It’s important to understand that there have been two human lifeways
The history of “humanity,” broadly defined, goes back two million years to the emergence of Homo Habilis. What we identify as “us” (Homo Sapiens) evolved about three hundred thousand years ago.
We have lived in two distinct ways. The original ways were characterized by human-scaled, stateless, propertyless, egalitarian-communitarian societies exhibiting a richness of cultural diversity. Such prevailed for all of the time until about five thousand years ago. After Gary Snyder, let’s call that paradigm of life the “Old Ways.”
In the wake of the Neolithic Revolution one human group after another transitioned to the “New Ways,” characterized by urbanism, statism, and developmentalism in the service of wealth accumulation.
Even during the last five thousand years, most humans stilled lived in tribes or villages. The New Ways didn’t become globally ubiquitous and predominant until about four hundred years ago. That constitutes an aberrant one percent of our species history.
Some people have the impression that my writings advocate going back to the Old Ways. It’s not true. We’ve learned much of value, particularly in the way of cautionary tales, during our wandering through developmentalist civilization. What I advocate is that we question the idea of “progress,” comprehend the problematic trajectories of the New Ways, and contrast those to what originally was basic and natural. In doing so we could arrive at a truly sapient synthesis of the modern and the primitive.
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Consider this scenario: Ask someone who has a job whether they work for an institution or for their community. It’s likely that they’ll respond: “What community?”
Baffled to even think in terms of “my community,” they might say: “I don’t work for the local municipal government.” But municipal government is an institution.
Not only don’t we live in community, we have trouble conceptualizing it. “Do you mean my neighborhood?” There is some conception of ‘neighborhood,’ but almost no one works for their neighborhood, which is just a vague nearby area or maybe a housing development.
We have lost what was, for 99% of our species history, our social context of life. A real community, in a sense relevant to the green worldview, is a relatively stable group of familiar and interdependent people who identify with and have control over their place-on-earth and their sources of sustenance. We now can only think in terms of institutions, municipalities, states, etc. This highlights how profound the difference is between the two human lifeways. And it’s the basis for what Edward Goldsmith calls “The Great U-Turn.”
P.S. — In regard to the problems that the progressive social change movements try to so hard to address — racism, injustice, inequality, social and ecological irresponsibility — does it continually seem like “two steps forward, one step back” (or “two steps forward, two steps back”)? Well, reforms can be won, and that’s all to the good. But it should be understood that we’ll never actually get very far within the context of the current lifeways. The deeply transformative work is to be building the new society within the shell of the old:
. rejuvenation of community life
. renewal of sense of place
. economic re-localization
. ecological rebalancing
. devolution of power, decentralization, simplification
. deconstruction of the institutional/technological Leviathan
