An annotated bibliography for “Knowing How to Remember”
Good Protocols SPC · Companion document · August 2026
Each title below opens its card on the Lineage Shelf, with doors to borrow it or buy it.
A note on architecture
This is the reading behind one paper, shelved by the work each voice does in it, and the shelving is itself a discipline. The house’s standing canon is arranged differently, by how much weight a voice can bear and by the makers whose work teaches by showing, and this page is the bibliography of one paper rather than that canon. The Ground voices govern: they set the ontology, the tone, and the surface of everything we publish. The Structure voices sit largely below the floor: they sharpen the diagnosis, and we cite them precisely and sparingly, because their register, however sound the analysis, can code a document into a culture war we are not fighting. The Ear voices are instrumentation only: they tell us how communication lands, and are never permitted to govern what is true or what is loved. Works marked [proposed accession] are additions this paper recommends to the standing canon.
Shelf I: The Ground, governing voices
Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (English ed. 2019) and The Uncontrollability of the World (English ed. 2020). The ethos’s sociological spine. Resonance, being reached and reaching back, is the criterion of a good relation to world, other, and past; alienation is its muting. Uncontrollability supplies the warrant for every “at stations, never ambient” rule we keep: what is rendered fully available and administered can no longer answer back. In this paper, Rosa grounds §3’s claim that standing accusation produces a mute world.
Hartmut Rosa, Situation und Konstellation (Suhrkamp, 2026). The lived moment versus the arrangement of forces: both true, and category-confusable. The ethos’s central diagnosis of present-tense resentment (meeting a person, addressing a constellation) is this distinction applied morally. Our working notes on it, and the twelve-cell rubric built from them, are described in the evaluation methodology paper.
Mary Parker Follett, Creative Experience (1924), “Constructive Conflict” (1925), and “The Giving of Orders” (1925). Integration over domination and compromise: the conflict is opened until the desires beneath the stated positions show, and something is built that satisfies both, as when one reader in a library wants the window open and another wants it shut, and they open a window in the next room. Integration needs persons with reasons and cannot run on avatars. She sets power-with against power-over, and her Law of the Situation, both parties taking their orders from the situation they study together, reaches from the neighborhood center in the 1920s what Rosa reaches from theory a century later.
Dan Siegel, The Developing Mind (1999) and Mindsight (2010). Interpersonal neurobiology; health as integration, parts differentiated and linked. The ethos borrows integration as its working definition of integrity (§5): the honest seam, not the hidden crack and not the collapse into the wound. Siegel’s domains of integration are the neurobiological face of what Rosa’s axes name sociologically, and he deepens the Ground beside Rosa and Follett.
Makoto Fujimura, Culture Care (2017) and Art and Faith: A Theology of Making (2021). Kintsugi, which our Theology of Formation promotes from metaphor to ontological claim, is the ethos’s image of the sincere past: breakage named in gold, vessel returned to service. Culture care versus culture war names the community-development stance of §6: feed the soil, don’t salt it.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986). The hero-and-spear story requires an enemy and a wound to organize itself; the carrier-bag story organizes around what is gathered and kept alive. §6’s argument that a community narrated as a battlefield will be developed as one, and that hard history can be carried as one thing among the things carried, is Le Guin applied to planning.
Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend (2020). Emergence and rise-above: growth as what becomes possible when security needs are tended, not as the reward for rehearsed struggle. Supports §5’s claim that formation aims at the forward reach, and supplies the humanistic-psychology bridge to the resilience shelf below.
Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, Designing Your Life (2016). Design posture toward one’s own life (prototype, iterate, reframe) as everyday agency practice. The quiet anti-fatalism of the canon: a person mid-design cannot simultaneously be a finished verdict.
Robert F. Kennedy, Remarks at the University of Kansas (March 18, 1968). The classic accounting of everything the official measure omits: the health of our children, the beauty of our poetry, the strength of our marriages. Bridges the two white papers: neither a community’s worth nor its wound was ever in the dashboard.
Wendell Berry, essays (esp. The Art of the Commonplace, 2002). Membership: the community as a body one belongs to and answers to, prior to any grievance or program. Berry’s fidelity-to-place underwrites the whole idea of a landed past: history as soil to be farmed, not a court that never adjourns.
Greg Beale, We Become What We Worship (2008). The formation mechanism stated as theology: we are conformed to what we behold with devotion. §3’s hardest claim, that organized, rehearsed grievance is a formation curriculum, is Beale’s law applied outside the sanctuary.
Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved (1992). Belovedness as conferred, non-positional, non-rival worth, the currency that defunds the status economy rather than competing within it. Nouwen’s three lies, I am what I have, I am what I do, I am what others say about me, name the status game’s ledger three decades before the literature formalized it, in a register that is hard to mistake for polemic. Anchors the Interlude (“The Ladder and the Knife”).
Shelf II: The Structure, diagnostic voices, below the floor
Cited precisely, deployed sparingly, never permitted to set the tone.
Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions (1987) and the trade-offs corpus. The constrained vision: systems as trade-off machines run by fallible people, not designs concealing malice. Supplies §3’s humility about institutions and §4’s discipline about disparity claims: “what is being traded against what, and who bears it?” as the replacement for “why is this still broken?”
Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character (1990) and White Guilt (2006). Race-holding: the grievance retained as exemption from risk, from agency, from the present tense. The mechanism §4 names, in the words of the writer who named it first. Structural use only.
Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom (2001). Poverty of worldview as a transmissible condition; the vocabulary of helplessness as self-fulfilling. Clinical observation of the curriculum grievance runs, read on the ground of belovedness so the diagnosis never curdles into contempt. Handle with the same care as Steele.
Rob Henderson, Troubled (2024); “luxury beliefs” essays. The diagnostic we use for §4’s cost accounting: postures that confer status on the comfortable while their operational costs are billed to the vulnerable. Troubled, his memoir of foster care, writes from inside our sectors. His ladder-or-knife fork, from a post on X, opens the Interlude.
Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book II. [proposed accession] The fork first drawn: zelos against phthonos, the pain at another’s good that resolves into emulation versus the pain that resolves into unmaking. Two short chapters of Greek that much of the modern envy literature footnotes.
Max Scheler, Ressentiment (1912). [proposed accession] The chemistry of swallowed envy: repeated impotent comparison transvaluing what cannot be reached into what should be despised, sour grapes elevated into a moral system. It stands under the Interlude’s account of grievance as envy’s archive.
Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour (1966; English 1969). The sociology: every society is governed by how it manages envy, whether through constraint institutions (concealment manners, luck-talk, evil-eye hygiene) or through entrenchment so complete the affect stops being recognized and presents itself as principle. Handling note, same class as Steele: never deployed as a solvent against claims from below; the misuse is the oldest objection to the book itself. The fruit test, not envy-diagnosis, governs every application.
René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961; English 1965). Mimetic desire: we want through models, the model becomes the rival, and convergence manufactures the scarcity it fears. The mechanics of the RFP pile-on and of best-practice replication as mimetic desire in evaluation’s clothing; the Interlude’s funding-commons analysis and the grain test in “Knowing When Not to Measure” both stand on Girard.
Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset (2021). Galef’s scout asks what is true, at what magnitude, and by what mechanism, and asks it with the same face toward claims we favor and claims we resent. That symmetry is the ethos’s epistemic discipline.
Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life (2018). Order-then-beauty: the sequence claim that stabilization precedes flourishing, in rooms as in lives. Beneath it lies the voluntary confrontation with chaos, and the book is read whole, met and thought with, neither dismissed nor defended.
Shelf III: The Ear, instrumentation only
Will Storr, The Unpersuadables (2014; UK title The Heretics, 2013), The Science of Storytelling (2019), The Status Game (2021), And You’ll Be Okay Forever (2026). How belief defends itself, how narrative lands, and, decisive for §4, how grievance can become a status economy with inflationary pressure. Storr explains the mechanics of the drift this ethos names. Standing discipline: Storr governs the Ear, never the Ground; he tells us how things are heard, and is not consulted on what is true or good.
Shelf IV: The archival warrant
Paul Andrew Hutton, The Apache Wars (2016) and The Undiscovered Country (2025). History without prejudice in both directions: every party a decision-maker with reasons, judgment landing on specified acts. Source of the ethos’s razor (act, actor, mechanism, magnitude) and of its proof that precision weighs more truly than indictment: the Bascom affair, Mangas Coloradas seized under a flag of truce, Miles and the Chiricahua scouts. It is the archive in which betrayal’s long half-life, and plain dealing’s, can both be read.
Shelf V: The formation floor (in-house and sources)
Good Protocols, Theology of Formation (2026, in-house). Five movements, imago Dei, Buddha-nature, epektasis, interbeing, and the logoi of Maximus, which meet in practice and part in metaphysics, sharing one working sentence: every person carries a sound not yet fully played. Kintsugi promoted from metaphor to ontological claim. It is the floor under §5.
Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses (4th c.). Epektasis: the person as constitutively forward-stretched. The oldest statement of the ethos’s anthropology: fixation on what lies behind as a violation of the creature’s own grain.
Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua (7th c.). The logoi: each created thing carrying its intended word. This is the grain doctrine as a claim about being: read the logos before reshaping the life.
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of Understanding / the Interbeing corpus. Interbeing received as practice: the caseworker and the funder stand inside the same field as the family, so no one is scenery. We take the practice and hold open the seam on the metaphysics beneath it.
Pa Tan, True Frequency: Finding the Sound Every Person Carries (ms., 2026). The full formation argument of which this ethos paper is the public face.
Formed Otherwise corpus (2026, in-house), with Damian Milton, “the double empathy problem” (2012); Barry Prizant, Uniquely Human (2015); Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes (2015); Temple Grandin; Nick Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies (2021); Devon Price, Unmasking Autism (2022); Monique Botha’s research. Two exports to the general ethos: benevolent supplantation, over-scaffolding as malformation generalized in §5 to treating a people as their damage, and the Double Empathy corrective in §6: misunderstanding between communities and institutions runs both directions, so one-sided deficit-mapping has failed before it starts.
Shelf VI: Community development, operative
Urie Bronfenbrenner, The Ecology of Human Development (1979). The nested levels our rubric reads, child, worker, family, and community anchor, and the reason “community development” and “formation” are one field seen at two magnifications.
John Kretzmann & John McKnight, Building Communities from the Inside Out (1993). [proposed accession] Asset-based community development: the carrier-bag map versus the needs map. §6’s institutional half; the canonical demonstration that deficit-mapping produces dependency on the mappers.
Shelf VII: Proposed accessions occasioned by this paper
Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949). The disarmament voice this ethos most needs: from inside Jim Crow, with zero illusion about oppression’s reality, the demonstration that fear, deception, and hatred complete the oppressor’s work within the oppressed. Thurman said what §3 and §7 reach for decades earlier, from inside Jim Crow and the Black church, and the paper reads as his student here. Recommended for the Ground itself.
Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (1999). The institutional proof of §2: maximal truth about atrocity as the foundation, not the enemy, of a shared future. Truth-conditioned amnesty as the sincere past made procedure.
George Bonanno, The End of Trauma (2021), and Ann Masten, Ordinary Magic (2014). The resilience science: recovery and resilience as the modal human trajectory, expectancy as an active ingredient, presumptive brokenness as quietly iatrogenic. The empirical floor under §5’s refusal to narrate people as their damage.
Nick Haslam, “Concept Creep” (Psychological Inquiry, 2016). The peer-reviewed name for the semantic drift §4 describes: harm-concepts expanding to ever milder referents. Lets the paper cite a literature rather than throw an elbow.
Amanda Ripley, High Conflict (2021). Conflict entrepreneurs and the us/them trap; the journalism of how communities get stuck in the grievance loop and the documented exits from it. Practical companion to Follett.
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946). The last freedom, the chosen stance toward what cannot be changed, from inside the camps, in his own account. The oldest modern proof that acknowledging the full weight of the past and refusing to be finished by it are one act, not two.
Cross-references within the ecology
“Knowing When Not to Measure” (2026): the measurement part of the one discipline · “Holding the Future Now” (2026): the part that faces the future · Rosa working notes and rubric methodology paper (in progress, Evaluation).