While walking through a thrift store in Portland the other day (hip, hip, hipster! capital of Oregon) a friend of mine looked around at all of the knick-knacks, the trinkets, the burned out television screens and pointless plastic smokeless ashtrays, and said, "The Sixties must have been an awesome time to be alive. Think about it--all of this technological junk floating around, convenience, with no thought about resource limits or ecological destruction . . ."
Yes, I thought. Damned are we to have been born at the end of the 20th Century.
This led me to think about my parents and grandparents, and most of their generation who live in the small town I live in, and how having been born in an Era Without Limits must severely limit their capacity to feel the urgency of the path of destruction our culture is now set on. I know many people in the older generation, who were ten to twenty years old in the 1960s, who seem content to go about their daily lives working jobs for meager paychecks until they can retire in the next decade. I think of the activists I have met in the past year, laboring away to stop Climate Change, Deforestation, Salmon Extinction, and how most of them will be dead when the bottom really begins to fallout--when all the salmon really DO die, when the Ogalalla auquifer dries and the Great Plains become the Great Desert, when the dollar caves in on itself, when our cancer rate goes from 1 in 3 to 1 in 1, when there are no longer streams fit for drinking, when corporations rule the world (Oh, wait, they're still around to see that one!) . . .
But still, I can't help feeling with my friend that we "young ones" are truly late born, born at the end of an era of cheap energy and seemingly abundant resources. Although as a whole our generation seems just as tuned out as our predecessors (more on that later), those of us who are contemplating a life after oil, or a life without water, or a life devoid of life, are really inheriting all of the consequences of our parents' and grandparents' blind devotion to the consumer ideal.
They have sown the wind--and we are reaping the whirlwind.
I picture an atomic bomb of mass industry dropped on the American continent, denuding forests, toxifying rivers, eliminating species, draining wetlands and auqifiers, scraping sea beds, mutilating soil--and WE are the ones 50 years later inheriting the fallout from that early technological gamble.
How is it that many of us are still able to stumble along through the mass diversions of television and high-technology as though nothing has changed since 1950? How has college indoctrinated a new culture of consumption, careerism, and addiction to speed that refuses to question the consequences of its daily activity? How have we grown more alienated from the landbases and watersheds that support us, sustain us?
I think on a certain level we all have a foundational consciousness and premonition that the way of life we have inherited is broken, aged, and failing. Even the "friends" on Facebook posting pictures of their babies, and celebrating a college football victory, and boasting of new journeys to faraway places, and contemplating the wonder of newly married life--all of them seem to have a piece of sadness that they are hiding, a little bit of awareness that this way of life, this super-abundance, will someday have to end. None of us can escape the warnings coming through daily on the radio and TV about food riots, rising tides, economic distress, and constant, agonizing conflict. Our mental environment has taken on the tone of crisis to reflect the ailing condition of our physical environment.
So I have coined a new term for anyone born from 1975 to the present: Generation Fallout.
The first generation to confront a landscape of diminishing possibilities, both ecological and material. The first generation to confront the future with dread, rather than with hope and excitement (some might note Spengler's talk in the 1920's of a similar condition, but the television/oil era of extravagant consumption did away with that . . . until now!).
There are several ways to keep the mill of delusion chugging along, pumping out new hopes despite the overwhelming evidence that the old hopes are dead. And I have no problem with hope and optimism so long as it is grounded in physical, and metaphysical, reality. But is the Green™ Movement grounded in reality? Does it take into account limits?
Will Technology save us in the end?
If we as a generation could accept our late-born status, and reconcile ourselves to the challenges we face--politically, ethically, materially, and, most importantly, spiritually--then we could really begin the work of building a new culture of grace and reciprocity from the ground up. But this requires that we become exceedingly honest, both with ourselves and with each other. This means a lot of things, which I see so many people doing right now that it does give me hope. I've seen a lot of people transitioning from the sadness of realizing you live at the end of an era, to hope at realizing we live at the dawn of a new one.
But we also could use a little help from the early-born ones, who got to have a party at our (the future's) expense. They created a lot of wealth and now young people are graduating and can't find jobs. We can't build a culture with youth alone. So help--both fiscal and technical--is sorely needed. We need encouragement, mentoring, and leadership, so that we can confront the challenges that face us without any need to run away to hope in a distance, centralized authority . . .
(Just a Rant on a Sunday Morning)
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
Kunstler on the War Path
James Howard Kunstler, author of the notorious doom-and-gloom synopsis of our modern predicament "The Long Emergency," has posted a new piece about our current status as a nation on the path towards financial and social collapse.He ends with this quote:
Americans look around and see nobody standing up for their interests. Their greatest interest is a vision of a fruitful society that they can help build and be a part of beyond the current wreckage of revolving-debt consumerism. It will have to be a vision based on fewer resources and on new arrangements for daily living. It will have to recognize losses frankly, and enable us to let go of things whose time is over, whether that is Happy Motoring, college-for-everybody, vast industries devoted to vanished leisure, or procedures geared to getting something-for-nothing.Although we hear a lot about "recovery" these days, it's clear that we have not recovered from what Kunstler calls "a crisis of leadership," and what I'd even further call "a crisis of vision." The kind of "orgy of credit card spending" that, according to Kunstler, characterizes the past half-century of American development could only have come about by letting capital--and the love of money--trump culture and community.
We need a new vision of a world "based on fewer resources and on new arrangements for daily living," that's for sure. But is Washington going to provide that? Is anyone with a master's degree or Ph.D. going to suggest we actually scale back our civilization, both in terms of spending and actual, physical growth? (Of course, they'll counter with fancy arguments about how such a scaling back would lead to the deaths of millions, maybe even billions of people . . .)
No one in Washington, not Obama nor any of his economic advisers, is going to offer this new vision of a scaled-back, "zero-growth" society. And, as Kunstler notes, we can hardly count on our baby-boomer, liberal lefties to point a critical finger at the faulty premises of American development over the past fifty years (cheap energy, cheap resources, runaway deficits, etc. etc.).
We need leadership on the ground, it seems, to take this country back starting at the very roots of the problem.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Things Both Wild and Free: Religion (and the Farm) Comes Full Circle
Cultivation is pretty popular these days. With urban gardens, green roofs, and permaculture design courses becoming more and more vogue with the young, environmentally-sensitive left, it's easy for a lot of us to get carried away with the limitless possibilities of the human imagination and think that our salvation as a culture lies in converting more people to the cult of cultivation.
But in his essay, "Good, Wild, Sacred," philosopher/poet and man of the wilds Gary Snyder points out that the term cultivation has always been synonymous with the destruction of wild nature. "Good Land," in the sense that settlers of North America used the term, was land that was agriculturally productive. Only through a battle against all that crept into the cultivated area—plants deemed useless to humans (called 'weeds'), birds, insects ('pests')—was civilized man able to maintain a precarious hold on his own survival. Cultivation itself came to mean the very exclusion of these wild and unruly—that is, unpredictable and uncontrollable—life-forms from the landscape.
The holy man, who practiced spiritual cultivation, refined his nature by extinguishing the wild desires and animal yearnings from his heart, what Christians derided as "the passions," which so easily led one astray from the pastoral paths charted out by tradition. Cultivation, from the Latin root cultivare, denoted the end of all things both wild and free.
However, as it begins to dawn on agriculturalists and gardeners across the world that the manufactured and heavily managed monocultures of modern farming are waging a Pyrrhic war against the dynamics of wild nature, the notion that the food needs of the human community and the needs of vital, intact ecosystems might be able to cooperate in producing a viable system for survival on this planet is steadily gaining steam. Permaculturalists are pushing the rest of the food-producing community to take into account the intricate webs of interdependence and mutuality that characterize the local ecosystem in which they plan to grow food. Cultivation is steadily evolving—with deeper ecological knowledge, with more receptivity to the subtle fluctuations in climate and geography, with growing communion between civilized humans, their non-human neighbors, and the natural habitat that they share—to incorporate more aspects of wildness, and more principles of wild, uncontrolled nature, in human agricultural systems design.
Weeds are no longer fought with the trowel, but instead smothered with mulch, or crowded out with a cover-crop. Insects and birds are no longer seen as pests to exclude, but visitors to include, with a nod towards the ecosystemic benefits their interactions might produce. In fact, the very notion that a garden, or cultivated area, exists solely for the sake of human usage is withering more and more with each day. Wildlife Garden, Food Forest, Edible Landscape—whatever term these new forms of cultivation choose to go under, the outcome is largely the same: that which was formerly exluded (to the pain and exhaustion of so many generations of growers) is now allowed to enter the 'cultivated space,' so that the inscrutable workings of nature can create living landscapes out of the man-made deserts of ages past.
As with our cultivation of the land, so too with our souls. To cultivate the spirit—as the holy man or priest once did—is no longer an industry of exclusion and renunciation; passion, wildness, intuition, emotion, all of those frightful weeds the 'holy' ones among us once sought to uproot, are encouraged to not only flower, but to prepare the ground—as most weeds so often do—for the sowing of larger, hardier, and more resilient seeds. Weeds are pioneer species, and as such love the open, sun-baked soil between our garden rows. They flourish where the gentler, more aesthetically pleasing or more palatable species would never journey. The wildness of heart that the revered sages of the past tried to eradicate—is it not preparing to unleash itself with a fury hitherto unknown to civilized man?
Our task is no longer eradicating wildness in order to cultivate the spirit—but neither is it eradicating cultivation so that the spirit will run wild and free. Having been tethered from birth to the umbilical cord of modern civilization, and to the cultural eyeglasses of the modern age, the resurgence of wildness in our hearts requires a modest, and unintrusive, cultivation. Like the permaculture designer, we must yield in some ways, and guide in others, so that the re-emerging wildness can fully take hold, and eventually unleash a spiritual reawakening deeper, and more longlasting, than anything else in the history of human civilization.
We cannot hope to retrieve the wildness of those peoples who truly lived in concert with the land, nor can we hope to resurrect them. Our only salvation lies in a deeper plunging on, and a greater awakening of the wildness that still lives within us. For though we may be occupiers of this continent, with an empire extending across the globe, somewhere, deep within our breasts, lies a hidden, and unextinquished, flame of humanness that draws its lifesource from the earth, and more directly from the landscape we inhabit.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Freedom, Love, and Revolt
I was reading a passage by J. Krishnamurti today, and felt it deeply underscored the importance of maintaining a perspective of radical negation towards the values and practices that dominate the globalized, technologized world of today.
He writes:
"Life is very beautiful, it is not this ugly thing that we have made of it; and you can appreciate its richness, its depth, its extraordinary loveliness when you revolt against everything--against organized religion, against tradition, against the present rotten society--so that you as a human being find out what for yourself is true . . . To live is to find out for yourself what is true, and you can do this only when there is freedom, when there is continuous revolution inwardly, within yourself."
It was Nietzsche who wrote that a philosopher must be the "bad conscience of his times." Those of us who strive for a world of spiritual and political freedom must be courageous enough to cultivate a healthy critique of "common sense."
This is why we question the sanity of the larger society.
This is why we doubt the reasoning of those in power.
This is why we challenge all signs of authority, whether spiritual, political, medical, or scientific.
This is why we cringe when some techno-enthusiast touts bio-fuels or some other techno-fix as the great solution to keep our precarious civilization from running itself into the ground.
It is the task of the educator, Krishnamurti argues, to:
"create an atmosphere of freedom so that you can live and find out for yourselves what is true, so that you become intelligent, so that you are able to face the world and understand it, not just conform to it, so that inwardly, deeply, psychologically you are in constant revolt; because it is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man [or woman] who conforms, who follows some tradition."
How does our educational system function today?
I think Krishnamurti's depiction is still accurate, though it is decades old. Little has changed in the era of Industrialism:
"The world is torn by conflicting beliefs, by caste and class distinctions, by separative nationalities, by every form of stupidity and cruelty--and this is the world you are educated to fit into. You are encouraged to fit into the framework of this disastrous society; your parents want you to do that, and you also want to fit in."
We must continue asking questions, the kinds of questions that no one wants asked around a dinner table, among family or friends. We must do this, because to not do this is to cultivate fear, and fear is the absence of love as well as the absence of freedom.
It is by no means a comfortable position to act as "the bad conscience of the times." Unfreedom, a life of dependence--on gadgets, on money, on self-willed delusion--would be far more comfortable.
This is why unfreedom is so heavily celebrated in our culture. This is why we strive for the newest gadgets, the biggest televisions, the roomiest houses, the most luxurious cars. This is why "comfort" and "convenience" are the most celebrated values of modernity.
If the inward revolt is quelled, if the fires are put to rest while we are just old enough to imbibe commercials on TV, what risk remains of a living, outward revolt to those benefiting from our destructive civilization?
This is preemptive war on the spiritual front.
So let us cultivate a little sweet revolt, my friends, a little healthy criticism, a love of danger and taste for discomfort, to keep our lives loving, open, and free.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Urban Armageddon
The city has claimed our minds, and our memories.
Human culture--the arts, music, film, all forms of abstraction and symbolic thought, the modern imagination itself--has been taken captive by the urban landscape, hemmed in by its convenient borders and ruled, ordered lines.
All disaster stories today revolve around an urban apocalypse, one in which countless urban inhabitants suddenly find their lives imperilled by a catastrophe of immense proportions. New York attacked by the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, L.A. ransacked by aliens, Tokyo pummelled by a giant dinosaur from the sea--always we find urban man cast in the role of victim (and notably, this victim comes from the wealthy, first world), starving for food, wandering amid ruins of a "once glorious and bountiful civilization."
This urban fetishism is central to our worldview as civilized human beings. Concrete torn up and overrun by weeds or tidal waves are supposed to instill a tragic fear in us from a very early age, so that we do not doubt the legitimacy and necessity of the civilized enterprise once we have entered adulthood.
In all things, the modern human being must identify first and foremost with the manmade world, must draw sustenance from it, yearn for it, as a leaf yearns for sunlight and a root for rich soil.
The disasters we conceive of in our collective imagination are always disasters of the city, as though there could be no viable future for humanity without an indefinite perpetuation of our towering landscapes of glass, concrete, and steel.
Why do we wish for a new world to be erected upon ruins?
What draws us civilized back,
again and again,
to our domesticated environments,
and away from the bounteous land?
The vast expanse of nature is a torment to us;
we have inherited the unconscious scars of our ancestors,
whose gross ineptitude in eking out a meager subsistence on the European continent plagued them with scarcity and want, and ultimately led them to a lifestyle of warfare and pillage.
Our ancestors, the Greeks, Romans, Indo-Europeans,
the civilized--
found not only subsistence, but abundance,
through conquering those peoples who derived their livelihood from living in concert with the land.
We have inherited their ineptitude,
and thus the thought that this system of entitlement
and minimal duress could somehow,
suddenly be taken from us--
by calamity,
by tidal wave,
by asteroid, earthquake, typhoon,
by flood, drought, dust storm, plague,
by famine, firestorm, invasion, nuclear attack
--acts upon our most hidden,
most unconsious,
and most fundamental
fears as civilized beings.
This explains, to some degree, the recent fascination we see in both the major media and small, urban news outlets with the depressed economy, with peak oil and climate change, among people who are not necessarily concerned with the broader ecological crisis resulting from our culture's (mis)treatment of the natural world.
It is our fear as petroleum dependent creatures wed to a global chain of supply and demand, and not necessarily as creatures in search of a reawakened connection to the natural world, that motivates us.
In the end, what even the most enlightened of us seek is often no more than a perpetuation of this system of privilige, and the attendant comfort we have come to require for survival during our 12,000 year divorce from the land.
Few of us are wild enough to see fecundity in the rubble,
to hear bird song in the silencing of the machine,
to wed ourselves to the tidal wave,
the earthquake,
the tornado and typhoon,
to find joy in the image of cities inundated by water,
human culture buried in the dust,
windows cracking, steel skyscrapers collapsing,
as angry volcanoes blot out the light
of a distant,
merciless sun.
Human culture--the arts, music, film, all forms of abstraction and symbolic thought, the modern imagination itself--has been taken captive by the urban landscape, hemmed in by its convenient borders and ruled, ordered lines.
All disaster stories today revolve around an urban apocalypse, one in which countless urban inhabitants suddenly find their lives imperilled by a catastrophe of immense proportions. New York attacked by the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, L.A. ransacked by aliens, Tokyo pummelled by a giant dinosaur from the sea--always we find urban man cast in the role of victim (and notably, this victim comes from the wealthy, first world), starving for food, wandering amid ruins of a "once glorious and bountiful civilization."
This urban fetishism is central to our worldview as civilized human beings. Concrete torn up and overrun by weeds or tidal waves are supposed to instill a tragic fear in us from a very early age, so that we do not doubt the legitimacy and necessity of the civilized enterprise once we have entered adulthood.
In all things, the modern human being must identify first and foremost with the manmade world, must draw sustenance from it, yearn for it, as a leaf yearns for sunlight and a root for rich soil.
The disasters we conceive of in our collective imagination are always disasters of the city, as though there could be no viable future for humanity without an indefinite perpetuation of our towering landscapes of glass, concrete, and steel.
Why do we wish for a new world to be erected upon ruins?
What draws us civilized back,
again and again,
to our domesticated environments,
and away from the bounteous land?
The vast expanse of nature is a torment to us;
we have inherited the unconscious scars of our ancestors,
whose gross ineptitude in eking out a meager subsistence on the European continent plagued them with scarcity and want, and ultimately led them to a lifestyle of warfare and pillage.
Our ancestors, the Greeks, Romans, Indo-Europeans,
the civilized--
found not only subsistence, but abundance,
through conquering those peoples who derived their livelihood from living in concert with the land.
We have inherited their ineptitude,
and thus the thought that this system of entitlement
and minimal duress could somehow,
suddenly be taken from us--
by calamity,
by tidal wave,
by asteroid, earthquake, typhoon,
by flood, drought, dust storm, plague,
by famine, firestorm, invasion, nuclear attack
--acts upon our most hidden,
most unconsious,
and most fundamental
fears as civilized beings.
This explains, to some degree, the recent fascination we see in both the major media and small, urban news outlets with the depressed economy, with peak oil and climate change, among people who are not necessarily concerned with the broader ecological crisis resulting from our culture's (mis)treatment of the natural world.
It is our fear as petroleum dependent creatures wed to a global chain of supply and demand, and not necessarily as creatures in search of a reawakened connection to the natural world, that motivates us.
In the end, what even the most enlightened of us seek is often no more than a perpetuation of this system of privilige, and the attendant comfort we have come to require for survival during our 12,000 year divorce from the land.
Few of us are wild enough to see fecundity in the rubble,
to hear bird song in the silencing of the machine,
to wed ourselves to the tidal wave,
the earthquake,
the tornado and typhoon,
to find joy in the image of cities inundated by water,
human culture buried in the dust,
windows cracking, steel skyscrapers collapsing,
as angry volcanoes blot out the light
of a distant,
merciless sun.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Institutional Inertia and its Antidote
I work for an institution. It is the penance I pay for wanting to exist on this planet. Being human, being vulnerable to the elements, I need shelter. I need food. I have chosen to secure these--as well as a portion to pay off my outstanding student loan debt--by working for a non-profit charter school.
I should amend that. The institution I work for is a registered 501(C)3 non-profit.
The very term "501(c)3" gives me chills.
We have been having meetings these past few days to mark the closing of the school year. We have been discussing several vital topics which get right to the heart of our mission as educators, such as:
1.) What is Education?
2.) What are the values we want to transmit to our student body to ensure their successful growth into secure, free-thinking human beings?
3.) Given that the global economy has entered a phase of terminal decline, if not total collapse, what are the strategies we must take as 21st century educators to revamp the prevailing educational paradigm for a post-oil, post-industrial future?
As you can imagine, it was an invigorating debate.
Discussions centered on the difference between centralized, industrial education--such as is found in large, prison-like high schools and colleges--and place-based education, which makes the land one inhabits an intricate participant in learning, if not the very focal point of learning itself.
There was a moderator to the debate, but he rarely interjected with his own views during discussions; rather, he sat quietly, making notes on the board of interesting ideas and practices that we could implement in the coming year to make our school more coherent in terms of vision, ideals, and approach to the classroom.
Everyone was engaged.
When someone made a poignant remark, people responded.
There was the moment when one teacher suggested finding strategies to make our school less dependent on fossil fuels for field trips and other excursions, and another teacher was quick to add that an all-staff commitment to using less fossil fuels in our personal lives would set an example for our student body.
Everyone agreed. A few teachers waited afterwards organizing carpools.
I had never seen such an outpouring of creative energy in such a formal, fluorescent-lit setting. The School Director encouraged everyone to participate vigorously in the debate and add their own views.
The direction our school takes in the coming years, he said, is something we all help steer. Our thoughts, our vision, our creativity are all crucial to the school's growth and success.
And not success as conventional schooling would have you define it, he added. Success is not what the technocrats in the education establishment call "student achievement," nor is it measured by "test scores"; rather, it is the extent to which our school grows to serve the community and the local landbase, the extent to which we as teachers inspire our students to conceptualize a communal life of resilient food systems and vibrant local culture forged from the ashes of our current alienating way of life.
It was great, really.
I only wish it were true.
The truth is, I have a crippling anxiety about working as a functionary of a multi-level institution. I cringe at the terms of technocracy: "skill-set", "inventory", "buy-in", "student achievement", "funding streams", "institutional viability", et al.
And when sitting in a meeting of reluctant technocrats, of mid-level bureaucrats fulfilling the call of the industrial juggernaut to increase the ranks of young workers, my mind--like most of theirs--completely shuts down.
The Director talks. We listen.
We listen, but only half-heartedly, and rarely are we given an avenue to interject our opinions. Opinions, when they are voiced, are mumbled outside in the hallway on the way to the bathroom:
"This shit sucks, man."
"Why the hell do we have to sit through this?"
"I could shoot myself."
"I'm just glad I have my i-phone."
The modern bureaucratic institution, though compiled of individuals with their own goals and ideals--some of whom are extremely forward-thinking and discontent with the status quo--eventually acquires a life of its own, a life anathema to all spontaneity and open discourse.
We see this with businesses, social services, governments, schools. We see this with international aid institutions, universities, environmental organizations even.
The bureacratic institution easily loses focus on its ostensible goal--in the case of my employer, educating at-risk youth--and settles into working solely to extend its own lifespan, to find new sources of funding, to keep itself afloat. No one dare question the overall goal itself, or how it is best achieved amid the changing circumstances of our current historical era, with its diminishing biodiversity and rapidly increasing human population, its changing climate and decreasing energy supplies.
Creativity is crushed, to the extent that even those with fresh ideas find themselves pitted against entrenched practices and the comfort of those higher up on the hierarchical chain. Most people--if they are human--feel stifled by the air of the institution, by the protocols it follows, the rigid guidelines it imposes on the infinitely dynamic processes of idea-generation and idea-sharing, yet few have words to express it.
Their voices, and the thoughts that give birth to them, have been silenced for too long, crushed out by dull lectures in classrooms through adolescence, by television and movies, video games and mass spectacles and alcohol since then. This is one more instance of boredom to press through before they get to drive home and watch reality TV. Before they get to sit back, relax, and crack open a beer.
And nothing ever changes.
Nothing ever does, they sigh.
The ultimate tragedy of modern institutions is that it is only through standardization that groups of civilized human beings appear to be able to get anything done. Without the hierarchical structure of a bureaucracy, a motley group like ours would function like a chicken with its head cut off. Although everyone I work with seems to resent our director for his dull facilitation of what could otherwise be productive meetings, no one dare challenge his power openly for fear of being censured by the group.
The age-old longing for a slave master over-powers our burgeoning creativity and we submit, willingly, to the logic of subordination.
We present ideas to our director like hesitant bards reciting poems before a magistrate. If his brow twitches, we know we may have gotten through. But in practice, we find his vision is lacking. He sees "funding streams," not potentialities. Nor does he see the futility of fighting to keep an institution afloat within a civilization that is fast approaching ecological calamity. The burdens of driving our institution weighs him down with the practical necessity of fitting our educational paradigm within the over-arching paradigm of industrial-technological civilization, so that he cannot question that civilization, he cannot peer at the roots and see just how rotten they are.
His job--like all of ours should we choose to operate within this extractive economy--depends precisely upon his willingness to not see, to remain oblivious, to keep civilization chugging along into the next quarter, next year, next decade.
Who can even begin to question the proper course of education for our youth without reckoning with the very real global crisis we now face?
The only antidote to this appears to me to be a radical denial of hierarchy, wherever we find it. Meetings may need moderators, but who says these must function as anchors miring us in the mud of practicality? Moderators should be open circuits that help transition ideas from the conceptualization phase to the development phase, not walls into which they fly and collapse dead to the floor.
Moderators need not be directors, either. In fact, the denial of hierarchy is best practiced by having anyone willing to moderate a meeting. All employees can function as moderators, so long as collective agreements are made as to how the meeting should function.
Is this ideal of institutional anarchy achievable? I think that with proper vision an institution can unite itself around a collective mission that draws its power not from "directors," "middle-managers," or "facilitators," but from the creative heart slumbering inside each of its members.
But institutional anarchy will always threaten the bedrock logic of institutionalization, which proclaims that human energies must be standardized, rigid, calculable. It is an oxymoron, but if we were all to come to terms with the very real prospect of ecological and economic collapse within the next decade, it would suddenly become imperative that we start re-thinking all of our paradigms--be they educational, agricultural, political--with or without the support of our leaders.
I should amend that. The institution I work for is a registered 501(C)3 non-profit.
The very term "501(c)3" gives me chills.
We have been having meetings these past few days to mark the closing of the school year. We have been discussing several vital topics which get right to the heart of our mission as educators, such as:
1.) What is Education?
2.) What are the values we want to transmit to our student body to ensure their successful growth into secure, free-thinking human beings?
3.) Given that the global economy has entered a phase of terminal decline, if not total collapse, what are the strategies we must take as 21st century educators to revamp the prevailing educational paradigm for a post-oil, post-industrial future?
As you can imagine, it was an invigorating debate.
Discussions centered on the difference between centralized, industrial education--such as is found in large, prison-like high schools and colleges--and place-based education, which makes the land one inhabits an intricate participant in learning, if not the very focal point of learning itself.
There was a moderator to the debate, but he rarely interjected with his own views during discussions; rather, he sat quietly, making notes on the board of interesting ideas and practices that we could implement in the coming year to make our school more coherent in terms of vision, ideals, and approach to the classroom.
Everyone was engaged.
When someone made a poignant remark, people responded.
There was the moment when one teacher suggested finding strategies to make our school less dependent on fossil fuels for field trips and other excursions, and another teacher was quick to add that an all-staff commitment to using less fossil fuels in our personal lives would set an example for our student body.
Everyone agreed. A few teachers waited afterwards organizing carpools.
I had never seen such an outpouring of creative energy in such a formal, fluorescent-lit setting. The School Director encouraged everyone to participate vigorously in the debate and add their own views.
The direction our school takes in the coming years, he said, is something we all help steer. Our thoughts, our vision, our creativity are all crucial to the school's growth and success.
And not success as conventional schooling would have you define it, he added. Success is not what the technocrats in the education establishment call "student achievement," nor is it measured by "test scores"; rather, it is the extent to which our school grows to serve the community and the local landbase, the extent to which we as teachers inspire our students to conceptualize a communal life of resilient food systems and vibrant local culture forged from the ashes of our current alienating way of life.
It was great, really.
I only wish it were true.
The truth is, I have a crippling anxiety about working as a functionary of a multi-level institution. I cringe at the terms of technocracy: "skill-set", "inventory", "buy-in", "student achievement", "funding streams", "institutional viability", et al.
And when sitting in a meeting of reluctant technocrats, of mid-level bureaucrats fulfilling the call of the industrial juggernaut to increase the ranks of young workers, my mind--like most of theirs--completely shuts down.
The Director talks. We listen.
We listen, but only half-heartedly, and rarely are we given an avenue to interject our opinions. Opinions, when they are voiced, are mumbled outside in the hallway on the way to the bathroom:
"This shit sucks, man."
"Why the hell do we have to sit through this?"
"I could shoot myself."
"I'm just glad I have my i-phone."
The modern bureaucratic institution, though compiled of individuals with their own goals and ideals--some of whom are extremely forward-thinking and discontent with the status quo--eventually acquires a life of its own, a life anathema to all spontaneity and open discourse.
We see this with businesses, social services, governments, schools. We see this with international aid institutions, universities, environmental organizations even.
The bureacratic institution easily loses focus on its ostensible goal--in the case of my employer, educating at-risk youth--and settles into working solely to extend its own lifespan, to find new sources of funding, to keep itself afloat. No one dare question the overall goal itself, or how it is best achieved amid the changing circumstances of our current historical era, with its diminishing biodiversity and rapidly increasing human population, its changing climate and decreasing energy supplies.
Creativity is crushed, to the extent that even those with fresh ideas find themselves pitted against entrenched practices and the comfort of those higher up on the hierarchical chain. Most people--if they are human--feel stifled by the air of the institution, by the protocols it follows, the rigid guidelines it imposes on the infinitely dynamic processes of idea-generation and idea-sharing, yet few have words to express it.
Their voices, and the thoughts that give birth to them, have been silenced for too long, crushed out by dull lectures in classrooms through adolescence, by television and movies, video games and mass spectacles and alcohol since then. This is one more instance of boredom to press through before they get to drive home and watch reality TV. Before they get to sit back, relax, and crack open a beer.
And nothing ever changes.
Nothing ever does, they sigh.
The ultimate tragedy of modern institutions is that it is only through standardization that groups of civilized human beings appear to be able to get anything done. Without the hierarchical structure of a bureaucracy, a motley group like ours would function like a chicken with its head cut off. Although everyone I work with seems to resent our director for his dull facilitation of what could otherwise be productive meetings, no one dare challenge his power openly for fear of being censured by the group.
The age-old longing for a slave master over-powers our burgeoning creativity and we submit, willingly, to the logic of subordination.
We present ideas to our director like hesitant bards reciting poems before a magistrate. If his brow twitches, we know we may have gotten through. But in practice, we find his vision is lacking. He sees "funding streams," not potentialities. Nor does he see the futility of fighting to keep an institution afloat within a civilization that is fast approaching ecological calamity. The burdens of driving our institution weighs him down with the practical necessity of fitting our educational paradigm within the over-arching paradigm of industrial-technological civilization, so that he cannot question that civilization, he cannot peer at the roots and see just how rotten they are.
His job--like all of ours should we choose to operate within this extractive economy--depends precisely upon his willingness to not see, to remain oblivious, to keep civilization chugging along into the next quarter, next year, next decade.
Who can even begin to question the proper course of education for our youth without reckoning with the very real global crisis we now face?
The only antidote to this appears to me to be a radical denial of hierarchy, wherever we find it. Meetings may need moderators, but who says these must function as anchors miring us in the mud of practicality? Moderators should be open circuits that help transition ideas from the conceptualization phase to the development phase, not walls into which they fly and collapse dead to the floor.
Moderators need not be directors, either. In fact, the denial of hierarchy is best practiced by having anyone willing to moderate a meeting. All employees can function as moderators, so long as collective agreements are made as to how the meeting should function.
Is this ideal of institutional anarchy achievable? I think that with proper vision an institution can unite itself around a collective mission that draws its power not from "directors," "middle-managers," or "facilitators," but from the creative heart slumbering inside each of its members.
But institutional anarchy will always threaten the bedrock logic of institutionalization, which proclaims that human energies must be standardized, rigid, calculable. It is an oxymoron, but if we were all to come to terms with the very real prospect of ecological and economic collapse within the next decade, it would suddenly become imperative that we start re-thinking all of our paradigms--be they educational, agricultural, political--with or without the support of our leaders.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Education and Its Discontents
The 9 month school year is a vicious torture created by foolish bureaucrats years ago, and yet we stick to it, not questioning.
Think about the human soul,
Think about the seasons,
How in summer the soul blossoms,
how you walk for hours,
play for hours,
run for hours,
travel, journey, traipse,
without wondering about the time.
And then in the fall, we enter our
school rooms, black dungeons,
we join the others who've had
their own peculiar journeys.
We don't discuss anything about our lives, our feelings, those infinitely minuscule developments and diversions that our soul has taken in the time passed. We walk into a room, and we sit.
And we look out the window. And outside the sky turns greyer.
The sun leaves us, slowly, and the earth grows cold.
And inside, we keep ignoring everything, as the vibrancy and life of the summer seems farther and farther away.
School is a terrible, terrible thing.
For those who hate it, it's painful, it brings terror, nausea, fear, dread.
There are those who have felt the dread before, and those who have not.
Those who know the terror of Sunday evenings when the light turns a melancholic blue... The belly aches, the rush to finish homework, the agony to "get ready" for bed.
The sun goes down, and slowly, silently, all Play exits the world.
We lose that Play more and more as we age.
"Time to go inside!"
"Time to sit down!"
"Time to watch a movie!"
"Time to read!"
"Time to bed!"
Something in us rebels against that soporific Siren, wooing us to sleep. But the schoolmasters charter us to go to the schoolhouse and sit, as our youths die with the dying of each summer, the dying of each day.
Imagine the child of any creature, the youth of any age, being put into a stockade while the hormones and visions of immaturity still rage within their fevered blood--what would come of them?
The child of the bear, in chains,
The child of the wolf, in a lunch room,
The child of the deer, set before a TV screen,
Imagine the sadness of bears and wolves and deer swept each morning inside just such a cage,
for it is a cage,
and we are wild creatures domesticated,
raised in nets and kept on display,
we are names on a ledger,
budget dollars on a page,
we are a source of revenue for the State,
we keep the politicians in power,
and keep the mega machine of Progress chugging along,
Imagine a beast so blind as to will its own servility,
Imagine a beast so afraid that having the world open to it, rushes back inside its cage,
Imagine a beast watching the sun in the shadows it makes through the blinds,
Imagine a beast that eats cereal shipped in by a truck, a beast that devours whatever calorie source it can get its teeth into,
a beast that can't outrun the weakest of its own kind.
Imagine an animal that NO LONGER RUNS.
That says, to its youngest, liveliest: "NO RUNNING."
Inside, you must not run.
Inside, you must sit down.
Inside, you must stay put.
Inside, you must fold your legs, and wait.
It is a sad thing that having engineered such a cruel, unjust system, that crushes the will of the wildest and robs them of their fangs, that we then sacrifice the best of our reformers to working within this tottering, deceitful facade. We seem to lack the creativity to cast the whole thing to the devil and let a new education rise from its ashes. We seem afraid to simply open the doors to our cage and . . . walk free. There's something about the boundlessness of the "Real World" that frightens us, even our teachers. Even the brightest, strongest of us would rather have our teeth pulled and refitted by the State than risk getting a cavity. The cruelest of us would rather be declawed. We're worried about what we might do to ourselves, or what might be done to us--we haven't the courage of real criminals who simply do as the moment demands of them.
The cage is safe. The meals come on time. The rent is always due at the 4th of the month, and the gas and water soon after. We PAY for our portion of the ecological debt. We get money and give it out to get our portion of the future Mid-Western desert, our taste of the dwindling Ogalalla. We've got to eat, don't we? Who can argue with that? We've got to have our car, right?
How early we take on this identity as civilized, caged creatures, creatures raised for cities, for conversations, for computers, like hogs in a feedlot. Shoot 'em out, fatten 'em up, and throw them on the platter for the mechanical death droids of progress. Shoot us full of antibiotics and send us out into the "real world." Put us behind the wheel of a car so we can get a "real job." Get us away from nature, away from experience, away from every other, away from ourselves. Put me in a tiny box, plug me full of downloaded (or pirated) music, and make me feel groovy.
Get a load of this future. It feels good, doesn't it? This is what we set our students up for, and the 9 month calendar assures us of this. Any growth had during the summer is washed out in the first few weeks of government food. The abstraction from nature continues, accelerates, and we shed off any of those claws, fangs, horns, those dreams, talents, aspirations, that may have germinated over the summer months. We chug them through the winter, when the days are shortest, the nights longest, and the perils greatest.
In the winter, the soul really can lose itself. Christmas comes and the year opens--family, presents, friends--and school is out. Resolutions are made, things begin to come together again as the scars of the fall semester begin to heal--and then it re-begins. The masquerade. The death dance. And it plugs on and on and on and on, until June.
June! Pretty soon, the countdown for summer vacation BEGINS.
Do you see the irony? All hope, joy, peace, patience, endurance, fortitude, grace, fullness, begins with the thought of that summer sun, of the moment school is over and we can re-emerge into the light, when that new dawn of the post-adolescence period is over and we can run freely-- but not to college! No, no more of the torture! We instill in our wildest a hatred of learning, because learning is most dangerous for them! If they were to truly grow into consciousness of THEMSELVES it would be our undoing! We would all run for the hills! If their voices ever spoke truly, truthfully, if purpose ever ruled their tongue... WOW!
What would be left to the guards manning the fortresses of futurity? How could they withstand the assault? A tidal wave of energy would bust the banks of every river, every avenue, street, channel, canyon... There would be no end to the wrath, and beyond the wrath, renewal. A gigantic tide shifting under the forces of intergalactic energy... Moon, Sun, Earth aligned, human hearts aligned, shaken, but now aligned. That great last moment of greatest friction when the new order almost locks into place, that great moment of greatest upheaval, of challenge, of cruelty, of confusion, which precedes any great coming together, any reunion-- that is where we now stand.
7 days until the end of School! Forever!
(Forever?)
Think about the human soul,
Think about the seasons,
How in summer the soul blossoms,
how you walk for hours,
play for hours,
run for hours,
travel, journey, traipse,
without wondering about the time.
And then in the fall, we enter our
school rooms, black dungeons,
we join the others who've had
their own peculiar journeys.
We don't discuss anything about our lives, our feelings, those infinitely minuscule developments and diversions that our soul has taken in the time passed. We walk into a room, and we sit.
And we look out the window. And outside the sky turns greyer.
The sun leaves us, slowly, and the earth grows cold.
And inside, we keep ignoring everything, as the vibrancy and life of the summer seems farther and farther away.
School is a terrible, terrible thing.
For those who hate it, it's painful, it brings terror, nausea, fear, dread.
There are those who have felt the dread before, and those who have not.
Those who know the terror of Sunday evenings when the light turns a melancholic blue... The belly aches, the rush to finish homework, the agony to "get ready" for bed.
The sun goes down, and slowly, silently, all Play exits the world.
We lose that Play more and more as we age.
"Time to go inside!"
"Time to sit down!"
"Time to watch a movie!"
"Time to read!"
"Time to bed!"
Something in us rebels against that soporific Siren, wooing us to sleep. But the schoolmasters charter us to go to the schoolhouse and sit, as our youths die with the dying of each summer, the dying of each day.
Imagine the child of any creature, the youth of any age, being put into a stockade while the hormones and visions of immaturity still rage within their fevered blood--what would come of them?
The child of the bear, in chains,
The child of the wolf, in a lunch room,
The child of the deer, set before a TV screen,
Imagine the sadness of bears and wolves and deer swept each morning inside just such a cage,
for it is a cage,
and we are wild creatures domesticated,
raised in nets and kept on display,
we are names on a ledger,
budget dollars on a page,
we are a source of revenue for the State,
we keep the politicians in power,
and keep the mega machine of Progress chugging along,
Imagine a beast so blind as to will its own servility,
Imagine a beast so afraid that having the world open to it, rushes back inside its cage,
Imagine a beast watching the sun in the shadows it makes through the blinds,
Imagine a beast that eats cereal shipped in by a truck, a beast that devours whatever calorie source it can get its teeth into,
a beast that can't outrun the weakest of its own kind.
Imagine an animal that NO LONGER RUNS.
That says, to its youngest, liveliest: "NO RUNNING."
Inside, you must not run.
Inside, you must sit down.
Inside, you must stay put.
Inside, you must fold your legs, and wait.
It is a sad thing that having engineered such a cruel, unjust system, that crushes the will of the wildest and robs them of their fangs, that we then sacrifice the best of our reformers to working within this tottering, deceitful facade. We seem to lack the creativity to cast the whole thing to the devil and let a new education rise from its ashes. We seem afraid to simply open the doors to our cage and . . . walk free. There's something about the boundlessness of the "Real World" that frightens us, even our teachers. Even the brightest, strongest of us would rather have our teeth pulled and refitted by the State than risk getting a cavity. The cruelest of us would rather be declawed. We're worried about what we might do to ourselves, or what might be done to us--we haven't the courage of real criminals who simply do as the moment demands of them.
The cage is safe. The meals come on time. The rent is always due at the 4th of the month, and the gas and water soon after. We PAY for our portion of the ecological debt. We get money and give it out to get our portion of the future Mid-Western desert, our taste of the dwindling Ogalalla. We've got to eat, don't we? Who can argue with that? We've got to have our car, right?
How early we take on this identity as civilized, caged creatures, creatures raised for cities, for conversations, for computers, like hogs in a feedlot. Shoot 'em out, fatten 'em up, and throw them on the platter for the mechanical death droids of progress. Shoot us full of antibiotics and send us out into the "real world." Put us behind the wheel of a car so we can get a "real job." Get us away from nature, away from experience, away from every other, away from ourselves. Put me in a tiny box, plug me full of downloaded (or pirated) music, and make me feel groovy.
Get a load of this future. It feels good, doesn't it? This is what we set our students up for, and the 9 month calendar assures us of this. Any growth had during the summer is washed out in the first few weeks of government food. The abstraction from nature continues, accelerates, and we shed off any of those claws, fangs, horns, those dreams, talents, aspirations, that may have germinated over the summer months. We chug them through the winter, when the days are shortest, the nights longest, and the perils greatest.
In the winter, the soul really can lose itself. Christmas comes and the year opens--family, presents, friends--and school is out. Resolutions are made, things begin to come together again as the scars of the fall semester begin to heal--and then it re-begins. The masquerade. The death dance. And it plugs on and on and on and on, until June.
June! Pretty soon, the countdown for summer vacation BEGINS.
Do you see the irony? All hope, joy, peace, patience, endurance, fortitude, grace, fullness, begins with the thought of that summer sun, of the moment school is over and we can re-emerge into the light, when that new dawn of the post-adolescence period is over and we can run freely-- but not to college! No, no more of the torture! We instill in our wildest a hatred of learning, because learning is most dangerous for them! If they were to truly grow into consciousness of THEMSELVES it would be our undoing! We would all run for the hills! If their voices ever spoke truly, truthfully, if purpose ever ruled their tongue... WOW!
What would be left to the guards manning the fortresses of futurity? How could they withstand the assault? A tidal wave of energy would bust the banks of every river, every avenue, street, channel, canyon... There would be no end to the wrath, and beyond the wrath, renewal. A gigantic tide shifting under the forces of intergalactic energy... Moon, Sun, Earth aligned, human hearts aligned, shaken, but now aligned. That great last moment of greatest friction when the new order almost locks into place, that great moment of greatest upheaval, of challenge, of cruelty, of confusion, which precedes any great coming together, any reunion-- that is where we now stand.
7 days until the end of School! Forever!
(Forever?)
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