#social compact

[rjzimmerman]

Covid-19 is teaching us the stern lesson that economic well-being and health justice are two sides of the same coin. To weather pandemics and restore the social contact that economic life demands, we need to sign a new social contract with public health.

This essay was published by The Hastings Center and the Center for Humans & Health. It is written by Bruce Jennings, who is an adjunct associate professor at the Vanderbilt University Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society, a senior fellow at the Center for Humans and Nature, and a senior advisor and a fellow at The Hastings Center, where he has co-directs a project on civic learning. He is author of Ecological Governance: Toward a New Social Contract with the Earth, among other pieces.

This is one of the best essays I’ve read about public health and the social contract. It will make you think, a lot, particularly if you read it slowly, or more than once, or both of those.

Excerpt:

Covid-19 is teaching us the stern lesson that economic well-being and health justice are two sides of the same coin. Measures to limit the spread of the disease and the loss of life have brought economic activity to its knees in many of the richest countries in the world. Public health measures like social distancing induce economic coma, and economic revival risks further assaults on the public’s health. These are the stakes in the pandemic now and writ large in climate change soon enough.

Here I want to turn attention from public health emergency response today to public health disaster preparation and planning tomorrow. This time, the failings of disaster planning are manifest in all countries seriously affected by Covid-19 especially in the United States, where the infrastructure of pandemic preparedness was deliberately dismantled.

What about next time? Will it be Keystone Kops or well-informed and judicious leadership inspiring trust? And there will be a next time, and a time after that. Zoonotic disease alone is a global sword of Damocles waiting to descend. Thousands of viral types are being exposed to naïve and rapacious human contact and stand poised for an evolutionary leap into our own bodies and lives.

To weather pandemics and restore the social contact that economic life demands, we need to sign a new social contract with public health.

One part of that involves disaster preparedness planning as an ongoing—not merely a periodic—activity. How we plan affects how we respond, and how tragic the ethical dilemmas of the response measures may be. I suggest that we rethink disaster planning so that it becomes a civic practice. If we do so, then a disaster preparedness planning process will come to be seen as an expression of the entire community about the value of the lives and health of its members. It is less like a commercial contract between seller (the experts) and buyer (the tax payers and those subject to the plan’s provisions) and more like a social contract, an agreement to be entered into by all that establishes commitments of responsibility for each.

[vulnerasti-cor-meum]

Hence is deduced the establishment of natural society among men. The general law of that society is, that each individual should do for the others every thing which their necessities require, and which he can perform without neglecting the duty that he owes to himself: a law which all men must observe in order to live in a manner consonant to their nature, and conformable to the views of their common creator,—a law which our own safety, our happiness, our dearest interests, ought to render sacred to every one of us. Such is the general obligation that binds us to the observance of our duties: let us fulfil them with care, if we would wisely endeavour to promote our own advantage.

Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations. (Haaknssen, ed.). Preliminaries: Section 10. (1758)

[syn-site]

...as we start to see people getting displaced there’s also this idea that we can look at other models—like academia or the arts, where people have a purpose that isn’t tied directly to money.

Joi Ito & President Obama discuss "redefining the social compact"

[mad-cow-mama]

Worth a read.

[danfrederick]

Social Compact & Sidewalk Culture

It feels like the last day of freshman year of college.  You’re not ready to leave and despite the homesickness and bumps along the way, you’ve made a home while still feeling this excitement and sense of newness.  You’ve found your favorite spots and begun to learn the patterns of those around you but very quickly it is time to pack and readjust to another schedule.

This is our second to last night in Sai Gon and, very characteristically, I am getting reflective.  After taking our Vietnamese midterm and learning more about our internships, we suddenly had an open evening.  I chose to walk.

In the past few weeks I have found a time each day to walk around the city on my own.  Aside from one day, I never felt uneasy.  I like that I have this personal time to silently walk down which ever street I choose, beginning to naturally move through the crowded sidewalks and confidently snake my way across the street 

Rush hour had set in which is it’s own thing in Sai Gon.  As I walked I thought about our discussion in Photography a few hours ago, about travel photography and how to move from taking descriptive to evocative images.  That got me wondering how best to depict Sai Gon in my photographs.  What makes this city the humming, colorful, flow that many others and I know it to be?

The traffic and the sidewalks.

Yes every city has those but here they have unique personalities. 

At first the motorcycles materializing from behind cars and next to me on the sidewalk drove me crazy.  It felt rude and impatient.  Wait and let me cross the street or at lease give me a safe place to walk around the city.  Now I hardly notice.  They are to be expected on the walkways with pedestrians or boldly ignoring red lights and continuing down the wrong side of the street if that will get them to where they want to go without breaking.  They give the city that sense of constant motion, fluid in its continuity.

In class Christophe once brought up the motorcycles, linking it to the French Revolution notion of the social compact.  We, as American citizens, are used to rules and the give take of entering into a society that has laws that both govern and protect us.  Viet Nam is different.

Right now I live in a Communist society, although they say it is milder than Russia or China.  Still Communist.  There are definitely rules but being a southern, newer member of the Communist party, originally part of the Republic of Viet Nam, Saigon carries an aura of frivolity and carefreeness.  It will bend the rules, making them up as it goes along in order to keep up the motion.  Nothing will hinder its flow.

So sidewalks operate in a different fashion than in America.

Not only are there the motorcycles but also there are also repair shops, cafes, kitchens, dining rooms, artisans, and vendors.  Walking through Sai Gon you will never go hungry and can find everything you need.  One photo project is to capture the sidewalk life of Viet Nam.  Having this ongoing project keeps me alert and definitely brings more things to the foreground.

To the right of our dorms there are always the low, red, plastic stools, which get more crowded during rush hour.  Men, women, students all sit and drink hot tea or iced coffee.  Right on the sidewalk.  Sorry if you want to walk through but that’s not how Sai Gon works.  Catching up with friends and enjoying good food come first.  If you want to move grab a bike.

Women make juice bars out of plastic bags, pulling cups, straws, ice and fruit out as if they had Mary Poppins’ purse.  The entrepreneurial spirit starts from the very streets.  The people have no boundaries.  The fact that no physical store denotes their space of business does not phase them.  That also comes at the risk of the social compact.  Walking around you may be tapped on the arm to buy nicely cut mango or nodded at to hop on a motorcycle taxi.  No logos, you just have to trust it, follow your instincts and get to know the rhythms.  Sai Gon does not care where you are from.  Once you’re on the streets you have chosen to join the flow. 

Twilight is my favorite time to walk around because everyone who is forced to operate in an institution is finally released back to their beloved sidewalks, back to their natural and preferred environment.  Teenagers stoop by trees and laugh or pass their phones around.  Older men congregate around their parked bikes, sharing a cigarette and observing their streets.  Women sit around little fires making waffle cookies, banh xeo, pho, fruit salad, or spring rolls.  Strange meats sit on metal plates and you might not know where your chopsticks have been but at least you have them.  They execute preparation, packaging and transactions in a sharp, timely manner and you learn that sidewalks probably make the best restaurants.

Stepping out to the streets might be daunting.  You will be stared at and you have to get used to the flow.  It’s not that it is fast, it’s that it is unbroken and local but it falls on you to put yourself in it, learn when to cross the street and know that it can’t be in a straight line, listen for surprising honks and look out for tea kettles and stove tops.  Once you begin to feel it though, you understand that the sidewalks break down more than just boundaries of streets and buildings, they break down social bonds.  Everyone it a friend on the street as long as there is a show of respect.  The person who feeds you may have a very different upbringing than you but they know how to cook and operate with care.  An array of people from all ages sit on newspapers in the parks or huddle at a corner.  People smile and become from, they exchange a taste of food, they nod, and soon strangers become friends and friends become family, maybe only at that moment on the sidewalk, but the sidewalk is always open and always flowing.   

That's where you find the Sai Gon's social compact.

[captainjdavis]

Prophetic: Religion the only Basis of Society by William Ellery Channing

Prophetic: Religion the only Basis of Society by William Ellery Channing

Religion the only Basis of Society by William E. Channing (1780–1842); grandson of William Ellery, (1727-1827) a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence

1. Religion is a social concern; for it operates powerfully on society, contributing, in various ways, to its stability and prosperity. Religion is not merely a private affair; the community is deeply interested in its diffusion;”…

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[idlnmclean]

Two things to consider in following or not following me

I am a prolific reblogger. If my Twitter statistics are anything to go by, 96%+ of my posts will be reblogs, and my post count is generally much higher than the typical poster. I have one major mode of operation with social media of this kind: amplifying and repeating signals. I regulate by what I ignore, and what ignore tends to be highly redundant information. If you post something with few notes that is relatively unique, I tend to reblog it if it is relevant to universal rights, economic corruption, futurism, transhumanism, art, sci-fi, robotics, philosophy, logic, mathematics, engineering, physics, cosmology, post-scarcity, anarchism, accessibility, Creative Commons, FLOS software and hardware, progress, neurology and psychology, and quite a bit more. I don't follow everyone who follows me because I am looking specifically for technoprogressive, anarchical, anti-capitalist, marginalized, creative, radically tolerant, analytically critical, or relatively uniquely relevant blogs to reblog consistently from. Alternatively, if you're the kind of pro-active assertive person that actually interacts with me and engages me in dialogue then I am far more likely to follow you even if you don't generally post things I'm interested in reblog going. All I ask in return for reblogging your content is word of mouth; tell your friends, family, co-workers, peers, teachers, students, etc about my blog. I never know who's going to post the most interesting and relevant things. Thanks, -Ian

[randomsubu]

Healthcare policy expert @haroldpollack reminds us what is at stake in this election: Medicaid & Medicare.