The Breaking Time

Hierarchy has its place

Sometimes, this is actually the right way to go

Megan Erickson has a great Jacobin piece defending the concept of public education against the "unschooling" fads. While it's full of great points, it also has some interesting bits on hierarchy, like this:

Why shouldn’t kids be asked to put away their crayons and go to lunch at the same time? Why do we assume that clear boundaries, a schedule, and a sense of hierarchy are so threatening to students? Why must the individual’s vision be so carefully and serenely sheltered from other people, who are experienced in this framework as interruptions? There is value in being pulled out of a daydream. There is value in learning to cope with a little coercion, in knowing what it means to cooperate on a daily basis with someone who doesn’t love you, someone who’s not your family member.

Yes, yes, and yes. This doesn't get said nearly enough, and along with her point about the difference between privilege and authority, it takes this from a good essay to a great one.

While Erickson's piece is focused on education, the same assumptions behind "unschooling" — extreme suspicion of any power structure — underlie a whole slew of other movements, from open source to consensus protest groups.

Sometimes, in some arenas, this approach works just fine (with information especially) but in many it doesn't. Sometimes hierarchy is exactly what's needed.

"There's a meeting:" MLK mixes the grand with the practical

There will be many good tributes to Martin Luther King, Jr. today, and in previous years here I've noted his forgotten side and quest for balance. 

But there's something else worth highlighting, and the speech above is a really good example. It's the end of "We Shall Overcome," an incredibly powerful few minutes. Almost lost in the applause, you can hear King giving the rapturous crowd instructions.

He's telling them to attend a meeting. After the heights of this speech, it seems an absolutely mundane thing to do. "That's why we're fighting for a more moral universe against all odds. Meet me in the fellowship hall in 10 minutes." Not a call to find themselves, not pulling them towards vague evolution, King wanted a concrete, immediate action. The rhetoric's important, but it's that combination that made the civil rights movement work.

Scientology hits schism time

Disorder in the House of Hubbard.

Fascinating piece from Alex Klein on the looming schism in Scientology, specifically over a real-estate scam involving the construction of its "Ideal Org" local headquarters:

But inside the church, the Ideal Orgs are sparking insurrection. Across the country, donors and high-ranking executives say that the aggressive fundraising and construction scheme is used to enrich the central church at the expense of the rank and file, helping to grow the Scientology war chest to over a billion dollars. Two former members, Mike Rinder and Mark Elliott, went so far as to call the project a "real estate scam." To some of these defectors, the structures are metaphors for the religion itself: garish on the outside, empty on the inside. The irony is that the very expansion that Scientology lauds as its renaissance is actually a symbol of internal dissent and decline.

One of the most interesting parts of the article is the dissidents' repeated references to L. Ron Hubbard's intent or original teachings. While some who've split from Scientology have ditched the whole thing, others have set up their own splinter groups.

That's a natural reaction. If people are attracted to a set of ideals and then the institution that supposedly represents them becomes corrupt or goes in a different direction, it's psychologically easier to find that the original goals were betrayed by the current leadership rather than abandon the whole structure.

The process of schism has happened in every creed from Christianity to Marxism, but this is a fascinating up-close glimpse at how it plays out. Hubbard's still within living memory, and people are already sharply disagreeing over what his intent really was. It's easy to see "Scientologists" in a century encompassing all swaths of ideologies.

This also highlights that arguing over whether a given creed, especially a large and old one, is good or evil somewhat misses the point. On a long enough timeline, multiplying sects will use the same founding mythology to justify every position.

Open Notes: Tech giants, North Korea, and convenient dystopias

Your next iPhone, made in sunny North Korea

• Google Exec Eric Schmidt recently returned from North Korea. While ostensibly a humanitarian and diplomatic mission, it's hard not to see in the wary welcomes for Kim Jong-Un's "knowledge-based economy" and the broaching of an end to sanctions as the beginning of North Korea becoming a China-style source of cheap labor for the tech industry. In fact, it's already being discussed.

• It's not that tech companies can't make good money if they pay their workers well and don't use Dickensian sweat shops; plenty do. But to make really whopping Apple-level amounts of cash requires really cheap labor, and that's easier in places where people are desperate and don't have any political power. Hence FoxConn.

• China's getting more prosperous and more restive, so the cost of doing business there might well go up, especially given growing labor unrest. Sooner, rather than later, escape hatches will be needed.

• The extreme irony of Stalinist states and the chic business sector finding that they need each other.

• Google's little-discussed yellow badge workers. While hardly laboring under North Korean conditions, it definitely points to a willingness to have an underclass even closer to home. Companies, whatever the ideals of their founders, are a structure set up for making money, and over time everything else becomes secondary.

• Combined with the slow collapse of the social safety net and real wages, give these trends a few decades and you could see more tech companies having large numbers low-wage employees closer to home, especially as the original founders age and they become more established institutions.

• William Gibson's line about the future not being evenly distributed applies to the future's nightmares as well (ask a Somali). It turns out the shining tech-fueled tomorrow might not just coexist with industrial dystopia, but require it.

Poems for Friday: H

Long Kesh prison.

Let's bring back Friday poetry from its holiday hiatus with this superb "there is no they" bit from Ciaran Carson:

The Powers-that-Be decreed that from the—of—the sausage rolls, for reasons

Of security, would be contracted to a different firm. They gave the prisoners no reasons.

 

The prisoners complained. We cannot reproduce his actual words here, since their spokesman is alleged

To be a sub-commander of a movement deemed to be illegal.

 

An actor spoke for him in almost-perfect lip-synch: It’s not the quality

We’re giving off about. Just that it seems they’re getting smaller. We’re talking quantity. 

 

His ‘Belfast’ accent wasn’t West enough. Is the H in H-Block aitch or haitch?

Does it matter? What we have we hold? Our day will come? Give or take an inch?

 

Well, give an inch and someone takes an effing mile. Everything is in the ways

You say them. Like, the prison that we call Long Kesh is to the Powers-that-Be The Maze.

The Red Umbrella Fund and financing social change

 

So here's an interesting initiative:

"Save us from saviours" is the piercing refrain of a growing human rights movement demanding that sex workers be recognised as more than victims to be rescued or strategic populations to be targeted for public health campaigns. It's likely to strike a nerve among some in the traditional aid and development industry, often criticised for top-down, paternalistic projects.

"Sex workers are discriminated against and their human rights unrecognised around the world, even where sex work isn't illegal," says Nadia van der Linde, co-ordinator of the Red Umbrella Fund, the first global grant-making mechanism set up to give sex workers more control of projects that directly concern them. "Even when they stand up for themselves, it's very hard for them to find support."

The fund, which was launched in April 2012, and will announce this month who will receive its first grants, grew out of a multi-year collaboration between sex worker organisations and interested donors, who first met five years ago to discuss campaigns to curb human trafficking.

Embracing a philosophy of "nothing for us without us", the innovative fund is governed by sex workers, who sit alongside donor representatives on the committees that oversee and manage its work.

More of this, please. When I've mentioned that movements for social change often flounder because of a lack of attention to infrastructure, the lack of things like the Red Umbrella Fund are exactly what I mean. Movements need resources, but that's traditionally an area that would-be activists don't think about. Witness Occupy, for example, which often had no idea to handle the funds it received, and ended up with horrors like meth fiends in control of finance.

That's what happens when an organization, whatever its philosophy, doesn't think about, well, organization. Shepherding resources carefully is even more important for the causes of the poor or ignored, because they're less likely to have patrons capable of just shoving them suitcases full of cash. A lot of worthy causes flounder because no one pays attention to the details.

Furthermore, structuring the organization carefully around access to those resources — instead of treating them like an afterthought — helps to increase the power of the populations who most need them. This looks like a promising model, and I hope to see more of it.

The Rundown: Ringing in the new year

Police and protesters fight in Athens as another demonstration turns violent. Couldn't find the photo credit for this image, unfortunately.

Welcome to 2013, readers. Here's a quick parcel of "may you live in interesting times" items to start off your new year.

• Greeks feel unfolding social and humanitarian crisis "There is an anger against the national government which hasn't yet expressed itself, and it's building up like water behind a dam, waiting to break out. They're going to start smashing shop windows and grabbing things, and ultimately I wouldn't put it past the Greek society to storm parliament."

• Tea estate owner, wife killed by workers in India The article refers to what was going on as a "labor dispute," but dispute seems too mild a word for "an army of 700 workers gets together, armed with bows and poison arrows, and set the plantation owners on fire."

• Police arrest teenager for doodling Remember my fear that, because dealing with real problems was hard, Newtown's aftermath would see zero-tolerance return with a vengeance? Yeah, that's happening.

• Slavery's global comeback A brutal piece about how slavery's made a return around the globe (and in many places, never went away). A reminder that even as the future rolls in, many of the past's horrors are still very much with us.

• "Arrest us all" As the protests — some violent — in India have drawn attention to the horrific levels of rape in that country, this is not a new problem. In 2005, a mob of 200 women marched into the Nagpur district court and brutally killed a serial rapist that the police had let go scot-free for years.

Worth remembering that when a justice system fails widely enough in its duty to mete out vengeance, people will eventually start doing the job themselves. While I personally think the women in Nagpur were completely justified to kill their tormentor, vigilantism gets real nasty when it becomes increasingly endemic.

• Interfaith unions on the rise in UK Marriages between Muslims and Christians are becoming more frequent in the UK. Remember this the next time someone tells you that Muslims — apparently uniquely among all types of immigrants — are all fanatics who won't ever change in response to a secular society.

• China removing addicts' pleasure centers In the next stage in China's march towards dystopia, some doctors are "treating" drug addiction by burning out the pleasure centers of addicts and the mentally ill. As if that wasn't enough, China's also ramping up its internet censorship. Malevolent robot overseers are probably just a few months away.

Amsterdam gulag: when your annoying neighbors can put you in prison

Piss off your neighbors and you have to live in the box

Amsterdam is going to create "scum villages" 

Yes, if your neighbors get too annoyed at you in Holland's capital, they'll soon be able to have you shipped off to what's essentially a low-level gulag. In fact, "there are already several small-scale trial projects in the Netherlands, including in Amsterdam, where 10 shipping container homes have been set aside for persistent offenders, living under 24-hour supervision from social workers and police."

Just to make clear, these are people who might be annoying, but whose behavior "falls short of criminality." So they've broken no law, but will essentially go to prison. That's amazingly fucked up.

I don't know about y'all, but like most people who live in cities, my neighborhood's inhabitants range from wonderful to absolute assholes. Yet I've mostly chalked the latter, as long as they don't cross any major lines, as a natural downside to living in a densely populated place. I don't feel the need to put them in a damn camp because they occasionally get on my nerves, and I sure as hell don't want them to have the power to do so to me. 

In practice, I can see this helping to put a really nasty edge on gentrification, shoving out the poor or different if enough of their neighbors get together. Indeed, that's how similar initiatives like the UK's ASBOs are generally used.

I've generally seen the Netherlands (from the outside, admittedly) as having an admirable combination between robust social services and a respect for individual freedom, but apparently that's not quite the case. Shockingly, to remain pluralistic, societies occasionally have to protect individuals from their own communities. Letting people send the couple down the hall to a damn shipping container because thheir neighbors think their sex is too loud doesn't accomplish that.

Idea Scavenge: have a stranger run your government

A gilded cage for an invited ruler. The square of Sienna's Palazzo Pubblico.

I stumbled upon an interesting idea recently while researching medieval social organization. While the topic may sound dry, it's actually fascinating stuff. A welter of communal, democratic and mercantile structures all co-existed. These are essentially the building blocks of the modern nation-state and corporation, along with many alternatives to those options.

I've already written about the peasant revenge gang that was the commune. The idea of a podesta is also pretty fascinating. While they started simply as foreign governors, they became much more interesting. From chronicler Leander Albertus:

The citizens, seeing that there often arose among them quarrels and altercations, whether from favoritism or friendship, from envy or hatred that one had against another, by which their republic suffered great harm, loss and detriment; therefore, they decided, after much deliberation, to provide against these disorders. And thus they began to create a man of foreign birth their chief magistrate, giving him every power, authority and jurisdiction over the city, as well over criminal as over civil causes, and in times of war as well as in times of peace, calling him praetor as being above the others, or podestà., as having every authority and power over the city."

There's a lot of factional strife in the modern era, after all, and some of the reasons for a figure like a podesta are still there. A capable outsider, mutually respected by most of the factions, might be a really good way to run a really fractious place and mediate disputes. Notably, the podesta's powers were later scaled back to mostly judicial functions, and they were intentionally isolated within their palaces to prevent any one group from having control

This idea seems like it could be really useful right now, especially for areas with a lot of distrust and political divisions. I could easily see something like a podesta being great for running a city-state or particular enclave. Outside perspective has its advantages, especially in dispute resolution. Local councils or military leaders still had plenty of power in cities with a podesta, but the respected stranger offered some check on local ambitions and provided a handy long-term perspective.

Importantly, in its most successful days, the podesta was chosen by locals, not imposed from the outside. Otherwise, they would end up terrible at settling disputes and would likely get thrown out by rebellion in the process.

Paul Kagame and colonial mentality 2.0

Rwandan President Paul Kagame, repeatedly condemned for running an effective country.

An interesting War Nerd piece argues that once again, the U.N. and the array of NGOs in Africa have stopped a "Tutsi Empire" from developing and that this is, in fact, a bad thing:

The real bad guys in the Congo are what most people call the good guys, the meddling fools like Bono and the UN and all those NGOs and “International Peacekeeping Missions.” Those guys stopped a decisive war of conquest dead in its tracks. And yeah, that is a bad thing. A very bad thing. If they hadn’t stopped the natural course of the war, Central Africa would be a single state, maybe not as dead calm as an American suburb but as peaceful as, say, any region of the Roman or Mongol Empires—and remember, under the Mongols, travelers could ride from Tbilisi to Baikal without fear of robbery.

To show you what I mean, imagine that there’d been a United Nations, a lot of NGOs, and a noisy meddlesome “international community” to barge in when we were starting our Civil War in 1861. How would the Civil War have ended? Simple: it wouldn’t have. The “peacekeepers” would have intervened exactly when one side was starting to win—say, the summer of 1863—to freeze the two sides in position, “halt the killing,” and encourage a stalemate that left everything up in the air.

I can almost see the headlines and the photos that would hit the media if Sherman had started out on his march through Georgia in our time: “Refugees Flee Blue Advance,” “Thousands Starving,” and plenty of pictures of skinny towhead Dixie kids looking scared, with pillars of smoke from burning barns in the background.

As usual with his columns, it makes for interesting, pitch-black reading and has some pretty devastating analysis. I think a Tutsi Empire is a bit far-fetched, but his basic point is right. In fact, there's an even more clear-cut example to the north, in Rwanda.

There, Paul Kagame leads a regime founded by the army that actually ended the '90s genocide through the innovative solution of shooting the people committing it until they stopped. In the ensuing years, Rwanda's gone from a post-apocalyptic wasteland to one of the most stable countries on the continent.

Kagame's also engaged in relatively good government, encouraging a wrenching but necessary reconciliation, offering amnesty and rebuilding the society in a way that is slowly breaking the ethnic divisions that plagued it before.

He gets a lot of credit for that, rightly, even from the "do-gooders" the War Nerd column blasts.

At the same time, Kagame's relentlessly gone after the remnants of the genocidaires that slaughtered over a million people. These have included wiping them out even if they're hiding in refugee camps that the UN stupidly set up to give them cover (after neglecting to do a damn thing to stop the original genocide).

For this last part, he's gotten tut-tutting from lots of international institutions and worries that he's being authoritarian.

In fact, it makes perfect sense. Kagame's executing a classic "hand and fist" strategy. His country has a nasty ethnic division, and going after every Hutu that participated in the genocide isn't possible. All-out revenge, appealing as it may be, would just cause a repeat of the same scenario.

At the same time, he has to make damn sure that genocide doesn't happen again because the same leaders who committed it the first time build up their own army and undo all that hard-won stability. That requires crushing them. If that means intervening in the politics of the Congo, so be it. National sovereignty's always been more honored in the breach, anyway.

Instead of some regrettable deviation, this is the exact sort of politics war-torn regions need more of: neither bloodthirsty or endemically weak.

To keep the Civil War analogy going, it's a lot like Lincoln signing off on both "let 'em up easy" and Sherman's march. "Take this amnesty" gets way more appealing when followed up with "or we'll keep shooting you." To use a negotiated truce as an example, it's doubtful we'd have peace in Northern Ireland if the IRA hadn't shown they could bring London's financial center to a screaming halt.

Sometimes NGOs and even the UN do good work in an area. If peacekeepers are putting an exclamation point on an existing, stable deal, for example, they can actually be effective (the fact they're not usually used this way partly accounts for their horrific record). But in this situation, the colonial mentality is alive and well: what Kagame's done is nothing out of the ordinary for any sane government, and would be quickly recognized as such if he wasn't leading an African nation.