Before going on to state the second principle –needed to get the rest of the way there– let me specify that it is impossible fully to apply the first principle and then go on to implement the second.\u00a0 When being a good person leads to questioning the powers that be, social systems resist ethical enlightenment.\u00a0\u00a0 Upton Sinclair expressed one facet of its resistance when he wrote: \u2018Nothing prevents a man from understanding more than his salary depending on not understanding<\/em>.\u2019\u00a0 \u00a0Although the educational pessimism of Bourdieu and Passeron is not (in my view) entirely right, it is not entirely wrong.\u00a0\u00a0 Dysfunctional systems reproduce themselves with dysfunctional educations.\u00a0 They resist the changes at the levels of psychology, therapy, spirituality, religion, science, philosophy and education that –if they were implemented– would lead toward the adaptive social structures that \u2013if they could be brought into existence\u2014 would solve the bottleneck problems.\u00a0 Progress has to be stepwise.\u00a0\u00a0 Pro-social education is both cause and effect of social changes that move in the direction of taking homo sapiens <\/em>off the endangered species list.<\/p>\n The other principle is do what works. <\/em>Adding the second principle to the first makes my philosophy true by definition.\u00a0 If we do what works, the problems are solved.\u00a0 If the problems are not solved, then whatever we did, we did not do what works.\u00a0 (I claim that the truth of this general idea survives adding the qualifications that would be needed to state it precisely.)\u00a0 My philosophy can still be called trivial, or called an abstraction that is useless in the real world, but it cannot be called false.<\/p>\n Let me give an example to show that (like the definition that proves that an atom with four protons is carbon) do what works <\/em>is a true-by-definition abstraction useful in the real world and is not trivial.\u00a0 Consider a central point Milton Friedman made in his 1976 Nobel Lecture. \u00a0\u00a0The populist measures taken by left-leaning governments to achieve full employment and build a welfare state did not work.\u00a0 Echoing his intellectual allies Karl Popper and Friedrich von Hayek, and also echoing innumerable editorials in the mainstream press, Friedman provided empirical evidence that their unintended consequences were inflation and unemployment.<\/p>\n Innumerable editorials in the same vein have made \u2018populist\u2019 a pejorative term.\u00a0\u00a0 \u2018Populist\u2019 names politicians who are, or are alleged to be, irresponsible and less than honest. \u00a0\u00a0To get votes they promise people things they want (like pensions and health care) when they know, or should know, that they cannot keep their promises.\u00a0 If they are elected, their government will not be able to raise the money to pay for implementing their programme. \u00a0The editorials regularly conclude with lines like, \u2018inevitably, it is the poor who will suffer the most.\u2019<\/p>\n In the real world do what works <\/em>is a right-wing principle.\u00a0 When Margaret Thatcher opens her purse, takes out a copy of The Fatal Conceit <\/em>by Friedrich von Hayek and proclaims \u2018This is what we believe!\u2019 she is saying:\u00a0 We do what works.\u00a0\u00a0 Labour does what does not work.\u00a0 History and logic prove it.<\/p>\n Treating do what works <\/em>as a basic philosophical principle is a way to recommend do what works<\/em> as a common normative framework <\/em>shared by right, left and centre.\u00a0\u00a0 It is a way to avoid what Lewis Coser called absolute conflict.\u00a0 In absolute conflict conversation is useless.\u00a0\u00a0 The opposed parties cannot reason together because they start from incompatible premises.<\/p>\n Moreover, taking doing what works <\/em>as a common premise leads to (that is to say, using appropriate educational methods it can be a starting point that leads to) structural understanding.<\/em><\/p>\n To move solutions to humanity\u2019s bottleneck problems out of the category of the impossible and into the category of the possible, structural understanding <\/em>is the second most important educational outcome, second only to a pro-social attitude.\u00a0 <\/em>Let me give an example to illustrate why:<\/p>\n Another of humanity\u2019s bottleneck problems is mass unemployment.\u00a0\u00a0 It can be lumped together with poorly paid, precarious and miserable employment.\u00a0 Together they make joining the advancing juggernaut of the culture of drugs and gangs for many people by far the more attractive option.\u00a0 But the solution to this problem is not pleasing investors at all costs, come what may.\u00a0\u00a0 To make this point one can concede to Friedman that social democratic policies led to stagflation and therefore did not work; but then add that a system that fails to provide pensions, health care, clean air, a sustainable biosphere, and good employment does not work either.\u00a0 The real solutions, the solutions that really work, must be ones that free humanity from the necessity to please investors at all costs, come what may.<\/p>\n We can restate the second of the two principles as:\u00a0 structural understanding.\u00a0 <\/em>Then do what works <\/em>would be reframed as a privileged common normative framework.\u00a0\u00a0 It is privileged because it is a starting point that leads to structural understanding. \u00a0\u00a0In Paulo Freire\u2019s terms it is a bisagra<\/em>, a wedge.\u00a0\u00a0 In Roy Bhaskar\u2019s terms it is a transcendental argument:\u00a0 it is a transcendental argument because it proves the necessity of an economy of solidarity starting from a premise that people who initially disagree with you accept. \u00a0Structural understanding makes it possible to see that solidarity really works, while individualism (what Andr\u00e9 Orl\u00e9an calls s\u00e9paration marchande <\/em>and E.F. Schumacher called \u2018institutionalized irresponsibility) at the end of the day does not work<\/p>\n An economy of solidarity (taken as a generic name for a loose coalition of many progressive tendencies today whose adherents would voluntarily accept the label) advocates an ethic, namely solidarity.\u00a0 Its ethics is neatly expressed by the founder of permaculture, Bill Mollison, as:\u00a0 1. Love the land, 2. Love the people. 3.\u00a0 Share the surplus.\u00a0 Solidarity is similar to Austrian liberalism because its foundations are ethical; but different from Austrian liberalism (sometimes called libertarianism) because its ethic is different.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Both realize that a social structure is, after all, an ethics.\u00a0\u00a0 Structure is about norms and roles, rules and rights.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For Austrian ultra-liberals like von Hayek and von Mises the heart of ethics and of structure is found in contract rules and property rights.<\/p>\n If we start from do what works <\/em>we can have a conversation.\u00a0 Instead of simply saying you see it your way, I see it mine, we can treat each other as persons of good will and look at the evidence together. \u00a0We can have what Linda Hartling calls a dignilogue<\/em>, dialogue with dignity.<\/p>\n Shortly before Milton Friedman argued that social democracy did not work because <\/em>it tried to create full employment and a welfare state, Jurgen Habermas in The Legitimation Crisis <\/em>gave different explanations of why social democracy does not work.\u00a0 The modern state (he had in mind states at least somewhat similar to Germany, his own) is overburdened and overwhelmed.\u00a0\u00a0 It has to attract investment, which implies spending money on infrastructure, security, subsidies and education while keeping taxes on the investing class low.\u00a0 It is pledged to make into realities the social human rights promised the masses during and after World War II, such as employment, housing, health, and pensions.\u00a0 Its constitutional frame is one of limited government, defined by private law.\u00a0 The bulk of society\u2019s wealth is beyond the government\u2019s reach, beyond its power to tax. \u00a0In modernity the market is the primary institution; the government is secondary.\u00a0 Markets govern states more than states govern markets.\u00a0\u00a0 Making matters still worse, the system-world (the world of business and government) is dominating the life-world (the world of families and personal relationships).\u00a0 But it is in the life-world where persons are formed. The former cannot function without the latter\u2019s human values.<\/p>\n Habermas is one of many to include in a bibliography of authors to read to learn structural understanding.\u00a0 He helps his readers to see both why the world as it is is not the world as it has to be, and also why Friedman in his Nobel Lecture was telling the truth about the world at is.\u00a0\u00a0 Trying to create full employment and welfare for all within the constraints of the now-dominant structures, built on the now-dominant values, really is impossible. <\/em>\u00a0\u00a0Unbounded organization is a conversation, an academy and a movement devoted to making the impossible possible.\u00a0\u00a0 It has emerged from theory, but it has also emerged from practical experience, for example from community organizing in the town of Bokfontein that has made Bokfontein immune from waves of communal violence that have periodically swept over similar South African towns. That experience will be described in a forthcoming book from Dignity Press by me with the assistance of Gavin Andersson.\u00a0 Those seeking more detail on how general ideas like those above have practical applications might be interested in the two appendices to my older (2004) Understanding the Global Economy <\/em>(with a Preface by Betty Reardon). It is available free in PDF on the Internet.\u00a0 One appendix is about ending war.\u00a0 The other (which has been published in Acorn, The<\/em> Journal of the Gandhi-King Society<\/em>) is about ending poverty.<\/p>\n _____________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n Life\u2019s (humanity\u2019s and the earth\u2019s) bottleneck problems can be solved, I dare to suggest, by applying just two general principles. The two can be regarded as principles of unbounded organization. Unbounded organization is the name of a conversation, an academy and a movement (one of many, but not one that duplicates what the others do) devoted to making the impossible possible. Here I contribute to its conversation the proposal that implementing just two principles will make the impossible possible; namely, a pro-social attitude plus doing what works; or alternatively, a pro-social attitude plus structural understanding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[232,680,354,401,267,487,119,109,985,380,172,75],"class_list":["post-137602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial","tag-capitalism","tag-conflict-resolution","tag-economics","tag-environment","tag-geopolitics","tag-human-rights","tag-peace","tag-politics","tag-social-justice","tag-solutions","tag-west","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137602\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/howard-richards.jpg\")
<\/a><\/em>Prof. Howard Richards is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. He was born in Pasadena, California but since 1966 has lived in Chile when not teaching in other places. Professor of Peace and Global Studies Emeritus, Earlham College, a school in Richmond Indiana affiliated with the Society of Friends (Quakers) known for its peace and social justice commitments. Stanford Law School, MA and PhD in Philosophy from UC Santa Barbara, Advanced Certificate in Education-Oxford,\u00a0 PhD in Educational Planning from University of Toronto. Books:\u00a0 <\/em>Dilemmas of Social Democracies with Joanna Swanger,\u00a0<\/em>Gandhi and the Future of Economics with Joanna Swanger, <\/em>The Nurturing of Time Future, Understanding the Global Economy (available as e-books),\u00a0<\/em>The Evaluation of Cultural Action (not an e book).\u00a0 <\/em>Hacia otras Economias with Raul Gonzalez, free download available at www.repensar.cl<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/em>Solidaridad, Participacion, Transparencia: conversaciones sobre el socialismo en Rosario, Argentina. Available free on the blogspot lahoradelaetica.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"