Da Vinci on change: cultivate your powers and unleash your whole person

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was the quintessential ‘Renaissance man’. Leonardo’s life is a testament to human creativity. Over six decades of creative activity, Leonardo showcased gifts as a painter, sculptor, scientist, anatomist, architect, engineer, inventor, botanist, and musician. His contributions are remarkable for their consistent brilliance. Leonardo’s paintings, including the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, are touchstones for the history of Western art. In his sketchbooks and journals, Leonardo developed a new visual language for representing bodies and surfaces, which fed into his painting and gave his figures an unprecedented realism. Leonardo’s studies of the natural world made a decisive contribution to the embryonic sciences of anatomy, hydrodynamics and physics. His architectural and engineering designs included bridges, irrigation projects, villas and cathedrals. His notebooks brim over with fantastic inventions, including diving equipment, armoured cars, flying machines, musical instruments and more.

As a cultural figure, Leonardo da Vinci sets a high bar for the rest of us. Few of us could hope to match his success in such a diversity of pursuits. Mostly when we dabble in fields beyond our professional training, we wind up conceding that, while we may be happy apprentices, we will never be grand masters. Yet, we shouldn’t be discouraged by this. While you and I may never enjoy the accomplishments of Leonardo da Vinci, we can nurture and explore a plethora of talents and abilities, just as he did. Leonardo gives us an ideal to aspire to, even if we can’t match his achievements. He is someone who cultivated his full potential to think, feel, do and be.

Spinoza in principle: ethics, affect, and friendship

One hundred years ago, Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was a famous philosopher, oft-quoted and respected, if notorious for his relationship with the authorities of his time. It is unclear why he fell out of fashion. We may have seen Spinoza’s statue in Amsterdam, or heard his name mentioned by another philosopher, but of Spinoza himself, we know nothing. This is unfortunate seeing as Spinoza is one of the most practical and relevant philosophers there is. There are all sorts of ways that we can apply Spinoza’s philosophy today. Henri Bergson, writing in the early 20th century, saw Spinoza as a philosopher of intuition. The Italian political theorist Antonio Negri argues that Spinoza is the key to understanding globalization and the postmodern age.

This post does not explore the work of these thinkers. I want to focus on Spinoza himself.

Spinoza was the son of a Portuguese merchant who had fled to Amsterdam with his family to escape the Catholic Inquisition. Spinoza senior couldn’t have picked a better place to have moved the family business. It was the height of the Dutch Golden Age and Amsterdam was the trading capital of the world. Amsterdam, moreover, was an excellent spot for Spinoza to begin a philosophical education. Through the seventeenth century, the liberal climate of Amsterdam drew a hoard of political and religious refugees from other parts of Europe, stimulating a lively intellectual culture. Strolling through Dam Square, Spinoza would have rubbed shoulders with French Huguenots, German Anabaptists, Spanish heretics, and Scottish freethinkers amidst the hustle and bustle of the markets and trade. Spinoza formed the principles of his philosophy long before he considered himself a philosopher, as a young man on the streets of Amsterdam.

Hooked on a feeling: how a chance encounter can change your life

I met a man named AJ Emmanuel as I was walking down the main street of my town. AJ was enlisting supporters for the UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency. He spotted me coming from a distance and lured me in with a parody of my loping stride. By the time we met, I was laughing and he was laughing too.

‘You are wasting your time with me!’ I told him. I explained how my partner and I give a set amount of money each month to a rolling roster of aid organizations. The UNHCR was somewhere on the list. ‘A good conversation is never a waste of time’, AJ replied. It was a sunny day and I was out for a walk – why not take the opportunity to chat?

I liked AJ immediately. He was confident and upbeat. There was mischief in his eyes, but seriousness, too – a tone of gravity underlying everything that he said. I sensed that I was in the presence of a kindred spirit – a street philosopher, of sorts – a man who had seen suffering enough to know that life has no guarantees, yet who is wise enough to appreciate that the only appropriate response is to celebrate each moment.

Social media as gift culture: building tribes

This is the final post in a series on social media gift cultures. Drawing on indigenous gift cultures, I have sought to understand how social media users create reputations, communities, and identities through sharing (or ‘gifting’) with online crowds. A gift culture perspective highlights the motivations and rewards of online sharing. It foregrounds how we should go about building tribal communities online, making online sharing social.

If you haven’t followed the series to date, I recommend you start at the beginning and work your way through. Like Hegel said, the truth is in the whole.

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In the last post, we considered how hard it is to maintain a reputation across multiple social media sites. Multi-tasking across sites and apps is challenging. We are inundated with information. It is hard enough to keep up with the torrent of information pouring through a single news feed. Keeping up with the traffic across multiple feeds can be a nightmare.

Information overload is only part of the problem. To manage our reputation across multiple communities, we need to tap into the torrent of information and share it in a targeted, strategic, way. Different systems attract different crowds, and each has a distinctive set of values and expectations. To key into crowds, you need to feed them appropriate gifts – content that will appeal to the specific community (or communities) you are addressing.

By filtering content and selecting choice gifts for specific crowds, we create prismatic, multi-faceted, identities. If we are playing the reputation game correctly, the identity that we create on, say, LinkedIn will be subtly different to the identity that we create on Tumblr or Facebook. There is nothing inauthentic about this, assuming that we allow that our identities are multi-faceted in the first place. The real problem is the stress and difficulty of maintaining this activity over time. The challenge of engaging with multiple flows of information and selecting choice content for multiple communities puts many people off. It is not just the time it takes to process the information on various channels. It is the pressure and anxiety involved in figuring out what information to push to different crowds in order to create a specific type of identity. On some level, most users are aware that the crowd is watching them and judging them on the basis of what they share. Their reputation is at stake and they don’t want to make a misstep and feel foolish (or worse!) as a result.

But social media shouldn’t be this hard. Engaging with multiple communities should be simple, fun, and intuitive. The key (surprise, surprise!) is to make the experience social. We need to build real relationships based in common values and interests. We need to build tribes.