Practical Philosophy

New ideas needed: decentralization

2005-08-26T07:44:00.000-07:00

We need ideas

I live in a world of ideas. I love puzzling out the deeper truths. And as I've come to understand ideas better, I understand why people are so resistant to new ones. Ideas can be surprisingly dangerous and powerful things. Indeed they can be the most dangerous weapon of all. Don’t believe me? Then consider Marxism. Marxism was a very powerful set of ideas, and millions of people devoted their lives to it. For a time, it seemed likely that the whole world might turn in its direction. We look back now and shake our heads, but the world is a very unfair place and Marxism directly talked to that. Massive, devastating revolutions were waged in its name and the blood spilled freely. People changed the world using it as a unifying force. And after support for this idea collapsed throughout most of the world, the world changed again. Up until that point there had been a rich dialogue between capitalism and communism. Even the staunchest capitalist had to recognize that many people thought there were better ways to organize the world. But when virtually all of the world’s communist regimes went capitalistic, we lost our other point of view. Suddenly it was the “end of history” and capitalism stood triumphant without any apparent opposition. Our ideas had changed, and as a result the world started going in another direction. But the world is still a very unfair place. Are we really heading in the right direction?

As dangerous as ideas can be, not having a coherent set of ideas can be even worse. That is the case today with the progressive movement. Progressives need a new set of ideas. Without this we will just continue to flounder. It is not enough to simply oppose all of the wrong headed ideas of the world – we need to push a coherent alternative. One of the main reasons we are currently so powerless is that our ideas are relatively powerless. We need a clear plan of our own so we know where we want to go and how we plan to get there. Without such a plan we will always be just trying to slow down the progress of someone else’s ideas instead of advancing our own. The ideas we need should capture the popular imagination, they should paint a picture of a better world, and they should offer a practical, preferably a proven mechanism to get us there. The ideas should bring clarity.

So how do we go about forming these ideas? Perhaps the first step is to take a look at our recent past and see what worked and what didn’t. We can think of the 20th century as a sort of proving ground for ideas. What have we learned? There were many horrible failures, and examples of things we don’t want to do again, but there were also a number of great successes.

What ideas have worked? Markets

One thing we seemed to have figured out is how to stimulate technological growth and wealth creation (at least for some). Back around the beginning of the 20th century we were just getting serious about industrializing the Western world. People had a lot less material wealth and most hungered for more. It is probably no coincidence that two of the most important ideas of the 20th century, Marxism and Capitalism, both promised more wealth for its adherents. Admittedly the mechanism for producing that wealth was vastly different, but that was the basic promise; everyone would get more stuff. Marxism promised that fair distribution and rational planning would produce more for everyone (except those greedy ruling classes), and capitalism offered the mystic “invisible hand” of the markets. Back in the 1900’s I would have placed my bet on Marxism, but it now looks like capitalism has emerged as the best way of producing wealth. As proof we can look at both Germany and Korea, which were split into two and then run with two very different regimes. What a perfect experiment: The same people, culture, and language, run by two very different systems. In both cases the capitalist side did much better economically and eventually politically. Now a communist will immediately object that neither of these countries were ‘true” examples of communism, and I agree. The problem is that in the last century there is not a single country that I am aware of that went communist that did not also succumb to an authoritarian government. And part of the fault for this is that in its initial stages Marxist theory calls for centralized control of the economy. Marxism never came up with a practical strategy on how to decentralize.

Which is not to say that capitalist governments can’t go authoritarian. Germany, Italy, and Japan were all democratic countries before they got swept up in war fever and then went on to form aggressive, authoritarian governments. Recently the United States has been showing troubling tendencies of following the very same path. But speaking in strictly of terms of economic wealth, it does seem like the bottom up market mechanism is far superior to the top down command economy. Any new sweeping theories are going to have to account for this stubborn fact. I think one of the reasons a new progressive theory has been taking so long to develop is because traditionally progressives have always been reflexively opposed to the abuses of capitalism. And now we are stuck. The simplest way to get past this stuck point is to acknowledge that, yes, open markets are a really good thing. Many wonderful things have come from letting go of central authority and letting the markets go where they will. And markets can actually be quite a lot of fun.

I’m probably close to losing half of my audience right here, but this is not a typical capitalist puff piece. I’m not blind to the many serious problems with capitalism. Accepting the market mechanism does not mean that we have to also accept all of capitalism. When a market is really working it pushes power down and encourages decentralization. And markets are by no means perfect. With startling regularity markets collapse into monopoly or control by just a few. And yet marketplaces can almost magically create wonderful things. The rules regulating a market make a huge difference. My favorite market is the Pike Place Market in Seattle. This market has strict rules requiring just about all of the products sold to actually have been made by the vendors. Market zealots say that the less regulation the better. But not in this case; strict regulation has made Pike Place Market into an international success. People flock to the market exactly because of these rules – they like buying directly from the artist or farmer, and there are unique items that you won’t find at any department store. And the profits generated by the market are used to support a number of neighborhood initiatives such as low income day care, help for the elderly and low income housing. Under normal market rules the whole place would have long since been replaced by some bland shopping mall with all the profits going to the typical capitalist cliques, and in the 70’s it very, very nearly was. Fortunately, the strong leadership of some neighborhood activists saved it. So marketplaces work, but like the Pike Place market we have to be careful to harness this raw force and point it in the direction we actually want to go.

What ideas have worked? Non-violent grassroots

But markets don’t solve the problem of how to fairly share the wealth, and in fact this is still a huge problem for us – we have an incredible concentration of wealth in just a few hands while the rest of the world goes hungry and poor. We clearly are not living in utopia yet. And even the word “utopia” has been discredited when so much death has resulted from “utopian” thinking. When I read some of the writings of early revolutionaries around the turn of the 20th century it is a little chilling to see how casually they talk of armed revolution. Little did they know the appalling number of people that were going to die in the coming century. These writers were earnestly working to figure out how to improve the human condition, and I think they had some good ideas, but clearly they also had some wrong headed ones. Their grievances were real and they are still valid – the world is still quite unfair and unjust. But most progressives have backed away from incendiary revolutionary-speak because they feel the weight of so many deaths.

But we did see some beautiful rays of light in the 20th century. For me the happiest story is of Gandhi. He helped lead a movement that ultimately lead to profound change on three continents; India, South Africa, and the U.S. What Gandhi showed is that there is a practical alternative to armed struggle. I find it incredibly hopeful that his approach actually worked three times in three very different areas. Gandhi got his start in South Africa and left behind a strong organization that later on was very influential in creating possibly the only successful, non-violent independence movement in Africa. He is famous, of course, for his role in the beautifully non-violent Indian independence movement. Even more importantly (but much less well known) Gandhi’s movement made major strides in leading India away from its oppressive caste system and towards democracy. And of course Martin Luther King kept a picture of Gandhi in his office as he lead African Americans part of the way to his dream. All of these movements created wonderful, lasting results and they did it with amazingly little bloodshed.

As influential as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Mandela were, most of their power was simply moral persuasion. Individual communities and villages did the actual work. It was only after this village/city level work was done that it was possible to ratify these changes on a national level. Take for example the work of Martin Luther King. Most of his work was at the city level, and yet we somehow remember his only talking at the national level. His group would go to, say, Birmingham, and work with the people in that city on their grievances and goals. He helped act as a focal point for the community, but it was the people living in the city that did most of the work. And it really was up to the community if the movement was going to succeed. For example, before going to Birmingham, King tried to help Albany, Georgia, but the local black community could never form a cohesive enough whole, and hence they failed. King did very much rely on federal marshals at times to keep him protected from the incredibly dangerous, bloodthirsty, rioting white mobs, but for a long time that is just about the only role the federal government played, everything was focused very much at the local level. The first step was to teach people how to stand up for their human dignity. People learned how to take back their own power. And then he did something even more remarkable. He showed that people standing in their own power can, in a nonviolent way, change the hearts and minds of deeply bigoted people. Half of the success story of Martin Luther King is of the whites that were persuaded to make big changes.

What a change. Up until this point, we had to have a strict, military chain of command with lots of willing but ignorant troops at the bottom. And this army had to use violent force. That was the only way anything practical ever got done. And this was the trap all of the communist revolutions fell into, simply because they could not conceive of any workable alternative. It was thought that you could harness all of that incredible anger against injustice and create something better from it. The results don’t back that up. Sure, centralized power is a great method of shifting power from one group to another, but it rarely if ever actually improves people’s lives and certainly not in the long term. But now we have an alternative. As unlikely as it might seem, it is possible to peacefully change a regime by moral persuasion and empowering people to take control themselves. This is amazingly good news. The problem is that progressives for the most part seem to have gotten the wrong message. They focus on some of the more dramatic parts such as big marches and think that is what grass roots organizing is all about. Big marches have an important place at times, but it is a mistake to put too much of a priority on them – the real work is happening in the communities we live in.

Decentralization

Marketplaces and grassroots organizing have more in common than it might first appear. The primary reason both are so effective is that they do not impose a strict hierarchical chain of command. Instead they both find ways to harness the incredible energy of many disparate groups working together. Both require some central planning and leadership, but it is very important for that leadership to push power down as much as possible. With free markets we see that we need to set up the marketplace rules and see that they are enforced. We need to make sure the market is doing what we want, and strictly prosecute abuses, but then we need to let go and see what happens. With grassroots organizing clearly it helps greatly to have a charismatic leader, but both Gandhi and Martin Luther King were powerful because they managed to change people’s hearts, not because they seized military or even political power. Just about all of the greatest successes of the 20th century came from one of these decentralized mechanisms, and just about all of our worst failures and atrocities came from situations where power was too centralized. Short term there are times when centralized power can achieve great things, such as the Apollo moon launches, but over time it never is as effective, as we see today with the current NASA. Centralized control does not work in the long term because it has no built in self-correcting mechanism. If things go wrong they tend to stay wrong or often even get worse. But if things go wrong in a company it will eventually either go out of business allowing other businesses to spring up or it will radically reorganize. If things go wrong in a grass roots movement it will either dissolve allowing other groups to spring up if necessary, or change into something else. Eventually the most workable ideas sift themselves out by a process of trial and error and rise to the top. And both mechanisms support many different solutions to any given problem.

The progressive movement has fallen into the classic pattern – a reform group comes, seizes power, makes many needed improvements, but then it solidifies into its own power base and gradually becomes less and less effective. And then they are shocked when everything suddenly falls apart. But there is hope. Progressives are reluctantly waking up to the fact that if they want to accomplish anything at all, their best bet is to start at the local level. And this is definitely where the work needs to start. States are now pioneering drug reform, prison reform, gay marriage, and auto fuel efficiency. A large number of states have approved much stricter auto emissions than required by the federal government. These are great first steps, but I suspect that the state level might still be too centralized – we need to go even further. We need to build power from the community level.

But we resist making that our focus. Much of the current progressive movement’s attention is invariably centered on the national level (or international level), with a little bit of attention spared for the state level, even less time to spare for the city level and almost nothing on the local neighborhood level. We have it exactly backwards. The most important thing is to get people actively involved at the community level, from there they will naturally branch out to city, county, and maybe even the state level. But not right away. We’ve fallen into a trap of going for the easy win – thinking we could skip over messy door-to-door politics, and just do it once at the federal level. We have forgotten how to forge consensus amongst many disparate groups. And as a result many people, for example, do not consider themselves environmentalists (they’re too extremist!), when in fact a healthy environment is very important to them. We’ve lost so many people because we have not connected to their daily lives. Getting people connected and working together is our most important challenge.

Practical examples of decentralization

So how does decentralization work? Let me briefly give a couple of examples of where it is already working.

Cohousing

I live in a cohousing community. A group of thirty families got together, bought 5 acres of land and then built a place to live. We each have our own houses with small kitchens, but we park off site and cluster our houses so that we leave lots of open space for gardens, chickens, and an orchard. We share a large common house, and have separate sheds for woodworking and pottery. The first cohousing communities were built in Denmark in the 1970’s and it has been a big success ever since. People tend to be just happier living in this kind of arrangement – we are tribal animals and this is a more natural arrangement than the rather extreme suburban experiment we’ve been embarked on in the last 50 years or so. And the kids love it. It is like year round summer camp for them, and they seem to thrive surrounded by so much love. They are free to roam without fear of cars, and they have a whole neighborhood supporting them. The first cohousing units in North America first sprang up in 1992, and there are now over eighty established cohousing communities with many more on the way.

Cohousing is a very good example of building up community power. We govern based on consensus and this has forced us to learn a very different way of dealing with each other. As you might well imagine, consensus decision-making can be quite a challenge, and not everyone is up to learning this new system. But it is surprising how well it is working. Instead of factions we have a working whole. Instead of just ignoring the minority opinion, we need to learn how to listen. And when you really listen to what at first might seem like a frivolous opinion, it is surprising how often you find they actually have a valid point. Instead of always feeling like helpless victims, in cohousing we realize that we can make big positive changes. It no longer is possible to blame everything on someone else. If something is not going well in the community, I realize, sometimes with a shock, that it is my job to help fix it. But first, before charging forwards, I have to really understand how other people feel about the problem. If we were to have a million cohousing communities, our politics would be transformed into something much better. And the focus would be on the community level.

Grass roots politics

As I’ve mentioned before, in some ways it is a blessing that progressives are currently so completely shut out of all three national branches of government. It forces us to focus on the state and city level instead which is where we probably should have been focusing all along. Washington State just recently joined California and (eight?) other states in passing a law that requires much stricter control of car emissions. The fight for gay rights is being done at the state level and despite the setbacks there have been some gains as well. There has already been some very interesting healthcare experiments done in Washington, Oregon, and other states, and I’m hoping that there will be more. And there is a pent up demand for this decentralization amongst progressives. Howard Dean ran a surprisingly powerful insurgency campaign with the message “You have the power”. He repeatedly told his followers that if they wanted to change things, they had the power to do so themselves. Even though Dean’s campaign was not ultimately successful, there is now an (unofficial) wing of the Democratic party that celebrates decentralization and pushing power down to the local level. Clearly we have not figured out how to best focus all of this energy, but I am hopeful to see so many other people are excited by this grass roots message.

One of the most exciting state initiatives is the move towards public financing of candidates. Both Arizona and Maine have moved to this system, and it has been a huge success. Massachusetts’s voters also approved public financing, but that state’s corrupt politicians have so far managed to fight it off. Public financing means that any candidate that can demonstrate enough local support (by raising a number of very small donations) will get public financing. If running against a candidate not using public financing, they will receive money equivalent to what the other candidate is spending – this makes sure that there is not penalty for using public financing. A majority of candidates in both Arizona and Maine now run “clean”, and there has been a big influx of new candidates that previously never could have broken into the power structure. This is one of the most positive political developments that I have seen, and the only reason I think progressives haven’t realized this is because they are still too busy paying attention to just the federal level.

Open source software

One of the most interesting and radical economic experiments is going on this very moment and it is being led by – of all people -- computer geeks. Programmers are getting together, creating extremely useful software and then giving it away for free. And millions upon millions of people have happily downloaded programs like this, programs like Firefox, Thunderbird, and Linux. Nothing is quite as subversive as seeing a communist experiment actually succeed. This movement, called open source software, is a huge success in the computer world. The surprising thing is how well it works as a model for creating software. Open source software has been growing by leaps and bounds and it not only is keeping pace with commercial software, but in a number of cases it is starting to surpass it. It is an excellent example of how powerful decentralization can be.

The way it works is that a programmer (or group of programmers) releases a piece of software that is “open source”. This means that the program includes the source code so that other programmers can tinker with the program if they want. The only stipulation is that any modification of the program also has to include their source. This stipulation is a license that comes with the program, and is sometimes called a viral license because if a programmer takes an open source program and merges it into his program they now are legally obligated to make their entire program open source. And if anyone else chooses to take up this program into their code they also have to open up their source, and it keeps on spreading on. Another interesting consequence of this open source license is that it doesn’t really make sense to charge money for the application. What would you be paying for? If you want just the compiled program you can compile it yourself, or find someone willing to compile it for you for a nominal charge.

When I first heard about the movement, I (along with most people) first wondered how something like this could possibly work. I had never seen software done in anything but a very centralized manner, and it was hard to imagine that anything else could work. Instead of just one company jealously guarding its source code, the code is now open for view by the entire world. Anyone with a better idea can contribute. For example, a young Italian man still living with his parents had an insight on how to greatly improve how the Linux operating system handles memory. He didn’t need anyone’s approval to start experimenting; he just went and implemented his ideas. And then he reported his results to the other Linux developers around the world. The other developers recognized the merits of what he had done so his code was incorporated into the program. Notice how this gets around the bottleneck created by centralization. Something like that could never happen at Microsoft because no one except employees with the right security clearances can ever look at their code. With open source, someone sees a way to improve something and then they just do it. Open source resembles a market in that it is somewhat chaotic, but it does not tightly try to control what happens, and as a result often wonderful, surprising things sprout up.

Where do we go next?

Perhaps progressives have been slow to develop a new ideology because they have been focused on the wrong thing. What if we decided that the goal of government is to push down power as much as possible and then get out of the way? This is a very different way of thinking about politics, and might take some getting used to. Before getting caught up with all the potential problems, take a moment to think of why it might just work. We can see that wonderful things have come from decentralization. And if we want to change the world we have to first give people back their power. Along with giving power to the local level we would also ask them to take responsibility. If your neighborhood school is having problems, instead of blaming someone else, it would be your responsibility to roll up your sleeves and pitch in to help solve the problem.

And decentralization would allow for much more experimentation and tolerance for different life styles. We need basic, fundamental constitutional rights – as much as some states are inordinately proud of their history of oppression or slavery we can never let anything like that happen again. But beyond that we should stay out of it. If one state is determined to have free access to guns then let them. If another state wants to legalize marijuana then let them. If another state wants to offer basic health care to everyone then let them. And hopefully, if it works, this decentralization could extend down to the county and city level. Seattle is a very different place than Spokane, and NYC is a very different place than Albany. Why not let them run things their own way? Gun ownership makes no sense in NYC, but there is a much better case to be made for it in upstate New York. Seattle residents might be willing to experiment with an income tax as a replacement for our regressive (and high) sales tax, whereas this is ideological anathema to Eastern Washington. Recently there has been serious talk about splitting Washington state into two to better reflect the reality that the western and eastern parts of the state are worlds apart. Most people reflexively resist this kind of idea, but it is in fact exactly what I’m advocating for – let people take control of their own lives.

Conservatives have traditionally been champions of states rights. Unfortunately, that has usually just been a code word for various attempts to continue slavery. But what if we can guarantee constitutional protection for everyone? With firm constitutional protections in place there is a lot to be said for states rights – it could lead to very positive decentralization. The pundits are constantly telling us that there is considerable resentment against big government, elites, and the liberal west and east coasts. Let’s put all that anger to productive use. Our constitution is already set up to support strong, independent states, we just need to change some laws to back this up. And the driving issue could possibly be abortion. Abortion is already just a couple of Supreme Court justices away from being made illegal again. Why not make this something that states decide? This is exactly what they’ve been asking for – how could they say no? Of course any legislation that allows this should also allow states a lot more freedom. And we could do a lot at the state level. We could require better car fuel economy, a saner approach to drug abuse, state wide health plans, a cleaner environment, better worker rights. We could make sure no one went hungry or homeless. If we really played our cards right we could work it so that no National Guards stationed in a state could be deployed overseas without the governor’s approval. Given how much the US is currently relying on the National Guard this could be an effective brake on foreign adventures. The ruling elite, afraid of losing power, would noisily struggle against it, but it could be fashioned into a very powerful, populist message. The bible belt states would take delight in passing regressive laws (subject to constitutional protections of course), but the progressive states would be freed up to pursue their own path without having to first get the approval of people in Kansas and Alabamas. And it would be the ultimate test. Free market extremists constantly talk about the paradise they can create without all of the meddlesome interference. Fine; show us. I’m confident that in the long run vibrant, hip, Seattle is always going to win over repressive Topeka.

I imagine you might be queasy about the thought of letting states go their own way on abortion. And truly I’m not dead set on this myself because a lot of woman would suffer; maybe this is too much. Maybe there is another wedge issue we can use. But we have to acknowledge that we already are perilously close to losing abortion on the federal level, anyways. This is a way to make sure that it won’t happen in our home states. And somehow we have to make our peace with the deep divisions in this country. These people really and truly live in a different culture and we need to find a way to live with that. It is true that once Kansas has outlawed abortion, Kansas will probably try to start working on, say, Oregon. But then we have the perfect answer – you don’t live here, it is none of your business. It might just be a workable solution. One key ingredient is that it has to be made very, very clear that people always have the right to move. If you don’t like living in a state that outlaws abortion, then move. If you don’t like something, look first to change it at the state level – don’t try to force it down the throats of the entire country. And over time we will see what ideas work. I’m confident that when California leads the way on drug reform it will eventually become obvious to everyone (except the most obstinate) that the throwing everyone in jail strategy just benefits the prison industry (and the politicians that are paid off by them). It would create a marketplace of ideas where we could watch and measure the effect of different policies. And the best states will attract the best talent and they will thrive. Progressive, tolerant California in the long term is always going to outshine repressive, corrupt Texas. And eventually, because of that success, progressive ideas will win out.

Conclusion

I truly think that decentralization is the most practical and effective mechanism we can use for creating a better world. My personal vision is a world where people live sustainably in peace with both their neighbors and their environment. I want to live in a world that helps people to lead deeply fulfilling, happy lives. I would like to live in a mostly non-hierarchical world, where people have both the power and responsibility to govern the land they live on. I believe people need a deep, rich connection with nature and are happiest when natural things surround them, and given the choice most people will choose that. People need the freedom to experiment and go their own way, but they also need support for when things don’t work out. I think just about everyone needs to feel like they belong to a supportive group, and so my paradise would be rich with such groups. Raising children is one of the most important things we do because it directly creates our future, and we need to create the best possible environments we can for raising children. Sustainability means to me passing the world on to our children in better shape than we received it. The way to get there is not to wait for someone else to make it happen, but to start building it right now where we live and work. One small group working to make the world a better place might not seem like much, but multiply that a million times over and you have something that could profoundly change the world.

Community and Environmentalism

2004-12-15T16:04:00.000-08:00

My professor held up a banana and asked, "When you eat a banana are you eating people too?" Even for The Evergreen State College (a notoriously liberal college) it was a strange way to start a lecture. I still smile when I remember this, even now many years later it strikes me as an amusing way to make a very serious point. I don't remember the specifics of the lecture, but the professor proceeded to give an overview of the bloody history of U.S intervention into Latin America making sure the area was safe for our banana corporations. And then he went on to the incredible, indiscriminate use of pesticides (after all bananas are grown in a jungle) and the awful toll on the workers being daily bathed in these poisons. By the end of the lecture I was convinced that I might very well be munching on people whenever I indulged in a banana. And of course, it goes beyond that. For example, are we not complicit in all that oil companies do when we buy gasoline? It is so easy to point at those nasty oil spills, but when I have a job that requires a lot of commuting, suddenly, I'm very grateful for all of that cheap oil. Don't I then share responsibility for all of the environmental destruction caused by oil production? Oh lord, you might be thinking, if I start thinking like that I'll have to feel guilty about just about everything I do. Exactly.

Most environmentalists feel a certain sense of disquiet about their lives. We try to do things like recycle or not drive as much, but when we really think about it we realize how very far we are from leading a sustainable lifestyle. The next reaction, at least for me, was to immediately go into despair. And despair is a very valid reaction. A truly sustainable human society seems like something out of one of my favorite science fiction stories - not something likely to happen any time soon, but wonderful to think about. So when I started to take responsibility for my actions I found myself in a painful conflict. I knew that I was not doing as much as I would like environmentally, and I passionately cared about the environment, but I was not ready to turn my back on society and become an environmental monk. I had very good reasons for living the way I did. On the other hand, the problem would still gnaw at me - why wasn't I living in accord with my own principles? I really wanted to cut back on my habit of munching on people and wilderness, but it just did not seem possible.

In short I was stuck. And when I'm thoroughly stuck, I find the solution often is to reframe the problem, in other words, get out of my box and look at the problem in a completely different way. In this case, I was looking at the problem from my rugged individualist, "I don't need your help thank you very much" point of view. The truth is, however, that there is just so much one lone individual can do when they are up against the flow of an entire culture. Then this radical sneaky idea came creeping in; "What if I ask for help?" Now this is normally the farthest thing from my mind - I hate asking for help. I would much, much prefer to sort things out on my own, not, shudder, turn to someone else to help me out. And yet, multiply me a million times and we end up with great numbers of people gamely struggling to lead a more environmental life all on their own, not getting very far and not happy about it. Maybe we all need to change the way we look at the problem?

The solution now seems obvious to me, but when I mention it to environmentalist friends for the first time, almost invariably I get blank looks. It is not, it seems, yet part of mainstream environmental thought. A famous Indian environmentalist, Van Danna Shiva, came to my community to talk. If you are not familiar with her, think of her as continuing the Gandhi tradition, but this time as an environmentalist working to empower Indian farmers getting bullied by big multi-national agricultural companies. In the environmental world she is a star, and a lot of dedicated environmentalists crowded into our community's common house to hear her speak. My favorite part of her lecture came during the question/answer session at the end. One of the dedicated environmentalists in the audience asked the question that was on everyone's mind, "What sort of actions should we be doing in this country?". Everyone in the room craned forward to hear her answer - this is something they very much wanted to know. Van Danna Shiva, paused, looked around, and then in a very Gandhian manner gestured around at my community and simply said, "This is a good start". Most of the environmentalists leaned back with a very puzzled look on their face - what a strange answer. This was definitely not the usual environmental message. Normally it might be a call for more political action, or legal action, or calls for self-sacrifice, or maybe protests at a National Forest. But she had a very different way of looking at the problem. She was pointing at our community and saying this was an excellent start for environmental action.

What did she mean? She was saying that building community is one of the most important things we can do to help the environment. Coming from someone who lived in India and worked to organize whole villages this was a common sense statement. But to many North Americans it is a new idea and takes some getting used to. Possibly it is new to you too. The best way to truly understand a new idea is to go through the actual thinking process that created the idea, and then see if it makes sense to you. So I'm going to talk a little about my own thinking process and how I came to realize how incredibly important building community is. My own process started by looking at the world I live in and the impacts I personally make, then I looked to the deeper roots to understand why things are as they are. Next, I thought long and hard about what it would take to fix these deeper problems. But first, lets look at our impacts.

One of our largest, personal impacts is housing. This is the chunk of space that we control. How big is our house or apartment? How much energy is needed to heat and cool it? How many resources were required to develop this structure? How much land surrounds the structure, and what kind of ecology is it? Is the ecology diverse and rich or is it mainly just one species? Grass lawns are a bit of a desert from an ecological point of view. Is the surrounding land connected to other land to form a contiguous whole or is it fenced off into small little isolated plots?

Another major impact is our relationship to our cars. Is the land surrounding us structured to favor people or cars? How much physical space is devoted to cars, both parking and roads? When walking or driving I started noticing how much space we devote to cars in our cities and towns. As I started to really pay attention I was astonished to see the majority of our public space dedicated for the use of cars. Cars change how we feel about the world. When I'm driving I feel like I'm in a little bubble completely separate, but when I walk or bicycle I felt connected to the land and the neighborhood. Try paying attention to how it feels when next you drive or walk. Cars force everything to adapt to them. When I'm driving the signs have to be enormous, and I have to have plenty of opportunity to pull off, this leads to acres and acres of paved strip mall parking. Many of our cities are designed for cars not people, certainly not for people on foot.

Recycling has become very popular, but if you look at the recycling logo it is just one point of a triangle: reduce, reuse, recycle. Too many people forget about the reduce and reuse part of the triangle. Recycling is great, but reusing something is an order of magnitude better, and not using the thing in the first place is even better. If you think about it, every object that we use has a very complex and long trail of ecological impacts involved in its manufacture. To produce even simple products we need to mine the raw resources out of the earth, ship the resources to various processing plants, ship the refined materials to factories to produce sub components, ship the components to factories for the final product, put on elaborate packaging, and then ship them to a store. The fewer objects we need to produce, the better it ultimately is for the environment.

The food we choose to eat has a major impact on the environment. How was the food grown or raised? Was it done on large factory farms? Was the food raised in highly industrialized monocultures that required large inputs of noxious herbicides and pesticides? Most people would not eat food they find lying on the ground, or with mold on it. But these same people eat without hesitation food with detectable traces of poisons. Consumer Reports did a test for pesticides and other poisons on produce, and they found a surprising amount even after thorough washing. Do I know where or how this food was grown? Was it grown sustainably? How much transportation was involved in getting this food to me? There is something deeply satisfying about eating food that is grown locally, and supporting local farmers helps keep vital the land around cities instead of just paving them over.

So given all the impacts that we are making on the environment, why do we keep on as we are, even if we are unhappy about it? I believe that people have very good reasons for what they do. As much as we would like to do the right thing environmentally, sometimes other things become more important. For example, when I first got engaged, my son from my previous marriage was very upset, and he was extremely negative towards my fiancée. She took it very well, but pointed out that if we were all going to live together we needed a large enough house to give her and her new stepson separate space. I suddenly had an excellent reason to want a large, possibly enormous house. After getting laid off, the job situation was pretty bleak and the only job I could find was a temporary one. It was absolutely a terrible, long commute, but I was grateful for it. So there I was on the road consuming lots of gasoline. Organics are really expensive. When carefully watching my expenses while laid off it was extremely hard to justify spending four times as much on organics as opposed to, say, saving up for dental care. When I finally got a permanent job my first reaction was to buy some stuff - it was very satisfying. I believe it is called retail therapy.

And then there are kids. This is probably one of the biggest impacts we have on the environment - raising children. Some hard-core environmentalists talk about the need to have less or no children. Unfortunately this has been tried before, the Shaker communities come to mind, and because of their no child policy they disappeared. Environmentalists that follow this philosophy will simply breed themselves out of existence. Raising children is one of life's greatest pleasures and for many of us is one of the most fulfilling things we will ever do. Most people planning on raising a family instinctively recognize that they want a place with lots of nature, and someplace where it is safe for the kids to run out and play. Most suburban developments are absolutely environmental disasters, but they are quite often the best alternative for families with children. I raised my son in Bellevue, an eastern suburb of Seattle. I knew it was far from ideal but it was the best available area for raising kids that I was aware of and it was within biking distance to work. We owned a nice, big suburban house with lots of gorgeous trees right next to a huge park - and it was in easy walking distance of a really good grade school. But there was almost no sense of community -- we all just drove up to our garages in the evening and left from our garages in the morning. On Halloween my son, Uly, and I were the only one on the block going door to door, everyone else with kids went to the local shopping mall to do their trick or treating.

Our physical structures are working against us - the way things are set up makes it very hard to lead a sustainable life. If we want a nice safe place to raise children we very likely are going to end up in a suburb. In that suburb typically the only practical way to get around is by car. Everyone lives in their own separate unit so the houses need to be very, very big, and since that is the focus they keep on getting bigger. When you drive to the huge parking lot at the huge super market, factory farms have many built in subsidies and can produce food for below the real production costs, so even if you can find organics for sale it will be hard to justify the price difference. Every house is isolated from all of the others so everyone has their own lawnmowers, garden equipment, shop tools, freezers, etc. And given the way the suburbs are set up, it is not surprising that shopping is one of the main forms of entertainment. If instead you choose to live in a city, you are cutting yourself off from a rich connection with nature, and the huge concentrations of people are way beyond any theoretical carrying capacity of the land.

So, the first step is to change the way things are structured. But we can't simply improve the structures - the world is the way it is because people want it that way. We live in a non-sustainable culture, that is, the way we feel and think about things directly leads to our non-sustainable world. We buy that isolated house because it just feels like the natural thing to do without really thinking about it. And we get a lot of validation for buying that house from everyone around us. Internally, our cultural beliefs are guiding us all the time. If we really want to reshape the structure of the world into a more sustainable place, we need to also change this culture of non-sustainability. But it goes the other way as well; if we want to change our culture we also need to change our structures. Our physical structures reinforce and create much of our culture. For example, when everyone lives in separate houses and drives in separate cars it creates a strong sense of being cut off from everyone else. This in turn reinforces the culture of the rugged individual who doesn't need or want the help of anyone. As long as people continue to live in this separate way, it is hard to create a different kind of culture. You can talk about it, but then everyone drives their car back to their separate homes. Structure and culture are closely bound and if we are going to get truly lasting changes we need to change both at the same time. So how do we get started on such a large sounding task? We don't have to do it all at once, in fact it probably best if we don't. I suggest that we can break it into bite size increments; change the culture a little, then change our structures a little and keep moving towards sustainability. And guess what? It turns out that there is already a movement doing this. It is called cohousing.

Cohousing starts with a group of people getting together and deciding that they want to cooperatively build (or rebuild) a place to live. So cohousing starts with a cultural change - people working together instead of staying atomized. The very first cohousing communities to follow this path were in Denmark in the late 70's. North Americans eventually noticed this phenomenon when a book was written about it, and this started a cohousing boom here. The first North American communities went up in 1992, and we now have well over a hundred established or under construction cohousing communities in the U.S and Canada. If you are curious to find out where they all are I encourage you to go to www.cohousing.org and take a look. When a group gets together to build a cohousing community they typically choose to cluster their houses together to leave lots of open space, park their cars in an offsite lot, and build a large common house for sharing community meals and activities. Because they are acting as a group they can develop a neighborhood that no developer ever could.

The community that I live in is on Bainbridge Island, which is a short ferry commute to Seattle. The community was built in 1992 and was either the first or second in the nation to go up depending on how you reckon it. The original group gathered together, pooled their money, got a shared bank loan, bought the land, hired architects and builders, helped with some of the building, and then moved in together. It is different from a commune in that everyone owns their own home and is responsible for their own livelihood; it is similar to a commune in that members emphasize community living and have structured the community buildings to reflect that. All major decisions are done by consensus. The actual houses are quite small by suburban standards and are clustered to leave a generous amount of space for a forest and garden area.

So what does cohousing have to do with environmentalism? Consider the physical structure of our community. We share a large, common house, which lets us live comfortably in much smaller houses than a typical suburban project. Our cars are parked off to one side of the property so we don't waste a lot of precious space on driveways. All of our houses are clustered, which leaves us with room for a large wooded natural area and garden. We share a carpentry workspace and a pottery workspace. We share a community worm bin and compost pile, and have many, many fruit trees scattered throughout the property. We have shared dinners five nights a week, and most community members make it a point to attend at least one community dinner a week if not more. We buy organic products in bulk from a wholesaler. Part of these bulk orders are for community meals, and part are orders that we split between individual families. These bulk orders significantly reduce the cost of buying organic. Just recently we put a little over an acre of our wooded common land into a wilderness trust that guarantees that we will never develop this land.

Compare this with the normal suburban development. Instead of building driveways up to each house we have space for a forest, garden, and orchard. Instead of pouring our money and materials into the construction of garages, we have a nice big common house to share meals in. It is very easy to get organic fruit; all I have to do is reach out and pluck it on my way home. In cohousing I know all of my neighbors and their kids, whereas the typical suburban enclave allows, even encourages us to be anonymous strangers. This is a very practical example; a group of people got together, agreed to change their culture and then built structures to reflect that new culture. I find this very exciting and hopeful. The most exciting thing of all is that it is an experiment that is working. If you visit one of these developments -- and I strongly encourage you to do so -- you will find that that the people living there love living in community.

Because we have a big, shared common house, the initial pressure on having separate spaces for my wife and my son were greatly reduced. Ulysses, my son, almost overnight was converted. He went from vigorously opposing the idea in theory to greatly enjoying it in practice. He quickly made friends with other kids his age, and they appropriated an underused section of the common house as their teenage hangout. My wife also found that she could wander over to neighbor's houses and hang out there. Our need for a large house was drastically reduced. We need less space on the outside as well. Because we share much of our property in common there is no need for us to have our own private half-acre of lawn for the kids to play on, and we have a nice plot in our community garden. All of our houses were built to a much higher environmental spec than code requires. When the community was being built the people shared a strong value of protecting the environment so they made the trade-offs that let them build in much better insulation and heating systems than would normally be built. Our lighting is more efficient and our toilets use less water. Our insulation is so good that they had to install special vents to make sure that we got enough air circulation. We use water based floor heating, which, in theory at least, is a much more efficient way to heat.

Cohousing naturally encourages a culture of sharing. I share a wood workshop with other community members so that I do not need to buy most of the basic tools that a suburbanite might want. We all share garden and lawn resources so we don't all have to have our very own lawnmower. In fact, anything that you can think of as a likely candidate for sharing is in fact shared somewhere in our community: cars, bikes, grills, kayaks, tools, freezers, kitchen appliances, vacuum cleaners, costumes, furniture, clothes, books, internet connection etc, etc. For the most part it is all pretty informal, and there is no pressure whatsoever. It just becomes a mindset - instead of hoarding, say, a food dehydrator or ice cream maker that I only use occasionally why don't I make it convenient for other people to use as well?

My community maintains a vital connection with nature. As I mentioned we have an orchard, and many fruit trees scattered throughout the property. When I feel like gardening, I have the benefit of a shared compost heap, incredibly rich worm bin tea and soil, and all of the tools that I might need within a close walk from my front door. We have avid recyclers that make a point of processing much of our organic waste through either a centralized worm bin, or through our chickens. Seven families jointly maintain a chicken coop, and a different family harvests the eggs each day. We also have a beautiful acre of woods. We are in an area zoned for high density, so this acre of woods is fast becoming one of the last wooded areas in our downtown.

Clustering the houses together and sharing a big common house lends towards sustainability in several different ways. It is much more efficient to have one central delivery place, and having all of the recyclables in one area is much, much more efficient than curbside pickup at separate houses, and studies have born this out. Our community makes big organic bulk orders from a wholesaler. We order quite a bit, and this only works because we have a large centralized place for people to come and pick up their orders. Having a centralized place also encourages us to share things like grills, firewood, and paint. It also gives us a very nice play area that can be shared by all of the kids.

Cohousing gives me a different relationship to my car. In general, my need to drive is somewhat reduced. We hold a fair amount of activities in the common house that I can just walk to, and if I do want to go to some event it is quite likely that I can carpool with someone. Notice how the structure of cohousing encourages car-pooling. Instead of having to jump into the car of a semi stranger and ask them to drive out of their way, we just meet in the parking lot and take off from there. We informally share a truck amongst members, and it is easy to ask someone if we can borrow their car. Just recently we bought an electric car to be shared by community members. The electric car only has a range of about 30 miles before it needs to be recharged, but it is perfect for local errands. We have people in our community that know enough about electricity to maintain it, and we have enough interested members to make sure that it will get a lot of use. This car is a concrete step in both our goal to both reduce our carbon impact (we're in the Northwest so our electricity is mostly from hydro), and our goal of reducing car ownership in the community.

When hauling groceries through the pelting rain to my house I sometimes think about the tradeoffs of not having a driveway right to my house. Despite the obvious disadvantages I think it really is worth it. Offsite parking has both cultural and physical effects. It requires a different mindset to give pedestrians, not cars pride of place. Kids are free to run around without fear of getting hit by a car. Also it makes us walk through the community and physically connect with the community on our way to and from work. I really enjoy walking through my community; we have beautiful landscaping, and I enjoy saying hello to people that happen to be up and about. Normal developments can't do offsite parking quite like this because it is outside the cultural norm. A developer would have a very, very hard time getting financing if they tried to build a project like ours. And they also would have a hard time attracting tenants - there needs to be a certain amount of trust and education before people are willing to make the leap. Which brings up the cultural changes necessary to do cohousing. Our physical, structural changes are excellent steps but only mildly radical. Our cultural changes, however, are perhaps a little more radical - at least for this society, and a big part of that is because we govern by consensus. And consensus is a big deal.

With apologies to Winston Churchill, I think that consensus is the worst form of government - until you consider the alternatives. When Winston Churchill made the comment he was talking about democracy, but for community building I don't think even direct democracy is the best method. For a while I ran a business with two other partners, and we operated by consensus. There were any number of times when I would enter into a heated business discussion with a tight belly, concerned that my position would simply be outvoted by the other two. Then I would remember that because we worked by consensus, nothing would be forced on me against my will, and that let me relax my tight belly enough to actually listen to the other points of view. And quite often, surprisingly, I found myself able to shift when necessary. It is the same with community meetings. Once everyone really, truly understands that nothing is going to get forced on them, they are much more flexible and able to work things out. The classic problem with democracy is that it almost inevitably breaks down into factions and gamesmanship - with consensus we don't get that.

Which is not to say that consensus is perfect because it is not. It means we have to go over and over an issue until every last person is OK with it. It requires lots and lots of meetings, and it can be quite intimidating to try and lead a proposal through the consensus process. Almost no one first coming into a consensus process has any practical experience with it. And why should they? Were do we ever learn to operate in a non-hierarchical manner? Certainly not in most families, schools, churches, or work places. Any group that wants to make consensus work is going to go through a learning process, and it turns out that not all members of that group will be able or willing to do that work so they leave. And they leave for good reason -- it is quite hard to do successful conflict resolution.

Given how difficult it is to get consensus right, why do I think it is so important? Because it is the best tool that I am aware of for changing our culture. It directly challenges the notion that we must rely on higher authority to get things done, and instead puts the responsibility squarely back on us. And it is working. If a meeting is not being run effectively, and I recognize how to fix it, instead of just blaming the leader, the onus is on me to speak up and help fix the process. We all have valuable talents and we all need to take turns leading. At my community every community member takes a turn co-leading a meeting. This ensures that we don't settle into a pattern where just a few are always taking the lead and even more importantly it ensures that everyone understands they are jointly responsible. We don't have the convenient fiction that everything would be just fine if we only didn't have so and so in charge.

I gave a talk on cohousing to an environmental class, and afterwards one of the students came up and said, "Cohousing sounds great, but you guys need to have more rental units". I agreed with him. But later I thought more about it and smacked my head in mock frustration - clearly I had failed to get across one of my main points! The whole point of cohousing is not that someone does it for you, but rather you yourself help to make it happen. If you want to live in a cohousing project that has lots of rental suites - get a group together and build one. This definitely is not easy to do, but it is a whole lot easier than you might suspect. We have been trained from childhood to believe that we are dependent on people higher in the hierarchy to get what we want: parents, teachers, and bosses. It is second nature to most of us to immediately look to the authority figure when we want to change something. There is a practical alternative - form a group. Many of us have never experienced the incredible power that comes from a group firmly committed to collective action. The most committed groups in this society are religious fundamentalists, and they've shown that they have power way beyond their actual numbers. Now imagine that kind of power harnessed by grass roots consensus and focused on creating a sustainable world.

Cohousing is already providing cultural benefits. For starters, cohousing communities are a nirvana for groups trying to get something started. We already have a core group of activist members, and if you hold a progressive event you already are guaranteed a certain minimum turn out. At my community we regularly have important speakers come and give a talk, and then raise money at the end. When environmental fundraisers go door to door they get a pleasant shock to find out how easy it is to gather money from us. When a local group needed money to form an organic farm coop they banged on a lot of closed doors until they finally came to my community where several of our members dug down deep to provide financing. When some people got excited about starting a local barter economy they also found a lot of closed doors until they chanced upon our cohousing group and found a ready made natural base for their system. Cohousing groups can act as little hotbeds of alternative culture that help spark and (more importantly) nurture change in the surrounding area.

So why do I think this cultural change is important environmentally? Before we can ever hope to make serious changes in our physical structures we have to first change the culture. In the case of cohousing, it is first necessary to get a group of people to agree on a basic plan. No bank would normally ever give a loan to a developer for the typical cohousing plan, and even with over 70% of the units pre-sold, cohousing groups still often struggle to get financing. Just by forming a group and deciding to build their homes together is a change in culture. It is enough of a change in culture to allow a better form of structure that was not possible before. I've been saying this a lot but let me repeat this one more time because it is so important: the culture had to change first before the actual physical cohousing structures could be built. Multiply this by millions of cohousing groups and suddenly we would have both a different culture as well as a much more sustainable structures.

Environmentalists sometimes make the mistake of thinking of environmental issues as somehow over there in, maybe, our national parks and forests, and separate from most of our daily concerns. They sometimes forget that the environment is actually our daily home. It is where we live. And we need to bring about a society that lives in peace with both itself and the environment that surrounds and supports it. One of the biggest cultural shifts we need to make is to encourage a culture of sharing. As long as we all insist on buying our own lawn mowers, power tools and food processors we are going to be consuming a lot of resources. The simplest and easiest way to reduce consumption is simply to share more things with each other. But to get to the point where this is simple and fun, you need to change our culture. How do you change our culture? By getting together in groups and living in a different way. It is simple, but also surprisingly tricky. People originally tried to do this by building communes, but it turned out that for most people this was way too great a leap. We need much smaller, gentler steps and cohousing provides this. The exciting thing is that cohousing works. People naturally want a richer, fuller life and cohousing helps to provide it. And along the way the world starts to become a better place, community by community, eco-niche by eco-niche.

As I mentioned earlier, of all the impacts that we have on the environment perhaps the most important is what kind of children we send into the world. So far the cohousing results look very good. Our children seem to really love cohousing - to them it is a little like an extended summer camp. One of the big problems with the 60's communes was that they were too cut off from the rest of the world, and children as they got older were desperate to move away. We're not seeing that in our communities. In my community we have a bunch of self-confident teenagers, and our community seems to be considered "cool" by other teenagers. Our children are learning how to confidently talk and deal with adults and to get a long with a wide range of children. Surprisingly, the teenagers in my community don't seem to go through a rebellious period - they have not needed it so far. One of our kids, Lucas, was in a grade school class where the teacher regularly rotated the seating every month. Then one month the teacher didn't rotate Lucas. When Lucas's mom inquired about the matter the teacher said, "Oh, Lucas is the only kid that seems to be able to get along with this one girl who is having a lot of trouble. I know I normally move the kids around, but Lucas is having such a good effect on this girl that I really want to keep him there". Other teachers have remarked on the ability of cohousing kids to work well with other kids. Peer pressure can work in a good way. My son is an only child and he was very averse to sharing things and was very picky about what he would eat. When we joined the community, his peers just assumed that you share lots of things, and they were accustomed to eating whatever was on offer at our community dinners. Now, my son is much more comfortable sharing things, and his food horizons have opened remarkably. Cohousing kids have grown up in a consensus based community where people are comfortable supporting each other - it will be fascinating to see what happens with this next generation.

My dream is to live in a sustainable world where people live in peace with each other and their surrounding environment. Cohousing, and movements like it, are the most effective mechanism that I can think of for actually achieving this. They harness people's discontent with our current culture - and make no mistake, people are not content with "mainstream" American culture - to create something better. This kind of change does not depend on appealing to higher authority. It does not rely on some charismatic leader, or a political vote that would inevitably be blocked by religious extremists. Instead it can happen organically and naturally, in small but important increments. And this kind of development, almost by definition is more environmentally sustainable. We already have a first generation of successful, flourishing cohousing communities, imagine what our country would be like if we had a million of these communities established. That would mean millions and millions of acres that are not paved, millions and millions of fewer cars and other house appliances. And it would mean millions of communities actively supporting and defending their local environment.

Why should environmentalists care about cohousing?

2004-12-15T15:31:00.001-08:00

When I talk to environmentalists about cohousing, they all nod and agree what a cool thing it is, but I suspect they sometimes have some objections that they are too polite to bring up. In this next section I would like to address what I suspect some of the questions people might secretly have about the viability of cohousing and community building in general.

It sounds like cohousing is a great idea, but it seems a little bit like a fringe phenomenon, and it probably would only work for certain people.

When I hear this I have to smile, you know there really is a truly radical experiment in housing go on. I'm not talking about cohousing or communes - those are the age-old tried and true methods of forming little villages. No, the radical experiment that I'm talking about is the idea of atomizing everyone into separate, anonymous housing. It has never been tried before on such a vast scale! We are just now getting in the test results, and from my point of view they don't look good at all. A book called "Bowling Alone" does a great job of describing how we have become cut off and alienated from each other. I believe we can see the results of that in our recent politics. I think that we have a strong, instinctual need to belong to a tribe. We are tribal animals. We don't feel complete unless we have that. Living in community is the natural order of things; it is how mankind has always lived until very recently.

And living in community is a lot more fun than you might suspect. I think a surprisingly high percentage of the population would be quite happy there. It is one thing to think about it intellectually and quite another to do it. Just about everyone who moves into an established cohousing project is very happy with it - it just feels right. Certainly, joining a newly forming group is not for everyone - getting a cohousing development built is quite an amazing challenge and requires a certain dedication. Yet moving into an existing, well established community is a very different proposition. Everything is working fairly smoothly, and people have learned how to trust each other. Moving into a community like that is a real pleasure.

It seems like everyone in the community would know about my private affairs. For example, if I wanted to bring home a different guy every night, I don't want to be gossiped about!

It is true that people in cohousing do tend to know more about what is going on in the lives of their neighbors, but all the groups that I have been involved in are tremendously accepting and non judgmental. You might be surprised to find that people will accept you for who you truly are - and you might be surprised to find out how much extra energy you get when you don't have to put on a "face". Not only that but you might find out that there are others in the exact situation as you. People tend to choose a cohousing group that fits their lifestyle. Urban cohousing groups tend to have a relatively high number of singles, whereas suburban cohousing not surprisingly tends to have more married couples with children.

Cohousing sounds nice, but it seems sort of like a side issue as far as environmentalism goes. Instead of focusing on saving a couple of suburban acres shouldn't our main priority be to preserve wilderness before it disappears?

Some years ago, Seattle tried (twice) to pass a referendum for building a major park in its downtown. Seattle is a beautiful city, but it is woefully lacking in downtown parks, and this was an attempt to remedy this. Surprisingly, a number of environmentalists were bitterly opposed to this proposal, saying "I would rather save 1000 acres of wilderness than save just one city acre!". Even more surprising to me was that some of my own friends seemed to find this reasoning compelling. The park initiatives failed and Seattle is unlikely to get a nice big downtown city park in the foreseeable future. If you stop and think, it really doesn't make any sense. Did this failure somehow help save wilderness? - I don't think so. There are two major fallacies in this thinking - one is an assumption of scarcity, the other is the assumption that only some land is worth saving.

The first fallacy was thinking that we couldn't both have a park and also preserve wilderness. In fact I would argue that the secret to getting wilderness preserved is to make sure that people have a daily connection with nature to make sure that they remember how important it is. It just is not the case that we only have the time, energy and money to do one or the other. When we muster the will to save one acre, this energy doesn't just dissipate, it can be focused on yet other projects. When we create the structure of a park, in a small way we are encouraging a shift in our culture by making nature a priority instead of, say, building yet another shopping mall. By consciously making nature a priority we then make it more likely that this will lead to other structural changes such as more parks and more wilderness land set aside. Once again it is a question of needing to change both our structure as well as our culture - we really need to work on both at the same time.

The second fallacy was to assume that only some land is worth saving. My heart tells me that all land is sacred and it all deserves compassion and protection. What does yours tell you? Saying a city park is not as important as wilderness is a bit like asking which child do you love more. All of the land deserves our love. Wilderness is incredibly beautiful and important to the ecology and I love walking through it, but it is not the only part of the environment. For better or worse we are an integral part of the environment and need to act as enlightened gardeners. The land we live on is just as important environmentally as any other part, and it equally deserves our love and compassion. Community helps us be better gardeners of this world. And I believe it is vitally important to take a stand for the land you actually live on.

It seems like cohousing would only work for people who are extraverted and social, not people who are introverted and value their alone time.

Actually, cohousing works really well for people who treasure their private time. I am very much an introvert, but that doesn't mean that I hate people or don't get lonely. I very much enjoy socializing over a community dinner, but when it is done I'm free to head back to reading my books. And remember, the socializing is not done with strangers, but people that I know well. Because I am an introvert I tend to be shy about forming relationships with people. Cohousing is an enormous help for me because it provides a great safe structure to form relationships with others slowly over time. When I want social contact I can easily get it, but at other times I can retreat to the privacy of my own house. I get the best of both worlds; as much private time as I want plus social contact whenever I want it as well.

The cohousing units that I have seen are all somewhat pricey. Is cohousing mainly a phenomenon for urban elites? What about housing for low income people?

Almost all cohousing, because it avoids a couple of profit taking middle-men, is significantly cheaper than comparable housing in the same area. There is no need for a developer to take his cut, and no need to pay real estate agents their fees. And members can build sweat equity by doing some of the construction work and landscaping. It makes it possible for some people to buy a house or condo that might not otherwise have been able to. That being said almost all of the first cohousing developments were firmly for middle class and above incomes. But the cohousing movement in North America is only around fifteen years old, and there still is a fair amount of institutional resistance to the movement. Most banks are unfamiliar with the concept and very resistant to making loans. Up to now almost all groups have had to have at least a couple of members that could make substantial loans to the group, and the groups have needed to attract members with good enough finances to persuade banks to give them a loan. This was necessary for the first generation of cohousing. With over a hundred thriving communities already up or on the way, it has been a very successful first generation, and it is remarkable that despite the substantial resistance groups have had to face so many communities have formed in such a small amount of time.

Most cohousing communities have a wide range of housing prices ranging from small studios all the way up to 4 bedroom townhouses. And some communities have a large number of renters. Some people rent an entire unit, and others bring in roommates. Some of the newer cohousing groups even design for this in advance by adding "mother-in-law" rooms that makes it easy to rent them out. Sometimes a cohousing group can get a nonprofit organization to subsidize part or all of the cost for some units to let special needs people to stay there

This is a good start but we can and should be doing even more. The main hurdle for getting lower income cohousing going is probably getting a loan from a bank. With banks already reluctant to loan to well-funded cohousing groups they are that much more reluctant to loan to low-income groups. It turns out that there is a surprising amount of grants available for low-income housing, but that by itself will not be enough to induce a bank to make a loan - they still will need to see a hefty down payment. The solution for this is, I hope, cohousing communities themselves. It turns out that there are a surprising number of people in cohousing who are quite happy to make a loan at, say, 6%, for a project that they believe in. I've already seen this in practice on a small scale. The money from people like this from all over the country could quite possibly provide enough seed money so that when combined with other low income housing subsidies the low income project could get off the ground.

If cohousing takes off the way I hope it does we could do even better. One hundred years ago it was common for local communities or organizations to form their own bank. Why can't cohousing do the same? My own community has cash reserves of over $200,000 for planned maintenance in the future. Multiply that by 100 communities and you have a pretty heft cash reserve that, although it would have to be invested very, very conservatively, could still provide loans to forming cohousing groups. Another potential source of money might come from insurance. One of my group's very highest expenses is insurance. It turns out that many cities form a network where they mutually insure themselves to reduce prices. Why not have cohousing groups do the same? Once this insurance collective built up suitable reserves, they would need to make prudent investments with this money - why not invest in other cohousing groups?

OK, you might have a point that cohousing is related to environmental concerns, but using the same reasoning you probably could make the point that just about any endeavor to improve the human condition is related to environmental concerns. It seems like cohousing is much more concerned about improving the relations of people to each other than it is concerned with improving people's relation to the environment.

We tend to think of humans as somehow completely separate from the environment. I don't think it works that way. The environment is not something we occasionally visit when we go on a camping trip - it is our home. The environment is the background in which all human activity fits in. Humans are now an integral part of the environment, and we need to build better habits for humanity.

Stop and think about the big picture for a moment. If we want to create a dramatically more sustainable landscape, how are we going to do it? How do we get people to consume less, and preferably be happy about it? Any answer that I can think of has to include some plausible mechanism for reforming our culture.

I can go one step further. I think that how we treat the environment is a mirror for how we generally treat each other. If we are not living in harmony with each other it should be no surprise that we are not living in harmony with the environment either. Learning to cooperate and live less selfishly and destructively will lead to major improvements in our environment.

You talk about changing the culture - isn't that maybe a little too Utopian? I mean it is a beautiful dream, but how likely is it to happen?

The interesting thing is that we already seeing a big cultural backlash, but not in a direction most environmentalists are happy with. The truth is that this grand experiment we've made in atomizing individuals into their individual mansions and encouraging them to consume as fast as they can does not provide a very fulfilling life. At its core the "American Dream" is hollow. The religious right has been growing at a shockingly rapid pace and for a very good reason - as hard as it is to believe, the fundamentalist way of life is much more fulfilling. Actually, this should not be too surprising - just about any community-based life would be better than the current "American Dream", but we underestimate the draw of this religious radicalism to our peril.

My point is that whether we like it or not, our culture is already undergoing dramatic shifts. What we call the mainstream culture is simply not working for many people. We need to provide an alternative, and things like cohousing are a good start. People are hungry for a better way to live, and we need to provide practical, workable alternatives. It turns out that humans need to feel part of a community. Any workable solution will have to draw upon the power of community. But just forming community by itself is not enough. The fundamentalists are drawing on the dark side of community. We are tribal animals and it is all too easy to rally a group together by pointing at outsiders and saying we are good and those people are evil. Put any group of people working together on tough challenges and you will quickly see a very human tendency for the group to bond. Cohousing very much relies on this phenomenon, but that is only part of the shift that I'm talking about. Cohousing groups, on their own and without a lot of theory behind them, are trying to set up a better way of life that does not require them to give up power to some authority figure. That is why consensus, as difficult as it can be, is so important.

I suspect that the main problem is not changing the culture - that is going to happen no matter what. No, the main problem is to make sure that our preferred version of culture becomes more wide spread. And this is not something we can just talk about - it is something we need to live and do. We are already a bit behind and we need to catch up.

What about urban living? It seems like the high densities in cities lend themselves to efficient resource allocation and therefore are more sustainable.

Certainly, any sustainable future that we create will require us to live closer together than many of us currently are. The question is how dense? It would be really interesting to see a formal scientific comparison of the ecological impact of dense urban living versus various suburban alternatives. One thing that strikes me about urban living is that we are far exceeding the carrying capacity of the land. If you have ever kept a fish tank you probably have noticed the dramatic difference between having just a few fish in the tank vs. keeping a large number. With just a few fish, it is relatively easy to keep the tank clean, but as you add fish, their wastes just start to over power the system. Similarly, in an urban environment with many people living densely packed together it just is not practical to use natural means to process the tremendous amount of wastes produced. Less dense communities are able to handle more of their wastes naturally. For example, in my community much of our organic wastes are either handled by our community worm bin or fed to our chickens, and even then our systems get overwhelmed at times.

But even more important is the question of what is the best habitat for humanity? One measure of a suitable habitat is how well does it work for its most vulnerable members: children and the elderly? Children need to be able to run around freely and safely. The very elderly also need a safe, pedestrian friendly, fairly slow paced environment. Most cities are not a good place for either the elderly or children, and probably are not that healthy for anyone else either. One major missing component is a daily vibrant connection with nature. I think ideally there will be a mix of communities. Some will be quite rural and some will be quite urban, but they will all offer safe havens to their weakest members, and all will provide a rich connection with the natural world. The design will emphasize people connecting with both each other and nature, so the buildings will not have more than three or four stories, and they will be pedestrian centered.

I like where I'm living and don't want to move. Cohousing sounds great for new developments, but what about all of the existing housing that we have? What do we do about that?

There already are some cohousing groups that are working with existing housing. Neighbors get together and form a dinner club and start to form bonds. Then they decide to tear down their fences, and let their lawns mingle. Then they start figuring out ways to share, maybe they share a common garden shed and a compost heap, maybe they start a car coop. Eventually, as they learn to trust each other, they might buy out an existing house that is somewhat central and designate it as a shared common house where they can have community meals. Later on (after years of fighting the city) they might even manage to close down one of their streets and set up off site parking. The street now is a shared garden and park, with a narrow access lane for emergency vehicles.

There are a few suburban communities where this has actually happened (but not, unfortunately, the street part yet as far as I know). I suspect that there aren't more because in some ways this kind of in-fill development is harder than cohousing. When working on creating a new site, a group has a clear goal that binds them together (and lots of adversity to tighten those bonds). Then when they move in, they have a custom built structure that encourages, even demands community development. There is plenty of time here for the group to make the necessary culture shifts. But in a normal neighborhood, the group is starting from scratch. It is a big deal to shift the culture and any group that is trying to do it needs lots of support. The current crop of new development cohousing is a very important step. It gives people concrete examples that they can visit and learn from. It trains people in how to live cooperatively and some of these people then start to train others.

Imagine a neighborhood where many of the people either grew up in cohousing or had lived in it before. It will be much, much easier to get that neighborhood to switch over than where almost no one has actually tried it before. It is definitely possible to switch over many of our existing communities but we probably need some more cultural shifts before we are ready. But probably less cultural work is needed than you might suspect. Again, most of us are so starved for community that there is a lot of pent up energy to make things like this happen. We just need to clearly explain the vision and then point to concrete, successful projects to get the ball rolling.

Limits of Reason

2004-08-26T17:52:00.000-07:00

"I can't quite explain why, but I know it is not true". We were sitting in a grassy courtyard surrounded by the dark-grey University of Chicago walls. Grey, grey minds always peering down at you was how a friend described the walls, but it was sunny and we were sitting on a park bench looking at the surprisingly pretty gray/shiny-purple pigeons hop around on the grass. We had just gotten out of class, and for some reason this brilliant young woman was taking me into her confidence. The class was a small freshman seminar based on the Great books. At the moment we were studying Immanuel Kant, a genius philosopher, who had written a book arguing very persuasively that morality could be explained entirely on the basis of rational, logical rules. I had found myself persuaded, but this young woman was not, and that is what we were talking about.

I sympathized with her - it was hard to argue against a genius. She thought for a moment, obviously searching for a way to explain herself. "I know he's wrong because I tried to commit suicide, but I'm still alive. I chose to stay alive because I realized that life is good." I looked at her not knowing what to say. This was not the typical University of Chicago conversation. This school, more than most, treasured the clear calmness of pure rationality. It was why a lot of us had chosen the school. What she was saying was anything but a purely rational argument, and yet I recognized that she was saying something very important and it had the smell of truth. But I also recognized the truth in what Immanuel Kant was saying -- along with all the other philosophers we were reading. How could such conflicting views both seem so right? Something was wrong here, but what? This was the start of my crisis of faith.

If I'm in a lot of pain, should I commit suicide? -- what a deeply moral question, and yet how absurd to think that the answer should come just by thinking strictly rationally about it. What this woman was trying to tell me, I think, was not that life is always good and wonderful, but that in its essence life is good. Some non-rational part of her just told her that simply being alive is good. And because she listened to that voice she was still alive whereas if she had just listened to her rational, despairing mind she probably would be dead. So she was rejecting the notion that morality was nothing more than another branch of mathematics. And yet that is not how people at University of Chicago thought you should approach any important question. Their approach was to think about any question as purely rationally as possible. They believed that if they only peered deeply enough with their rational minds then Truth would be revealed. This is essentially a religious path - basing one's life on a discipline of deeply held faith. We tend to think of religion as worship of God, but I think it is more accurate to say it is based on faith, and my faith was shaken. Maybe there were other, better paths to follow?

How do I know what is true and what is false? This is a surprisingly deep question, and surprisingly few people ever think much about it. Or then again, perhaps it isn't surprising. Whether we are aware of it or not we all have mental machinery humming along that helps us make the countless choices we need to make. Most of us instinctually recognize that messing with this machinery might cause a person's life to break down. Indeed, I have seen it happen -- people can literally think themselves into craziness. But on the other hand not understanding how we make decisions leaves us helpless to our own machinery. This unconscious machinery does not always work that well, and sometimes, like in the case of the young woman choosing to live or die this makes a great deal of difference. If we want to lead a deep, rich fulfilling life it is necessary to make sure that our underlying assumptions (our mechanism) is sound. And one of the key assumptions that we need to examine is how we sort data into knowledge - how do we decide if we believe something is true or not?

Another way of looking at this question is to think about what is going on when you argue with someone. Presumably, we argue with people to get them to see our point of view, and hopefully convert them. Amazingly, it occasionally works, but why? How are they persuaded to change their mind? When I turn inward, and think about things I find I have an inner sense of logical truth. I can think about something and if I think clearly enough about it, the truth becomes self-evident. In mathematics, that most rational discipline, everything is based on proofs. For convenience most of us in school just skipped over the proofs and went straight to using the results, but in principle the idea is that learning Mathematics is based on a process of self-discovery. As we learn math we go through an accelerated, significantly cleaned up re-creation of the history of mathematics. That is, we are re-creating the same mental discovery process inside ourselves as the original mathematicians - no wonder it is so hard! Mathematicians don't believe in the proofs because someone else told them to, they believe them because they have stepped through the proof in their own head, and gone over it and over it until they find that they recognize the truth in it. This is an amazing revelation when you first discover it. This is the real reason why everyone should study math - if done correctly we learn to celebrate the amazing power of our rational mind.

Science, at its best, is the application of math to the real world. Scientists look to mathematically model the world, and then they run experiments to check how well the model matches what actually happens. If they meet some unexplained physical phenomenon, scientists look to their theorists to see if they can't invent a new mathematical model that explains the phenomenon. Science has had incredible success in explaining the world. The problem is, we have almost had too much success. The tendency is to try and explain everything through scientific, rational methods. Many people take the position that they don't believe anything that cannot be scientifically or logically proven. I think for many this has lead to arrogance and a certain mental laziness. What we forget is that as powerful and wonderful as human reason is, it is just one source of knowledge. There are many questions in our life where it is inappropriate to think about just rationally. The young woman deciding on whether to commit suicide or not is a dramatic one, but there are many others.

But I didn't know all this when I was sitting back there on that picnic bench at U. of C. It has taken a long personal journey before it became obvious to me that there are many sources of knowledge that are equally valid as my pure reason. To most people this is hardly a revelation - my wife laughs that I was ever in doubt about this. But, I wish someone had explained this to me when I was younger. One of my favorite ways to check on the truth of something is to think about it rationally. In fact, in my experience, so relatively few people think about things in a deeply rational way that is tempting to dismiss most people as ignorant. This is of course a very arrogant point of view, but it is very real for us thinkers. Many of us contemptuously dismiss, for example, religion as just a construct for the ignorant and superstitious. And when we do, we are missing something very deep and important. What we are skipping over is the underlying assumption that the only true source of knowledge is rational thought. Is this true? What we forget is that this is just an assumption, a faith if you like. It is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the only information we will listen to is our rational mind, then we will always "discover" that only the rational mind is worth listening to.

From the time that I was quite young I've been fascinated with ideas. I thought about all sorts of things, and built up extraordinarily large mental, logical constructions. I read almost nonstop, exploring all sorts of imaginary worlds, and I fell in love with the rational method. Spock became my role model. In short, I was a nerd - but that was back before there was a certain cool about being a nerd, and this was a problem for me. My high school was an inner city working class school. Intellectuals were not well tolerated, and I kept my love of ideas fairly well hidden. Once, while I was on the football team, I got tired of waiting for the bus. It seemed like we were always waiting for something in the pseudo military that was the football team and I decided to throw caution to the wind and pulled out a sci-fi book to read. Friends on the team came over to check in with me sincerely worried that there might be something wrong - they were really, touchingly concerned. The next day the coach accosted my father in the hallway (my father worked as the music supervisor for the district), and said in the bluff joking jock style "Do you know what the hell your son was doing the other day?!? He was reading!!, that's what. What the hell has gotten into him!!?". The truly funny thing is that the coach was only half joking. And no, I am not exaggerating even a little.

It was remarkably like being gay and in the closet. I was too scared to openly declare myself an intellectual, so I kept it hidden. So of course, I took that as my central identity. I longed to be an openly flaming intellectual, and looked for my version of San Francisco. The University of Chicago seemed to fit the bill nicely. The school was so intellectually pure they didn't have any practical art or music classes, only art and music theory. The school at the time didn't even have a computer science department - leaving that to be handled by the purer math department instead. The only problem was that nobody seemed to be very happy-those gray minds always were beating down. During my prospective weekend, my sweet hosts (a senior boyfriend and his freshman girlfriend) spent the entire time trying to talk me out of going to the school. I didn't listen of course; I was too caught up with the idea of going to school were everyone was an open, flaming, intellectual. I just figured that not everyone had surrendered themselves to pure sweet rationality, and that caused them unhappiness.

Before college I used to think that the world would be a much, much better place if everyone were just like me - oh sure, it would be a more boring, predictable world, but at least we wouldn't have all that insane murderous cruelty. I was wrong. U. of C. gave me a glimpse of what a world of many me's might be like - and it turns out that too many brooding intellectuals in one place is not a good idea at all. They need leavening! What goes missing is joy, beauty, and simple silliness. I remember sitting in on a difficult, advanced philosophy class (studying another book of Immanuel Kant) and looking around thinking about the professor and graduate students there. Here they had dedicated their lives to pure reason, and yet they looked miserable. One look at these people and I realized that no matter how good I was at philosophy I definitely did not want to lead lives like theirs. Clearly something was wrong with the path they were on but what? Maybe pure reason was not the answer after all?

After my second year at U. of C., I dropped out. I took a year off and explored for a while. On my way to Olympic National Park to do some hiking in Washington, I discovered The Evergreen College and fell in love with it almost from the moment I entered the college. This is what I had been looking for. The college didn't have separate classes, but instead two or three teachers would address certain core questions in a year-long seminar. The seminar that caught my eye was "Computability and Cognition". The seminar description started off with the question: "What are the limits of Reason? Can a computer be as an intelligent as a human?" In the class we studied Goedel's theorem. It turns out that there are mathematical truths that cannot be proven correct. Let me say that again because it is very important - something can be logically true, but there is no rational way to prove it so. In other words, any system of rational thought can not answer all questions, even some rational questions.

In class we studied how formal reasoning works. It turns out that any formal reasoning system starts out with basic assumptions (called axioms) and works up from there. No useful logical system can be built without these assumptions, but these assumptions have to be taken on faith - they are outside of the system. So many arguments are pointless because the two different people are starting with different faith based assumptions. Given how enormously important our assumptions are, it is shocking how unaware we typically are of them. When I talk about our mental machinery this is a major component.

Traditionally, rationalists start with the assumption that only their rational mind can be trusted as a source of knowledge everything else is fallible. Descartes Meditations is classical exposition of this mindset. The problem, though, as Descartes himself points out is that given this mindset you start to doubt that anything up to and possibly including even yourself is real. "I think therefore I am" is a very different mindset from "I have a body therefore I am". Doubting that anything at all in the world except your own mind is real is a pretty weird view on life, and I don't particularly recommend it. But it is important to understand that many people choose to live in this strange kind of world. Without realizing it they get caught in a trap; at their core they only have faith in their rationality to guide them and so everything else including their own senses comes into suspicion.

A close follow up to this worldview is the belief that the mind is just so much computer software. The idea is that human intelligence can be completely captured by mathematical symbols. The actual physical substrate is almost irrelevant - it is the pure reason behind it that is all that matters. Since the 1950's computer scientists have been arrogantly predicting the imminent dawn of Artificial Intelligence, and they've always been embarrassingly wrong. The only examples that we have of consciousness (ourselves and animals) are very biological, why would we immediately assume that the body has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness? What proof do we have of this? The answer is so far absolutely none.

We stand profoundly ignorant of our own minds. In our arrogance we assume that the same methods that teased out the secrets of the stars would work just as well to tease out the secrets of the soul. It hasn't happened that way. We don't understand how and why we have consciousness. We certainly can't artificially create consciousness, nor have we come close to doing so. We don't, in short, have a mathematics of the mind. Until we do develop such a system we need to stand humbly and admit how much we still do not know. Really, this is the only possible rational response - don't assume we know something when we in fact do not.

When I realized that reason in fact has limits to what it can tell me, I became curious to explore what else was out there. For a time, I became very serious about Zen Buddhism, and meditated diligently. It was a revelation that we can calm our chattering minds to enter into another, larger mental space. Zen meditation requires an almost athletic ability to focus the mind and body to absolute stillness. At the peak of my ability, I spent a week at a Zen monastery just north of San Francisco, and every morning we would start the day by meditating for two early hours in the austere but beautiful temple. One morning at breakfast a woman who had been noisily struggling with the severe discipline of Zen meditation asked if everyone had heard the ocean this morning. One of the monks smiled and simply said the ocean had always been there she just had gotten quiet enough to hear it. And it was true, you had to get very, very quiet and still to hear the ocean, but once you did it was always present.

And that was my answer. It turns out that when I quiet my rational mind there are other sources of knowledge available to me. My mind had been so loudly talking to me that I could not hear the ocean. My rational mind might have an answer for just about everything, but that doesn't guarantee that what it has to say is terribly useful. In mathematics it is possible to arrange mathematical symbols so that they fit the syntactic rules, but what they represent are meaningless. In the same way it is possible to ask a number of questions that seem to make sense, but are meaningless, really, if you try to answer them rationally. Questions like "Should I commit suicide?", or "What is the meaning of life?" only have truly satisfying answers if you quiet your mind down enough to hear them.

What about emotions? Where do they fit in? The traditional view on emotions is that they are separate from rational thought. You can either think emotionally or you can think rationally. Star Trek's Spock, my former idol, was a great proponent of this. I no longer believe it. I think that everything we do is accompanied by emotion including rational thought. When I am working through a computer problem I tend to feel calm and serene - these are emotions that I treasure and are a good part of the reason I love to work with computers. There has been recent psychological research to show that emotions and rational thought are much more intertwined than we previously believed. So, for me, emotions are an intrinsic part of all our experience, sometimes they are very intense and sometimes they are almost unnoticeable, but they are always with us. And yes, they are a source of knowledge in the same way that any of my body's senses are a source of knowledge. But I'm not convinced that they are independent of all my other mental states, I think they are just an important part of being self-aware.

Later on in my life, I realized that I was in a lot of mental pain. Some things were working well in my life, but many others were not. Fortunately, my determination held to get to the truth no matter where it took me. I tried talk therapy, but was deeply unimpressed with that method, although it seems to have worked for others. Then I stumbled onto some mildly radical personal growth seminars. I absolutely loved them. It turned out that I had some work to do - my mental machinery needed some fixing. It was exhilarating to be given permission to connect to others on a deeper level and find out that many of their struggles were in fact mine as well. And then I started on the hard work of changing the beliefs and assumptions that were getting in my way. One of my biggest problems was that I had a voice that was constantly tearing me down and even punishing me. The battle was to learn to love myself instead of hating myself. One practice I used was to look in the mirror at my acne-scarred face and saying from the heart, "I love you". To this day, every time I have a painful, negative thought about myself I habitually remind myself, "I have value", and touch my hand to my heart. This may not sound like much, but it has been of enormous help to me. An acquaintance that knew me both before and after I had done this work said that, "You look a lot more comfortable in your skin now" - that describes it nicely.

The work of mental healing was fascinating, and I delved even deeper into it. The more I explored the more I came to realize that the very heart of healing is centered on spirituality, and I started to recognize and cherish my spiritual self. Oops. As a devout atheist (of course I was!), this was deeply surprising and not a little troubling. Note that I am not talking about "God", which is something I still do not believe in at least the traditional way, but instead the unexpectedly powerful human mystery that I was discovering inside myself and others. After much thought and discussion, I realized that I was spiritual but not religious - there is a big difference. Spirituality is about experiencing the underlying truth, while religion is about the forms and rituals that are supposed to help you get to that truth. There are many paths to the same goal, and no religion has the exclusive answer -- unfortunately many religions are confused about that point. Most religions seem to have forgotten their original purpose of helping people discover and cherish their spiritual natures, and instead have been deeply corrupted into little more than a means of control. Note that the personal growth courses themselves made no overt or even implicit reference to spirituality - if they had they would probably have lost a lot of customers including, at least initially, me. But what I started to notice was that when the courses were working best they were evoking what I call spirituality. Spirituality, for me, is the strength I find inside myself to forgive; both others and myself. It helps me to discover what is truly important and lets me feel deeply connected.

If you are a true rationalist, I imagine you are deeply skeptical about all of this. A lot of religious talk seems like complete nonsense (or worse) to me too. How can I trust any system of thought that shouts my group is right and everyone else is so wrong that they are going to suffer eternal torture? My first strong reaction to this kind of craziness was to discount religions altogether as obviously false. And yet, most of the human race is religious (and presumably spiritual). Are all those people really just incredibly superstitious and ignorant? Many rationalists actually believe this, but I don't think they've deeply thought about the matter - it is a case were arrogance gets in the way of discovering the truth. Isn't it just possible that all of these religions are tapping into something shared by us all? Perhaps the message is getting badly distorted and misused, but isn't it possible there is an important shared, core experience that all of these religions are tapping into? I became very curious about this possibility, but in order to discover this shared truth I had to do the work myself - much like working through a math proof.

Back at University of Chicago I took a Physics class with a bunch of cutthroat pre-meds. The competition for getting a good grade was pretty intense, but I personally wasn't that concerned about my grade simply because so much of my own hard-earned money was at stake that I was determined to actually learning something. On the tests we were expected to have memorized a number of equations. This really bothered me because I knew that I along with all the pre-meds would quickly just forget all of the equations and therefore really learn nothing. However, I discovered that if I memorized just one of the equations I could derive the others. I'm not even close to a mathematical genius, but I can be stubborn. So on each question of the test I would flip the test page over and start deriving the necessary equation and when I finally got it, I would flip the page back over, copy the derived equation and start doing the problem. As you can imagine this was a somewhat slow process, and invariably I only had time to do about half of the test, but I did well enough on the first part of the test that I finished that I would usually get a "B".

Discovering spirituality was a similar process for me. Rather than just taking the established spiritual "proofs" on faith, I, starting on first principles, stubbornly worked them through for myself. For example, I learned that sexuality has three levels: body, heart, and spirit. Through painful trial and error I learned that the reason many religions get so worked up about sexuality is that on a spiritual level sex is very powerful and really should not be toyed with. The original messengers quite likely were just trying to emphasize the importance of recognizing this and hoping to keep people from hurting themselves. I think that in most cases that message has gotten seriously garbled. The problem with working out all of this on my own was that it was hard, time consuming, and at times painful. And in the end I just rediscovered things that spiritual leaders have been saying all along. But it was worth it because it was my first concrete experience in listening to a source of knowledge outside of my rationality. I found that there really is something to what those spiritual people are saying. But, again, you don't need to take this on faith - this is something you can prove to yourself by doing the work on your own.

The first step was to examine my basic assumptions. Did I really think that rationality is the only valid source of knowledge? I noticed that I had a lot of initial resistance to even admitting the possibility that there might be other valid sources of knowledge, and I got very curious about why. Partly the fear was based on losing control and giving up my powerful ability of mind and venturing into areas were I was very much a beginner. The next step was to stop thinking and start exploring what else was out there. Reason could point out the possibility of other worlds, but after that, I had to turn off my reasoning brain and start listening to myself in a different way.

Before I talked about Descartes' (and my) assumption that the rational mind is the center and everything else including our bodies revolves around it. I now believe just the opposite - it is our bodies that are the center and everything else including our rational minds revolves around the body. I know this from my own personal experience. Perhaps you do too, but have never stopped to think about it. Again, the proof for this statement is not in thinking about it rationally, but to instead introspect and remember the states that you have been to, and to at least be open to the possibility of finding other states. Here are some of the states that I have directly experienced:

Runner's High

I love to run. Our bodies love and need to work. When I run, I quickly slip into a semi-trance and my body just takes over. I typically have wonderful conversations with myself as I run - it is when I'm at my strongest. I make my most courageous decisions while I'm running - I feel powerful and capable. People who don't believe that this state exists, or doubt that they can achieve it themselves are, by their very disbelief, keeping themselves from achieving this state. Isn't that strange? This is a very real state of consciousness, and yet some rationalists would discount it as not really existing or not very important.

Berserker rage

I found this in football. I found that if I prepared myself mentally all of the day before a game I could go into a very, very powerful rage/trance during the game - it made me a star for a while. It turns out that we have a war-like, berserker state where we can do incredibly physical feats. The Vikings knew about these states - it is where we get the word "berserk" from. The rage/trance let me perform way beyond my normal athletic limits. On the down side I also smashed through people without being conscious of what harm I was doing to them. From a rational point of view I can't say much to defend this other than it is a lot more fun than you might think. To fully embrace being human we must accept that, on a very deep level, humans are unusually war-like animals.

Personal growth

As I mentioned before, the more I worked towards healing my psychological wounds in my thirties, the more I discovered that just about all of this work revolves around spirituality. Another word for it, perhaps, is love, but it is a very powerful form of it. I know this is a difficult word for many, but it is the best that I can come up with for now. After taking a particularly powerful set of courses I remember just sitting in the Microsoft cafeteria and feeling unconditional love for everyone around me - regardless of how they might feel about me. Some of our best spiritual leaders talk about this state of consciousness; whatever word you choose our world could use more of this.

Communion with Nature

The reason I love hiking and backpacking is that it puts me in closer connection with nature. Given a chance, I think all of us can feel this deep connection with the natural world. Environmentalist oppose the destruction of wilderness not just because of rational reasons, but because the land is sacred to them. Walk through a strand of old growth trees with a quiet mind, and I strongly suspect you might discover what I mean. There is a value to a tree far beyond its narrow economic value. There is a reason why even in the densest cities we find it imperative to mix in greenery and trees. There are many paths to spirituality, taking a long walk in wilderness is one of my personal favorites.

Energy and multiple orgasms

This one surprised me. It turns out that men can have multiple orgasms. It involves some of the same breathing and mind discipline I learned in Zen. It also involves consciously channeling sexual energy through the body to redirect it from going to orgasm. The Tantrics in China did a lot of exploration into this. To a strict rationalist this sounds like mumbo-jumbo, but it is a demonstrably concrete and physical phenomenon.

This one is worth pursuing for two reasons - it is a very pleasurable discipline, and it also demonstrates the amazing connections between mind, body, and our energy. Once I personally experienced changing my energy flows to do something that I thought impossible, I became a lot more curious and open to some of the New Age woo-woo talk about energy. I don't claim to completely understand it, and I don't want to make exaggerated claims, but our control of our own energy levels is much more complex and powerful than a typical, limited rationalist view of the world would want to admit.

Sex and spirituality

The more I pay attention during sex, the more powerful and profound it becomes. As I mentioned before, I discovered that sex for me has three levels - the body, the emotions, and the spirit. Quite often I approached (and sometimes still approach) sex as if I were happily munching through a bag of potato chips. That's sex on the body level. Sex is such a powerful, body based experience that many of us get stuck here. Then I learned to open my heart to my partner. That's sex on the emotional level. Finally, I started to pay close attention to the energy exchange between my partner and myself. That is sex on the spiritual level. And when I started paying attention to my spirituality (or energy level if you prefer), I found that it showed up nowhere more strongly than in sex.

Self-Healing

A constant "problem" with drug tests is that annoying placebo effect. It turns out that people can consciously will themselves to get better simply by believing they are taking a powerful drug when in fact they are just taking an inert placebo pill. This is truly amazing.

In my mid thirties, I developed a very dangerous and painful tumor in my spinal column. Despite the fact that it was life threatening, it was one of the times I was most powerful. I interviewed for and got a very demanding position at work. A dear friend came to visit me after the surgery, and we laughed when we realized that I was giving comfort and strength to him instead of the other way around.

One big problem, though, was that in removing the tumor, the surgeon had to remove a large chunk of the nerve connections to my left arm. One of my doctors looked at the body as a machine and was quite firm in telling me that there was no way I was going to regain the lost functionality. How could I? -- The nerves controlling it were completely removed. The actual surgeon, though, told me that we don't fully understand the body mind connection, and it is hard to predict exactly what could be re-established.

So there I sat in my hospital bed, feeling very powerful and determined to do whatever I could to help my mind fully reconnect to my arm. I consciously poured as much love as I could into my poor damaged arm. Later that night I felt a tremendous wave of energy that flowed from my left side throughout my body and then seemed to fill the entire room with energy. It was incredible. It felt like being kissed by an angel. Now I hasten to add that despite this experience I didn't have a religious conversion. I still don't believe in some patriarchal (or matriarchal ) God sitting in heaven with their white robed angels. But now from direct personal experience I do know that there are states of consciousness that I never even dreamed possible while I was living firmly in my rational world. And as for my arm, I made a complete recovery - I regained complete control. The second doctor was right. I can't say for sure that my mental efforts added to this, but I also can't say for sure that they didn't. And I sure know that I experienced something extraordinary.

Life is a rich and varied banquet. Rationalists that stay safe in only their rational minds are missing out on the full richness of being fully human. When I try to talk about this with my rationalist friends it is somewhat frustrating - I end up basically saying, yes, pizza is one of my favorite foods too, but there is so much else out there as well, why not do a little more exploring?

A good scientist is supposed to follow the truth no matter where it takes them. Sometimes the pursuit of truth can take them to places that completely upset the current paradigm and yet the scientist is expected to keep on going no matter what. I believe this - follow the truth no matter where it leads. In my case, it has taken me to states of consciousness that I never would have guessed at. So where am I now that is different from where I was back on that picnic bench at University of Chicago? What do I know now that I didn't then?

I have learned how to bring up other parts of myself to deal with such a deep crisis as that young lady faced- this is one case where my rational mind would take a back seat. Simply being alive, even in pain is a good thing that needs celebrating. But almost certainly the core of her problem was self-hate and serious depression. I now know a lot about self-hate, and suicide is the ultimate expression of self-hate. The path back from suicide is learning to love oneself, and that almost inevitably touches upon what I call spirituality. I also know about crushing depression, and the solution is to recognize that it is a whole body problem, and needs a whole body treatment that includes exercise, diet, mood enhancers (like St. John's Wort or even possibly prescription drugs), a change in thinking, and of course spiritual work. It wasn't so much a case that Kant, the genius rationalist philosopher, was wrong, but simply that what he had to say wasn't terribly useful in this case.

The reason I felt so conflicted during our conversation was that I had been following a jealous God. Strict rationalists, along with many Christians, believe that they are following the one True faith, and everyone else is just a deluded infidel. But what I didn't know at the time is that it is possible to make deep use of reason without being such a narrow, intolerant fundamentalist. It turns out that there are many paths to Truth, and rationality is just one of them. I've learned to welcome and honor all of my mind/body faculties. When I live in balance with my heart, mind, and spirit, I find my life to be most fulfilling. When I get out of balance, it is ultimately unhealthy. That is why I ultimately left both the University of Chicago, and the Zen monastery - both were very useful training grounds, but both were in the end very unbalanced.

Further Resources:

Gödel Escher Bach
By Douglas R. Hofstadter

If you feel like exploring your rational mind, this is definitely the book for you. This is the best book I've seen for explaining the rational method. Amongst his other themes Hofstadter does a great job of explaining Goedel's theorem.

The Multi Orgasmic Couple
By Mantak Chia and Maneen Chia, Douglas Abrams and Rachel Abrams.

In very down to earth practical terms shows how both men and women can focus their minds and bodies to achieve multiple orgasms. Then goes on to show how the partners can share that energy. If you have your doubts about sex being a spiritual exercise, try this book.

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
By Robert Fulghum

Actually I would recommend any of Fulghum's books. He does a great job of talking in a very practical way about spiritual matters without resorting to the "God" word or invoking religion.

First post

2004-08-26T17:00:00.000-07:00

Welcome.

The goal of this blog is to discuss practical philosophy. It turns out that ideas are wildly important, in many cases they rule our lives, so it is important to be clear about what ideas we embrace. On the other hand, philosophy is notorious for veering off into completely abstract fields with little or no practical relevance. So my focus here is on ideas that directly affect how we live our lives.