While changes in our ideas, and our systems of ideas, are essential for transition to a new ecological society; by themselves new ideas will not be enough. We need to build practices and institutions that will support, encourage and house those ideas. This post suggests some of what may be needed beyond the change in ideas.
New practices and institutions need:
a) Non-destructive economic power and self-sufficiency. While organisations can accept donations from other institutions, they cannot depend upon them, as that tends to direct efforts to keeping sponsors on side. Economic power and practice should be exemplary. That is, it should show people the way forward. It should demonstrate that economic activity does not have to involve ecological destruction and pollution, and that it can promote ecological health and regeneration. It should be attractive.
b) To develop cosmologies more useful and appealing than the ‘profit is the only good’ command of neoliberalism (‘interconnection’, ‘complexity’, ‘surprise’, ‘co-operation and competition’, are useful terms in this venture). Cosmologies should make neoliberal cosmologies seem obviously idiotic – which they are, so this is not hard.
Understandings and cosmologies always have to be tested through interaction with the world. We cannot understand things completely in advance of such interaction. We have to be prepared to modify our understanding to accord with our experience. We learn through experience. It is easy to be mislead by desires, hopes and the agreement of valued others. This contrasts with neoliberal understandings which are supposed to be certain, are imposed upon the world, and are held to be ‘true’ despite experience to the contrary.
Any cosmology will face problems, and these problems should not be suppressed, they need to be recognized and explored, and people be open to solutions, if possible. In a complex system, politics should be largely experimental.
c) Ethics is an important part of cosmology. It demonstrates how we think the universe works and should work. The ethics of the new ecological co-operation should probably promote freedom, equitability, and recognition of interdependence and the strength we gain from other beings (human and non-human). We may need to promote the idea of ethical complexity, and of ethical guidelines rather than rules in order to deal with the complexity of reality, and of our lack of complete predictivity. An Action can be good, but we need to check its results, rather than assume they are good in advance, and modify accordingly. Ethics needs to make clear what is wrong with the neoliberal establishment and its hangers on, more than it needs absolute agreement on anything. Ethical dispute is a sign of ethical awareness.
d) We need to be able to promulgate these ideas and help communication between interested people. We cannot expect the mainstream media to do this. We have to set up communication networks. The Right underground has done this, we can use what is useful and transform it – although we probably won’t get billionaires, or intelligence agencies, sinking money and activity into helping the project.
Communication always faces problems of interpretation and power (that is the message may not be intended to mean what I think it means). While it is sometimes difficult to determine if a disruptive message is informative or a troll, it is important to know about messages, as they are feedback and possibly useful. At the least they might tell you how you are perceived, or what you are being made to look like. It is however, impossible to listen to everything, and so people evaluate importance, so this is an intrinsic problem.
Hierarchy disrupts communication. The more punitive the hierarchy the more disruption. Hierarchies need to be kept gentle and shallow in terms of power.
People at the front line often know more about what is done and what should be done, than those co-ordinating actions elsewhere. This is the management paradox. This needs to be born in mind at all times.
e) The new institutions and practices need forms of organisation. Organisation is a form of power, and competence. However, this organisation does not have to be uniform, or hierarchical. Local groups can choose their modes of organization, furthering conviviality, and meeting objectives. The main point is that they can work together, and that we recognize the power of sociality. Successful groups are often groups which have social payoffs; support, care, friendships and so on. People look after each other. Psychological support will be needed for those challenging established patterns of behaviour.
We may not be able to specify the types of organisation that are needed in advance. We can follow guidelines, but we need to be aware that organisational forms will be emergent; they will emerge as people learn and face problems, especially the problems generated by their own actions and organisation. Organisation should only rarely, if ever, be imposed from outside. Not all groups in the organisation of organisations needs to have the same focus, and that is fine.
Rather than specifying what the organisation should be, it may be more useful to say what should be avoided.
f) Cooperation is needed, but harmony and absolute agreement is not. Indeed, absolute agreement will not happen, unless you aim for dictatorship and support of an ideal over reality, and these will fail in the long term. Absolute agreement can prevent learning, and adaptation. Variety can promulgate evolutionary success. Friction can show creativity. The problem is getting the balance between cooperation and disharmony right. But disagreement is not an automatic sign of failure.
Sometimes sub-organisations may need to split off if the disagreement is strong enough. This is quite natural. With care, the organisations still may be able to talk to each other, carry out exchange, and come together for common purposes. These latter points are more important than the split.
g) The organisations should have a way of rewarding members’ effort through status, respect and sometimes responsibility, without letting status differentials become stultified hierarchies. Status achievement must be open, and not restricted to particular social categories. The organisations will need to be “societies organised against becoming mini-states” and with formal mechanisms for halting, or undermining, the accumulation of power by individuals or groups.
h) Hierarchies will develop, but they should be relatively shallow, and not protect those at the top from risk. Risk should be more or less equally distributed amongst the active. Although there is something to be said for higher status accruing risk. Your recognised ‘warriors’ are those who take risks, rather than who allocate risks to uninvolved others…
i) The aim is to win over ‘the enemy,’ as much as possible, rather than destroy them, while recognising that the enemy is more than likely willing to destroy you. The enemy is to some extent conceptual more than personal; it is the neoliberal death machine, which is wired into destruction. If this death machine can openly destroy the planet it depends upon for survival, it will have little problem with trying to destroy obstacles such as rebels.
j) If possible all these points should reinforce each other.
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