Facts and Analysis for Social Issues

Why is there not a central location for finding authoritative opinion and (especially!) facts about social issues and environmental problems like methampehtamine abuse, gun violence, vlobal climate change, and immigration? Wouldn't activists, educators, students, and writers love something like this? (Yeah, I've heard of Google, but I was thinking of creating something more focused and user friendly.)

But my idea is to make things even easier on people, especially people who are not very Web savvy. This objective could be served by creating a directory like DMOZ or Yahoo. The social issues directory would be organized into topics and subtopics. So, if you were interested in global climate change you might follow a path like this: Environment > Issues > Climate Change.

I see this directory as part of a larger project aimed at increasing the quality of information and thinking that underlies our approach to expalining and dealing with social problems of all types. The project would have two other components. The first would be a project to define and measure the impact on society of "social pollution" -- ideas that are unscientific, illogical, and/or undermine widely-held values. This project could publish a toungue-in-cheek Social Pollution Index modeled on the famous Harper's Index.

The other component of my "social pollution prevention project" would be an effort to identify and promote better ideas, attitudes, and beliefs. By "better" -- and yes there is a way to judge others' beliefs and lifestyles --I mean that the ideas would support values like health, family, and material sufficiency while also being scientifically valid and logically sound. Of course values have to have priority over scientific "truth" and cold logic.

I can't remember who wrote "Auschwitz was a rational place but it was not a reasonable one." We don't want to go down that path in our thinking about how things ought to be.

Thinking (and Doing)

Edward DeBono talks about thinking clubs in his book De Bono's Thinking Course. The main point of those clubs was to practice the use of various thinking tools that he developed over the years. I think his idea could be taken much further. Global warming news got me thinking even harder about the matter. We need more thinking clubs that are also doing clubs.

Here is what I mean: If you work in social activism, social services, or public education you probably have figured out that things could be better. Getting back to the environment for a second, think of what more could be done to save neergy, repair damaged ecosystems, and such. We need new ideas here, and we need the ideas that exist put to wider use, and sooner rather than later. Or maybe you just need new ideas for fundraising in your community...

Anyway, however lofty or modest your goal may be, you must have a plan to make things happen. And you almost invariably will have to get and implement the ideas in social circumstances that actually exist. Not could exist or should exist, but really exist now. What does all this mean?

We face several challenges here. We need ideas that can be implement by the people who get them. If people can't implement their own ideas, then they need to "sell" them to someone who can. The public needs to be educated about the idea and its value, in terms of peoples' current interests and concerns. (Nobody cares that you think meat is murder or SUV owners are raping the planet.) We need to know how to adapt the ideas that already exist so that they are workable in new communities and new organizations.

This all gets us back to my idea of thinking clubs that also make things happen. Next time I'll explain in more detail how these clubs would work.