January 1, 2026

A Note on Tiny Manifesto #11

What I am trying to do with these tiny manifestoes in 2026, and why I start with #11

As the occasion demands and as time allows, I may support my Tiny Manifestoes with notes such as the following: 

My primal question as a philosopher, over a lifetime, has been and remains: What is good for humans, taking into account what is good for the whole earth? Being the kind of philosopher that I am, I take it that this is a question that I cannot answer with less than the whole of my own life, while that whole life must include intentional reflection on my own life, deliberation with my friends about the actions that constitute my life in relation to the actions that constitute their lives, and documented articulation of my discoveries as they result from my reflections and deliberations. Also, being the kind of philosopher that I am, I take it that reflection on my life relies on attention to the best thinking available so far on what is good for humans (taking into account what is good for the whole earth), attention to the objective historical conditions within which I find myself and that provide the affordances and constraints within which I am able to act—and so also attention to the actions of others that have co-constituted these conditions, and attention to the effects and other implications of my own actions so far.

As a part of this work I intend a little experiment in 2026: writing the first iteration of a personal pattern language for my own political action in the form of 250 tiny manifestoes, at the pace of one tiny manifesto per weekday for fifty of the year’s weeks. I intend to write at this pace because I find that I write better within a routine than without a routine. In each tiny manifesto I will focus on one intention to action. With each intention I intend to address a problem I encounter in my efforts to act politically. And in each tiny manifesto I will articulate some of my considerations in responding to that particular problem with that particular intention to action. Because I also find that I write better within regular word count constraints, I will limit each manifesto post to roughly 500 words.

Since sometime in the 1980s I have wanted to write a political pattern language, inspired by A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, written by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, and Shlomo Angel (published by Oxford University Press in 1977). In future notes on my project I may write more about what Alexander and his friends mean by “a pattern language.” For now I will limit myself to noting that I intend each tiny manifesto to articulate one pattern for my own political practice, and that (following Alexander and friends, p. xiii) I take it that, “No pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that it is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded within it.” With the exception of the very first and the very last of these tiny manifesto posts I will therefore gesture in each post towards connections between the pattern articulated in that post and that pattern’s potentially encompassed and encompassing patterns. In the 2026 iteration of this pattern language I will not be able to do more than gesture, as I will be articulating the pattern language day-by-day, so that the connections, such as they might be, will only appear in due course.

“In due course” is a constraint on my work in this project in  a further way: I am committed to other projects and most of those other projects involve vowed or contracted commitments of my time, so that I doubt that I will be able to invest more than an hour a day, to a total of five hours a week, in this project. Taking into account what I know about my own current capacities as a writer, to produce these tiny manifestoes at the pace of one per week day with an effort of one hour of writing per manifesto will mean that I will have to take bigger risks than I prefer in published writing: risks that could include the risk of making assertions that may turn out to be fairly obviously mistaken (rather than merely contestible), the risk of publishing writing that may turn out to be relatively shoddily crafted (in terms ranging from proofreading through style to argument), and the risk of publicly committing myself to actions that I then fail to take (including the risk of not being able to maintain the pace of writing these posts to which I am committing myself). I don’t like such risks, but I don’t think such risks are avoidable in any mildly serious project (and the avoidance of such risks results in sad lives, such as that of George Eliot’s Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch). I intend to mitigate such risks by designating my tiny manifestoes of 2026 as a first iteration, so that the prospect remains open that I will be able to revise each particular manifesto and the whole set of 250 manifestoes in future iterations, taking into consideration what I learn in the course of the project, in the rest of my research, and in the course of my life as a whole.

I currently image the project as a whole to consist of five sets of fifty tiny manifestoes each: (1) Preparatory actions I can intend without involving anyone else but myself; (2) Actions I can intend so as to not help make things worse within the constraints of the liberal capitalist nation state system of the mid-twenty-first century and as a citizen of such states; (3) Actions I can intend in struggle against the fascist barbarism emerging as a successor to the liberal capitalist nation state system of the mid-twenty-first century; (4) Actions I can intend in struggle for the emergence of a better successor to the liberal capitalist nation state system of the mid-twenty-first century; (5) Actions I can intend in hope as an apocalyptic witness to the world to come. I can imagine future iterations of my pattern language being arranged differently, but this is the arrangement with which I intend to start. Since I do not have the full set of 250 tiny manifestoes imagined in advance, I intend to start the year’s set of related posts with what I hypothesize to be Tiny Manifestoes #11, #61, #111, #161, and #211.