Today, we are a mostly impatient lot. We have trouble waiting five minutes for a coffee and fume if a flight is late. It is difficult to imagine that we might have to wait decades for something. In the world of ideas, things don’t always move quickly. Most of us can’t persist in developing a line of inquiry for weeks and months, never mind years or decades. But some very interesting and valuable ideas take a long time to find their way.
I’ve been a fan of C. S. “Buzz” Holling ever since I read his remarkable panarchy paper years ago. In 1973 while working at the University of British Columbia, Holling wrote a paper that was rather different than what his ecology colleagues at the time were writing. He rejected closed system, linear analysis of ecological systems that were based on equilibrium thinking. The dominant ideas (and given the rigidity of academia, dominant is probably too light a word) in the early 70’s tended to emphasize that populations of animals, plants, and people, move away from stable equilibrium when pressured by disease, predators, etc., and back to equilibrium when the threat is gone. This is true in some cases but Holling happened on a critical variance.
In time, Holling came to see that the assumptions of an equilibrium, command-control framework left out many important factors, including the observation that in some cases, when a population fell below a certain threshold, it never returned to its previous state even if the condition that led to the decline in the population was removed. If you take too many fish out of a lake, a total ban on fishing may not, even after decades, lead to the growth of a population similar to what was there before the decline. In Holling’s theoretical and empirical framework, the system settled into a stable state that was far from the earlier supposed equilibrium.
In a recent interview, Holling recollected how that 1973 paper and attendant ideas didn’t gain real traction for decades. At the end of his career and now in retirement, his work has contributed to institutions like the Stockholm Resilience Centre and has led to awards and increasing recognition with some now referring to Holling as the father of resilience theory.
His advice, when asked about what he would do now if he was just starting a research career, was that it is absolutely essential to pursue something that fascinates you. He suggests visiting your past to see what, as a child, captured your imagination, mesmerized you, piqued your excitement. Then, find ways to pursue that. There needs to be some deeply rooted ticking thing in your heart that fuels your pursuit. Coming from someone who waited decades to see his ideas gain acceptance, I think that’s worth considering.
We all know of historic examples of people who had ideas that were not recognized until long after they were dead. In that sense, I suppose Holling’s wait has not been as long as some. In either case, it is important that we avoid developing short-term success horizons.
This week, spurred by my participation in a local poetry workshop, I pulled a back issue of Room of One’s Own, the Canadian feminist literary journal, off the shelf. It served as a reminder that truth often arrives in the simplest of pictures, the fewest of words. Such as those of Ann Scowcroft:
iv. the wind
I stand next to him. He wears patched
coveralls and a straw hat.
He is pointing at the walnut’s leaves showing their grey-green
undersides, rattling in the south-easterly wind.
It’s going to rain, he says. You can tell by the leaves.
I am six.
I believe him.
Everything he says is true.
One of my favorite books from 2009 is Mary Karr’s third memoir, Lit. I hadn’t read her previous memoirs or her poetry (despite her status as a very celebrated memoirist, recipient of various awards and grants), and a publisher sent the book to me. I opened it, not knowing what to expect, and I was immediately riveted to the page. (And it’s a long book.)
Karr had a horrific childhood, but this book isn’t about that – it’s the account of her growth into adulthood and, ultimately, toward her eventual conversion to Catholicism after years of dysfunction and alcoholism. I suppose a Karr devotee would have known that she is now Catholic; I was ignorant, but halfway through the book I suddenly got the feeling that this would be a conversion narrative.
And it is one, messily, beautifully so. It’s what I’d hope all conversion narratives might be. Karr does not gloss over anything in her retelling, and she doesn’t claim to have clean and perfect life today. Conversion is very much an ongoing process to her. And that’s the kind of conversion narrative people long for – as evidenced by Lit’s placement on nearly every major “Best of 2009″ list. I think Flannery O’Connor would like Mary Karr.
Karr is interviewed in The Paris Review this month. I’ve read a lot of these interviews, but this is one of the best I’ve read. Laced with colorful language, it’s no-nonsense, bitingly truthful, and, yet, hopeful.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have any writing rituals, things you have to do in order to write?KARR
I pray. I ask God what to write. I know that sounds insane, but I do. I say: What do you want me to say? I have a sense that God wanted these books written. That doesn’t mean they’re meant to be bestsellers. Nor am I hearing voices. But a lot of times I’ll get stuck and I’ll just say, Help me. A nonbeliever might think of it as talking to my superego, or some better self. But I do have a sense of being guided.INTERVIEWER
What does it sound like when you get stuck?KARR
F—. Sh–. Don’t. F—. You dumb b—h – who ever told you that you could write? That’s what it sounds like.
Fast Company started this line of inquiry for me with a piece they published on dead malls. They featured Dixie Square Mall, pictured above from the website DeadMalls.com. Another one is El Con Mall. There are many, many more. Pop culture commentators and analysts talk about malls as our ritual religious gathering places, the temples of western consumerism. For the last ten years, Brian Florens and Peter Blackbird have been taking road trips to visit dead malls and record what they find. Here are some video shots of an abandoned Birmingham, Alabama mall that they visited (a bit less scary than Dixie Square Mall).
Our ideas and most important beliefs get translated into our physical infrastructure so that if you want to know us, you would do well to observe what we do and also what we build. The interesting phenomena is that our ideas sometimes change more quickly than the built environment. Dead malls are a good example. So are ornate downtown churches that are mostly empty. The physical infrastructure is an echo, in some cases, of what we once thought was important.
Business model relics and changing spiritual expressions point to places where the ideas and systems changed more quickly than the physical artifacts that once represented those ideas and systems.
When I was eight we bought a farm in northern Alberta and on the river quarter was an abandoned homestead. The log house, barn and outbuildings were overgrown with trees, grass and shrubs – a powerful imaginative space that I can feel as easily now as I did when I first saw it. It was once a prime location to set up a farm but had, within a few short decades, been made less desirable because there was easier road access outside the river valley. The people were gone. Their ideas inaccessible except as represented by what they had built and left behind.
What are your favourite abandoned spaces? What do they say?
As the Globe reports, it seems people are still interested in writing, and in what writers have to say about it.
“Inspired by the British paperback publication of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, the Guardian newspaper asked a selection of fiction writers for their rules, and got a surprisingly wide range of responses.”
The answers, which have gone viral, appear now on the Guardian website. Among them…
Roddy Doyle: Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, e.g. “horse,” “ran,” “said.”
Richard Ford: Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer is a good idea.
Neil Gaiman: Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
Jonathan Franzen: It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
A.L. Kennedy: Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pull-overs or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.
Philip Pullman: My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work.
Margaret Atwood: Prayer might work.
And with that, I turn off my server and pick up my pen. On I go…
The bulk of Cardus staff just finished gathering around the big screen watching this year’s Speech from the Throne. Throne speeches are usually a collection of vauge sentiments intended to signal direction rather than project specific policy prescriptions. Except for policy junkies they usually don’t merit more than a passing glance.
That said, we don’t want to get carried away with the 6000 words or so delivered by the Governor General this afternoon. But there are a few signals we find encouraging:
First, it builds on who we are rather than what governments should do. It projects positive attributes for the country as a whole, that extend beyond the mere work of politics. On page seventeen it lists:
We could dissect this list at length, but what is remarkable is the substantive difference in tone compared to the pan-Canadian consensus that would have defined the country over the last thirty years.
Second, investment in Canada is increasingly signalled. Russ Kuykendall made important observations in his review of the Red Wilson report several years ago. In this area he signalled the role of non-governmental institutions that needs to and will be acknowledged in the economic realm and how these shape our social architecture. These are critical forces shaping our economy and, in practical terms, will effect such rates as cellular and internet.
Third, there is a robust acknowledgement of the importance of the charitable sector. There are promises about the reduction of red tape and the introduction of a Prime Minister’s award for volunteerism, all positive signals regarding issues Cardus raised in A Canadian Culture of Generosity. These might be lip service or they might foreshadow something more substantive in tomorrow’s budget addressing the tax structure relating to charities, providing this sector with the tools to increase its capacity. Here’s to hoping for the latter.
Niall Ferguson writes about Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge of Chaos in the latest Foreign Affairs. Ferguson is a historian and a cracking – if controversial – writer. Yet for his obvious sympathies to historians, his argument in this latest article is a caution to our retrospectively anchored predictive capacities. He writes,
Most of the fat-tail phenomenon that historians study are not the climaxes of prolonged and deterministic story lines; instead, they represent perturbations, and sometimes the complete breakdowns, of complex systems.
Complexity theory has been borrowed from other disciplines, the natural sciences among them. The key insight is the distinction between complicated systems and complex systems. In a complicated system, the unit can be parsed and dissected: think of an internal combustion engine. A complex system is has organic interdependencies that mean one or another part of the system cannot be removed and examined without altering the matrix as a whole: think of the human brain. The instinct behind the Millennium Development Goals, among others, is a complex systems theory instinct: we cannot tackle one or another of these problems, they are a coherent system that must be moved incrementally in total, not simply tackled one piece at a time. Bob Goudzwaard calls this the interlocking nature of global crises .
Ferguson writes that when things go wrong in a complex system, the scale of disruption is nearly impossible to anticipate. As such, there is the tendency to move from stability to instability quite suddenly. Ferguson projects this is our imperial moment. And the critical node in the adaptability of the current world system is what he calls confidence.
In imperial crises, it is not the material underpinnings of power that really matter but expectations about future power… it is this shift that is crucial: a complex adaptive system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability.
Ultimately he argues it is the privilege of historians to retrospectively portray the process of imperial dissolution as slow acting, with multiple overdetermining causes. Rather, empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse. The shift from consummation to destruction and then to desolation is not cyclical. It is sudden.
Friday morning breakfast at Jubilee.
Last week at this time, quite a number of us were making the tough transition from Jubilee, where we’d spent the weekend, back to reality. I’m not sure what my friends to the north were doing, but I was dragging myself out of bed and to the Empire State Building to lecture on evaluating sources for research papers. I told my students that I spent the weekend remembering what it was like to function on very little sleep. They were appreciative.
I’m curious to see what other Cardus staffers took away from our experience – besides our many shared conversations late at night. As I mention at the Jubilee blog today, the image of John Perkins preaching from the very edge of the stage, beckoning to us as students, will sit with me for a long time.
We were privileged to meet with a number of people while we were there, including a late-night talk with Mike Hickerson of InterVarsity’s Emerging Scholars Network and breakfast with a couple of our favorite Comment authors, David Greusel and David Naugle. We strategized and planned for the future. I personally was privileged (or something) to learn a lot of new information about the Canadian political system and curling.
Most of all, though, I came away from Jubilee knowing that something great is afoot, that God is doing some awesome things and I’m grateful to just be extended the grace to be a part of it with such enjoyable co-laborers.
And I also left grateful, as I often do after these sorts of gatherings, that we live in the age of social media, when it’s easy to continue the conversation after the lights go down.
– by Nicholas Ellens
Growing up in Lent our evening devotions changed tune and we relished in older traditions, borrowed from various cultures, times, and places. As children, we enjoyed the baking of fresh, triune-pretzels on Sunday afternoons and our epicurean awareness of the liturgical season culminated in Good Friday’s hot crossed buns with the pregnant expectation of Easter’s pascha, a Ukrainian concoction described in A Continual Feast as made of “farmer cheese and cream, butter, eggs, and sugar: just about everything (except meat) that had been given up for Lent.”
While Lent in my childhood involved some forms of abstention in subsequent years, I performed a few silent and secretive fasts, as well as more publicly fasting from coffee and facebook most recently. In truth, I am not quite sure what I think.
Today, I logged on to facebook (which I clearly have not given up this time around) to find a friend’s post as follows:
thoughts on Lent from Chocolat: “I think that we can’t go around measuring our goodness by what we don’t do. By what we deny ourselves, what we resist, and who we exclude. I think we’ve got to measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create and who we include.”
I enjoyed Chocolat, though I found the related Babbette’s Feast to better present the salvation from self-imposed, excessive stoicism. This post was met with an array of responses, ranging from “I have always felt lent was a silly pharisaical [sic.] way of going about things. ‘look how holy I am!’ to ‘I believe that experiencing the depths of God’s goodness (in whatever form) requires times of voluntary abstinence and restraint. We may assume that a song which contains more notes would be more beautiful and powerful; but it’s the spaces between the notes that gives the piece it’s depth and power.’ I am not alone in my inability to make sense of the observation of the season.
I am sceptical of whether I can apply the messages of Chocolat (and Babbette’s Feast) to a culture of grotesque over-consumption and insatiable desire for personal ‘happiness’. There is certainly truth in what I will call the simple answer, that the observation of Lent is only important as far as it reflects an appropriate state of mind and heart. But what of the importance of liturgy and religious practise as more than simply a reflection of the life of faith? What of Jamie Smith’s argument that we are liturgical creatures who inevitably live liturgical lives which in turn form us? The alternative—choosing to live without liturgy—is based in the Modernist myth of the ‘rational man’, or so the claim goes.
And so I enter Lent torn. It remains unclear to me how, why or in what fashion we should think of this Season.
– submitted to After Hours by Nicholas Ellens.
More: read contributing editor, Alissa Wilkinson’s, reflections on Lent at Living Jubilee.
Last night I attended a lecture at The Hamilton Spectator with my daughter Charae. She was there to take notes for a school newspaper article (and to keep her dad company). The lecture featured the results of Evelyn Forget (Department of Community Health Sciences, University of Manitoba) research on a social experiment that was conducted in Dauphin, Manitoba between 1974 and 1978. Every family in the town of 10,000 was guaranteed a minimum income of 60% of the low income cut-off. The primary interest of the original work was to see how this would impact the labour market in the community. In that regard, it seems to have had little effect.
In going back over the data that had been squirreled away, Dr. Forget did notice two social impacts for that time period that were notable. The first was that high school graduations increased notably during that period. The conclusion she drew was that families having a minimum income guarantee felt less pressure to move their grade 11 students into the workforce. The second conclusion was that the number of hospital visits declined during this period as well for the group studied.
She explained that under welfare programs at that time, if you worked at all, your support was dropped (mostly). With the guaranteed minimum income (Mincome) you could work at a low-paying job and, if it paid less than the income cut-off percentage, you would have your wages topped up rather than having your support turned off if you earned anything at all.
Four similar tests were done in the US but the Dauphin site was the only community that represented a saturation site, i.e. every family could apply for and receive support as long as they met the minimum requirements.
I asked about how much the program cost vs how much was saved by decreased hospital visits, students finishing high school, etc. She said that was still in the process of being figured out but her work thus far would lead her to believe that it would be far less expensive than the current arrangement we have today. People can work but if all they can find is a low-paying job, they are able to work and receive support for the gap that remains.
When the money disappeared, graduation and health visits seem to have moved back toward where they were, though the question about how group that benefited from the program turned out in the long haul was difficult to answer. She said many people had contacted her to say how much the program had helped them but, as she pointed out, that kind of self selection usually means you hear from those who did well rather than from the people who may have gone to prison.
Universal health care came fully online in while a minimum income did not. An interesting historical note from the Canadian landscape. This research tells us what was the case but not what will be the case or what effect such a move might have today. Apparently there were 1800 boxes of forms, questionnaires, anthropologists reviews, sociologists reports, and material of that nature for her to go through – warehoused and waiting for the right person to come along. Though I have a real love for research, that sort of tedium would have gotten the best of me.
Ideas? Post 
