The Fever Chart

At the center of salvation history stands a simple Jewish peasant girl. As the Old Testament began with the story of Eve, the New Testament begins with the story of Mary, the New Eve, mother of the New Adam. She is the Theotokos, the God-Bearer, Ark of the New Covenant. She is the first Christian, and the mother of the Church, which is the Body of her son, Jesus Christ. It is therefore entirely appropriate that on the Feast of her Immaculate Conception we should pause to contemplate this plain Jewish maiden, the Mother of God.

As a former Evangelical, there is still something deep within me that flinches ever-so-slightly at the invocation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Though all of my old questions about Mary’s role in salvation history have long since been resolved, and although I’ve now been consecrated to the Immaculate Heart for well over a decade, I remain conscious of that imperceptible spasm of reservation that awakens upon hearing the Angelus, the Regina Coeli, or any other Marian prayer.

So it is odd that I should always be so moved by reading the great Marian hymn of the East, the Akathistos, which dates from the Sixth Century. The language is florid, as was often the style in the history of the Church; and yet, this hymn – a litany, really – manages to navigate the delicate line between the entirely proper exaltation of Our Lady as humanity’s greatest perfection (hyperdulia) and the improper, near-idolatrous worship of Mary (latria) that can sometimes be detected in popular devotion. As St. Louis de Montfort wrote in True Devotion to Mary: “If devotion to our Lady distracted us from our Lord, we would have to reject it as an illusion of the devil.” The Akathistos avoids becoming such an illusion by always placing Mary in a subordinate role to Jesus Christ, our God and Savior. Thus, she is the tendril, not the bud; the soil, not the fruit; the table, not the meal; and the rock, not the living water that springs from it.

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Less than thirty days before the Iowa Caucus, it appears that we are finally achieving some sort of clarity in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. The contours of a real three-candidate contest are finally begining to emerge, with Newt Gingrich as the conservative insurgent, Mitt Romney as the Wall Street Establishment candidate, and Ron Paul in his now-familiar role as libertarian gadfly. From where I sit, Ron Paul can’t win the nomination and Mitt Romney can’t beat Barack Obama, but Gingrich could do both; and that should give pause to anyone who cares about avoiding what could be an unimaginable conflagration in the Middle East sometime in mid to late 2013.

Just today, Gingrich pledged to nominate former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton to the post of Secretary of State if he becomes President. Bolton has long been one of the chief advocates for global, unilateral, and pre-emptive US military intervention and occupation. He was of course a cheerleader for the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and has opposed American withdrawal from those countries. He celebrated the Israeli siege of Gaza and has long advocated launching a pre-emptive war against Iran. Most recently, Bolton has suggested that only having President Obama in the White House makes American intervention in Syria unwise. With Obama gone and, say, President Gingrich in office, Bolton’s Syrian assessment would presumably change. One of Bolton’s biggest boosters and confidants in the Neoconservative intelligentsia is Max Boot, who in separate columns this week has demanded two new pre-emptive American wars, one against Syria and another against Iran.

Both Bolton and Boot predictably deploy the Hitler analogy whenever they talk about Iran. Bolton, for instance, has said, “If the choice is them continuing [towards a nuclear bomb] or the use of force, I think you’re at a Hitler marching into the Rhineland point … We’re still in 1936, but not for long.” In an article linked above, Boot writes, “After the failure to stop Hitler and Bin Laden, among others, Westerners were said to have suffered a ‘failure of imagination.’ We are suffering that same failure today as we fail to face up to the growing threat from the Islamic Republic.” Both Bolton and Boot deployed the same analogy nine years ago in the run-up to our unprovoked war against Iraq. Their argument is always based on the supposed irrationality and apocalypticism of their targeted regimes, whether Hussein’s Iraq or Ahmadinejad’s Iran. But those repeated invocations of Hitler and 1936 by Bolton and Boot themselves represent a kind of irrational, apocalyptic thinking. Moreover, their views fit very neatly into the irrational and apocalyptic worldview of that most important element in the Republican Party base: Evangelical Christians. It is that faction that gives the views of Bolton and Boot credence, that endorses their insistence that Israel is the only vital US interest in the Middle East, and that drives otherwise sophisticated and intelligent people to contemplate igniting a conflict the outcome of which we can only imagine.

Of course, the views of Bolton and Boot are, let’s admit, already the views of Newt Gingrich, right down to the Hitler analogy. Gingrich has recently said, “It’s like the 1930s. The Iranian regime is dedicated to creating a second Holocaust, in terms of wanting to annihilate Israel.” And in debate after debate, he has pledged to take unilateral military action against Iran, beginning with a bombing campaign aimed at overturning the regime. So, as the campaign for the Republican nomination clarifies, let’s be clear about one other thing: If Newt Gingrich is elected President, and presuming it hasn’t already happened, the United States will deliberately initiate, without provocation, a pre-emptive war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. And we will reap the whirlwind.

This image was first published in 1971, and apart from a specific reference to napalm is as relevant today as it was then. More so, because hunger is making a BIG comeback in the United States right now (not that it ever really went away). The US Department of Agriculture estimates that 17.4 million families are now “food insecure,” which means that “during any given month, they will be out of money, out of food, and forced to miss meals or seek assistance to feed themselves.” Those families include an estimated one in four American children and millions of senior citizens. And yet, we continue to spend $10 billion a week in Iraq and Afghanistan – you do remember that we’re at war, don’t you? – and more on “defense” and “national security” than the rest of the world combined. We’ve spent hundreds of billions bailing out banks and corporations, and now we’re spending hundreds of billions more purchasing our own debt. Meanwhile, wealthy and popular men like Herman Cain look down their noses and blame the hungry for their hunger.

How far we are from the Kingdom of God. How perverse and twisted our affections. How hollow and loveless our ideologies. How ridiculous our diversions and pretenses. How pathetic our justifications for letting our brothers and sisters languish. May God have mercy on us. We’re going to need it.

(Thanks to Sojourners for the image and the inspiration)

Driving through Watch Hill, a wealthy neighborhood perched atop a promontory that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean from the town of Westerly, Rhode Island, one might be forgiven for thinking that all is well in the Republic. Here, handsome families stroll the covered walkways of the village, past high-end realtors’ offices, upscale gift shops, and charming restaurants. Expensive sail and motor boats bob on their moorings in the cove, including one waterborne behemoth with an enormous, arching flybridge and a helicopter landing pad. In one corner of the main drag, children squeal as the Flying Horse Carousel stirs to life, the way it has thousands of times every summer since 1876. At the nearby St. Clair Annex, adults and kids alike wrestle with top-heavy ice cream cones beneath patriotic bunting. Around the corner from the Annex, on the private Watch Hill Beach, the privileged and their progeny luxuriate in the shade of canvas cabanas, splash about in the low surf, or sashay along the shore toward the mile-long dune of Napatree Point. A subdued sunlight lies warm on the skin. The skirls of seagulls and the muttering of well-tuned auto engines compete with gentle pipe organ melodies and the background hum of crashing waves. Every sense seems to confirm that Watch Hill and the world around it is a peaceful, orderly, and happy place.

But on this day storm clouds loom to the north, above the palatial homes and barbered lawns on the bluff. As I pull into a parking spot on Bay St., a dark line of shadow moves across the promontory, past the elegant Ocean House, and races down the steep slope into the village. Just as the midday darkness envelopes the scene, a low drumroll of thunder sounds and a strong wind sweeps up the boulevard, rattling cafe umbrellas and upending baseball caps. At once, the happy faces disappear, replaced by disbelieving glances aimed at the traitorous sky. A moment later, when the first sharp crack of thunder announces the arrival of rain, those faces turn to worry, then frustration, and finally, anger. Within minutes, the lovely late summer scene has been swept away, as wind and rain batter the covered walks and expensive shops, egged on by heaving waves that have appeared in the cove.

In America, the leading edge of a storm far worse than the one that inconvenienced those happy crowds in Watch Hill is now bearing down on us. The fast-moving shadows of the past thirty years – the accumulation of public and private debt, the overextension of empire, our addiction to oil and abuse of the planet – are giving way to the full cyclonic fury of collapse. In 2008, when the first shadows raced across the body politic, the face of America was painted with disbelief and worry, as one institution of American capitalism after another collapsed in a welter of mismanagement, criminal hubris, and outright fraud. By the summer of 2011, with the nation teetering on the brink of a deflationary depression, zombified state and local governments lurching toward bankruptcy, and hot wars in at least five foreign lands, the face of America is turning from frustration to anger, and that anger may itself soon be transformed into an unfocused, irrational rage. Despite what the acolytes of our national civil religion believe, the United States does not hold an exemption from history and human nature. Time and again, both here and elsewhere, conditions of social crisis have given rise to violence against marginal or minority populations.

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I’m not going to cry bitter tears over Anwar Al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, American citizens whose assassinations were engineered by the United States government yesterday, but I may shed a few for the Constitution that their killers were sworn to uphold. Al-Awlaki was a Phoenix-born jihadi propagandist who produced anti-American and anti-Western video lectures and sermons for rebroadcast on the web. Samir Khan was a 25 year-old North Carolinian who just last year started a English-language jihadist magazine titled ”Inspire.” Khan’s stated publishing goal was to recruit young Muslims to take up arms against the West and specifically the United States.

But it should be noted that neither Al-Awlaki or Khan had renounced his American citizenship. Neither had been tried and convicted of any crime. No attempt had been made to arrest and charge them under US law. There is no evidence that they had directly engaged in armed attacks on the United States or Americans abroad, or that they were conspiring with others to commit specific attacks against the United States or Americans abroad. And the only proof that Al-Awlaki had any hand in the operational planning of terrorist attacks amounts to this: the CIA says so. It was a claim the Agency never even bothered to make against Samir Khan.

So meager, in fact, is the evidence against Al-Awlaki that news outlets reporting his assassination today are at a bit of a loss: CBS News calls him a “U.S.-born cleric suspected of inspiring or helping plan numerous attacks on the United States.” CNN describes him as one “whose fluency in English and technology made him one of the top terrorist recruiters in the world.” Fox News says he was an “ideological leader.” And according to the New York Times, “His Internet lectures and sermons were linked to more than a dozen terrorist investigations in the United States, Britain and Canada. Get that: his lectures and sermons were linked to investigations. And for this American citizen was executed by drone on the expressed, personal instructions of Barack Obama, without formal charge and without trial.

Some will say that by even raising this issue, I am giving succor to terrorists. Such is the inverted totalitarianism of America in the “Age of Terror.” My response is two-fold. First, by any reckoning of the due process rights enshrined in the 5th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, unless an American citizen is a direct, immediate, and lethal threat to the United States or its citizens, it is manifestly illegal – and certainly immoral – for that citizen to be assassinated by the federal government. Unless, of course, one invokes Nixon’s Law: “When the President does it, that means it’s not illegal.” Second, one would think that those most eager to advance the principle of “limited government” would be out front and center against this kind of extra-judicial murder.  The right-wing often lampoons Barack Obama as a pharoah, but what is more pharaonic than the arbitrary power of life and death in the hands of a mortal, fallible man? John Adams wrote, “Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people.” Yesterday the target of arbitrary power was Anwar Al-Awlaki. Who will it be tomorrow?

Jacques Maritain, from “Art & Scholasticism”

If you want to make a Christian work, then be Christian, and simply try to make a beautiful work, into which your heart will pass; do not try to “make Christian.”

Do not make the absurd attempt to dissociate in yourself the artist and the Christian. They are one, if you are truly Christian, and if your art is not isolated from your soul by some system of aesthetics. But apply only the artist to the work; precisely because the artist and the Christian are one, the work will derive wholly from each of them.

Do not separate your art from your faith. But leave distinct what is distinct. Do not try to blend by force what life unites so well. If you were to make of your aesthetic an article of faith, you would spoil your faith. If you were to make of your devotion a rule of artistic activity, or if you were to turn desire to edify into a method of your art, you would spoil your art.

The entire soul of the artist reaches and rules his work, but it must reach it and rule it only through the artistic habitus. Art tolerates no division here. It will not allow any foreign element, juxtaposing itself to it, to mingle, in the production of the work, its regulation with art’s own. Tame it, and it will do all that you want it to do. Use violence, and it will accomplish nothing good. Christian work would have the artist, as artist, free.

Nevertheless art will be Christian, and will reveal in its beauty the interior reflection of the radiance of grace, only if it overflows from a heart suffused by grace. For the virtue of art which reaches it and rules it directly, presupposes that the appetite is rightly disposed with regard to the beauty of the work. And if the beauty of the work is Christian, it is because the appetite of the artist is rightly disposed with regard to such a beauty, and because in the soul of the artist Christ is present through love. The quality of the work is here the reflection of the love from which it issues, and which moves the virtue of art instrumentally. Thus it is by reason of an intrinsic superelevation that art is Christian, and it is through love that this superelevation takes place.

It follows from this that the work will be Christian in the exact degree in which love is vibrant. Let’s make no mistake about it: what is required is the very actuality of love, contemplation in charity. Christian work would have the artist, as man, a saint.

Pope John Paul II, from “Letter to Artists”

Every genuine artistic intuition goes beyond what the senses perceive and, reaching beneath reality’s surface, strives to interpret its hidden mystery. The intuition itself springs from the depths of the human soul, where the desire to give meaning to one’s own life is joined by the fleeting vision of beauty and of the mysterious unity of things. All artists experience the unbridgeable gap which lies between the work of their hands, however successful it may be, and the dazzling perfection of the beauty glimpsed in the ardour of the creative moment: what they manage to express in their painting, their sculpting, their creating is no more than a glimmer of the splendour which flared for a moment before the eyes of their spirit.

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This is my second “guest post” at the Catholic group blog, Vox Nova. It appeared on July 6, 2011.

For my second “guest post” here at Vox Nova, I had originally intended to write on one of several subjects that have claimed my interest lately, such as the application of Catholic Social Teaching to the rebuilding of local economies. I also considered offering a reflection on one of my favorite devotional books. I thought maybe something on de Caussade’s “Abandonment” or da Bergamo’s “Humility of Heart” might be appropriate.

But life has a way of hammering the cruelest twists into our finely wrought plans. You see, last week a close relative of mine was in a one-car motor vehicle accident. Worse, she was over the legal limit for alcohol. Worse still, it was her second DUI in nine months and she now faces jail time, heavy fines, and many years without a driver’s license. As has happened so often before, the disease that lurks in her mind like a caged beast has broken its bars and ravaged her hopes for a different, better life.

A confession: For the past three years I have only been able to muster one prayer. It is offered for a select few people in my life and goes like this: “Guide and protect them, O Lord. Keep them healthy in mind and body. Kindle in them the fire of your love, and give them peace.” I first composed this prayer when my son went off to fight in Iraq, during the so-called “surge” of 2007. At first I prayed specifically for his safe return; but it soon occurred to me that prayers for safe returns had been offered by thousands – tens of thousands – of parents whose children had come back from Iraq or Afghanistan maimed or dead. What right did I have to ask that my son be spared? More to the point, could I even believe in a God who might answer my prayer while ignoring the pleas of all those others? And so, I stopped asking. Instead, I composed the most generic of prayers – one that has as much to do with a disposition of heart as with the circumstances of life and death.

My son did return safely, only to go back once more and return safely yet again. He served honorably in a dishonorable war, and came back whole. Was it grace or luck? Should I thank God, or thank my lucky stars? I didn’t know then and today I’m no closer to the answer. I do know that I’m still praying that prayer. But this week, in the wake of another loved one’s brush with death, I’ve had to ask the grace-luck question all over again, including its implications for the proper allocation of my very real thankfulness. In this morning’s newspaper, there’s a story about a young man who was killed last night in a one-car auto accident. Was anyone praying for him? Was anyone protecting him? Was his death just bad luck or some awful form of grace? If I give thanks to God for saving my family member’s life, does another family have the right to assign him the blame for their crushing loss?

I know that the Scripture calls us to “give thanks in all things,” and that “my ways are not your ways.” I also know that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, and that “there is an appointed hour for everything.” No one gets out of here alive. But in between the sunshine and the rain, in the decades or moments before those appointed hours, there are questions. There are even doubts. Most of us don’t have the time, the capacity, or the will to dive deeply into scholarly debates about theodicy and the interplay between free will and grace. We collapse into bed after long, busy days. We think about work, food, sex, family, and the bills. We read when we can, pray when we’re able, and mouth easy answers not because we believe them, but precisely because they are easy. We take the questions that flummox philosophers and set them aside; at least until we’re confronted with the reality that life is far more complex than we would like to think. I am confronting that reality this week, and I’m sorry to say I have no real or satisfying answers.

In moments like this, I often find solace – or at least simple companionship – in poetry. This week, my companion has been a poem by Mark Jarman titled “Five Psalms,”which reads in part:

First forgive the silence
That answers prayer,
Then forgive the prayer
That stains the silence.

Excuse the absence
That feels like presence,
Then excuse the feeling
That insists on presence.

Pardon the delay
Of revelation,
Then ask pardon for revealing
Your impatience.

Forgive God
For being only a word,
Then ask God to forgive
The betrayal of language.

My first “guest post” at the Catholic group blog, Vox Nova, appeared on June 17, 2011.

Last Monday’s Republican debate at St. Anselm’s College in New Hampshire was billed by CNN as the first major event of the 2012 presidential campaign. The choice of a Benedictine institution was weirdly appropriate because the debate also kicked off our quadrennial Catholic scrap over electoral politics. A year from now, the battle will be fully engaged. The two camps will have emerged from their respective quarters to savage each other on the deck of the ship of state, contending for control of the rudder, seeking to define each other down the plank and into the Davy Jones Locker of American Church history.

“Conservatives” and Republicans will come armed with abortion, ESCR, and gay marriage. They’ll hurl accusations of indifference to the unborn and the sanctity of marriage. They’ll intone “SOCIALISM” at every turn, and warn darkly of hidden agendas aimed at remaking the Church in the image of MoveOn.org. “Liberals” and Democrats will come armed with war and torture, capital punishment, and market idolatry. They’ll hurl accusations of indifference to the poor, the sick, and the marginalized. They’ll intone “CORPORATIONS” at every turn, and warn darkly of hidden agendas aimed at remaking the Church in the image of the Tea Party. Both sides will engage in hand-to-hand combat over the meaning and application of terms like “intrinsic evil,” “remote cooperation,” and “prudential judgment,” all the while accusing their opponents of distortion, dishonesty, or simple ignorance. Then, on Election Day + 1, winners will celebrate the return or arrival of truth and justice, while the vanquished will foretell dire calamities soon to be visited on the land.

I used to engage in these war games, and enjoyed watching others engage in them. I fought under the conviction that the soul of the Church – at least in America – was being contested. Don’t get me wrong: my intent is not to trivialize or dismiss either the importance of the issues contested or the legitimate passions of the contestants. It is true that from a Catholic perspective there is a fundamental problem with a party that aggressively supports both the killing of the unborn and a revolutionary redefinition of marriage. And it is also true that from that same perspective there is a fundamental problem with a party that aggressively seeks to dismantle the social safety net in the name – acknowledged or not – of a Darwinian economic ideology, and which uncritically celebrates war, torture, and empire.

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1.
Let us think of God as a lover
Who never calls,
Whose pleasure in us is aroused
In unrepeatable ways,
God as a body we cannot
Separate from desire,
Saying to us, “Your love
Is only physical.”
Let us think of God as a bronze
With green skin
Or a plane that draws the eye close
To the texture of paint.
Let us think of God as life,
A bacillus or virus,
As death, an igneous rock
In a quartz garden.
Then, let us think of kissing
God with the kisses
Of our mouths, of lying with God,
As sea worms lie,
Snugly petrifying
In their coral shirts.
Let us think of ourselves
As part of God,
Neither alive nor dead,
But like Alpha, Omega,
Glyphs and hieroglyphs,
Numbers, data.

2.
First forgive the silence
That answers prayer,
Then forgive the prayer
That stains the silence.

Excuse the absence
That feels like presence,
Then excuse the feeling
That insists on presence.

Pardon the delay
Of revelation,
Then ask pardon for revealing
Your impatience.

Forgive God
For being only a word,
Then ask God to forgive
The betrayal of language.

3.
God of the Syllable
God of the Word
God Who Speaks to Us
God Who Is Dumb

The One God The Many
God the Unnameable
God of the Human Face
God of the Mask

God of the Gene Pool
Microbe Mineral
God of the Sparrow’s Fall
God of the Spark

God of the Act of God
Blameless Jealous
God of Surprises
And Startling Joy

God Who Is Absent
God Who Is Present
God Who Finds Us
In Our Hiding Places

God Whom We Thank
Whom We Forget to Thank
Father God Mother
Inhuman Infant

Cosmic Chthonic
God of the Nucleus
Dead God Living God
Alpha God Zed

God Whom We Name
God Whom We Cannot Name
When We Open Our Mouths
With the Name God Word God

4.
The new day cancels dread
And dawn forgives all sins,
All the judgments of insomnia,
As if they were only dreams.

The ugly confrontation
After midnight, with the mirror,
Turns white around the edges
And burns away like frost.

Daylight undoes gravity
And lightness responds to the light.
The new day lifts all weight,
Like stepping off into space.

Where is that room you woke to,
By clock-light, at 3 a.m.?
Nightmare’s many mansions,
Falling, have taken it with them.

The new day, the day’s newness,
And the wretchedness that, you thought,
Would never, never depart,
Meet—and there is goodbye.

A bad night lies ahead
And a new day beyond that—
A simple sequence, but hard
To remember in the right order.

5.
Lord of dimensions and the dimensionless,
Wave and particle, all and none,

Who lets us measure the wounded atom,
Who lets us doubt all measurement,

When in this world we betray you
Let us be faithful in another.

Is it possible to create whole-places that are resilient, sustainable, and human-scaled, and which combine widely distributed property ownership with an overarching concern for the common good? These aims, which are informed by and cohere with Catholic Social Teaching (CST), are the goals of a new theoretical paradigm for placemaking and economic development that my business partner, Fred Presley, and I term Econogenesis^™ ─ literally, the creation of an economy.

Econogenesis is still an intellectual medley of particular ideas and approaches, including the “economic gardening” model pioneered in Littleton, CO; the “enterprise facilitation” of Ernesto Sirolli (Ripples on the Zambezi); Muhammad Yunus’s ideas on microfinance and microcredit; elements of Distributism, the “third way” economic system; a whole lot of Jane Jacobs and the New Urbanism movement; the “small is beautiful” work of E. F. Schumacher; and Peter Senge’s ideas on “the learning organization.” There are dashes of Richard Florida, Fritjof Capra, Richard David Hames and Donella Meadows in the mix, too! And, of course, the CST principles of solidarity, subsidiarity, the dignity of the human person and the primacy of the common good provide the background radiation for this entire paradigm.

Although Econogenesis is still nascent, we believe it already contradicts conventional thinking about economic development, which views natural resources as the basis for economic growth. Once identified, natural resources are then exploited by the deployment of financial capital, often without regard to impacts on human ecology.  In contrast, we consider human persons themselves to be the true engine of economic development because it is people who supply value, both as the producers and users of goods and services. Not surprisingly then, our primary focus is on the development of human capital, and especially the creation of conditions in which human ingenuity can be unlocked and unleashed. 

What we hope to avoid at all costs is the kind of automobile-centric, one-dimensional “development” seen so often in the United States, where land is cleared, highways built, and dense pods of housing are erected around a central commercial strip. This kind of flat, featureless “crudscape” – to borrow a term from James Howard Kunstler, the author of The Geography of Nowhere – is antithetical to real placemaking, which has as its object the cultivation of richly creative and concordant human social environments. What we hope to achieve is not just housing, and certainly not just “development,” but place … and community.

First, though, it is important to outline some of our foundational principles.  Wherever this exciting project takes us, and whatever ideas are crystallized and enacted, these criteria must be met, or at least not contradicted in practice.  

Oriented Toward Whole-Place

Most of the problems faced by communities represent interrelated components in broader, more complex systems. These problems cannot be solved in isolation apart from their impacts on the rest of the system; and attempts to craft such isolated solutions often only leads to greater problems elsewhere.  A ‘whole-place’ orientation will drive placemakers to solicit the perspectives of all stakeholders, including those whose relationship to a particular community is attenuated by geography or culture. This “borderless” mentality enables communities to zoom out on the wider system, and to gain an appreciation for particular challenges and opportunities as manifestations of wider, systemic perturbations. Such zooming in and out is the very heart of whole-systems thinking.

Resilient

We define resilience as nothing more than the ability to adapt to changing conditions in a flow. The model par excellence for resilience is nature itself, which obeys an immutable process of growth, conservation, release, and reorganization known as the “adaptive cycle.” This process is non-linear and dynamic. It embraces complexity, traps and distributes knowledge, conserves energy, is self-organized and self-healing, and is directed toward outcomes that benefit the whole.

Man-made systems tend to be linear, mechanical, and goal-directed. Pumps, pencils, and power plants are examples of linear systems. We need them and they have value, but such systems are highly vulnerable to shocks, both internal and external. In intensely human environments like businesses and communities, where complexity, not simplicity, is the dominant feature, linear systems tend to break down because they simply cannot survive the rate and magnitude of change. Human environments, like natural ecosystems, are resilient to the extent that they obey the adaptive cycle.

Sustainable

To “sustain” means, among other things, “to support, hold, or bear up from below; bear the weight of, as a structure,” and “to supply with food, drink, and other necessities of life.” A sustainable place develops local strategies for providing water, waste conversion, food, energy, recreation, transportation and other critical community needs. While the notion of complete self-sufficiency directly contradicts a whole-systems view of the world, it is possible to establish a level of local sufficiency that is robust and reliable.

A sustainable place is also self-organizing, which is a characteristic of distributed, decentralized networks. A self-organizing community is one in which members are empowered to learn independently, take the initiative, communicate freely, exchange incentives and resolve conflicts. Such communities share common values, which act as mediums of social exchange and provide a baseline for defining whole outcomes.   

Human-Scaled

Human-scaled places are those fitted to the social, emotional, physical and intellectual needs of people, not the other way around. This means built-forms – buildings and streetscapes – that are walkable, livable, and encourage cooperative social activity. It means commercial, government, education, and civic arrangements that are comprehensible, accessible, and user-friendly. Human-scaled places offer people a sense of dignity and control, which in turns fosters individual initiative, creativity and innovation. They reduce or eliminate the social and psychic isolation that afflicts high-entropy industrial societies.  

Human-scale also demands that places be created with a high degree of inculturation, a fancy word denoting consonance with the embedded culture and ethos of a people. This is especially true in the field of international development, which has sometimes been associated with a kind of cultural imperialism that effectively alienated people from their own traditions, folkways, and beliefs. Human-scale means recognizing that Iraqis or West Africans will simply never be Swiss burghers or Vermont farmers, nor should they be! There is more than enough good “stuff” in every indigenous culture for locally attuned development to work, especially if one brings to the task a whole-place orientation.

Person-Focused

While human-scaled places are fitted to the social, emotional, physical and intellectual needs of people in the aggregate, person-focus means erecting systems that empower particular human beings to realize their potential. Practically, person-focus means building “learning communities,” where education of the young is a given, and opportunities for lifelong learning are available. It also means racial, cultural, religious, and ideological pluralism, equal justice under law, and universal access to basic health care. Most of all, person-focus means providing pathways for persons to learn and practice trades, to create successful businesses and build some measure of economic independence for themselves and their families.

Ultimately, person-focus means achieving the widest possible social distribution of the ownership of productive property. This includes land, but also homes and family-based cottage industries – including crafts, transportation, retail and light manufacturing – as well as cooperatives, guilds and trade associations, with ownership spread equitably among the freemen and women who participate.

Organized for the Common Good

Because human beings flourish within the context of community, and community is rooted in place, the concept of the common good is fundamental to both placemaking and community-building. The common good does not mean privileging the group over persons. Nor is it simply the assertion of individual “rights.” And the common good is not reducible to the utilitarian formula, “the greatest good for the greatest number of people.” The common good means engaging and empowering the range of stakeholders to achieve what we call Win³ solutions: Is it good for you? Is it good for me? Is it good for all our neighbors? Viewed this way, the common good is simply whole-systems thinking crystallized.

These principles are the physics of Econogenesis, the boundaries conditions within which we hope a new and exciting approach to development will blossom; and through that approach, whole-places that are resilient, sustainable, human-scaled, person-focused, and organized for the common good of the people who live there and the planet they live on