We swoop in for our first interstitial episode in six months. Neil has the plague, but Micah and I talk about the future of The Conversation, our perpetual need to raise the project’s visibility, and our naïve hope for funding another season of production. In light of James Bamford’s conversation and my op-ed about digital liberties in Boing Boing, we talk about themes that aren’t connected: digital liberties, race, gender, and agriculture.

Artwork by Eleanor Davis.

Scott Douglas, III, is the Executive Director of Greater Birmingham Ministries, an interfaith organization in Birmingham, Alabama. GBM provides poverty relief, lobbies to reform Alabama’s state constitution, and has recently been active in opposing self-deportation laws.

My conversation with Scott is a powerful reminder that status quo ideas vary deeply based on location and that equality—or equity, as Scott prefers—remains just as cutting-edge of an idea today as it did fifty years ago. Like Roberta Francis, Henry Louis Taylor, and Carolyn Raffensperger, Scott takes us into the legal structures undergirding our society to find discriminatory systems that are felt more often than seen. History plays a major role in this episode and Scott offers a great account of how people perceive historical moments in the present and in retrospect.

You’ll hear strong connections with Chuck Collins and Mark Mykleby about wealth and security. Elsewhere, listen for a John Fife-style spiritual critique of the individualism prized by thinkers like Oliver Porter, Richard Saul Wurman, and David Miller.

Artwork by Eleanor Davis.

Our world exists on multiple, simultaneous scales. The increase in random, violent outbursts results, in part, from tensions created by changing geographic and social scales since the industrial revolution.

The world is too small: beginning with the steam engine and telegraph, accessibility has made the physical world feel smaller. All land is accounted for. The Earth has been mapped, enclosed, and made accessible through transit. For those who feel constrained by society, there is no escape. More recently, information technology has demystified much of the world. We can travel without motion, making the exotic cheap and commonplace. In the process, sharp cultural distinctions are slowly mellowing into global homogeneity—our inability to escape physically is becoming mirrored by our inability to escape culturally.

The world is too big: global population has increased hyperbolically, growing from roughly one to seven billion in the last century alone. Concurrently, we pack ourselves into cities (often forced by economic necessity) more tightly than at any previous point in history. The weight of our numbers devalues life and the immense volume of our creativity renders us unable to keep pace with the present. Inundated by a flood of our own species, we are forced to confront our limits in new ways, not only the limits of our empathy, but the eerie limits of our biology—our most creative thoughts are common to hordes of others and a quick search on YouTube exposes our most practiced talents as commonplace. Elsewhere, our greatest thinkers and most powerful organizations flail about in efforts to make sense of the world and, even when they command our respect, we view them with a tinge of contempt and pity. Everything is cliché. In the big picture, personal agency feels dead.

Trapped on a postage stamp-sized planet, suffocated by numbers, marching to the tune of bureaucracies seemingly conscious yet inhuman, our old explanatory narratives ring hollow and farcical. Millenarianism is debunked weekly, sending believers scurrying hysterically to the next phony apocalypse. Glassy-eyed pimps of techno-rapture sell an ill-conceived future that is always arriving yet never here, never satisfactory. Even war has been stripped of its phony pretension to meaning. It has been a long time since we’ve had the purposeful joy of killing Nazis and today our enemy is a vague concept defined by politicians we hate and mistrust. What are we left with? Plastic surgery and sacred underwear.

As our narratives implode around us and we are dwarfed by careening systems of our own design, we retreat into micro-narratives of control like bulimics exerting power over the most basic aspects of their lives. In its best manifestations, this control-drive can be sublimated into career, family, local community, or a fixation with health. It can be a positive interior journey that is spiritual, philosophical, or artistic.

There can also be micro-narratives that offer meaning through violence. Because state sponsored war is too anonymous and pointless (and probably scary) for the violent egoists among us, they hallucinate enemies at schools and marathons. With sufficient brutality, their personal micro-narrative can explode onto the media landscape and, briefly, give us a collective narrative. The Tsarnaevs, Lanzas, and Loughners of the world lust for this moment and bask in our attention—they’re living out a fantasy war with their own ludicrous grievances, foes, and justifications. They are desperate to impose this narrative arc on our post-narrative world, to be the story we talk about. They will do this if it means murdering innocents, psychologically destroying their parents and dying, broken and alone, on the concrete of a sidewalk or a cell.

All of these young men are sadists and might have been so in any era, but they are uniquely visible today because we inhabit a world which gives them nothing to believe in, no space to be feral, and constantly pricks their soft egos with reminders of smallness. In a disgusting twist of irony, their deranged bids to achieve meaning through violence only highlight their ultimate meaninglessness. Families will spend lifetimes grieving for irreplaceable and senseless losses, but the media will bury the spectacle (it’s really not a story) under a million fresh banalities, Twitter will revert to solipsism, and the shape of the world will remain unchanged.

We are all casualties of this world, not just because we could get shredded in the crossfire of another zit-faced madman, but because we encourage them. Even when our micro-narratives are satisfying, they don’t fulfill all of our needs. They can be repetitive, dull and, if we step back from them, lose their meaning entirely. Spectacles like the Boston Marathon bombing and ensuing shootout give us a break from routine, a common story, and a simple plot: there are clear villains and the solution is to kill or capture them. We get off on determining truth from gossipy tweets, cliffhangers, and the death of strangers. We bond over a common story with friends, delight in casting judgment, and quietly relish the horror—as long as the people we know are safe. “Voyeurism” doesn’t capture the perversity of our fascination with distant tragedies.

It is temping to glance back in nostalgia, to imagine a primitive and undeveloped time when we could naively enjoy the psychological comfort of big narratives, feel like we objectively understood reality, and go on a good adventure. Yet we know those eras were violent and senseless too, albeit for different reasons, and every one of today’s shooters could have been the foot-soldier burning your town. The answer is not to turn back the clock, but to focus on how our challenges differ from the past.

We live in a historical moment when we can no longer vent our worst element into an imperial army or spew them across the West as greedy and sanctimonious homesteaders. Unfortunately, coliseums are out of style, too. But we can reign in our love of simple, dramatic narratives and stop rewarding bloody outbursts with fawning attention. For those of us out of the line of fire, we could use our much-vaunted social media to start a conversation about the root causes of violence rather than titillating ourselves with the irrelevant details of an unfolding story. Should we examine class and social mobility? Depictions of violence in media? Gun control? The alienation of cities?

A real conversation would demand research and thought—neither of which we like—and comes with no guarantee of solving anything. But here’s the deal: talking about substantive issues can’t make things worse. With luck, the right conversation might even help us find better ways to ease the tension of a world that is too small and too large.

Chris Carter is a self-taught electrical engineer and founder of MASS Collective, a workspace in Atlanta, Georgia that combines hands-on learning, apprenticeship, and traditional education for students and makers of all ages.

We’ve talked about education with Mark Mykleby, Lawrence Torcello, and Andrew Keen, but our only conversation dedicated entirely to the subject was with Lisa Petrides back in the early days of The Conversation. Lisa’s work leaned towards research and the development of new educational models, but Chris is coming at the problem from a very different perspective—as an autodidact who felt underserved by traditional education systems.

This episode starts with a discussion of what MASS Collective is before moving into a discussion of creativity, critical thinking, and civic engagement. In an unexpected echo of Joseph Tainter, Chris leaves us with the image of systems—all systems, natural and social—described by a sine wave oscillating between order and chaos.

Artwork by Eleanor Davis.

Oliver Porter designs and implements partnerships between municipalities and corporations, allowing cities to privatize virtually all of their functions. Since his central role in incorporating Sandy Springs, Georgia in 2005, Oliver his moved on to advising numerous other American and Japanese cities through his consultancy firm PPP Associates and has authored two books, Creating the New City of Sandy Springs and Public/Private Partnerships for Local Governments. Before his work in urban privatization, he was an executive at AT&T.

Our conversation telescopes from micro to macro, beginning with the story of Sandy Springs’ incorporation and ending with an extended back-and-forth about the role of government, human nature, and American decline. You’ll want to keep Lawrence Torcello’s discussion of John Rawls in mind as Oliver and I discuss the biological and social lotteries—which segues into a contrast with Chuck Collins regarding safety nets and opportunity. Happiness and satisfaction come up as well and we discover a resonance between Laura Musikanski’s work and Oliver’s interest in making government more responsive to the electorate. Finally, we’ll revisit the question nagging at James Bamford: what is democracy good for if it chooses to undermine itself? Let’s be honest, nobody’s going to answer that question more succinctly than Winston Churchill.

Micah and I conclude the episode with a discussion of how Oliver’s themes relate to local/central and individual/collective tensions we’ve seen elsewhere in The Conversation. We’ll also touch upon declension narratives, opportunity and historical context, and return (twice) to Mark Mykleby’s aphorism that “our assumptions have become our truths.”

Artwork by Eleanor Davis.

Col. Mark “Puck” Mykleby is a former marine and co-author (along with Capt. Wayne Porter) of A National Strategic Narrative for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, a document that encouraged broadening the concept of defense to include sustainability. Currently Mark is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan policy institute dedicated to questions about the American future. We learned about Mark through our 41st interviewee, John Fullerton.

There are a lot of ideas packed into this episode: America as an organism in a strategic ecology, sustainability as national narrative that succeeds containment, and the broadening of sustainability to include everything from an engaged populace to new metrics for growth. Mark also talks about America’s lack of a society-wide conversation about the future and the difference between being a resident and being a citizen.

Topically, there are connections to Laura Musikanski’s work at the Happiness Initative, David Korten’s new myth, and John Fullerton’s financial thinking. You’ll also want to ponder the connection between Mark and Lawrence Torcello. Is Classical Liberalism the best path to achieving conversation?

James Bamford is an author and journalist who has written extensively about the National Security Agency. His books include The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and The Shadow Factory. He has also produced a documentary for NOVA on PBS. We learned about James last year through a Wired article about the NSA’s new data center in Bluffdale, Utah.

My conversation with James covers several topics that have been missing from The Conversation thus far: privacy, surveillance, and the threat of totalitarian government. As a result, this episode has few overt connections to the rest of the project, but there are underlying commonalities. From Chuck Collins to David Korten, we have heard thinkers concerned with hyperindividualism in its economic and social manifestations. On the other end of the spectrum, we have David Miller and Robert Zubrin who are worried about the possibility for collective regulation to dampen individual creativity and enterprise. James departs from all of these conversations and examines how the individual/community tension plays out in the realm of security and personal liberty.

Micah, Neil, and I conclude the episode with an attempt to better integrate James into the rest of the project. Somehow, this leads us into a discussion of what government is for and if an apathetic democracy is worth preserving.

John Seager is the President of Population Connection, formerly Zero Population Growth. Since its founding in 1968, Population Connection has been America’s largest grassroots organization dedicated to the question of overpopulation. Prior to his work at Population Connection, John worked for the EPA and in congressional politics.

Population is a regular theme in The Conversation but hasn’t been well developed in previous episodes. John remedies that. He also argues that overpopulation results primarily from gender inequality and a lack of access to affordable contraception—education and affluence matter, but they are secondary to equality. Combatting overpopulation is often thought of in centralized and draconian terms, but John feels that population levels will naturally plateau if individuals are allowed to freely choose the size of their families. Does this make you think of the Constitutional questions discussed in Roberta Francis’ episode?

Early in The Conversation, Alexander Rose mentioned his concern that a declining population could threaten our economic system. That question surfaced again, albeit in a slightly different guise, when I spoke to John Fullerton about the challenge of decelerating the economy—though we did not talk about population decline, it’s worth asking if our appraisals of corporate value assume a growing population.

Seager also gives us another perspective on the ideological purity and social pragmatism discussion that Neil and I had at the end of Gary Francione’s episode. Like Francione, Seager is a moral realist in certain areas—gender equality being one—but he also embraces incremental change and makes a case for the word “opportunism.” Are purity and pragmatism a false binary? Are they equally effective (or ineffective) modes of achieving social goals? Micah, Neil and I will talk about this more at the end of the episode.

One last connection to leave you with: Robert Zubrin. Zubrin claims that overpopulation is a false concept and that, with sufficient freedom and creativity, we can support ever greater populations. Does this make him at odds with Seager? Or does Seager’s emphasis on individual freedom and choice make his ideas compatible with Zubrin’s? We don’t know.

Artwork by Eleanor Davis.

Roberta Francis has been advocating for the Equal Rights Amendment for over thirty years, chairs the ERA Taskforce for the National Council of Women’s Organizations and administers equalrightsamendment.org. She has also been active with the New Jersey League of Women Voters.

There’s something ridiculous about needing to include the ERA in a project about the future—why didn’t we take care of this ninety years ago? If the ERA reminds us of anything, it’s that old ideas can remain new and common sense can be remarkably controversial. I will revisit this theme in my upcoming conversation with Scott Douglas of Greater Birmingham Ministries.

Roberta and I talk about why the ERA failed and why it’s still necessary to a population that, largely, believes sex equality is already guaranteed by the Constitution. We conclude by talking about the tension between individual and collective good, the role of government, and compromise. You will hear echos of Peter Warren, Lawrence Torcello and, in the last coda, John Fife.

Artwork by Eleanor Davis.

First, I maintain that being vegan is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being nonviolent. That is, we cannot claim to embrace nonviolence but continue to consume animal products, which necessarily involve violence, given that our best justification for doing so is that they taste good. There is no other compulsion or necessity. We certainly do not need animal foods for optimal health. Therefore, we cannot consistently claim to embrace nonviolence at the same time that we are participating directly in the unjustifiable suffering and death of sentient beings. Yes, there are other things that we should do to live a nonviolent life. But veganism is certainly the least we can do given that consuming animal products cannot be justified.

Second, as to the impossibility of living a perfect nonviolent life: I never denied that. Indeed, it would be absurd to do so. The most conscientious practitioner of nonviolence necessarily causes some harm. The point is that if we take nonviolence seriously, there’s a great deal of harm we could avoid with relatively little or no inconvenience to ourselves. So I was not proposing any “purity” with respect to nonviolence. I was simply saying that not being able to live a nonviolent life perfectly does not justify continuing to engage in violence that is easily avoided.

Third, although Jainism and other spiritual traditions inform my thinking about nonviolence, so do other things, such as moral realism. In any event, my theory about animal rights has never relied on any notions other than traditional philosophical concepts. Most of us accept that, other things being equal, the fact that an action results in the suffering or death of a human or nonhuman counts against that action for moral purposes. The imposition of suffering or death on a sentient being requires a justification and whatever else may suffice, pleasure, amusement, or convenience cannot suffice. To the extent that we do accept this basic moral idea—and, again, I think most of us do—we are committed to veganism.

Fourth, the idea that being “pragmatic” requires that we regard veganism as too “abstract” or “impractical,” and that we have to accept some utilitarian thinking and, perhaps, aim for better conditions for animals, misses the point. Because animals are property, human interests will always outweigh animal interests and animal welfare standards will, as a result, always remain low. That is, animals are chattel property and have only an economic value. It costs money to protect their interests and we generally do that only when we get an economic benefit. This ensures that welfare standards are always low and generally linked to the level of protection necessary to exploit animals in an economically efficient way. Think about it: we have had animal welfare for 200 years now and we are exploiting more animals in more horrific ways than at any time in human history. So I would regard the utilitarian approach as profoundly unpragmatic!

Fifth, “tipping point” studies indicate that we need only to get about 10% of the population to accept veganism as a moral baseline before that belief becomes widely accepted in the society. When we consider this, along with the undisputable facts that animal agriculture is destroying the environment and is detrimental to human health, promoting veganism as a moral baseline is most pragmatic.

Sixth, both of you seem to assume that going vegan is difficult. On the contrary, it’s extremely easy and far less expensive than a diet involving animal foods. A minute—literally—on the Internet will produce thousands of healthy, inexpensive, and easy recipes.

So Aengus, Neil: are you vegan yet?

If not, it’s because you don’t want to be, and not because there’s any inherent difficulty in consuming a diet of fruits, vegetables, grains, beans, and nuts, or because there’s any tension between theory or practice, or because going vegan requires that you accept a “pure” version of nonviolence.

Gary L. Francione
Board of Governors Professor of Law
& Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Distinguished Scholar of Law and Philosophy
Rutgers University School of Law
Gary L. Francione