What comes to mind when I write that someone has used words as blunt instruments? Insults or arguments maybe, the kind of hate-speech that pushes you away? But today I’m thinking of something slightly different: phrases and concepts that come pre-embedded with coded meanings that are seldom questioned. Recently, I’ve seen a bunch of them deployed in ways that block insight and progress. Let me offer a few examples.

“Artists equate to gentrification.” Like other blunt rhetorical instruments, this one contains a half-truth. There are many examples of artists moving into hard-pressed neighborhoods in search of cheap rent and disused commercial space; fast-forward a few years and galleries and performance spaces have filled out storefront vacancies, bars and restaurants have multiplied, and trendsetters with spending capacity are scouring the vacancies left by local families who can longer afford to live there.

The accusation gets thrown at artists and organizations contemplating a move into one of these neighborhoods. The typical response is either slinking off in shame or adopting a kind of willful blindness and forging ahead. But are those the only choices: move in and push others out or move on?

This is yet another manifestation of a familiar tendency in this country’s political discourse, the repeated conversion of public issues to private troubles (to borrow a concept of C. Wright Mills that I love). That way they can more easily be hidden, dismissed, and ignored. The real issues have to do with policy and planning, economic inequality, and a market-driven culture that privileges profit over people.

It’s just not as simple as the equation of artists and gentrification wants to make it. No urban neighborhood is static: go back a generation or three and the complexion, class character, and fabric of just about any block will bring surprises. Some neighborhoods rise, some fall, but they all change. People don’t live in a museum: anything you might do to freeze the fluidity natural to urban life is likely to lead to stagnation. After all, some of the ingredients of what we call gentrification can be positive: more amenities, safer streets, more economic opportunity. The big downside of gentrification is displacement. People get priced out of their own neighborhoods; they feel uncomfortable or unwelcome on streets that once felt familiar. Change was desired, but when it comes, someone else reaps the benefits while those who are displaced pay the price.

Often, I see people accepting the sleight-of-hand that converts this social mess to a question of private choice. Artists or organizations move in, knowing they may be part of the common pattern that ends in forced resettlement (for the artists too, when rents rise far beyond the affordable rates that enticed them in the first place). They don’t talk about it too much. Maybe they try to be friendly, even offering their gifts to the neighborhood in some way. But no one really believes that a sustaining neighborliness will prevail.

Instead it feels like a slow-motion accident: you can see the days coming when a cup of coffee costs $5 and swarms of fit, fashionable young adults line up for the privilege of buying it. After all, when issues are reduced to a toggle-switch—move in and be an evil gentrifier or stay away altogether—there’s not much incentive to deeper scrutiny.

The antidote? Unpack the concept of gentrification, converting a blunt instrument to a sharp tool for understanding. Ask harder questions: what can artists and arts organizations do to resist being used by speculators whose aim is to profit from displacement? How can they engage with their neighbors in understanding the forces at work and devising ways to have an impact on the neighborhood’s future, vitality and prosperity that aren’t driven by displacement? How can they build relationships that invite collaboration rather than defaulting to mistrust? How can the discoveries made in their own neighborhood work their way back up the policy pipeline to affect the actions—the regulations, programs, funding pools—taken in other neighborhoods?

“Ethnicity equates to cultural integration.” I was in a meeting where someone bemoaned the pervasive failure to value culture’s power. People don’t yet get the transformative force of image, music, drama and other art forms, this person said. They don’t yet get what’s to be gained from bringing artists with their gifts of innovation, improvisation, resourcefulness, and imagination to the table when important public issues are at stake.

Someone said, “That’s not true for all communities; our community understands this.” Another rhetorical blunt instrument with a half-truth at its core. In general, the community life of people whose cultural value is under attack—immigrants, racial and sexual minorities and many others—is more lavishly threaded with artistic expressions. Songs and celebrations take on multiple meanings, carrying their traditional messages of commemoration, for instance, but also asserting the right to culture in unmistakeable cadences. Sometimes there are special roles for professional artists, and sometimes the invitation to make culture is open, equal, and universal. But either way, a truth pointed out in a 1996 UN Report continues to be true: The World Commission on Culture and Development wrote that, “people turn to culture as a means of self-definition and mobilization and assert their local cultural values. For the poorest among them, their own values are often the only thing that they can assert.”

The cultivation of traditional customs, festivals, and cultural practices is often more robust and determined in immigrant communities of all races than in comparable urban communities in the home country, where cultural identity and a sense of belonging are not so strongly contested. But that doesn’t translate to each and every person. In any community, regardless of ethnic identity or immigration status, numbers of people feel disconnected from the music, movement, stories, or imagery others associate with their ethnic category. Perhaps they’ve been drawn into the rootlessness fed by commercial culture. Recently a friend posted her astonishment on Facebook when an evidently Latino teenager passing her family in a public park said, “I hate people who speak Spanish.” He’s not the only one cut off from what might be of value in heritage, not the only one missing out on how it might be renewed today for the benefit of the living. Nor are most of the artists that I know in these communities any more likely to be invited by the powers-that-be to take meaningful part in making general social policy (as opposed to, say, providing entertainment at a political event).

It’s possible to make reasonable generalizations based on outward signifiers: I don’t know any white person who’s experienced a direct equivalent to being pulled over for “driving while black,” for instance, but I know many African Americans who have. But the type of disconnection expressed by that boy in the park is too widely distributed for many generalizations to stick to large, blunt ethnic categories such as “Asian,” Native American,” or “white.”

The antidote to any kind of essentialism is particularity. Unpack the blunt categories of race or ethnicity to make room for the truth that individual experiences and perceptions—including perceptions of culture itself—differ just as much within categories as between them. The emergent world holds a wide space for commonality and for huge particularity of difference; our understanding needs to be sharp enough to see that.

“We don’t have the metric for culture and social change.” This one drives me nuts. I’ve written many times (most recently in my new book, The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future) on this challenge, which is something like a locked-room mystery: no exit if you accept the given parameters.

Philanthropy in general is risk-averse (which is kind of ironic for an enterprise which amounts to investing in what has not yet happened). Many funders now want extremely detailed accounts of proposed projects, including the prediction of specific outcomes should funding be received. The fear of looking foolish is pretty pervasive in this society, distorting our notion of success in many ways. But among the risk-averse, the metric-obsessed subgroup of philanthropists really has it bad: above all, they don’t want to be seen as betting on the wrong horse.

Naturally, many grant applicants take these requirements at face-value: what else are they to do? They search for ironclad indicators that will prove to funders that a socially engaged art project justifies investment. This snipe-hunt ignores major obstacles. Cultural change aggregates over time (just like any meaningful change), frustrating the desire for immediate results. What claims can provably be made for a one-year grant? In a complex situation with many coexisting factors, it’s nearly impossible to prove which ones have clear impact: not every correlation is a cause, not by a longshot. The more people try to find the metric, the clearer it becomes that it’s not actual proof being sought, but a sort of gentlemen’s agreement in which funder and grantee/applicant tacitly agree to treat some metric as plausible, even if its logic is holey as Swiss cheese.

The implicit assumption behind this blunt rhetorical instrument is that in other contexts, the metric exists and dependably delivers. Sometimes it does, although there’s always a tautology in measuring what can be measured. Still, if your metric is babies vaccinated or malaria cases reduced, what you measure actually says something about what you get (but not necessarily about the priority, ethics, or depth of your approach). But if your goal is to cultivate community, bridge social barriers, or enable self-expression, it’s not at all clear that the typically proferred metrics capture or convey value in any meaningful sense.

Under these circumstances—and to me, this is now the crux of the matter—the demand to produce the metric is akin to spinning straw into gold: an impossible and impossibly preoccupying task that provides plausible deniability for funders who didn’t really want to fund culture as a path to social change in the first place. The antidote? Unpack the metrics syndrome, bring the debate out into the open, and sharpen this blunt instrument into a tool for understanding a broken system which is now being further damaged by an obsession with the quantification of absolutely everything. Take inspiration from the most forward-looking investors in new ideas in technology, who understand the need to embrace risk and who know that the best investment is in people, not numbers.

I was moved by this subtle dance film, Well Contested Sites, a collaboration between a group of previously incarcerated men, performing artists, choreographer Amie Dowling and filmmaker Austin Forbord. The collaborators say, “several of the artists/performers have been incarcerated and it is by drawing on these men’s physical memories that Well Contested Sites connects audiences to the impact of incarceration. Not a blunt instrument.

John Trudell knows how to unpack blunt instruments. “Crazy Horse” from his album Bone Days.

Both books can be bought for a 20% discount from a special page, a gift to my dear readers: to buy The Wave or The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future, just click the links in this paragraph and enter the discount code 76KPUKT8 when you check out.

The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future is non-fiction. One of its two main parts features 28 short chapters (most no more than a page or two) exploring emergent knowledge from many realms including commerce, anthropology, social science, medicine, spirituality, cognitive science, art, public policy, and others. Each chapter highlights stories, research, and emerging developments that point to a specific public interest in cultivating empathy, imagination, and community through artistic and cultural creativity. The Wave is speculative fiction: not utopian, because everything in it is doable, but a glimpse of this possible world that I hope will spark other social imaginations.

At my site, you’ll find testimonials from readers like Eric Booth, Peter Coyote, Bob Holman, Lucy Lippard, Van Jones, Jerry Michalski, Raymond Tymas-Jones, and Gloria Steinem. I’m thrilled to have the endorsement of these stellar individuals.

If you live near New York or the San Francisco Bay Area, please come to my launches: May 23rd at NYU and June 2 at the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley.

If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you know what I care most about are awareness and choice. I see our vast potential; I see our capacity to actualize it; I see that we are on the cusp of a new paradigm in which creativity, social imagination, and empathy will be given their true value. But I have absolutely no idea whether we will reach the tipping-point. That’s up to you, to me, to all of us.

I wrote these books to share a perspective that I hope will help others see the same potentials, discovering new ways to enact them. If you share that aim, please tell others about both new books. Tweet this blog. Like my Facebook page for the books. Suggest me as a speaker. Introduce me to new networks. If books can make a difference—and goodness knows they’ve made a huge difference in my life—I hope and trust these can help.

And I’m thrilled to be back at blogging. There are so many things I haven’t had time to write about this spring: how eager we were to have a story to fit the bombings in Boston, how almost any story—diehard IRA, white supremacists, Kazakh terrorists—would do, as if these neat tales actually explain anything. How George Bush discovered art….

I’m writing this heading home from Philadelphia, where the lilacs, dogwoods, redbuds, tulips, azaleas and other glorious blooms took my breath away. I didn’t have much time to walk, but at the back of my mind when I did was the awareness of people who have passed away in recent weeks. Bob Edgar, a lifelong fighter for social justice, will be hugely missed. Richie Havens’ passing seems somehow to herald the end of an era. I can’t precisely describe the rough sweetness of his music, but you can hear it in his take on this aptly named Beatles song “In My Life.” I honor the creativity of these great spirits who inspire me to repeat my constant mantra: I don’t want to waste my precious time on this earth. If I succeeded in my intentions, my new books are encoded with that message on every page. I hope you’ll want to see for yourself.

I can’t embed “In My Life” from YouTube, so here’s a wonderful medly of love songs sung by Richie Havens, “Tupelo Honey” and “Just Like A Woman.”

READ ABOUT The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future and The Wave.

The youngest jumped up and walked to a spot directly opposite my window. He pointed at something on the ground. From my perspective it resembled a small tangle of straw. Talking and gesticulating, he returned to his companions. One followed him back to the spot, then knelt down for an inspection. After a few seconds, he extended his index finger carefully, the way you urge a parakeet to perch on your hand. The bit of straw jumped onto his finger: an insect! The man tiptoed back to the wagon, extending his hand to his companions. The third man placed his own finger parallel to his coworker’s, and for a short time—gently, gently—they passed the insect back and forth hand-to-hand. Then, moving in slow-motion, the rescuer swept his hand back, keeping it parallel to the ground, then swooped it through the air, top-speed. With the energy of that boost, the insect took flight. The four of us watched until we could see it no longer.

I have always been touched by evidence of delicacy, of gentleness, in men whose work entails physical skill and force. I think the sweetness of that contrast for me has something to do with having lost my father in childhood, with my faded memories of ladders and brushes, clanging metal, the chemical smells and soiled rags of his work as a housepainter, with the image of him kneeling down to meet my small self face-to-face. Now it seems to me a parable: the omnipresent possibility of grace even in the hardest places, of beauty surrounded by dust.

Something is happening to me. I can scarcely bear to read the news, that compendium of availability cascades in which the compulsion to repeat whatever bit of fatuous received wisdom occupies the top of the hour takes precedence over considered thought, a felt sense of reality, a healthy respect for the depth of our own ignorance. I am each day more interested in justice, kindness, and transparency; and each day less willing to believe that politics as it is practiced in the realm of money and media will advance any of those conditions.

When I’ve shared this with friends, a surprisingly large number of them have reported the same gathering sense of transformation.

Before you lob accusations of escapism, allow me to say that I am thoroughly familar with the argument that we have a duty to consume the headlines, that it is a form of citizenship all of us must exercise. I absolutely agree that an uninformed democracy is unlikely to be a democracy at all. I read, I listen, I study the world and think about what it means. I just don’t focus my study on information as commodity, the fast-food kind that addicts with an excess of faux suspense and urgent emptiness. What interests me now is the considered opinion that has taken time to produce and deserves time to integrate, and the habits of mind that are learned through what might be called slow media.

For a long time, I have been counseling controlled consumption of mass media, especially sounds and images beamed by commercial enterprises from the center to the margins, animated chiefly by the need to fill time between commercials. I have seen too much of the consequences of media poisoning. I think of the young people who ask for advice when I speak at universities: What can I do, they ask me, to avoid becoming cynical and depressed? Before I answer, I ask how much news they are consuming, whether via TV or online alternatives. Their lists astonish me. I tell them to go on a media diet—cold turkey if they can, or a severely limited dosage if they can’t live without it—and see if that helps. So far, the answer is always yes. At any age, mainlining media-driven fear paralyzes and demoralizes us. I haven’t mainlined for a very long time. My challenge now is to get myself to consume even a tiny dose, and I feel on the verge of abandoning that.

Instead, I value my refusal to collude in the colonization of my own mind by a system dedicated to the commercialization of absolutely everything and to distracting the populace from noticing what is being done in our name. Awareness is fragile. That tangle of straw that owed its flight to the unearned grace of three burly men who took the time to notice: that is my mind, and yours too. The parable of the baggage-handlers has a moral. I like the way William Carlos Williams expressed it in his poem, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”: “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.”

When we are awake, our true condition is radical amazement as described by Abraham Joshua Heschel: “The greatest hindrance to knowledge is our adjustment to conventional notions, to mental cliches. Wonder or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is, therefore, a prerequisite for authentic awareness…” Whatever nourishes this feeling, that’s what I want to attend to now. I have no intention of abandoning my drive to act on behalf of justice, kindness, and transparency; I know that it matters most when radical amazement fuels it.

Consider this beautiful version of “Whispering Pines” by Lucinda Williams, from the new Levon Helm tribute album, Love for Levon.”

I see his point, of course. If the course of events on a global scale were actually determined by the blind-spots and shortsightedness of individuals who—like those running my friend’s workplace—had been promoted to their level of incompetence, I doubt a single train would run on time.

Luckily for us, saving grace abounds. Most systems, even those as localized as a workplace, are equipped with wiggle room and other resilience factors that prevent any individual’s ineptitude from carrying the day. When you scale up to whole societies and transnational systems, the insulation tends to scale proportionately. Certain principles seem to be woven into the fabric of reality: things that have stood the test of time are likely to last, for instance. And all of this works to the advantage of life on earth despite the massive disregard, disability, and disingenous self-dealing that marks our public and private systems of order.

I told my friend that when I thought about all that could go wrong in the big world, I usually found myself in the opposite position: awestruck at how little of it actually comes to pass. I’m not minimizing a single one of our many social and environmental problems: a lot goes wrong—way too much of it due to human misdeeds—and the suffering it produces is deeply consequential. But enough goes right so that the deep desires of human beings can continue to be enacted: parents cherish their children; lovers revel in love; food is raised, cooked, and eaten; communities form, worship what they value most, and renew the legacy inherited from the past for the benefit of the future.

It’s been a super-busy time for me, getting two books out, traveling for work and much else. What do you let go of when it’s crunch time? For me it’s the news. You can read my reasons in the lines I wrote above. Collectively, the news as actually configured puts us in the state my wary friend described. A digest of any day’s headlines can be boiled down to two words: Watch out!

Are you scared yet?

I still get a glimpse of the news secondhand from my friends, of course. One friend has been following the selection of a new Pope with rapt attention. Yesterday news from the Vatican came in a puff of white smoke announcing the election of the Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (the first non-European in 1200 years, although his parents were Italian, so the claim is perhaps a semi-technicality). He is said to be an austere individual who has spoken out for those suffering in poverty. He’s also an intense conservative, strongly supporting church policies on abortion, same-sex marriage and adoption, and the ordination of women, and often advocating for them in secular contexts. He rejects the liberation theology that embraces not just compassion for the poor but change in the conditions that produce poverty. There is talk that he was complicit (at least by remaining silent) along with others in the church hierarchy in the face of the Argentine dictatorship’s abuses.

The French have a saying, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (or in English, The more things change, the more they stay the same).

My friend’s interest is rooted in the fact that he was compelled to endure many years of Catholic-school education (although he is not Catholic). For me, his stories of beatings, humiliations, penalties and punishments seem more revealing than the inside-baseball reportage of hermetically sealed brocaded rooms, the baroque trappings of a system that designates a group of men who have eschewed the pleasures and challenges of ordinary life on earth to dictate key conditions shaping others’ lives. In exactly the same way, I choose stories of individual lives on the journey to freedom over the inside-baseball stories of—say— the sequester staged in DC. I defend both political and religious liberty without reservation: your worship is your choice, absolutely, as is your vote. But I feel no more obligation to genuflect to the backroom political dealings of religious power than to the secular trade in money and influence that has shaped this nation’s political realities nor to any other star-chamber system.

Instead, I want to keep my eyes and ears focused on the human-scale stories that sustain us, that provide an antidote to the fear that is the media’s stock in trade. This past weekend, I visited Bloomsburg, PA, to take part in the opening weekend of the Bloomsburg Theater Ensemble’s Flood Stories, Too, a play by former BTE member Jerry Stropnicky based on local people’s stories of the flood of 2011, which inundated a large number of homes (and thereby, lives). In the talk I gave after the Saturday matinee, I quoted my friend Dudley Cocke, artistic director of Roadside Theater in Appalachia, one project of Appalshop, the umbrella organization for a bunch of cultural projects centered in Whitesburg, Kentucky. I interviewed Dudley a few years ago for a long essay I wrote about the Thousand Kites Project, “a community-based performance, web, video and radio project centered on the United States prison system.” He talked about the importance of telling our own stories:

I always make the proposition that we are the storytelling animal and that language and story has been our selective advantage, and that’s why we’re still sitting here having espresso in the afternoon.

There have always been these contested narratives. If story is how we understand ourselves and understand the world, then there’s always going to be these contests of stories. If one just goes to a neutral mode and isn’t active in telling and trying to search for one’s own story individually and then in group, then somebody else will be there with a story and be there ready to tell your story within their story. It’s like a guy in Choteau, Montana—a dry land farmer—told me: “We got so much incoming. We want to send something out.”

In every community—in every nation, every faith community, every family, perhaps in every human heart—there is a contested narrative. The world being as full of possibility as it is, one side says, “Watch out! Be very afraid!” and encourages us to defer to those who want to shape our stories to serve their own interests. The other side says, “Tell your story. I’m listening and I know your story matters most when it is told in your own voice and words.” To me, this is the meta-question of our moment. If we stop cooperating with the fearmongers’ directives, then change in structures of consolidated power—religious or secular—become much more possible to imagine, and once imagined, to enact.

I spoke to (or eavesdropped on) quite a few audience members in Bloomsburg after the two performances of Flood Stories, Too that I witnessed. Every comment supported the deep truth that enables me to take a break from the canned news that broadcasts from the center to the margins of our society, addicting us to the precise wave-length of anxiety that serves its operators. Those comments confirmed my impression that BTE members, like so many dedicated community-based artists I know, fit the description I shared in my talk at Bloomsburg University: they embody “the sacred trust of returning a community’s own stories to its members in a form they can use.” Not a form that will scare them into buying products or waiting for authoritative orders. Not a form that will reinforce the might and right to rule of the powerful. But a form that says that our stories matter, that the way we shape our stories shapes our lives, and that we possess the power to write those stories for ourselves.

Spring is peaking here. I walked by the Bay today listening to a great cut from The Audience With Betty Carter, a medley of “Can’t We Talk It Over” and “Either It’s Love Or It Isn’t,” which fit my subject to a T. But YouTube disappointed me. Still, how can you go wrong with “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most”?

I have been thinking hard about this lately, as friends share with me the work of artists whose approach is embedded with this knowledge as beads are laid into the wax and wood base of a Huichol mask. And even more as I observe political work that is simultaneously spiritual work and simultaneously art work and the three are braided so closely that it is impossible to pass a hair’s-breadth between them. For instance:

The wonderful media artist Mona Smith (her heritage is Sisseton–Wahpeton Dakota Oyate; check out the Bdote MemoryMap for an interactive embodiment of Dakota people’s relationship to Minnesota) sent me a link to Gyasi Ross’s “A Guide to Idle No More for Dummies,” published last month. It’s a concise and straightforward explication of a movement that is anchored in centuries of resistance to exploitation and expansive in its vision: “this movement belongs to anybody who wants to stand up for the Earth and women and also make a positive change in the community,” Ross writes.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Hawaii’s Poet Laureate and founder of HawaiiSlam, Kealoha, whose work embodies a rejection of corporate values in favor of the continuity and vitality of indigenous, earth-centered values. I was especially taken with his performance of his poem “Chances,” which captures my own truth too (and probably yours) with its refrain, “What are the chances?”:

I come from a long line of impossibilities
A circumstance that happened to manifest because random chance allowed it to.

Which reminded me of my friend Bob Holman, a wonderful poet who founded The Endangered Languages Poetry Project (and with linguists Daniel Kaufman and Juliette Blevins cofounded the Endangered Language Alliance). Bob has been working on a series of documentaries about endangered languages. The first few videos are available at one of his sites, with a full PBS series to come.

To see a whole range of work that asserts the inseparability of art, spirit, and positive social change, visit the website of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation and click on the link for 2013 Artist Fellowships. You will find writers, media makers, visual artists, dancers, musicians, and others whose work foreshadows the world being born.

I feel very strongly that soon, enough people will perceive this to reach a tipping-point. I can almost see the old divisions start to fall away, crumbling under the weight of their own arbitrariness, freeing our common culture from their grip. But I am impatient for it to happen. I find myself sitting like a mother bird waiting for that first peck to crack the shell and release new life into the world. I think it will help to crack the shell if we name things as they are: to begin saying that a project or organization or event falls into the category of wholeness; rather than choosing between art, politics, and spirit, refusing the distinction and choosing them all.

Beyond all the other ways my heart lifts at this emergent reality is the spirit of generosity than infuses it. None of this work conceals or minimizes the damage done, genocides, colonial powers’ indifference to the cultures they trampled, injuries to Mother Earth and life itself. But neither does it sink to revenge, neither does it become the thing it opposes. When I think about the sheer weight of generosity required to desire the enlightenment of those who have injured you, I understand moral grandeur and the healing it can bring. I breathe in hope grounded in reality.

So much music tells this story but I can’t help myself, readers, I have to offer another Roy Buchanan: art, spirit, politics, “Five String Blues”:

Oh, Jesus, this is my final plea
Yes, Jesus, this is my final plea
You know I’m still beggin’ you
Don’t let the Devil get the best of me

No matter what the field—regardless of whether the seeker is an artist, activist, or falls into another category altogether—I always offer the same response. “Do what gives you pleasure,” I say. “When do you feel most aligned? When do you feel that your gifts are being used most fully? Imagine yourself as a musical instrument: when do you know you are playing the music you were created to make?”

If I had captured them with a camera, I could make a really cool little art piece out of the microexpressions this elicits: delight, puzzlement, renewed delight, skepticism, thrill, anxiety, a perpetually renewing cascade of conflicting feelings. Here’s how I read them: Really? I can be happy? Wait! That sounds selfish! But it would feel so great…just imagine! But why should my feelings matter: don’t I have to listen to those who know best? Can I really have this? I hope so! And so on.

It’s a mini-treatise on our common culture, isn’t it? We’re forever being exhorted to seek happiness through consumption, each proffered purchase promising the beginning of bliss. And we’re forever being told to condition our life-choices on some calculation in which presumed necessity, conventionally accepted odds of success, and expert predictions figure much more prominently than the pleasure of living fully into our natures and capacities.

I recognize that not everyone is granted the opportunity to pursue a vocation that feels more like delight than drudgery. (Believe me, hacking a path through several decades as a self-employed artist and public intellectual has had its longueurs, and still I don’t mistake it for mining coal, sewing piecework, or standing at a cash-register). But even a hard livelihood has moments of grace (if you didn’t read about Trash Dance back in the spring, for instance, check it out now). And it isn’t just a question of livelihood, but also of avocation, passion, and pastime.

Why is my advice to seekers unfailingly the same? For four reasons:

(1) Despite a plethora of expert opinions, computer projections, and authoritative pronouncements, no one really knows a best way to bring about positive social change. In part, that’s because we human beings are so different in character and habit: what reaches me may turn you off and vice versa. As my old friend Rabbi David Wolfe-Blank used to say (riffing from a passage in Isaiah), “Holy, holy, holy is the Mother of Multiplicity.”

(2) Expert opinion gushes and morphs constantly, but pause the flow anywhere for a moment: if you correlate past predictions with actual outcomes, experts tend to fall flat. I greatly admire Philip Tetlock’s work on this, which has shown an inverse correlation between expertise and correct predictions: the more honors, titles, and endowed chairs you have, the more likely you are to ignore your own biases and misread the signs. So why be guided by an expert’s fondness for his or her own opinions? Your guess may be just as good.

(3) The only law I have seen to be observed more often than violated is the law of unintended consequences. So many of the things that afflict us today are rooted in good intentions: our constipated bureaucracies result from the accumulation of checks and balances; our mushrooming prison-industrial complex was justified in the name of public safety; our soul-crushing “teach to the tests” educational system was conditioned on a sincere (if wildly misconceived) desire to improve education; and so on. Think twice about taking actions because they promise fantastic results; the fantasy may play out more as a horror-story than a fairytale. We can never know the longterm consequences of our actions, but we can judge whether they feel deeply aligned, deeply satisfying, as we take them and be guided by that.

(4) You, as one human being in this glorious garden of multiplicity, will have the most energy, capability, and skill if you are aligned with your essence and pleasure. You will have more staying-power instead of getting discouraged when dramatic results fail to show up instantly. What you do will be infused with love, beauty, and meaning, rather than the grudging sense of duty that makes some activism grim and counterproductive. In experiencing the pleasure of being alive and using your gifts fully, you will afford others a glimpse of that possibility, inspiring them to do the same, adding to your positive impact.

I like this Janiva Magness version of “Things Left Undone.”

When your life is over, and you’re reaching in the end,
River of Jordan is around the bend,
Will you be counting all the trophies that you won?
Or will you look back on the things left undone?

My blog philosophy is to wait till I have something to say rather than adhering to a preset schedule. Usually I have something to say once a week or so, but I couldn’t rouse myself to add to the tidal wave of words engulfing the blogosphere this month. Mostly my reasons have been personal. I’ve been at that familiar stage for a writer: the writing is done. I think it’s good (and response from early readers suggests that I could be right). But that doesn’t mean everyone else will think so. Once again, I find myself putting forward ideas that are sure to gore someone’s sacred ox. Once again, I have granted myself the freedom to mix categories, cross boundaries, suggest possibilities that not everyone may welcome. I took some heart from Nassim Taleb’s point in Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder that writers can be antifragile to criticism: “[I]f you really want people to read a book, tell them it is ‘overrated,’” he writes, “with a sense of outrage.” Of course, I hope everyone loves my new work, but whatever may come, I’m almost ready to say, “Bring it on.”

All this hope, anticipation, and effort is a little decentering, though. As always, my antidote is music. The last few weeks I’ve been listening obsessively to Roy Buchanan, infusing my system with Vitamin G (that’s for guitar), drinking in music’s magical powers to activate body, mind, heart, and soul. So if you’re a little glad to see me back in the blogosphere, thank Roy. I do.

If you don’t know Roy Buchanan’s music, you are in for a rare treat. He was a remarkable guitarist who played music of many genres with the utter conviction and commitment of a consummate artist. Listen to “Wayfaring Pilgrim” as you read a bit about his life. His playing on this song winds itself around my heart, opening it like a gate.

Buchanan came up in a hardscrabble world, the child of agricultural workers who migrated from Arkansas to a small town at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. He left home young to chase opportunity in music—played with Johnny Otis’s band at 15—and managed to father seven children with his wife, Judy Owens, despite gigging and touring almost constantly for the better part of three decades.

There are obstacles and advantages to coming up without a normative sense of social status or all that much grasp of the rules. Our early lives were very different—city/country, immigrant/American, Jew/Pentacostal—but that marginality to the American dream is something we shared. Sometimes it makes for a steep climb toward a sense of belonging; but it can also grant a power of self-authorization to borrow anything, to braid any form of beauty into the tapestry you weave of your life. When Buchanan heard Hendrix, he integrated that jagged, polemical sound into his playing and made it his own. Listen to his Hendrix-inspired version of “Hey Joe.” Or a beautifully clean straight-up jazz version of “Misty” that makes your cheeks ache with pleasure. Or this amazing live version of Roy’s original composition, his spiritual manifesto, “The Messiah Will Come Again.” The sheer unbounded beauty and creativity of this music grants me permission: whatever you need, it says, use that.

Buchanan struggled with life and often lost the battle. He got addicted, got clean, got drunk, got clean, and died in a Fairfax, Virginia, jail cell a month before his 49th birthday in 1988, locked up on a charge of public intoxication. (The official ruling was suicide, but some people close to Buchanan dispute that.) The most detailed account of his life—which reads like a “Where’s Waldo?” of popular music, with Buchanan playing the Waldo part—can be found at the Vinyl Records site. It gives a lasting impression of a man of great talent who kept being “discovered” (he taught Robbie Robertson to play well, was offered Brian Jones’ spot in the Rolling Stones in 1969, opened for The Band during his last year on the road) without exactly emerging into recognition.

There is a powerful integrity to Roy’s diverse music—something that transcends genre—which emerges so clearly on what might be called standards. “These Arms of Mine” is associated with the inimitable Otis Redding, but Buchanan’s version with Kanika Kress, a Chicago blues musician whose life was cut even shorter than his, surrounds and cradles you so you don’t want it to stop. Buchanan’s take on Don Gibson’s 1956 anthem “Sweet Dreams” is unparalleled. Listening to these songs reminds me that every generation—every artist—is authorized to renew the legacy inherited from the past, and each renewal propels the work toward the next.

You can find an account of Buchanan’s early life and music in a 1971 PBS special entitled Introducing Roy Buchanan!, hosted by Bill Graham. It’s on YouTube in three parts (scroll down under “About” for links to parts 2 and 3). “I think the lonely thing is kind of born inside of a person,” Roy says in part 1. “That’s what makes him play. Your soul seems to be completely someplace else from other people’s, a lonesome feeling. My dad used to call it the blues.”

I’m feeling much better now, and still listening daily to my Roy Buchanan playlist. If you need one more for the road—there can never be too much of Roy’s music—here’s an epic version of “Soul Dressing,” originally released by Booker T. and The MGs in 1965. Still not enough? Buchanan’s original composition, “Pete’s Blues.”

I find this insistence on one form of activism fatiguing. It reminds me of the old alchemical idea: that if you perform the same action over and over again, it will eventually yield a transformative result. At this point, I think most old-style forms of organizing have about as much chance of succeeding in addressing our crises as ancient alchemical experiments had of finding the philosopher’s stone and transmuting base metal into gold. But you can’t make anyone see what he or she is not ready to perceive, no matter how plainly it is inscribed in reality.

When it comes to actualizing a paradigm shift—replacing an old reality-map that can’t hold newly emerging information with a new framework that can—the biggest challenge is human perception. A paradigm shift has been compared to an optical illusion: when an optical illusion flips between a duck and a rabbit or a vase and two facing profiles, it isn’t that the printed image has altered in the slightest. The entire change is in how the identical information is seen: if a perceiver is willing to let go of commitment to one image, the exact same information can be read in a second markedly different way.

For several years, I’ve been writing and speaking about a paradigm shift in which culture—and specifically art, the purest expression of culture through movement, image, music, story, and so on—is finally being given its true value as the container for all social organization and action, the place where we discover identity, explore values, learn about each other, and imagine a future. Every day I see more evidence, but this week has been remarkably emblematic of the whole shift. Just a very few examples:

A group of 600 guitarists gathered in Darjeeling, India, last week played John Lennon’s song “Imagine” in tribute to the young woman whose rape by a gang has been a flashpoint for protests around the globe. These images have been widely circulated.

The indigenous peoples’ movement Idle No More, which began in Canada and has spread rapidly, “calls on all people to join in a revolution which honors and fulfills Indigenous sovereignty which protects the land and water. Colonization continues through attacks to Indigenous rights and damage to the land and water. We must repair these violations, live the spirit and intent of the treaty relationship, work towards justice in action, and protect Mother Earth.”

Idle No More has called upon people to come together for Round Dances in which movement, song, and drumming express the unity of activism, art, and spiritual practice. Here’s some footage of a Round Dance flash mob in Oakland, California, yesterday.

The growing initiative called “One Billion Rising,” begun by Vagina Monologues author and V-Day founder Eve Ensler, centers on a huge number of public dance events in which women and their supporters stand up to demand an end to violence against women.

I could spend days at the keyboard listing music, drama, dance, video, visual art, interactive media, literature and other artistic expressions of the vast, decentralized movement for social justice. YouTube videos (which is to say short films) have become our most popular form of political speech. Groups like 100 Thousand Poets for Change organize many simultaneous events around the world asserting the defense of freedom through art. Pick any genre or artform: hip-hop , graphic art , murals—and you will find countless examples to draw on, with more emerging every day.

I’m a little sad that some people are still so committed to the old paradigm of social change that they can’t yet allow these powerful, multidimensional alternatives to come into focus. But not too sad: what is emergent will not be stopped; and it’s just a matter of time before it can’t be ignored.

Here’s the Playing for Change version of “Imagine,” featuring well over a hundred musicians from around the world.

Earlier this year, I wrote about one such debunking, Daniel Kahneman’s examination of Jim Collins’ business blockbuster Built to Last (Collins’ 2004 book is still high in Amazon’s top 50 business books, so go figure):

[T]he companies chosen as exemplars in Jim Collins’ mega-bestseller Built to Last, a book that contrasts more and less successful companies’ performance, then attempts to explain how to emulate the winners. Only, if you fast-forward a few years after the the time-period covered in Collins’ book, even the winners don’t win. “On average,” Kahneman writes, “the gap in corporate profitability and stock returns between the outstanding firms and the less successful firms studied in Built to Last shrank to almost nothing in the period following the study … the average gap must shrink because the original gap was due in good part to luck, which contributed both to the success of top firms and to the lagging performance of the rest.” All these works that praise winners and purport to reveal their secrets are actually snapshots of a temporary condition, masquerading as a treasure-maps.

So here’s my advice to arts and other nonprofit organizations that are being pressured to invest in blueprint-style long-range plans: don’t do it.

For decades, part of my work has been consulting with nonprofit organizations, especially arts- and culture-related ones. Years ago, a big chunk of this comprised planning: projecting programs, budgets, and strategies into the future, charting five or even ten years ahead in the expectation that we were creating a blueprint that would provide useful guidance for the entire journey. Investing in planning now, the idea goes, allows you to focus on implementation moving forward.

It’s been a while since I stopped doing that type of planning, although people keep wanting it. I just didn’t see the point in a world that is so profoundly shaped by unpredictable forces in pretending that budget projections and careful lists of objectives and tasks were going to be worth the paper they were printed on a few years down the road. The extreme examples are many and easy to name: what good would a five-year plan do an arts organization based near Ground Zero on 9/11, or in New Orleans at the time of Katrina? But even absent calamitous events, who could predict that so many major arts funders of, say, a dozen years ago would drop out of that enterprise, radically change directions, or—given the many emergencies affecting their core base of recipients—decide to consolidate funding for them that’s got?

When organization leaders ask me about planning, I respond by talking about readiness. Are you nimble, self-aware, grounded enough in some respects to take risks in others? There are still plenty of good reasons to work with a well-qualified consultant: the right outsider can help you spot strengths and deficits, making better use of the former and working to remedy the latter. A consultant may have a skill or information you need that is lacking in-house; a skillful, perceptive consultant who isn’t immersed in your organizational culture may be able to spot opportunity you are missing simply because of your ingrained habit of basing future steps on past practices. A consultant can help you design a new program or initiative as a experiment, building in plenty of places to pause, reflect, and renew.

The big risk in conventional planning is that it locks you into a path, making it hard to change nimbly as times and circumstances change. If you buy the conventional planning package, you will likely be faced with the decision between sucking it up and following the blueprint regardless of where it pinches, or discarding it, blowing off the investment, and starting again. Without the need to be loyal to a blueprint, you can change course whenever needed, experimenting with a few different directions while remaining alert to opportunity and tracking the consequences of your choices.

Yet I still run across consultants who are out there hawking five- and ten-year plans, and organizations whose leaders have been told—sometimes by funders—that something is missing without them. Of course, there is a vast body of management literature that touts the value of planning, reinforcing this.

I’ve been reading Nassim Taleb’s new book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, and despite the usual complaints of arrogance (which cannot be dismissed: the man is indeed arrogant), I’ve been loving it even more than The Black Swan, which I adored. I’m sure I’ll want to write more about it later, but for now, I would commend anyone who is impressed by the literature of planning to Taleb’s point in a chapter entitled “Lecturing Birds on How to Fly.”

Throughout the book, he shows how mere correlations have often been mistaken for cause-and-effect. For example: despite vast investment in systematic pharmaceutical research, most truly useful drugs were discovered by trial and error, often leading to primary uses that had nothing to do with their invention. (Viagra came out of research into high blood pressure; that was Minoxidil’s first use too, but it is much more widespread as a treatment for baldness; and so on.) In the chapter in question, Taleb points out how we tend to believe in an arrow of causality from academic research to applied science and technology to practice, when much more often it is the opposite: people discover something through tinkering and trial-and-error, then academics study it and provide explanations assumed necessary to the discovery. To illustrate, he suggests a thought-experiment:

Think of the following event: A collection of hieratic persons (from Harvard or some such place) lecture birds on how to fly. Imagine bald males in their sixties, dressed in black robes, officiating in a form of English that is full of jargon, with equations here and there for good measure. The bird flies. Wonderful confirmation! They rush to the department of ornithology to write books, articles, and reports stating that the bird has obeyed them, an impeccable causal inference. The Harvard Department of Ornithology is now indispensable for bird flying.

You could say I love Taleb’s advice on planning so much because it exactly mirrors my own, but then you’d also have to stipulate that my own advice is derived from two fairly indispensible ingredients: a long stretch of on-the-ground work with organizations and a disinclination to take money for work that isn’t worth the investment. He’s talking about businesses, but his advice applies just as aptly to nonprofits:

(i) Look for optionality; in fact, rank things according to optionality (note: he means keeping your options open, seeking opportunities with multiple possible positive outcomes), (ii) preferably with open-ended, not closed-ended, payoffs; (iii) Do not invest in business plans but in people…one gets immunity from the backfit narratives of the business plan by investing in people. It is simply more robust to do so; (iv) Make sure you are barbelled, whatever that means in your business. (By “barbelled,” Taleb means being very conservative and very aggressive at the same time: do all you can to secure stability with low-risk investments—for a nonprofit, perhaps this translates as effectively maintaining your most successful and attractive programs—but leave yourself a meaningful slice of resources for high-risk opportunities with potentially big payoffs.)

Happy new year, everyone! My resolution is to avoid mistaking correlations for causes and continue subjecting our modern superstitions to scrutiny. Wishing you a 2013 of clear sight, free of theoretical nonsense, and full of the freedom to learn from experience!

A great Little Feat version of Alan Toussaint’s “On Your Way Down,” a remedy for hubris.

Both, I think. At this time of year, I am always reminded of Paulo Freire’s brilliant insight that rather than a single idea or happening tipping the scale of history, at every moment an ecology of ideas, a “thematic universe,” shapes reality.

Freire wrote that every epoch is characterized by “a complex of ideas, concepts, hopes, doubts, values and challenges in dialectical interaction with their opposites.” This complex, interacting whole—our thematic universe—weaves the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times.

In some sense, all elements of any era’s potential thematic universe are timeless. “Faith versus reason” has been present in one or another manifestation forever, for example. But in each epoch, the foreground is occupied by themes of special richness and meaning in that moment. Always, they cannot be resolved by the triumph of a single proposition. But a dialelectic can ripen like a seed-pod, spreading its progeny across the culture. When this happens, we feel a holographic saturation: the little world of personal relationship is as affected as is global reality.

This year, I want to mention a couple of opposing forces that appear to me in high relief, striking at each other with flintlike percussive regularity. First is our view of the human subject: the ideal of absolute choice—free will, let’s say—in conflict with a growing body of knowledge about the inbuilt character and limitations of our brains and bodies. Second is our view of human commonality and compassion: the impulse to put a fence around our hearts, admitting only the inner-circles of family and tribe, in contention with an ever-expanding knowledge of the interrelatedness of life and our capacity to widen our embrace.

Knowing ourselves: capacities versus intentions. Over the past year—and a few that preceded it—one of my greatest encouragements has been reading the work of cognitive scientists like Daniel Kahnemann whose experiments illuminate the gap between our ideas of ourselves and the raw material we bring to life.

When we learn about wrongdoing, for instance, there is a tendency to exempt ourselves from the potential it reveals. I could never do that, we say, confidently placing those who could in a category to which we don’t belong. From these writings, I’ve understood how many such susceptibilities are well-distributed across the human race. I’ve been forced to admit that you and I (along with every other human) are also affected by them. They originate in characteristics of mind: “confirmation bias” is the big one. We tend to scan for evidence that supports our beliefs and gloss over the rest. The world is so jam-packed with evidence, it’s easy to heap up confirmation so high it carries the certainty of an alp. Consequently, the history of ideas has a characteristic shape: we’re absolutely sure of something—how else to feel when so much evidence confirms it?—until a new idea offers a better explanation that sends the old one tumbling. When the old idea is pernicious (e.g., that the members of particular social categories—races, religions, genders, orientations—are inferior), false certainties can be written in blood, or at least the currency of great suffering.

Our brains are essentially reactive, constructed to respond to certain stimuli in certain ways. Seeing a shadowy figure enter a nighttime street triggers brain chemicals that convince us danger has been engaged, that our options are fight or flight. Or someone offers a bargain that careful thought would reveal as too good to be true, but the part of our minds capable of careful thought is taking a nap while the part that is all eager appetite handles the steering-wheel. I think of myself as quite self-aware, but I am forced to admit that under certain circumstances, with certain pressures and temptations, I am more likely to go with an impulse than subject it to questioning. Ironically, it’s only by remembering that—something I may find very difficult to do under just such circumstances—that I have any hope of escaping my susceptibilities.

The lessons of science have taught me to try for awareness, and when I fail, to notice that when the fog clears. These are the same lessons many millions learn from spiritual practice, observing the workings of the mind, bringing awareness to the impulses rooted in our animal selves, refusing to grant ourselves the exemption that insists on our own innocence, displacing damage to others. How would our lives change—how would the world change—if we could apply this knowledge, now ratified by both faith and reason?

The scale of compassion: big and little selves. What suffering do we notice? For what suffering do we accept responsibility? Where are we moved to mourn, and beyond mourning, to act? The default setting for human empathy barely needs repeating: me first, my relations, my tribe, my people, and then, in concentric circles, the rest of the world. Yet more and more, our enormously enhanced ability to glimpse the wider world has blurred the boundaries, calling us to extend compassion far beyond the defaults.

I keep hearing people say that their hearts are snagged on the Sandy Hook School massacre in Connecticut, that they are consumed by lingering sadness and shock. “It’s personal,” someone told me. This is not difficult to comprehend. The violence of young and innocent lives erased by an evil rooted in the deep distortion of one man with a gun: the purity of the ache, its airtight insusceptibility to ameliorating interpretation despite the thousands of words dispensed with that intention—these things make it an apt emblem for pointless loss, an apt instrument of personal pain regardless of direct connection to the victims. Have you notice the proliferation of punditry casting authors in the lead roles (the titles follow a formula: “I am Adam Lanza’s”—mother, teacher, shrink, victim, etc.)?

Meanwhile, many voices are raised to question whether this heartwrending loss will also open the gates of compassion wide enough to admit the full weight of suffering, including the pain caused not by one broken man, but by our collective actions. In my previous essay, I wrote about the scale of murder committed with our commonwealth and in our names, asking how “we extend to all of those damaged by our grand self-entitlement to punish others the same compassion that is ignited in moments such as these.” Others ask why such compassion is not offered to innocent victims in other countries such as Syria; or why there is more outrage and organized response generated after the death of white children than children of color.

Sometimes the lens is pulled way back. For example, yesterday, hundreds of comments were posted to Nassim Taleb’s Facebook contention that a much more powerful killer is being ignored:

The press is making us mistake a mouse for an elephant, and an elephant for a mouse. Today, in the U.S., many more people are dying from overfeeding than underfeeding, many more people are killed by excessive comfort than discomfort, and for all the evil of the gun lobby, firearms harm much, much fewer people (<1%) than the corn syrup, cereal, wheat, and orange juice industries. I cannot believe that, in the 21st century, "intelligent" people would mistake the lurid for the statistical.

Does your mind rebel at this? How can Taleb compare corn syrup to guns as a weapon of mass destruction? Is he trivializing a tragedy?

Consider just one health consequence of overfeeding. Diabetes entails genetic factors, but Type 2 diabetes, which accounts for 90% of all cases, is generally triggered by what are called “lifestyle factors,” chiefly diet and exercise. It is expanding exponentionally around the globe as a “western-style” diet replaces traditional diets involving fewer processed foods and sweets. In the U.S., the CDC calls diabetes an “epidemic,” noting that it is the 7th largest cause of death. It has a huge public policy dimension: corn and other grains get the lion’s share of U.S. agricultural subsidy, directly resulting in the ubiquitous presence of high-fructose corn syrup in both adults’ and children’s diets, which correlates to growing diabetes rates. Simply stated, taxpayers underwrite the contamination of our food supply with substances that kill millions, and then bear the resulting health costs and personal losses.

The counter-argument is that there is an element of choice in diet: you have the option to eschew a Big Gulp, but an oncoming bullet doesn’t respond to polite demurral. Yet that truth obscures the extent of our investment in promoting health risks, the extent of our success in spreading harm and therefore our collective culpability. The CDC identifies diabetes as a leading cause in over 230,000 deaths in 2007 alone. In 2011, 31,000 deaths were attributed to firearms.

The gun lobby is about as pernicious as any organized force in our society, and I am glad to see more and more people responding with outrage to things like the NRA’s deranged proposal to put armed guards in every school. I am for gun control; and also for an end to the subsidies and policies that have contributed to the diabetes and other diet-related epidemics. Many of us have expanded the circles of compassion so that addressing gun violence leads directly to addressing other policies that cause many times the fatalities. I am noticing how increasing numbers are calling out the relationship to suffering that privileges the local and immediate and ignores the harm we cause without seeming to care, expanding their awareness to take in the entire planet and our impact on the future of life itself. Within our thematic universe, that dialetic—the little us versus the big us—is gathering force. How would our lives change—how would the world change—if we could apply this knowledge, now ratified by both faith and reason?

Blessings to all my friends who celebrate Christmas as a time of compassion, of goodwill to all. May that spirit suffuse our thematic universe this year. We need the help.

Been listening to a little of the neo-doowop lately. What can I say? These are tender times. Love from me to you, readers: Woody Guthrie via Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. “This Land Is Your Land.”