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Monolog: Daniel Ben-Horin
"Monolog" is a standing feature of The Sophist in which we ask one person to share his or her point of view on issues pertinent to those involved with socially-focused organizations.
Name: Daniel Ben-Horin
Title: President
Organization: CompuMentor (http://www.compumentor.org/ and http://www.techsoup.org/)
Least Favorite Buzzword: "At the end of the day" because, at the end of the day, it's a totally gratuitous way of saying "ultimately," a perfectly good, low-tech word.
Favorite Web Site: eBay (http://www.ebay.com/) because it efficiently puts technology in the service of communication, transactions, and community. I enjoy lots of other sites--fun sites, pretty sites, San Francisco Giants sites, my friends' blogs, Google news indexes, Craig's List. But if you’re talking about lessons to be learned by nonprofits, eBay has really written the book about what works.
Favorite Quotation: "Perfection is the enemy of the good." --Anonymous
Recommended Reading: I read 99 percent fiction, a couple of daily newspapers, and articles that friends send me or I hear about on blogs and listserves. Books I’ve loved recently: Corrections, White Teeth, Empire Falls, Three Junes, Motherless Brooklyn, Any Old Iron. The best magazine journalism I’ve seen in recent memory was "The Economics of Empire" by Bill Finnegan in the May Harper's. It made me feel like I finally got what globalization was about, good and bad.
Prediction for the Sector: The "sector," ah, the sector. What is this thing? It's a very American thing, that's for sure. It arose out of a particular concatenation of historical and social circumstances and perseveres in the same idiosyncratic fashion, but after yea these many years, people start talking about it as if it has an independent reality, as if it's a given that a certain specific amount of social reality must be achieved by nonprofit organizations working more or less the way nonprofit organizations work today. I don't think it's necessarily so. Nonprofits exist in the DMZ between the private sector and government. A reshaping of either will profoundly affect the land between them. If we are indeed entering a period of rampant global corporate hegemony, then we can expect more and more corporatization of the major part of the nonprofit sector and more and more oppositional behavior from the minor (largely defunded) part...a schism within the sector. If there is a strong backlash against multinational-driven globalization, we might see a sector that starts truly acting on the principles of alternative values--e.g. play over efficiency--that Jeremy Rifkin so eloquently espouses.
Hedgehog or Fox?* I think I’m a hedgehog who likes to hang out with foxes. I certainly like the second group of writers [examples of foxes from Isaiah Berlin’s essay; see below] more than the first [examples of hedgehogs], and I run from true believers as fast as my tiny feet can carry me. But a light went on for me in my early 20s, and I hope it never goes off, having to do with the goal worth seeking being the quixotic one of understanding Darwin, Marx, and Freud, those three great determinists, and using that understanding to foster our unique human attribute--self-consciousness (a.k.a. sentience) and undo determinism.
* This alludes to Isaiah Berlin's 1953 essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox," in which he uses a line from the Greek poet Archilochus ("The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.") as the basis for dividing writers and thinkers into one of two categories: the hedgehogs "who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel--a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance" and the foxes "who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause…seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision." Berlin says Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust are hedgehogs; Shakespeare, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzak, and Joyce are foxes.
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