Barack Obama and The Integral

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Two ways of looking at things. The emerging punditry says McCain ran a noble campaign, all things considered, and Hillary Clinton is now seen as having helped Barack, with her antics, and to be a great person all around. Or, rolling back to things we actually witnessed and words actually spoken, these two, McCain and Clinton, diminished the political life of the country and themselves. If you believe in Providence, you perhaps figure that these two were just players in the drama of Barack's overcoming all obstacles to win the Presidency. But, from months in the trenches, it is hard to be so philosophical. I prefer to see everything as a spectrum, and for any good tendencies in McCain or Clinton, there were bad and even vile tendencies which we saw, and took in and recoiled from. God may love everyone but God tells the truth, no matter whether we see God as the very best within us, or as the One who refused to give any name but I AM to Moses. And the truth is that what we could not stomach was real and a part of history and cannot now be whitewashed. Period. End of screed.

Instead of sending money, how about some infrastructure jobs? SOURCE

Our transition team is on the case -- ready to reverse 200 Bush assaults on justice and the American way. SOURCE

With all the talk about the middle class, how about some good old fashioned poverty? Start with this photo essay. SOURCE

and The IntegralDo not turn away from this. Competence is the minimum standard for what gets done in an Obama era. But integral is the elusive and essential element of O-generation competence. It is like applying a 50-state strategy to your mental processes. Integral is having the elements together in your head so that problems you solve will actually be solutions.

Let me illustrate. Imagine that the government has $700 billion that it can spend. Note that the high figure for stimulus packages is $100 billion. Is there something wrong here? We think we can do better if we have one-seventh of the pie. But how much better might we do with all the pie. In other words, if the economy would do better by realizing the basic aims with labor-intensive solutions, then why not apply the money to hiring teachers and paying builders and ordering materials and so forth.

One aspect of integral is cottoning to values enunciated by Thorstein Veblen. Why quote Baudrillard when Veblen said the same thing in a more cutting and understandable way? These values point to a certain clarity of purpose, serious competence and no truck with the sort of game playing that Barack aptly characterized with various mild epithets during the campaign.

Thorstein Veblen on the Web

OK, let us get seriously integral with a simple example. Suppose you want a human settlement that will

1. Integrate living and working by making employment available within walking distance.

2. Have enough bulk to make it economically viable to construct the entire settlement with the cojones to actually be sustainable. You do not want to simply have one wind turbine for each separate dwelling and one recycling widget per tract home and so forth.

We want to actually make sustainability work, so we need a scale that would make it possible to recycle on site, create energy with wind and sun and the results of recycling on site, etc.

3. Shuffle institutions that are currently set up one way so that they can have life in an integral setting.

For example, how many worship spaces does a settlement need? Answer, one and a clock.

How could one create affordable education and care from birth on up? By providing in a pedestrian human settlement the "junior" elements of education and care -- shall we say nodes where preventative things get done, play and care spaces, models of space where computers are shared and teaching is done interactively by folks who can train kids to learn on their own.

You get the idea.

4. Build model settlements as pilot projects in areas where current zoning and other regulations are not operative.

One reason we have the noxious sprawl we are saddled with is that cookie-cutter development has simply accepted the form required by existing laws. We need to escape these constrictions to create an integral settlement that is actually O-Generation, to coin a phrase.

5. Make Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language required reading.

No, you will not buy everything he and his colleagues say. But your eyes will be opened to the need for NESTING that he saw well before it ever became a feature of html.

Our present architecture and design is human only by accident. That we love it and accept it says more about us and our capacity for vision and integral consciousness, than about the way things got put together. Better, if competence is our goal, to think integrally, like Alexander did.

The Essential Site for Understanding Alexander

Here is the major point of this post, drawn from this wonderful site.

Preserve country towns where they exist; and encourage the growth of new self contained towns, with populations between 500 and 10,000, entirely surrounded by open countryside and at least 10 miles from neighbouring towns. Make it the regions collective concern to give each town the wherewithal it needs to build a base of local industry, so that these towns are not dormitories for people who work in other places, but real towns- able to sustain the whole of life. SOURCE

I have no illusions. We are creative whether we know it or not. We will slog through.

But I badly pray and hope and want Barack and Company to devote some of that Billion Stash to the creation of models that will actually achieve the very nice goals articulated by all the non-profit organizations that will gather like carp at the Lake Mead Marina, trying to get a chunk of change to keep their thinking fuelled for the future.

We do not need more of that, we need Apollo Edicts that say such things as:

Build a human settlement that has no cars, integrates the needed "junior" elements of living, is ecologically sustainable and that people might like to live in.

And then puts it under leadership that can take an integral vision and break it into chunks, like Alexander does. So that each element is done correctly. So the model itself has legs and can show us there is a better way to live than in warehouses called schools, commuting setups that waste time and money, communities built around fear and separation, life that leeches creativity from children, etc.

If we are moving beyond oil, let us move beyond inhuman human settlements.

Ah, but:

If all the money goes to keep an executive in his BMW making it from Wall Street to Greenwich in an hour both ways, we will be a long time before anything leeches down to Main St.

There may not be many Main Streets left.

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