Brian's Asides

Consider another example: military pay versus pay in civilian firms. Overall military pay is relatively flat – that is, it does not go up and down depending on performance, and it is also lower than for comparable positions in civilian firms. Nothing in standard economic analysis can make sense of such a pay structure – or of the rituals that are central to military tradition.

But with identity economics it all makes sense, and we gain an entirely new perspective on work incentives, not just in the military, but in all pursuits. In organizations that function well, employees identify with their work and their organizations. If employees feel more like insiders – a key purpose of military rituals – there is little need for incentive pay or pay-for-performance schemes. The military changes the identity of its recruits, inculcating in them values such as duty and service.

In the civilian world, too, the most important determinant of whether an organization functions well is not the monetary incentive system, as standard economic models would imply, but whether its workers identify with the organization and with their job within it. If they do not, they will seek to game the incentive system, rather than to meet the organization’s goals

There is another lesson. That is that the U.N.-affiliated bodies are better at certain things than others. Clearly the "Hopenhagen" messaging campaign was a sleeper hit of sorts -- not at driving the political decision-making process, but at finding its way into t-shirt designs, protesters' chants, and online petition drives. Meanwhile U.N. affiliates such as the World Health Organization and certain programs under UNESCO are fairly effective at gathering and distributing  information and funding, after a political consensus has already been established (i.e., disease is bad; child mortality is bad). Yet the U.N. Security Council itself is largely dysfunctional. Alas, the United Nations has never worked smoothly as a forum for resolving multi-faceted and contentious international political disputes. (Savvy commentators like Council on Foreign Relations' Michael A. Levi are now examining alternative venues for moving climate talks forward.)

This is what I was getting at in How to Build in the 21st Century.

It doesn't matter how essential the cause is, or how genuinely good our intentions are, or how much effort we invest, the Spectacle of Awesomeness can get in the way of the Process of Actual Progress.

The U.N. is very much a 20th century institution -- a set of rather unnatural mechanisms imagined and designed and willed into existence by Very Important Men from another time -- almost like a monument to mid-century managerial power, or a kind of conspiracy by the past to control the future.

Sometimes monumental symbols and spectacles are what's needed -- as in bringing attention to a set of problems and ideas, i.e. climate change. The U.N. has done that. Is this the end of what it can accomplish? Can it do more? How? By even more strenuously centralized efforts?

Or is it time to reconceive it?

A leader or creator -- in whatever career -- needs to have an understanding of the social and historical context of the problems he or she confronts. He/she needs to have a rich imagination as he confronts unprecedented challenges -- within a startup company, a non-profit organization, or a state legislature. He/she needs to have the ability and confidence needed to arrive at original approaches to a problem. And he/she needs a broad set of skills of analysis, reasoning, and communication, as he works with others to discover and implement new solutions. So a liberal education is a superb foundation for almost any career -- engineer, accountant, doctor, community activist, or president.

This picture argues for breadth in the undergraduate experience. It also argues for two other curricular values: interdisciplinarity and multicultural breadth. It is evident that the difficult problems our civilization faces do not fit neatly into specific academic disciplines. Climate change, mortgage crises, and the legacy of racism all pose dense, "wicked" problems that demand cross-discipline collaboration. And likewise, the advantages created for US society by the racial and ethnic diversity of our population will be wasted if our young adults don't learn how to see the world through multiple perspectives of different human circumstances. A university isn't the only place where multicultural learning takes place, but it is one very important place. And to date universities have only scratched the surface in creating a genuinely multicultural learning environment.

Everything comes back to education.

Not only does Haddow fail to see that hip subculture is a big machine for creating sex and art, he fails to see that being hip can be a sort of code of honour, something sadly lacking in the cultural mainstream. The spiritual sloth Haddow accuses the hip subculture of is actually much more prevalent in the general population, which schlepps about in jeans and listens to shapeless, floppy music and sleepwalks through shapeless, floppy jobs. People in the hip subculture are more likely -- like chivalric aristocrats -- to pay attention to what they're wearing, to experiment, to innovate. As for the value of what they come up with, that brings us back to the hands-on prac crit the Adbusters article avoids, desperate to stay arm's-length.

Sure, the hip subculture, seen from a certain distance (like next door when you're trying to sleep and they're partying), can be frustratingly superficial, conformist, holier than thou. But think of it as something people do in their 20s, and think of 20something hipsters spreading out, in their 30s and 40s, in more and more individual directions, becoming artists, visionaries, eccentrics... or just settling down to bring up kids in a neighbourhood with an organic grocery and soya milk ice cream.

In the end, the camera is mightier than the rock.

Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission, Western civilization has had a succession of counter-culture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society.

But after punk was plasticized and hip hop lost its impetus for social change, all of the formerly dominant streams of "counter-culture" have merged together. Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the "Hipster."

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the "hipster" – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

The article is over a year old but keeps coming to mind as I think and write about creativity...

The word "hipster" has been around for the better part of a century. What does it say when we're incapable of creating new names?

When all we can see is what’s happening at a given moment, we tend to follow the crowd: we fail to develop the ability to think, work, learn, and live apart from that crowd. But when we can view our own actions playing out over time in one continuous thread, as in a lifestream, we get a better idea of who we are (or perhaps aren’t). Then we can stop following the crowd from fad to fad and ground ourselves via sustainable personal identities, each with our own respective knowledge, skills, styles and voices that nobody else can duplicate.

The thread metaphor is especially valuable when we try to make sense of the relation between personal and social aspects of living, or the relation between “the individual” and “the group.”

The value of self-reliance is not merely personal or individualistic. When we each cultivate distinctive talents and personal mastery for ourselves, our society becomes richer and more robust: the greater degree of variety of knowledge and competence is present in a group, the more likely the group is to survive and thrive via emerging challenges and opportunities.

Hence a social fabric develops as our many personal threads distribute evenly accross the full range of experience – not tangling too close together nor leaving too many gaps, but each tending to find an individual niche with just enough wiggle room. And it’s just as important that our threads should all continually stretch towards the future, learning and growing via new challenges, rather than going in circles, or falling slack and getting tied into knots.

My proposal for the role of news is to provide the perpendicular threads that weave our lives into a coherent fabric. Without these common cross-references it’s difficult to maintain an even distribution. Without obective threads being weaved laterally, the fabric may disintegrate into separate bunches, tangles, and braids.

News and personal information (like emails or Facebook notifications) aren’t separate things; they’re more like two lines intersecting (to modify one of William James’s great metaphors). The intersecting point of any given event is neither just news or just personal information, but is referenced by properties of both.

As we communicate through the course of the day, we each have an individual responsibility to continually weave information into the fabric of our world – interpreting each moment into information that can be exchanged both laterally via social/news threads and vertically in the form of personal identity and meaning, leaving some aspect of the thread open, stretching towards the future.

WHEN Philoctetes in the Lemnian isle
          Like a form sculptured on a monument
          Lay couched; on him or his dread bow unbent
          Some wild Bird oft might settle and beguile
          The rigid features of a transient smile,
          Disperse the tear, or to the sigh give vent,
          Slackening the pains of ruthless banishment
          From his loved home, and from heroic toil.
          And trust that spiritual Creatures round us move,
          Griefs to allay which Reason cannot heal;                   10
          Yea, veriest reptiles have sufficed to prove
          To fettered wretchedness, that no Bastile
          Is deep enough to exclude the light of love,
          Though man for brother man has ceased to feel.
                                                              1827.