We live in a day, says the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead2,"when civilization is shifting its basic outlook: a major turning point in history where the presuppositions on which society is structured are being analyzed, sharply challenged, and profoundly changed."Alfred North Whitehead was a teacher of John Maynard Keynes, whose significance in Keynes' thinking is underappreciated. Whitehead was a British proponent of process philosophy akin to that of John Dewey, a founding member of the NAACP, here in the US. This way of thinking about the world, which manifestly resonated with Dr. King, was the guiding philosophy behind the economic perspective on this street re-naming. It allowed an envisioning of what people took to be impossible that also took place from other progressive perspectives.
This philosophy differs from ordinary ways of thinking that take the world as a fixed set of things to be categorized or of the community as composed of isolated individuals with fixed opinions in a framework of fixed rules. In this problem solving alternative view, people are in a constant state of change as they go through the biological and mental actions of life in their social and natural context. The sense rules make is an appropriate and necessary object of scientific investigation, and people are capable of educating themselves. They are not fixed objects to be polled, studied, and listened to or votes to be bought and pandered to, but active joint participants in inquiry and common problem solving.
Thus, we reply to hermeneutic framing of Martin Luther King Jr. street re-namings with the slogan 'it is about race, not place' to call attention to the distinction between agency, power relations, and habits of mind, or institutions exposed and transformed in the street renaming as opposed to the more common sense of place appropriate to reading Newtown or the Northeast Neighborhood in the time of R4.
Keynes carried hints of problem solving philosophy, perhaps through his time with Whitehead, to his economics which remains directly relevant to today's government shutdown and health care and immigration reform debates.