Here is a brief reflection on the linguistic evolution of the term "guys", and to a lesser extent the word "guy". In my white Chicago upbringing, "guys" was the second person plural that is lacking in standard English (akin to "youse" or "y'all" in other dialects), regardless of gender makeup of the group. I have recently heard people object to the use of "guys" as a standard second person plural, because it is male-normative. I can sympathize with their feelings, but I probably won't change a pretty important feature of the dialect I speak.
Indeed, I have tried to skew in the other direction, reclaiming both "guys" and "guy" as totally gender neutral terms. Again, this is perhaps easier for me given that I grew up and continue to use the singular "guy" to refer even to inanimate objects. So this latest little innovation allows me to bring up my kids in a less gender-hypersensitive way, avoiding referring to the sex of a kid when it's totally irrelevant to what I'm saying.
Anyway, the article I've linked to seems to indicate that I'm not the only one making subtle moves in this direction.
Thursday, December 15, 2016
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
A philosophical reflection on driverless cars
This is a neat little article from Linkedin about driverless cars. It forecasts that these marvels have a long time yet before they become pervasive on roadways. The reason for this, according to the author, are the questions of agency and liability surrounding these cars. Because the agency for driving decisions, especially split-second ones, will no longer rest with the passenger but with a programmer or algorithm, there arise sticky questions of what these cars should do in the case of an accident. The author gives the example of whether a car faced with a child in the roadway should swerve into oncoming traffic, thus endangering the passenger and other vehicles but potentially saving the child, or if it should plow forward, thus protecting the passenger/buyer of the car but squashing the hapless kid.
Anyway, it just goes to show that our world is a mix of technical or objective conditions on the one hand, and social ones, such that there is rarely a simple, purely technical innovation that can be rolled out in society. You always have to consider the social, too. Technology doesn't exist free of social context.
Anyway, it just goes to show that our world is a mix of technical or objective conditions on the one hand, and social ones, such that there is rarely a simple, purely technical innovation that can be rolled out in society. You always have to consider the social, too. Technology doesn't exist free of social context.
Sunday, December 11, 2016
African migrants in Central America
This is a fascinating account of the increasing flow of African migrants through Central America to get to the US. I wish them luck on their journey. And since Africa is likely to be the next source of mass migration to the US, I hope that some of these migrants come to Chicago to lay down routes and enclaves that will nourish the city with new people and new ideas for the next few decades.
Friday, December 9, 2016
Trojan Horse Aid
I recently read a book called Trojan Horse Aid, in which an anthropologist and longtime worker in the field of economic development (Susan Walsh) describes how local cultural traits that promote the resilience of people's livelihoods can be undermined by processes of donor-led economic development. The book has elements of travelogue, as the author weaves in her original participant-observer notes where needed to illustrate a point. (Though it is nothing like another book I've been reading recently called 8 feet in the Andes about an Irishwoman and her daughter hiking Pizarro's trail in the 1980s, which despite being set in the same general geographic region and also a good read in its own way, is more focused on humorous outsider observations, occasional bits of condescending colonialism yearning for the good old days before agrarian reform, and a morbid fascination with making sweeping cultural generalizations about the taciturn, stoic Indians vs. the wily, aggressive mestizos.)
Trojan Horse Aid is a carefully done, epistemologically honest, self-aware anthropological analysis of outside development aid in a remote area of the southern Andes with very strong indigenous culture and customs. The book's thesis is essentially that, while modern agricultural practices and increased integration into national and global markets may increase income (and thus wellbeing) in the short term in such communities, these modern processes also inherently discredit and undercut local, indigenous practices for managing the landscape and local society. Given the fragile, ever-changing conditions of the local Andean ecosystem, the modern practices ultimately fail, such that their economic benefits disappear, but now the pre-existing system has been weakened or forgotten, leaving the population less resilient than before, less able to respond to the ecological and socioeconomic conditions of their surroundings.
A subsidiary theme that I found fascinating was the idea of problem-based development vs. asset-based development. The former approach is one that I and most other development experts tend to use. We look at what is wrong in a community, or a country, or even in a global system, and then try to figure out how to fix it. (Walsh also describes this approach as "dipstick development"; more on this later). In the best of cases this assessment occurs hand-in-hand with the people themselves that are directly affected by the problem, and who will be most affected by the solution. But ultimately it is centered on lacks, and can easily lead to our focusing so much on what's missing or deficient in a community that we fail to see its strengths and assets, or what's worse, to believe that it has no positive qualities whatsoever to draw on in its own development. Conversely, an asset-based development model would look first and foremost at a community's strengths, at what it does well already, in order to guide future development processes while avoiding damage to the very strengths you want to build on. On a technical level, you probably should use a bit of both approaches, building on already-present strengths while seeking to overcome existing problems. But given the dynamics of history, power, and cultural framing that are inevitably part of any development project that brings together outside "experts" with a local "needy" community, I agree with the author that we would all do well to actively affirm a community's strengths as a way of reshaping the prevailing narrative of lack- or problem-based development, which ultimately makes communities less empowered to take on and own their own processes of development.
By the way, this dynamic of outside experts promoting inappropriate models that both undermine resilience and disempower local communities can come from the Left just as much as from the Right; Walsh details both radical Marxist and progressive groups and assistentialist Christian fundamentalists who in varying degrees employ the same flawed approaches to development in her Andean region of study.
Lastly, and perhaps most shockingly to those of us who highly value the written word, Walsh's analysis calls into question much of the orthodoxy regarding literacy. She argues very coherently that what keeps indigenous Bolivians and many others the world over in poverty, is not their ability or inability to read, but rather the power dynamics that keep them from exercising political power or accessing productive resources. People suffer not from illiteracy, but from "poverty, scarcity, and hegemony". Their illiteracy is more a symptom of their poverty, not a cause of it. Furthermore, the people Walsh profiles are in fact profoundly literate when it comes to reading landscapes and ecosystems, a skill lacking in most of the rest of us (the lack of which will very possibly lead to our ultimate demise as a species), but currently a skill disparaged and unvalued because it is held by a group that isn't valued by the status quo.
I guess I have to agree with Walsh's argument that book literacy is not necessarily the panacea many of us hold it to be. If so, we need to temper our almost religious regard of literacy as a universal, unambiguous boon. She criticizes what she describes as the "dipstick model" of literacy, similar to the dipstick model of development, which posits that people are poor and wretched because of some lacking factor that, if properly measured (as by a dipstick), can be filled and thus resolve their problems. (A quick aside--Walsh cites one of my heroes and the namesake of my youngest son, Paulo Freire, as a major critic of the dipstick model of education and literacy, but points out that Freire was often uncritical of his own reverence for literacy as a tool for liberation and empowerment). Walsh rightly argues that the dipstick conception of literacy or any other purported cause of poverty implicitly justifies class stratification and inequality as simply the natural result of sorting processes, whereby those deficient in the valued factor are left behind. The patent incoherence of such thinking is made manifest by a few simple examples. In societies like the US or Colombia with widespread literacy, there still exist yawning socioeconomic divides that will not be resolved by all the reading and writing in the world. Conversely, even the elite in cultures like that of Homer's Greece were largely illiterate, but that didn't stop them from enjoying the fruits of power, nor from edifying sophisticated, developed societies.
If this sounds a bit extreme to my readers, let me make a similar and perhaps less controversial analogy. The fact that many indigenous Andeans don't speak Spanish is often cited as a proximate cause for their poverty. Not speaking the dominant language sets them back as far as job opportunities, education, and even just being accepted as "normal" or "desireable" by mestizos in social or professional settings. But this is only a proximate, superficial description of the situation. We know that there are billions of people in the world that don't speak Spanish, and many of them are doing just fine economically and politically. So the issue isn't that the Aymara language is somehow innately causative of poverty (this sounds absurd when I say it this way, since it seems so obvious, but it's important to clearly make the point). No, the root cause of Aymara-speakers' poverty is that Bolivian society is organized in a million ways to favor Spanish-speakers and to disadvantage indigenous people. Given this state of affairs, learning Spanish will not change the lot of most indigenous Bolivians. The only thing that will do that is a profound political change whereby indigenous people are given an equal say in how society is run and how resources are distributed. In the same way then, literacy or the lack thereof is not the determining factor in social arrangements that perpetuate inequality, political disempowerment, and economic poverty.
Okay, so far so good. But here is Walsh's really revolutionary claim about literacy: maybe learning to read can actually harm a community in some ways. In the same way that modern farming techniques and synthetic inputs can undermine the community's long-term resilience by replacing deep-rooted dynamics and ways of thought with alien practices unsuited to the local context, Walsh argues that the linear, explicit, verbal thinking required for literacy may in fact undermine the nonverbal, multi-pronged, nonlinear thought patterns that underlie successful management of complex ecosystems. Many of the landscape management practices employed by the Aymara are best learned by doing, and can't easily be codified (as they would have to be to go in a book). They are the fruit of years of observations in differing conditions, in dry years and wet years, cold seasons and hot ones and seasons that should be cold but one year were hot, years of planting one crop or another or leaving a field fallow for differing spans of time. There are constant, non-statistical experiments being carried out, often driven by a gut feeling that something new might work. The lessons come from many iterations of recurring cycles that always differ slightly from one time to the next, a process of improvisation underlain by a massive body of accumulated knowledge. Walsh describes this way of thinking and learning as connectionism, and a series of "sequential adjustments to unpredictable conditions". Not only can none of this be captured in a book, but Walsh argues that the very Cartesian, strict if-then rules and generalizations taught through literacy and Western education in general may destroy the capacity to learn in this other, connectionist way.
This can't be discounted as an overly romantic rendering of Andean thought and practice by an anti-modernist. Scientists are just barely beginning to understand the utterly complex phenomena going on all at once in ecosystems like the Andean highlands, and often must acknowledge that the Popper-style scientific method of controlling variables and falsifying hypotheses just doesn't transfer easily to such contexts. Indeed, many are the ecosystems whose complexity is being inexorably destroyed while scientists struggle to understand just one piece of them, in a race to study what is rapidly disappearing. Similarly, often the best-preserved natural landscapes are those managed not as science-based conservation areas or parks, but rather those under indigenous land management regimes based on what can often seem like superstition and quasi-magical principles. Biodiversity, that flourishing, overwhelming, as-yet-uncategorized proliferation of pulsing life, seems to be healthiest when managed by peoples not employing a strict Western rationality. If we lose these lifeways, these ways of thinking and acting and managing complexity in the natural environment, then the entire human race will have lost an important part of its heritage (both cultural and ecological), indeed perhaps the very key to our continued survival on the planet.
Walsh's book comes with no easy solutions. In fact, the end chapters with ostensible proposals seemed quite weak to me. Walsh recommends what she describes as "inside-out" development and a focus on dignity, namely in that outside aid experts and technicians should enter local communities with more humility, in an attitude of equals working out solutions together with the community. This is sound development, and I agree with it, but it's not very groundbreaking. I can't blame Walsh though for not having an easy solution to the dilemmas and problems she observes. The topics she discusses are difficult, and have no easy solutions. While it's clearly no good to promote unsustainable ways of doing things that bring high productivity in the short term at the expense of long-term survival, neither is the status quo of survival- or subsistence-based peasant systems that sustainably provide people with just enough to live but not enough to prosper.
Walsh hints at a possible way out of this impasse, such that Andean peasants are neither forced into an outside mold of modernity that ultimately undercuts their resilience, nor maintained in a state of resilient, romantic millennarian poverty. In the end it's about power. If the Aymara communities in Trojan Horse Aid were granted the same voice and right to self-determination as everyone else in Bolivia, they would be able to preserve the positive aspects of their traditional way of life, while also evolving, researching new ways of doing things, and incorporating select foreign ideas that can improve their well-being, all in accord with their priorities and world view. In other words, you'd be better off empowering people to be able to dictate the terms of their development, as opposed to "capacitating" them to fit into the prevailing, hostile system.
One last key insight of Walsh is that we need to begin to conceive of peasant farmers (with their non-linear approach) as landscape managers and not just producers of agricultural goods. This is an idea that has been discussed even in high-level agricultural policy in the US and Europe, but Walsh frames it in a particularly effective, convincing way
Trojan Horse Aid is a carefully done, epistemologically honest, self-aware anthropological analysis of outside development aid in a remote area of the southern Andes with very strong indigenous culture and customs. The book's thesis is essentially that, while modern agricultural practices and increased integration into national and global markets may increase income (and thus wellbeing) in the short term in such communities, these modern processes also inherently discredit and undercut local, indigenous practices for managing the landscape and local society. Given the fragile, ever-changing conditions of the local Andean ecosystem, the modern practices ultimately fail, such that their economic benefits disappear, but now the pre-existing system has been weakened or forgotten, leaving the population less resilient than before, less able to respond to the ecological and socioeconomic conditions of their surroundings.
A subsidiary theme that I found fascinating was the idea of problem-based development vs. asset-based development. The former approach is one that I and most other development experts tend to use. We look at what is wrong in a community, or a country, or even in a global system, and then try to figure out how to fix it. (Walsh also describes this approach as "dipstick development"; more on this later). In the best of cases this assessment occurs hand-in-hand with the people themselves that are directly affected by the problem, and who will be most affected by the solution. But ultimately it is centered on lacks, and can easily lead to our focusing so much on what's missing or deficient in a community that we fail to see its strengths and assets, or what's worse, to believe that it has no positive qualities whatsoever to draw on in its own development. Conversely, an asset-based development model would look first and foremost at a community's strengths, at what it does well already, in order to guide future development processes while avoiding damage to the very strengths you want to build on. On a technical level, you probably should use a bit of both approaches, building on already-present strengths while seeking to overcome existing problems. But given the dynamics of history, power, and cultural framing that are inevitably part of any development project that brings together outside "experts" with a local "needy" community, I agree with the author that we would all do well to actively affirm a community's strengths as a way of reshaping the prevailing narrative of lack- or problem-based development, which ultimately makes communities less empowered to take on and own their own processes of development.
By the way, this dynamic of outside experts promoting inappropriate models that both undermine resilience and disempower local communities can come from the Left just as much as from the Right; Walsh details both radical Marxist and progressive groups and assistentialist Christian fundamentalists who in varying degrees employ the same flawed approaches to development in her Andean region of study.
Lastly, and perhaps most shockingly to those of us who highly value the written word, Walsh's analysis calls into question much of the orthodoxy regarding literacy. She argues very coherently that what keeps indigenous Bolivians and many others the world over in poverty, is not their ability or inability to read, but rather the power dynamics that keep them from exercising political power or accessing productive resources. People suffer not from illiteracy, but from "poverty, scarcity, and hegemony". Their illiteracy is more a symptom of their poverty, not a cause of it. Furthermore, the people Walsh profiles are in fact profoundly literate when it comes to reading landscapes and ecosystems, a skill lacking in most of the rest of us (the lack of which will very possibly lead to our ultimate demise as a species), but currently a skill disparaged and unvalued because it is held by a group that isn't valued by the status quo.
I guess I have to agree with Walsh's argument that book literacy is not necessarily the panacea many of us hold it to be. If so, we need to temper our almost religious regard of literacy as a universal, unambiguous boon. She criticizes what she describes as the "dipstick model" of literacy, similar to the dipstick model of development, which posits that people are poor and wretched because of some lacking factor that, if properly measured (as by a dipstick), can be filled and thus resolve their problems. (A quick aside--Walsh cites one of my heroes and the namesake of my youngest son, Paulo Freire, as a major critic of the dipstick model of education and literacy, but points out that Freire was often uncritical of his own reverence for literacy as a tool for liberation and empowerment). Walsh rightly argues that the dipstick conception of literacy or any other purported cause of poverty implicitly justifies class stratification and inequality as simply the natural result of sorting processes, whereby those deficient in the valued factor are left behind. The patent incoherence of such thinking is made manifest by a few simple examples. In societies like the US or Colombia with widespread literacy, there still exist yawning socioeconomic divides that will not be resolved by all the reading and writing in the world. Conversely, even the elite in cultures like that of Homer's Greece were largely illiterate, but that didn't stop them from enjoying the fruits of power, nor from edifying sophisticated, developed societies.
Okay, so far so good. But here is Walsh's really revolutionary claim about literacy: maybe learning to read can actually harm a community in some ways. In the same way that modern farming techniques and synthetic inputs can undermine the community's long-term resilience by replacing deep-rooted dynamics and ways of thought with alien practices unsuited to the local context, Walsh argues that the linear, explicit, verbal thinking required for literacy may in fact undermine the nonverbal, multi-pronged, nonlinear thought patterns that underlie successful management of complex ecosystems. Many of the landscape management practices employed by the Aymara are best learned by doing, and can't easily be codified (as they would have to be to go in a book). They are the fruit of years of observations in differing conditions, in dry years and wet years, cold seasons and hot ones and seasons that should be cold but one year were hot, years of planting one crop or another or leaving a field fallow for differing spans of time. There are constant, non-statistical experiments being carried out, often driven by a gut feeling that something new might work. The lessons come from many iterations of recurring cycles that always differ slightly from one time to the next, a process of improvisation underlain by a massive body of accumulated knowledge. Walsh describes this way of thinking and learning as connectionism, and a series of "sequential adjustments to unpredictable conditions". Not only can none of this be captured in a book, but Walsh argues that the very Cartesian, strict if-then rules and generalizations taught through literacy and Western education in general may destroy the capacity to learn in this other, connectionist way.
This can't be discounted as an overly romantic rendering of Andean thought and practice by an anti-modernist. Scientists are just barely beginning to understand the utterly complex phenomena going on all at once in ecosystems like the Andean highlands, and often must acknowledge that the Popper-style scientific method of controlling variables and falsifying hypotheses just doesn't transfer easily to such contexts. Indeed, many are the ecosystems whose complexity is being inexorably destroyed while scientists struggle to understand just one piece of them, in a race to study what is rapidly disappearing. Similarly, often the best-preserved natural landscapes are those managed not as science-based conservation areas or parks, but rather those under indigenous land management regimes based on what can often seem like superstition and quasi-magical principles. Biodiversity, that flourishing, overwhelming, as-yet-uncategorized proliferation of pulsing life, seems to be healthiest when managed by peoples not employing a strict Western rationality. If we lose these lifeways, these ways of thinking and acting and managing complexity in the natural environment, then the entire human race will have lost an important part of its heritage (both cultural and ecological), indeed perhaps the very key to our continued survival on the planet.
Walsh's book comes with no easy solutions. In fact, the end chapters with ostensible proposals seemed quite weak to me. Walsh recommends what she describes as "inside-out" development and a focus on dignity, namely in that outside aid experts and technicians should enter local communities with more humility, in an attitude of equals working out solutions together with the community. This is sound development, and I agree with it, but it's not very groundbreaking. I can't blame Walsh though for not having an easy solution to the dilemmas and problems she observes. The topics she discusses are difficult, and have no easy solutions. While it's clearly no good to promote unsustainable ways of doing things that bring high productivity in the short term at the expense of long-term survival, neither is the status quo of survival- or subsistence-based peasant systems that sustainably provide people with just enough to live but not enough to prosper.
Walsh hints at a possible way out of this impasse, such that Andean peasants are neither forced into an outside mold of modernity that ultimately undercuts their resilience, nor maintained in a state of resilient, romantic millennarian poverty. In the end it's about power. If the Aymara communities in Trojan Horse Aid were granted the same voice and right to self-determination as everyone else in Bolivia, they would be able to preserve the positive aspects of their traditional way of life, while also evolving, researching new ways of doing things, and incorporating select foreign ideas that can improve their well-being, all in accord with their priorities and world view. In other words, you'd be better off empowering people to be able to dictate the terms of their development, as opposed to "capacitating" them to fit into the prevailing, hostile system.
One last key insight of Walsh is that we need to begin to conceive of peasant farmers (with their non-linear approach) as landscape managers and not just producers of agricultural goods. This is an idea that has been discussed even in high-level agricultural policy in the US and Europe, but Walsh frames it in a particularly effective, convincing way
Wednesday, December 7, 2016
Monday, December 5, 2016
Corruption as a driver for extremist violence
I just read the book Thieves of State, by Sarah Chayes. It describes the complex functioning of a corrupt state, starting with the example of post-2003 Afghanistan but expanding the analysis to other places like Nigeria and Uzbekistan, not to mention the financial free-for-all of the 21st-century US. Anyway, the basic thesis is that corruption not only slows development processes, but in fact drives and legitimizes the appearance of extremist groups that promise a return to a purer, more honest model of governance. Though most people in a given country don't agree with the details of these groups' sociopolitical agendas, many do at least subscribe to their attack on an oppressive, corrupt status quo. Maybe this has a parallel in the rise of Trump in the US, many of whose supporters may not agree with his exact agenda but who like the way he attacks a corrupt system.
Saturday, December 3, 2016
Thursday, December 1, 2016
Third World Green Daddy 67: Sustainable Birthdays
A while ago I offered my thoughts on doing Halloween sustainably.
Here now are some of our experiences celebrating birthdays in a way that costs less and hopefully uses fewer natural resources.
You can start with creative invites. My wife sent these out for a cowboy-themed party. Though considering that she spent like a week making them, they're probably not the best low-cost, low-effort option.
You can make your own plates fun and goofy. This is a spider meatloaf my mom made for a birthday.
You or a nearby grandma can make your own cake
A few times we've broken down and paid to have someone make a special cake.
We almost always make our own pinatas, from Santa-shaped
to weird scarecrows
to Edward Gorey-looking dog/gargoyles
to creatures shaped more by available materials than by any prior planning.
What to fill the pinatas with? We've managed to avoid candy, albeit by replacing it with cheap plastic trinkets.
You can make your own paper confetti, which is also a thrill when it comes out of the pinata.
As for activities to keep kids busy, you can make a maze or a castle for them to play in
a rocket
or just strew boxes about for them to make their own inventions.
Balloons are surefire entertainment.
You can easily learn how to make balloon animals with a kit, and this is a good source of excitement and wonder, too.
If you're near a playground, just take the kids there for a while to play.
We did this once in Arlington, and parents were wowed. It was like the most novel thing they'd ever seen.
If you find old play equipment in the alley, hold on to it for your next Bday party, as we did with this basketball hoop.
More quiet activities can include puzzles
You can do reading time, and have kids draw in their own big books.
You can do papier mache masks, either as presents, party favors, or activities in their own right.
Little artesanal things like clay whistles work well for goodie bags, too.
The biggest hits we've had have been homemade puppet productions of favorites like Brown Bear Brown Bear, the Little Blue Truck, or Peter and the Wolf. For this you need an artistically-inclined grandpa and a lot of willing older siblings and cousins as puppeteers.
Here now are some of our experiences celebrating birthdays in a way that costs less and hopefully uses fewer natural resources.
You can start with creative invites. My wife sent these out for a cowboy-themed party. Though considering that she spent like a week making them, they're probably not the best low-cost, low-effort option.
Paper cutouts make for fun, cheap decorations.
And leis are a wearable decoration.
The food is easy to do yourself. Tacos are a good option.
Popcorn is an easy snack to pass around.
Having kids make their own pizzas has become a standby in our birthdays.
You can make your own plates fun and goofy. This is a spider meatloaf my mom made for a birthday.
Desserts? Having kids decorate cookies is always a hit.
Ditto for cupcakes
Note too the PB&J sandwiches cut out in fun shapes, and the fruit skewers.
You or a nearby grandma can make your own cake
We almost always make our own pinatas, from Santa-shaped
to weird scarecrows
to Edward Gorey-looking dog/gargoyles
to creatures shaped more by available materials than by any prior planning.
What to fill the pinatas with? We've managed to avoid candy, albeit by replacing it with cheap plastic trinkets.
You can make your own paper confetti, which is also a thrill when it comes out of the pinata.
As for activities to keep kids busy, you can make a maze or a castle for them to play in
a rocket
or just strew boxes about for them to make their own inventions.
Balloons are surefire entertainment.
You can easily learn how to make balloon animals with a kit, and this is a good source of excitement and wonder, too.
If you're near a playground, just take the kids there for a while to play.
We did this once in Arlington, and parents were wowed. It was like the most novel thing they'd ever seen.
If you find old play equipment in the alley, hold on to it for your next Bday party, as we did with this basketball hoop.
More quiet activities can include puzzles
They can make their own party hats or just draw on butcher paper on the floor.
One year we had a friend's daughter who is studying child development serve as the party coordinator. She made really cool stick horses as party favors for kids to take home.
