"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.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Monday, April 28, 2008
Governance
I was kvetching to Rhonda about Bloomington's silly Naturalized Lawn policy, which basically puts the professional arm of the City Government in the business of landscaping of your front and back yard.
"Just to play devil's advocate," said Rhonda, "what if the City's zoning ordinances required each homestead to submit and follow a permaculture plan?"
"The problem with that," I replied, "is that it's the wrong scale for good permacultural decision-making. At the City scale, people just abdicate their political power to a faceless authority. The government acts in loco parentis and people live without a sense of responsibility to their immediate surroundings. The government can never be as present as householders in zones I-III and so it can't manage them effectively. That's a recipe for negligence, apathy, massive taxes, helpless citizens and punitive policing. No thanks. Even my neighborhood (Green Acres) is too big for good governance. It should split into two or three villages small enough for effective decisions involving Zones II through IV. Also, I would not want leaders selected by competitive election, which invites paid influence, elitism, cronyism and corruption. Instead, they should be assigned by lot from the village, with short, overlapping terms. Even then, leaders would not decide, but would mediate transactions, facilitate consensus and administer back-up voting, schedules and performance review."
I forgot to add that in each decision, someone should be assigned to learn from and speak for the land and its more-than-human inhabitants (perhaps in some cases under the tutelage of knowledgeable mentors). Also, when it comes to Zone V and net flows into and out of villages, they should convene inter-village councils (again by lot and consensus) to set policy. All of which must be absolutely transparent to all residents. No Closed Doors. No Paid Influence.
Rhonda (who is a very talented permaculture teacher) then described how an Indianapolis neighborhood of about 700 houses managed something similar to what I described.
Now we're getting somewhere! Too many environmentalists sound like old-school communists to me. Global warming and global shortages would seem to require global decision-making to solve, but really, they require people to start living much more efficiently. To do that, they must re-use and stretch local resources and depend far less on extraction and imports. They must understand and work with the regenerative power of natural ecologies around them. They must step up to the task of governance at a radically local level, and act with much greater accountability to their immediate neighbors.
"Just to play devil's advocate," said Rhonda, "what if the City's zoning ordinances required each homestead to submit and follow a permaculture plan?"
"The problem with that," I replied, "is that it's the wrong scale for good permacultural decision-making. At the City scale, people just abdicate their political power to a faceless authority. The government acts in loco parentis and people live without a sense of responsibility to their immediate surroundings. The government can never be as present as householders in zones I-III and so it can't manage them effectively. That's a recipe for negligence, apathy, massive taxes, helpless citizens and punitive policing. No thanks. Even my neighborhood (Green Acres) is too big for good governance. It should split into two or three villages small enough for effective decisions involving Zones II through IV. Also, I would not want leaders selected by competitive election, which invites paid influence, elitism, cronyism and corruption. Instead, they should be assigned by lot from the village, with short, overlapping terms. Even then, leaders would not decide, but would mediate transactions, facilitate consensus and administer back-up voting, schedules and performance review."
I forgot to add that in each decision, someone should be assigned to learn from and speak for the land and its more-than-human inhabitants (perhaps in some cases under the tutelage of knowledgeable mentors). Also, when it comes to Zone V and net flows into and out of villages, they should convene inter-village councils (again by lot and consensus) to set policy. All of which must be absolutely transparent to all residents. No Closed Doors. No Paid Influence.
Rhonda (who is a very talented permaculture teacher) then described how an Indianapolis neighborhood of about 700 houses managed something similar to what I described.
Now we're getting somewhere! Too many environmentalists sound like old-school communists to me. Global warming and global shortages would seem to require global decision-making to solve, but really, they require people to start living much more efficiently. To do that, they must re-use and stretch local resources and depend far less on extraction and imports. They must understand and work with the regenerative power of natural ecologies around them. They must step up to the task of governance at a radically local level, and act with much greater accountability to their immediate neighbors.
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