Beyond Civilization

Since my last post, I have read two more books by Daniel Quinn (can you tell that I'm out of school?), My Ishmael and Beyond Civilization. I've actually reached the bottom of that stack of books (with another to take its place, of course). My Ishmael, the sequel to Ishmael, was largely redundant, it seemed, except that it gave a happy ending for the plot line, and it also went into the actual purpose of school. Beyond Civilization attempted to give concrete answers as to where to go from the theory Quinn presents. It really ends up being a really good non-answer. Our civilization is based on the belief that there is only one right way to live, and this is it (it just doesn't work because we are all flawed and need to be improved somehow before it'll work perfectly, as it's designed to). His response or answer or non-answer is that there is no one right way for people to live. It is the very fact that everyone is living the same way now, as opposed to a diversity of ways, that makes what we are doing unsustainable, forcing ourselves into one big unnatural niche in the environment instead of the millions of niches available (and sustainable) in each person's particular location (local, not global). So he proposes one way that evolution has shown to be effective in the past (just 10,000 years ago, having been developed over the 3 millions years we've been on this earth), and that way is the tribe. It is a way that accepts people as they are, acceeding to their imperfections. The old tribes he is looking to as models were ethnic closed tribes, whose existence focused around cooperating to make a living through a diversity of ways (foraging, hunting, various levels of agriculture and shepherding). He proposes open tribes in which people work together and are interdependent on each other to make a living. This is not a commune, in which people simply live together. It is a paradigm shift from hierarchy to balance and equality. His vision challenged me in two ways. First, he dispelled the notion of seeking voluntary poverty, because people cannot be inspired by a vision of the future in which they are giving up something, as opposed to gaining something. What people would gain by embracing a tribal lifestyle is security for life. There is, of course, still a trade off of letting go of materialistic comforts to some degree, but that is not the focus; it's not the goal. The goal is acheiving security (quite selfishly, but still in a way that benefits the whole tribe). The second way he challenges me with this vision is that he does not move to resist or actively change the larger hierarchical systems but to still work within them, just in a radically different way. So he is calling me to market my skills for the benefit of the tribe. (my problem has always been "what skills?! and where could i possibly employ them?"). I can definitely accept his point of view on the first issue, but not completely on the second. I still feel that we have a responsibility to struggle against the institutions in place, if only to breed more resistance. Other than that, I really like his ideas, or his challenge to be inventive and generate ideas, rather. Although there is still always the challenge of finding tribe members.