Commoning and the End of Domination

"Domination has ruled the world for thousands of years," said Steve at a recent book group. "Why should we expect to turn it around so quickly? I'd be surprised if we see any change in our lifetimes."

The book we had been reading, Riane Eisler's The Chalice and The Blade, had made the archeological case that for the bulk of our history, humans have lived in peaceful societies based on a balanced partnership between men and women (and, I would add, with their environment and fellow species as well). She called these "partnership societies," though I prefer to call them commoners and their realm the commons. Eisler then described the gradual, incredibly violent assault that swept away the commons to make the world we live in now: a world where the threat of violence, pain and separation enslaves countries, nations, workers, women, children and animals. A world of domination.

For over 7,000 years, armies, jihads, crusades, pirates, empires and corporations have devoured the wealth of the world in their relentless quest for conquest. Against such massive power, the commons that previously defined human life for tens of thousands of years seems weak indeed.

But isn't it interesting how much effort it took the dominators to prevail, and how incomplete their victories were? For example, despite the tradition of authoritarian dominance that runs through all the Abrahamic religions, the first thousand years of Christian church art contains not a hint of the crucifiction and the culture of torture and fear that came with it. Instead, church murals depicted heavenly peasant feasts in vibrant garden settings.

Even today, it's almost unimaginably expensive to keep the commons broken. It takes billions of dollars of omni-present commercial media to distract people with elusive, seemingly attainable visions of personal material happiness. It takes a massive military. It takes removing all children from their families and the ground that sustains them and putting them in schools that teach consumer and nationalistic values. It takes the raping priesthoods of the world's richest organizations to don the mask of godhood and put the fear of it in people. It takes drug laws that 41% of the populace has broken, and a massive, violent prison system.

Commoning seems fragile when measured against these massive arsenals of Empire. Yet the mere fact that it takes such enormous resources to suppress testifies to its intrinsic strength.

Commoning is what we do to sustain ourselves together. It's wired into our being at all levels, from our highest intellectual ideals to our immediate social instincts to the cellular partnerships we enjoy with the bacteria and mitochondria that keep our bodies alive. Every human is a commoner at the core because we co-evolved with each other and with every other living being to sustain the overall system of life. We have an undeniably visceral bond of loyalty that transcends nation, profession, race or gender. We are loyal to life above all.

We now live in a time when domination has grown so big that in a single lifetime, it has permananetly damaged the life systems that sustain us. It is physically impossible for domination to continue its exponential conquest for another lifetime, let alone another few millennia. But how much of the world will it bring down when it falls, and how much of the damage can commoning heal?

The answer depends not on whether we step away from domination, because those who survive it most definitely will. There is no other way. But the health of the world depends on how completely we change course, and how soon. This I don't know. But it will happen.

No matter how powerful domination seems, no matter how long it has been around, it is dying. It is not aligned with life, it cannot outlast life, and its days of increase have already ended forever. As it loses its grip and dies, Empire's most loyal followers will rediscover their deeper bonds. We are all commoners at the core.