrix. A paradigm, in his formulation, is a constellation of facts, theories, methods, and assumptions about reality that allows researchers to isolate data, elaborate theories, and solve problems. Aristotle’s “Physica,” Ptolemy’s “Almagest,” Newton’s “Principia” and Lavoisier’s “Chemistry” are examples of scientific classics that gave rise to new paradigms. Each of these works triggered a revolution, rendering irrelevant much of what came before them. The chief characteristic of a paradigm, Kuhn argued, is that it has its own set of rules and illuminates its own set of facts. Because it is self-validating, it tends to be resistant to change.

Kuhn pointed out that as long as a paradigm is successful at explaining observed phenomena and solving problems, it remains dominant. But as new phenomena begin to contradict it, the paradigm succumbs to increasing doubt. And as anomalies multiply, it is thrown into crisis. At this stage, what is needed is the articulation of a radically new theory or insight, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, that can explain the apparent contradictions. In this way, long periods of “normal” science are followed by brief intellectual upheavals that reorder the basic theoretical assumptions of the field.

New paradigms rarely appear on the scene full-blown. Their early formulations are typically crude and incomplete. They are often the products not of deliberation or interpretation, but of “a relatively sudden and unstructured event like the gestalt switch,” Kuhn wrote. “Scientists then often speak of the ’scales falling from the eyes’ or of the ‘lightening flash’ that inundates a previously obscure puzzle, enabling its components to be seen in a new way that for the first time permits its solution.”

New paradigms are never immediately accepted by the scientific community. They may gain ground because of some dramatic and unforseen verification, or for personal or aesthetic reasons — they may appear “neater,” “simpler,” or “more elegant” than their older counterparts. But the choice between competing paradigms ultimately comes down to personal conviction since, as he put it, “the competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs.” While the new paradigm tends to be more successful in accounting for and predicting phenomena, there is ultimately no absolute standard for determining whether one paradigm is better than another.

Kuhn stressed that a new paradigm is almost always the work of a young person or someone new to the field. After a number of years in a certain discipline, a scientist tends to be too emotionally and habitually invested in the prevailing paradigm. Indeed, the established leaders of the older tradition may never accept the new view of reality. As Kuhn wrote, “Copernicanism made few converts for almost a century after Copernicus death. Newton’s work was not generally accepted, particularly on the Continent, for more than half a century after the ‘Principia’ appeared. Priestley never accepted the oxygen theory, nor Lord Kelvin the electromagnetic theory, and so on.” Adherents to the old paradigm usually go to their graves with their faith unshaken, Kuhn wryly noted. Even when confronted with overwhelming evidence, they stubbornly stick with the wrong but familiar.

The fact that Kuhn’s treatise — an academic essay on a fairly specialized subject, the psychological factors at work in the advancement of science — went on to win a wide audience is one of the great surprise stories in the history of ideas. But Kuhn had put his finger on something that was widely intuited, if not openly acknowledged or articulated, namely that change proceeds by upheaval. It’s not a smooth and gradual process. Transformations are violent because they necessitate the destruction and reordering of our most basic conceptual frameworks.

Not all of Kuhn’s conclusions have stood the test of time. For example, recent work has called into question the idea that scientific paradigms are “incommensurable” and that paradigm shifts are therefore essentially irrational events. For example, Canadian philosopher Paul Thagard says there is enough continuity in scientific revolutions to suggest that the process is not really arbitrary or non-linear. He likens a paradigm-shift to the process of learning a second language. (Read my review of Thagard’s book here)

But never mind. Kuhn’s basic insights stand and his service to our understanding of the psychology of change has been incalculable. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was described by Scientific American’s John Horgan as “the most influential treatise ever written on how science … proceeds.” Philosopher Richard Rorty called it “the most influential English-language philosophy book of the last half-century. It sold the most copies, made the greatest difference to our ways of thinking, and was the subject of the most intense and complex debates.” “For a quarter of a century,” Huston Smith wrote in 1982, it was “the most cited book on college campuses and … turned ‘paradigm’ into a household word.” The book, in other words, is an evergreen.

More from scottlondon.com:

• My review of Conceptual Revolutions by Paul Thagard
• My review of Paradigms in Progress by Hazel Henderson
• Literature review: Understanding Change: Strategies for Innovation and Renewal
• Audio clip: The New Science with Elisabet Sahtouris and Willis Harman (Requires RealPlayer)

In his new book, visionary physicist Peter Russell expands on the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo, suggesting that humanity has advanced to the point in its evolutionary journey where it is poised to make the “next evolutionary leap” — the critical shift from personal to global consciousness.

With the latest breakthroughs in telecommunications and globe-spanning computer networks, we are already seeing the signs of an embryonic “global brain,” he says. “The interlinking of humanity that began with the emergence of language has now progressed to the point where information can be transmitted to anyone, anywhere, at the speed of light. Billions of messages continually shuttle back and forth, in an ever-growing web of communication, linking the billions of minds of humanity together into a single system.”

According to Russell, creating a planetary consciousness also involves transforming individual human consciousness. “Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness,” he says quoting Vaclav Havel, “nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which the world is headed — the ecological, social demographic or general breakdown of civilization — will be unavoidable.”

The consciousness crisis we find ourselves in today, he observes, can be attributed in part to the Enlightenment view that the universe is composed of loosely connected and distinct objects. The notion of ourselves as atomized and separate individuals, combined with the cultural belief that we will find happiness by changing the world around us, is one of the critical dilemmas we face today.

Echoing the point he made in his book Waking Up in Time (see review), Russell argues that we need to break out of this mindset and develop a consciousness of ourselves as part of a grander system. The basic wisdom already exists in the spiritual traditions of almost all cultures. The challenge at the dawn of the 21st century, Russell says, will be to tap this wisdom and embrace it, rather than simply speak it.

As part of a book project I’m involved with, I was asked to submit a list of five great books — personal favorites that, for better or worse, have challenged and inspired my work, perhaps shaped my way of seeing the world. It was an fun assignment, but also an impossible task. For every book that deserved a place on the list, ten others recommended themselves. I asked myself whether any list could be complete without Blake or Rilke? Without Nietzsche or Schopenhauer? Where did Hamlet fit in? Or The Grand Inquisitor? Or the essays of George Orwell? Okay, I thought, how about something simple and straightforward, like an informal list, in no particular order, of books I keep by the bed — works that nourish my meditations and inspire me when cupboard of ideas is bare. These are the five I came up with…

Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy

In this classic anthology published in 1945, Huxley suggests that there is an identifiable transcendent unity at the core of the enduring wisdom traditions — a common vision as to the nature of ultimate reality, knowledge, ethics, and spiritual life — despite the great surface variety of doctrines, practices, and cultures. He refers to it as the “perennial philosophy,” saying that the outlook is common to people everywhere and at all times, with the notable exception of the modern West. Using excerpts from classic spiritual texts, mystical writings, visionary poetry, and other sources, Huxley sketches the broad outlines of this philosophy with penetrating insight and originality. A sublime collection.

Paramahansa Yogananda: The Autobiography of a Yogi

This spiritual classic is not only absorbing and beautifully written, it is as inspiring and relevant today as it must have been when it appeared in 1946. The book is a chronicle of the life of one of India’s most revered spiritual teachers, beginning with tales from his unusual childhood, accounts of his meetings with saints and sages, a description of his rigorous course of study with his guru, and a chronicle of his subsequent travels to the West to live and teach. Yogananda casts a light not only his own spiritual evolution but also his relationship to the religious traditions of the West, such as the teachings of Jesus, offering a probing look at the ultimate mysteries of human existence. (An unabridged audio version of the book, brilliantly read by actor Ben Kingsley, was released in 1997.)

Lewis Mumford: The Transformations of Man

The Transformations of Man is a masterful survey of those rare and pivotal moments in human history when an entirely new way of perceiving the world broke into popular consciousness and thereby changed the course of civilization. The book appeared in 1956, about a decade before the human potential movement hit its stride. Mumford was among the first philosophers to propose that “if life, in its fullness and wholeness, is to furnish our criterion for all development, then our philosophy must respect … above all, the tendency to self-actualization and self-transcendence.” He also made a forceful case for the cultivation of our capacity as human beings to love: “Without a positive concentration upon love in all its phases, we can hardly hope to rescue the earth and all the creatures that inhabit it from the insensate forces of hate, violence, and destruction that now threaten it.”
Richard Tarnas: The Passion of the Western Mind

In this sweeping intellectual history published in 1991, Richard Tarnas surveys the evolution of Western thought from ancient Greece to the Renaissance, from the scientific revolution to the dawn of the 21st century, illuminating the pivotal ideas in philosophy, religion, and science that have forged our unique cultural outlook. He also reflects on our curious postmodern predicament at the end of the millennium. Today, he says, we find ourselves wandering disconsolately between two worlds — one dying and the other struggling to be born. On the one hand, the spiritual and intellectual certainties of the past no longer command our allegiance. On the other, the promises of a more integral worldview, a cosmology of tomorrow — one based on a deeper relationship with nature and with the larger cosmos — require of us a leap of faith few are as yet willing to take. With the future of the human spirit and the future of the planet hanging in the balance, he says we have no choice but to embrace courage, imagination, and our deepest inner resources.

Theodore Zeldin: An Intimate History of Humanity

Published in 1995, An Intimate History of Humanity is a wide-ranging survey of human feelings and emotions that have helped to shape not only the lives of individuals but the course of entire civilizations. Rather than focus on social, economic, or political history, Theodore Zeldin looks at, among other things, courage, friendship, fear, loneliness, conversation, misunderstanding, frustration, and the yearning to escape. He presents some two dozen chapters that address a variety of themes, including “Why compassion has flowered even in stony ground” and “How travelers are becoming the largest nation in the world, and how they have learned to see only what they are looking for.” Each chapter begins with a biography of a living person, usually based on author interviews. These portraits are then placed against the backdrop of a universal history. The idea, as Zeldin says, is “to look at the facts through two lenses simultaneously, both through a microscope, choosing details that illuminate life in those aspects that touch people most closely, and through a telescope, surveying large problems from a great distance. I hope I can say enough to show that humans have many more options before them than they currently believe.” A beautifully written book and a remarkable achievement.

The Price of a Dream by David Bornstein is a compelling and well-written account of how Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus started the Grameen Bank out of his own pocket in the 1970s and thereby launched the microcredit movement. Grameen and efforts like it are transforming not only conventional banking practices but also social and economic development programs throughout the world.

Grameen, whose name is derived from the Bangla word for “village,” first began as an experiment operating from special windows in the traditional national banks. In 1983, the bank became an independent entity. Despite predictions from traditional bankers that Grameen’s clients would take the money and run, 97 percent of its loans are repaid — a rate comparable to Chase Manhattan’s. The reason is that the system is based on trust and mutual accountability. To qualify for a loan, a villager must become a member of a five‑person borrowers group. Groups share responsibility for loan repayments — and defaults — so they are typically very careful in choosing new members. Since most villagers have none of the data that bankers traditionally use to decide if a prospective borrower is credit-worthy, they must rely on trust and social pressure. As Bornstein points out, Grameen’s system ensures “that villagers are brought together frequently in a setting where they are forced to answer for their actions before all eyes.”

Villagers can borrow money from the Grameen Bank only if their assets fall below the value of a half acre of land. Since this range includes half the population of Bangladesh, Grameen Bank branches usually comprise a cross‑section of villagers: some borrowers are absolutely destitute; some are slightly better off; and some are near the top levels of the eligibility criterion. The better‑off villagers usually take larger loans thereby “subsidizing” the poorer ones. This allows Grameen to sustain itself and continue to reach more poor people.

As Bornstein makes clear, the Grameen philosophy represents a radical departure from the traditional idea of banking. By working in villages and small towns rather than cities, lending mostly to women rather than men, and promoting self-employment rather than wage-employment, as well as creating programs and workshops aimed at redressing a wide range of social problems in the countryside, the bank has effectively redefined credit from a privilege reserved for a few fortunate people to a tool by which millions of poor villagers can improve their lives.

Oddly enough, Bornstein says, the Grameen Bank represents a new twist on supply-side economics. It is founded on the idea not of   “trickle-down” prosperity but rather the “bubble-up” effect. While supply-side economics is based on the idea of injecting capital into the economy from the top down — at the level of corporate investors, in the form of tax cuts and special incentives — the Grameen approach is to inject it at ground level in the form of loans to the poor. In the long run the effects benefit everyone, including the wealthy, because as small-business people improve their social standing they eventually reach a point where they have more spending power. This ultimately translates into greater consumer demand for such items as soap, toothpaste and clothing, thereby stimulating the overall economy.

Today the Grameen Bank has become a leader of the so-called microlending movement. The model has been replicated in Malaysia, the Philippines, Malawi, and many parts of Africa. Hundreds of programs have also cropped up in Canada and the United States. Their systems vary according to context and culture, Bornstein notes, but their objectives are the same. “Like Grameen, they view poor people as clients, not beneficiaries, and they seek to provide them with the means to support themselves through dignified self-employment.”

Cultural critic Todd Gitlin’s latest essay collection, Intellectuals and the Flag, takes the attacks of September 11 as a point of departure for raising difficult questions about political authority, patriotism, civic engagement, and the role of intellectuals in American public life. My review of the book appears in the new issue of the Journal of Politics.

An excerpt:

Todd Gitlin has written a number of fine books over the past two decades, among them The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and The Twilight of Common Dreams, and his occasional pieces in the New York Times Book Review, Mother Jones, Harper’s and elsewhere are always intelligent and engaging, often eloquent, occasionally brilliant. But perhaps his most memorable work remains a series of short essays that have never, technically speaking, appeared in print.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, Gitlin wrote a string of commentaries combining first-hand accounts of living in Manhattan, about a mile downwind of Ground Zero, with incisive analysis of the responses to the attacks by politicians and other public figures. The essays were posted on the openDemocracy website, the first one within 24 hours of the twin towers’ collapse. Gitlin’s dispatches from the front quickly made the rounds on the Internet, circulating via listservs and forwarded e-mails. For many of us, they were a bracing antidote for that “perverse abuse of language in play from Washington officials,” as he put it, and the “overwrought metaphors” endlessly circulated and amplified through the media.

Several key passages from the 9/11 commentaries reappear in “The Intellectuals and the Flag,” the centerpiece of Gitlin’s new essay collection by the same name. [...] What Gitlin sets out to do in these essays, he says, is to lay the foundation for a recovery of the left, to point the way to a renewed sense of patriotism —

not the patriotism of symbolic display and empty ritual, he insists, but of self-sacrifice, tough-minded criticism, vigorous ideas, and an active engagement with the difficult issues of our time.

Better Together brings together a dozen case studies of successful community-building efforts in the United States. The book is an outgrowth of the Saguaro Seminar on Civic Engagement in America, a three-year dialogue among leading thinkers and activists about how to build and strengthen the American community (though it bears little resemblance to the Seminar’s final report of the same name).

As Robert Putnam and Lewis Feldstein note in the book’s opening pages, the stories in the book represent “exceptional cases in which creative social entrepreneurs [are] moving against the nationwide tide and creating vibrant new forms of social connectedness.” The book is presented as a response to civic leaders, local officials, foundation executives, community activists, and others who believe that the decline of civic engagement documented in Putnam’s Bowling Alonecan be reversed.

“We focus on these social-capital success stories,” Putnam and Feldstein write, “hoping and believing that they may in fact be harbingers of a broader revival of social capital in this country.” The examples they present are certainly robust and successful enough to serve as convincing models for how to build strong and sustainable communities. They devote a chapter each to:

• Valley Interfaith, a coalition of church and school groups in the Rio Grande Valley that, like its sister organizations in the Texas Industrial Areas Foundation, uses the grassroots organizing model to build relationships, develop civic leaders, create a culture of small-group dialogue, and mobilize broad-based political action.
• The branches of the Chicago Public Library that have become a major force for social connection and civic revitalization in and around Chicago by refashioning themselves as vibrant community centers.
• The Shipyard Project in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, an initiative that helped reconnect a divided community through a creative arts project that expressed through dance the history and work of the local naval shipyard.
• The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, a community revitalization project in Boston that rescued a neighborhood from the brink of catastrophic decline.
• The social and economic transformation of Tupelo, Mississippi, from a dying cotton town in one of the poorest counties in the state into a thriving and prosperous community that became the top dairy county in the United States.
• Saddleback, a mega-church in Orange County, California, that attracts more than 45,000 congregants through a mixture of flashy shows featuring popular music and big video screens and small-group gatherings where members can get to know one another, build relationships, receive support, and discuss public and private issues.
• The Waupun, Wisconsin chapter of the Do Something League, a national organization established to encourage community activism and develop leadership skills among young people.
• The Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based union that creates social capital through extensive and time-consuming face-to-face conversations between two people, or among small groups of people, because it is an effective strategy for sustaining the organization.
• Experience Corps, an organization of seniors, mostly women, ranging in age from fifty-something to their seventies and eighties, who volunteer fifteen hours a week tutoring kids, offering support, and building community in the schools of greater Philadelphia.
• United Parcel Service, an example of a corporation that sponsors community volunteering and workplace flexibility to allow employees to reconcile their professional duties with their family and community obligations, not so much out of altruism but because it stimulates profits in the long run.
• Craigslist.org, a “virtual community” based in San Francisco that uses the Internet not as an alternative but as a supplement to face-to-face communication in order to forge connections between people in the community, foster dialogue about local issues, and create free public “spaces” where the community can find itself.
• Portland, Oregon, a city that has bucked the national trend and experienced a remarkable civic renaissance over the last two decades thanks in part to innovative leadership, a tradition of community activism, and a vibrant culture of public participation.

While Putnam and Feldstein admit that their collection of stories offers no blueprints or secret recipes for creating social capital, they draw out some of the common themes and offer a set of tentative guidelines in the concluding chapter. One of their key findings is that social capital is best realized in the pursuit of some other goal or set of goals. In all the cases in the book, social connectedness was a byproduct of working toward some specific objective, not an end in itself.

The case studies also suggest that building social capital is time-consuming and labor intensive. It can only develop through a process of relationship-building based on trust and reciprocity. Sharing personal and collective stories are often a critical part of this process. Narratives, Putnam and Feldstein state, “help people construct and reconstruct their interests…. Telling and listening to stories creates empathy and helps people find the things they have in common, which then eases the formation of enduring groups and networks.”

Another common theme is the importance of building in a redundancy of contact in any social capital initiative so that people encounter one another in multiple settings and contexts. This reinforces a sense of reciprocal obligation and extends the boundaries of empathy in the community. “Reweaving social webs,” Putnam and Feldstein conclude, “will … depend on our ability to create new spaces for recognition, reconnection, conversation, and debate. Creating these spaces will require innovative uses of technology, creative urban and regional planning, and political will.”