This week’s essay is about Stewart Brand. (Except it isn’t, not really. It’s about how we think about social and political change.) If you haven’t heard of Brand before, here are the basics: He’s an iconic figure in the history of tech culture and the counterculture
This is a really interesting post, so thank you for writing it. I have conflicting feelings about Brand, but for somewhat different reasons than you state.
Reading the Whole Earth catalogs in the mid-70s was a key factor in my ditching of teen dreams to become a car designer. Instead, I moved to a rural community and got involved in environmental activism. At least for me, the catalogs weren’t just about practical tips (a la Mother Earth News magazine) but also about a different way of thinking about how society could be best run. In a very real sense, the catalogs and spin-off magazines (the Co-Evolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review) were my introduction to environmental philosophy.
It doesn’t surprise me that histories by mainstream environmental groups ignore Brand. Their focus has tended to be on the nuts and bolts of the policy-making process whereas Brand has hovered more at the “conceptual” level. I am not using the word “cultural” because Brand’s build-your-own-community focus was ultimately political in nature: It revolved around how do we make decisions -- individually and collectively -- about the substance of our lives.
I have a great deal of appreciation for Alinsky’s work but would differ with him that the back-to-the-land movements were “copping out.” A lot of useful social experimentation occurred even when it was short lived. Why must we insist that there is only One Best Way to engage in social change?
All that said, in recent years I have tilted more to the thinking of others in Brand’s orbit, such as Gregory Bateson and Paul Hawkins. Someone once said of Brand that his idea of heaven is a room full of people arguing. He has always seemed to enjoy being an iconoclast – and that tendency would appear to have grown as he has aged.
I don’t agree with Brand’s optimistic take on nuclear energy and geoengineering. In addition, I was disappointed with his libertarian-tinged analysis of global urban trends that he offered in a keynote address at an American Planning Association conference a few years ago.
Despite those criticisms, I still use some of Brand’s concepts in my own environmental theorizing, such as his argument that a “robust and adaptable” civilization must maintain equilibrium between six levels that operate at differing speeds: fashion/art, commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture, and nature.
Perhaps I’m weird, but even though I recently retired I have limited patience for arguments about “legacies.” What’s more important is how we can draw from the past ideas that can help us solve our current problems. I find that Brand still helps me to broaden my thinking even when I disagree with him. That ain’t nothing.
In the 1960s there were attempts to get people to believe that the world was small, such as "It's a Small World After All" at the 1964 World's Fair. However, the mental model was that the world is approximately infinite, and it followed that the solution to pollution is dilution. The photo of earth from space did a lot to change this notion, by providing the first view of earth as another spaceship. The other thing that it did was show that the familiar political boundary maps were not what the planet really looked like, which we all knew but did not fully appreciate. As a young person I had looked at a lot of black and white photos of the earth from low-earth orbit, because Dad was the first radio amateur to receive satellite photos. Geography, studied from space, is confusing and non-obvious. Confusion creates the mental space to rethink the relationship between political boundaries and ecology. The view from beyond low-earth orbit was compelling. A good way to continue to develop this understanding is to look at the photos from Planet.com, some of which show sharp contrasts in the environment across political boundaries. These are perhaps the consequences of natural experiments created by politics and especially water use.
There's at least a little argument to be made that seemingly small cultural moments can have a causal importance that isn't well captured by conventional histories of social movements that focus on organizing and on a relationship between social movements and the formal activities of governments and major civic institutions. This is actually a bit of the still-existing tension between cultural history and social history when it comes to narrating the reasons why change happens over time--it's both an empirical and epistemological tension, and not the least because self-promoting figures like Brand can insistently tell a story often enough about the importance of an image or practice or idea or book that they shift the overall story we tell in the present about why a change happened in the past.
Consider for example this question, "How important was it that men started wearing their hair longer during the 1960s and 1970s?" Well, on one hand, it was a surprisingly constant subject of conversation and argument during that time--seemingly a major fuel for inter-generational and inter-class tensions. And it was a lasting change in that since that point, men have been pretty free to have short hair, long hair, man-buns or mullets as they please. But was that all that it was? Was hair just a superficial sign of some deeper social struggle or change, was it kind of an epiphenomenon of little importance, or was it actually one of the causes of a broader change in outlook and attitude? You can make a fair case for all of those, or try to synthesize them.
Basically, as per the last part of what you write here, I'm not notionally opposed to the argument that a picture of the full Earth as seen from space had a peculiarly intense impact on viewers that was important in the normalizing of environmentalism as a sociopolitical orientation or position. And I guess I could concede that Brand was one person calling for that image? But as you say, even in the best-case scenario, that one image isn't more important or even as close to as important as all that organizing or even as important as many other iconic images (crying Indians, burning rivers, deformed eagle babies, etc.) and it doesn't entitle Brand to his rebranding.
Brand is a perfect example of all the good and bad of The 60's(tm). Hunter S. Thompson wrote the best description and eulogy to this philosophy I've ever read, a paragraph dropped almost at random in the middle of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. You absolutely need a Vision to change the world, but you also need to do more that describe it to people if you actually want change. If, however, you want to justify your choices and actions, a Vision works great. Just dig up Steve Jobs and ask him.
Stewart Brand always reminded me a bit of Buckminster Fuller. I once went to a talk Fuller gave and mentioned it to my boss who explained that Buckminster Fuller was a poet. Being a technical sort, I hadn't considered the importance of poetry, at least not in my undergraduate days. Fuller wasn't exactly an engineer, and he was definitely not a scientist, but he tried to distill and propagate some idea of the 20th century machine age with its streamlines and new materials and new ways of looking at things large and small.
Brand was something like that too. He tried to capture and spread a way of looking at the world, one that was being adopted by others with greater technical and organizational skills than his own. Alinsky was a brilliant tactician. Others were brilliant strategists. Yet others were the one's who helped them find the path. Maybe this is my way of saying he wasn't completely useless. NASA was going to take that photo of the earth with or without him. Such a photo was a set piece from science fiction if nothing else. Still, it was hard to be of a certain generation and to see that photo and not think about matters of perspective and viewpoint.
P.S. When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, he supposedly said, "so you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."
This is a really interesting post, so thank you for writing it. I have conflicting feelings about Brand, but for somewhat different reasons than you state.
Reading the Whole Earth catalogs in the mid-70s was a key factor in my ditching of teen dreams to become a car designer. Instead, I moved to a rural community and got involved in environmental activism. At least for me, the catalogs weren’t just about practical tips (a la Mother Earth News magazine) but also about a different way of thinking about how society could be best run. In a very real sense, the catalogs and spin-off magazines (the Co-Evolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review) were my introduction to environmental philosophy.
It doesn’t surprise me that histories by mainstream environmental groups ignore Brand. Their focus has tended to be on the nuts and bolts of the policy-making process whereas Brand has hovered more at the “conceptual” level. I am not using the word “cultural” because Brand’s build-your-own-community focus was ultimately political in nature: It revolved around how do we make decisions -- individually and collectively -- about the substance of our lives.
I have a great deal of appreciation for Alinsky’s work but would differ with him that the back-to-the-land movements were “copping out.” A lot of useful social experimentation occurred even when it was short lived. Why must we insist that there is only One Best Way to engage in social change?
All that said, in recent years I have tilted more to the thinking of others in Brand’s orbit, such as Gregory Bateson and Paul Hawkins. Someone once said of Brand that his idea of heaven is a room full of people arguing. He has always seemed to enjoy being an iconoclast – and that tendency would appear to have grown as he has aged.
I don’t agree with Brand’s optimistic take on nuclear energy and geoengineering. In addition, I was disappointed with his libertarian-tinged analysis of global urban trends that he offered in a keynote address at an American Planning Association conference a few years ago.
Despite those criticisms, I still use some of Brand’s concepts in my own environmental theorizing, such as his argument that a “robust and adaptable” civilization must maintain equilibrium between six levels that operate at differing speeds: fashion/art, commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture, and nature.
Perhaps I’m weird, but even though I recently retired I have limited patience for arguments about “legacies.” What’s more important is how we can draw from the past ideas that can help us solve our current problems. I find that Brand still helps me to broaden my thinking even when I disagree with him. That ain’t nothing.
In the 1960s there were attempts to get people to believe that the world was small, such as "It's a Small World After All" at the 1964 World's Fair. However, the mental model was that the world is approximately infinite, and it followed that the solution to pollution is dilution. The photo of earth from space did a lot to change this notion, by providing the first view of earth as another spaceship. The other thing that it did was show that the familiar political boundary maps were not what the planet really looked like, which we all knew but did not fully appreciate. As a young person I had looked at a lot of black and white photos of the earth from low-earth orbit, because Dad was the first radio amateur to receive satellite photos. Geography, studied from space, is confusing and non-obvious. Confusion creates the mental space to rethink the relationship between political boundaries and ecology. The view from beyond low-earth orbit was compelling. A good way to continue to develop this understanding is to look at the photos from Planet.com, some of which show sharp contrasts in the environment across political boundaries. These are perhaps the consequences of natural experiments created by politics and especially water use.
There's at least a little argument to be made that seemingly small cultural moments can have a causal importance that isn't well captured by conventional histories of social movements that focus on organizing and on a relationship between social movements and the formal activities of governments and major civic institutions. This is actually a bit of the still-existing tension between cultural history and social history when it comes to narrating the reasons why change happens over time--it's both an empirical and epistemological tension, and not the least because self-promoting figures like Brand can insistently tell a story often enough about the importance of an image or practice or idea or book that they shift the overall story we tell in the present about why a change happened in the past.
Consider for example this question, "How important was it that men started wearing their hair longer during the 1960s and 1970s?" Well, on one hand, it was a surprisingly constant subject of conversation and argument during that time--seemingly a major fuel for inter-generational and inter-class tensions. And it was a lasting change in that since that point, men have been pretty free to have short hair, long hair, man-buns or mullets as they please. But was that all that it was? Was hair just a superficial sign of some deeper social struggle or change, was it kind of an epiphenomenon of little importance, or was it actually one of the causes of a broader change in outlook and attitude? You can make a fair case for all of those, or try to synthesize them.
Basically, as per the last part of what you write here, I'm not notionally opposed to the argument that a picture of the full Earth as seen from space had a peculiarly intense impact on viewers that was important in the normalizing of environmentalism as a sociopolitical orientation or position. And I guess I could concede that Brand was one person calling for that image? But as you say, even in the best-case scenario, that one image isn't more important or even as close to as important as all that organizing or even as important as many other iconic images (crying Indians, burning rivers, deformed eagle babies, etc.) and it doesn't entitle Brand to his rebranding.
Brand is a perfect example of all the good and bad of The 60's(tm). Hunter S. Thompson wrote the best description and eulogy to this philosophy I've ever read, a paragraph dropped almost at random in the middle of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. You absolutely need a Vision to change the world, but you also need to do more that describe it to people if you actually want change. If, however, you want to justify your choices and actions, a Vision works great. Just dig up Steve Jobs and ask him.
Stewart Brand always reminded me a bit of Buckminster Fuller. I once went to a talk Fuller gave and mentioned it to my boss who explained that Buckminster Fuller was a poet. Being a technical sort, I hadn't considered the importance of poetry, at least not in my undergraduate days. Fuller wasn't exactly an engineer, and he was definitely not a scientist, but he tried to distill and propagate some idea of the 20th century machine age with its streamlines and new materials and new ways of looking at things large and small.
Brand was something like that too. He tried to capture and spread a way of looking at the world, one that was being adopted by others with greater technical and organizational skills than his own. Alinsky was a brilliant tactician. Others were brilliant strategists. Yet others were the one's who helped them find the path. Maybe this is my way of saying he wasn't completely useless. NASA was going to take that photo of the earth with or without him. Such a photo was a set piece from science fiction if nothing else. Still, it was hard to be of a certain generation and to see that photo and not think about matters of perspective and viewpoint.
P.S. When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, he supposedly said, "so you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."