Liberal politics, Michael Walzer observes, is difficult “because it offers so few emotional rewards…it lacks warmth and intimacy.” Without universal foundations—Lionel Trilling termed it “a large tendency rather than a concise body of doctrine”—liberalism can offer only narratives of sacrifice and common purpose, ones that can often be trumped by the tales of the right …

[See Walzer, Michael. Radical Principles: Reflections of an Unreconstructed Democrat. Basic Books, 1980, 69,68:  "A liberal nation can have no collective purpose …. Liberalism, even at its most permissive, is a hard politics because it offers to few emotional rewards; the liberal state is not a home for its citizens; it lacks warmth and intimacy."]

[See Townsley, Jeremy. "Walzer, Citizenship, Globalization and Global Public Goods," citing Veit Bader, “Citizenship and Exclusion: Radical Democracy, Community, and Justice. Or, what is Wrong with Communitarianism?”Political Theory23 (1995): 218:  "...neighborhoods, clubs and families ... are 'warm, horizontal [communities] … based on consent’ whereas states are ‘cold vertical institutions, based not on free entry but on enforced membership and physical violence. Strictly speaking, [states] are not associations at all, but institutions.’”]

… To be a “liberal” is to be a child of the Enlightenment… Liberalism insists that individuals take hold of their fate and shape it  …

… If both [FDR and Reagan] met with mixed success in policy terms, both nevertheless were able to reshape political culture because the optimism and self-confidence of the visions they offered captured the imagination of a majority of Americans, particularly the young.

If their fortunes are ever to revive, liberals must find a way to recapture this simultaneously militant and optimistic spirit. The “larger message” for what Roosevelt called “the liberal party” was a clear and simple one: “As new conditions and problems arise beyond the power of men and women to meet as individuals, it becomes the duty of the Government itself to find new remedies with which to meet them.” Add to this John Dewey’s precept that “government should regularly intervene to help equalize conditions between the wealthy and the poor, between the overprivileged and the underprivileged,” while acknowledging Reinhold Niebuhr’s prescient call for “humility” in all such undertakings, and you have a concise, compelling statement of what it means—then as now—to call oneself an “American liberal.”

When liberals lose confidence in their ability to lead Americans toward the fulfillment of this vision, they lose their reason for being liberals. If the history of liberalism has a single lesson to teach us, it is that what liberals have to fear most—far more than conservatives—is fear itself.

So, the cold state is to provide what the individual cannot? Where do the real downsides of government fit in here? A return to the FDR past is insufficient/unrealistic, and doesn’t acknowledge the truths of conservative views.

In terms of the basic principles Roger Conner and I are developing for looking at political situations: in evaluating Alterman’s presentation, and evaluating the liberal vision, a key step is seeing them from opposing/different perspectives, starting with the assumption these other views are valid.

Came across the following that uses clear language to describe a parallel situation school children face:

Collini, Stefan. “Side by Side: On Britain’s School Wars.” The Nation, November 1, 2011.

Saltus, Richard W., and Richard J. Blakely. “Unique geologic insights from ‘non-unique’ gravity and magnetic interpretation.” GSA Today 21, no. 12 (December 2011): 4-10.

… Many of the greatest scientific challenges of today span the traditional subdivisions of science. Climate change research, for example, spans Earth, atmospheric,  and biological sciences and requires the combination of results from physics, chemistry, biology, geology, engineering, sociology, and economics. A key component to successful integrated science is the effective communication and mutual understanding of uncertainties arising in all of the component studies that feed into the ultimate integrated solution. But, it is also important to realize that the ultimate significance of a given result is not necessarily related to the relative certainty of that result. A partial solution or constraint to a fundamental problem may have greater significance than an exact solution to a trivial problem. And an effective integrated solution may encompass a wide range of uncertainties in the component results. To paraphrase Aristotle: The whole (integrated interpretation) is greater than the sum of its parts (methods and assumptions). And, we might add, the individual parts do not necessarily contribute equally to the sum. …

Her writing explains just where the National Park Service is coming from re both its natural area and historic site management founded on the baseline ideal, and shreds it.

From what I’ve read so far (only part way through the book), I think she is overconfident about the potential for well planned management to provide solutions and is insufficiently unaware of its downsides. Similar to the way complexities and ambiguities render the baseline ideal landscape undefinable and unattainable, complexities and uncertainties limit the role of environmental management (a term which my mentor Grant McConnell used to spit out with disdain).

Further steps developing from Marris’s work so far could include expanding it to the social/cultural and putting her critique of the baseline ideal together with a critique of planned management. The two critiques make a good pair. Would be very interesting to do that and see what develops from it.

Marris, Emma. Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. 1st ed. New York, NY: Bloomsbury USA, 2011.
audio interview with Emma Marris at http://www.wpr.org/hereonearth/archive_110901k.cfm

Addictions are our human tendencies to be neurotic taken one step further into the realm of brain disease.

So, attachment, in the Buddhist sense, is psychological and social fixation on desire (neurotic), but  is also physiological, in that it is physically embodied, including but not limited to in the brain. The brain is altered by the process. At some point this physiological alteration becomes sufficient for it to be called a brain disease. That then, in Kimber’s perspective as I understand it, is the point where it is designated as addiction. Some addictions involve irreversible physiological changes and thus require ongoing drug treatment to maintain functional brain chemistry.

Notice here that all attachment, all fixated desire, has a physical element. When of  character and degree to be signficantly disfunctional (by some standard), then it is a disease, like other physical diseases.

from Shultziner, D., T. Stevens, M. Stevens, B. A Stewart, R. J Hannagan, and G. Saltini-Semerari. “The causes and scope of political egalitarianism during the Last Glacial: a multi-disciplinary perspective.” Biology and Philosophy 25 (2010): 319-346.

…For the development of hierarchical social structures, for example, social factors are essential but not sufficient—high degrees of resource abundance and stability are also essential. …

By similar logic, scarcity and instability break down hierarchical social structures, e.g. Somalia today, etc. What you get now is a return to small social units adapting to instability & scarcity, but in a situation of crowding and access to modern weaponry, rather than Pleistocene conditions.

News of the conference  is essentially isolated to within progressive/left publications and blogs. No NY Times coverage. Didn’t find any discussion & debate about conference findings in sources with a point of view different from Morales and conference participants. The one mainline US media story I came across was in Time magazine, entitled “Bolivia’s Morales: Eating Chicken Makes You Gay?” with a link to “world’s worst-dressed leaders” ahead of any mention of climate issues.

I found out about the conference only because I read The Nation. Thank you Naomi Klein.

Note the combination of mainstream media control over information + interest groups talking only to themselves within publications and blogs that circulate among like-minded people, making engagement with the complexity of issues e.g. those raised at the conference almost impossible. There is no conversation.

[The White House party gate-crashing] was a symbolic indication (and, luckily, only symbolic) of how unbridled irrationality harnessed to sheer will, whether ludicrous in the crashers’ case or homicidal in the instance of the Fort Hood gunman, can penetrate even our most secure fortifications. Both incidents stand as a haunting reproach to the elegant powers of logic with which Obama tried to sell his exquisitely calibrated plan to vanquish Al Qaeda and its mad brethren.

Juxtapose this insight with the instability Tony Judt describes in his current NY Review of Books essay:

…Before 1914, it was widely asserted that the logic of peaceful economic exchange would triumph over national self-interest. No one expected all this to come to an abrupt end. But it did.

We too have lived through an era of stability, certainty, and the illusion of indefinite economic improvement. But all that is now behind us. For the foreseeable future we shall be as economically insecure as we are culturally uncertain. We are assuredly less confident of our collective purposes, our environmental well-being, or our personal safety than at any time since World War II. We have no idea what sort of world our children will inherit, but we can no longer delude ourselves into supposing that it must resemble our own in reassuring ways.

These indicate starting points for strategic thinking and effective action, and for personal decisions about how and when to engage with issues and events.

from Parks, S. D. “Leadership, Spirituality, and the College as a Mentoring Environment.” Journal of College and Character 10, no. 2 (2008), 5:

In Christian tradition, for instance, a dove is often used as a symbol for Spirit. In the Celtic experience of Christianity, however, a wild goose is often used as a symbol of Spirit. The symbols are similar, but they take us to different places. For example, a group of people was asked to think of the presence of Spirit as a dove, and then to consider how they should respond to a situation of injustice in inner-city housing. Their response tended to move in the direction of prayer and patience. Then they were asked to consider the same situation, thinking of Spirit as a wild goose. Their response then tended to move in the direction of mass protest at city hall!