“Be anything you like,” Thomas Merton once said, “be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.” I love this quote. It’s a reminder to slow down and reexamine what we’re doing. The fierce drive to accomplish something and make a name for ourselves too often [...]
I was delighted by the news that this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics went to Elinor Ostrom (along with Oliver Williamson). She’s a maverick, someone who has challenged conventional wisdom in her field for some time. By recognizing her work in understanding resource management systems, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is acknowledging the [...]
One of Hegel’s great contributions to Western philosophy was a theory he called dialectical progression. As he saw it, ideas and worldviews tend to evolve through a series of stages. First there is an idea or concept, a thesis. Over time it inevitably gives rise to its opposite, its antithesis. The interaction of the two [...]
In horticulture, the art of grafting involves fusing the stems, leaves, flowers, or fruits of one plant with the rootstock of another. The process is especially useful with plants that can’t be propagated easily by seed. The basic principle also applies to ideas. Sometimes the best way to introduce a new concept is to marry it to one that [...]
To create real change, we have to “language” our message so it speaks to different value structures, says Ken Wilber in an interview in the latest issue of Ode Magazine. For example, when Al Gore speaks of global warming, he says that the entire world needs to change its behavior. “But he says so in [...]
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 [...]
In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell observed that just as thought can corrupt language, so language can corrupt thought. “A bad usage can be spread by tradition and imitation,” he said, “even among people who should and do know better.” Academic prose is the most obvious example. Many scholarly books [...]
As hippie-mystic John Perry Barlow has pointed out, the Internet has a lot in common with the 19th century American West. It’s vast, unmapped, culturally and legally ambiguous, hard to navigate, and up for grabs. Large institutions already claim to own the place, but most of the actual natives are solitary and independent, sometimes to [...]
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has spent the better part of forty years studying the phenomenology of happiness. What makes life genuinely satisfying, he says, is the experience of “flow” — that state of optimal awareness in which our concentration is intently focused and we’re fully absorbed in what we’re doing. During flow experiences, our body, mind, and consciousness [...]
It’s a sad fact that while most of us spend a sizeable part of our lives communicating with others — in face-to-face conversations, over the phone, in committee meetings, via e-mail and social networks — we seem more separate and disconnected than ever. Genuine understanding seems to be the exception rather than the norm in everyday communication. We [...]
The German philosopher Hegel gave us what is still perhaps the most compelling model of how societies change and evolve. His theory of dialectical progression suggested that cultures evolve in much the same way as ideas or outlooks do. The prevailing concept — or thesis as he called it — over time gives rise to its opposite, its [...]
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 [...]