I am finding it more and more difficult to write in these
pages. It is not so much that I
have less to say, although I admit to being less clear on how to say my
increasingly non-language conceptions, comprehensions and feelings, but I have
said most of it before and perhaps better. There is not a constant stream of new things to say. There never has been. Certainly, every day events take place
that, from one point of view, can be considered new, though in Reality they are
only another turn of the same wheel that must be dressed up to avoid the “dog
bites man” appellation.
Drawing the picture created by the dots of individual events
has always been the sine qua non of the human condition: doing it well has
meant easy survival and doing it badly has often meant one of the several forms
of disastrous failure – with large helpings of good and ill fortune thrown
in. Someone such as myself, who
has neither the resources of material, energy or interest to do original reporting
or the status of ‘expert’ to do detailed evaluation of day-to-day events can
only reasonable offer, hopefully evocative and perhaps innovative ways for
seeing the events that inform and plaque us.
And we desperately need ways of organizing present experiences
that can comport with the realities that confront us. The model is simple, executing it ‘in reality’ is not. Reality will always elude us, we have
no facility for it, but we have the adaptive process of “Story” that, when
functioning properly, designs a significant body of our community members and
their behaviors into satisfactory relationships with Reality. There is, however, a great and terrible
caveat:
A metaphor that I have used before: a juggler violates
“reality”; with only two hands it ‘should not be possible’ to suspend 3 or more
objects in controlled flight. And,
in fact, it is only possible for a short period of time. For most people only seconds, for some,
minutes, and certainly this “violation” of reality can only be carried on for a
short number of hours by even the most talented. And so it is with the human treatment of the biophysical
world: we are juggling its many properties, keeping more balls in the air than
possible in the long run, but have become completely dependent on the juggling
for the survival of both our numbers and the way most of us live. It is not unnatural in such a
circumstance to see the juggling as more real and vital than the Reality in
which such juggling is, in evolutionary time, a short-term aberration. It should be noted that thousands of
generations may live out their lives during the juggling phase, only a few will
be part of the falling down.
But this metaphor must be examined more closely before
despairing – if one considers the metaphor prescient and thus worthy of
despair. The juggler may be
convinced to divest him or her self of the suspended objects one at a time
until the juggling is ended and the objects are all completely in the thrall of
the most direct laws of nature.
And, and this is important, the juggling can be made to go on in
well-controlled and regulated ways that, while risking some failures, are all
designed for controlled endings after short forays into improbability. This would be a most human way to
approach life on a sustainable planet.
For this to happen we need a new Story, one in which there
is real democracy, equity and social justice; by ‘real’ I mean both that these
qualities of community actually exist in a functional form and that communities
struggle with the real difficulties that they present. It is my goal to, in the smallest of
possible ways, to help generate that Story. It is the way available to all of us: to tell the new Story
to others.
In this new Story the central pillars of the present Story,
wealth and property, are seen not as unquestionable, but as cognitive
structures gone wrong and used to build structures of repression and
destruction, the greatest acts of juggling in human history. Wealth and property have historical
antecedents that account for their present form rather than being the absolute
and correct culmination of human economic and political thought. From God-kings, to kings, to the
struggle for the commons, property has been a great confusion. Locke, Blackstone, Smith and Marx did
their part in trying to rationalize the issues; they were just jugglers good
enough for a little while.
We are seeing the consequences in international corporations
and in wealth accumulations that give absolute impunity to a few millions of
people – and generally people the least well equipped to empathize with and act
responsibly toward the rest of humanity and the life on the earth that receives
the down stream effects of that impunity.
There are only two forces that allow the present construction: the force
of arms and the force of the present Story that makes the gaining of wealth and
property acceptable and desirable.
If that Story were eroded sufficiently, then only the force of arms
would be left – and that has never been enough.
Many of those who live and act in the Land of Impunity know
these things and spend vast amounts of their wealth to control the Story, but
the Story is not an army that does as it is told; Story, like a tattered
mimeographed sheet passed from hand to hand in East Berlin, can prepare a
revolution. It was the Story,
shared by so many, that let the Berlin Wall fall in one night as an
incomprehensible, outlandish party.
It is very likely that the people didn’t even know that they had come to
share a Story of such power, waiting only to be catalyzed by events. This is the process to which we must
contribute, even if we don’t know what to say or how to say it.
