re: that “intermediate level”
The poles are: primal indigenism at the one extreme, our hypermodern reality at the other.
We should move back in the direction of the former, but hopefully we will have learned some lessons from our misguided journey toward the latter, and hopefully we can retain some advantageous stuff.
E. F. Schumacher advocated for “intermediate technology.”
David Watson talked about a “synthesis of the primitive and the modern.”
I answered the following when Sharon wrote: “ . . . the issues are larger than the United States. The move to conservatism is global. What we see as our own socio-economic problems are occurring almost everywhere. The forces are larger than personalities or specific governance methods. There is a movement toward radical conservatism in the form of autocratic governments that is growing stronger all over western civilization.”
It’s a function of the malaise of our globalized hypermodern society. What’s been lost in the “progression” to our current reality is the intermediate level of association (and support), the one between the nuclear-family household and the mass-society Leviathan. That’s the level of community. Restoring it is what our movement is about.
People don’t realize what’s been lost. The vast majority of humans lived in tribes, villages, and small towns for the vast extent of pre-history and even for millennia of the historical period until relatively very recently. Now most isolated individuals or isolated households confront a world of huge impersonal institutions, remote power centers, and globalized economies characterized by cruel inequalities.
Confused and bereft, people may turn to radical conservatism or religious fundamentalism or opioids, but the real solution is something old/new, something hardly even considered anymore: stable, local community life, grounded in our re-dwelling in particular places on Earth:
