April 15th, Meeting and Roundtable Discussion

We started our meeting with a short discussion of our housework (content coming), followed by a presentation by Dimitri on the common line of evolution of Russian urban development: building blocks progressing from the Stalinist quarter to microrayon to larger microrayon to residential rayon.

After Dimitri’s lecture, Leslie Kavanaugh gave a inspiring overview of the development of “collective,” and the individual’s place within the world in philosophical terms (and also an essential reading list for budding philosophers).

POLIS (CITY) = Politics

• Plato – Republic - “philosopher king”
• Machiavelli – The Prince
• Sun Tzu – The Art of War
• Hobbes (1651) – Leviathan
• Locke (1689) – Second Treatise on Government
• Rousseau (1762) – Social Contract
• Proudhon (1850) – General Idea of Revolution – negative social contract
• Marx (1848) – Communist Manifesto
• Paris Commune (1871) – basis of European system, idea of local governance, labor laws, separation of church and state, etc.
• Negri/Hardt (2000) – Empire - hypercapitalism

Leslie started her talk with the thesis that politics is intrinsically linked to “city” (and thus ideas of how we should live together) from its linguistic Greek origins. She continued her presentation by giving an overview of major turning points in philosophical thought that are taken for granted in our modern world. Her final message was that how we organize ourselves economically is how we organize ourselves socially. She left us with the message that it is up to us to explore new ways of living together, that we should not shy away from being “political” as designers, and that there is a whole spectrum between the two extremes of Hypercapitalism and Communism.

Coincidentally, I read something related on John Thackara’s blog, Doors of Perception. He says:

John Michael Greer…suggests that the time may be ripe to change the question. “Oversimplifying reality into two rigid categories is probably the most pervasive source of failed thinking in the modern world”, he writes. “Rather than limit ourselves to a choice between two unpromising alternatives – “capitalism” and “socialism” – why not look at different frameworks, such as distributism.

Distributism. Right. Having paused to find out what distributism is, or was I return to find Greer writing about another novelty: the Druid notion of ternary thinking. “The basic practice is that when you encounter any classification of the world into two and only two sides (we call this a binary), think of a third option that isn’t simply a compromise between them. With practice you get very good at noticing the blind spots that make binary thinking seem to make sense. Yes, you can then go on to look for a fourth, fifth, etc.!”

Finally, we concluded with a mindmapping session. We split up into five small groups to consider the term, “ideal neighborhood.” Some major themes present throughout individual mindmaps turned out to be intangible qualities of neighborhoods that can manifest themselves in tangible ways:

safety, social control/neighborhood watch, responsibility, tolerance, connection, interaction and communication,

as well as good proportions of

diversity/uniformity, structure/chaos, identification, individualism/collectivism