In and Out of the Dark

My life has become so strange. I can't believe that I was a New York City resident for four and a half years, and I can't believe that I now live on a little farm in the western foothills of the Catskills. Instead of looking at street corners and skyscrapers, the view around here is of trees and hillsides.

I was a bit scared when I was coming out here that I would feel really isolated, so far from public transportation and urban amenities. I am a city creature, having spent most of my adult life in Cambridge and Somerville (aka Camberville) and most recently Staten Island and Queens. I spent quite a bit of the bus ride out here looking at my fears and trying to face them.

But it has been great being here.  I love the folks that I am living with and they have been helpful in trying to think about how I can get around.

I am living here to continue to live in community.  The tiny urban commune that I had been living in for nearly two years is no more.  The three of us finally decided that it wasn't working for any of us and dissolved it.  Ironically, the commune that I am now in is an outgrowth of the work that I did with Sarah and Kevin five years ago,  and Sarah has been a major support for me here.

And, yes, I have all but abandoned this blog.  I am putting all my energies into the Commune Life blog.  I have several ideas for posts here, but I am not sure when I will have the time or energy to write them.  But, since I have been most faithful about writing at this time of the year, I decided to put a little extra time and energy into at least writing this post.

I hope that anyone who reads this reaps the gifts of the darkness. May you face your fears and grow from them.  Happy (belated) Halloween.  Happy Samhain. Welcome to the darker days.

Into Yet Another New Year

While I haven't been posting here, I haven't been idle.

I've been cleaning and cooking for and shopping for the commune I live in, getting involved with local groups, recovering from a stupid and scary injury that was entirely my fault, working on compost, helping with growing projects until the growing season was over, and I even wrote a three part fantasy story for which I am working on the last chapter. 

Most importantly, as of today, I am taking back control of the Commune Life  blog. I will return to the intensive schedule of having something out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

I just got back from an Assembly of communes in southern Missouri and it made me want to be more involved with the Federation of Egalitarian Communities.  And I visited East Brook Community Farm and that made me want to build connection between them and Cotyledon, our community.

So, I have much to do in 2019.  I cannot imagine getting bored with my life.  I just wonder how I ever did stuff and worked for a living, too.  I certainly don't think of myself as 'retired', it's that I no longer get paid directly for the work that I do.

And, yes, the times are challenging.   My wish for everyone who reads this is a new year that is better than the old. 

And I hope to write a little more in the new year. Let's see.  As they say, time will tell.

“We spend January 1st walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives...not looking for flaws, but for potential.” ― Ellen Goodman

Ten Years!

Ten years ago on this date, I posted my first piece on this blog. To celebrate and to see how much I have changed in ten years, I want to examine everything that I wrote there and look at it in relation to how I am now.

First, it was the summer solstice; this year the solstice is tomorrow. It happens. I decided to go for the calendar date rather than the event to publish this.  Does that make me a bad pagan?

I said I wanted to change the world as a teenager and still did when I wrote that post. And now I still want social change. (The natural world works fine, as long as we work with it.  It’s society that needs to change.) But I wouldn't say I want to change society. I would say I want to be part of changing this society. It's definitely a group effort.

I am still influenced by all the identities I’ve been, and there is still a little of the teen in me (even at nearly sixty-seven), but I no longer identify as a revolutionary (partly for the reasons I outlined in my last post, and partly because, having studied history, I think revolutionaries seldom change more than the people in power).  As horribly new agey as it sounds, I’m more of an ‘evolutionary’ these days, a slow change person. I also don't think of myself as much of a theorist these days either. As to what I am politically, I’m probably mostly a communist anarchist or egalitarian communitarian or whatever the current equivalent is. I want sharing and equality and community.

And these days, I neither do co-counseling nor meditation. I sometimes do empathy sessions.   I am most influenced by Compassionate Communication (aka NVC) and permaculture, and live in a tiny income-sharing community in Queens, NY.  I suspect I couldn't imagine living in New York City ten years ago, but here I am. At least I’m finally doing the kind of community that I have wanted for a long time. I just wish I had more people to do it with.

I wouldn't change a thing in that next paragraph. “Any change… has to be built from the ground up and it has to be a cooperative, community effort.” Yes. Absolutely.

I am still filled with plenty of ideas. (I’m currently writing a fantasy novel and working on it every night.) And I am still looking for people. I am dragging myself out the door to the Ranch, to the urban farm in the neighborhood, to the composting operation in the city.  And I am trying to find the balance between doing too much and doing too little. These days I have faith that if I can keep going and can be patient long enough, I will find the right folks.

The rest of the post talks about what I wanted to do with the blog. Here’s what I want to do now. Recently I’ve been posting once a week. Now I want to take a break.

I’ve done ten years of posting and four hundred and sixty-one posts (including this one). I am not done. I still want to write about mushrooms (as opposed to simply fungi) and human physiology (hormones and kidneys and bones and blood) and whatever else that comes along which I think would be useful, and I think I want to reach five hundred posts.  But it’s summer and I want to do things. There will more later.

I ended my first post with a quote from the Dalai Lama, “My religion is kindness.”  In my last bunch of bleak posts, I’ve said again and again, the one thing we can do is be kind. Yes, I would say my religion is kindness. Kindness and compassion and love.

I used to have a word or phrase of the day and a hero of the day. My word of the day was ‘Relocalization’ and I still think it's a good one.  My hero was Audre Lorde and she is still a hero of mine. And so I will end with a quote from her.

Quote of the Day: “...I do think that we have been taught to think, to codify information in certain old ways, to learn, to understand in certain ways.  The possible shapes of what has not been before exist only in that back place, where we keep those unnamed, untamed longings for something different and beyond what is now called possible, and to which our understanding can only build roads...” - Audre Lorde

Commune Dramas

I often joke that all these utopian communities that I’ve heard folks dream up would work great if they didn't need to be filled with people. When someone can't figure out why it’s so hard to start communities or why so many fall apart, I want to just say, “It’s people!”  Communities are made up of imperfect people. It's the only kind of people I know of.

We recently had a visit from a leader in the communities movement. He and I spent a couple of hours going over some of the turmoil roiling through various communities. He made some remark about all the ‘commune dramas’.

Even more recently, I was on call with members of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities. (The good news is that our little commune, Cotyledon, is now officially a Community in Dialogue with the FEC. It was approved of with Guinea Pig noises. I’m not making that up! Who says that communards don't have a sense of humor?) We spent more than a half hour of that call talking about just some of the conflicts and problems that were going on at a member community dealing with some serious issues. When it was finally decided that we had talked through stuff as much as we could and figured out what kind of support the FEC could bring to the commune in question, we decided to turn to other business and the woman facilitating the call announced to a completely different community, “I should make you a certificate for being the ‘Community with the Most Problems, Spring, 2018’.  You could put it up on your wall.” (Again, humor. Very necessary.) We then launched into a discussion about some of the many difficulties that this other community was dealing with.

Commune dramas happen (and dramas happen at co-ops and cohousing communities, although not as often and intensely since people at those communities aren't as intimately involved) because you have lots of very imperfect people trying to work closely together to do some really tricky stuff.

On top of that, even the most isolated communes have lots of people going in and out and these people bring all of the problems of society (competition, scapegoating, racism, patriarchy, privilege, homophobia, intolerance, sensitivity, judgement, etc) in with them. Communes are always struggling with the question of who they will accept and who they won't and when to ask someone to leave and what behaviors can be tolerated (or not).  If you limited communities to only people who have it all together, they would be empty. As a result, there is lots of struggle and lots of drama at the communes. Given that, it's amazing, when you think about it, that a community like Twin Oaks could last more than fifty years (and it's still going). I think that’s an an incredible victory.

I have little illusions that  communes are all wonderful utopias.  I see the myriad problems that they deal with. I’ve seen the dark side of communal living.  It comes with the territory.

So, when you hear me go, “Rah! Rah! Community!”, know that it's because I believe strongly in what they are trying to achieve. Yes, in many ways they are poor vehicles for social change. But I don't know of anything better.

Quote of the Day: “Folks have found their own level after the first years of being overwhelmed.  Some of them have been disappointed with the lack of emotional intimacy, while others, especially teens, have felt uncomfortable living in a fishbowl.

“At times, most of us have probably asked ourselves, ‘What am I doing here?’--a question, I believe, that arises from a complex calculation of time and energy spent and one’s tolerance for conflict.  Sometimes I’ve asked myself, after a difficult confrontation, why I should put so much of my life energy into something that seems, at the time, to give back little. Yet I’m sure that at other times each of us has surely declared: ‘I can't imagine living anywhere else!’--a response to the very personal exchanges that make living in community so rewarding.” - Roberta Wilson  

Difficulties, Tragedy, Complexity, and Kindness

I generally try to be optimistic. Optimists live longer, for one thing. And they are more likely to be listened to, for another.

I know a man who launches into a tirade about mass extinction on very little provocation. It doesn't make others want to do anything about climate change; it makes others want to avoid him.

But, as much as I want to be optimistic, I try to be realistic as well. The world isn't going to be the way that we want it to be, the world is the way that it is and it is very complex. There are a lot of wonderful things going on and a lot of worrisome things going on and one doesn't negate the other.

I try to keep a fairly positive tone in this blog but lately I have been thinking about some of the difficulties with social change (social change being the focus of this blog) and I think it's important to talk about them.

As much of a communities booster as I am, communities are far from perfect and acknowledging that and pointing out the pitfalls and difficulties is part of showing what real community (not an ideal utopia) is, warts and all. Knowing the problems with communities doesn't make me want to give up on them, but it makes me appreciate even more how difficult building them is and some of the limitations of communities as vehicles for social change.  I will write more about this in my next post.

Even more difficult to look at is climate change and the ways we are destroying the earth.  This, indeed, is tragedy. The man I spoke of could be right, we could be headed for extinction, or, at the very least, one poisoned planet. And we need to look at that as well--and I intend to in a future post.

And then there's population, which I want to talk about.  And the slow pace of social change, which I may also devote a post to.

There are just so many problems in the world.

I don't plan on tackling all of them in this blog, but I will say that I am grateful for anyone working on any of them.  I do want to acknowledge three in particular that I don't intend to write a post on at this point, but I think are particularly difficult and troublesome.  These are racism, male domination, and economic inequality.

More than fifty years after the civil rights movement began, black men are still being shot by police, and being incarcerated at horrendous rates.   Recently, two black men were arrested at a Starbucks for asking to use the restroom and, even more recently, three African-American women were stopped by the police as they were moving out of an Airbnb because a white woman in the neighborhood saw them and was afraid there was a burglary in progress.  It turns out that there was also a white woman with these women, but she wasn't seen as “suspicious”. Unfortunately, I see articles like this on a regular basis.

Women are finally being heard about the abuse and harassment and exploitation they receive from men, particularly rich and powerful men. Unfortunately, that continues as well. The #metoo movement is exposing a fault line in sexual relationships that has been needed to be looked at for a long time. The communes have been pushing consent culture even before this, but even in the communes, there are a great many problems. As long as men have more power than women, this is going to continue, and changing power dynamics is far from easy, especially when men don't want to give up power.

The point of income-sharing communities is to reduce economic inequality, but I don't see that changing in this society any time soon, either.  In fact, with the current administration, I suspect economic inequality will be increasing. And even if we got it under control in the US, our lifestyle causes poverty and hunger around the world.  And that's hard to change as well.

My question is always, what can we do?  At the very least, we can care. We can live simply and treat others well. Above all, we can be kind--to others and to ourselves.   It's not accidental that my first two Quotes of the Day on this blog were about kindness. As Kurt Vonnegut said, “There's only one rule that I know of… you've got to be kind.”

Quote of the Day: “Love and kindness are never wasted.  They always make a difference.” - Barbara De Angelis

The Three Pillars of Social Change

I'm currently studying a bunch of different things, including mycology, which is the study of fungi.  I was reading a book on Radical Mycology (by Peter McCoy) where I read the first description outside of my writing or Joanna Macy’s of what I think of as the best strategy for social change.  Peter McCoy briefly talks about what he refers as ‘the three major pillars of social change’: “education and awareness building around important issues; resisting, slowing, and stopping ineffective or disastrous social systems; and designing functional and appropriate alternative systems that increase quality of life.”  He then goes on to other things, but I was surprised.

If I have any long term readers left, they probably have heard all this several times, most recently with my essay on Strategy.  The short version, for recent readers, is that I believe that for social change to happen, you need three things: Analysis (that is, a clear understanding of what is currently going on), Vision (knowing where you want to go to), and Strategy (figuring out how you can get there).  

I think there is a lot of good analysis and vision around but for a long while I felt there wasn't much in the way of clear strategy. Then I heard Joanna Macy talk about what she called The Great Turning. She said that there were three dimensions to it: actions to stop or slow down harm, creation of ‘structural alternatives’, and a shift in consciousness.  I immediately related it to a chant that I heard many years ago in Detroit: “Agitate, Educate, Organize!” Her point is that we need to do all three of these to create change.

Yes, the order shifts around between her version, Peter McCoy’s version, and the labor organizing chant, but the same pieces are in each: the need for ‘holding actions’, for building alternatives,  and for getting information out that can change people's perspectives. We need folks out there agitating--marching, demonstrating, and doing civil disobedience--to buy time for us to not only create those alternatives, but get them up and running and make sure that they work, and then networking them together to put something in place that can replace the current, oppressive system.   (I love what the International Workers of the World say in their ‘Preamble’ : “...we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”) But all this alternative creation doesn't mean much unless people know about it and understand why it is necessary.

I truly appreciate all those folks out there, putting their bodies on the front lines.  For my part, I have been working on creating communes as well as various sustainable structures, and supporting others as they built stuff.   I plan to talk more about what I’m currently up to in a post soon. And I think of this blog, as well as the one on Commune Life that I managed until recently, as educational work, letting folks know about alternative ways of living.

And I want anyone reading this to think about what you can do to help make a better world. Which of these is the better strategy?  The one that calls to you.

Quote of the Day: “The first dimension of the Great Turning is… heroic work… It serves to save some lives, and some ecosystems, species, and cultures… for the sustainable society to come. It is, however, insufficient to bring that society about.

“The second dimension of the Great Turning is equally crucial….We are … creating structural alternatives. … They may be hard to see at first, because they are seldom featured in the media,  but if you keep your eyes open… they come into view… The actions that burgeon from our hands and minds may look marginal, but they hold the seeds for the future.

“These nascent institutions cannot take root and survive without deeply ingrained values to sustain them.  … They require… a profound shift in our perception of reality… It is the third, most basic dimension of the Great Turning.” - Joanna Macy

All-American Communes

I’m far from patriotic and so it seems wild to me to label anything,  “All-American”, but I also realize that at the beginning of this blog, I spent four months (from a post labeled “US History 1:Why?” on January 1st, 2009, to “USH30: What About Now?”  posted on April 27th) focusing on American history.   

In fact, the most popular post on this blog, by far, is one of the history posts,  “USH25:Social Movements in the Eighties”.  It's had over three thousand page views, which isn't a lot for a blog, I know, but the next most popular post has only five hundred something page views.   My guess is that the reason it's so popular is that it shows up in searches, and it may be one of the few pieces on eighties social movements, and it's being used by high school and college students for writing papers.

I’ve talked extensively here about communes and communities as laboratories for social change and, in my history posts, I also talked about communal histories, especially the utopian communities of the nineteenth century.  I have thought about that as the beginning of the communal movement in the US.

Finally, I have a Google newsfeed set up to flag any articles on “Communes" or “Intentional Communities”.  Recently this showed up.

 

It's a promotional piece for a talk on the Oneida community.  I’ve always been fascinated by this community, but what grabbed my attention was the beginning of the piece.   

The author mentions the communes of the sixties and how ‘counter-culture’ and, for some people, ‘un-American’ they were.   He then goes on to say: “In reality, though, they were as American as apple pie.  We often miss the fact that the English colonies in America started out as experimental utopian societies: the Pilgrims with their communism and commitment to the simple life; Massachusetts and the other Puritan colonies, with their austerity and a commitment to self-examination and self-criticism that would make Chairman Mao cheer; Rhode Island, with its commitment to anarchy; the Pennsylvania Quakers, with their pacifism and their mysticism; the pacifist anabaptist sects, with their semi-closed communities; Georgia, where the rulers imported misfits and criminals so as to reprogram them after isolating them in the wilderness.

“Our pioneer settlers were the lunatic fringe, and when they sailed away, folks back in Europe were delighted to wave goodbye.”

It’s a very different view of American history, and one that makes me appreciate that the communal experiments that a bunch of us are engaging in, go a long way back.

Quote of the Day: “We got another burst of utopian communities in the middle of the 19th century, as the world was turning toward the modern age, away from lifestyles that had endured for a thousand years. … While dozens of such communities speckled the American landscape, they lay especially thick in a band then ran from Boston to Buffalo. “ - Kirk House

Deeper into the Soil

When I started writing this, I realized that it would be my fifth post about soil.  (I added a label called “Soil" so that my posts about soil and soil science can be found more easily.   My last post on this was The Soul of Soil,  written back in December of 2015.)  I think about soil a bunch and I’ve written about soil a bunch.   In this post I will try to dig a little deeper, so to speak.

What does soil have to do with social change?  At the most basic level, if you want to create a sustainable society,  you need to take care of the soil.  Soil is what sustains us.  And, because I am interested in communities as a tool for building a new society, and communities (and societies) consist of people and I want to see healthy people, they need to eat well and that requires good soil.  There will be no social change without taking care of the soil.  We literally, as well as metaphorically, stand on the soil.

I’ve talked several times about soil science being a combination of chemistry,  geology, and biology.   So, when I decided to start re-learning about soil, the first thing I did was do a bunch of background reading on geology.  Then I started reading about soil, both in books like Teaming with Microbes (see my post on Soil Science where I talk a little about this book) and a textbook called Fundamental Soil Science (by Mark Coyne and James Thompson) and in other science books, like the book that started it all, Biology, by Neil Campbell and Jane Reece (that's the one I refer to in my post on Biology 101: An Introduction) and a book that I acquired last year, called Environment by Peter Raven and Linda Berg, that have chapters focusing on soil.

Interestingly enough, both the Biology and Fundamental Soil Science textbooks talk about biogeochemical cycles.  Yes, biology, geology, and chemistry.

What they are talking about is the cycling of elements (at the least, carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus--but the Soil Science book also covers sulfur and even iron and manganese and “heavy metals”) through the soil and the atmosphere and the water.  Ions of these elements (or compounds that contain them, like phosphates and sulfates) cycle through all of these, plus rocks and living creatures. Thus biogeochemical.

I’m also learning a lot more about weathering (how the rocks turn into soil), soil profiles (and the different horizons involved with that), and the various types of soil.   There are still chapters to read on soil management, the hydrologic (water) cycle, watersheds, and soil fertility--so much to learn.  I find myself reading and rereading chapters and getting out even more books from the library. And soon it will be spring and I will be actually working with the soil and creating more soil by composting. Maybe I will never be done with soil science.

In the meantime, speaking of science, I currently have four science heroes--and they are all women.   And I don't think that is an accident.   I will talk more about that in my next post.

Quote of the Day: “Real soil is active, alive, moving!” - Elaine Ingham

Back Once More

It's been a while. I’ve been busy with another blog as well as starting a new community.

And suddenly, for complicated reasons, I am done with the other blog.

And, honestly, I didn't start right back on this one.  Part of what was going on is feeling a bit burnt from the pace that I had set for myself on the other blog.   I was cranking out posts, many of which I was soliciting rather than writing, three times a week.   I kept hearing from people that we should have been posting less often.   But for me the hard part wasn't the frequency, it was that I was mostly doing it by myself.

Still, in many ways I'm sorry to see it go.  But this does give me time to return to this blog.

The community I’m in has a bit of a focus on urban agriculture.   And right now, February, there isn't much happening in that respect.  We did have a wild day earlier this week when the temperature was suddenly in the mid-seventies.   Global weirding at work, but we took advantage of it to get some needed work done outdoors.

Otherwise I am doing a lot of reading.   Science stuff mostly.   Soil science, geology, mycology, and nutrition are big for me right now, as I wait for the growing season to arrive. Soil science is particularly interesting to me because it combines chemistry, biology, and geology, is closely connected to my love of compost and composting, and the soil is the absolute foundation for plant life.

So, as I return to this blog, I plan to do a bunch of writing about what I am reading as well as what I am thinking about.  And these days much of it is about science.  Science and social change and, of course, community.   So get ready for some posts about science, starting with soil science.

Quote of the day: “Math and science originally come from the goddess traditions of ancient Egypt.  … Ma’at was the Goddess of truth, justice and divine wisdom who brought the universe into order from chaos at the beginning of creation.  Her name is the root of the word ‘mathematics’.” - Mara Penfil and Fern Katz

The light and the dark again

Yes.  I haven't written in this blog since February.  No.  I haven't died.

I've been busy.

I have been managing another blog,  Commune Life, and that has taken lots and lots of time.  I've also been part of a group that has just started a new community which we are calling Cotyledon.

A cotyledon is the embryonic part of a seed that holds the nutrients for the new plant and bursts out and sends up a tiny shoot with one or two little leaves.  We see ourselves as the germination of the work we have been doing over the past two years in NYC.

And just as the cotyledon develops in the dark and makes its way into the light, our fragile little community is determined to develop into an ongoing commune that will make a difference in the world.

I wish all of you who read this the blessings of both the dark and the light.

Quote of the Day:  "Every moment of light and dark is a miracle. "  - Walt Whitman

TINA is the Enemy

Those who read this blog regularly are probably pretty surprised that I said anyone was the enemy and, if you just started reading this, you are probably wondering: “Who’s Tina?”

To start off with, TINA isn’t a person.  TINA is an expression, an acronym, popularized by Margaret Thatcher.  It stands for There Is No Alternative.  This is the lie that is used to keep oppressive systems in place.  “Yes, it isn’t great but what can you do?  There isn’t any alternative.”  As long as people believe that, corporate capitalism can prevent people from rebelling and, more importantly, from seeing that something quite different would be a lot better.

Its opposite is the phrase, “Another World is Possible” (the motto of the World Social Forum).  Or as Arundhati Roy said, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

Part of why I’m not posting on here as much these days is because I manage another blog called Commune Life.  Folks who’ve been following my blog know that I regard communities, especially income-sharing communities, as laboratories for social change.  One of my points on the Commune Life blog is to point out all the different communes that are out there.  There are many alternatives to the mainstream way of living.

And, of all things, Atlantic magazine (which I think of as a mainstream, high class publication) seems to be getting this--and sharing it with their readers.  First, last fall, they published a piece on one of the newest communes, Compersia.  (I’m especially proud of this because it came out of the Point A project which is working to form new communes in urban areas, starting with Washington, DC, and New York City.  Compersia came out of the DC group.  I’m living in NYC these days working with Point A to build a new commune there--so Compersia is sort of a sister project.)  Now, they have published a piece that totally gets it.    They called it: “Seeking an Escape From Trump’s America:  Why some people are withdrawing from mainstream society into ‘intentional communities’—and what the rest of the country can learn from them” and it features two Virginia communes that are often on the Commune Life blog:  Living Energy Farm and Cambia.  

But communal living isn’t the only alternative.  I strongly recommend an article just published on the GEO website that points out many of the alternatives.  I love the part of the title that just says “We Have Choices”.  Now, truly more than ever, we need to know that there are alternatives and we do have choices.

In my last post, Now What???,  I talked about there being three parts to social change.  The first is resistance, struggle, holding actions, what’s sometimes called ‘agitation’.  The second part is building alternatives--communes, co-operative businesses, permaculture projects, Transition Initiatives, and many more.  And the third part is education--changing people’s consciousness.  I see the Commune Life blog as part of that.   All these alternatives don’t do that much if no one is aware of them.  Even this post (pointing out that there are indeed alternatives) is a piece of this work.  In my next post I will talk about another education strategy that I’ve been thinking about for a while.

Quote of the Day:  “Let's bring our most resourceful selves to these first, pivotal 100 days...​”  - Pamela Boyce Simms and Dan Miner

The Next Society 3: The Process

Let me begin by saying again that the emergent process for a future social/political/economic structure is going to be organic--that is, messy--if it's going to work at all.  All the wonderful theories in the world have less influence than all of the many competing and divergent interests that slowly form organic structure. 

When I talk about communities like Twin Oaks, I often joke that "...no one in their right mind would create a community like Twin Oaks."  That's because no one 'created' Twin Oaks.  Twin Oaks is the way that it is because it evolved that way over time.  It certainly didn't become the little behaviorist community that its founders envisioned.

Likewise, as new structures emerge, they won't be exactly what anyone has planned.  And they will emerge.  Anyone who thinks that capitalism as it's currently practiced is sustainable, hasn't looked what it's doing to the environment, the growing anti-globalism sentiment, and the fact that it's only a recent player on the scene (as I laid out in my first article, Some Background).

And I'm not saying that a decentralized, diverse society is what's going to happen.  It's what I consider most likely and most feasible (and I also think most desirable).  But if we're talking about an organic process, we're talking about something that we can't control.  Unexpected things are going to happen and society will change as a result.

When I say that this corporate capitalist society is not sustainable, I mean that  it will bring down the planet if it continues--but I also know that it will continue for a while yet.  I see us in the place where the Roman empire was as it started falling apart.  Just as that process took a long time, I see corporate capitalism in a slow, incremental process of decay.

The feudal system that followed the fall of Rome was fairly decentralized (although anything but nonhierarchal) even though there were periodic attempts to recreate a centralized structure.  The irony is that the biggest, longest lasting attempt (the Holy Roman Empire) turned out to be rather patchwork and decentralized.  As Wikipedia puts it: "The empire never achieved the extent of political unification ... evolving instead into a decentralized, limited elective monarchy composed of hundreds of sub-units, principalities, duchies, counties, Free Imperial Cities, and other domains."

And that's what I think is going to happen again--this is the patchwork politics I spoke about in my last post.  However, I think that successful communities, co-operative networks, etc, can form a template that can be built on and can influence the structures of this new, decentralized society.  And building those communities and alternative structures is the work that we can and need to do.

Trying to build a whole new society from a some blueprint won't work. It's good to have some idea of where we want to go, else as a society we will simply drift, but we're not going to be able to control the process.  Letting things happen, trying to influence what happens when we can and letting it go when we can't, is what we can do.  I think we will need to have some idealism and a lot of pragmatism to get anywhere.



Quote of the Day:  "How did Twin Oaks get so far from its origins?
"When I tried to start a Walden Two community, I didn't expect it to turn away from the scientific and rational and embrace popular movements.  But we did not have a lot of choice in member selection.  Who was available to join the fledgling community of 1969-1972?  Hippies, that's who.  I know one group that was very serious about Walden Two and tried to build a community without any hippies in it.  It failed for lack of people." - Kat Kinkade

The Next Society 1: Some Background

I want to return again to the major theme of this blog: social change/social alchemy. 

I've been working on this blog for eight years now.  During that time, I've studied and thought a lot about, not only social transformation, but history, systems thinking, and communities as laboratories for social change.

Lately I've been thinking a bit about what we're working toward.  What would a new society look like?  How would it come about?  How likely is change to really happen?

Over the next few posts, I want to put my ideas out about where we might be heading. As someone once said, "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future."

Nevertheless, I'd like to give it a try.

I think that one of the best ways to look at the future is to look at what's happened in the past.

I'm going to start with politics and economics.  Until very recently in history, these two were intertwined.

Here's my rapid, super condensed, super simplified, idiosyncratic version of world history:

We start with nomadic, hunter-gatherer tribes.  As I quoted in my post on Chimps, Bonobos, and Tribes (March 31, 2016),  Iain Couzin and Mark Laidre claim that “More than 99% of human history was spent in a hunter-gatherer existence..." That began to change with the development of agriculture.  There are a bunch of theories as to how that came about but with agriculture, tribes settled down and inequality grew.

Eventually the tribes grew into the city-states of Sumer, Egypt, Phoencia, Babylonia, Greece, and eventually Rome--and many of these became the seats of empire.   Rome was the biggest empire but it eventually overextended itself and had to deal with internal conflicts and corruption. Rome was finally done in by the tribal groups that they referred to as 'barbarians'. These tribes settled down into fiefdoms, new kingdoms, and new empires. This was the Middle Ages and the system that emerged from this has been called feudalism. 

There had been traders and merchants through much of history, but they were kept in control by the rulers.  In the 1600s and 1700s, the merchants began to gain power as they grew richer.  With industrialization in the 1800s, they took control and capitalism emerged.  All this has been described by David Ricardo, David Hume, and Adam Smith.

My point here is that Ricardo, Hume, and Smith described the growth of capitalism--they did not invent it.  Capitalism, like the city-states, empires, and feudalism, emerged in an organic growth process.

Karl Marx (who even many mainstream capitalist economists view as an important economic theorist) studied this process and attempted to predict the next stage.  He was influenced by Hegel's dialectical method where a thesis meets an antithesis and through their clash a synthesis emerges.  He saw the contradictions of capitalism leading to an emergent dictatorship of the proletariat.  While he encouraged and worked for a revolution, he saw this as an organic process that would occur when the situation was right.  As Wikipedia points out, "Marx accused ... other revolutionaries of being 'adventurists' because of their belief that a revolutionary situation could be created out of thin air by the sheer 'will power' of the revolutionaries without regard to the economic realities of the current situation."  While he did dedicate himself to trying to change the world, he pointed out "Communism is ... not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. ... The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."

The person who changed all this was Vladmir Lenin, who came up with the idea of "a revolutionary vanguard party" which would overthrow the capitalist government.  He started with Russia, which would have horrified Marx, since Russia was a largely agricultural society and practically still in the feudal stage.  Rather than socialism emerging through an organic process, Lenin claimed "that capitalism could ultimately only be overthrown with revolution..."  This became the template for all the "Communist" countries, where socialism was imposed from the top rather than grown from the bottom.  We have now seen the results of that.

When people point to these countries as examples of why communism can't work, I point to Twin Oaks where communism has been working for nearly fifty years and is going strong.  The difference is that at Twin Oaks, it grew from the ground up and it's entirely voluntary to be part of it.

So, my first claim about the next society is that it will emerge organically, out of things that have been grown from the ground up, and I predict that it will come from several sources that will be strung together--that is, it will be networked.

Next: A Patchwork Politic


Quote of the Day:  "Life did not take over the globe by conquest, but by networking." - Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan

Doing the Work

Thomas Edison made the point with his quote:  "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration." 

I'm sitting in a community now that is struggling with some financial issues.  A bunch of visitors and newcomers have all these great ideas for new businesses and making money.  They are more than happy to tell us what we should do.

The problem here certainly isn't a lack of good ideas.  The problem is (and I don't just see it in this community but in lots of places in communities and social change situations) that ideas are easy.  But things don't happen because someone has a good idea.  Things happen because there are people willing to do the work to make them happen.

I've heard a story from Twin Oaks about the solar panels that are near a community entrance.  The community gets a certain amount of its energy from them.  The story is that they are there because one member wanted Twin Oaks to have solar panels and proposed it, and then met with the people who had problems with this, and reformulated his proposal, and then dealt with those who had difficulties with the new proposal, and kept on and on doing this for months.  He finally came up with something that everybody was okay with and then they were able to get these solar panels. 

I've heard this called 'shepherding the process'.  You take responsibility for making it happen, you talk with folks, you work with folks, you do what you need to do so that it gets done.  This is a lot more work than just putting out an idea, but this is what makes things happen.

A related thing that I've noticed is visitors coming to dinner at the community that I'm in now and wanting to talk about how the community works as we're trying to clean up after dinner.  If you want to make a good impression on a community that you're visiting, offer to help.  They may not need it, they may not want it, but it will be noticed.

There are those who come up with the ideas, who can expound on how communities can work and how we need to change the world, and there are those working to build communities, to keep communities going, and to create a better world.  Obviously, I'm part of the former (this blog is an example of that) but I also try to be part of the latter group.  I want to see change happen and that means that I know I need to do the work to make it happen.

Nothing is going to happen without the willingness to work.







Quote of the Day:  "Grace happens when we act with others on behalf of the world." - Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown

Reclaiming the Commons

In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote an often cited paper for Science magazine, called “The Tragedy of the Commons”.  He claimed that any common property “remorselessly generates tragedy” since it’s to the advantage of each individual to use as much of this common thing that they share (called by those who deal with this stuff, “The Commons”) and thus deplete it to the point no one could use it.  While this might make some theoretical sense, many writers since (most notably Elinor Ostrum--who I talked about in my post on Original Virtue, 9/14/08) have pointed out that tribal societies have managed the commons without difficulty for generations and generations.

The book, Whose Common Future? by the staff of the magazine The Ecologist (subtitle “Reclaiming the Commons”), is an in depth look at the use and misuse of the commons.  They begin by citing several examples from around the world where local folks carefully manage their common assets.  They point out that tribes, neighborhoods, and societies have developed checks and balances so that no one takes a lot more than their share and resources are sustained rather than depleted.

Then they look at the enclosure movement, which was the end of common property and the beginning of almost all property being private. (For more on this see my post on Land, 5/28/09, where I reference Whose Common Future?)  The book goes into great detail about globalization and privatization, how power elites want to manage the commons and profit from it.

In their final chapter, called “Reclaiming the Commons”, the writers return to examples of how people can take back common resources and how they can collectively manage it.  They finish with “A Concluding Remark” where they are careful point out that they have no policy recommendations.  First, because policy recommendations assume that there’s some policy-makers that they want to appeal to, which is once again giving power to the elites.  And, most importantly, it implies that there are global, overall solutions where their point is that the commons need to be managed by local communities and in each case, the community itself will find a way that works for that specific community.  Local solutions are diverse solutions.

Quote of the Day:  “One cannot legislate the commons into existence; nor can the commons be reclaimed simply by adopting ‘green techniques’ such as organic agriculture, alternative energy strategies or better public transport--necessary and desirable though such strategies often are.  Rather, commons regimes emerge through ordinary people’s day-to-day resistance to enclosure, and their efforts to regain the mutual support, responsibility and trust that sustain the commons.” - The Ecologist

It's alive! And communal!

So, just to make my life more complicated, I am taking on one more blog.  In addition to this blog, and my very silly blog about a fictional commune in an unnamed Green Mountain State (which may give you some idea about how silly the blog is), I will be part of a crew that will start a blog focusing on egalitarian income sharing communities, called Commune Life.  I am going to be one of the main editors.

The scope of the blog is on anything about living in income sharing communities.  The structure of the blog is that we will have a new article focusing on communal living every Monday, a photo essay featuring an income sharing community every Wednesday, and a previously published article (from various blogs--including mine) every Friday.

If you follow the link above and go to the blog now (like anytime in April, 2016), you will find a note saying “NOTHING FOUND”  (their caps).  The blog doesn’t start until May 2nd.  But please come over and check us out in May.  Here’s your chance to learn all about communal living.  And there will be pictures.

Quote of the Day:  “Communards are not immune to the range of human experience of birth, death, love, loss and the like. People have still ended up hurt, sad, and lonely. We are far from perfect. It is important to remember that perfection is not the goal. Progress is.” - Cel Free Farm

Chimps, Bonobos, and Tribes

Lately I’ve been thinking a bit about our primate relatives and what their social structure says about what human beings are capable of being.  

Way back at the beginning of this blog, I wrote posts about Bonobos and Chimpanzees (7/30/08) and about Peacemaking among Primates (a book by Frans de Waal) in a post entitled Peace on Earth  (12/24/08).  These bonobos and chimpanzees are our closest animal relatives.

In many ways the behaviors of chimps and bonobos couldn’t be more different.  In a very broad generality, chimpanzees are hierarchical, patriarchal, competitive, and violent, whereas bonobos tend to be more egalitarian, matriarchal, cooperative, and much less violent.  In books like Our Inner Ape (another book by Frans de Waal) they represent opposing tendencies that humans have--people perhaps are a bit of both.  But is there any behavior that both species have in common?

Here’s one.  Both chimps and bonobos are what’s called fission-fusion species.  Baboons, orangutans, and spider monkeys are as well--and so are humans.  What this means is that populations combine and separate.    Often during the day they split up and travel in little groups and at night they all get back together.  This is especially common among the chimps and bonobos.  To quote Iain Couzin and Mark  Laidre, “The most fluid societies of any nonhuman primate are found among chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus), humanity's nearest living relatives.”

The point is that chimps, bonobos, and humans are all tribal animals.  There is a bigger ‘parent group’ (which I will refer to as the tribe) and smaller subgroups (which I’ve heard called clans or bands).  Again, quoting Couzin and Laidre: “More than 99% of human history was spent in a hunter-gatherer existence, characterized by dynamically shifting social groupings at multiple levels. At the highest tier in hunter-gatherer societies is the ethno-linguistic group or ‘tribe’, formed by several local ‘bands’ that fuse together when resources like water are clustered during dry seasons. Bands themselves, which are made up of around 30 individuals, break up into smaller foraging parties during daily forays out from a base camp. While some individuals remain at the camp to watch over youngsters and tend the old or injured, the foraging parties gather edible plant material and hunt animals, afterward bringing the bounty back to a central place for sharing and redistribution.”

We are tribal animals.  We belong in tribes.  “...99% of human was spent…” in tribes and our closest animal relatives live in fission-fusion tribes.  It’s in our biology.  So current human civilization is an anomaly.  And we are constantly trying to reform into tribes.

Conservative Republicans know this--at least at a gut level.  Their loyalty is to their tribe--and they see themselves besieged by those who don’t fit: pinkos, queers, Muslims, and Mexicans.

I think small towns and villages are our tribes--and in the cities, neighborhoods.  There was a story about the Portuguese population of East Cambridge (MA) several decades ago, that if a kid misbehaved several blocks away, his mother would know about it (via a phone call) before he got a chance to get home.  The pluses and minuses of villages, towns, and neighborhoods was that most folks knew one another.  This was a problems if you didn’t fit in--if you were too liberal or radical or queer or whatever.  But a big problem with big cities is that few people know each other and that gives many folks the liberty to be anonymously rude or worse.  You can much more easily mistreat someone you are not likely to see again.

I think intentional communities are part of what I will call the re-tribalization movement.  Even at large communities like Twin Oaks, or Dancing Rabbit, or Ganas,  I feel more at home since as I walk around I realize that I know most of the people I walk by.  Since being in community, I often feel bewildered by walking city streets and realizing that I don’t know any of the people I see.  It feels wrong somehow.

And, in larger communities, I see smaller subgroupings happening--which some of us (ironically given the info I have above) call ‘finding our tribe’.  I think these subgroups are reenacting our history of clans and bands within a tribe.  This fissioning and fusing is in our genes.

What else can we learn from primates?  I’ve talked a lot about bonobos and chimpanzees.  In my next post I want to focus on a study done with baboons.

Quote of the Day:  “...why is gossip necessary? Far from being mere small talk, gossip serves myriad vital functions within our fission–fusion societies, both at the individual level and at the group level. Gossip can facilitate social cohesion in the face of repeated separations, reminding individuals of the bonds they have with distant others. And it can also allow information to percolate through the group about the trustworthiness of each member, enabling listeners to keep track of others despite limited first-hand observation. Gossip, therefore, and maybe even language more generally, may have evolved specifically as an adaptation to the highly fission–fusion-oriented societies of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.”  - Iain Couzin and Mark  Laidre