Building a Scaffold for Social Change

Adam Weaver

Cosmic Sun/Self-Existing Warrior

Somacub@yahoo.com

The truth is that we need to make a deep and rapid change in our current social systems and in the underlying models and ideals of our society.

I agree with that, but I don't think change like that is possible except as an accumulation of individual, personal paradigm shifts. We can't tell people to think about consumerism differently; the motivations for living the way we live are conditioned into each of us individually. But at least this crisis is helping to bring the destructive nature of the status quo to light. I think it's a good thing. It is obvious that adjustments have to be made; I just hope people realize it has to begin from the individual level, and will not work with political, top-down approaches.

I am excited about evolver.net. www.raptitude.com -- The gentle art of sanity amidst civilization

daniel

i always welcome the provocations offered by you and other pundits on reality sandwich, as well as much if the commentary generated in response. and yet, i feel that there is a fundamental level at which much of what is offered -- and the responses that arise therefrom -- suffers from a lack of very crucial significance. in a nutshell, that lacuna concerns the linguistic challenge we face.

for example, while many pundits of the alternative paradigms cite the giant thinker named herbert marshall mcluhan, his essential argument is often overlooked. wired magazine declared mcluhan their patron saint back in the 90s based on the notion that mcluhan was a news media thinker. in fact, mcluhan had very little to say about new media, other than to warn us that there would be no understanding new media before coming to grips with the old and existing media. and, as a matter of fact, we have effectively reached a point where people are discussing the effects of the computer without ever having understood the effects of the alphabet, print, radio, film or television. thus, we can equate this with a workforce wherein the users of the cordless impact drill/driver are experts at that tool, though they have never understood the manual screwdriver.

few advocates of utopia [whether implicit or explicit] have pointed out the imperative need to grasp the deep role played by language in the formulation of all understanding -- future, past, present. curiously, the theorists of art, architecture, design, social relations, etc. enjoyed the fresh perspective regarding all things modern when the counterrevolutionary agents of power as inevitable targeted the linguistic investigations of the situationist international at the buried [viz, hidden] roots of a philosophical distraction known as post-modernism.

post-modernism effectively dismantled marxian solutions, fully aware that the marxist critique shares many ideas with all other critiques, left and right. it is, of course, easy to critique a flawed system like capitalism or communism. where ideologies differ isn't in their critique of dominant systems, but in the solutions. the left -- especially in the usa -- fell apart when it split its critique into the fashionable rubrics known as identity politics. as such, no sweeping solutions were needed to appease the various identities that shared critiques in the interest of their specialized [and ultimately miniscule or insignificant] solutions. still, identity politics DID indicate the extent o which language is important to change. of course, no longer using words to insult others' physical attributes hardly constitutes significant change, but these little changes have pointed the way for the us to realize real change of general significance.

your article -- as well as the early responses i read here -- contains a few of the utopian movement's most difficult terms. [i say nothing of the term utopia, which obviously is a term wrought thru and thru with flaws.]

capitalism: until the recent economic meltdown, it was nearly impossible to criticize capitalism openly. happily, events have changed peoples' minds enough to make the term at least allowable. still, there are many who defend capitalism not only as a system, but argue that it is human nature. of course, utopists know that capitalism is NOT human nature, but learned behavior. still, the two divergent understandings point to the problem of definition. as such, it may be useful to employ the term as often as possible, underscoring its learned qualities and eschewing the lie of its innate tendency.

individual: the individual, of course, is non-existent from the utopist perspective. we do nothing alone. the unique understanding of our universe that our personae express is nonetheless socially generated. we are not the inventors of english or any other idiom. beyond the shared tool of language, we also enjoy a degree of trust that is continually and incredibly overlooked and discounted. we trust others to bring us food that is not tainted and -- given the labeling on packaged foods and unpackaged produce -- even healthy. an organic locally grown apple resembles a pesticide ridden apple shipped from across the continent in every way. thus, we have only the label -- affixed by unknown persons to that fruit -- to assure us that there is any difference. the fact that we trust these labels proves that we trust the unseen people who affix these labels. this basic trust extends to every aspect of our lives, from the construction of our dwellings to the engineers of every element integral to our global transportation networks. unable to exist individually, it is foolish to continue speaking of individuals.

historically, the individual is born pretty much simultaneously with capitalism. before capitalism, the great chain of being endemic to western civilization proved the divinity essential to the life we all lived, despite its hierarchic construct. outside the parameters of the west, tribal nations emphasized not only the connection of each human with the next, but also with every aspect of the abundant multitude that is the nature which sustains us. if we are to continue to discuss the sustainable alternatives to capitalism, we would do well to desist discussing individuals. they are passe, doomed to the isolation they can never enjoy or attain. no man is an island, and even so, no island exists alone. islands are simply part of a vast ocean.

you point to a "passive, consumer consciousness [wherein] people have not been encouraged to think or to act for themselves." i understand your drift. but i have always resisted the characterization of my fellow citizens' "passive, consumer consciousness." the genius of consumerism is not its ability to imbue anyone with passivity. humans are always active, always conscious. in the same way, i reject the platitude suggesting that we use only 10% or so of our brains. rather, the genius of consumerism is that it gives people confidence in the activity of making conscious choices. they are not passive; they have simply accepted the notion that the range of possible choices is limited to what the manufacturers offer. this is why people are disgruntled by these very limits; hence, the widespread complaint that there are 500 channels but nothing on them. people have actively chosen to wait for the agents of authority to offer more. ipods, x-boxes, etc. we demand organic foods be delivered, but we fail to choose to convert every lawn into a garden. if every homeowner would grow food instead of cutting the grass, we could point to the activity and call ourselves active, but our activity remains wedded to seeking alternative economies. if we are passive, it is in our active refusal to imagine all that we are -- let alone all that we might be.

economy: economy is based on the greek words that mean "naming the home" and naming things is what economies are best at. to give a thing a name is to assign it a value. economies are thus nothing but the engine of illusion our good books hint at. our modern economic models work primarily by promoting the notion of scarcity. capitalism promotes the problem of scarcity and promises to resolve it by assigning values. communism promotes the same problem of scarcity and promises to resolve it by controlling the means of production. of course, the problem with scarcity is that we live in a universe of abundance. there is even an abundance when it comes to ideas dealing with imagined scarcity. curiously, the universe has no name. while we are surrounded in the universe by planets and stars that carry names, our home -- like the one real godhead -- has no name.

ecology: ecology is based on greek words that mean "the language of the home." what is the language of home? all around us, outer space is full of silence. here, sound abounds. we say that birds sing songs, but do they? are they titled and copyrighted? are they even songs? is communication limited to the compendium of words entered between the covers of the oxford english dictionary of historical principles? what do the seasons tell us? what do infants stare at with such abandon and apparent glee? how is it that we detect the movement of molecular entities -- our flaking skin, home to millions of parasites, a brick, a stone, the air we breathe, so much more -- as stillness. how much of our inability to talk to the animals is due to our fear of them and our disparagement of dr doolittle? ecology means paying attention to the man -- and the crickets and worms and beavers and snakes and winds and seas and oh so many other souls -- behind the curtain. it means deep listening. it means replacing time with rhythm, refilling the delimited space of architecture and territory, property and state with the measureless infinite.

i've obviously said too much. still, there are some excellent indications out there -- far more learned than what i set forth here -- regarding the importance of changing language in the interests of revolution.

vincent kaufman's "angels of purity" is available in the collection, Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (October Books) and discusses the importance of language to the revolutionaries' seminal actions.

also, these essays in the situationist online archive:

definitions, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/definitions.html

Captive Words: Preface to a Situationist Dictionary, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/captive.html

beyond the situationists, roland barthes' books fragments of a lover's discourse and mythologies stand as great examples of the alternative lexicon

walter benjamin's "one-way street" further demonstrates an approach to deriving alternative meaning of socially iconoclastic merit in the seemingly ordinary

careful readings of the works of mcluhan, especially gutenberg galaxy extensively explore the historic trajectory of recorded language and the attendant social implications thereof.

i raise this issue in all earnestness, not unaware of the derision it might attract, not to mention the possibility that it may seem of the point or dangerously desultory. still, i find that the definition of terms demanded by academic theses are valuable assets to discussions in both verbal and oral formats. far too often, cavalier use of epithets, misappropriations, bogus definitions, acontextualizations and a host of other erroneous formulations manage to bog down otherwise cogent arguments, even creating virulent disagreement where there is none [in this case, the second comment--posted by davidcain--would seem to be such an instance (notwithstanding my own verbose contribution)].

at any rate, think about it.

i believe i first offered you this perspective in woodstock a couple of years back, suggesting that the word "individual" may have outlived it usefulness... (oddly enough, i rarely recall my own statements at such a temporal remove. there may be some meaning there. if so, i hope it's a "good" one.)

peace

norman douglas

we're certainly on the way to the next paradigm...

"Conquer inner foes; triumph over your ego" -- Sathya Sai Baba

Just been thinking recent about how my own mind has many more neurological patterns accessible to my thought, which are enabling of belief in positive social change for saving the Earth.

My father's work in the early 1970's, (after he was offered a post-doctoral position at Harvard but could not take it up because he already had a young family, and so other folk then replicated his work in NMR studies, and the MRI machines in hospitals are based on that work), was among scientists working in Hobart Tasmania (where the "Permaculture" theories were than in development), where his professor was one among the first men to predict the Greenhouse effect.

That was the social environment of my early childhood, and today, everybody has concerns about issues which were only believed in by a small minority of men with very specialized knowledge when very little myself, yet able to remember well.

Don't underestimate the worth of Australia and its people, and in particular our indigenous belief system, from which is generated a good quantity of the best science. eg. The human genome project, having discovered seven markers of ancestry in every human being, so we are all linked by seven ancestral mothers, is nothing new to Australian Aborigines, because the story of the Seven Sisters, has always been ours.