Friends, Sorry to be mostly out of touch last week...I was attending a conference in Manchester, "Alternative Futures and Popular Protest", where I presented a paper: "Toward a Democratic Society: Dialog as a Cultural Movement". It was a very interesting experience. All of the folks there, as you might expect, would consider themselves to be 'strongly in favor of social change'. And yet, because they are working in an academic context, most of them seemed strangely distanced from what they are studying and writing about. With a few notable exceptions there was no discussion of 'how to create change', but rather discussions of research methodology and the like. In the Sufi tradition, academics are a favorite target of ridicule. There's one story where Nasrudin comes upon someone who fell down a well. Nasrudin starts lowering a rope to the fellow, saying "Rope for you". The fellow says, "That's not a complete sentence. Until you learn to talk correctly you'll never get anywhere." So Nasrudin pulls the rope back up, and says, "I'll return to save you after I've learned how to talk". I couldn't help responding in a similar vein to most (not all) of the papers. I hope I didn't make too many enemies, because it's not the people that are the problem, it's academia. People are channeled into studying smaller and smaller parts of problems, until they see only the leaf instead of the tree, not to mention the forest. The Sufis also say: "To gain knowledge, learn a fact every day. To gain wisdom, forget a fact every day." Fortunately there were also some very good papers. Humanity always finds a way to show through, despite imprisoning contexts. One of my favorites was on the Landless Peasant Movement in Brazil. Through a combination of direct action and making use of favorable legislation, these folks are able to occupy unused land and set up successful cooperative farms. And the presenter was clearly 'engaged' with her topic. But even with this talk, I had to take exception to the language used in the paper. It was filled with words like "problematization" and I got a headache trying to follow. I asked if this kind of language was necessary, or if people used it to impress one another. I got an honest answer: the language is forced by the socialization process in academia. As a consequence the papers would be undecipherable by the activists who might benefit from the well-hidden insights. Nonetheless I was pleased to be invited to participate, and the discussion after my paper was lively. If I attend next year, I think I'll attempt a paper on the 'academic problem', if I can find an approach that would be useful and not merely critical. Perhaps something about 'writing to inform activists'. --- There are many topics queued up for our dialog here on the lists. Yes, there is more about climate change, in particular the co-option of that (real) problem by elites. I've also gotten lots of messages about "Jewish conspiracies" and I think it's about time we talk about that. As with most things there's some element of truth, but there's also some unconscious anti-semitism at work. One thing we can be happy about this week is that there was no attack on Iran, as was predicted in the Israeli press. bye for now, rkm -- -------------------------------------------------------- Escaping the Matrix website http://escapingthematrix.org/ cyberjournal website http://cyberjournal.org Community Democracy Framework http://cyberjournal.org/DemocracyFramework.html Subscribe cyberjournal list •••@••.••• (send blank message) Posting archives http://cyberjournal.org/show_archives/ Moderator •••@••.••• (comments welcome)
