🏛 Dinghies, third ways, and elephants
Should I stay or should I go? is not just a song by The Clash
Happy New Year from Maryland. It feels good to be back in the swing after two weeks off. I decided yesterday that January’s Talking Back to Walden will be about ice. Brrrrrrr! 🥶
My #1 favorite thing about my first year on Substack has been meeting and interacting with the fabulous readers and writers here. I’m inspired by your generosity, talent, dedication to craft, and most of all, humanity. I admire your quirks, knowledge, unique perspectives, humor, emotional depth, vulnerability, honesty, trust, and self-permission.
Just before New Year’s,
’s brilliant community writing project, Same Walk, Different Shoes went live. I’m still working my way through the rich trove of stories, and it’s a wonderful reminder of the lovely ecosystem I’ve managed to find myself in here.My fondness for you all feels extra poignant, because during the last half of December, I had interactions with many of you, including
who restacked many excellent pieces, over the whole freedom-of-speech, ethics, fairness, and decency controversy. (That decency could even BE controversial is soooo 2020’s, isn’t it?) Which has me today thinking about Zodiac dinghies, third ways, and elephants.Dinghies
A lifetime ago on Earth Day, a patrician, privileged, bow-tied New York City architect with a frat-bro haircut showed me my life’s work. William McDonough would go on to some fame (for an architect), but that day he gave a speech at a Young Architects Forum about this thing called “green architecture,” or maybe by then it was already “sustainable design.”
You could tell he came from money—the Seagram’s fortune, as it happens. I was mesmerized not only by what he said, but how he said it, with all the conviction and confidence of someone perfectly at ease in corporate boardrooms.
Addressing the criticism already being directed at him by purist hardcore environmentalists who said he was too cozy with industry, he asked this question: To turn a ship to a whole new course, where would you rather be: on the bridge guiding the captain or in a Zodiac dingy ten stories down, cursing and shaking your fist?
Now there’s a man who understands power and influence. His analogies were fresh and brilliantly persuasive. One example that continues to inspire me, decades later:
"In Oberlin, we asked, How can we design a building like a tree?—a fecund structure that purifies waters and makes oxygen and food," he says. "In Coffee Creek, we asked, What if a town were like a forest?"1
I thought of McDonough’s question when contemplating the painful dilemma facing many great writers here on Substack. Given the reality of the co-founders’ naïve (cynical, corrupt, disingenuous, insert-your-adjective-here) stance on “free speech,” extended to promoting and profiting from white supremacist (proto-fascist, fascist-curious, happily-fascist, insert-your-name-here) accounts. As The Clash so eloquently put it way back in 1982, “"Should I Stay or Should I Go"?
Is it better to stay and work for change from within, as McDonough advocated? Or is it more principled to, as some have already done, jump ship for more ethical waters? Being up on the bridge and in the corporate boardroom has worked for McDonough. It landed him and his partner, Michael Braungart in an October 2007 issue of Time magazine as “Heroes for the Planet.” (Oh, those were optimistic days!)
Of course, this isn’t a simple either-or. One is not better than another. These are individual choices, based on unique perspectives and personal ethics. Though inspired by McDonough’s smart analogies, supreme confidence, and gift for public speaking, I was never going to be like him. I was never even in a corporate boardroom. I spent ten years educating myself and trying to convince my bosses and co-workers that sustainable design was the future, but became increasingly disillusioned with my profession’s sluggishness to embrace change.
Third ways
I gravitated to a third way, articulated by another Time magazine “hero” who actually made the cover—R. Buckminster Fuller, or Bucky as he is fondly known.2 Fuller was super-quotable, and this one is my touchstone:
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
So, neither in a Zodiac down at the waterline, nor hobnobbing with the captain and the power-elites on the bridge and in the boardroom. Whole new ship. Or no ship; who knows?
For my Substack analogy, maybe a third way is migration to an open-source, paid platform like Ghost, which I learned of in this post by
. Ghost is owned by a foundation HQ’d in Singapore.3 It’s attractive as an alternative to the corruptible capitalist model. Fewer worries about investors tying co-founders’ hands with proto-fascist, techno-utopian political agendas, for one thing.As it turns out, publishing and architecture aren’t the only broken professions. They’re all broken, as voices as wide-ranging as Greta Thunberg, Naomi Klein, Dougald Hine, and Paul Kingsnorth keep telling anyone who will listen. Those of us who accept the diagnosis of the many failures of Modernity and Capitalism, including the dangerously wrong-headed belief that technology is the solution rather than the problem, are left to contemplate the age-old question:
What now?
I’m fascinated that the theories of how we might carry forward are as diverse as the voices of diagnosis. I find points of agreement with many of them and trip over areas of disagreement with others.
Elephants
For my part, what it comes down to is, I don’t want to leave Substack. During one of my interactions last month of the tripping-over-disagreements persuasion, I thought of the parable of the blind men describing the elephant.4 Let’s admit with humility that we each have but a small part of the truth. And that we need each other to grasp the bigger picture—even if we never arrive at a complete picture of the Whole Truth.
Partial truths are about all that’s available to us in this lifetime. That has helped me tremendously in recent years to make peace with less-than-ideal situations, which, let’s face it, are pretty much what we’ve got. I teach in an R-1 state university that prides itself on yearly raking in hundreds of millions of research dollars,5 while tuition remains out of reach for too many.
At the same time, one-third of our program’s undergrads are first-generation college students—and we couldn’t be more proud of them. Yes, they’re chasing the ever-elusive, mythical “American Dream” (that is itself part of the crumbling collapse of Modernity). And they are utterly committed and talented and hard-working, dare I say visionary future leaders. I’ll stick around as long as what I have to teach is of any use to them.
Their inspiring work is why I started this newsletter in the first place, as a companion to a podcast I produced.6 In June, the Building Hope Substack shifted focus, but not purpose. It will continue to be a place of practice, a place to shine light in the darkness. For me personally as a writer and reader, there is no better place to engage with the talented, generous, kind people I’ve met here on Substack.
Because I can’t resist, here’s a quick recap of a few highlights and lowlights of 2023:
Highlights
A little sound effect to get in the mood.7
Post with the most engagement in 2023:
Second-most popular post:
The story I wrote for Same Walk, Different Shoes community writing project came in a close third:
Lowlights
And the stubborn self-indulgence award goes to. . . .
Series that began strongly enough, but dropped off with each installment. I kept slogging and pressed send after seven weeks with a relieved, “There, that’s done.”
Thanks for reading. I look forward to more interactions in the coming year!
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From Time Magazine, 2.22.99
Source: this article
$834 million in 2023, according to this article
Building Hope is available on all the podcasting platforms, and on our website.
Your work is so thoughtful, Julie, and I’ll read you with pleasure wherever you are.
Not planning on leaving Substack connections behind.
And I’m not even leaving entirely out of principle. I’m petty, too! I didn’t like the style in which the management handled our concerns and that made me doubly not want to hand them 10% of my earnings. I knew that every single time I’d see a payment come through Stripe with that 10% lopped off I was going to grimace.
Right now I’m setting up at beehiiv since Ghost was a little daunting for me, tech-wise. I was pleased to learn that beehiiv’s CEO came right out and said that Nazi and anti-trans content is banned on their platform. (Learned this from Rusty Foster’s Today in Tabs newsletter, also on beehiiv now.)
There’s a lot to love on this platform and plenty of things I’ll miss. I don’t blame anyone for staying one bit. New pastures feel intuitively right for me; I’ll be able to hear myself think better elsewhere. But I can see that the collaborative, social, bustling vibe here is inspirational for lots of my favorite writers. Keep on!
Excellent post, Julie, with lots of great ideas and quotes.
I've also looked at Ghost as an alternative platform. I'm a believer in not-for-profits moving into the social media space, too. I sit on the board of one: https://www.newsmastfoundation.org/ If you have a moment, check it out and let me know what you think.