My body my choice

Some recent serendipity has brought memories of time with my grandchildren this summer and concern over rising individualism in our society to the forefront of my mind.

Kinship experience

A commentary by Deacon William T. Ditewig, Ph.D. on the Limits of Choice, Personal Freedom and the Common Good concludes “The bottom line is that “my body, my choice” is an inadequate and flawed argument no matter who makes it.” 

My personal freedom extends only as far as the personal freedom of others. At some point, the moral choice is to surrender a measure of personal freedom for the common good of all. Consider how we veterans are often greeted: “Thank you for your service!” It is acknowledged that, as a class of people, military personnel put their own personal freedom aside to a degree in order to benefit their comrades and the country. Taking the vaccination, even under a mandate, is less about one’s personal good than it is about the good of others.1

When we look at vaccination through the slice of reality that concentrates on scientific analysis and focuses on what we can measure with our traditional senses most of the Canadian population accepts vaccination as a means to reduce the “viral load” in the population, reduce the chances of the unvaccinated acquiring serious infection, and reduce the pressure on our health care system of over crowded ICU’s and exhausted health care workers.

Thinking about the time with my grandchildren, two of whom are too young for vaccination, I am aware of a reality outside our experience with the slice based on measurement and physical senses. I am connected to my grandchildren in a kinship based on love that extends my good feelings for them to care as if they were my body. I am reminded of the times when calling their names, I address them by their father’s name or conversely, they address me as “Dad”. This familial connection is a step beyond a narrow perception of reality and the individual. Neuroscience may be able to identify how different areas of the brain “light up” in response to connection with loved ones. 

In the past year, I spent some time in treatment, surgery, and recovery. One realization coming from that time is that the prayers and good wishes of people support healing. Another insight is that the person receiving emotional and physical support from others also incurs an obligation to also act to support his own recovery and healing.

The connection of kinship denies the argument “my body, my choice”. When we imagine the characteristics of a better world, we see that one step involves understanding that all humanity is connected. Our choices are influenced by the needs of others and our actions impact the lives of others. 

An earlier blog post “Discerning Benefits for all in Culture Wars” ( http://tinyurl.com/y223u2hh  ) offers support for the idea that opportunity for more common ground than difference in the Culture Wars may lead to replacement of dualistic confrontation with mutual appreciation and understanding.

1(2021, August 21). The Limits of Choice: Personal Freedom and the Common Good. Retrieved August 22, 2021, from https://billditewig.blog/2021/08/21/the-limits-of-choice-personal-freedom-and-the-common-good/ 

Guidelines for change after COVID-19

When Canada has put the COVID-19 crisis behind us, we will likely make changes in our attitudes toward how we restore our economy and what changes will better prepare us for the future.

Contemplate economic change

Merran Smith & Dan Woynillowicz offer an opinion on April 8 2020 in the National Observer that Canada should come out of COVID-19 with a new economy. The stark reality is that Canada’s traditionally strong oil and gas sector is confronted with both cyclical and structural change. It will never return to its halcyon boom days of the early 2000s. We need to shift from a mantra of “no barrel left behind” to one in which no oil worker or region is left behind. And we need to reorient and rebuild our energy sector with a focus on clean energy.

 To start, renewable power sources, energy storage and transmission lines. More public transit, walking paths and bike lanes. Clean fuel and renewable gas plants that draw on waste streams from forestry, agriculture and municipal garbage. Electric vehicle charging stations and a domestic zero-emission transportation industry that already spans buses, trucks, cars and ferries. Energy efficient homes, buildings and factories.
And for all this building, let’s use Canadian-made, low-carbon concrete and steel, or sustainably produced mass timber. Let’s use the metals and minerals abundant in Canada in those wind turbines, solar panels and batteries.
To build this workforce, we need support for training and retraining Canadians whose past jobs may not return. Many of these programs can and should start while unemployed workers are sitting at home.1

The Resilience web site discusses COVID-19 and a New New Deal. On a societal level, Covid-19 is opening doors and perceptions at unprecedented rates. This group urges us to amplify any insights and revelations that help us as a global society to use this shock to our future benefit.

 The original New Deal, led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, established between 1933 and 1939, employed 8.5 million people, lifting them and their families from poverty. The New Deal became fundamental to a more progressive government; Social Security, banking regulations like the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, home loans, farm and rural programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps and a significant expansion of the National Park Service were just a few of the elements that led to a remarkable transformation of our government.2

Changes after COVID-19

During an Interview with Pope Francis on April 8, 2020 Austen Ivereigh asked whether it was possible to see an economy that is more human, and if the Pope sees the crisis and the economic devastation it is wreaking as a chance for an ecological conversion, for reassessing priorities and lifestyles.

 “every crisis contains both danger and opportunity: the opportunity to move out from the danger. Today I believe we have to slow down our rate of production and consumption (Laudato si’, 191) and to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world. We need to reconnect with our real surroundings. This is the opportunity for conversion...Yes, I see early signs of an economy that is less liquid, more human”, he adds,  “but let us not lose our memory once all this is past, let us not file it away and go back to where we were. This is the time to take the decisive step, to move from using and misusing nature to contemplating it. We have lost the contemplative dimension; we have to get it back at this time.”3

Sea level rise

Marc Stenger (Troyes, France), bishop president of Pax Christi International, reminds us that Pope Francis offers us this monumental gift of “Laudato Si” which could become more and more our Charter in the post-coronavirus era. Our responsibility as we define the new economy after the COVID-19 crisis is to contemplate a plan to restore greater concern for the economic health of all people and encourage our greater kinship with Nature and care of the planet.

References

1	(2020, April 8). Let's come out of COVID-19 with a new economy | National .... Retrieved April 15, 2020, from https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/04/08/opinion/lets-come-out-covid-19-new-economy
2	(2020, March 25). COVID-19 and a New New Deal - Resilience. Retrieved April 15, 2020, from https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-03-25/covid-19-and-a-new-new-deal/
3	(2020, April 8). Pope: How I am living through the Covid-19 pandemic .... Retrieved April 15, 2020, from https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2020-04/pope-how-i-am-living-through-the-covid-19-pandemic.html
4	(2020, March 23). Covid 19 - Pax Christi International. Retrieved April 15, 2020, from https://paxchristi.net/2020/03/23/covid-19/

The role of kinship after Covid 19

The Covid 19 crisis has changed the role of many of the players in our globalized economy. Government has become the source of resources to sustain countries as the financial crisis remakes our employment status.

Employment changes

Change in the attitude we have to kinship was being advocated by people working for social, economic, and environmental justice before the coronavirus pandemic. A kinship model to our care of the pollution, climate change, water resources, and loss of biodiversity is proposed by Pope Francis in his 2015 encyclical “Laudato Si Care of Our Common Home”.

Appeal from Laudato Si

Naomi Klein in 2014 did not see the climate crisis as being separable from economic and racial justice. We are now collectively dealing with the impacts of an industrial model that always had sacrificial places and sacrificial people. There was this Faustian bargain at the center of the fossil fuel economy from the very start—the sacrifice of coal miners’ lungs and of coal mining communities—and it was accompanied by a deepening of theories of racial and class superiority. Because you can’t have a system built on sacrificial places and sacrificial people unless you have a theory that justifies their sacrifice.

 The promise of climate justice—as opposed to just climate action—is that, in changing our economy to respond to climate change, we can do more than move away from fossil fuels. We can heal the centuries-old wounds that were intrinsic to an extractivist economy and an extractivist worldview. We can get at the root of the problem.1

In Nova Scotia, many residents of Scottish descent are interested in the history of Hogmanay. Ben Johnson comments many of the traditional Hogmanay celebrations were originally brought to Scotland by the invading Vikings in the early 8th and 9th centuries.

  “First footing” (or the “first foot” in the house after midnight) is still common across Scotland. To ensure good luck for the house the first foot should be a dark-haired male, and he should bring with him symbolic pieces of coal, shortbread, salt, black bun and a wee dram of whisky. The dark-haired male bit is believed to be a throwback to the Viking days, when a big blonde stranger arriving on your doorstep with a big axe meant big trouble, and probably not a very happy New Year!2

My Gaelic grandmother, Christina Campbell, from the area of Cape Breton that is the headwater of the Margaree River was very concerned about the “First footing” on New Year’s Day at her home in Sydney when my dark eyed brother and my blue eyed self would rush in to visit our grandparents. I learned early that her preference was to have my brother come through the door first. This Gaelic understanding of kinship, limited to one’s family or clan, has outlived its usefulness.

City and kinship

Achieving justice for all involves expanding the notion of kinship to all. Economic and social justice activity in some areas of Nova Scotia with a diverse economic base and resources in people, land, and sea can move forward by encouraging greater kinship, literally greater “family emphasis, among “clans” that have lived mostly separately, on the farm, at the wharf, on the reservation, in the suburbs, in supply towns, and the mining camps.

Resources and kinship

Projects in food production without scarcity, alternate energy generation, urban design for climate change, protection of water resources, indigenous land use rights, and action to maintain biodiversity are realizable in small districts and municipalities as “pilots” for implementation on a larger scale in other jurisdictions.

"family" resource projects

Fr. Daniel P. Horan, OFM introduces viewers to the three models or approaches to creation that have arisen over the course of Christian history.

 These different ways of interpreting sacred scripture and theology will help set the context for how we can approach and understand Pope Francis's teaching in his encyclical letter. Pope Francis uses words of a Kinship and Stewardship Model3

Our traditional sense of “clan” in Nova Scotia is not an impediment to more cooperation. It is a model of cooperation that we can extend to all people as the beginning of an attitude of building sustainable communities where scarcity, greed, individual privilege, and entitlement are less operative because we are doing it for the well being of “family”.

References

1	(n.d.). Naomi Klein - Capitalism vs. the Climate - Tricycle: The .... Retrieved April 8, 2020, from https://tricycle.org/magazine/capitalism-vs-climate/
2	(n.d.). The History of Hogmanay - Historic UK. Retrieved April 8, 2020, from https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/The-History-of-Hogmanay/
3	(n.d.). "Understanding Laudato Si" Series - YouTube. Retrieved April 8, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO2W1tFFtdJn9V9_DvEbz9Bygt7XsYXRj

Initial Comment on Designing and Constructing a TRUE Net Zero City

The promise of the ideas of The Venus Project and Resource Based Economics are laid out in the YouTube video Designing and Constructing a TRUE Net Zero City. (https://youtu.be/ap3NCou1rSc ).

Terms to Understand

Many of the terms in the video will be new to viewers.

Terms that may be new

J. Roy Hopkins has written about the enduring influence of Jean Piaget, very much discussed in the BEd. program in the 90’s, among people involved with cognitive neuroscience.

 Piaget’s interview ended with a question about how he saw the future of psychology.“With optimism,” he replied. “We see new problems every day.” More than 40 years later, I think it is fair to say that Piaget’s influence remains strong and that his optimism was justified. Much of the revolution in cognitive neuroscience was anticipated by Piaget’s approach. The “contemporary biological revolution” that he believed had bypassed the behaviorists has continued unabated since Piaget’s death in 1980. I think if he could be interviewed today, he would express delight in the direction of the field.1

If Piaget’s approach is applied to Designing and Constructing a TRUE Net Zero City use of familiar terms that can be applied in a practical way now may facilitate assimilation of this “new situation” based on concepts of changing one parameter at a time, environmental kinship as expressed in documents since 2015, understanding how “greed” has become entrenched in our economic system in the past decades,

Topic	Ponder Patterns Article
Changing one parameter at a time	Kinship in a “Parallel Polis”
Environmental kinship as expressed in documents since 2015	Truth, Beauty, and Goodness in Climate Change
Understanding how “greed” has become entrenched in our economic system in the past decades	Ayn Rand and threats in our economic and political lives

and the advantage of sharing resources in real communities now,

Resources in an area of Nova Scotia

as the Covid-19 crisis is demonstrating to us.

Reference

 1(2011, December 1). The Enduring Influence of Jean Piaget – Association for .... Retrieved April 6, 2020, from https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/jean-piaget

Ayn Rand and threats in our economic and political lives

Bill McKibben, author of “Falter: has the human game begun to play itself out?” writes two somewhat contradictory comments about Ayn Rand.

Sea level rising

On one hand he suggests that the novelist may have been one the most influential influences on the “Money Men” like Alan Greenspan, avatar of neoliberalism and the chief architect of the world’s economy in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and on the other hand that Rand might well have written with a crayon.

 Her ideas about the world are simple minded, one dimensional, and poisonous.Rand called her theory “objectivism”. It’s emotional core, channeled by Rand, is simple. Government is bad. Selfishness is good. Watch out for yourself. Solidarity is a trap. Taxes are theft. You are not the boss of me.1

Even without knowing how her influence was spread by people like Greenspan through the Thatcher-Reagan years, and became part of the formation of Paul Ryan, Rex Tillerson, and Mike Pompeo we can see this “philosophy” has permeated much of our political and social attitudes. McKibben comments that Donald Trump told USA Today that Rand’s first novel, “The Fountainhead”, was his favourite book.

Some kinship directions

The need for an attitude to existence not based on selfishness is becoming clearer to us in this time of COVID-19. Our understanding of kinship needs to be expanded to include as “kin” all humanity and indeed all of nature as we address the real threats to species survival where coronavirus stands with devastation of water resources, forced global migration, and climate change as existential threats.

Reference

1McKibben, B. (2020). Falter: has the human game begun to play itself out? New York: Henry Holt and Company. 

Kinship in a “Parallel Polis”

Some people are of the view that when the world emerges from the COVID-19 crisis, our political and social structures will not return to the status quo.

Status Quo?

This may be an opportunity to consider the flaws in our political, economic, and social structures and consider a methodology of change that dates back to the end of the Cold War that involves a “Parallel Polis”. Self isolation practice has opened opportunities to learn by reading and using podcasts. Recently Eleanor Wachtel, host of CBC’s Writers and Company, interviewed Masha Gessen on the nature of power and morality.

 The topic of “Parallel Polis” is discussed on the podcast from  22:22 min to 29:40 min of the 57:58 min of the production. They discuss Václav Havel's Charter 77 that was developed as Czechoslovakia moved away from the Communist model. The power of polis essay written by Havel asserts we can create a parallel society not by splitting off or separation but by conversation across work areas about one change we can make in our economic, political, social, or religious practice.1

Pankaj Mishra, writing for the New Yorker, examines Václav Havel’s lessons on how to create a “Parallel Polis” in the shadow of the Trump Administration disruption of our political processes. A key component in the examples given by Masha Gessen, from Israel and Palestine relations, is to focus on changing one thing in the new community that is formed as a “Parallel Polis”.

 The spontaneous and vigorous opposition to Trump, whether at the women’s marches the day after his Inauguration or at the protests at U.S. airports in support of a viciously demonized people, has already manifested many of the qualities that Havel wished to see in civil society: trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, and love. Many more people realize, as Havel did, that arbitrary and inhuman power cannot deprive them of the inner freedom to make moral choices, and to make human community meaningful. They are shaping a redemptive politics of dissidence in the free world, nearly three decades after the fall of Communism. To measure the American dissidents’ success in electoral or any other quantifiable terms would be beside the point. For they are creating a “parallel polis”: the vital space where many, over the next four years, will find refuge from our age of anger, and learn to live in truth.2

The desirable moral changes cited by Pankaj Mishra suggest that “kinship” might be a key element in economic and political change in an emerging “Parallel Polis”.

 The problems before humankind, as Havel saw it, were far deeper than the opposition between socialism and capitalism, which were both “thoroughly ideological and often semantically confused categories [that] have long since been beside the point.” The Western system, though materially more successful, also crushed the human individual, inducing feelings of powerlessness, which—as Trump’s victory has shown—can turn politically toxic. In Havel’s analysis, politics in general had become too “machine-like” and unresponsive, degrading flesh-and-blood human beings into “statistical choruses of voters.”
According to Havel, “the sole method of politics is quantifiable success,” which meant that “good and evil” were losing “all absolute meaning.” Long before the George W. Bush Administration went to war in Iraq on a false pretext, Havel identified, in the free as well as the unfree world, “a power grounded in an omnipresent ideological fiction which can rationalize anything without ever having to brush against the truth.” In his view, “ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages and political slogans” had amassed a uniquely maligned power in the modern world, which pressed upon individuals everywhere, depriving “humans—rulers as well as the ruled—of their conscience, of their common sense and natural speech, and thereby, of their actual humanity.”2

This rediscovered “kinship” could be applied to healing right vs left divisions in politics and economics and very relevantly in restoring the “kinship” that is missing in our failure to understand our complex relationship with the species on this planet,

A "kinship" energy source needed

including ourselves, that are endangered by our headlong selfish destruction of life through global warming.

References

1	(2020, March 27). From Soviet Russia to Trump's America, Masha Gessen on the .... Retrieved April 1, 2020, from https://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany/from-soviet-russia-to-trump-s-america-masha-gessen-on-the-nature-of-power-and-morality-1.5512254
2	(2017, February 8). Václav Havel's Lessons on How to Create a “Parallel Polis .... Retrieved April 1, 2020, from https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/vaclav-havels-lessons-on-how-to-create-a-parallel-polis