Rolla Lewis
David, lovely post. I hope you will connect more of your integral permaculture perspective into the discussion board postings. I would love to hear about places that are enacting the work, as you say linking theory from above and practice/doing from below. The below work keeps me grounded.
I do like Clayton and Heinzekehr’s Organic Marxism: An Alternative to Capitalism and Ecological Catastrophe.
Charles,
Thanks. I like Samar’s description as an anarcho-communist kibbutz. Those are the places I want to hear more about and how they are creating communities that work for all…
David, thanks for your kind words. The key to lifescaping AR process is collaborating WITH others. Thus, enacting participatory democracy and the challenges working with others toward a goal defined by all. I’m certain that somewhere in the back of my head the “Quality Gurus'” ideas probably informed me in some way because I heard about Deming in graduate courses….. No relation to C. I. Lewis, I think. He sounds interesting…
Charles, yes kibbutzim is an excellent exemplar. The challenge is that the article is over 40 years old. Martin Buber in Paths to Utopia (1949) offers kibbutzim as a living example of bringing about or striving for utopia.
There is an international movement of intentional communities, too: https://www.ic.org/directory/oekodorf-sennrueti/
There are a couple intentional communities near Portland that I have not visited, but you have to arrange a visit.
I’m with you there. I think the challenge is finding exemplars and places where folks are approximating production and businesses grounded in a process-relational ontology. Heck, I’d be happy to see places that are enacting process-relational perspectives in any organization. Until we have examples and exemplars, we are merely talking. I continually call for and dream about a Tourist Guide to Process-Relational Businesses, Communities, etc. Years ago Theodore Roszak wrote a book titled Sources where he put together a list of places and people who were trying to live into creating a counter-culture. It’s way out of date and was probably out of date when it was published but it was an attempt to offer concrete pathways….
Charles, I appreciate your thoughtfulness and clarity. I’m with you thinking outside of ideological boxes. We get painted into corners. Although I think most people do not think ideology; they live it or if they think it, they do so in very narrow ways, thinking life will go on like it is. How do we invite genuine dialogue?
Funny, I hammered out my response defining “hyper-individual” without really reflecting, as I should have. That rush to do or say something runs contrary to both what Ellen Langer researched in Mindfulness and what Mark C. Taylor critiqued in Speed Limits. It even runs contrary to what I taught my students, “Get off your high-horse. Listen, listen, listen some more and enter the world of your client.” One of my cohorts even made T-shirts with “Get Off Your High-Horse” printed on them.
I wanted to be concrete in the process of critiquing my hobby-farm, exurban hyper-individualist friend, but failed to be reflective, what I wrote brought out a number of points when I read it. First, I positioned myself in judgment. This brings a number of things to mind: a) Jesus’ parable of the splinter (Matthew 7:3-29); b) Jon Haidt’s Righteous Mind where he points out “morality binds and blinds” and “Beware of anyone who insists that there is one true morality for all people, times, and places—particularly if that morality is founded upon a single moral foundation” (p. 316); c) How reading one thing can influence another; I had just reviewed Smith and Max-Neef’s Economics Unmasked and the quote, “… in the dominate world view the real goal of a well functioning economic system is to protect the wealth and power of the rich” (p. 29). I connect hyper-individualism to the wealth and power of the rich and privileged few. My rant missed some points. Second, I want to differentiate the hobby-farmer from people who are sustaining traditional or creating new ways of living on the land. To remain on my concrete and specific example path, I know a fellow who owns an irrigation business. He has 20 or so acres where he and his wife, their sons and their wives and children live. It is a multi-generational farm where they have woodland, fruit and nut trees, and a huge garden. I only know him and his son, but they both love the land, their family, and their autonomy. They also feel connected to the larger community in terms of their business and their church. To me, that transcends the hobby-farm example. Another example is the master gardener who I talked about in the earlier post. He wanted to be able to supply a restaurant and food back with vegetables and the county told him he would have to get a series of permits that made it too costly for him to even consider doing what he wanted to do. When he told me that, I explored how his right-wing politics and my left had much in common. I encouraged him to read David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules. Graber makes clear that the Left has always been essentially antibureaucratic in its inspiration, and at its best the Let is founded on a “political ontology of the imagination” or an “ontology of creativity” (p. 88). He and I talked for a while and as long as I focused on the local (decentralizing rather than anarchy), we found genuine common ground and a desire to create more vibrant communities where we lived. Neither of these folks would be described as hyper-individualistic to me. Hobby-farms with spaceship, self-contained, colonizer-like homes, completely dependent upon power, resources, water delivered from afar are what I was trying to get at when trying to describe hyper-individualism. Hope this clarifies a bit.
Kent, Thanks for your question. Let me be concrete and define what I mean by hyper-individualist by giving an example. I know a fellow who opposes wasting taxes on the poor and other “wasteful” government programs. He lives in exurbia on a three-acre lot in a house with numerous features that allow for all sorts of entertainment, TV, pool, hot tub, etc. He is able to retreat into his home, go out into the community when he wants, go 35 miles to the city for entertainment, travel, etc. He views himself as self-sufficient and capable of hiring help when he needs something done. Or when there is something he cannot do or that he is not interested in doing. In other words, resources are not an issue, unless you count that he lives in an area that always exists at the edge of a drought; water is a regional issue. Interestingly though, and here is where the yearning for community comes in. He has a neighbor who is a master gardener and they have a relationship where they share the bounty from their gardens. They even make wine together. There is a caring bond between them. Both are deeply connected to their families, etc. They have what they call is a “good” life, free from the strife, poverty, “excessive taxes” that folks in the city pay, etc. Like Little House on the Prairie, he and his neighbor are rugged individualists who are independent.
Hello Charles, Another illuminating post. Thank you. I agree. Let me try to make this concrete in some way. Personally I am challenged promoting dialogue, or even better, engaging in dialectical critique of capitalism in ways that maintain conversations with liberal and conservative friends about dismantling Neoliberal, capitalist ideology. I cannot offer much of a pathway in fostering such conversations.
I seem to come from another world when I am with many liberals and conservatives. I’ve been smitten by Paul Goodman, E. F. Schumacher, Murray Bookchin, John Clark, and other decentralists for years. I can move some conversations along, speak to common interests, freedom, equity, etc. These can be conversations with pretty conservative folks, who embrace the Neoliberal, capitalist ideology as the shield opposed to socialism, Marxism, taxation, etc. Say Marx and some of these folks begin frothing at the mouth. When I avoid saying that I like dialectical social ecology (aka, anarchism) and I find Marx an ally, the conversations will move along. We can talk about autonomy, local community, mutual aid, gardening, farmers’ markets, worker owned businesses, etc. Within these conversations, I hear a yearning for community and a clinging to hyper-individualism. It’s an interesting contradiction in most cases.
As I think about this, many folks I know give lip service to some form of theoretical Neoliberal, capitalism but they are little more than zombie-individualists, consuming as much as they can, pointing to their houses, cars, where they ate, the exotic places they have been to, etc. Their purpose and value in life is predicated on creating a life where they will stand in invidious distinction, as Veblen pointed out, above others. That is to say, their consumption defines who they are and how they express themselves in relation to others.
There is a certain tragedy inherent in what I am sharing because I am talking about an ideological chasm and a relational chasm with folks I know in passing, as friends, and even people I love. This makes me realize how thankful I am for the communities that I am part of…..
Charles, As always, thank you very much. Fromm is a hero to me. Sadly, he was marginalized by the psychoanalytic community in the USA because he offered a perspective that differed from Freud.
I realize I have to re-read his Sane Society. It’s been 50 years since I read it and it is well-worth reading again.
Nicholas, Thanks for the introduction. I appreciate what you are bringing to the course and conversation.
Charles, I’m happy to see you are in the course. I always appreciate your insightful comments and suggested resources. Although I have to say that the stack of “books-to-read” gets larger and larger during our exchanges. Always with appreciation,
Thomas, Great to see you again. Always appreciate that you are a retired carpenter because one of my life mentors was one and always telling stories with profound and understated wisdom.
Tim,
Thanks so much for the story about your relationship with Herman Daly and the impact the Common Good had upon your thinking.Nicholas,
Thanks for sharing your pamphlet. You’re right, I thought you were bouncing off Bill McKibben’s work. Glad you clarified.