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HUMAN-SCALE BIOREGIONS ARE NOT UTOPIAN SOLUTIONS
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- GEORGE SAND
- Liberation of the Spirit
HUMAN-SCALE BIOREGIONS ARE NOT UTOPIAN SOLUTIONS1. HUMAN-SCALE SOCIETIES ARE PROVEN ALTERNATIVES Kirkpatrick Sale, author, Secretary of the E.F. Schumacher Society, HUMAN SCALE, 1980, page 40-1. Finally, the evidence continues to mount that such a human-scale future is, at least in its major aspects, proven. Models for almost every part of such a future already exists now, or have existed in the very recent past, in many different nations of the world, including our own: the worker-owned plywood companies of the Pacific Northwest; the ecologically-sound and solar-powered community of Davis, California; the consensual democracy practiced by Quaker meetings across the county; the worker self-management schemes of Yugoslavian factories; the non-hierarchical societies of Eastern Africa; the self-sufficient intentional communities, from Twin Oaks, Virginia, to Cerro Gordo, Oregon; the generations-old communes of the Jews in Israel, the Amana colonies in Iowa, the Bruderhof in New York, and others; the direct democracy of various New England communities; the non-authoritarian work programs of many American corporations; the cooperative movements of the United States, Canada, and Britain; and countless other pieces of evidence that we shall be exploring in later sections. None of these models is perfect, by any means; some are deeply flawed, and none of them exhibits all the elements of a human-scale life as it might be in optimum form. Yet taken together, the successful innovation of this one with the most durable practice of that, they show that all the elements of such a life, far from being utopian, are practical and possible, should we wish to pursue them.
Kirkpatrick Sale, author, Secretary of the E.F. Schumacher Society, HUMAN SCALE, 1980, page 39-40. The alternative future is somewhat less likely than the technofix one, I should think, since it calls for somewhat broader changes over time, and for the dislocation of powers that, despite being caught in recurrent double-binds, retain considerable momentum. But it is by no means a utopian pipe-dream, and there are many reasons to imagine its coming about. It accords with some of the deepest instincts of the human animal, possibly encoded in our DNA, such as the drive for individual expression, for tribal and community sustenance, for harmony with the natural world of stars and trees and songbirds, for companionship and cooperation. It accords with the experience of by far the greatest part of human history, from the earliest settlements right down to many parts of the world today, during which people lived in compact villages and self-contained towns and cities, crafting and farming for themselves, knit to other settlements through travel and trade without any sacrifice of sovereignty. And it accords with much that is rooted in the American experience, such as the anti-authoritarian beliefs of the Pilgrim settlers, the traditions of cooperation and self-sufficiency that grew up in the early towns, the town meeting democracies that extended at one time from New England to Virginia, the rural and agrarian values among the Founding Fathers, their suspicion of authority and centralism, and the tenets of individualism that for generations drove people from the cities to the frontier.
WRITER 1804 - 1876Life and Work Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, who later changed her name to George Sand, was born into a family of decadence and wealth (her rich father had openly sired several illegitimate children) and spent most of her life based at Nohant, her Grandmother’s pastoral home in Berry, France. Nohant would always be her home, but she frequently traveled to and worked in Paris, which, during the Nineteenth Century, was the center of European intellectual and political radicalism. Sometimes inspired by these intellectual and political currents, other times consciously uninspired by them, she wrote prolifically until her death. She is remembered as a passionate humanist, romanticist, and mystic; her writings span subjects including marriage, socialism, feminism, gothic romance, pastoral peasantry, and inner subjective soul-searching. Unlike so many writers, she fought with a vengeance against being labeled. Sand gained notoriety with her first novel, Indiana, published in 1832. It was the story of an unhappy wife struggling to free herself from an oppressive marriage. While she continued to publish equally successful novels, Sand also worked as a journalist, covering the events leading up to the 1848 Revolution and its bloody, chaotic aftermath. Her writings also addressed gender, music and theater, and she seemed adept at most any intellectual subject While she defied categorization, two certain themes ran across the majority of her work: (1) Liberation and Social Reform, and (2) Gender Distinctions. Liberation of the SpiritSand had an involved interest in the philosophy and practice of social liberation. The corrupt French Government was replaced by a provisional body in 1848, which claimed to speak for the interests of the masses. This appealed to Sand, who wrote propaganda for the government until she became disillusioned by the mob violence in Paris that followed, as well as by the corrupt government of Louis Bonaparte (also called Napoleon III), who had wormed his way into public confidence. This inspired Sand to withdraw from political causes, but not before she had come out, both politically and in her novels, as a supporter of utopian socialism. Her model of the ideal citizen was the peasant farmer, hardworking, dedicated to his community, at peace with himself. Since Sand was not interested in the economics or mechanics of capitalism and socialism, her idealistic images were limited to the interpersonal and aesthetic (or artistic) aspects of such revolutionary reform. But for her, liberation was not simply a political act, and one need not only be liberated from unjust laws or oppressive economic conditions. Anticipating Twentieth Century Postmodernism, Sand longed for liberation from the very structuralist thinking behind such laws or economic conditions. Being a Romantic, she saw true human freedom in spontaneity and “play” rather than in conforming to the structures of thinking or action that even progressive revolutionaries seemed unable to escape. For this, she was labeled a ‘mystic,’ a designation she did not dispute, although her attitude that a change in consciousness is necessary for positive social change does not sound nearly as controversial today as it did a hundred years ago. 1848, after all, was the year that Karl Marx and Friedrick Engels published The Communist Manifesto, a document their followers hailed as the triumph of a “scientific socialism” which declared not only capitalism, but also utopian (or mystical, or religious) socialism as its mortal enemies. For Marxists, true communism had to recognize that individuals were products of society in the same sense as non-human nature or commodities objects, with the possible exception that humans can change their material circumstances. And since Marxists believe that this change can only come through the actions of macro social forces, for them, Sand’s Romantic individualism was good for little more than poetic inspiration. But Sand would remain convinced that individual consciousness does matter. This belief would be validated by her experiences of the mob violence and corruption that she witnessed. In the name of liberation, and using the dogma of democracy or socialism to validate most any violent action, people around her became as corrupt as the regime they opposed. True liberationists, she held, must stand above such oppression and refuse to be pulled down to the enemy’s level. 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