Town Hall

This talk was squarely aimed at the twenty-something young lady about to embark on her career as an elementary school teacher, so as a thirty-something software developer, I was not the target audience. I found the tear-jerking parts somewhat trying, but I enjoyed the talk anyway and could see how many of Rafe’s lessons would apply to raising my own theoretical children. My favorite part of the lecture was not when the ten year olds were (very cutely) bumbling Shakespeare, but when they followed it up with a riff on how we are all quoting Shakespeare all the time. They must’ve rattled off fifty different cliches so common that it’s hard to imagine them all coming from the same author. But I guess they did.

I’ve been intrigued by Town Hall for quite some time now, but just haven’t gotten around to going. I just found out that one of my favorite writers, David Quammen, will be giving a talk here on 9/26, so I think it’s about time I check it out!

This was one of the better talks I’ve been to. I liked it for many reasons—one being that Robert Fuller didn’t claim to have all the answers but still came off as a wise and authoratative person on his own topic. He’s obviously put a lot of thought into Liberty, Fraternity & Equality as governing concepts. And he claims that his idea of Dignity is more a result of a thinking on the couch when he’d become a “nobody” himself without the title or rank privledge he’d held before leaving his job. He’s lived the philosophy he is suggesting we embrace.

During the follow-up Q&A session a potentially uncomfortable moment unfolded as a gentleman in his 50s talked about living in downtown Seattle for 20+ years—but feeling like he’d been routinely ignored by his fellow citizens. On his walk to the talk last night he described people looking away from him as he made his way through his city to Town Hall from downtown. He dressed and looked perhaps less fortunate or lower in rank than other folks at the talk last night (he was bushy bearded and modestly dressed). His voice quavered as he tried to get out that he felt hurt and banished by his own Seattle people. After a bit of emotional rambling he finally asked Dr. Fuller what he thought the solution to such alienation might be. Fuller graciously asked the man how he would answer his own question.

The room of Seattleites hushed and (in my mind) a rare collective moment of strangers connecting with strangers occured. Fuller, myself, the man asking the question and others waited expectantly, not knowing what was going to happen next. The man paused, then said that if people would simply gesture and acknowledge him … instead of ignoring him … he would feel like he belonged. It was a golden moment.

To me this exchange summarized much of the entire evening: a little dignity between people can go a long way.

Learn more about the Dignity Movement.

I heard Robert Fuller on the radio this morning talking about the “politics of dignity” and I have to say, he was on fire (here’s a link to the podcast). He’s taken a concept I’ve heard political theorists wrestle with and has made it so practical that just about anyone can understand what he’s talking about. What I found compelling was Fuller’s description of “dignity” as a way out of the bounds (and internal tensions) of libertarianism or egalitarianism. I also found he had a succinct way of relating this view of “equal dignity” in areas from public policy, the workplace, and foreign affairs. I believe he’ll be reading tonight at the University bookstore, but I plan on catching him tomorrow at Town Hall.

“Maybe I’ll see you again in ten years, when whales are pulling the cruise ships.” “The shopping and suburban living fiestas are over.” “Phoenix is going to dry up and blow away.” “The immersive ugliness of America is entropy made visible.” “Americans are overfed clowns eating clown food and driving around in clown cars.” “Democrats need to stop wasting time on gender identity issues and start working on things that matter.” Kunstler is quite a character and has a forceful speaking style that is engaging, if at times a bit over the top. You get the sense that, if his politics were different and the situation presented itself, he’d make an excellent right-wing dictator.

While this was sort of a “we’re screwed, really screwed” speech, Kunstler fully believes that the end of the cheap energy era is going to force the world to re-localize after the globalization bubble bursts. We’ll have to design and inhabit walkable, human-scale cities. We’ll have to travel less and interact with our neighbors more. We’ll have to produce and consume local goods and local food. Motoring will become less affordable and therefore less ubiquitous. And so on. Basically, all the stuff that makes American urban architecture and culture terrible – suburban sprawl, the design and construction aesthetic of the strip mall, big box stores – depend on a cheap oil economy, so they can’t last. In that sense, the speech was strangely hopeful.

Though his new book is on the crisis of “post peak” oil economy, I found Kunstler’s thoughts on new urbanism the most interesting. I’ve added Geography of Nowhere to my to-read list.

If Greg Palast wasn’t the worst speaker I’ve seen at Town Hall, he was at least the most ill-prepared. (I assume that he’s more of a writer than a presenter, and would never write a phrase like “at least the most ill-prepared”). Not only was there no order or cohesiveness to his presentation – just a randomly thrown-together set of lefty sarcasm and “shocker” headlines about corruption on the right. That would be one thing. But this man was standing in a room with the capacity for hundreds of people and all his visual aids were printed on 8 1/2 by 11 paper. “Here’s page 73 of the government document describing the delay of Iraqi elections until after the oil and support systems could be sold off and privatized.” (Sort of looks like a small white piece of paper from back here.) “Here’s a graph of the likelihood of your vote being invalidated during the election, categorized by race.” (Sort of looks like a small white piece of paper from back here.) And so on.

To top it all off, the first half hour of the night featured various local lefties giving props out to one another for audience applause. Let’s hear it for independent bookstore Elliott Bay Books! Pause for applause. Let’s hear it for Mind Over Matters! Pause for applause. It was like having too many if-you-like-this-you’ll-like-that previews diminish the power of the main feature.

Palast was genuinely funny at times and a lot of the information was interesting, but there just wasn’t enough of it to warrant the length and cost of the speech.

I’m preaching to the choir here as both of you appear to be going—but this looks to be a promising talk on Sunday. See you there!

At my third Town Hall talk last night I decided this place has already enriched my life enough that I should become a member. Anyone else interested? It’s $35 for a year membership. They save seats for members and the ticket prices are sometimes lower. Totally worth it even without the perks.

I enjoyed Daniel Gilbert’s talk last night—if anything I wish he would have cut his humorous examples in half and left more time to vere off the planned path of his talk and into the more interesting territory of the Q&A session that followed. But he’s an entertaining speaker and the talk was well received by the sold-out crowd.

I enjoyed the analogy of measuring happiness as Optometry. It’s all established through asking questions and adjusting for context. Never really thought about it before, but the prescription glasses I wear are arrived at after an extensive interview by a person who knows what and how to ask me, “is A better or B? Better A; better B”.

One thing that stuck in my head was the concept of reducing all life decisions to a happiness value equation. How does that explain contextual happiness with multiple events that rely on one another? For instance, if you go on vacation you can hit the pause button on a given day where you’re definitely not happy, but within the context of the greater goal of “vacation” you end up with a very happy vacation experience. It just seems that if you separate these equations too much and can get absurd. You lose the drama.

That said, this isn’t where Mr. Gilbert was taking his talk but I’d love to hear his thoughts on it. He was clear that you can’t separate the chemicals of happiness in your brain from the event causing happiness. They’re intertwined.

Thanks for a highly engaging and entertaining talk, Mr. Happiness Optometrist!

The critical side of an audience member at a Town Hall speech has to recognize that many if not most of the speakers are there primarily to peddle their latest book, that their introduction to the topic at hand is meant to entertain and enlighten, but also to whet one’s appetite for a product conveniently offered for sale at a merch table off stage right. That critical side was a bit more vocal last night as Gilbert seemed to focus on the chapter in his book which would titillate the broadest spectrum of people without necessarily speaking to the substantial portion of his book. He filled his talk almost entirely with folksy examples of illogical human psychology, wowing the audience with their own collective folly, especially regarding finances. It’s a kind of presentational cheating to pad a speech with folksy examples at all, and it’s definitely like cheating to fill a whole lecture with ideas that aren’t unique to your own work. I’d heard most of the ideas on price points and valuation from other speakers in the past, and I’m not even sure how he ties the psychology around monetary valuation to the pursuit of real happiness in his book.

Having said all that, he gave a confident presentation, threw in a few jokes that were non-duds, and I thought it was worthwhile to attend. I must admit that, though it might be another example of him cheating to win the crowd, I did get a upswell of civic pride when he opened with “Berkeley, Cambridge, Seattle. Is there a fourth place where hundreds of people will show up to hear a guy talk about ideas?” Thanks to Town Hall (not just Seattle) for facilitating such things.