People are, by most accounts, individuals. Thus the challenge of building good societies becomes a question of the role of individuals within a collective.

“Individuals” and “society,” as John Dewey bemoans, are often treated as antitheses. Building societies degrades the individual while individual freedom degrades societies.

Within this framework, one’s only hope is to develop strategies to balance these opposing interests. Individual freedom should be supported, but only within reason – laws should protect the collective whole.

As individuals within a society, we may debate where the proper line is – should laws govern firearms? Seat belt use? – but the framework is the same. Balancing the individual and the collective.

In The Public and its Problems -  spoiler alert, the public has many problems – Dewey refutes the individual vs collective standard:

A thing is one when it stands, lies or moves as a unit independently of other things…But even vulgar common sense at once introduces certain qualifications. The tree stands only when rooted in soil; it lives or dies in the mode of its connections with sunlight, air and water. Then too the tree is a collection of interacting parts; is the tree a more single whole than its cells?

Now, this all sounds a little earthy crunchy, as it were. Yes, yes, we are all connected. All part of nature. Blah, blah, hippie speech. Maybe it’s because I grew up in Northern California, but I’ve heard this all before.

It sounds good in theory, a skeptic might say, but does this cosmic connection mean anything in the real world? I am still me, you are still you, and you and I are still unique individuals. We still have a challenge: individual vs. society.

Or could this be an issue of frame?

Consider Peter Singer’s argument for acting as a global citizen. He begins by quoting  the Victorian philosopher Henry Sidgwick: We should all agree that each of us is bound to show kindness to his parents and spouse and children, and to other kinsmen in a less degree…

Singer reports that his students “nod their heads in agreement at the various circles of moral concern” which Sidgwick goes on to name.

Then the Victorian takes this little jaunt: [We should show kindness] to those of our own race more than to black or yellow men, and generally to human beings in proportion to their affinity to ourselves.

Yikes. Awkward. Singer’s students “sit up in shock.”

Treating your family with more care than others seems, perhaps, natural, but preferring your own race over others seems racist. Because it is racist. The notion appropriately ruffles our modern morality.

The point, of course, is to highlight this dissonance. This type of moral reasoning – that I should care about those “close to me” above others – is so pervasive that it too often goes unchecked. I may believe it’s immoral to care more for Europeans than for Africans, but accepting that I do have “circles of concern” makes me prone to such an outrage.

Singer argues that we need to re-frame the question of who is “like us,” by recognizing the common humanity that binds us all together.

I’ll leave that argument aside for the moment and bring this back to Dewey by saying that if you accept circles of moral concern – if you love your children more than a stranger – that is indicative that the individual/society struggle is more complex than a duality. There are many levels of association in between.

As Dewey goes on to describe:

Any human being is in one respect an association, consisting of a multitude of of cells each living its own life. And as the activity of each cell is conditioned and directed by those with which it interacts, so the human being whom we fasten upon as individual par excellence is moved and regulated by his associations with others; what he does and what the consequences of his behavior are, what his experience consists of, cannot even be described, much less accounted for, in isolation.

It is only when we strip man of their associations that we find the abstraction we call an “individual.” But in taking away the associations, we have taken away the meaning, the context – the “individual” as we know it is but a reflection, a placeholder, a simplification of the truth.

In true Deweyan fashion, I think I’ll conclude this post with a science metaphor.

Light, as you may know, is both a particle and a wave. In some experiments, it will behave as a discrete, complete particle. A single whole.

In other experiments, it will behave as a wave – altering the waves around it and radiating outwards with no discernible beginning or end.

A particle and a wave.

While this was first demonstrated with light, a core principle of quantum physics is that every material object, every thing that exists, is both a particle and wave. Yes, indeed, you yourself are a particle and a wave.

At least in a physical sense.

But, of course, one could apply this metaphor to associational living, with each person both a particle – a discrete ball of something – and a wave – a changing presence which affects those around it just as it is affected in turn.

Our families become atoms, our cities molecules, our countries cells, and our world a collective whole – consisting of a multitude of of cells each living its own life.

And somehow this complex world of dual natures and interactions becomes something coherent. Amidst the chaos, the randomness, and noise. It is complex, indeed, but it works.

My lists of open positions seem popular, and I am able to post them with increasing frequency, because the market appears to be improving. That’s excellent news; it is really hard to create a movement without viable career paths.

The Democracy Fund “seeks to hire two Program Associates, each of whom will be focused on supporting one of our three initiatives and providing assistance to the other two. The three initiatives aim to create a more responsive political system, foster more informed participation, and improve the capacity of our political system to solve problems.”

The Mikva Challenge, an excellent civic education organization traditionally based in Chicago, is looking for “a great educator with an entrepreneurial spirit who can help Mikva replicate its Democracy in Action program to S. California cities and classroom (LA is the hub).”

The Department of Management at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business invites applications for the Rocereto Professorship in Leadership with appointment beginning in the academic year 2014-15.

Public Conversations Project seeks a Program Coordinator who will be “responsible for providing day-to-day coordination and support for Public Conversations Project’s Open Enrollment Training Program and Fieldwork (Customized Training, Facilitated Dialogue, Consulting/Coaching).  The Coordinator is also responsible for new business development.  The Coordinator will also assist with PCP training and facilitation.”

“Social Capital Inc. is looking for a part-time “Community Connector” to work on a new community web portal for the Healthy Chelsea Coalition. Please spread the word if you know of candidates in the #Boston area! Looking for someone fluent in Spanish as well as English.”

“Nonprofit VOTE, an independent, nonpartisan 501(c)(3)nonprofit organization currently located in Boston, MA, is seeking an inspired Executive Director to oversee, manage, and grow the organization. Nonprofit VOTE works nationally and in the states to harness the reach of nonprofits to increase voter participation and to close participation gaps, especially among populations underrepresented in the political process.”

The University of Michigan’s Rackham Graduate School is recruiting a new Academic Program Officer with responsibility for initiatives in public scholarship.  “The new Academic Program Officer will continue to be responsible for day-to-day oversight for Arts of Citizenship programs–the Institute for Social Change, the Summer Fellows program, and the Graduate Students Grants program–and will work with Mathew Countryman, Mark Kamimura-Jimenez, the Director of Graduate Student Success, and the incoming Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities to develop a number of new initiatives in public scholarship, including the Engaged Pedagogy Initiative that Arts of Citizenship has undertaken in conjunction with the Center for Engaged Academic Learning and the Residential College.”

The Coady International Institute rightly calls itself “a world-class leader in community-based, citizen-driven development education.” It is based in Halifax, Nova Scotia and has both a global reach and deep local roots. It is led by the distinguished scholar/activist John Gaventa. “The Institute is committed to reducing poverty and transforming societies by strengthening local economies, building resilient communities, and promoting accountable democracies.” The Institute seeks a Specialist in Citizen Engagement, Advocacy and Accountability (a program teaching staff position). They explain: “The Institute is in the process of strengthening its work on promoting accountable democracies. How citizens make their voices heard through innovative advocacy, accountability and peacebuilding strategies that influence governments and other institutions is a critical issue around the world. Citizen engagement, grounded in power analysis, is important in all of our programs.”

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I’ll admit to having something of a penchant for the melodramatic – somehow the art of such flourishes strike me as imbued with valuable meaning.

So perhaps it is simply that flair for the dramatic which occasionally catches me uttering such phrases as: well…existence is hard.

I made that very statement conversationally the other day, though in retrospect such apparently bleak phraseology is not the stuff so-called proper conversations are made of.

I immediately regretted having voiced it.

But, perhaps, there is no need for such regret. Perhaps the statement isn’t so melodramatic after all. In fact, is it not true that existence is hard?

Life is hard is a well known adage, and existence, I would posit, is roughly as hard as life.

Yet existence is hard sounds dark, dreary, and – as I was told – depressing. It’s the kind of thing you might say before tossing yourself off a cliff or going out in some other dramatic fashion.

I imagine someone simply disintegrating into nothingness, too overcome with the difficulty of existence to even hold their molecules together. They might simply disperse, scattered upon the air. An ex-parrot.

But why should it be so depressing that existence is hard? Should we rather have it that existence be easy?

I’ll not deny that the option sounds tempting. Some days, in particular, life would just be so much easier…if life were easy. But life isn’t easy. Existence is hard, and sometimes it’s a struggle to get out bed in the morning.

And that’s okay.

I don’t dream of a utopia where all is perfect and harmonious all the time. If such a state were even possible, I would find it…unsatisfactory. It sounds static, fake, forced. That is not life in its finest sense.

Growth and change and improvement takes conflict, disagreement, and tension.

I’d certainly agree that there are no shortage of things we can improve upon in our society. And I like to think that those improvements could create a better world. A more just world.

But life will always be hard. I’d not advocate that everyone live forever. Nor that everyone hold the same opinion. I might argue that we have the same capabilities, but I wouldn’t advocate to have the same functionings. These realities create challenges.

We should certainly strive to minimize those challenges. I’d advocate for civil dialogue. For systems that treat people fairly and equitably. For collective efforts to address our collective problems.

But we will still have problems. There’s no end to the road, only the constant challenge of continuous improvement. Facing those challenges will make us better, and braving those challenges will make the good times sweeter.

To embrace the role of dysfunction is to embrace the nature of change – to spurn a static ideal. To say that the bad times make you appreciate the good is to appreciate the bad times – to accept that they add value to a complicated world. To say existence is hard is to acknowledge a challenge – but to be cowed by it.

So yes, existence is hard. It is a challenge. But a worthy challenge.

I for one will strive to undertake it.

There are a lot of choices one must make in life, and this can often be a stressful process – will the choice I select lead to the outcome I hope for?

One may never know the full answer to that question, but occasionally in life there are those rare moments where you can’t help but think - if this is happening, I must be doing something right.

So, since birthdays breed self-reflection, here, in no particular order, are a few moments that make me feel I must have made good choices somewhere along the line.

• I woke up one morning and decided I’d go to work dressed as a pirate. That might have made the list by itself, but the best part of this story is that I already owned everything I needed to dress like a pirate. I don’t know what the Good Life is, but if I can dress like a pirate at whim, I must be doing something right.
• Without any intentional strategy on my part, a group of my friends took the public bus to my wedding. Because that was the obvious way to get there.
• At one point, a couple of my friends and I took it upon ourselves to make T-shirts for our favorite Gubernatorial candidate and wear them out to bars where we informally canvassed. Do we know how to have a good time or what?
• The girl who was, unfortunately, probably the most picked-upon girl in my high school class once told me she respected me.
• One of my birthday gifts today was this math joke: What does Sin B/ Tan B equal? Answer here.
• My sister and I were once tasked with getting folding chairs out of a shed that turned out to be padlocked. However, whoever built the shed had put the hinges on the outside, so rather than return empty-handed, we took the hinges off, got what we needed, and screwed the hinges back on. We had a screwdriver on us, of course. Why would we not?
• Pretty much my favorite thing in the world is to hang out with civic nerdy people. Or nerdy civic people. I’m not sure which.

I can’t claim to have made no unfortunate decisions, and its certainly the case that things haven’t always worked out as I might have hoped. But hey – at least I’m doing something right.