Daily Archives: January 27, 2020

Among the most dangerous arguments for racial profiling are the most rational. They are persuasive because they are by definition based on logic and statistics. The premise is that a stereotype is true, or more probably true than false, or at least more true of the group subjected to it than of other populations.

These utilitarian calculations can be about Chinese immigrant scientists who are alleged to be spies or African American youngsters who are alleged to be thugs. The same principles are at stake. The more successful we are eliminating old-school prejudice, the more it mutates into education-resistant forms. Instead of angry demagogues shouting obscenities to threaten violence, we now are confronted by calm academics displaying PowerPoint slides with percentages which are color coded literally and figuratively.

People who appear to be anything but extremists prefer these justifications for their attitudes. They even deny that they are bigots; they are merely reviewing evidence. Some use fancy terms, such as Bayesian inference, which is an important technique for revising predictions based on additional information, but which also can be abused like any other intellectual tool.

They assert openly that individuals of Chinese heritage have a propensity toward loyalty to the Chinese government, out of ethnic affinity, even if they are United States citizens. They add that the Chinese government is recruiting agents through such appeals. Thus, they insist, targeting Chinese Americans is appropriate. If one is guilty, others must be too.

Frank Wu

The problem is that we should believe what is rational and that leads us to suppose what is rational also is right. Yet there are many claims and public policies that are superficially reasonable yet morally wrong. That extends beyond discrimination. Philosophers have a term for it, the naturalistic fallacy, which consists of confusing descriptive claims about the world with normative claims about our ideals. People realize this: we would be appalled by an advocate for euthanizing children who are disabled, because cost-benefit analysis proves society would be better off economically. We can concede for the sake of discussion that the descriptive claim (disabled children cost more than they benefit, materially) is accurate, without concluding that the normative claim (they should be killed) follows.

Much that looks rational also is not. Thanks to confirmation bias, our tendency to exaggerate patterns to select the data conforming to our pre-existing assumptions, we discount warnings about risks.

Experiments, not to mention experience, demonstrates that the same behavior exhibited by whites and blacks is processed by observers very differently. The white youngster is acting up because they need treatment for attention deficit disorder, while the black kid is revealing tendencies toward future law breaking that should be punished preemptively, even if objectively their temper tantrums are identical. The suggestion that African Americans are biologically or culturally oriented toward criminality, because they happen to be overrepresented in the prison system, verges on comedy and arguably crosses the line except for its tragedy. It requires willful disregard of the causes of disparities, which include the self-fulfilling prophecy of racism.

Even if we were disinterested in civil rights and hostile to diversity, sophisticated empiricism would include collateral consequences. A thick description, to use the phrase of social scientists, of how the world works would incorporate the penalty to productivity caused by false positives. A person who wished only to maximize the gains generated by law enforcement investigations would account for the damage done by accusations which turn out to be erroneous if not malicious. That is not limited to the person who is affected, whose life may be ruined, and the community she belongs to, which suffers the cumulative losses, because others have invested in training that person who is cast aside without respect.

The crux of racial profiling is not improved with rationalism. At their heart, invidious stereotypes depend on using the identity of people (the classification of race or ethnicity) to deduce the actions of persons (espionage or theft). The Supreme Court, by and large, has come around. Legislation challenged for constitutionality must be rational. The judges err on the side of the government. Laws, however, that operate by dividing people according to a suspect classification such as race or ethnicity are said to trigger strict scrutiny. The judges demand an explanation.

Thanks to a movement for Black equality, which not only eliminated the formal, legal versions of bias but also created a consensus about informal, everyday norms, we continue our progress as a democracy. If we are fooled by bigots because they have lowered their voices and armed themselves with numbers, we will regress.

Frank H. Wu is the William L. Prosser Distinguished Professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University.

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Beware the Racist Who Claims to Be Rational - Diverse: Issues in Higher Education

The Supreme Court of Israel yesterday resolved to its own satisfaction the complex question of what constitutes a Jew in Israeli law. But its verdict, reached by a 5-4 majority, promises to pose a series of cruel dilemmas for religious Jews, and carries the seeds of a major politico-religious storm both within the country and among Jews generally.

Sitting for the first time with nine of its 10 members, the court yesterday announced in Jerusalem that the children of Lieutenant-Commander Binyamin Shalit should be registered by the Ministry of the Interior as Jews, though their mother is a Scot of no declared religion. Under Rabbinical law Jewishness descends through the female line and, apart from conversion, it is not possible for the children of a non-Jewish woman to be considered Jews.

Thus for the first time, the law of the state differs from that of the Rabbinate in the most sensitive area of the Israeli consciousness. From time immemorial the Orthodox have maintained that there can be no separation of nationality and faith for the Jew. This tenet was observed by the Government when it refused to accept that Commander Shalits children could be shown on their identity cards as Jewish after their religion had been declared as none. The fact of a non-Jewish mother was held to be conclusive.

The problem was not entirely academic in that various rights and liabilities stem from the declaration of nationality Moslems, for example, may not serve in the Israel army the Commander held that a civil question was being determined on religious grounds.

Tradition From the time of the Palestine mandate there has been a tradition that each community in the country Jewish, Moslem, and Christian appointed a religious body to determine the law relating to personal status religion, marriage, divorce, and the like. This was maintained when the State of Israel was formed. Because of the circumstances of its foundation and the long history of the Diaspora it was probably inevitable that the influence of the strictly Orthodox Jews should be disproportionate.

The main impression to strike the visitor to Israel is the sometimes crazy mixture of fervent experimental socialism and rock-hard fundamentalist religion. I was once driving through an ultra modern housing estate when my car was stoned by outraged children who saw me breaking the rules of the Sabbath. They were not particularly contrite when they found I was not Jewish.

These Orthodox elements represent about 20 per cent of the population, and every Government since independence has had to rely on the religious parties to form part of the coalition. At present the New Religious Party holds three portfolios in the Cabinet, including the crucial Ministry of the Interior. There have been strong reports that Mrs Meir, the Prime Minister, has given undertakings to upset the courts ruling by new legislation.

Russian Jews? But the consequent debate seems likely to open some raw wounds. If the decision is repealed what will be the position of the Russian Jews? This community, two million strong, is of huge emotional significance in Israel.

But there has been a fair amount of intermarriage down the years and many Russian families who regard themselves as Jewish, and are certainly so treated by the Soviet Government, have non-Jewish mothers. Are they to return to the homeland and then find themselves disqualified as Jewish in the name of Judaism? And what about American Jews, whose funds largely support the State? They have intermarried too, and are not likely to be wildly happy at being told their children are beyond the pale.

The issue has always been there, of course, but it has been tidied away because of its embarrassments. More than one-third of the Jews in Germany who perished under the Nazis had married Gentiles but the Israelis accepted the reparations paid on their behalf and that of their children. No one could seriously argue that they should not have done, but that is the danger which the Orthodox Jews now find themselves in.

With one extreme Orthodox sect disputing even the right of the Jewish State to exist as a secular entity one should not, perhaps, look for too much rationalism in the debate. It strikes deep into the subconsciousness of a race which has been concerned for two millennia to maintain its identity against every assault. But one of its results may well be to disentangle Israel from some of the stifling religiosity which was the price of its foundation. And that, in turn, could even lead to some sort of advance in the whole political stalemate of the Middle East.

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Israel rules on what constitutes a Jew archive, 1970 - The Guardian

Key point: Perhaps World War III will come one daybut today is not that day.

Will Tehran and Washington let slip the dogs of war following last weeks aerial takedown of Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corpss IRGC) Quds Force? You could be forgiven for thinking so considering the hot takes that greeted the news of the drone strike outside Baghdad. For example, one prominent commentator, the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haass, opined that the Middle East region (and possibly the world) will be the battlefield.

Color me skeptical. The apocalypse is not at hand.

Haass is right in the limited sense that irregular military operations now span the globe. Terrorists thirst to strike at far as well as near enemies in hopes of degrading their will to fight. They respect no national boundaries and never have. Frontiers are likewise murky in the cyber realm, to name another battleground with no defined battlefronts. The United States and Iran have waged cyber combat for a decade or more, dating to the Stuxnet worm attack on the Iranian nuclear complex in 2010.

The coming weeks and months may see irregular warfare prosecuted with newfound vigor through such familiar unconventional warmaking methods. Its doubtful Tehran would launch into conventional operations, stepping onto ground it knows America dominates. To launch full-scale military reprisals would justify full-scale U.S. military reprisals that, in all likelihood, would outstrip Irans in firepower and ferocity. The ayatollahs who oversee the Islamic Republic fret about coming up on the losing end of such a clash. As well they might, considering hard experience.

So the outlook is for more of the same. Thats a far cry from the more fevered prophecies of World War III aired since Soleimani went to his reward. To fathom Tehrans dilemma, lets ask a fellow who knew a thing or two about Persian ambitions. (The pre-Islamic Persian Empire, which bestrode the Middle East and menaced Europe, remains the lodestone of geopolitical successeven for Islamic Iran.)

The Athenian historian Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War, a fifth-century-B.C. maelstrom that engulfed the Greek world. Persia was a major player in that contest. In fact, it helped decide the endgame when the Great King supplied Athens antagonist, Sparta, with the resources to build itself into a naval power capable of defeating the vaunted Athenian navy at sea. But Thucydides also meditates on human nature at many junctures in his history, deriving observations of universal scope. At one stage, for instance, he has Athenian ambassadors posit that three of the prime movers impelling human actions are fear, honor, and interest. The emissaries appear to speak for the father of history.

Fear, honor, interest. There are few better places to start puzzling out why individuals and societies do what they do and glimpse what we ought to do. How does Thucydides hypothesis apply to post-Soleimani antagonism between the United States and Iran? Well, the slaying of the Quds Force chieftain puts the ball squarely in the Islamic Republics court. The mullahs must reply to the strike in some fashion. To remain idle would be to make themselves look weak and ineffectual in the eyes of the region and of ordinary Iranians.

In fecklessness lies danger. Doubly so now, after protests convulsed parts of Iran last November. The ensuing crackdown cost hundreds of Iranians their livesand revealed how deeply resentments against the religious regime run. No autocrat relishes weakness, least of all an autocrat whose rule has come under duress from within. A show of power and steadfastness is necessary to cow domestic opponents.

But fear is an omnidirectional, multiple-domain thing for Iranian potentates. External threats abound. Iranians are keenly attuned to geographic encirclement, for instance. They view their country as the Middle Easts rightful heavyweight. Yet U.S. forces or their allies surround and constrain the Islamic Republic from all points of the compass with the partial exception of the northeastern quadrant, which encompasses the stans of Central Asia, and beyond them Russia.

Look at your map. The U.S. Navy commands the westerly maritime flank, backed up by the U.S. Air Force. Americas Gulf Arab allies ring the western shores of the Persian Gulf. U.S. forces remain in Iraq to the northwest, where Suleimani fell, and in Afghanistan to the east. Even Pakistan, to the southeast, is an American treaty ally, albeit an uneasy one. These are forbidding surroundings. Tendrils of U.S. influence curl all around the Islamic Republics borders. Breaking out seems like a natural impulse for Iranian diplomacy and military strategy.

And yet. However fervent about its geopolitical ambitions, the Iranian leadership will be loath to undertake measures beyond the intermittent bombings, support to militants elsewhere in the region, and ritual denunciations of the Great Satan that have been mainstays of Iranian foreign policy for forty years now. Iranian leaders comprehend the forces arrayed against them. A serious effort at a breakout will remain premature unless and until they consummate their bid for atomic weaponry. The ability to threaten nuclear devastation may embolden them to trybut that remains for the future.

Next, honor. Irregular warfare is indecisive in itself, but it can provide splashy returns on a modest investment of resources and effort. Having staked their political legitimacy on sticking it to the Great Satan and his Middle Eastern toadies, the ayatollahs must deliver regular incremental results. Direct attacks on U.S. forces make good clickbait; so do pictures showing IRGC light surface combatants tailing U.S. Navy task forces; so do attacks on vital economic infrastructure in U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia. And headlines convey the image of a virile power on the move.

The honor motive, then, merges with fear. Iranians fear being denied the honor they consider their due as the natural hegemon of the Gulf region and the Islamic world.

And lastly, interest. Mischief-making must suffice for Iran until it can amass the material wherewithal to make itself a hegemon. Its fascinating that Thucydides lists material gain last among forces that animate human beings. After all, foreign-policy specialists list it first. Interest is quantifiable, and it seems to feed straight into calculations of cost, benefit, and risk. It makes statecraft seem rational!

Theres no way to know for sure after two millennia, but it seems likely the sage old Greek meant to deflate such excesses of rationalism. Namely, he regarded human nature as being about more than things we can count, like economic output or a large field army. For Thucydides cost/benefit arithmetic takes a back seat to not-strictly-rational passionssome of them dark, such as rage and spite, and others brightthat drive us all.

And indeed, for Iranians material interest constitutes the way to rejuvenate national honor while holding fear at bay. Breaking the economic blockade manifest in, say, the Trump administrations maximum pressure strategy would permit Tehran to revitalize the countrys moribund oil and gas sector. Renewed export trade would furnish wealth. Some could go into accoutrements of great power such as a high-tech navy and air force.

In turn Iranian leaders could back a more ambitious diplomacy with steel. They would enjoy the option of departing from their purely irregular, troublemaking ways and competing through more conventional methods. Or, more likely, they would harness irregular means as an adjunct to traditional strategic competition. Material gain, in short, not just satisfies economic needs and wants but amplifies martial might. In so doing it satisfies non-material cravings for renown and geopolitical say-so.

And the American side? Repeat this process. Refract U.S. policy and strategy through Thucydides prism of fear, honor, and interest, consider how Iranian and American motives may intersect and interact, and see what light that appraisal shines into the future. My take: perhaps World War III will come one daybut today is not that day.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and the author of A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy, out last month. The views voiced here are his alone. This article first appeared earlier this month.

Image: Flickr.

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Why America And Iran Won't Go To War Anytime Soon - The National Interest Online

It was early summer, and I was on the verge of turning 40. I found myself entertaining a recurring daydream of escaping from time. I would be hustling my son out the door to get him to school, or walking briskly to work on the day of a deadline, or castigating myself for being online when I should have been methodically and efficiently putting words on paper, and I would have this vision of myself as a character in a video game discovering a secret level. This vision was informed by the platform games I loved as a child Super Mario Bros, Sonic the Hedgehog and so on in which the character you controlled moved across the screen from left to right through a scrolling landscape, encountering obstacles and adversaries as you progressed to the end of the level. In this daydream, I would see myself pushing against a wall or lowering myself down the yawning mouth of a pipe, and thereby discovering this secret level, this hidden chamber where I could exist for a time outside of time, where the clock was not forever running down to zero.

My relationship with time had always been characterised by a certain baleful anxiety, but as I approached the start of the decade in which I would have no choice but to think of myself as middle-aged, this anxiety intensified. I was always in the middle of some calculation or quantification with respect to time, and such thoughts were always predicated on an understanding of it as a precious and limited resource. What time was it right now? How much time was left for me to do the thing I was doing, and when would I have to stop doing it to do the next thing?

This resource being as limited as it was, should I not be doing something better with it, something more urgent or interesting or authentic? At some point in my late 30s, I recognised the paradoxical source of this anxiety: that every single thing in life took much longer than I expected it to, except for life itself, which went much faster, and would be over before I knew where I was.

Much of this had to do with being a parent. Having two young children had radically altered my relationship with the days and hours of my life. Almost every moment was accounted for in a way that it had never been before. But it was also the sheer velocity of change, the state of growth and flux in which my children existed, and the constant small adjustments that were necessary to accommodate these changes. I would realise that my son no longer mispronounced a particular word in that adorable way he once had, or that his baby sister had stopped doing that thing of nodding very seriously and emphatically when she heard a song she liked that she was, in fact, no longer a baby at all and that those eras had now passed for good, along with countless others that would pass unnoticed and unremembered, and I would feel sad and remorseful about not having lived more fully in those moments, not having stopped or at least slowed the flow of time. And when I felt this way, I would succumb to the daydream of the video game, the secret level, the escape from time itself.

My son turned six around then, itself a significant milestone in that he was, for the first time, at an age I myself could dimly remember being. And with this new phase of parenthood, I began to think how strange it was, given how precious those early years now seemed to me, that I spent so little time thinking about my own childhood, the lost civilisation on which my adult self now stood. The motion of the video game unfurled rightward, and I had no choice but to follow its motion towards the future, towards the completion of the game itself.

And then one day, about a week and a half before I turned 40, I found myself alone in a forest in Devon, where I discovered this secret level of my daydreams.

Here is how I did it: I came to a clearing in a forest by a riverbank in Dartmoor national park, far enough from any trail that it seemed unlikely I would encounter anyone while I was there. I gathered some loose branches and stones and arranged them in a circle of about 10 metres in diameter, and then I walked into the circle and did not leave it until the same time the following day.

The short version of this story is that nothing happened in that time: that I did nothing and witnessed nothing, experienced only the passage of the hours and minutes, and the languid dynamics of my own boredom. The long version isnt exactly The Iliad, either, but in that version something could be said to have happened. Because by the time I walked out of that circle the following afternoon, Id had an entirely unexpected and intensely cathartic encounter with the passage of time, and with my own mortality.

This is a practice commonly referred to as a wilderness solo. The basic principle is that you go out into nature, the wilder and more remote the better, and confine yourself to one very small area for a set period a day, two days, three days, sometimes longer. During this period, you forego anything that might come between yourself and your own solitude. No phone. No books or other reading material. You dont build a fire, because building a fire is a way to keep yourself busy, watching the dance of its flames a primitive entertainment. Most participants choose not to bring food, because when you have got nothing to do for a day and a night, the prospect of eating a sandwich can easily become an all-encompassing preoccupation, undermining the entire project of unmediated communion with nature. After that period of immersion, you step outside of your circle, and you re-enter the world.

Until fairly recently, I was not a person who had a lot of time for nature. I wished it well in all its dealings, and was glad to take its side in any quarrel with the forces arrayed against it, but my regard for it was essentially abstract, and I would just as soon have left it to its own devices. Nature was something I encountered as scenery, an experience to be consumed before getting back in the car and continuing on my way. But about the middle of 2016, amid the endlessly unfurling horrors of that years news, I became increasingly preoccupied with how this darkening political reality seemed to foreshadow a near future defined by a permanent state of climate emergency. And these things felt connected in some way that resisted easy definition: the speed and efficiency with which technology was gutting democracy and alienating us from the reality of human suffering, and the increasing extremity of our estrangement from the natural world. I was thinking all the time about climate change, about the future my children would be forced to live in, about what we had done and were continuing to do to the world. But at some point it dawned on me that I didnt know the first thing about that world. What I knew was the great indoors in which I lived my life: the insides of buildings, the insides of books, the interlocking interiors of the internet and my own mind. When I talked about nature, I didnt know what I meant. In a way that was somehow both vague and urgent, I felt that it was time to go outside.

I came across an organisation called Way of Nature UK that arranged group wilderness retreats, and I signed up for a trip. This was how, in the spring of 2017, I ended up spending a week with a group of about 20 other people in a remote wilderness reserve called Alladale in the Scottish Highlands, towards the end of which everyone went off to various locations and did a solo. How did I feel about sitting by a river for 24 hours and doing absolutely nothing, aside from looking at grass and clouds and water and so on? I felt slightly intimidated. I felt uncomfortable. I felt, above all, reflexively cynical, in the way that I was reflexively cynical about pretty much anything that felt new-agey or hippyish or otherwise overly earnest to me. But over the course of that week, and in particular the 24 hours I spent alone by the river, that brittle carapace of cynicism began to give way. What affected me most deeply about that time alone in nature was the aspect of it I had initially been most daunted by. The experience of the solo is the experience of time itself, in its rawest and most unmediated form.

When I stepped into that ad-hoc ceremonial circle in Devon last summer, it had been over a year since I had performed the ritual, and I found myself craving the solitude and immersion it provided.

Andres Roberts, Way of Natures co-founder, picked me up that morning outside my hotel in Bristol, near where he lives. I had got to know him pretty well on the two previous trips I had done with him, and my new enthusiasm for spending time alone in nature had been informed by his quietly ecstatic way of talking about the wilderness. As we drove south along the M5 through intermittent downpours of rain, he spoke about his work, and the ideas underpinning it. If there was a single word that encapsulated the value he was trying to incubate, that word was slowness. There was an extraordinary transformative power, he insisted, in the practice of sitting and doing nothing, and thereby slowing your mind and body to a meditative rhythm in nature.

One of Robertss major themes was the idea that our particular civilisation, at our particular time, was unusual in not having as part of its cultural repertoire some ritual whereby during periods of change or upheaval people went out alone into nature. When he talked about the practice of the wilderness solo, he talked about it in such terms as a ritual whereby you stepped out of the flux of the world, in order to gain some perspective on the flux, and your place within it.

A word he used a lot in talking about his work, and in describing the experience and value of the nature solo, was re-enchantment. He was of the opinion that most people, most of the time, lived life in a state of disenchantment. What he wanted to do, above all, was to help people strip away the layers of hard rationalism that accrued around the adult mind, so that they could return to a more childlike engagement with the world. And in reaching this state, he said, this place of re-enchantment, we could come to see ourselves not as separate from and in control of nature, but as part of it.

It was harder than anticipated, finding a solo spot. We had settled on Dartmoor for its proximity to Bristol and its relatively humane weather outlook, but it was not a place with which Roberrts was particularly familiar. We followed at first a northward trail, planning to cross a footbridge into deeper forest on the far side of the river, but when we eventually found it, the gate to the footbridge was firmly padlocked.

Further along the trail we met a man out for a walk with his dog. Early 70s, bearded, wax jacketed, he wore the dogs lead draped athwart himself shoulder to hip in the manner of a mayoral sash. Roberts asked him whether there was a bridge we could cross further on. He shook his head and courteously informed us, in a Devonshire accent as soft and mulchy as the ground beneath our feet, that we were on land privately owned by one of his neighbours, and that the more densely forested territory across the river was private, too, and that we technically required a permit to walk this trail.

We turned and strolled back with him toward the road, and as he chatted to us about the cottage he and his wife had recently renovated, and their troubles with the local conservation society who disapproved of their alterations to the property, I was struck by how easily the concept of private land ownership could be made to feel absurd. It seemed perfectly rational in towns and cities, in housing estates and apartment buildings, for people to own their little portions of the world. But here, on the flourishing banks of a torrential river, the thought that this place was the sole property of some mere person that that person could own the deeds to a river bank or a forest seemed deeply and disorientingly counterintuitive, in a way that threatened to undermine the whole spirit of our enterprise. It felt impossible, as I put it to Roberts after we parted company with the man, to pursue the kind of immersive experience of a place we were after when you worried you might be trespassing.

Yes, he said. Although this is England. Literally half of the land in this country is owned by less than 1% of the population. A handful of aristocrats and corporations.

He reassured me, though, that we would find a suitable place for my solo, on commonly owned land where I wouldnt have to worry about some local squire coming along and telling me I had no business having an immersive experience with his privately owned nature.

We found another trail, running northward along the River Dart. Roberts lowered his voice to not much more than a whisper, eventually stopping talking altogether, and slowed his pace so that I was walking well ahead of him. I understood this deliberate minimisation of his own presence to mean that we had entered a kind of buffer zone between the outside world and the solo space. This was one of the great charms of how he worked; without his having seemed to do anything very specific, you were made to understand that some ritual was underway, that you were somehow in the midst of the sacred.

The point of being here is to be here. An hour or two into my time in the forest, I wrote these words in my notebook, and drew a box around them to emphasise their authority and self-sufficiency. And then I stopped writing words in my notebook altogether, because writing words is my work, and I was wary of taking an utilitarian approach to the solo. The point of being there, after all, was to be there. (The cynical reader might argue that the point of being there was to write about being there an argument the cynical writer will, on balance, concede, if only to avoid getting bogged down in the ontological complexities of the whole relationship between experiencing things and writing about them.)

And what did I do, while I was being there, in the forest, by the river? Nothing, more or less. The first half hour or so, there was a certain amount of housekeeping to attend to. I had to find exactly the right spot: not too damp; flat enough to pitch a tent once night began to fall; sheltered from the elements, but not so sheltered as to obscure the view of the river and the far bank. I had to mark out the circle, of course. I had to gather flat stones and sticks and bits of branches, and arrange them around a beech tree I had chosen as the central feature of my location. It could, I suppose, have been an oak tree, or an elm, or some other type of lofty deciduous of which I, being no Robert MacFarlane, had no prior knowledge.

But once all that was out of the way, I had to confront that fact of having nothing to do. In theory, I should have greeted this experience with open arms. I had, in fact, been looking forward to it for weeks to having no tasks to attend to, no places to go, no obligations to meet. Here I was with nothing to do but inhabit the spaciousness of every passing moment, to bathe at leisure in the pooled flow of time itself. In theory, it was the dream. In practice, if I could have taken out my phone and gone on Twitter I surely would have. (Thankfully, this possibility was foreclosed to me by the fact of having no mobile coverage. In any case, Id stowed my phone in my backpack in order to stop myself violating the spirit of the wilderness solo by spending the whole time looking through photos of my children, or opening up the New Yorker app and immersing myself not in nature, but in back issues of a magazine I never had the time to read, for reasons gestured at above.)

When youre actually in it, the reality of the solo is, at least at first, one of total boredom. I cannot stress enough how little there is to do when you have confined yourself to the inside of a small circle of stones and sticks in a forest. But it is an instructive kind of boredom, insofar as boredom is the raw and unmediated experience of time. It is considered best practice not to have a watch, and to turn off your phone and keep it somewhere in the bottom of a bag so as to avoid the temptation to constantly check how long youve been out and how long you have left. And as you become untethered from your accustomed orientation in time from always knowing what time it is, how long you have to do the thing youre doing, when you have to stop doing it to do the next thing you begin to glimpse a new perspective on the anxiety that arises from that orientation. Because this anxiety, which amounts to a sort of cost-benefit analysis of every passing moment, is a quintessentially modern predicament.

As weirdly counterintuitive as it feels to acknowledge, human beings are not naturally predisposed to think of life in terms of seconds and hours, of how they might be optimised. The development of mechanical clocks during the middle ages and, later, the advent of widespread precision timekeeping that facilitated the industrial revolution, fundamentally changed the way in which the human animal related to the world. Time became both an abstraction and a commodity, a raw material to be bought and sold, saved or squandered.

The mass adoption of this new conception of time, abstract and removed from the organic context of nature, was central to the rise of capitalism, and to the accelerating mechanisation of life. Beginning in the 14th century, as the American cultural critic Neil Postman put it, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded. To sit by a river for a day and a night is to experience the reinstatement, if only temporarily, of that authority.

What did I do, sitting in that forest? I drank a lot of water, because I had brought a lot of water, and drinking it was, if only in the most basic of senses, something to do. And because I drank a lot of water, I took a great many resulting pisses around the far side of the tree, and this too presented something to do, however minor. I would occasionally treat myself to a bit of a stand, or even a little stroll around my circle, but mostly I was content to sit propped against my backpack with my legs spread before me on the soft carpet of leaves. I spent a lot of time looking at those leaves: holding them up to the light, observing the delicate webbings, the desiccated veins, crumbling them slowly between my fingers. This, I admit, was only slightly more interesting than doing nothing at all.

The tree, in time, became a central object of my attention. I cant say how long I spent standing in front of its trunk, staring at its covering of bright green moss, its gnarled protuberances of bark, but it must have been at least an hour. The moss was leafy, and felt both delicate and spongily resilient beneath my hand, and the longer I stared at it, the more I came to feel that I was gazing downward from a great height at a forest, that the moss was a canopy of leaves and the bark the ground beneath. The surface of the tree was its own ecosystem, expansive and intricate, and when I looked closely enough I saw that there were tiny insects everywhere, spiders and other many-legged creatures, whom I imagined living out their days aware of no other world than that little vastness, that forest within a forest.

My own incapacity to give this tree a name seemed suddenly strange to me, and slightly sad. In the ordinary run of things, if I were curious enough about what kind of tree I was looking at, I would have just gone on Google, or downloaded one of those tree-recognising apps, but this option was not available to me. Then it occurred to me that there was something about the not knowing that was somehow right. Not having a human name to give the tree, a category in which to put it, made the tree more real and present to me than it otherwise would have, or so I allowed myself to believe.

At some point it came to my attention that I was no longer bored, and that I had not been bored for some time. This is not to say that I was in a state of high mental stimulation, but that the hours of inactivity had induced in me a kind of meditative stupor, whereby I was receptive to the information of the environment to the ceaseless clamour of the river, the chattering of the birds overhead, the urgent whisperings of the leaves in the breeze, the modulations of temperature and light but uninclined to think much about this information, or anything else. I had, I realised, become attuned to the frequencies of the forest. I had found the secret level.

This is a thing that has happened to me whenever I have been alone in nature for an extended period: there occurs, some hours in, a subtle but profound modulation in consciousness whereby I come to experience myself as part of the place I am in, as an organism among organisms. This is a state of mind in which I can watch a small spider crawl along my arm for many minutes, feeling a kind of sentimental fellowship with this busy, delicate creature, whom in the normal run of things I would not hesitate to brush off in irritation or disgust.

In these moments, I find myself thinking of the place itself as somehow conscious of my presence. To be alone in a forest, and to be thinking of the forest as somehow aware of you: I will acknowledge that this sounds like the very substance of nightmare, but, in fact, it is a strangely beautiful and quietly moving experience, and I think it must be what people mean when they talk about intuiting the presence of God.

The word that comes to mind is immanence a term I learned as a philosophy undergraduate and which I did not remotely understand until I began to have these experiences of being alone in nature. In his 1836 essay Nature, American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson identifies precisely this sublime phenomenon. The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, he writes, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. Its a phenomenon that he views as both an apprehension of the divine and a return to the childs perception of the world. In the woods, he writes, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child.

I am struck now by how strongly these lines of Emerson these ideas of casting off years, of attaining the spirit of early childhood resonate with the strangest and most unsettling and, in the end, most wonderful aspect of my experience in the woods. While I was there, I didnt spend much time thinking about reaching 40, and whatever lay beyond. What I thought about was the distant past of my own childhood, which I spent in the countryside, in a house beside a small wood with a little stream running through it: a tamely arcadian surrounding which provided the setting for countless imagined adventures, battles and voyages. Something about sitting alone among the trees, looking at the river, put me in mind of that period of my life. The fact of having all this time now, and nothing to do with it; the slow process by which intense boredom had given way to a kind of absent-minded and playful immersion: these were things I associated with my own childhood. I remembered what Andres Roberts had said about re-enchantment, about time in nature as a means of returning to a more childlike engagement with the world.

And then for a long time I thought about my son, of how he existed in a thin space between reality and fantasy. I thought of how attached he was to his favourite toy, a small brown rabbit he carried everywhere with him, clutched in the crook of an arm, of how real and alive that rabbit was to him. This was in my mind because the previous evening, as I had unpacked at my hotel, I saw that my wife had slipped among my camping things a stuffed rabbit I myself had been deeply attached to when I was small. She had found it on a recent visit to my parents house, where it had been lying around for years in my childhood bedroom. That rabbit, with its floppy long limbs and its black button eyes and its faded blue dungarees, had been as real to me, as invested with surplus love, as my sons stuffed rabbit now was to him. I thought of how soon a year from now, or maybe less my sons rabbit would stop being real to him, how soon his world would lose the magic he himself had breathed into it.

And I thought with a pang of how I was always hurrying him to get dressed, to get out the door for school, to finish his dinner, to get ready for bed and of how heedlessly I was inflicting upon him my own anxious awareness of time as an oppressive force. How before he knew where he was, his own childhood would have receded into the past, and he too would be out of the secret level of childhood and into the laterally scrolling world of adulthood.

As the sun was going down in Dartmoor, I put up my tent and, in the dwindling light of the forest, rummaged in my backpack for my head-mounted torch. Inside the backpack, my hand encountered again the familiar softness of the stuffed rabbit. I held the toy a moment, smiled again at this touching and witty gesture of my wifes, and then decided to take a photo of it to send to her when I had mobile coverage the following day. I propped the rabbit against the outer lining of the tent and turned away to rummage again in my bag for my phone, and when I turned back I was overcome by a shock of recognition. I was seeing the rabbit not as I had seen it a moment before, as an intriguing relic of the submerged civilisation of my childhood, but as I had seen it as a small boy.

The rabbit was entirely alive to me in that moment. It was as though all the love I had invested in this object in those days was still contained within it, within him, and the experience of its sudden animation was overwhelming. I was looking at the rabbit, and the rabbit was looking at me, and it was seeing me, and I was both myself and the child I had once been. Whatever complex of emotions I was feeling was neither sentimental nor nostalgic in character, but powerfully existential. I felt simultaneously closer to myself as a child than I had in all the years of adulthood, and yet that sudden closeness came as an experience of loss, of immeasurable distance. It was as though time had folded in on itself, and the present was touching the past. There I was, as close to 40 as made no difference, alone in a forest on a moonless night and weeping with cathartic abandon at the sight of a threadbare stuffed animal. I was mourning my childhood, and the mourning felt long overdue.

I woke early, and lay still for a time listening to water dropping from the branches and leaves onto the outer layer of my tent. I had slept more soundly than I had expected, given the hard ground beneath me and the mummifying strictures of the sleeping bag. The absolute darkness and solitude had aroused neither loneliness nor unease. I had felt strangely at home with the sounds and silences of the forest at night.

Until very recently, the idea of spending a rainy morning alone in a forest would have been a profoundly unattractive one, but I found myself relishing the prospect of these last hours. The restlessness I had experienced the previous day, in that last stretch of the solo, was entirely absent now, the question of what to do with myself for several hours having come to seem nowhere near as pressing. The idea of such a question felt, in fact, somehow absurd. I went to the edge of my circle and sat down, and looked at the river.

You would have thought that Id have been more or less done with looking at the river by now, but in fact I was eager to get stuck into it again after the long night-time hours of not looking at the river. In terms of the diversions that were presently available to me, looking at the river was the hottest ticket in town. And so I sat there at the edge of my little circle on the riverbank and binge-watched the river. There is, it turns out, a lot going on at any one time in a river, especially if youve got nothing else to be looking at.

There were birds coming and going all the time, skimming low over the water and landing on the banks. There was the occasional ambiguous shape flitting on the periphery of my vision that may well have been some kind of leaping fish. I attended in particular to a bit of river directly in front of me where the water plunged low into a sort of miniature waterfall, immediately after which it appeared to run backward into itself, a phenomenon I couldnt begin to try to account for, but for which the most likely culprit seemed to be gravity. I stared at this spectacle for so long that a kind of optical illusion began to assert itself, whereby when I glanced up at the opposite bank, the long grass and drooping ferns seemed themselves to be engaged in sympathetic movements, swirling impossibly before my eyes. It could have been the effect of hours of meditative inactivity, or it could just have been hunger, but there was something mildly trippy about the experience.

Around noon, I heard a gently insistent bird call coming from a little way upriver. I turned toward it, and saw Roberts standing not far off with his back against a tree trunk, making an owl sound with his hands cupped to his mouth. I gathered my things, and we walked in silence out of the forest, him keeping several paces behind me. This seemed both entirely deliberate and entirely natural, and its effect was to preserve a measure of my solitude as I gradually emerged from the circle, out of the secret level and back into time.

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See the original post:

Splendid isolation: how I stopped time by sitting in a forest for 24 hours - The Guardian

Ed. note: This is an excerpt from Free, Fair, and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons, by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier. You can find out more about the book here.

The British sociologist Raymond Williams once wrote, Culture is ordinary. We could say much the same about commoning. It is terribly ordinary. Commoning is what common people decide for themselves in their specific circumstances if they want to get along with each other and produce as much wealth for everyone as possible. If commoning can be considered a way of life or a type of culture, then it provides what any culture must meaning both in a formal and in a deeply existential sense, as art sociologist Pascal Gielen writes. Modern societies have largely forgotten about commoning. Therefore, showcasing its elemental dailyness opens the door for seeing how the commons can provide a platform for effective alternatives to capitalism.

We start our explorations with the Social Life of commoning because its motifs constitute the core of any commons while also manifesting in the two other spheres, Provisioning and Peer Governance. Over the course of more than fifteen years, we have visited dozens of commons, talked with hundreds of people, and read about scores of commons in the scholarly literature. We have come to see that commoning is not like an on/off switch, something that exists or it doesnt. It is more a matter of intensity like a dimmer switch on a light; the intensity of various patterns of commoning may be weak or strong, according to what people really do, but its degree of illumination and continuity lead us to the threshold of conscious self-organization. This means that we have the capacity to affect the process to intensify commoning at any given moment.

People may or may not be self-aware about these patterns of Social Life. In Indigenous cultures, tradition and habit can make commoning seem utterly normal, rendering it invisible. In Western industrialized societies, commoning is invisible as well, but for a different reason: it has been culturally marginalized. That is why we have embarked upon our archeological excavations of commons around the world to bring the little-discussed realities of commoning into the bright light of day.

It is important that people experiment with these patterns so that they can understand commoning better and develop new ways of living, provisioning, and governing themselves. The capacity to make change lies right before us, and is at once cultural, organizational, generative, and political, if we keep in mind the three spheres of the Triad. It can transform our economy and our political systems, our institutions and ourselves. As J.K. Gibson-Graham have written, If to change ourselves is to change our worlds, and the relation is reciprocal, then the project of history making is never a distant one but always right here, on the borders of our sensing, thinking, feeling, moving bodies. Politics ultimately originates in our subjectivity, say Gibson-Graham, and in the sensational and gravitational experience of embodiment.

Pascal Gielen refers to culture as a stealth laboratory for new forms of life, an omnipresent incubator, hardly noticed precisely because it is everywhere. The commons is such a laboratory. In modern times, market capitalism and its categories of thought have more or less mandated how we will behave, invest, organize institutions, and so forth, by presuming that human beings are basically selfish, materialistic, utility-maximizing individuals. No wonder commoning, with its different insights about human beings, is so often seen as strange. It has been eclipsed by the shiny cultural mindscape of modernity.

And yet, the way commoning catalyzes change is clear: the more you align yourself with a commons worldview and the more you practice commoning, the more you learn how to become a commoner. This, in turn, has sweeping ramifications for economics, politics, and culture. The patterns that comprise the Social Life of Commoning are specific forms of cooperation, sharing, and ways that people relate to each other. One could say that a commons arises when the patterns of Social Life reach a sufficient density of practice, threshold of self-organization, and continuity to express themselves as a coherent social institution.

Shared purpose and values are the lifeblood of any commons. Without them, a commons loses its coherence and vitality. But shared purpose and values can only arise when people contribute from their own passion and commitment, connect with each other, and share certain experiences. A commons does not necessarily start with shared purpose and values. These outcomes must be earned by commoners over time as they struggle to bring their diverse perspectives into greater alignment. This is important because the sense of shared purpose in a commons cant be formally imposed or declared. It must arise organically through meaningful commoning over time. A rooted culture cannot be built overnight.

Cultivate shared purpose and values

Just declaring shared purpose and values is like planting a tree and not watering it. Shared purpose and values need to be cultivated through collective reflection, traditions, celebrations, and participation in all kinds of activities. All this can help strengthen mutual commitments. To be sure, the formal design of organizations and infrastructures can help, but there is no substitute for commoning to align and deepen peoples concerns and values. This takes time.

At Next Barn Over the CSA farm described in Chapter 1 the commitment to fresh, organic local food is cultivated by hosting family dinners, inviting people to volunteer, suggesting recipes using seasonal vegetables, and reaching out to help needy neighborhoods. The best way to bring people together is to be authentic. Ideally, everyone should be able to contribute something they really enjoy doing. The most helpful question is not, what do we need? It is, what do we have? What is possible with what is available here and now? This is reflected in the poems that Next Barn Over occasionally sends to members, which included this one by Wendell Berry:

What We Need is Here

Geese appear high over us,

pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,

as in love or sleep, holds

them to their way, clear

in the ancient faith: what we need

is here. And we pray, not

for new earth or heaven, but to be

quiet in heart, and in eye,

clear. What we need is here.

One of the most important ways to strengthen shared purpose and values is by ritualizing togetherness meeting regularly, sharing deeply, cooking together, celebrating successes, candidly assessing failures. This is essential to building a culture of commoning and a shared identity.

Ritualize togetherness

The rituals of togetherness can be as simple as regular meetings or as complicated as the specialized practices of an agroecology commons. A fair amount of community fun and frolic is also required. The many farmers of Mexico, New Mexico, and Colorado who participate in acequia irrigation commons have learned over centuries to ritualize togetherness. Everyone is, of course, concerned about his or her own allotment of water, but everyone also works together to maintain the water ditches and track the ecological limits of water usage. Software hackers are renowned for their creative rituals such as hackathons to figure out how to solve software problems and invent jargon that is understood only by them. The Quechua overseeing the Potato Park in Peru are bound together through their spiritual values and practices, much as the religious practices of Indonesian subak rice farmers help them coordinate when to plant seeds and irrigate their fields without depleting finite waters.

Rituals tend to work best when they are woven into ordinary daily life, and are not treated as something separate and unusual. At Enspiral, a networked guild of several hundred participants, participants ritualize their group life through regular, in-person retreats. In many countries such as Greece, Italy, France, and Finland, regional festivals are a way that people have celebrated the ethic and accomplishments of commoning. What better way to Ritualize Togetherness than a party or festival, especially among strangers? Indeed, some commoners make a party out of everything. At the many open workshops of Konglomerat, in Dresden, Germany, when its time to clean shared rooms, workshops, machinery, and toilets, members put a Putzival on the groups agenda. The term sounds cute, clean, and fun at once, because putzig (the adjective) means cute and putzen (the verb) means to clean, making it kind of a cute Cleanup Festival. People get the music on and have fun getting rid of dust and dirt.

Contribute freely means giving without expecting to receive anything of equivalent value, at least not here and now. It also means that when people do receive something, it is without feeling the need to reciprocate in direct ways. Wherever we contribute freely, the use of quid pro quos is minimized and the potential for sharing and dividing up is enhanced. Such acts occur when community gardeners break ground in the spring, or when people submit editorial content to Wikipedia with no expectation of return or even formal credit. They just do it, for a variety of reasons to learn a skill, join a community, earn respect, build job credentials, or simply to be part of something. By contributing freely, people also get back something they really enjoy, like the flowers from a community garden or the food grown there. People contribute freely when they give money to crowdfunding campaigns, volunteer their physical labor to maintain hiking trails, or organize neighborhood events. The giving is its own reward.

Contribute freely

It is important not to make overly broad claims about how to contribute freely in a commons because so much is situational. As long as a persons contribution is not coerced, everything is fine. There cannot be an even-steven calculation or strict reciprocity at work, even though that is always a temptation. And yet, it is intriguing that a freely given contribution often comes back to the giver, somehow, somewhere. In his classic book The Gift, Lewis Hyde explores the spiritual and emotional significance of gift exchange as revealed in diverse cultures, anthropology, and literature. Explaining the difference between circular giving and reciprocal giving, Hyde writes:

When I give to someone from whom I do not receive (and yet I do receive elsewhere), it is as if the gift goes around a corner before it comes back. I have to give blindly. And I will feel a sort of blind gratitude as well When the gift moves in a circle its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith.

The idea to Contribute Freely is not a matter of unconditional, perpetual giving, however. Nor is it not necessarily circular. But if the goal is to contribute to a resilient commons, gift-givers need to make sure that their contributions are voluntary and commonly agreed upon, and not induced by pressure or sanctions from the outside. A commons wont survive without freely given contributions. The specific ways of contributing to the common pool where? when? how? in what quantities? depend first and foremost on what people can really give. This in turn reflects their socioeconomic situation, customary rules, the level of peoples commitment, how they feel about a certain process, trust in decision-making processes, levels of participation, and so on. Of course, giving can also be simply an expression of goodwill or joy, or support for a cause.

To Contribute Freely helps build a healthy commons because it affirms the ethical norm of sharing, dividing up, and freely cooperating. A strict accounting of who gives what to whom may be helpful, but it is not always needed. While an accounting may work in larger and less personal contexts, a sharp focus on precise contributions and entitlements can undermine what makes a commons special: its a space where money doesnt rule everything.

While commons surely need people to Contribute Freely, they are not a fairy tale land of self-sacrificing volunteers. There is also social exchange based on some form of reciprocity between persons. But the reciprocity in a commons is of a different character than that of trade in markets. Markets are based on individuals bargaining to extract as much as possible for themselves when making exchanges of equivalent monetary value (price).

Practice gentle reciprocity

What matters is the feeling of fairness, which is not necessarily the same as providing absolutely equal shares or equivalent money-value exchange to everyone. Fairness is about ensuring that all needs have been seen and met. A self-confident, gracious commons is thus one that is content with social equals enjoying a roughly balanced (but not absolutely equal) exchange over time. Choosing to not calculate in precise terms who owes whom is the practice of gentle reciprocity. It is often a matter of social wisdom and tolerance. Practicing strict, direct reciprocity by identifying people as debtors or creditors in the first place can create invidious social distinctions and fan divisive jealousies. Yet allowing free riders to shirk their fair contribution to a groups efforts can generate resentments and deplete the groups shared wealth and goodwill. No one wants to be a sucker, keeping a promise that everyone else is breaking, as Professor Elinor Ostrom once wrote.5 So a commons must ensure a rough equivalence of contribution and entitlement among its participants without insisting upon fully audited reciprocity and without coercing contributions.

People who are able to ride a bicycle, play the piano, or run a marathon often cannot explain how they do it. They dont consciously know what they know. Thats because much of our knowledge is tacit or embodied, and not necessarily conscious and cognitive. We can know more than we can tell, as Michael Polanyi puts it in his books on this subject.6 Our bodies often know different things than our conscious minds. We feel the arrival of spring, sense when something is amiss in a social setting, and relax when we visit beloved bodies of water. It is fair to say that commoning begins with these deep reservoirs of embodied and situated knowing and perception.

Trust situated knowing

Political scientist Frank Fischer has documented the habit of professional experts and bureaucracies to ignore local knowledge that can help relate technical facts and social values.7 A number of movements and organizations are actively trying to change this by calling attention to the deep wisdom of situated knowing. Permaculture designers insist on the necessity to observe and interact and to creatively use and respond to change, for example.8 People in the Transition Town movement take pride in co-creating a post-fossil world through mind, heart and hand.

Embodied experience opens up a very different way of understanding how to govern people and shared resources, going well beyond cognitive, behavioralist approaches. It points to other ways of knowing intuition, feelings, subconscious knowledge, historical experience. Just as the physical human body somehow gives rise to consciousness, so the coming together of an I and we yields a new sphere of group consciousness that is best known through experience, not language. Anthropologist James Suzman described how he puzzled over the meaning of the term n!ow as used by the Ju/hoansi Bushmen in southern Africa. The term seems to refer to a fundamental property of people and meat animals that manifests itself in the weather whenever such animals are killed or when a human is born or dies. But after failing to entirely grasp the elusive idea expressed by n!ow, Suzman concluded that some experiential and embodied knowledge simply cannot be expressed through language, let alone be translated into another language: To know n!ow and understand it, you have to have been a product of this land, to have been shaped by its seasonal rhythms, and to have experienced the bonds that formed between hunters and their prey.9

Our feelings are exquisitely sensitive to changes in the living natural world and our social relationships. In her book Tending the Wild, M. Kat Anderson shows how Native Americans in the area now known as California developed an astonishingly subtle knowledge of their local ecosystems and the lives of specific plant and animal species: Several important insights were revealed to me as I walked with Native American elders and accompanied them on plant gathering walks. The first of these was that one gains respect for nature by using it judiciously. By using a plant or an animal, interacting with it where it lives, and tying your well-being to its existence, you can be intimate with it and understand it.10

Situated knowing is obviously not confined to traditional peoples. Such forms of knowing and know-how are found among mountaineers assessing the safety of ice sheets, athletes sensing where and how rapidly the ball is traveling, and politicians sensing the public mood. Situated knowing is especially important in commons, where people often have subtle insights about their care-wealth. Indeed, this is what makes so many commons so vital and robust. Situated knowing, then, is not just knowledge. It is an outgrowth of doing and experience including, often, deeper communion with nature and affective labor in stewarding it. Philosopher Donna Haraway has famously described situated knowledge as a feminist empiricism in the course of challenging the ideas of scientific objectivity.11

Despite the overwhelming power of scientific rationalism, often leveraged by bureaucratic administration, it remains possible to honor situated knowledge and apply it. It is, in any case, within us and omnipresent around us, but not readily recognized and trusted.

The great appeal of many commons is their invitation often, in fact, a necessity to bring people into closer communion with nature. In commons that revolve around natural biowealth water, farmland, forests, fisheries, wild game people quickly realize that there are natural limits. People involved in agroecology, permaculture, community forests, and traditional irrigation become closely attuned to the rhythms of natural systems and the subtle indicators of their health or endangerment.

Deepen communion with nature

In commons, people are not focused on the exchange value or financialization of so-called natural capital. The more they engage directly with nature, the more commoners develop intimate relationships of respect and understanding for the Earth as an elegant, sacred, living system. Commons give people practical vehicles for deepening their engagement with nature. When M. Kat Anderson asked native elders in California why some plants and animals were disappearing, they blamed the absence of human interaction with a plant or an animal. They suggested that people need an active relationship with plants because not only do plants benefit from human use, but some may actually depend on humans using them. The conservation of endangered species and the restoration of historic ecosystems might require the reintroduction of careful human stewardship rather than simple hands-off preservation.12 Indigenous wisdom suggests that human beings must interact with nature as consciously helpful users, protectors, and stewards. This idea is finding its way into some state policies. In Guatemala, the government had long attempted to stop cattle ranchers, farmers, illegal loggers, and drug traffickers from destroying lands in the Maya Biosphere Reserve. After concluding that it could not stop such behaviors, the government realized that the most effective way to protect forests is to give control of them to the communities who already live there.13

The same thing happened in Nepal, where community participation in the management of forests greatly improved ecological stewardship. Following the reintroduction of a multiparty system in Nepal in 1990, new policies and funding mechanisms were created to support grassroots-based, self-governing groups. In all, some 16,000 community forest user groups are now managing 1.2 million hectares of land, or about one fourth of Nepals forested areas.14

The point is not simply to develop economic or government policies that are more sustainable. The point is for people to have opportunities to deepen their relationships to natural systems, and in so doing, come to know them, love them, and protect them. This is the seed from which grows the structured situated knowing of permaculture and ecomimicry in design,15 among many other eco-friendly innovations. It is the spell of the sensuous, in David Abramss phrase, that pulls us toward a deeper understanding of the nature and ourselves.16 Ecophilosopher Andreas Weber argues our connections to nature are so deep and existential that our inner lives and feelings bear the imprint of the outer world. Living organisms experience themselves as physical matter via their emotions, which is part of a larger drama of biopoetic relationships among living creatures. We are of the same stuff as the world, writes Weber, which is why a walk through a meadow or the arrival of spring causes such delight.17 Deepening our communion with nature is an indispensable path toward responsible care of the teeming, living world that lies beyond humanity.

Any cooperative endeavor will face serious challenges, many of them stemming from personal behaviors or power relations. The question is not if, but how the inevitable conflicts that arise will be dealt with. Ignoring them is not an option. What we mean by preserving relationships in addressing conflicts might be best explained by drawing on Elinor Ostroms insights.

Preserve relationships in addressing conflicts

Like any institution, a commons must have rules and norms that apply to everyone. But what also matters a great deal is how those rules and norms are upheld. There must be an honest, transparent reckoning of conflict or violation, but also a spirit of respect and concern for all the people involved. In some contexts people are not able to leave, which makes it a priority to try to preserve relationships while addressing conflicts. Hence the use of graduated sanctions, one of the eight design principles for commons identified by Elinor Ostrom. (See Appendix D.) It is important to recognize and rectify the harm, but also to honor the dignity of the person involved and their relationships with fellow commoners. Relationships can also be preserved when group complicity or systemic problems are acknowledged. The idea is not to secure consensus through threats of punishment, but to prevent misaligned relationships in the first place. When transgressions do occur, it is important to mete out sanctions in gradually increasing severity, all in a context of trust, candor, and honesty. A frequent technique is to sit in a circle and discuss a problematic situation or behavior. (We have seen effective deliberations in circles with more than one hundred people.) The art is to give everyone the right to be heard, bear witness, and suggest changes while sharing the observed problem and its implications transparently.

When one of us observed a large circle of members of the Venezuelan federation of cooperatives, Cecosesola, she was perplexed at how complaints against people were often commingled with affection, with meetings concluding by people hugging the accused. After what seemed to be a more than challenging session involving deep emotions and interpersonal conflicts, the expression of respect and conspicuous displays of hugs signaled that deep, honest criticism is linked to enduring respect and care. Other commons may use mediation or other forms of group deliberation. Many software commons have a choice that may or may not preserve relationships while addressing a dispute the practice of forking the code, which in effect splits the project into separate endeavors. One or several participants to leave but still work on the same base of software code and take it in different creative directions. Of course, not all conflicts can be bridged. At some point, forking a project or excluding a person may be the only practical option. What always matters, though, is striving to maintain collective morale while being unflinchingly honest. Denial and self-deception dont help anyone.

In many commons people are not fully aware of their own practices. The underlying values and social dynamics both the constructive ones and the less helpful ones may be only dimly perceived. This makes a commons vulnerable. Even engaged people may forget how to maintain themselves as a commons in the face of daily operational challenges, the necessity (and seductions) of making money, the enticements of wielding power, new ideas about organizational governance, and countless other factors. It is therefore vital that commoners reflect on their peer governance. That is the only way that they can protect the integrity of the commons against enclosure, cooptation, or the entropy that can sap institutions of their energy.

Reflect on your peer governance

We include this pattern, Reflect on Your Peer Governance, as part of the Social Life of Commoning and not as an issue of Peer Governance, because we regard it as a foundational necessity. German economist and commons scholar Johannes Euler has pointed out that just as there is no commons without commoning, so there is no commoning without peer governance. If you want your commons to survive decades or even centuries, governance behaviors must be made explicit and honestly discussed. Unself-conscious forms of commoning risk losing their way. Unless a group has centuries of tradition, culture, and ritual to act as stabilizing forces, its members must consciously reflect upon the processes that make a commons work or that could make it better.

* * *

In the end, commoning is not just a state of enhanced awareness and being, like Zen practice or mindfulness. It is an enactment of peer provisioning and peer governance. It is the condition and means by which those occur. We might add that it is the cultural form of a new kind of politics. At its most ambitious, commoning begins a process of re-imagining the terms of modern human civilization at a time when its idealized notion of human aspiration, homo economicus, is revealing itself to be profoundly antisocial, indifferent to democratic norms, and ecologically irresponsible.

This is why a vital aspect of the Social Life of Commoning is the idea of strengthening the Nested-I. This is not a pattern as such, because it represents what happens more generally when other patterns of commoning are enacted: our individual and collective interests converge and align! We enter into a symbiosis among individual beings and our larger context. Participants in the WikiHouse network enact the Nested-I as they share and make shareable their design innovations with each other. The use of open standards and modularity encourages anyone to contribute freely in building something bigger than themselves, while reaping individual benefits in the process. The idea of the Nested-I also animates federated wikis, which vest individuals with the autonomy to create personal wikis to suit their own tastes and points of view, while inscribing such wikis within larger federations (known as neighborhoods) to allow the easy sharing of wiki pages (see pp. 246252).

The reality of the Nested-I is arguably that of the human species even if conventional economics continues to believe in the isolated-I as a sovereign, rational agent. What economics fails to comprehend is the biophysical absurdity of this foundational premise. Living beings are deeply and dynamically interconnected. Even Western medicines fixation on single-agent pathogens that supposedly have a cause/effect relationship with our bodies, is giving way to a more complicated story. Increasingly scientists are discovering that individual living systems are nested within larger living systems while at the same time being comprised of smaller living elements. Its holism all the way up and down! The Human Microbiome Project has identified about 100 trillion nonhuman life forms bacteria, fungi, etc. that live within our bodies, especially in our digestive tract, taking up between two and five pounds of our body weight. It turns out that these organisms are essential to our health and well-being as individuals. One might say that our individual bodies dont even have definitive boundaries; we are immersed in all sorts of symbiotic relationships to the food we eat, the bacteria around and within us, and the local landscape. In short, the Nested-I has a more than human dimension. We literally blur into a network of other living organisms and systems.18

This is what the idea of the Nested-I and its Ubuntu Rationality expresses: an individuals actions not only serve his or her own interests, they are part of a larger, more intricate symphony of negotiation and change with other living beings in a living Earth. It bears noting that while this impulse to work with our fellow commoners may have elements of conscious choice, it is a fundamentally nonrational, embodied instinct as well. Strengthening the Nested-I means developing the space to express affection, respect, laughter, playfulness, passion, and love in the mundane chores of teamwork and ritualized togetherness that any commons must honor.19

It is also worth noting that a commons can get the mix of collective control and individualism wrong. A group may exert a suffocating presence on the individual, or on certain types of individuals. Patriarchy is a problem in many subsistence and digital commons despite womens significant role in commoning. A coercive conformism can quickly turn a community into a cult. Charismatic leaders may get things done by consolidating power, but at the cost of a weaker, less robust culture. Nourishing the Nested-I requires an artful, respectful balance between the needs of the individual and the imperatives of the group.

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The Social Life of Commoning - Resilience