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Guidelines
towards an ecologically inspired model of citizenship mindful of "THE
EARTHLY NEEDS OF THE BODY AND THE SOUL" (S.WEIL)[1]
por
Sylvia María Valls
GUIDELINES TOWARDS AN ECOLOGICALLY INSPIRED MODEL OF
CITIZENSHIP MINDFUL OF "THE EARTHLY NEEDS OF THE BODY AND THE SOUL"
(S.WEIL) APPENDICES follow…pp. 15- 41, Index infra p. 14.
l. The
model is set forth taking into consideration a basic assumption which is itself
the result of an extended process of observation on the part of many
philosophers, ecologists,
theologians, sociologists etc...:
that the survival of the species and,
with it, the physical and spiritual health of earthly beings, will depend upon
our ability to "think globally, act locally".
To think "globally" as members of a universal or worldwide
ecological system that can not be contained by frontiers and by political
establishments that appear today as
unnatural as they are historically and socially
obsolete ; at the same time, that
being alert to global realities, and to global interests, demands that one
recognize the importance of
restoring to localities a greater margin of control as
to what goes on at home.
What is at stake, briefly,
is the need to think the integrity of the globe while one acts primarily at the
local level. . . Think globally, act locally.
2. Following
Simone Weil's reasoning in relation to the "earthly needs of the body and
the soul" [see Appendix] and her critique of nationalism for being
responsible for the destruction of local traditions, this model seeks to restore
to the locality, to the municipality or the county, through the agency of the
extended family, schools, churches, trade ‑unions, civil associations,
corporations etc...the task of recognizing peoples' full status as citizens at
their places of temporary and/or permanent residence. (Nationalism, Simone Weil
observed, amounted to the negative triumph
of the abstract over what is concrete :
a city, she says, is thinkable, it has a direct relationship, visceral,
tangible with my childhood and with my destiny whereas the "nation" is
so all‑ encompassing that it finally becomes little more than its symbols
‑code of arms, flag, anthem : excuses for those wars destructive
of everything that for me is truly precious such as my house, my home,
family, friends, field, animals, garden, town square, temples, monuments that
stand for experiences shared by successive generations, that pond hidden away,
the sea, la mar, my tongue, the tongue that is my mother's tongue, that
of my brothers, companions, with whom I can share, fraternize, it is this which
is one's patria, one's homeland, the purveyors of what in the country of
one's heart is truly of value, what is fragile and hence, alone, worthy of
sacrifice : the nation-state, on the other hand, sacrifices me instead, in
exchange for what, if not for deadening lies ‑‑ it is the greatest
of frauds, the true demiurge of today, the false god...).
The public sphere, nevertheless, in terms of people's movement back and
forth, would limit its functions to those of registration and verification of
the current status of the person as determined by law, carrying on its tasks
with the help of the private sphere and with the most advanced communications
technology at our disposal, facilitating instead of obstructing documentation.
Briefly, it is a matter of getting citizenship to act as an instrument
for the protection of human beings instead of their disenfranchisement.
3. Membership
in a local community would not erase membership that has been acquired in
another one; on the contrary, it
would be possible throughout an entire lifetime to continue building on a
lifelong curriculum of citizenship in a variety of localities throughout a
region, continent or the globe as inter-municipal networks develop far and wide:
naturally, the principle of reciprocity would have to rule
exchanges between and amongst localities. The
networks would be multiple and could intercross and intertwine without much
conflict (for example, there would be networks of exchange that would emerge
from common interests at the level of the bioregion; others that would emerge
from exchanges rooted in linguistic and cultural affinities or complementarities
of a certain type; others, still, that would help to coordinate and to regulate
the production and distribution of shoes or of artichokes, of medical services,
of the fishing industry and/or water sports etc...).
4. The disorder and chaos generated by population
explosion and by monetary bottlenecks, by the waste that results from
overproduction unleashing scarcity (as when the farmer is ruined by too
plentiful a crop so that he then fails to earn what is required) etc..., while
not prone to be eliminated entirely, would still be greatly alleviated as long
as our "marvelous machines" are used for the extension of truly
useful programs developed with the understanding that nothing positive is to
come of a technology for which we are not capable of finding an adequate, alert
programming oriented towards the satisfaction of the real bodily and spiritual
needs of human beings.
Recognizing that any
solution to a problem is apt to generate other kinds of problems (a
situation referred to by Ivan Illich as the factor of ´´counterproductivity,´´
with iatrogenesis constituting its specific case in the field of medicine
--so that you are charged first for getting rid of one ailment, then for getting
rid of the one generated under such a peculiar brand of ´´health management´´
mystification), it is necessary
to put into action solutions whose outcome will not make the balance of our
misery as a species even worse than it already is but, rather, raise the
general quality of life throughout our societies while diminishing the
levels of oppression, injustice, of bodily and spiritual hunger. (It is
enough to want to diminish them considerably, instead of pretending to
eradicate them altogether since the latter is hardly possible, either in the
long or in the short run: basically,
any kind of ´´radical fundamentalism´´ for the sake of ´´justice´´
tends to generate more harm than good.)
The required information, concepts, knowledge and wisdom exist, but they are splintered throughout an immense, complex network of
electronic brains that are at once biological and manmade :
there is no existing political machinery, there is no "second
wave" government (see Toffler,
appendix), able to handle successfully all the requirements for adequate
documentation and identification of individuals and their communities ; and, even
when the system might seemingly tend towards efficiency instead of chaos, a
centralized power appears increasingly capricious and alien to our concrete and
circumstantial reality, constantly exposed as we are to sudden and unexpected
change. The (supposedly) "efficient" industrial civilization that
consolidated the tendencies towards centralization in almost every aspect of our
lives must at last give way to another type of social, political, economic
organization that has the inherent capacity to "process" the existing
information and to create the kinds of programs for which our societies across
the globe are clamoring. Those
who manage to survive what might befall us within a relatively short period of
time will find themselves having to legislate so that the citizenry will be
fully protected within a context that is no longer national but
supranational: local or municipal, regional and interregional.
(Unfortunately, increasingly little hope appears to be left that change
will come about outside of a legal context of ´´exceptionality´´ or ´´de
facto´´, [especially after the transparently fraudulent elections in Florida
that has put the Bushes and their cohorts back in the Presidency].)
The fact is that most of our gadgets are badly used (inefficiently and/or
to the wrong purpose‑‑lacking efficacy) simply because the
intelligent programs fail to arrive in time to match the rapid arrival in the
market of our dazzling equipment (without going much further into the reasons
why : as in other areas, our
disastrous habit of putting the cart before the horse, or of turning the means
into an end, has led us to favor the proliferation of the means
‑‑ the computers ‑‑ over and above the realization
of their legitimate end which is the communication of intelligent programs).
What is needed, then, first
and foremost, in order to redress
such a dangerous situation as presently obtains, is to become universally
conscious of the unsustainability of the nation-state;
that this hybrid monster which has grown to unhealthy, life threatening
proportions, and which continues to bring forth smaller versions of itself
throughout the globe without the slightest regard for human misery, must be
clinically and effectively dismantled now that at last we have the
technology on hand, as much as the programmatic potential, that
will allow us to change "quantity of life" for
"quality" as a criterion of health and of well‑being.
A most important aspect of
the kind of awareness that is required for our survival, of course, involves not
only the realization that our notions of "national sovereignty" are as
meaningless as they are dangerous, but that it is not life itself,
unqualifiedly, that must be regarded as "sacred" but the values that
make a life worth living: the earthly needs of the body must
be satisfied, indeed, only in order to allow human beings to nourish
their souls so that they may learn to transcend themselves in the very act of
fully realizing themselves¼ (t the same time, the "dichotomy"
body/soul must be seen to function only half/way ; sexual union ‑‑ which in Simone Weil's list of
"needs" shone by its absence ‑‑ would seem to mark that
crucial point of intersection between the two dimensions.
Similarly, the experience of sacred communion consists of a marvelous
state thanks to which the body/spirit inverts its polarity, so to speak :
the body empties itself in the spirit, and the spirit in the body, so
that "the opposites coincide" (noting, with S.Weil, that the "coincidentia
oppositorum" occurs at
a higher level of understanding and realization, "not on the same plane,
somewhere in between the two").
The joy of the mystic is
that of a supremely accomplished sensualist (´´St.´´ Paul, not
necessarily what you might call a mystic, once acknowledged that "the
paradox of the spirit is that it must manifest itself through material things");
thus, for Simone Weil, "Beauty is the smile of tenderness that Christ
sends to the creature through the material world."
5. Following
what has so far been set forth : Only a system of interlocking networks throughout our
communities, from house to house, from house to agency, to school, from school
to school, amongst the different public entities both public and private, will
be able to sort out the immense wealth of information that is out there, with
the sufficient intelligence, speed, and flexibility to put to test and to revise
effectively and efficiently the programs that alone will be able to satisfy our
needs as human beings‑‑ needs
which proliferate within an ever growing shuffleboard of relationships in
constant movement that characterize our human enterprise. We need people, jobs,
the product of our labor, services, capital, knowledge, to be able to move with
ease so that the maximum utilization of resources may be obtained, understanding
that the maximum utilization refers to criteria of global value that goes beyond
our own immediacy in both time and space, criteria of quality and not
merely of quantity (see, in the Appendices, an appeal to sensible farming
beautifully made time and again by Wendell Berry, insisting on the pride of
good farming that returns to the land what it has taken, among other things).
We are talking about
responsible behavior across national frontiers as much as beyond our own
generation.
To stop confusing the means with the end in itself entails, in the case
of public agencies, recognizing for oneself a limited, transitory function. No government can
guarantee the happiness of its citizens, or that each one will realize in a
complete way his human potential : but a government can and should look
after the ability of its citizens to organize themselves in order to undertake
pertinent initiatives with a view to bettering their chances of satisfying their
multiple needs. The latter
implies an activity that is of the order of the governor of a ship, as Simone
Weil sought, thanks to which a slight pressure here or there will act so as to
restore the necessary balance and keep us in course as soon as an imbalance or
deviation makes itself felt. No
more. Nor less.
This principle understands that one of the needs of the soul is to participate in a tasks of public utility or of collective
interest and to be able to exercise one's personal initiative in the
performance of that task. One
of the things I believe to be involved here is what Toffler refers to as the
tendency towards "adhocization", or that spontaneous emergence of
groups "for this" and "for that" ‑‑ ad hoc
‑‑ whose life is briefer, or longer, pending the issue at hand,
usually very specific and more or less restricted in time and scope: a
characteristically "third wave" trait, indeed.
Which, remarkably ‑‑however‑‑ should not
entail the kind of corruption presently discernible whereby the private sphere
enters into the public and the public into the private with nefarious
consequences. It entails, rather, the careful separation ‑‑ to
the extent that the latter may appear necessary and possible ‑‑
of what is public from what is private, discarding, once and for all the
incomprehensible juridical concept that allows an external authority to rule our
lives in things that pertain to persons in their intimacy and consensual
relations.
For the public domain, what would not be acceptable is for the personal
initiative to deviate from the collective purpose in order to satisfy purely
private ones. It would allow for a
public agency to intervene, upon request by a private party, within the sphere
of private life, but without the ability to impose very easily within this
sphere criteria of common consensus concerning matters which, by their very
nature, should remain subject to the discretion of private individuals between
or amongst themselves or between the individual and his own conscience (or
"God"). This is a
principle that implies tolerance and an effort to maintain the tension between
parties, among persons and between individuals and society, or among different
societies, at a tolerable level. It implies discarding altogether the notion
of ´´crime´´ from the sphere of consensual activity:
Where there is no victim there can be no crime¼ Suicide as the assassination of oneself (fallo da se) was an
invention that we owe to St. Augustine´s concern with preventing Christians
from opting for a better life in the hereafter, instead of remaining on this
side of the divide, where the institutional Church required of their vital
existence in view of the ultimate objective of worldly expansion.
Better slaves than martyrs.
6. Such
a model of citizenship assumes a drastically different approach to what
constitutes our "security" and puts into question the
innumerable fallacies of the very notion of "national security".
There can be no "national security", nor local, nor global,
that is not rooted in an awareness of the realities confronting us in terms of
planetary safety and which concern everyone in an equal measure ;
similarly, the "nation" (to the extent such a term can signify
anything that is very concrete) will not survive unless local communities cease
to be thwarted in their efforts to control their own destinies within a
framework of relationships that is respectful of its peculiarities
‑‑ cultural, linguistic, historical, natural, bioregional--
perceived as part of a whole that transcends the particular but that at
the same time is, necessarily and healthfully so, composed of particularities.
What has been said in relation to the sphere of the private and of the
public may be applied to the laws that are to govern the exchanges between the
locality ‑‑ the municipality ‑‑ and that which is to
govern inter-local or inter-municipal relations at the level of the multiple
continental and intercontinental regions. An experimental period of transition
could include the possibility of a dual track for citizenship that will allow us
to be citizens of an entire country at the same time that one creates a curriculum
of citizenship in one or several local communities beyond present
national frontiers.
These dual‑track citizens would be exempt from military service in
the traditional sense but might accept duties in conformity with the morality of
a single planet for all earthly beings : to
be able to nourish several homelands at the local level across existing national
frontiers is something that is in conformity with the possibilities and
requirements of our advanced communications technology just as it is in
conformity with our already well established concern regarding the solution of
the extraordinary ecological problems confronting us. It is also something that is in perfect agreement with the
need to establish roots in several natural environments, in the wider sense
suggested by Simone Weil and,
also, one way to begin to resolve the
problems of "minority" ethnic groups (racial, religious,
linguistic) in many "nations" or "republics" whose efforts
to function as centralized ´´powers´´ have been unleashing explosive
tensions in so many places. Think of Ireland and of Great
Britain, of the complex culture of Mexico, of the (former) Soviet Union, of
recent events in Iraq, of Israel and the Palestinians, of Canada vis à vis
Quebec, Spain vis à vis the Basque movement for independence etc...not to
mention Yugoslavia or the Balkans. Unless
we tend to these problems soon, we will see more and more countries torn asunder
by inner conflicts of just such a nature emerging everywhere [as we have
seen and are unfortunately, increasingly seeing¼]
An interim arrangement that could be of some help is for
multi‑national couples and their children to be able to entertain full
citizenship in at least two countries.
Stop separating families!
Rather than burning all of our national flags, it would be very good if
we could agree to confine them, respectfully so, to a new kind of museum
dedicated to preserving the relics of "unnatural history".
7. In
keeping with the model of citizenship envisioned is the principle, generally
accepted, that a type of investment that tends to act in a most harmful sort of
way for the health and
stability of the community is defined by absenteeism, these days increasingly in the form of free-floating investments, one day
here the other gone. Absentee landlords and entrepreneurs (the state
included) tend by nature to be less careful and less respectful than those who
think of themselves as destined to reside in a place for a long time or from
generation to generation ; when the
principal proprietors of the land, house, enterprise, feel themselves destined
to reside with full obligations and rights in the community, their
actions tend to be guided or motivated in such a
way as to yield substantially more positive results.
[The other side of the coin is residence lacking any kind of rootedness
because of a lack of proprietary bonds or feeling of belonging when one is
deprived of both private and public property.]
To grant municipal citizenship to the investor at the same time that a
commitment is expected towards the physical and moral well being of that
community is something entirely congruent with ecological and humanist
principles, as it is with the philosophy of "small is beautiful"
(Schumaker). What is big can be ´´beautiful´´ too, undoubtedly ;
but, when it is a matter of dealing with the consequences of one's
errors, generally the small ones are a lot easier to repair than the bigger ones.
A big "transnational" enterprise could, just the same, channel its
investments through small partnerships rooted in their own localities, attentive
to a great variety of opportunities that would include the real needs of the
communities within which such enterprises and their partners would reside in
full exercise of civic rights and obligations. Such residence could be
periodic, or cyclic, but in any case it is important that the allegiance be
authentic and not merely formal ; that
it tend towards preservation and sustainability of the community and that it
provide continuity. Consider
that the value of innovation, necessary for survival, can be catastrophic if it
is disconnected from a certain tradition‑‑
that the value of innovation is fortified by the value of continuity. [The Solari model suggests that only the locals should be
allowed to make decisions, and I would agree;
the other angle is to make the ´´global´´ community more congruent
with place and to facilitate the process whereby one becomes a recognized
citizen in a certain locality.]
8. Thus,
as a corollary to the general improvement that would come about with regard to
human rights (in view of the greater protection of the laws apt to be enjoyed by
those who today find themselves suffering from what amounts to a new form of
slavery resulting from the humiliating condition of "alienhood", legal
or illegal) but, also, to the extent that ´´rootedness´´ in various
"natural environments" (S. Weil) would facilitate population movement
while, concomitantly, the most
desperate conditions that generate the need to migrate begin to experience some
relief, the society as a whole would be protecting itself from business
practices that depend most nefariously upon relative "advantages"
offered within certain localities as a result of the lack of protection from
which people and nature presently suffer.
Instead of exploiting such disadvantages, enterprises would be forced to
consider other profit enhancing, relative advantages for both the short and long
run : their chances of obtaining a
reasonable gain (not an outrageous one) would then depend more on their
capacity to respond to the emergence of new markets resulting from a general
rise in the levels of income and of the standard of living of the working
population; they would need to depend more upon the proximity of raw materials
and find justification for their investments in social and economic factors
issuing from the decentralizing tendencies characteristic of the civilization of
the third wave described by Toffler ; thus, the advantage of a more diversified,
de-massified or individualized production would come to the fore, as would the
many positive aspects to be derived from reuniting producers and consumers or of
bringing them closer together, at least.
One healthy trend would be the general acceptance of the soundness of
"labor intensive" methods in agricultural policy as prescribed by soil
conservationists. Such policies would require of legal innovations allowing for greater
flexibility in land tenure arrangements; the new laws would have to take
into consideration psychological, economic, social and cultural factors that
bear upon ecologically acceptable practices, granting to localities a wide
margin of self ‑ determination
necessary so that the measures will obtain more positive rather than negative
results, within a framework of inevitable interdependence that would
nevertheless gear itself towards the greatest desirable self‑sufficiency
‑‑ especially, as pertains to that crucial factor upon which all
else depends : nutrition (of body and soul, we might add).
In conjunction with the latter, extraordinary benefits would accrue to us from
the reinsertion of economically productive activity into the home, as Simone
Weil clearly sensed (Oppression and Freedom) and as Toffler has
envisioned on the basis of more recent developments that are conspiring to keep
more and more people working at home (the new technology, the price of gas,
sprawling urban areas, greater and greater distance to be traveled at greater
and greater expense, both monetary, psychological and ecological).
Such a development could become a great boon towards the spiritual or
psychological recovery of societies devastated by the splintering off of the
last remnants of the "nuclear" family at a time when the
re‑emerging "extended family" has been unable to
find any kind of stability because of legal
insufficiencies of our systems of law and politics and because of the turmoil
(and under-toe) created by the shock and power shifts of the "three waves
of civilization" [a reference here to Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Power
Shift, Bantam Books, Nov. 1990)
The malaise and the psychosis of individuals battered
by a civilization that has split them apart through prolonged, unrelenting
unemployment and‑‑among other things‑‑ through an excess
of contradictory demands (directed at producers against consumers and
vice‑versa, when the same individuals are both) can not be resolved with
self‑serving, unrealistic methods such as the
"war on drugs for a drug free America" happens to be ;
the problems of childhood, of youth, maturity and of old age can be
resolved only by paying the fullest attention to the real needs of human beings
in this world –needs which, as we can see, are not exactly the ones ´´created´´
by the vested interests of a system of massive production and distribution of
products and ´´services´´ --not those ´´needs´´ that Ivan Illich
has judiciously put in doubt when he analyzes what ´´developmental´´
politics promoting an unreachable ´´future´´ have really meant [see, in this regard, my essay on
´´Wendell Berry, Ivan Illich and Simone
Weil, a Political Alternative for Our Times´´, now
included in the Appendices. Also included among the latter, ´´Metáforas
discordantes del gran (des) concierto ecológico,
to be translated under the title: (Dis)concerting Metaphores of the Great
Ecological Concert.]
Thirty years before the
advent of the micro‑chip, Simone Weil dreamed of another civilization in
which work would be so organized as to contribute greatly to the spiritual
realization of human beings, in which the play of children would not be divorced
from their parents daily toil but could, in many cases, become a part of
mutually enriching activities, learning, joyful, productive, rewarding
activities. She imagined a mode of production that would decentralize industry
and relocate it in the countryside throughout thousands of smaller, cooperative
efforts recombining the family hearth with the workshop in a much closer
association with nature : a thrifty enterprise of human proportions, mindful of
sustainability in every sense, reuniting producer and consumer in many ways.
Part of what Illich refers to as a
´´convivial society´´. Cybernetic programs such as the one invented by Catherine
Austin Fitts, Community Wizzard, would allow communities, in their place,
to find out what is really going on within their own sphere, at their own center
–in their very heart (which is the reason why such a program along with its
intrepid, persistent creator have been persecuted and forced to fight bitterly
for their very life). [For rigorous information concerning the framework
that maintains us all ignorant of much of what goes on, visit the site of
this courageous ´´cybernetic guerrillera´´ --www.SolariGideon.com
–some of whose articles I have been translating into Spanish:
´´Narco-Dollars for Dummies´´ (you can find it at
www.narconews.com) and ´´The Myth of the Rule of Law, or How the
Money Works: The Destruction of
Hamilton Securities Group´´ --both available in English and Spanish from
the Solari network,
catherine@solari.com
. Also from me.]
9. The struggle for dominion has led to the systematic uprooting
of entire populations that accompanies the imposition of one language over
another. To be deprived of one's language amounts to a mutilation of the soul.
It is one thing to encourage people to acquire a second or third language
that will allow them to integrate effectively into a socio‑cultural or
work space, and another very different one to pressure on all sides so that
one's mother tongue be abandoned. No government should be licensed to force
human beings to become so devastatingly uprooted. One's native tongue is, in
effect, one's socio‑cultural womb and it is not possible to divorce
ourselves from it without serious spiritual harm overcoming us, our families,
our entire society. Linguistic imperialism not only harms us morally but
economically as well. (Of course,
it is an important aspect of the struggle for markets within the
mass‑minded mentality of the civilization of the ´´second wave,´´
rabidly holding on to its ways even at the expense of destroying all life.)
(*9-1) Illich explains (in Deschooling Society) that in reality
this business about ´´maternal tongue´´ was an invention by the first
grammatologist of the Castilian language, Nebrija, who rapidly realized the uses
that his work could be put as part of the Spanish Crown´s efforts to impose its
empire over the many communities that were just beginning to awaken, 500 years
ago, to the possibilities of the printing press.
The drive to disqualify vernacular languages thus becomes the
means of appropriating the instruments of communication by some over others
–in that specific historical juncture, by those who had the
knowledge of Castilian, the ´´official, mother´´ tongue, over those who did not.
Here we face a situation that is analogous to that of the famous
"mega‑seeds" meant to bring about the
"mega‑crops" of the "green revolution", so effective
in propitiating the more recent calamities of much of the ´´developing´´
world and putting so many farmers of the advanced countries also at a
disadvantage: the great genetic "banks" that a vast variety of seeds
used to offer has been greatly decimated as a result of the insistence upon
concentrating on a much smaller number of super‑crops;
consequently, farmers have tended as much to over‑produce as to
have to increase their dependence upon chemicals as a way of controlling the
greater incidence of plagues that tend to accompany vast extensions of single
crop, single strain cultures‑‑ the ruin of farmers through loss of
income, of soil depletion and of the poisoning of water resources affecting
everyone sooner or later.
As is the case with the seeds of agriculture, languages contain in them
the accumulated memory of millenniums of experience, of knowledge
‑‑that is to say, the power to adapt to new circumstances.
For example : the precious
medical knowledge of peoples who have studied nature, and who understand and
have a name for the medicinal use of thousands of plants, disappears with the
passing away of these populations. It is not even necessary for the ethnic
groups to disappear as such ; it is
enough that they abandon their language in favor of another one, for that
precious knowledge accumulated in the course of a hundred generations to simply
evaporate from one generation to the next. As with the "genetic banks"
wiped out as a result of concentrating on a few strands of super seeds, it is
hardly possible for the "phonemic banks" through which our knowledge
of nature across the globe has been encoded to disappear without great hunks of
the memory of our species getting wiped out as well.
More than a simple analogy,
between those two kinds of reservoirs, we see indeed a profound interdependence.
The future of our adaptability as a species demands a greater respect for
diversity: bridges need to be established amongst the separate islands of our
diversity, instead of a single, solid, identical mass of wasteland becoming our
lot.
Multilingual education must be encouraged and no one should be forced to
sacrifice his lineage. (*9-2)
(*9-1) One's lineage should be
considered not so much a matter of "pride" as an important component
of one's ability to survive both physically and spiritually, indissolubly bound
to one's instinct of self‑preservation, that continuity may be maintained
as part of our strategy of survival and of family cohesion across generations
and across present day national frontiers.
(**9-2)
In his [at the time, very recent] research, Victor Zuñiga, of the
Colegio de la Frontera Norte, found that Mexican migration to the United States is more
highly conditioned by cultural factors related to ascendancy ‑‑ to
lineage‑‑ than by economic factors (without, of course, pretending
that the latter do not weigh). It
was very touching to me to discover thanks to his fascinating data how
adolescent Mexicans who planned eventually to migrate had already, by their
early teens, developed a kind of compensatory psychological mechanism that
allowed them to remain faithful to both their homelands :
those whose family relations would eventually take them to live in
Houston thought Houston to be the most beautiful city in the world;
but, unlike their fellow students who did not have very definite plans to
move across the border and who spoke of a marked preference for hamburgers,
those who were certain they would sooner or later be living in "the most
beautiful city in the world" demonstrated disdain for hamburgers and the
greatest appreciation for Mexican food over all the others.
55% considered Spanish "the most beautiful language" and 35%
considered that language to be English; 10% went for other languages, especially
French and Italian (thus, close to two thirds remained faithful to Romance). The
traditions that mediate the Mexican migrant's insertion into life in the United
States go back for at least four generations and have their origin in four
Mexican States primarily (Jalisco, Zacatecas, Michoacán and Chihuahua).
Thus, it is parental networks clearly that provide the mechanisms of
adaptation through a refined knowledge of labor market behavior,
of migratory laws and how to use them advantageously and, of course,
through economic and psychological support.
The speed with which all kinds of news travel by way of these networks is
truly amazing [though I, for one, would be thankful to hear a serious study
documenting present levels of e-mail ´´counterproductivity´´].
This is precisely what I am
referring to when I say that "the programs" exist and that they are
scattered throughout millions of "electronic brains" that are as much
biological as man made.
10. Among the political changes most apt to benefit the coming
into existence of a viable inter-municipal system would be the introduction of
mechanisms for the selection of legislators, judges and administrators that
would cease to rely upon the corrupt, ferocious and very destructive system of
selection provided by competing political parties. I would recommend an alternative for the very same reasons
expressed by Simone Weil ("Note concerning the general suppression of
political parties.") In Cuba, a Popular Assembly freed from the
ideological entrapment of a manipulative, repressive,
´´hero´´ worshipping Communist Party ‑‑ political organ of the
Cuban army under the rule of that classical caudillo that Fidel Castro has
always been ‑‑ could result in a government intimately connected
with the hopes and real needs of the population.
But one must believe in miracles without expecting them to occur.
I do not know what hope can be entertained that the army will withdraw from the
selection process so that the latter will be able to proceed without the
pressures of brute force, in a mood allowing for public dialogue to develop
without the corrupting effects of partisan debate poisoning the atmosphere.
Such a miracle would be just as overwhelming were it to come about in
Washington as in Havana, indeed. It is political parties that corrupt
dialogue (or the free circulation of ideas) and turn it
into ´´debate´´ (the forced, unwholesome confrontation of ideas).
If it is unanimously recognized that the best results for a country as a
whole issue from a decision making process in which legislators skirt
partisanship and act in solidarity with what appears to be the best course of
action ‑‑ how is one then to pretend that for a country to become
"democratic" it must, of necessity, base its political life upon the
manifestly inadequate procedure of parties competing for supremacy.
[Such a belief is based on what Simone Weil termed "illegitimate
contradictions"; "legitimate
contradictions" exist in the form of the paradox, since the
absence of contradiction is not necessarily a criterion for truth...but, to
recognize that partisanship is bad and to pretend that any good can possibly
come from the activity of political parties is simply pure and
unadulterated nonsense...]
Contrary to the notion generally promoted by those who claim that the
existence of political parties, in open competition, is the hallmark of a
democracy worthy of the name, their existence in fact guarantees little more
than the deliberate distortion of important issues as a result of bad faith in
their handling by candidates who, in the midst of a campaign, agree to disagree
on what it is safe to disagree on, even when basically they might be in
agreement. Those horny questions,
on which much public passion has already been invested, no one will tackle
squarely for fear of losing precious votes, even when society would be well
served to have an opportunity to clarify the issues dispassionately and, then,
to be able to exercise a legitimate choice more in keeping with the foremost
objective of attaining to some level of social well being:
Caught between the ´´lead´´ (or bullet) and the ´´silver´´,
most prefer to accept the dough.
Thanks to the unrelenting, corrupting influence of political parties,
propaganda has a field day and elections continue to be decided by the
force of money. The reason why the proponents of "law and
order" have taken us such a long way along the road to lawlessness and
disorder is that no one wishes to obey a government that is legitimately
perceived as illegitimate, and it is pretty obvious that an electoral
system that relies increasingly upon the buying power of dirty money will fail
dismally to command respect outside of the arenas that it effectively controls (but, of course, nothing like a war of some kind or another to alienate
in just the proper measure reasonable thoughts in the public's mind and to
promote the visceral reactions of a rather cheap brand of patriotism).
More than half of the American people shrink from voting mostly because
they became aware of the sham a long time ago and do not to want to lend
credibility to the process. The rest choose to remain confused; a few, or not so
few, act with complete cynicism.
If the existence of political parties subverts the very process upon
which we claim to base the legitimacy of our democratic type of government, it
does so, not only by corrupting the possibilities for legitimate choice, but
also (and greatly as a result of the latter) by compromising to a large
extent the efficacy of our system of checks and balances amongst
the three branches of government, the latter truly the hallmark of a ´´democratic´´
system worthy of the name, as most people will agree (and in this
respect Simone Weil fully concurred: see,
especially, her proposals for a new Constitution).
A ´´democracy´´ worthy of its name, of our respect and support, would
be one in which the three branches of government remained truly independent from
each another, in which those elected to office would have to think first and
foremost about the public interest: in
such a way that power would serve as a means for the pursuit of the
public good instead of as the end in itself of all action, against the
public good. Those who love
power for power's sake, or who are put into a situation of not being able to
think about the public good because the need to retain power overrides all
serious consideration of just about everything else, will never be able to tell
what their real obligations are ; they will lie to themselves and to others and
will contribute only their share of our final harvest of infectious lies.
We allow ourselves to
pretend that we have something that can be called democracy because we are able
to point to its histrionic side: political "debate", whereas the task
of analyzing the mechanisms through which "the will of the people"
actually might exert itself is a far more difficult thing to do (and for some,
more dangerous); to the extent,
however, that such a vague notion means anything at all, it is apt to refer
primarily to a sense of justice and of truth that can surface in public life
only in the absence of public passion instilled in the masses by political
parties for their own devious ends.
And yet, the common man in the street knows¼ even those who have been cheated out of the most elementary tools of
analysis and who find themselves in a situation that prevents them from
articulating their understanding with any measure of clarity, those very same
people, in spite of everything, know --since they are in contact with reality-- that there is indeed a difference between the ´´map´´ and
the ´´territory´´.
In essence, then, a democracy worthy of its name would not be defined by
how many political parties compete to confuse the issues but by how many
people are able to participate in a vast, complex, on going, decision making
process from the bottom up and in the absence of "public passion" that
has been created around certain issues (or non‑issues) with the intended
purpose of maintaining in power certain interest groups whose ultimate concern
for the well being of humanity or for the "public good", in the sense
that most citizens would want to see it defined, can hardly be said to exist.
(That these forces at work manage their information in highly deceptive ways and
are not even able to tell what their own real –human-- interests are, in the
long run, is not the least of the problems that we are facing.)
A democracy worthy of its name would maintain a careful, real, balance of
powers so as to prevent, among other things, that a transient majority,
instinctively pushed by momentary passions, will be able to impose upon
any minority ‑‑ or upon itself – decisions that to the conscience
of those not poisoned by the same social "bug" (affecting the
"social beast") would find repugnant. It would
rely more, instead, on people's real knowledge of real people when it comes to
selecting individuals who are to find themselves in the delicate situation of
having to think about, and decide, certain very important matters for us.
It would elicit educated responses from voters on clear issues that would
be open to intelligent discussion ‑‑ to dialogue, over
´´debate´´, rather than forcing voters to have to decide between competing
"images" à la Hollywood or Madison Avenue that have been
concocted with the support of massive
funding from highly suspect regions of our economic activity, increasingly
dominated by organized crime.
A decent democracy, and not this indecency that is being
perpetrated upon our body politic, would safeguard us‑‑ at the very
least‑‑ from having to choose what seems right along with what we
definitely do not want to have to swallow, after some execrable Chef and his
scullions have taken the liberty to decide for us, in some filthy, uninspected
kitchen, what it is that goes with what. It would leave the greatest number possible of decisions in
the hands of those who must live with its consequences by decentralizing government truly and effectively as contemplated here,
instead of just playing lip service to local autonomy for demagogic reasons
while rapidly moving to suffocate it as soon as an effort is put in movement to
exercise such autonomy. It would use our most innovative technology, as well,
to allow the masses of illiterates or semi‑literate people to
express themselves, at last, and to protect their interests ‑‑ to
enter into contracts that they understand and can accept so that they will
not continue to be cheated out of their life, out of their liberty, and of all
their property, without fail.
What is more, such a democracy would make that very ´´stability´´
that the proponents of "law and order" claim to seek, a much more
likely outcome of our political activity. And,
with that greater over‑all stability across borders and sectors of our
societies, we would find ourselves in a situation less conducive to the
disruptive effects of massive capital flights from one region to another
(geographic, economic) which have so contributed to putting our world in its
present, sorry state. Above all, it would give each one the opportunity of
acting within the context of a great number of legitimate hierarchies.
For, if the younger generations reject increasingly the very notion of
´´hierarchy´´ it is only because we have become, finally, the only
species universally led by illegitimate hierarchies (and thanks,
for the most part, to that most undemocratic aberration that we refer to as
the ´´competition among political parties´´¼).
Among the aspirations of the human soul are those of equality and
of consented obedience, as Simone Weil observed with extraordinary insight.
And only a legitimate hierarchy preserves equality and allows
us at the same time the opportunity of exercising a consented obedience,
quite as this blessed ´´Red Virgin´´ pointed out (´´The Martian´´ being
the other loving nickname her great teacher, Alain, bestowed upon her).
Such developments, call them what you may, would be far more apt to
satisfy ‑‑ both in the long run as in the short‑‑ the
earthly needs of those who have a lot as much as of those who have been left
with virtually nothing: an
improvement in nearly every sense imaginable.
AMEN!
REVISED: April/September 2002 in
Valle de Bravo, Mexico. This work
was presented on June 22, 1991, at the International Social Studies
Conference on the Caribbean gathered in the Intercontinental Hotel in Miami
June 21-23. I have made a number of
stylistic adjustments, adding a few notes and references (especially as concerns
Ivan Illich, whose work I was barely acquainted with at the time, and also in
relation to Catherine Austin Fitts whose ´´solari´´ ideas I am now so happy
to be able to integrate within the matrix of this increasingly ´´sustainable´´
proposal!). Note: APPENDICES now include an explanation by Catherine of her ´´solari´´
conception (see the Solari Bullet points).
After the ´´mega-seed hoax´´ referred to below, we are now getting
bombarded with ´´seedless´´ plants, whose ´´seedless buds´´ fail to
germinate (triumphantly so, one might say,
for those devilish pranksters whose business it is to sell them and who
belong to an ersatz divinity that will offer nothing but pain for
free¼). Applying the metaphore
about languages/phonemes and seeds (Point 9) we might say we are now facing
the prospect of the imposition of a quasi total speechlessness, or of the
programmatic death of agriculture.
CORRESPONDENCE, QUESTIONS AND
OTHER INPUT WELCOME AT:
mamadoc77@hotmail.com
sylviamvalls@yahoo.com
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