Utopian Thinking

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/magazine/utopia.html

“To be a utopian takes grand, ambitious thinking. But when it comes to implementing these ideas into policies and practice, Bregman suggests a humble, tinkering approach…”

One consistent experience I’ve had over the 15 months I have been talking about the One Love Symposium and the Human Services Professional is that, to as many people as I have described our goals, specifically to intentionally develop the body of professional scholarship around the point of human interface that is the defining feature of those high-touch professions that make up the Human Services Professional (Education, Healthcare, and Governance), there seems to be a small but persistent faction that insist on two things - 1.) The concept needs to be simpler and more easily bulleted and 2.) The concept is too simple, surely someone has done this already.

Let me be clear, the Human Services Professional is a simple idea based on a simple assertion: human beings are basically good and are motivated to do the right thing. The reason why it seems complicated is because no one has done it before.

This short article by Malia Wollan brought to my attention an interesting young Danish scholar who has been talking about just this type of social transformation since 2015. Rutger Bregman, just 33 years old, has been talking about how to change the world, slowly, deliberately, effectively since he was in his 20’s and getting a fair amount of attention for it. He spoke at the World Economic Forum at Davos about universal basic income, he’s been interviewed by Andrew Yang and Trevor Noah about not just his support of a universal basic income, but also about his research into the nature of people, specifically whether people are inherently good or evil. He thinks we’re good, and he bases his argument, among many examples of institutional faith in human effort, on a real life Lord of the Flies situation, except this group of boys survive by cooperation and mutual support. His argument is that this is the true nature of human beings. But don’t take my word for it, read his awesome book, Utopia for Realists.

The blues line of Bregman’s work is that there are other ways to think about human beings. Rather than viewing ourselves as fundamentally flawed and in need of a strong management hand, Bregman’s work suggests that there are actually many examples in history that indicate that people, by and large, are cooperative and mostly good. This notion has implications for meaningful social change at all levels. For the purposes of the One Love Symposium, Bregman’s work suggests that there is good, solid logic behind efforts that seek to subtly shape the landscape of work with small but intentional investments in human capacity, particularly for professions that are in need of updating, like education, healthcare and governance.

These three pillar professions are similar in their reliance on the moment of human connection where the professional, vested with the power of assessment, and responsible for what amounts to, in many cases, life and death decision-making is called upon to decide what to do next - in these professions these decision points can have lasting impacts; consider the school to prison pipeline, differential health outcomes based on race and class, and George Floyd.

The One Love Symposium and the information building activities that lead up to it will be an opportunity to use the public scholarship model to build important knowledge around the point of service - that moment where critical decisions about human intention, behavior, and circumstances are made. The schedule of events include:

Summer Data Collection: Youth and Community Stakeholders (June, 2021 - September 2021) - Young people across Michigan will be participating in data collection in support of the One Love Symposium and developing the key competencies and professional dispositions of the Human Services Professional. Committed youth programs include: Young Leaders, Benton Harbor MI; Young Kings, Ypsilanti MI; Upward Bound, Ypsilanti MI; KYDNet, Kalamazoo MI; Neutral Zone, Ann Arbor MI; Grizzly School, Ypsilanti MI.

One Love Symposium: Preview Event (September, 2021) - Professional Meeting and facilitated values-focused decision-making conversation, featuring Dr. Michael Johnson, Dr. Wendy Burke, Interim Department Head, Eastern Michigan University, Teacher Education, Rebecca Guzman, Founding member of MiCHWA, and representation from Washtenaw Community College Police Academy.

One Love Symposium (February, 2022) - Integrated Arts, Public Scholarship, and Professional Meetings to figure out what makes us human and how we can bring our country back together - Art and Conversation for Social Transformation!

Here’s to “tinker[ing] towards utopia”!!