It is Not Going Back, Ever, Thank God
It is broke. Maybe, on the surface of our thoughts and feelings, we want it all to go back to how it was, but in reality we need a saner way to do things.
The sane man wants liberty or death. We have figured that out. But how to engage that liberty is another question. We want to be free, but free to do what and how to do it? In a simpler age it was sufficient to name a few freedoms in our constitution and leave it at that. But the complexity we live in today may demand that we go further to define just how we need to pursue abstract principles like "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". With no means spelled out about how to pursue our freedoms we end up instead in endless litigation. And now it has gone further to system collapse.
When honest people live and work together for awhile they know each other. If they live in a small village lost in Nature they will find themselves working cooperatively to help each other survive. And they will end up living and loving together and feeling very much a part of Nature and close to each other and God as well.
In the fast city life there is little opportunity for deep relationships with either each other or Nature. Anonymity is the rule and people end up living in houses packed together like little cages. Quantity of life there is in the city but where is the beauty or quality? Where is the adventure? The city is like a zoo with everyone in their cages. The exclusive ethic of private property and the scramble to get it means we do not live or work or play together. We might do it all side by side but we are not a vital interacting human community.
Once in awhile we have surrogate play and sit and watch others run around chasing a ball. Oh goody! Did the play give vent to feelings bottled up and then set the stage for intimacy with the ones played with? No! Nobody played with anybody. We just watched while others ran around doing our play for us. And they were not playing either, they were making money.
Once a week we go to church. We listen to the deep rules on how to live life. But then we go back to the rest of the week and the rules and the life do not really touch all that much. And this time when we do come together we just sit there and listen and do not really do much to interact.
If real interaction has been lost in human groups ( I dare not say human community for it does not exist ) then we are all a bunch of robots living and working and obeying civilization's programming and propaganda.
Civilization is patriarchy and patriarchy is about quantitative life and competitive life. Quality in life and cooperation in life are not. Few of us could cooperate to form a country village and know how to talk to our neighbor and negotiate for communal help in case of emergency, or have a group picnic and genuinely enjoy ourselves and talk and have fun.
In cities today we are herded here and there and do not question it. Any real attempt at deep socializing would and does end up in misunderstanding and violence so we have the police to make sure we do not talk or interact or work out our differences.
The patriarchal nuclear family lives very isolated even though right next door to other families. The isolated husband and wife end up in domestic violence often. To find meaning we pursue things. We have become a society of gadget makers and gadget collectors. And instead of we owning our things our things own us. Our things take up all our time to obtain, leaving scarce time to enjoy life.
How did it all get this way? Once we all lived in Nature. Then we reproduced in excess and could no longer just be traveling nomads, just like animal herds and flocks. We pursued life more than the purpose of life. We pursued quantity of life and expanded and expanded.
We then had to be sedentary and work to nurture and grow the animal and the plant and become farmers. We had impacted Nature too much with our sheer quantity of human life and she was in peril and could no longer feed us. We had to cultivate the animal and plant and begin the Agricultural Revolution which is patriarchal civilization.
Land became all privately owned. Empires made sure that the wandering nomads were pushed out. With quantity of life pursued, instead of the inner purpose of life, which goes beyond mere physical life, we expanded further and further beyond mere farming.
Patriarchal civilization got too big. Sedentary farming was beginning to take over everything. The agricultural revolution or patriarchal civilization lasted for about twelve thousand years. It caused tribal nomadic matriarchy to be pushed almost to extinction. Then we went further into the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution is now endangering the Agricultural Revolution. If it endangers it too far we all starve. Agricultural Revolution and civilization and patriarchy is now over. But the Industrial Revolution is going on socially as if patriarchy were not over. The social ladder of top-down patriarchy is not moving over to include the bottom-up lost matriarchy. And due to things being more extreme in the Industrial Revolution we must accomplish the re-inclusion of the lost matriarchy. The horizontal bonding of tribal matriarchy is not coming back in as it should. And the merger of the two, patriarchy and matriarchy is not happening as it should.
When most people are farmers and a few are soldiers, and merchants in tiny cities, then a society that is very macho can survive, It survives because most people are on the land and too busy just trying to stay alive to be very dangerous to each other or the planet. But now is different.
Once the Agricultural Revolution downsized to admit the Industrial Revolution the social fabric of the human world needed to morph very quickly and it has only morphed and evolved a bit. When we got extremely technical it became imperative to become also wise. And to do that our culture must be androgynous or double-sexed.
Patriarchy is about quantity and not quality, about competition and not cooperation, about life and not death/rebirth, about expansion and not contraction or sane limit. So once we moved into the Industrial Revolution and did not change the social and ethical and spiritual fabric of patriarchy we quickly began to consume the planet. A mere two hundred years ago America was an unplundered continent. Now there is not that much left of her pristine natural beauty.
Life is not an item. Life is an open-ended evolving eternal process. Life reaches beyond the grave. The physical vehicle of the body is left behind but the soul travels on. A life lived for quantity, for physical life alone, stops there and is a life wasted. The soul lives on without having profited from that life lost.
Even mathematics finds that sets of numbers indicate larger sets of numbers. And life indicates a larger set into which mere physical life fits.
Patriarchy, moving ever in its quest for infinite mere physical life and quantity of life, moving ever in disregard for quality and death/rebirth and contraction and the night side to balance the day side of things, moving for infinite life on a finite planet, moves relentlessly on towards planet-death. You simply can not have infinite growth on a finite planet. Humankind must evolve now to create an androgynous double-sexed culture or die.
As much as we might want the old complacent comforts back, without anything new happening, what we really need to do is to try and discover what it means to be a human community interacting so as to be good for each other and Nature and good for that part of us that will live on when the mere physical vehicle dies.
Bow or Break
Primal Pairs for a New Covenant With Earth and Each Other
Bow to day and bow to night
Bow to growth and bow to limit
Bow to Life and Light
And to Darkness and Death/Rebirth
Bow to God and to God-in-Nature
Bow to the God within yourself
Bow to the woman and to the man
Bow to matriarchy and to patriarchy
Bow to individual competitiveness
And individual property
Bow to group cooperativeness
And the village commons
Bow to market competitiveness and capitalism
Bow to the ethic of shared wealth for all
Bow to single entrepeneurial endeavor
Bow to employee-owned and operated business
Bow to the lone human in his own castle
The impetus to form a private space
Bow to communal/democratic
And the local/global new age village
Bow to the vertical/representational republic
And a parliament or governing body
Bow to the bottom-up democratic
And each man with empowered self-representation
Without the halves of this dualistic universe
Integrated in human culture
The human is killing himself
And kills all else as well
Evolve now oh human ...
Or leave Nature half alive
For a species that can evolve.
This planet is a Blessed Being
The cosmos itself
Is a sentient open-ended growing thing
And may soon leave us behind
Unless we engage our forward momentum to the stars
