Who Are You?

In class, Ousmane had us write in response to the prompt, "What defines your personal identity, and what does community mean to you?" This is what I scrawled:

I am a member of the human community in general and a member of a not-yet-existent/fledgling tribe in particular. Humans, of which community, as I said, I am a part, have great capacities for acquiring and using knowledge, for using consciousness and consciences, for empathy, ingenuity, sensibility, improvisation. Sometimes groups within the larger human association (species) squander these innate capacities and so any Cartesian legacy for being `thinking things` becomes nearly meaningless, without substance/grounding, for if a `thinking thing` presumes its own logic and rationality but in actuality acts without any sensibility or awareness of surroundings, for planetary, social, and tribal community contexts, then such actions essentially counter and reverse any intuitive logical capacities such `thinking things` innately (apparently) possess...(to be continued, especially since I`ve been thinking a lot about different framings of "sense," "rationality," and "logics" as groundwork for my upcoming thesis work)...

We then discussed in groups what national identity and community identity meant in our lives, what definitions we could come up with. In my group, we drew out the communal natures of traditional villages formed by the early pilgrims and colonists in the United States, long before it ever became known as such. Because so much of the value of community has disintegrated in the United States in favor of extreme individualist values, we kind of had a difficult time drawing out such examples of community identity in relation to the country that we live in and call home. We thought of small churches, going back to the first evangelical communities in Israel and Greece, how a certain concern for others and community experience were valued highly, as they were in American churches before we went through the more recent proliferation of mega-churches. It even used to be common in the United States, especially in times of greater scarcity, such as during the World Wars, to ask around in one`s neighborhood for some sugar or salt, or other staples and basic supplies, but today dependency has dwindled to the point that it`s hardly okay to ask a neighbor for anything. People often don`t even know their neighbors by name.

Ousmane said after these writing activities, very elegantly and yet very simply, something to the effect of, "No one person is completely isolated." He also gave us a quote from Kofi Annan in class:

"What makes a community? What binds it together? For some it is faith. For others it is the defence of an idea, such as democracy [or the fight against poverty]. Some communities are homogenous, others multicultural. Some are as small as schools and villages; others as large as continents...What binds us into an international community? In the broadest sense there is a shared vision of a better world for all people...Together we are stronger."

When I looked it up, I discovered that the version we`d been given was slightly abbreviated and edited (as evidenced by brackets and ellipses above). Here is the full version of the excerpted quote I found within a full text by the former U.N.-Secretary General, titled "The World Community Often Fails to Act Together, But It Can and It Should":

"What makes a community? What binds it together? For some it is faith. For others it is the defence of an idea, such as democracy. Some communities are homogeneous, others multicultural. Some are as small as schools and villages; others as large as continents. Today, of course, more and more communities are "virtual", discovering and promoting their shared values through the latest communications and information technologies. What binds us into an international community? In the broadest sense there is a shared vision of a better world for all people, as set out, for example, in the founding Charter of the United Nations. There is our sense of common vulnerability in the face of global warming and the threat posed by the spread of weapons of mass destruction. There is the framework of international law, treaties and human rights conventions. There is equally our sense of shared opportunity, which is why we build common markets and joint institutions such as the United Nations."

Later, I was reading Daniel Quinn`s Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest, and I found these passages with very similar themes, all of which make me feel very content to remember the simplicity of our connectedness, such the remedy that it is to feeling overly isolated and alone (Yes, he seems to stress some words unnecessarily, but I never said that I always agree with his mode of writing):

"Actually, it's plainly written in their lives. It's plainly written in the general community to which they belonged: the community of life on this planet. Anyone can read it. You just have to look.

Every creature born in the biological community of the earth belongs to the community. Nothing lives in isolation from the rest; nothing can live in isolation from the rest. Nothing lives only in itself, needing nothing from the community. Nothing lives only for itself, owing nothing to the community. Nothing is untouchable or untouched. Every life in the community is owed to the community--and is paid back to the community in death. The community is a web of life, and every strand of the web is a path to all the other strands. Nothing is exempt. Nothing is special. Nothing lives on a strand by itself, unconnected to the rest (Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest by Daniel Quinn, Chapter Eleven, pages 147-148)."

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What "Ecovillage" Means in Senegal

Much of this is copied from my notes so quotes and many phrasings can be attributed to our Tufts professor, M.Z.!

The goal of the recent proliferation of Ecovillage Movements has been to create ecovillages and sustainable communities which, by their own nebulous definitions, are meant to achieve a state such that they are sustainable on their own. Oh, how this folds in on itself! Do we perpetually insist on defining terms with the defined word used in the explanation? In my Permaculture course, Bill Mollison gave a much more satisfying definition of sustainability, which I can share with you in the future. He also shared with us a long tirade about the majority of people who rally around the term "sustainability" and don`t actually have any idea about its meaning!

She essentially began with a graph, which she referred to as the "World Model Standard Run." A google search turned up this carbon copy. The graph basically depicts the ideas of carrying capacity, "overshoot" (such the technical term that it is!), and consumption. What she had to say about it was merely that "There was no big bang; When we passed carrying capacity, there was no boom (because we had fossil fuels). We didn`t realize we were headed for disaster." She did, to her credit, leave room for some self-questioning: "Is it true? Do we know? But there is a possibility we`re in some deep trouble."

We talked about how Africa is huge (We were informed that the land mass of Africa would fit the combined land masses of Argentina, U.S., New Zealand, India, China, and Europe, perhaps more, but this needs further substantiation. She showed us an image of this, but it couldn`t have been to scale; I think it was just intended to convey the idea!). Also, another student mentioned that U.S. maps during the cold war magnified the U.S. and the Soviet Union to emphasize their conflict so Africa doesn`t look so big (also needs some background research - anyone up for the challenge?). Anyhow, in spite of (perhaps because of, but I`m skeptical!) its largeness, Africa has been rather isolated (although when the Sahara was still habitable 10,000 years ago...Here, she made a sideways reference, sort of, to the fact that agriculture made it uninhabitable by about the time of 4,500 years ago. Gee, imagine that! Fertile Crescent turning to "totalitarian agriculture" and depleting/gobbling up the resources of the planet! More research needed here, as well!) and so has changed at a different, less dramatic pace with the onslaught of colonization and the Industrial Revolution. Of course, most of Africa is somehow defined by its relationship to such forces, but the rate at which its many "Leaver" tribes have declined in prominence has been much slower than elsewhere around the globe (take the Americas for a counter-example!).

Speaking of the confluences of what many have simplified into dichotomies of East and West, South and North, those disparate dispersions of that "one right way to live" across the globe, we discussed a South African ecovillage, Tlholego, which I was surprised I had never heard of before (then again, when I stumbled on Pun Pun, I was equally shocked it hadn`t come up sooner). Tlholego was supposedly built on a European model, which means the guiding principle was "Let`s look to the past," but because it was styling itself also after European fashions, they didn`t do this very well. Yes, it`s in South Africa, and they have mixed indigenous tribes with disgruntled city-dwellers, blacks and whites, but they`ve also based much of their ecological efforts on science, overlooking the potential of existing techniques (hence reducing the cost and time inputs of research) and even intuition/instinct.

This brings me very nicely to this astonishing moment from our class. M.Z., our professor, mentioned that the BBC website has reconstructed how the British and Irish lived 2,000 years ago, taking painstaking efforts to explain and illustrate the methods, the materials, and the details of everyday life. But right here in Senegal, people live (exactly or almost exactly) the same today!

In Senegal, GENSEN (Global Ecovillage Network-Senegal), they have approved 45 low footprint villages in 10 regions (2 zones with 7 regions: nord = Dakar, Thiés, Diourbel, St. Louis, Fatiak; sud = Kolda, Casamance), with 31, 500 population, much of which longs to return to "the golden age." Out of this 31,500, perhaps 315 can say what an "ecovillage" is. Around this point, M.Z. stated, "GENSEN believes that the colonial (system) leaves them in unnecessary conflict," referring I believe to villages and ancient traditions and the "Western"/"Taker" way. (A note on terminology: I`ve spent a lot of time preoccupied with the right and wrong words, but it seems so clear to me at this moment that it doesn`t matter that much. We are not supposed to have a vocabulary to explain monstrosity (monster cultures and all they engender) because we aren`t supposed to have monstrosity. But out of hundreds of thousands, all we needed was one. And we got that one. And now we`re stuck explaining how one devoured the majority of hundreds. - Though of course some declined on their own.)

A telling moment in class was related to NGOs. Our professor quoted a man from Burkina Faso: "Why won`t they let us work for our own villages?!" The system doesn`t work well now; top-down formal villages cost a lot of money, and there is no interest by imported outsiders in the villages they are imported into. That man won`t want to be there. Besides, villagers are suspicious. Whereas if he`s from the village, this shifts a lot. He has interest, he has the villagers` trust; good things happen.

One of the things that she brought up in class that was most mind-boggling for me was the mere notion of "TWO SOCIAL CONTRACTS" (which is how it looks in my notes). It solves all kinds of dilemmas I`ve been dealing with in my head, avoiding having to work them out with others who can only see one trajectory of history that pits tribal law in the primitive "dark ages" and written law as a godsend, a salvation. It cuts out this trajectory by showing how both function entirely by different political means and mechanics they can hardly be thrown together on a clear line. They function in entirely different planes, and the disintegration in tribal law that was succeeded by a long nothingness and followed by written rules such as the Code of Hammurabai (see The Story of B for discussion of tribal law and "Taker" law) explains how these two entirely distinct notions of government and social functioning could be so incompatible and dissimilar, entirely unrelated (think skewed, in terms of geometry!).

One such social contract is that which M.Z. placed within the "Global Market System" (though Quinn and I would broaden it to "Taker" culture in its long and winding history): -Primary economic units are government & private organizations. -Employment services and distribution of goods are monetary exchanges. They are regulated to include nepotism. - Everything is (strictly) MONITORED. ...There is a legitimate conflict of interest (in Senegal?) with the realities of life support systems; 29% of the Senegalese population had jobs in 2007; there is much corruption, many are underpaid, many in higher ranks are (untrustworthy?).

The other social contract belongs to African Traditional Societies: -Family, lineage are primary units -Cradle to grave social security is assumed by the hierarchical structure of kinship; friendship obligations; distribution system regulated by the hierarchy. -FAMILY is the strongest force (which cancels out any need for unwieldy governmental structures).

What the meaning of ecovillage in Senegal (and Africa in general, it seems) came down to was this: "Northern" ecovillages are trying to create sustainable lifestyles post-Industrial Revolution, whereas "Southern" ecovillages are trying to sustain pre-Industrial Revolution lifestyles (shortest, simplest route to sustainability; we have a handout that defines an ecovillage--and don`t take this for a final word because I`ll be providing multiple definitions until I can distill the clearest and most deserving definition--as "a village that works to preserve its traditions and its natural resources against poverty and degradation, while upgrading the living environment of its inhabitants. An ecovillage is seeking both preservation and modernization in four areas," which areas are 1) sustainable traditions, culture, religion, and values, 2) sustainable environmental conditions, 3) sustainable economics, and 4) sustainable society (the health, education, and safety of the whole ecovillage).). Some of us discussed in class how North & South are merely current popular jargon, that such language oversimplifies the realities and doesn`t capture nuances.

M.Z. asked us if we thought the isolated heritage of much of Africa, and its lagging behind the Industrial Revolution, seemed like a blessing or a disadvantage. It was clear in my head that this was just right, completely as it should be, because that meant more tribes had lost fewer integral components of their belief systems, lifestyles, etc.. But looking around the room and noticing what our professor stressed, it became clear that most people see it as a mixed advantage, which makes plenty of sense also. Moving along, at about this point in the class, she exclaimed, "Look at how the diagrams by the Europeans are trying to discover how to go backwards." And then, "Here is permaculture," showing some garden or one construction project. No, that was not permaculture. I don`t know if permaculture can be encapsulated in one image (I doubt it!). And though in the notes it sounds as though she might have been ridiculing the tendency to think in terms of "going backwards" I`m almost positive she stressed it in such a way as to say this was the goal, the thing people interested in sustainability aspire to. But this makes no sense. It is impossible to imagine we could go backwards, and those who do look nothing less than foolish. We can only go forward. So we go forward, with knowledge of the past, current innovation, and ongoing inventiveness. She did mention the following, which made plenty of sense in this context: "Here in Africa you can still find answers you can`t find elsewhere (`cause they`re still in the original version)."

Yet it apparently doesn`t raise any eyebrows here that the governing mentality is
"Think Globally. Act Locally." For education, transportation, and other "modernization" needs, it doesn`t seem to occur to anyone to look anywhere other than to the so-called Western world. So a group might claim to have in its interest the perpetuation of traditions and the urge to circumvent the ugliness of the Industrial Revolution, but the endpoint they want to get to is still the "modern" one, the appealing lifestyle seen on television (soap operas from the Americas being especially popular), just via a route that bypasses all the smog, congestion, and violence. Meaning: It doesn`t matter what inherent violence might lurk within that lifestyle; because it`s glamorous and convenient and healthy and sleek, everyone should strive for this one particular manner of existence. Perhaps the derailing happens in something as simple (and oh so unassuming!) as education. Tribal societies don`t need to have curriculum when learning is so interwoven with daily life and experience. Sorry, it`s kind of driving me crazy. Expect Providence references for a follow-up!

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Local? Global? How Should We Live and Interact?

Written March 10, 2008, especially for Proseminar, on a topic both of interest to me and of relevance to the program. Not my most stunning writing, but decent enough in its clarity and simplicity...Nevertheless, this essay ends on a note that is very much central to a large component of my upcoming thesis work, gauge-ing various degrees of sustainability across the gamut of human societies (as much as possible, of course). Also, we discussed regionalism today in politics (hoorah!)...

“Now, it’s feeling like a small town with six billion people downtown at a little sidewalk fair in Earth Town Square. There are Germans selling Audis filled with gasoline from Saudis to Australians sipping Kenyan coffee in their Chinese shoes; Argentines are meeting Mongols over french fries at McDonald’s, and the place looks strangely tiny when you see it from the moon…” – “Earth Town Square” by Peter Mayer (singer/songwriter)

Community! As social creatures, we humans cannot extricate ourselves completely from our social surroundings. We come to know the world through them, and there is strong evidence to support the claim that we leave this world by severing our ties to our society. We cannot live alone with any degree of safety comparable to that enjoyed by, say, a band of foragers. We may define our community in different ways, yet the integral role of other people to our prospects for survival defines our relationships as essential to our lives. Could this also possibly be a sufficient way for us to define home?

Let us define community as a group of people living in close proximity and interacting with each other and their surroundings. This definition stresses interconnectedness, a concept borrowed from ecology, which, after all, applies to us humans as much as to other creatures. Our focus now shifts to the question of the community’s surroundings. Where does the community end and the external world begin? How large is the purview of the community? How large can a community grow before it ceases to be a community?

In other words, the question is how should we define local? By miles? By regions? National or physical geographic borders? Population? At this point, I become unsure. Much writing has recently been released on the benefits of local-scale economies and the scourge of their global-scale counterparts. Still another set of writers continues to vouch for the advantages of globalization, a world in which “Australians [sip] Kenyan coffee in their Chinese shoes; Argentines [meet] Mongols for french fries at McDonald’s.” This is the part where an exploration of the various texts, for and against globalization, would be quite useful. I would like to research the various arguments and see which ones make the most sense and which ones fail to address critical considerations. There are many related questions I would like to address— How global is globalization? If two countries are trading with each other and nobody else, does that really count as global? Should different regions maintain strong communication and contact, or should localization involve greater degrees of isolation? Should communities or regions struggling to maintain a local focus create a network amongst themselves? How much does interconnection affect the outcome for each individual community or region? To what degree should we trade outside of the local system? Does local entail being completely self-sufficient? What does remaining incompletely self-sufficient mean for everyone involved? Who is the self remaining sufficient? Local government? The family? The individual? And how will we define or measure sufficiency anyway?

William McDonough once stated his design standards in a TED Talk, “Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power – economically, equitably, ecologically, and elegantly enjoyed.” I would like to examine how local and global focuses could contribute to the development of William McDonough’s standards. Would a local focus be in danger of becoming overrun by the tyranny of the majority? Would a global focus inherently counter the ideals?

Discerning the advantages of local or global systems is an intriguing question and very relevant to our time. How should we live? What will provide the best results for people? How should we interact? How does communication modify the course a local or global system takes? The questions proliferate. Because community has a crucial role in our lives, it makes sense for us to ask in what form or forms the community is most effective to us. The next question then becomes, “What are the primary functions of community?” How else would we define effectiveness if we did not understand what was supposed to be effective? In any case, questions about the way to define community, local, home, or global, and the way (or the extent to which) those systems should interact, are increasingly important in our contemporary world, where our sustainable behavior or lack thereof will reflect themselves in our own future. A final question, then, makes us wonder, “How does the concept of ‘our children’s future’ correlate to change? Can it be an effective inciting force, or is it an abdication of responsibility?” It seems we might find some direction in exploring the nuances of all these questions.

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Vision is Humble

SPOILER ALERT

Good After Dachau book review/synopsis

In After Dachau, Daniel Quinn’s mortifying novel of society 2,000 years down the road had Hitler been able to take over the world, the main character uncovers the truth and feels intensely compelled to share his findings, to goad everyone else to attention, consciousness, and remorse. But what he discovers, after a staged kidnapping intended solely to prove a single point to him, is that “no one cares.” This revelation liberates him to redirect his energies so that he is able to do something other than fret, feel trapped, and despise everyone in his society. He takes his energy and opens a bookstore/gallery, eccentrically selling old books seized during World War II (even spearheading publication of Anne Frank’s unearthed diary) and showcasing his fiancée’s Abstract Expressionist artwork (named Gloria, she is a black woman born in 1922 and killed in the final wave of exterminations of minority populations in the genocide, when it came to New York City, trapped 2,000 years later in the body of a crash victim, Mallory Hastings). The gallery opening is abysmal, precisely because no one cares, but little by little, with Gloria and Jason’s perseverance, it gains steam as its own radical protest. One evening, someone hurls a (flaming?) brick through the storefront. Someone cares.

Despite the odds, the horrors, the ghastly unearthed secrets, the guilt, the passage of 2,000 years, it turns out others in their society can feel threatened by the fact that their world is built on lies, that they are suddenly being accused and implicated in the horrific destructive actions that their way of life was founded upon. Despite the (unbearable weight, or light-weighted-ness) of history, the brick-thrower cared about something that happened 2,000 years before, and so did Jason. Both the brick-thrower, bent supposedly on either keeping the past a secret or defending his ancestors' inhumane actions, the atrocities they perpetuated, and Jason, bent on learning about and from the truth, have particular visions, mythologies, agendas that they want to propagate (create support for) in the world. Jason slowly attracts attention, the brick-thrower slowly nurtures (his or her) exacerbation/outrage/animosity. Their visions slowly grow, humbly. While most people (rightly) do not condone the ideology moving the brick thrower to action, they can wholeheartedly relate to Jason’s character and thinking. They too would be outraged if no one cared about something so earth-shatteringly monumental and de-stabilizing about their culture. They too would do whatever it took, persevering humbly, working slowly, little by little/poco a poco, to gain steam and support for their vision and perspective on life, on an ethical lifestyle change that addresses the dark history and breaks from it in a way that will hopefully prevent a similar future catastrophe.

The analogies Quinn is trying to draw in After Dachau are many. His writing in all his other novels and nonfiction concerns itself with the similarly dark origins of our own civilization. He concludes that “History is written by the conquerors,” that we are blind to the lies we’ve been told, the mythologies/rationales/ideologies, “stories we tell about how things came to be this way,” precisely because we know nothing other than these stories; presented with nothing else, we take our stories, our histories, to be the only ones there are, to be authoritative writings of how things came to be this way, we situate ourselves, plant our feet in the ground, to then discover how unstable things are -- well, that’s just not what we asked for, not at all what we bargained for, completely unacceptable. Yet Quinn has always had this as one of his best traits as a thinker, his willingness to take on the role of the gadfly, much the way that Socrates did in his time (the similarities between the two are striking; exploration for another day). All his writing is meant to expose the lies, the secrets, the hidden realities, the mythologies, those darknesses we are all reluctant, unwilling to see, for good reason—because then our world must enter through such dramatic upheaval, an upheaval we shirk from because we are so stunningly unprepared for anything of that magnitude.

He instructs in Ishmael or Story of B to “Teach 100. If you cannot teach 100, then teach 10. If you cannot teach 10, teach 1” (though I can't seem to locate this quote). Vision is humble. Vision, he believes, is the most drastic, inciting force, the most rife with potential to turn everything, every last aspect of our cultural reality, on its head. Yet people are slow in coming around to it. God knows how much opposition I have to deal with in advocating for Neo-Tribalist thought and vision. Vision must be humble in order to survive disillusionment, discouragement, loneliness, isolation, but it will be all worth it, apparently, because one day, utter silence and solitude skips ahead many years in one breath, and a brick is sent through a wall; one day, there is a sudden transformation from silence to momentum (think Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, and the magic number - is it 125?), and many people turn to the vision because it suddenly makes sense, matters, is worth caring about, even if it is only because it offers a simpler way of living than an increasingly unlivable, harder to continue, lifestyle. Vision must be dedicated, must be perseverant, sturdy, and as such, humble vision will be less liable to crack than a volatile, impatient mentality powering an individual’s experience of the vision.

The use of art as radical protest is an intriguing component of the story. Quinn does not in any way condone what he calls programs (in My Ishmael, he includes intentional communities as such a misguided program…more on that later!). I think many protests and social movements he sees as programs in this regard, as ineffective movements that are not nearly as transformative or radical, altering, as their constituent movers and shakers think they are, which is why I found it interesting that he included similar methods in After Dachau. I think he was making a delicate distinction that any methods used to perpetuate a new vision, to educate others, even if they resemble other social movements, if they use activist art and methods, are still unique by virtue of their driving force, vision - the flowing river that overpowers the flimsy sticks or programs stuck in its path.

Quinn prefaces the entire work with a note on his complete and utter lack of support for ideas of rebirth, past lives, and reincarnation. I found this intriguing, fascinating, humorous, and all, when I first opened the novel. I see many similarities to my fear/disinterest/suspicion of New Age ideas and practices, a bias I’ve been meaning to explore in writing (what’s the difference between supporting a Buddhist praying with a singing bowl and a New Age-y practitioner or dabbler co-opting the practice for their own spiritual fulfillment/journey/whims? – think Andrew Bird’s “Heretics”: “What a crack!” – See what I mean? How do you tell?). A lot of sorting must be done to clear up the unattractiveness, the prejudice, and the merits or detriments of New Age-ism…Also a project for another day! Until next time!

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