Disconnecting America

When we were kids growing up in what was probably a “lower-to-middle” middle class neighborhood in southeast Houston, we rarely thought about politics at any level. Carl does remember the JFK nomination and election when he was in the third grade, primarily because some kids were actually walking around the playground carrying signs that read “Kennedy.” Chuck remembers a Jimmy Carter town hall meeting around 1976 and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan as events that started his thinking about the US political process.

However, neither of us remembers politics particularly dividing the nation in the 60s and 70s. From the little we saw in those days, there were different philosophies, and of course the Vietnam War was a divider (with apologies to Clausewitz…we recall that war “is the continuation of politics (policy) by other means”!). But both parties usually knew when to say “that’s enough politics” and to put America first. That’s all changed!

We started this blog precisely because we do remember the days when politics might drive elections and guide policy, but it didn’t tear apart the nation so deeply that America actually became two nations: Redtopia and Bluedreamia. It was this tearing apart that convinced us we had to say something. As we contemplated this blog, all we saw was increasing acrimony across the aisle facilitated by partisan media organs that had just gone too far…it was getting so bad that America was becoming dysfunctional and the country we love was at risk.

What we thought of as personal experience and intuition when we started this blog came to light for us this month thanks to a Washington Post Op-Ed piece by Dana Milbank, titled online as America’s new cycle of partisan hatred. “Up until the mid-1980s, the typical American held the view that partisans on the other side operated with good intentions. But that has changed in dramatic fashion, as a study published last year by Stanford and Princeton researchers demonstrates,” Milbank wrote. As Milbank and the Stanford/Princeton study indicate, it’s worse than we thought. [1]

Occasionally it takes a long time to circulate important insights about the changing nature of the American electorate, given the study Milbank cites came out last June; however, the implications of this study are worthwhile nonetheless. This is no longer the 60s, 70s and 80s.

When we started the blog, perhaps we were guilty of still living in the good ole’ 80s. We thought the political divide that facilitated the edge-driven politics we’ve cited many times was created by office-seekers and power-hungry politicians who couldn’t find anything good to do for America. But, as Walt Kelly said in Pogo “we have met the enemy and it is us!” [2]

The authors of the study Milbank cites, Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood, claim that Americans have allowed politics to pull us away from compromise that led to the foundation of the United States and towards the edges that politicians do in fact exploit. “Our evidence demonstrates that hostile feelings for the opposing party are ingrained or automatic in voters’ minds, and that affective polarization based on party is just as strong as polarization based on race. We further show that party cues exert powerful effects on non-political judgments and behaviors. Partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, and do so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race.” [3] The American electorate is in cahoots with politicians in creating our disconnects and divides!

As the authors and Milbank note, partisan political discrimination has replaced race as the main reason for keeping Americans from the Center. This politically driven partisanship inhibits and now apparently disincentivizes the function of compromise and cooperation that has been the root of American success and national prosperity. Political partisanship is trumping putting America first, and American voters are enabling it whether by design or by neglect.

Milbank writes that “partisanship is more tribal than anything — the result of an ill-informed electorate.” As Westwood, one of the paper’s authors, told Milbank for his Op-Ed piece, “…most people understand their side is good and the opposing side is bad, so it’s much easier for them to form these emotional opinions of political parties.” Redtopia and Bluedreamia now form the basis for tribes that insist on fighting against each other rather than moving forward together for America.

This is saddening to say the least, and politicians feel perfectly free to exploit it: “elected officials and professional partisans then reinforce the tribal tendency in the electorate with overheated rhetoric, perpetual campaigns, negative ads and increasingly partisan media outlets,” Milbank notes from the Iyengar and Westwood study. [4]

In other important ways, the social fabric of America is changing as well. “Americans increasingly live in neighborhoods with like-minded partisans, marry fellow partisans and disapprove of their children marrying mates from the other party, and they are more likely to choose partners based on partisanship than physical or personality attributes,” Milbank continues.

Instead of using the Connected Age to bring us closer together as a nation, our political tribes and those we elect to represent us use information age technologies to disconnect us across political party lines. Yes, this is most saddening indeed. The Connected Age is tearing us apart when it comes to politics.

What is the answer?

Sadly, it is almost impossible to write anything that won’t seem hopelessly naïve given the situation in which America finds herself, but here’s a stab. America: sober up! The right and the left edges driving politics today might be best viewed as drug pushers that are willing to take the nation down for their own short-sighted, selfish goals. To enhance their power, they feed us edge-driven ideological hallucinogens that reinforce and even build our fears and insecurities.

Just as we have had “Just say no” drilled into us in the past, it now seems time to “Just say no to extremism and personal attacks.” Our nation is truly at stake. Anytime a politician personally attacks his or her opponent, push away.

In our youth, we don’t recall many people personally attacking Presidents Ford, Carter or Reagan, as much as making light of them. There weren’t serious efforts to dehumanize them. Sure there were disagreements about policy, but we didn’t see nearly the same level of personal attacks we commonly witness today.

Since our politicians refuse to be adult, it is up to the voters to be “the adults in the room.”

Again, at the risk of being naïve, just say no to extremism and personal attacks. Could it be as simple as civility? We’d love to hear from readers…let us know if we’re off-base here!

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 4/22/2015.

[1] The news story of this study was also reported in The Stanford News as “Political animosity exceeds racial hostility, new Stanford research shows,” 10/4/2014 and “What Is Really Tearing America Apart” in an NPR blog post, 10/15/2014, by Linton Weeks.

[2] This quote was apparently originally provided by Walt Kelly for an Earth Day poster in 1970, something that seems appropriate given the publication date for this post.

[3] Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood, “Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization,” June 2014.

[4] The restraints against this type of socio-political disconnect are self-feeding. Milbank continues in his Op-Ed: ‘“Unlike race, gender and other social divides where group-related attitudes and behaviors are constrained by social norms, there are no corresponding pressures to temper disapproval of political opponents,” they (Iyengar and Westwood) conclude. “If anything, the rhetoric and actions of political leaders demonstrate that hostility directed at the opposition is acceptable, even appropriate. Partisans therefore feel free to express animus and engage in discriminatory behavior toward opposing partisans.”

Washed-Up Thinking

by Carl W. Hunt

My wife and I are fortunate to live near the beach. As I’ve described before, we live in Lewes, Delaware, where the Atlantic Ocean and the Delaware Bay meet at Cape Henlopen. The bay and Cape Henlopen were first discovered by Henry Hudson; none other than William Penn, the first governor of the Pennsylvania colony, set aside Cape Henlopen to be a family “park” in the designation of some of the first public lands in America.

We can walk to Lewes Beach on the Delaware Bay side, but have to drive or bike to the Atlantic beach at Cape Henlopen State Park. We often find sea glass or pottery from sunken ships washed up on the shore…walking the beaches and looking for these simple treasures are a pleasurable pastime for us as coastal residents. This week we found a piece of well-weathered green sea glass washed up on the bay-side of Cape Henlopen Point. This discovery struck me as symbolic of what my brother Chuck and I have intended to demonstrate with Reconnecting to the American Promise.

In addition to just walking on the beach, bloggers are often inspired to write about news events or commentaries they’ve recently read…sometimes we feel compelled to make our thoughts known relative to our frame of reference. I found a bit of inspiration from that piece of sea glass and a commentary I read this week for work, tilted “The Menace of Menace” by Anna Simons, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School.

The observant reader might note the small seashell trapped in the mouth of the bottle-top of the glass my wife and I found. Perhaps the small creature originally in this shell simply got lodged within the glass by the movement of the water in the bay, or perhaps it sought protection and wedged itself in. In any event, this shell was not going anywhere without being damaged if was removed…it was stuck.

According to Anna Simons, America is stuck in a cycle of thinking and acceptance of being stuck that is damaging our present and dimming our future. This thinking cycle is disconnecting us from the American Promise.

Simons, an anthropologist like our friend Larry Kuznar (author of two posts in this blog), describes our thinking in the context of the “menace” of terror and violence that America and the West have helped to promulgate in the veil of social structures that exist today. “By having helped market to the world the notion that menace is an acceptable lifestyle choice, we have helped make atrocities more rather than less likely” Simons writes.

I had to go back and make sure I knew the dictionary meaning of “menace” to confirm I understood Simons’ use of the word, and in terms of what the social thinking of America and the West in this generation has empowered, she nailed it. We don’t use the word today as much as we have in the past, but the word is appropriate to the current age. Dictionary.com defines menace as “something that threatens to cause evil, harm, injury, etc.; a threat” or “a person whose actions, attitudes, or ideas are considered dangerous or harmful.”

Simons continues “We Americans have come to lionize menace on the big screen, the small screen, and the computer screen, in the music industry, the fashion industry, and the sports industry. Look at how legions of Americans dress, and listen to how they talk—with expletive-laced vitriol…It is not just those who portray menace, but also those who produce and direct menace-as-entertainment.”

I’m old-fashioned…I admit it. I find the “expletive-laced vitriol” as part of everyday language difficult to take. If this and “menace-as-entertainment” have become as mainstream as Simons writes, America is indeed supporting the acceptance of menace as a socially acceptable behavior and it’s pouring over into the rest of the world without our realizing it. This collective social acceptance is not only disconnecting our own people from the American Promise, it’s disconnecting the rest of the world.

There are probably several underlying causes of this social trend in America, but one stands out that’s consistent with this blog’s published philosophies about small towns and community-based living. Simons notes that “one downside to so few of us living in small-scale, face-to-face societies, villages, or communities is that bad social actors used to be objects of withering scorn and thus served as object lessons for how to not behave.” This is really important because it suggests the critical need for communities to be cohesive, be socially responsible and to police themselves.

Behaviors generated from the lower levels upward are the true builders of culture and society. This is right in line with what our friends Wayne Porter and Puck Mykleby have published in the National Strategic Narrative, also a source of blog posts for RAP.

According to Simons, we’ve stopped thinking about our responsibilities in growing good communities and culture in America and have let our society slip away as we accept and even nurture the growth of menace in the world. That’s where we as a nation have drifted in the wrong direction and gotten stuck in the sea glass, as it were.

It’s not too late to get unstuck, Simons writes: “…the only effective way to rescue future generations here and abroad from further innovations in crude violence…is to make less of menace. Otherwise, without doing something about the proliferation of this meme, the menace from menace will only intensify.”

To that, I would add that this acceptance of menace has washed up on our shores, just as that piece of sea glass, and we need to toss it right back into the water and get back to Reconnecting to the American Promise. Let’s not get stuck in washed-up thinking.

Originally posted by Carl W. Hunt, 2/8/2015.

Momentum Misplaced

by Carl Hunt

Well, I’m actually talking about two kinds of momentum in this long-delayed post: the momentum slipping away from the Founders’ dream; and admittedly my own. As the primary author of this blog, it’s my responsibility to find the motivation and momentum in “my inner being” to post something meaningful at least once a month…that was the goal starting this out last February.

Events of the past two months dampened my motivation a wee bit. I didn’t lose it…I just misplaced it. Chuck, my brother and coauthor, and I will find it again soon (see the ending of this post), but for the time being, I’m afraid it’s lying underneath a pile of books and papers on my desk.

One reason for that pile on my desk is that I was fortunate to get back to a paying job. Since this new work is for the United States government, Chuck and I have been trying to figure out what we can say and how we can say it while still making the occasional comment (blog post) about how much America has been disconnected from its promise and its leaders.

We still passionately believe in our nation and the experimental system that was put in place in 1789 to make it work in a world that was quite unsteady at the time. In spite of our politicians’ hubris today in thinking they know better about how to run a government in 2014 than the Framers did back then, it’s still an experiment…the world is no less unsteady today either. Americans lose track of that too often.

The bottom line is that the Framers developed a way of thinking about national and international affairs that was novel for their time; that’s why their approach was different than anything other nations were doing in the late 18^th Century. Our politicians, courts and statesmen need to do the same thing for our time.

In truth, the United States is more of a laboratory for freedom, security and prosperity now than it was 225 years ago. This is a big factor in why we gravitated towards documents like The National Strategic Narrative by Wayne Porter and Puck Mykeby. As we noted, the “Narrative” recognizes the need to become more flexible and adaptive in this day and age and restart a dialogue among Americans about what’s important today. The Narrative offers to reexamine the empirical evidence we’ve gathered during the first 225 years of our nation’s “Great Experiment.”

Now on to my momentum misplacement: I won’t say that the election of November, 2014 inhibited my momentum but it does give me pause when I hear certain politicians say “the American people have spoken.” The evidence I observed in the post-election analyses indicated that most of the American people in fact did not speak (at least very loudly, not at 39.6% of the eligible electorate). For either party to keep claiming that “the American people have spoken” when so few actually did is childish and speaks to how poorly our politicians are at motivating Americans to be a part of our experiment.

That really shouldn’t be a momentum killer for any of us, however. It should offer us all a challenge to embrace the experimentation of our Founders and Reconnect to the American Promise. This is where our politicians should also be focusing: creating new and fresh opportunities for more people to succeed in achieving the American Promise and be part of our nation’s experiment. This is how our nation will regain the momentum our Founders established.

As for me, I’ll start clearing my desk more often and find my own momentum again. In fact, my friend Walt Natemeyer, about whom I wrote last March, has agreed to team up on a blog post soon that will address two important functions of leaders, political and otherwise: creating shared vision and developing a framework for common agreement, both critical duties of leaders that those in our Congress have apparently forgotten in recent years. Chuck and I are looking forward to collaborating with Walt on this project.

A Postscript: A bit unrelated to the post above, we just read a New York Times blog post entitled “Social Media Deepens Partisan Divides. But Not Always.” This post was based in part on a slightly dated paper called “Ideological Segregation Online and Offline” (which does offer empirical evidence, by the way…the kind of evidence that politicians should also be looking for). Both pieces were encouraging, particularly about our younger Americans. It appears that the battle between polarized media outlets may not be as good for channelizing Americans as some politicians had hoped. That’s good news for all of us as it offers to keep alive our critical need to Reconnect to the American Promise.

Originally posted by Carl W. Hunt, 11/21/2014.

The American Promise and “World Order”

by Carl W. Hunt

This week, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reviewed another former Secretary of State’s latest book, expressing some insights common to those we publish in Reconnecting to the American Promise. Clinton published a thoughtful book review of Henry Kissinger’s book World Order, comparing the chaos of past and present world events. [1] 

This RAP post is not specifically a review of Kissinger’s book but more a review of Clinton’s review. While her appraisal of Kissinger’s book is enlightening, so are Clinton’s thoughts about how the America of today must meet our own obligations to our people while continuing to inspire a world in which enlightened leadership is so desperately needed. [2]

The contrasting and complementary reflections of a Secretary who served a Republican administration during the more global Cold War and a Secretary who served a Democratic administration during several regional hot wars are interesting. According to Clinton’s review, there are actually more complementary thoughts than contrasts. And, there are significant agreements between their perspectives that are worth noting in light of the theme of RAP.

Perhaps paradoxically, RAP has not sought to discuss a great deal about world events, preferring to address issues related to helping America focus more on equal access to opportunity and the political environment that we need to bring about that focus. That, along with restoring the voice of the American Center, comprises the key principals of RAP. It was gratifying to see that Hillary Clinton’s review emphasized that as well: “Sustaining America’s leadership in the world depends on renewing the American dream for all our people,” she wrote in her Washington Post book review this week.

We’ve created a distinction between the American Promise and the “American Dream” in this blog, primarily to emphasize the leadership responsibilities of our elected officials to both create and enforce access to opportunity. In other posts, we’ve commented on the failures of our politicians in that area, so no need to dwell further there.

The main point here and in Clinton’s review is that ensuring opportunity for Americans is central to our nation’s ability to inspire, lead and even motivate other nations in the world to embrace what both she and Kissinger called a “bipartisan commitment to protecting and expanding a community of nations devoted to freedom, market economies and cooperation” that worked successfully during the Cold War.

Thanks in large part to an America that has politically curtailed the concept of domestic cooperation in the last few years, it’s hard to know if we still actually maintain that kind of globally-focused bipartisan commitment Clinton discusses. After all, bipartisanship is a word rarely used to describe American political leadership any longer. In fact, it would appear we’ve forgotten as a nation not only our responsibilities globally but also nationally in terms of bipartisanship and cooperation in an increasingly chaotic world as described by both Clinton and Kissinger.

This is the sad point that we’ve not addressed in RAP: the danger in forgetting these responsibilities to act in a bipartisan way is not just to America (and its failure to fulfill the American Promise of access to opportunity), but it’s also to the rest of the world. The dangers we create in pulling away from the responsibilities we’ve met in past times of global chaos affect the world in significantly different ways today. Kissinger and Clinton both point this out with their insights about globally distributed social media and diverse and diffused political perspectives.

However, when it comes to ultimately recognizing and discharging global responsibilities, America in the past has indeed been the leader. There is just no other nation in the history of our world that can meet these responsibilities – as Clinton and Kissinger both point out, that’s just the way it is!

In this day and age, America is the only nation that can “relate ‘power to legitimacy’” Clinton writes, quoting Kissinger’s book. That’s an enormous responsibility, burdened by the pull of the chaos that exists in this world today. But, we are the only nation that can take on this responsibility and help ensure both our own national security and freedoms and help the world see the value in emulating some of our better nature.

Most importantly, we can only live up to these responsibilities on a framework of cooperative and collaborative bipartisanship here in American government (at all levels). That has been the enduring theme of Reconnecting to the American Promise. This time, however, we need to look at this theme through the lens of America at home and abroad…we certainly will in the future.

Originally posted by Carl W. Hunt, 9/7/2014.

Notes:

[1] World Order is scheduled to be released Tuesday, 9-9-2014, by Penguin Press.

[2] In my cursory examination of various other reviews of Kissinger’s book, I found a gamut of perspectives that included critiques that Kissinger was calling for America to form a new “world order.” As a graduate of the US Defense Department’s National War College in 2003, and recalling the readings of Kissinger at the time, I don’t think that’s what he’s saying…I’ll have to read the book to be certain, of course. But, by my review of Clinton’s piece in the Washington Post and a look at other online reviews, I think what Kissinger is pointing out is that a new “world order” is taking place whether America wants to be a part of it or not and that if we don’t figure out how to play a distinctly American role, as described by Clinton, this new “world order” will leave America increasingly irrelevant. In my view, failure to engage in any opportunity to shape an equitably beneficial “world order” should not be acceptable to any American.

* Image of World Order, courtesy of multiple book review sites, including Amazon.com, Google Books and Publishers Weekly.com.

Renewing American Vigor: Consumption and Production

In spite of the way this title may sound, this is NOT about renewing America by making and buying more “stuff.” This blog post accompanies the delivery of the RAP essay entitled “Renewing American Vigor: Transforming Consumption and Production.” After two months of promising this essay and drafting many versions, we decided to just post the draft as it is today, knowing we’ll never get it “perfect.”

The essay is several times longer than our typical blog posts, but it took a few more words to report on how production and consumption have led to the state of the American Promise today. Our intent is to demonstrate how transforming the production and consumption of “stuff” is at the heart of what we can do as individuals to regenerate and renew American vigor and potential to more broadly fulfill the American Promise.

The American ideal of possessing “stuff” has roots in the influence John Locke had on George Mason and Thomas Jefferson in their respective writings of the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the American Declaration of Independence. [1] We noted this in a post that introduced what we called a Platform for RAP (called FAPITCA at the time).

Our essay on production and consumption in America shares these roots. We’ve also sought to expand the discussion to talk about sustainability of the American Promise and way of life through smarter production and ownership of property and ideas in light of what’s possible today. We address consumption, production and “ownership” of ideas as additional items of “stuff” we sometimes tend to hold on to all too long.

The essay traces an important part of the story of how Americans think about the acquisition and possession of “stuff” (again, where “stuff” means both physical and intellectual possessions). We go back and cite previous work in this area by Betty and Mike Sproule, and Annie Leonard, as we’ve previously written about in “…and our Posterity…”. Their work introduces important driving forces that have led to the challenges we have with production and consumption in America. The essay also introduces the role of marketing and investing in the world of American consumption.

Since this blog is about America in the Connected Age, we devote a good deal of the essay to how we might harness the tools of information technology to transform consumption and production. As we note in the essay, the “problem is that we have been unable to see the forest of opportunity in a new age of connectivity because all we can see are the trees that compose our individual relationships to the present and the future.” We make the case for the imperative of leveraging information technologies available to us today.

Additionally, we revisit one of our very favorite authors in American history and culture, John D. MacDonald, creator of the well-known “Travis McGee” series of novels. It turns out that the ol’ beach bum Travis and his sidekick, Meyer, had a lot of insight about America today even though they talked about an America of 40-50 years ago. [2]

Finally, we wrap up the current version of the essay with a review of some highly pertinent insights from our friends Wayne Porter and Puck Mykleby, the authors of A National Strategic Narrative. We’ve written about Wayne and Puck’s work in several previous posts, but in the essay we try to tie some of their relevant thoughts to the ideas of transformed consumption in America. Thanks to Wayne, Puck and Betty Sproule for making the Narrative so accessible!

Note that we call this the “current version of the essay.” This simply means that we understand an undertaking like the essay can only be a draft in the Connected Age. Our networked world changes quickly and an essay about production and consumption in America needs to maintain some level of fluidity, as well. This also means that we intend for our readers to help us maintain this essay through their comments and edits. We mean this…please help us make this essay better!

We hope you find value in the time you might invest in “Renewing American Vigor: Transforming Consumption and Production.”

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 9/4/2014/.

Notes:

[1] As noted in the essay, George Mason even had designs on transforming American consumption back in September, 1787, while the Constitutional Convention was wrapping up the final drafts of the Constitution.

[2] Contemporary mystery and adventure fiction readers who enjoy novels by Carl Hiaasen and Lee Child (“Jack Reacher”) will appreciate their respective Forewords in the last two re-releases of the “Travis McGee” series.

Reconnecting to the American Promise

Change is good, or so “they” say. We had enough comments from “they” that we made what we think is a significant change to the blog. We hope it’s a good one (or “they” will probably let us know again!).

The change, as demonstrated by the new page titles, is of course streamlining the name of the blog to Reconnecting to the American Promise (RAP) from Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age (FAPITCA).

There’s no question that the acronym is shorter, as well as easier to pronounce, but it may even be closer to the truth we hope to talk about in the blog: throughout its over two centuries of existence, America was indeed connected to the promise of its origins, we started losing that connection in the last few decades, and now we as a nation finally recognize we need to reestablish our connection to the American Promise.

If we don’t reconnect Americans to the American Promise, pretty soon there won’t be an America that our Founders would recognize. That’s what we want to talk about in the future as well as build on the foundation of the first sixth months of the existence of this blog.

That’s right…we’ve been doing FAPITCA, now RAP, for over six months now and this is the 39^th posting. When we started, we didn’t know how long we would try to tell the story of America and its Promise, but we’ve had just enough interest and participation that it seems more than reasonable to keep going.

With almost 50,000 words published, we hope we’ve appropriately reflected on the failings in today’s elected leadership to keep Americans connected to the American Promise, while we’ve pointed to the hope the future of America in the Connected Age offers. We’re hardly out of the woods, but new generations of Americans, growing up with Connected Age technologies and thinking are now poised to help us get back on track. We just need to make sure our young people understand what’s at stake.

Our hope and our objectives for RAP are to keep telling the story of an America reconnecting to the original hopes and dreams of our Founders as we leverage the spirit and vigor of our youth. With your continued help, we’ll keep telling that story. It’s definitely time to Reconnect to the American Promise!

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 8/25/2014.

Thomas Paine: IT Legend of the 70s (1770s, that is)

by Carl W. Hunt

In the 21^st Century, we “moderns” tend to view technology, and most specifically information technology, as both the harbinger and the facilitator of a revolution in life. Search companies help us find information immediately, hardware companies deliver incredibly fast processing and presentation capabilities and software companies find ways to make information easy to store, access and manipulate. The revolution in information technology has been astounding!

What hasn’t been so astounding or particularly revolutionary is what this information really says and how it touches us as Americans who are still part of a great revolutionary experiment started 238 years ago. Apart from the scientific insights that modern IT has packaged and presented to a more widespread audience, and the promise of revolutions in medicine, transportation and robotics, where are the great ideas about social change? And I don’t mean Facebook or Google+!

The ideas and concepts that have been pushed around through modern IT haven’t been nearly as revolutionary as those of one Englishman who did as much as any Founding Father to set America on an enduring and revolutionary course of its own. [i] Of course, this revolutionary master of IT in the days of the Founders is Thomas Paine. [ii]

Thomas Paine in his role as an early information technologist and yes, revolutionary, is a merger that we need today more than ever. America and its “revolution” in IT could use someone who could think about America’s future and articulate those ideas in ways that haven’t been before: that was a hallmark of Thomas Paine.

Common Sense: We Still Need It!

Source Data Below.

Perhaps where we’ve erred the most in recent years in establishing and maintaining good governance in America is by letting it get too complex, too big and too convoluted. In Common Sense, Paine wrote “I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature which no art can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered.” If we revisited and even “rewrote” Common Sense today, that principle of simplicity would endure, even in a nation of over 318 million.

But, we would still have government lest anarchy prevail, a point that Paine also made. Government is more than a necessary evil, as Paine wrote about the British government (and government in general), and we would do well to follow his “common sense” advice about how we move forward with our own government today.

Paine originally wrote that representatives of the people to the government should be direct representatives, thereby giving the electorate more say in those that governed them. In a nation closing in on 320 million people, that won’t work as well today as it might have in 1776, but that’s where “common sense” IT could come into play.

Back in April, Chuck and I wrote about Harnessing the Tools of Collaboration. Our nation has made dramatic progress in pioneering and implementing collaborative IT tools that have started to change government for the better.

Unfortunately, these tools haven’t changed politics for the better. Government, as an abstract entity outside politics, is poised to harness the tools of collaboration. Politics harnesses the tools to seek gain for the party’s objectives and enhance reelection potential. In America, the government and politics coevolve and today, politics have been the dominant force. I think Thomas Paine would say that’s just not “common sense.”

It’s way past time to go back and reread Paine and the Founders to see how Common Sense guided the formation of our nation and made it possible to get through our very rough first century and endure through this century.

What’s Holding Common Sense Back Today?

Perhaps the single greatest inhibition to a return to “Common Sense” in government today is a stark lack of courage. Our laws in 2014 are a hodge-podge of patches that sometimes don’t even reflect the original problems they were meant to address: Tax, Transportation and Immigration laws being three of the worst collections of such “fixes”. Our elected leaders, mostly in Congress, refuse to address fundamental rewrites of these laws that reflect 2014 rather than 1914 (1814?) for fear of electoral backlash…gutless only begins to describe these “leaders” who somehow keep getting reelected! [iii] Add to that a tendency to bring more people into government to write, interpret and enforce these patchwork laws, and government gets even more complex. There’s no “common sense” here!

Another inhibition to a return to “common sense” approaches to government is a media that’s divided even more than our Congress, pandering to intellectual and geographic divides in an “arms race” to be more popular or sell more ads than their competitors. Okay, this is the American way, but without some level of “common sense” applied to the media, the American Way may disappear into islands of disconnectedness and lack of concern for a national entity that made the freedom of the press possible in the first place. Come on, media…get your act together and use some “common sense” to promote America rather than tear it down!

Source Data Below.

From a material standpoint, our systems of production and consumption have ceased to follow any recognizable pattern of “common sense” as well. Chuck and I already beat on this idea in past blog posts and the FAPITCA Platform, so there are only a couple of pointers in this post: here and here. But, Thomas Paine noted an interesting contrast about society and government that applies, writing that “Society is produced by our wants” (the essence of our production and consumption of both goods and ideas) with government serving as a constraint by “restraining our vices.” [iv] This indicates that government does in fact have some (at least a limited) role in moderating production and consumption so that the wants of society do not destroy all the resources that could be consumed in meeting those wants. That’s just “common sense” too!

If these appeals to look at America in the light of Thomas Paine as a revolutionary IT legend make sense, we’re way behind the power curve and we need to rebuild some “common sense” into American government now! To make these changes, and include a modernization of Common Sense, it’s worth going back and revisiting a blog post I wrote in April called A Narrative for our Nation and our Promise. The authors of the National Strategic Narrative provide some deep insights on how to move forward…these guys got it right and best of all, they used “Common Sense.” I think Thomas Paine would agree.

Originally posted by Carl W. Hunt, 8/22/2014.

[i] Chuck and I wrote a bit about Thomas Paine as an influential thinker of the American Revolution who appreciated the sacrifices and commitment of the Continental Congress in 1776, contrasting it to what he might think about today’s Congress. Unfortunately, Congress’s contributions to the American people have only been on the decline since we wrote that post in February.

[ii] Speaking of mastery of the IT of the time, Paine’s Common Sense sold over 500,000 copies in 1776, still the largest selling book in proportion to the population in American history, which was estimated at 2.5 million at the time. That’s some legendary IT there!

[iii] Obviously, President Obama did address Health Care in his first term, but neglected to embrace the input of the opposition party. This shortcoming has only been exacerbated by the political divide that makes it almost impossible to address the shortcomings in a sensible…”common sense”…fashion.

[iv] The actual quote from Common Sense, in context is: “Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.” Paine went on to write that “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil” but it is necessary in any event. A key premise of FAPITCA has been that government is necessary, but it does need to be done right, and in recent years it has not been done right. Also, remember that Thomas Paine was a revolutionary who successfully raised the issues but did not accomplish much at all when he was placed in positions of authority to fix the problems he identified (including government positions in England, France and of course, America)! As America has often been able to do, we must find and leverage the strengths of our people, in the right ways at the right time.

Image Sources:

Common Sense: Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Commonsense.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Commonsense.jpg

Lewes, UK Tavern Sign: “White Hart Paine plaque” by Sussexonian. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons; http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:White_Hart_Paine_plaque.jpg#mediaviewer/File:White_Hart_Paine_plaque.jpg. This commemoration of Thomas Paine is particularly significant in that Paine lived and developed many of his original ideas while living in Lewes, Sussex Country, UK, working for the local government…Lewes, DE, named for its UK sibling, is the author’s home.

Platform Part V: Education, Science and Culture (Section B)

subtitle: Enough with the Boring Blog Post Titles, Eh?

Larry Kuznar’s post about the failings of higher education last week deserved a better title than we gave it. It was a brave and outstanding piece written by someone who knows how higher education works in the nation today. Larry’s post also opened the door to express more of our own perspectives.

Larry’s post was part of the series on a Platform for FAPITCA we “cleverly” called Building a Platform, Part I, in which we introduced an outline for five “Planks” that a more center-focused “political party” could use to inform how our nation moves away from fringe- and edge-driven politics. [1] Recent posts, while titled with boring but semi-descriptive phrases, are all part of this Platform; after today’s post, we’ll have only one plank left. [2]

Most importantly, we’re indebted to Larry for challenging us with his example to open up more and try to express our feelings about America with less equivocation. This means no longer blaming both sides of the political spectrum equally with softly uttered descriptions, although we will endeavor to maintain balance and represent the Center as an attractor to the disillusioned in the Edges. [3] America needs these people at the Edges to come back towards the Center, post-haste…please! [4]

First, here are a couple of thoughts about how Larry’s post fits into the Science, Culture and Education plank of the FAPITCA: America is greatest when we support the sciences (and the arts, hence culture). Education for our upcoming generations is the singular best way to build and strengthen our contributions to both our nation’s and the world’s science and arts. [5]

Each of the planks of the FAPITCA Platform is proposed as part of a whole. This whole benefits from linkages between the planks through rich interacting network connections that leverage the Connected Age in which we live. The planks can even compensate for each other when one is working less well than we might hope. [6]

As Larry noted, education and the resultant growth of science and culture (and arts) that ensues from education are deeply interacting pieces of the plank that deserve constant attention and investment to sustain our future as a nation. Education must evoke critical thinking and problem solving capabilities in order to grow America. They combine and even coevolve to provide the basis for our “national seed corn.”

It’s a mystery to us how our American system of education has not been more greatly valued and received more investment and encouragement. Instead, the various education factions line up against each other and rail about how the other side’s approach is so wrong. The various sides’ capacity, if it exists, to listen to each other and compromise with our nation’s interests in mind could surely produce a better working educational system if only they really wanted to and cared enough about America’s future.

It’s sad to note that too many in our political parties have forgotten whatever lessons they learned in school about compromise and collaboration. How much longer are the two parties and their supporting factions going to refuse to work together so we can stop eating our seed corn?

While both parties are at fault in the realm of agreement, the rise and influence of entities like the so-called “Tea Party” faction and its ilk have aggravated the failure of our national capacity to compromise and cooperate. These groups, even if well intended, must get down off their high-horses and start cooperating a bit more…with BOTH parties. They need to use the education they received in the American school system to help us move forward, not backwards! [7]

In the last few decades, America has been at the global forefront in scientific discovery and technological development (which leveraged those discoveries in science, by the way). We’ve also led in social and cultural activities that changed the world in many places and pushed forward the role of higher education across the nation and the world.

As Larry pointed out, education in America has experienced challenges to continuing that momentum of the past. We’ve lapsed in how many levels of education stack up with the rest of the world. But, this is America…we can fix that. If we don’t, science and culture will also lapse!

Our biggest challenge is that we have to collectively rediscover the will to succeed as a nation…we have to want to fix education. We have to embrace the need to invest in our ability to do good science. Americans must desire to collaborate and exploit our science into even better technologies, cleaner environment, enhanced infrastructures and other improvements in our way of life. Most importantly, we have to feel the love in doing all of this for our children and their children. We think Americans really do want to do these things…so let’s do it.

Now, if we can only find better titles for our blog posts! We want to and we will!

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 7/16/2014.

NOTES:

[1] While we have been disparaging in our blog posts of the “Edge” and “Fringe” (the edge of the edge, as we like to label them) segments of American political parties throughout our posts, we do appreciate the paradox that they also apparently represent a source of real “out of the box” thinking about politics in this nation. In that regard, the Edges and Fringes might have a leg up on imagining new ways to govern and the rejection of the traps of excessive government and financial policy into which we’ve fallen as a nation through traditional politics. We strongly recommend the edges and fringes read Joseph Stiglitz’s recent book The Price of Inequality (or at least the essay of the same name at AlterNet) to better understand the effective role of government (as the Founders intended), rather than reject government outright.

[2] After this post and the final Plank post, we’ll finally post that essay on Transforming Consumption in America that expands on the second plank, again “cleverly” titled “Transform Production and Consumption.”

[3] So, some admissions: We are both moderately progressive, reformed semi-conservative types…sorry we can’t make a meaningful acronym out of that; perhaps we were really “radical moderates” as Elliot Richardson coined it in a book of the same name). One friend called Carl “socially progressive and fiscally conservative”…maybe that also works! The bottom line is that we’re not particularly happy with where the Edges of the Republican Party have taken our nation in the last decade or two, making issues of inane subjects that really should not affect how our nation moves forward in Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age. This is not to say that the Democratic Party is above the fray in promoting irrelevancy as well, but the Republican Party has not done well by America, perhaps even for the last 20 years. If only we could say the Democratic Party had done all that much better! As Adelson, Buffet and Gates wrote recently in Break the Immigration Impasse, “Americans deserve better than this” and “It’s time for 535 of America’s citizens to remember what they owe to the 318 million who employ them.”

[4] The bottom line here is that the Edges and Fringes (and apparently even the larger parties with which they are associated) could likely never come together sufficiently to champion opportunity for all Americans. At the rate we seem to be going, they probably could never be large enough to be a source of real change that enables maximum equal access to opportunity for all. Only the Center can act with enough mass and momentum to bring about that kind of change. A balanced Center that understands the importance of equal access to opportunity, and enforces it with their vote, will make the kind of difference America so desperately needs now.

[5] To ensure we can sustain such growth, we also commented on the need for protecting our environment and infrastructure…that one plank is tied to the success of all of the rest.

[6] The interacting principles of FAPITCA can also be viewed as a complex system that creates maximum resiliency and opportunity if used to inspire new thinking about governance in America.

[7] See footnote 1.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Platform, Part V, Section A: How Higher Ed Fails the American Promise

Editor’s Note: This post is part of the FAPITCA Platform series entitled: Sustain and Advance American Culture, Science and Education. Dr. Kuznar provides us a distinctive perspective on education in America.

By Dr. Lawrence Kuznar, Ph.D., Indiana University – Purdue University, Fort Wayne [1]

Higher education is central for Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age. This essay is one insider’s perspective on how higher education fails to deliver that promise to our next generation, and what can be done to correct this failure. [2]

The core of the problem is that higher education has become a system for issuing credentials (degrees), and not one that transfers the skills our next generation requires to serve themselves and our society in a globalized, interconnected world.

Consider three dimensions of the problem:

• Our upcoming generation needs to acquire a set of useful thinking skills from universities
• Our universities claim to confer these skills
• Universities actually provide something else

The system fails due to specific actions by faculty, administrators and students, and therefore integrated changes in their actions can solve the problem.

Desired Thinking Skills

Here’s the bottom line objective: Today’s college graduates need to be employed to be productive, and the skills employers desire are consistent with academic ideals that are applicable to both the world of work and responsible citizenship. This involves knowing how to think and how to learn (and keep learning and thinking)!

A couple of recent surveys (National Association of Colleges and Employers, Chronicle of Higher Education) [3] provide results consistent with other research on the skills employers want and need, and what graduates often lack. Some of the most important skills employers note lacking in college grads, and that would be most valuable in the modern workplace, include: verbal and written expression, time management, problem solving and decision-making.

What Universities Claim to Produce

Academics consistently insist a baccalaureate degree signifies that a graduate has acquired the time-honored skills of expression, critical thinking and love of learning. This is true for an elite research institution such as Harvard [4], and for a State-sponsored institution such as Indiana University – Purdue University, Fort Wayne, which serves typical middle Americans. [5] Yet, employers of recent graduates claim that these skills are lacking across the board. Something is wrong.

What Universities Really Confer

If students are not acquiring the skills that academics claim they teach, then what do students get from their universities? The answer is simple: a credential, the baccalaureate degree.  Universities are more systems that confer symbols in the form of diplomas, and less like institutions that educate the next generation.

The Problem: Why Don’t Students Learn?

Universities fail to educate and prepare the next generation to lead our society because education has become a tertiary objective at best. Arum and Roska’s 2011 Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses is an honest and sound analysis of higher education’s failings. They administered a widely accepted test of expression and critical thinking to thousands of college students across the spectrum of higher education institutions. They found that students demonstrated only marginal gains in these skills since high school, and those gains were directly proportionate to the amount of time students spent reading and writing for their class requirements.

The problem is not that students are lazy. They spend a lot of time socializing, working and even serving their communities. What they do not do is spend much time studying because educators do not require much reading and much writing on behalf their students.

Arum and Roska keenly point out that over the past several decades, an agreement has tacitly emerged between faculty and students: “Don’t bother me and I won’t challenge you.” Students responded as consummately rational actors, allocating their time efficiently to gain their credential, the degree, with the least effort possible. We have incentivized students to earn credentials, and de-incentivized them to learn.

Why don’t my colleagues and I require students to read, process and think? It is because that would be valuable time taken away from our research, our ever-increasing administrative duties, and other academic activities. There is a triumvirate involved in this systemic failure. Administrators focus on creating new programs and increasing graduation rates, faculty concentrate on research accomplishment, and students efficiently gain the benefit we taught them to value, the degree.

In the end, everyone gets what they want (or think they “want”), but the students are robbed of a genuine education and our society is robbed of an upcoming generation prepared to meet the challenges of a new, interconnected and globalized world. We rob our future of the thinkers our nation so desperately needs!

The Solution

The solution is daunting, especially given how administrative, faculty and student goals interact to create an agenda that subverts the real educational mission…this substituted agenda has taken on a life of its own. [6]

Businesses in our modern economy demand smart, creative, communicative and sound-thinking employees and this should be used as incentive for positive change. To help things change, employers need to emphasize credentials less, and value evidence of thinking and the ability to express oneself effectively more in potential and desired employees. This could be fed back into the cycle through more active support of effective universities on the part of employers.

There is some progress. Some employers are starting to scrutinize the whole applicant and some universities are helping students develop portfolios as a means of demonstrating their skills. However, we need a tighter focus, and real education.

The successful Berlin model [7] that required educators to be current in their fields by engaging in active research has metastasized, practically turning many of our universities into for-profit research institutes. Teaching at these institutions is often denigrated, and graduate students are socialized to avoid and dislike the classroom.

In order to avoid this distraction and refocus the system on education:

• Faculty and administration must balance the emphasis between research, teaching and service in meaningful ways when evaluating faculty for tenure, promotion, and compensation.
• Time spent productively challenging and interacting with students should be rewarded and not punished. If so, I am pretty sure many of us would focus more time on challenging students and not merely mollifying them.
• Graduation rates should not dominate the metrics used to calculate state and federal support.
• Instead of using graduation rates, the teaching component in state and federal funding formulae needs to measure actual learning and intellectual development, not credentialing. An educated public can prevail upon legislators to change those formulae.

As for the students in this new focus on education, they just need to be themselves. Our next generations have always risen to a challenge, and they continue to do so today: that’s an American legacy that still works! Unfortunately, the older among us have forgotten that legacy and have stopped truly challenging our young learners in productive ways.

The problems with our higher education system genuinely threaten our ability to sustain the American Promise. If we fail to recalibrate our higher education system toward learning and away from symbolic credentialing, then we fail to provide our next generation with the tools they need in a modern, globally interconnected world…the Connected Age. Ironically, these are timeless tools the ancient Greek founders designed and intended for higher education to deliver 2500 years ago. It’s time to get back to applying their wisdom to the future of America!

Originally posted by Carl Hunt, on behalf of Dr. Lawrence Kuznar, on 7/9/2014.

NOTES:

[1] Mariah Yager kindly produced graphics for this essay.

[2] I am a career university professor. I attended a large state institution for my undergraduate degree where I witnessed the shift from learning to credentialing, and then attended an elite research institution for my graduate work where I was socialized to focus entirely on research and to denigrate teaching. I have spent the past 24 years as a professor at an institution that primarily serves working class, first generation college students. The views I express are mine alone and do not reflect any official position of my university.

[3] National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) 2014, Job Outlook Survey https://www.naceweb.org/about-us/press/skills-employers-value-in-new-hires.aspx?land-surv-lp-3-prsrel-07042014; The Role of Higher Education in Career Development: Employer Perceptions https://chronicle.com/items/biz/pdf/Employers%20Survey.pdf.

[4] “To these ends, the College encourages students to respect ideas and their free expression, and to rejoice in discovery and in critical thought” http://www.harvard.edu/faqs/mission-statement.

[5] “IPFW values… a strong general education program and baccalaureate framework that emphasize critical thinking, promote lifelong learning” http://www.ipfw.edu/about/strategic-plan/mission-values-vision.html.

[6] While I am focusing on education, it is important to note that universities also have equally important research and service missions that cannot be ignored in any solution. While none of these missions can be neglected, education has been de-emphasized and thus fallen behind.

[7] Anderson, Robert (March 2010). “The ‘Idea of a University’ today”. History & Policy. United Kingdom: History & Policy. Retrieved 20 June 2014.

The Platform, Part IV – Environment and Infrastructure, Section A

Section A (again)[1]

How often do you hear “one thing leads to another” or it’s slightly cruder version “it’s just one damned thing after another!” That’s the way life seems: we just have to deal with one challenge or opportunity after another and hope our planning and preparation are sound enough to handle it.

The problem, of course, is that it’s not really the way life works today in the Connected Age. All too often, it’s really a bunch of “damned things” all happening at the same time!

Life in America is really about dealing with a lot of things that not only appear to happen at the same time, but also the many things that interact with each other. These interactions typically affect the outcomes of the other events that happen – some scientists call that complexity.

Whatever you call it, it makes anticipation and prediction pretty tough. That’s probably why Yogi Berra said that prediction is always tough, particularly when it’s about the future. Interaction of these “damned things” make it hard to understand what’s happening and what it means for the future. Nowhere is that truer than in trying to understand how people and ecosystems interact and what the consequences will be.

And, the modified “old adage” is really true when we try to understand how our environment and the infrastructure we’ve designed should work together. The intersection of the environment and our infrastructure in America is its own ecosystem. This merged ecosystem is perhaps the most potentially productive “system of systems” we have for progress in America: Mother Nature provides the one, and we provide the other.

Sustaining the Platform: Balance

This next topic in the FAPTICA platform deals with one of the richest and most difficult interactions we have to face in modern times: the interaction of our environment and our American infrastructure, as well as what it means to our quality of life and our future as a nation.

Just think about it: America is a complex ecosystem of diverse, interacting parts…it’s truly a lot of things all happening at the same time. An ecosystem works because it has interdependent parts that actually get along with each other well enough to produce growth and sustainment, even in the face of apparently simultaneous and self-serving actions.

Life works like that in culture, politics and families, too. As Americans, however, we’re failing more and more to get our “parts” working together enough to survive and grow. Good growth requires balance.

Throughout the FAPTICA effort, we’ve emphasized how important balance has been to our past successes as a nation and to our future. We need balance in our culture, society and political system…balance that helps to heal disconnects between our habitats, our societal dysfunctions and the environment in which we live on this world.

Ecosystems find this balance somehow or they perish. The ecosystem of environment and infrastructure sustain a working balance, or they would if we don’t ignore or abuse them. Today, the American ecosystem is losing its balance in so many ways that it’s getting harder and harder for us to find a common path to the future that all of our age groups can appreciate and in which they can find hope and mutual support. Protecting our environment and nurturing our infrastructure…keeping them in balance…builds that path to the future.

If you’re looking for a prime example of how our balance is off-kilter, think about what we call habitats, more specifically human habitats. This means where we live, raise our families, participate in our communities, find inspiration, and make a living. All of these things are part of our habitat.

As Americans we are squeaking by, some better than others, but the sad thing is that we probably know more about (or at least agree on) the habitat needs of white-tailed deer or horseshoe crabs than we do about human habitats. At this point in our American story, we seem to ignore our own habitat needs just as we ignore the environment and neglect our infrastructure.

Thinking a little more about human habitat, suppose you could “ask” a deer or any other living thing, (metaphorically speaking, of course) if living in an apartment surrounded by concrete on a busy highway is a good habitat. Apart from it being the only affordable place available, why we would we do this to ourselves? If deer could talk, surely they’d tell us “Don’t live like that – take better care of yourself, your family and the world that sustains us all!” If you forced a deer to live in that kind of hardscrabble setting, it would almost certainly suffer a premature death after experiencing significant dysfunction—stress, illness, malnutrition, etc. Oh wait – that’s what happens to people!

Unfortunately, humans often ignore their instincts and create and live in unfavorable habitats that fail to tap the promise of effectively synergizing our environment and infrastructure. Humans too can suffer a premature death after experiencing significant dysfunction—stress, illness, obesity, malnutrition, depression, chemical dependencies, family strife, crime…the list goes on. More and more it appears our habitats contribute to many of our leading societal ills, including political and societal woes.

Jan Hauser, a long-time consultant to FAPITCA notes “where we live, how we live, and what we demand creates situations of such complexity that any single set of rules will not suffice, and understanding what the key important factors are creates what is all too often a daunting problem.” Complexity scientists, such as previously quoted Harold Morowitz, might say “this is due to the complex and dynamical nature of various environmental factors and the complexity of adaptive bio-systems,” Jan points out. We’ll return in the future to this concept of a multiple “set of rules” since it also addresses the idea of sustainability and access to opportunity.[2]

Jan also adds that “much lip service has been given to ‘sustainability’ or ‘sustainable communities,’ but often times when we take a closer look, we find “greenwashing” or improvised models which omit or obscure important shortfalls.” Such shortfalls, Jan says “are usually a product of good human intentions, but are often incorrect due to a natural tendency for our typical thought patterns to unwittingly have many misrepresentations, omissions, and errors.”

Bottom line: the interaction of our environment and our infrastructure sustain the American society and our failure to recognize this and make good long-term decisions to correct our shortfalls practically ensure we will lose balance in America. We’ll also talk more about contemporary ideas on decision-making as a function of maintaining balance and creating opportunity in the near future.

As with many problems we identify and propose as “critical” in FAPITCA, this challenge of balancing the protection of the environment with the need to generate and sustain infrastructure creates tough, tough narratives to understand yet alone resolve. In our next installment of this two-part post on “The Platform, Part IV – Environment and Infrastructure,” we’ll begin to look at how our recent history offers insights into approaching ways to leverage and protect the synergies we seek between environment and infrastructure in America. Until next time…

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 6/27/2014.

Notes:

[1] Yes, this is another 2-parter! Several of the FAPITCA Platform proposals exceed the commonly accepted length of blog post of around 1000 words (okay, 800-1000 words! Of course, we routinely bust that limit…sorry!). Since we’ve been successful in getting some outside expertise in some of these pieces, we want to ensure we take the space necessary to express relevant and diverse thinking. In this piece, we welcome Carl’s friend Jan Hauser. Jan has been a long-time advocate for looking at the environment and infrastructure in a synergistic light. His background is in the footnote below.

[2] Jan Hauser is a pioneer of developing and applying science and technology to business, social and environmental problems. He was formerly a principal (technology) architect at Sun Microsystems and a visiting professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. Jan is also responsible for Sun Microsystems joining The Santa Fe Institute and has lectured at the Smithsonian Institution on “Complexity and Gaia” a topic closely related to this post. He periodically spends time working on the difficult and complex problems of “Global Sustainability” (see www.janhauser.com). Editor’s Note: speaking of the Naval Postgraduate School, these ideas about environment and infrastructure also reflect inspiration from the National Strategic Narrative, quoted previously in FAPITCA posts.