Utopia Governance & the Commons by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

Utopia Governance and the Commons

and services. Make banking more local and personal. Return it to being a service.

Another idea, known as the Tobin Tax — after American economist, James Tobin — is to tax financial transactions. (A similar idea was proposed by John Maynard Keynes.) In particular it is aimed at reducing the excessive trading in shares as these would arguably be hit hardest by the tax. Money crossing national borders — as it so often does in the financial economy — is especially problematic. It is a symptom of the severe abstraction of finance from the real world of goods and services, people and communities, which it is allegedly supposed to be serving. Perhaps only tighter regulations can address this.

A further idea is to put a minimum term on the ownership of shares. This would return stocks and shares to their original function of investing in the future of a business rather than the casino gaming of the financial economy that trade in shares has become. But there can be drawbacks to this strategy, as it would tend to discourage speculative investment that can aid new ventures.

Another idea (also proposed by Maynard Keynes) is money that is de-valued over time, so could, for instance, require some kind of stamp attached to it (often literally a postage stamp) in order to bring it back up to the bank note’s nominal value. The intention is to prevent money from being hoarded. The greater circulation of money then helps the economy.

 

238

Utopia Governance and the Commons

Another alternative might be that governments could spend money into existence by creating debt-free finance for public goods, sometimes referred to as ‘sovereign money’. (See, for instance, Ellen Hodgson Brown — The Web of Debt and Andrew Jackson and Ben Dyson — Modernising Money.)

 

How Do the Utopias View the

Social Commons?

The reader, at this point, may well be expecting me to ascribe the monetisation of the economies to Privatopia and Cornucopia, and suggest that Ecotopia stands out as giving due regard to the social commons, re-making, the emotional economy and compassion. However, I’m choosing to break ranks! I think all the utopias recognise the importance of the social commons in their various ways. In Privatopia, our emotional economy is frustrated — closed in by the system that no longer serves us — but it is still there beneath the surface, waiting to be set free. I’d also like to pick out the Cornucopians, in particular, for their belief in abundance. We often view economics as a dull science of graphs, statistics and confusing rhetoric, but essentially it is about trying to give us prosperity and secure our ongoing viability. The positivity of the Cornucopians at least shares that hunger for a future of security and abundance. In later chapters we will see that this might be realised in a lot of different ways — most importantly we may work with nature, rather than against her — and see both human flourishing and restored and enhanced eco-systems.

 

239

Utopia Governance and the Commons

 

Ecotopians are often the promoters of a gift economy, but they also just leave it there, without really getting to grips with what it might mean. I hope this chapter has shown that ‘the gift’ is a lot more prevalent in our lives than we might realise — in fact, transactions are the aberration, gift is the norm. My wish for the Ecotopians is that they would take this more fully on board, rather than bending to the temptation to treat nature as a cost-benefit analysis.

 

Summary

We could ask at this point, what is the purpose of the economy? Is it to maximise profit? To maximise production? To make the best of scarce resources? Is it even to maximise employment? Economics, at least of the more traditional varieties, would suggest one or more of these alternatives. But in this book I would suggest that the purpose of the economy may best be described as what would serve people most effectively. There is enough for everyone on Earth to have a comfortable life and for nature still to flourish — if we could only sort out our issues of fair distribution, sensible agriculture, sensible energy use and consumption. We have grown enough. We have come of age. It is time to work to other values. Scarcity — often regarding as the starting point for economics — is really just relevant to our material economy (if indeed it is relevant at all). Abundance is the rule for all the other economies we have discussed and this is enhanced by our human desires for pleasure and flourishing.

 

240

Utopia Governance and the Commons

 

Putting economics first puts money first, with all value derived from money. By contrast, putting social relations first puts value and worth back into other things as a priority over finance. We need to be making a life, not just making a living. The social commons, re-making, compassion and the emotional economy undergird all else that we do. Compassion is the currency of the emotional economy. It is about pleasure, caring, community, celebration, art, music, humour. The value espoused by the emotional economy is intrinsic value, in other words, things have value just for being themselves. Community and relationships have a worth that cannot be translated into financial transactions.

Could we devise a diagram to show the workings of the emotional economy, to sit within nature and place and alongside the material and cultural economies? Well, to do this we need to step back a little. Look again at the diagrams in Chapter 3. We can note a couple of points. Firstly, stuff just magically appears at the start of the economy and at the end of the process it seems to disappear — consumption is, on this model, the ‘death’ of stuff. This probably doesn’t seem so strange to us. We have grown up with a narrative of things beginning out of nothing and a further narrative that we can throw things away and that’s the end of them. But of course, when we look at the later figures in Chapter 4, we see that this is not the case. Everything comes from nature and from a particular place, and everything, one way or another, returns to her — whether it is ‘consumed’ by humans, or thrown away as

 

241

Utopia Governance and the Commons

waste. So there is a circular economy. Whether or not we intend it to be circular is another matter. If we use nature blindly, it is a bad circle. If we use her resources wisely, it could be a virtuous circle. So, this is our first diagram, the circular economy, and it fits especially well with the emotional economy we have been discussing in this chapter. It fits quite well with culture too, and of course nature is our prime example of a virtuous circle. Circular economies are the focus of John Todd of the New Alchemy Institute, Masachussets, the book, Cradle to Cradle, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart and Walter Stahel of the Product Life Institute in Switzerland. (It was Stahel who coined the phrase ‘cradle to cradle’.)

 

Figure 8.3 The Circular Economy

We can extend the same logic to all of the economies that we have looked at — nature, place (I am using the term ‘spatial economy’ here), culture and the emotional economy. As I’ve hinted at above, thinking of some of these economies as circular may be a stretch, and

 

242

Utopia Governance and the Commons

perhaps it is more of an aspiration than a reality. Nevertheless, I’d suggest they could all reasonably be circular. Furthermore, to provide another view of all these economies, as they have been described in preceding chapters, we can arrange them as nested one within another. So this gives us our second diagram.

 

Figure 8.4 Nested Economies

Finally, we can go back and re-visit the discussions on the gift economy, earlier in this chapter. The key idea there is that the gift is given to build others up. Whilst the ideas explored around gift may seem alien to us, I think this is because our culture has immersed us in buying, selling, trading and transactions.

 

243

Utopia Governance and the Commons

I’d suggest instead that gifting is always going on. So, our final diagram shows this idea of a gift exchange back and forth between two economies. The principle could be applied to all of the five economies we have described.

 

Figure 8.5 Gift Exchange between Two

Economies

All of the economies flow into one another. The material economy has elements of the cultural economy, by way of invention and technical know-how. The cultural economy has elements of the material, as many of its ‘products’ are physical things. So we can see maintenance and care — aspects of the emotional economy — as features of the service sector, that are usually bundled up with the ‘goods and services’ of the material economy. The gift economy is based on relationship, as opposed to our current, limited, material economy, based on transaction.

Nature, places, culture and people are all brimming with an abundance of gifts. If we were to be more aware of this then perhaps we

 

244

Utopia Governance and the Commons

would see a great many things in a different light. It is not that I am suggesting that we abandon money. It is rather that we place things into a wider context. The wider context includes nature, the commons and our relationships around place, culture, making and re-making. And it includes a vision of a new story.

The issues raised by the social commons/emotional economy bring us back to the question of changing the system or changing people — a question we have encountered several times throughout this work. But these alternative options are not really so different. For the system to change, those who make decisions — be it a few people, or all, or most, of the population — must change. Otherwise, if people were already different, the system would already be changing. Could a few people, who just happen to be our leaders, change without some part of society changing as well? It seems unlikely. It seem more likely that a wider change will need to occur, and then our leaders will be forced to follow.

The next four chapters try to put all of the foregoing discussions into some context — in relation to nature, place, compassion and pleasure. The chapter on compassion, in particular, takes up this theme of changing individuals and communities as the key to more structural change. But, as we have explored in this chapter, all of this ultimately leads back to nature. So we start with nature in the next chapter.

 

245

Utopia Governance and the Commons

 

246

Utopia Governance and the Commons

 

9. Nature

‘In wilderness is the preservation of the world.’

Henry David Thoreau

‘If you do not rest upon the good foundations of nature, you will labour with little humour and with less profit. Those who take for their standard any one but nature — the mistress of all masters — weary themselves in vain.’

Leonardo da Vinci

The first of four chapters on the themes of nature, place, compassion and pleasure. The focus of these chapters is to explore subjects that I feel are essential for discussion, if a system of deliberative democracy is to be established. As such, all that is expressed here is simply ideas and not necessarily proposals. If

 

247

Utopia Governance and the Commons

we had the chance, we would be allowed to decide on what kind of governance we might like. If we opted for a deliberative democracy, then we might have an opportunity of all being involved in making decisions about the subjects addressed in these four chapters. Until then, this is all just speculation. I hope, nonetheless, that the ideas explored will be by way of an incentive to see what we could all be talking about, if only the opportunity were given to us.

 

Natural Commons and Wild Nature

As discussed in Chapter 4, it is essential to our existence on Earth that we appropriate nature in some way in order to sustain and reproduce ourselves. I have designated this part of nature that we need to use as the natural commons. There remain however, features of nature that could be viewed as too important, unique or beautiful in themselves to be exploited as ‘resource’. I have used the term ‘wild nature’ to describe this aspect of nature. How do we differentiate between these two types of nature — natural commons and wild nature? In Chapter 4, I suggested that this is a matter of attributing intrinsic and extrinsic value. One way or another — whether the choice is seen in these terms or not — there seems no way of avoiding this decision. It is also a ‘moveable feast’. Some parts of nature that we may use as a resource today we would be best to keep as wild nature, and vice versa, and these decisions may change over time.

We should also recognise our own wild mind, wild body and wild soul; in other words, the wild nature within ourselves. If we were more at

 

248

Utopia Governance and the Commons

home in our bodies, would we likewise be more settled in our minds, souls, relationships and even in our politics? How do we acknowledge these connections in our lives and respect them? Taking up the ideas of the last chapter, we might view wild body and wild mind as gifts from the economy of nature to our human economies of culture, making and re-making.

Science is premised on dead matter as the basis of everything. As we progress from physics through chemistry to biology and psychology, the assumed dead nature of fundamental reality casts a long shadow. So to make a distinction between natural commons and wild nature — extrinsic and intrinsic value — is anathema to science. This is not to criticise individual scientists, who may be well-meaning in keeping a sharp divide between their research and the moral implications of its application. But again, that is a difficult balance. We are certainly given the impression that science, just as science, is about dead anonymous matter. Physics, at least for the time being, has triumphed over biology.

 

Connection and Inspiration from

Nature

Nature is many things. We humans tend to project onto her the spirit of the age. It used to be competition and survival of the fittest. More recently it tends to be stories of co-operation, which I take as a sign of hope. Some writers (see, for instance, Jay Griffith’s Wild) suggest that nature provides us with a ‘morality’ that is superior to anything that humans have so far

 

249

Utopia Governance and the Commons

devised. (Meanwhile, Mark Rowlands’ — The Philosopher and the Wolf — says that only a truly nasty species would devise a system of justice!) But — whilst the examples of co-operation nature offers us are inspiring — to see her as a root of morality is not, I think, her primary source of value for us. There are, however, moral implications on how we, as humans, put value on nature, and we will look at this later in the chapter. Meanwhile, we look to nature for her beauty, wonder and enchantment. Encounters with wild places are essential for our well-being. I have no logical argument to offer as to why this is the case, but I think it is critical. I think that even looking out for a tree or a stream or some other small feature of the natural world close to where we live has immense value. One of the writers on deep ecology related his ideas to a small bank of grass near his house. Wild nature speaks to our ‘deeper’ selves — to our inner wildness. To lose this would be to lose something fundamental to who we are. It is often dismissed as romantic or anti-development to wish to have places protected as wilderness. But I would say that without some true wilderness on our planet we are greatly diminished. Without wilderness we will forget how fragile and trivial we are in relation to the forces that have shaped us.

Bill Plotkin (Nature and the Human Soul) offers us three premises:

‘(i) A more mature human society requires more mature human individuals.

‘(ii) Nature (including our own deeper nature, soul) has always provided, and still provides, the best template for human maturation.

 

250

Utopia Governance and the Commons

‘(iii) Every human being has a unique and mystical relationship to the wild world, and that conscious discovery and cultivation of that relationship is the core of true adulthood.’

Nature then, is arguably our primary source of inspiration. The inspiration fires our imagination. David Abram tells us: ‘Bereft of contact with wildness, the human mind loses its coherence, and the human heart ceases to beat.’ So, it is nature that is the ultimate source of our creativity. It is imagination and creativity that give value, both to individual lives and to humanity generally. Our response to nature and beauty is hopefully one of wonder and gratitude. Our response to our way of being in the world is hopefully one of joy. The enchantment of nature provides us with a ‘radical de-centre-ing’ or ‘lateralness’, to use Elaine Scarry’s terms. (On Beauty and Being Just.) This, I suggest, is the threshold between merely surviving and genuinely living. Sharon Blackie (The Enchanted Life) describes enchantment as four things: Participation in the living world, thus belonging and not separation. Wonder and curiosity, therefore accepting mystery. Embodied experience over rationality. And finally, mythic imagination as the living principle of the world.

There are many groups and movements that are dedicated to protecting nature in different ways. They are variously described as environmentalists, conservationists, ecologists (either ‘deep’ or, presumably, ‘shallow’) and so on. Often these groups will back up their hopes and dreams about the natural world with facts and figures, as if to demonstrate that there are

 

251

Utopia Governance and the Commons

practical or economic reasons for preserving nature. (Essentially, in the terms adopted by this book, regarding all of nature as a resource.) One thing that unites all of the groups though (perhaps more than any of them would care to admit) is a love of beauty. It would be better for us all, I think, if more people would just admit to this heart’s desire and tell us that they care about the small and humble examples of the natural world close to their own lives and how deeply important this is to us. People might say that there are many big and important problems out there in the wider world that need sorting without us fussing over beauty. I suppose that in a world premised on ‘getting things done’, efficiency, and ‘pragmatism’, the ideas I’m presenting here will seem like vague and flaky notions. Our deep connection and reliance on nature might seem odd to introduce as a ‘reason’ for why we might seek to do things differently. I have no concrete explanations to offer. But I would say here, and throughout this book, that if we do not pay attention to the small things right where we live, then we will not be motivated to do anything about the bigger problems in the world. I think the care of nature is the true pragmatism — that our ways of doing things and getting things done today are deeply flawed.

So I am suggesting taking time to savour the little encounters with nature that our everyday lives afford. If a tree or a little patch of garden or a stretch of riverbank or shoreline does nothing for us, then the bigger problems of the world will not actually mean anything to us either. If we do not care about the tree outside our window, will we care about the rainforests of

 

252

Utopia Governance and the Commons

South America or an ice shelf breaking up in Antarctica? Without this connection, we are in danger of losing what is wild — of creating everything as bland and predictable.

Sometimes it is said that we have a ‘relationship’ with nature and that this is the source of joy that it affords us. However, we saw in Chapter 4 that all our human activities are embedded in nature. All production, for instance, is a relationship with nature — even mining or drilling for oil. I’d say that the term ‘relationship with nature’ is too abstract. Rather, there are specific relations — with our own bodies, with other people, with a dog, a cat, the birds in the garden, with a stream, a tree, the soil in the vegetable plot, the animal taken to slaughter, the crop we harvest for food. We are wild mind, wild body and wild soul — the embodiment of nature. The split that we identified right at the start of this book between Eden and the surrounding wilderness has stayed with us down the centuries and it is difficult to shake off. But, as with several questions we have encountered in our discussion, this need not be an either/or. Sometimes seeing the human world as a protected place, a haven from nature, is beneficial. But sometimes, we can find a haven in nature. Humans have the probably unique ability of seeing it both ways — of being separate from nature yet embedded within her.

 

Our Own Wild Nature

The primary encounter with the natural world is through our own bodies. There is little, if anything, in human experience that is not felt

 

253

Utopia Governance and the Commons

through the body. Our physical presence, and our feelings about that presence, makes an enormous difference to how we view the world. Much of the time our thoughts about our experiences are just rationalisations of our physical reactions — and often very inaccurate rationalisations at that. Our bodies are part of wild nature, so they share that intrinsic value that I have discussed above and in earlier chapters. Every day we spend time and energy ‘re-making’ ourselves. Should we not therefore be honouring that which we spend so much effort re-making? A first step to better acceptance of our bodies may be a compassion for ourselves — compassion in the sense of joy and celebration that we will be exploring in a future chapter. Our pleasure — rather than our power — is what could define our relationship with our embodied selves and the natural world.

But rather than celebrating the body, culture generally has been moving in the opposite direction, towards being more thought-based and abstract. In Western culture, our feelings about our own bodies are, to say the least, ambivalent. Rather than a celebration — as all bodies should be — most of us are made to feel ashamed and embarrassed about who we are. It’s an open question as to what effect this alienation from our own bodies has on our relationship with each other and with the wider world of nature. Our technology has created even more veils between our embodied selves and the natural world. So maybe it is no accident that our culture often seems to treat the natural world with indifference or sometimes wants to tidy and sanitise nature, as if it is not quite respectable when left to its own devices. I

 

254

Utopia Governance and the Commons

think that our relationship with our bodies needs to be healed before we can make real progress on improving our relationship with nature. It is only one aspect of our wider connection with nature, but I think that it is an important one nonetheless.

 

Nature and Value

In the previous chapter, we took a look at the different ways that value is understood — in particular by our economics. We noted that utility value is the value that something has to us in its use, whilst commodity value is the value something has in exchange for other things. I hope it is clear from this that natural resources fall, more or less, within the first category — they have instrumental or utility value to us towards the manufacture of products. The way economic value is realised from natural commons is a peculiarity of the way capitalist economies function. Clear felling a forest, for instance, will always appear to generate more profit than managing and preserving it. There seems to be no good economic argument for the preservation of wilderness. In the longer term though, and from a wider, ecological perspective, the forest has value above anything that could ever be described or accounted for in purely economic terms. (Or, to put it another way, there is an opportunity cost that is missed in the preservation of wild nature — there is a market failure. If we were more savvy, we would recognise that keeping the forest would eventually generate more wealth.)

In this chapter, I have said that there is a

 

255

Utopia Governance and the Commons

further type of value that we need to take into account — intrinsic value. The value that the natural world holds for us in these terms puts it way beyond any calculation of utility value. This is more even than the value we might derive from nature as ‘environmental services’. So I have suggested a split between the natural commons (utility value) and wild nature (intrinsic value).

There is a place, of course, for accounting — but those who most strongly advocate this approach are apt to be very dismissive of the split between natural commons and wild nature. Dieter Helm, in Natural Capital, argues that, as I’ve noted in an earlier chapter, those I have described as Ecotopians set infinite value on all nature and will therefore not countenance the use of any of it. This is a caricature that I have not seen proposed by anyone else. Helm does not acknowledge the split I have identified above, except perhaps in an indirect fashion. He does, however, offer a simple formula for managing natural capital — that we should organise our economies such that the amount of natural capital remains at least constant going forward, and should maybe even increase in the short-term, until we achieve a better balance. In a similar vein, Evan Eisenberg (Ecology of Eden) suggests, ‘so to manage nature as to minimise the need to manage nature.’

Destroying wild nature might one day be seen as on a par with crimes that we are unequivocal about condemning without need for further justification, such as slavery or child abuse. No-one would seriously do a cost-benefit analysis for the re-introduction of slavery or the

 

256

Utopia Governance and the Commons

legalisation of child pornography. Perhaps, in decades to come, we will look back on the pricing of the destruction of our rainforests with equal incredulity. So the question of value, when applied to nature, might be better if it is not considered to be an economic question. A moral explanation has more hope of success than an economic one. The moral stance has now been taken up for nature by what is described as ‘widening the moral community’.

 

Nature as part of the ‘Moral

Community’

From the above, it is our human culture that invests nature with either intrinsic value or extrinsic, instrumental value. At the most basic level, we might say that all animals and plants have a ‘right’ to their own life and autonomous existence. Furthermore, as we’ve seen, there is a tendency to think of ourselves as ’outside’ nature, whereas, in fact, we are one community. We’ve already looked at the ownership of land being more about stewardship and custodianship than property, and this is a step towards recognising that the use of land is about seeing ourselves as part of this wider community of nature. Deep ecologist Aldo Leopold offers us this perspective. He says:

‘We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us… But when we see land as a community to which we belong we may begin to use it with love and respect.’

Whilst this is still an invention of human culture, it would be a good place to start in giving the natural world a greater say in our politics.

 

257

Utopia Governance and the Commons

Nature is in no position to defend such a right — even to comprehend it. We need, therefore, to have human agents who will represent nature’s ‘interests’ for her in a formal and legal sense. Someone needs to speak for the land, the ocean, the air, the rivers, the fauna and the flora, whenever there are questions of our human activities disturbing a wild place. This, in practical terms, is the extension to the moral community. The governments of Iceland and Equador already give legal status to the environment.

From our discussions about Parapolity and Parecon in earlier chapters, I am suggesting that our deep connection with nature and the extension of the moral community need to include some representation for the natural world in our lowest level of government. So, if the ideas of Parapolity were to be successful, this would be at the neighbourhood level. It is the people who live near or within our natural habitats who are at the front line for their protection. People could be empowered to protect the natural places on their doorsteps. Owners of wild land may be encouraged to keep the land they hold in trust as wilderness. Businesses may be encouraged to keep some space for nature and developers encouraged to create parks and wildlife havens. Even within cities, there is a need for ‘wilderness’. Greenbelts and wildlife corridors are essential features of our built environment and deserve the utmost protection. All of this may be possible with the grass-roots system of Parapolity.

 

258

Utopia Governance and the Commons

Re-Wilding

George Monbiot, in his book, Feral, speaks of ‘re-wilding’ our land, creating places that are ‘self-willed’. It is no longer really a case of ‘preservation’ of habitats, because we would often be hard-pressed to find an era to which we might want a particular area of land to return. (Even packets of ‘wild’ flowers, sold in the UK, contain species that are actually invasive!) Some have suggested that it takes 1,000 years for a species to become ‘indigenous’. (Perhaps then, the UK will eventually embrace the grey squirrel as its own.) We also hear reports of new species emerging with incredible speed — perhaps nature is going into overdrive as a result of the changes wrought by humanity. We are faced with a choice of whether just to accept this big shake up of species now and leave nature to find her way, or if we should still try to bring habitats back to some previous ‘pure’ state. As climate change starts to bite, we are also faced with the dilemma of whether to help species that cannot move in time to avoid disaster or leave them to their fate. These are complex issues, but as Monbiot reminds us, nature herself is self-willed and will find ways to respond to changing circumstances that may well surprise us and hopefully will delight us.

Despite the difficulties described above, of deciding when a landscape is ‘genuinely’ natural, or when it is in some ways compromised by invasive species, there is at least a clearer division between land that is ‘developed’ and land that is left to nature. As the human population grows, there is pressure on such places to give way to farmland or

 

259

Utopia Governance and the Commons

pasture, managed forests or tourism. The preservation of wild land — so far as this is possible — could be made a priority.

Re-wilding, and along with it, such alternative agricultural practices as regenerative agriculture and permaculture (including ocean permaculture) are the somewhat forgotten cousins of the efforts to curb climate change. It might be that we could manage to go back to an abundant world of nature and solve a good many other problems along the way.

 

Living on Wild Land

As I write this in 2020, there remains only a tiny number of humans living completely within nature and untouched by civilisation. Often, we have viewed that ‘state of nature’ as a blissful state, somehow very much more pure and innocent than the ‘civilised’ world. Hard evidence might suggest otherwise, but nonetheless this feeling persists. People living in earlier centuries felt differently. Wild places were dangerous. Nature was seen as threatening, and potentially outlaws and bandits lurked outwith the bounds of towns and villages, seeking to prey on the unsuspecting traveller. A previous state of living happily with nature may have been there in myths — but then the Garden of Eden was still very much a protected place, not a wilderness. So, deep within the psyche of our cultures, there persists a strong threshold between nature and civilisation — wilderness and city or, as Evan Eisenberg has described it, the Mountain and the Tower, as explored in his book, The Ecology of Eden. The more ‘developed’ we have become, it seems, the

 

260

Utopia Governance and the Commons

more likely this desire to cross over into wilderness is manifested. Even if there were no environmental problems, giving us pragmatic reasons for looking toward simpler lifestyles, I think this longing for wilderness would still persist.

When it comes to an ‘indigenous’ people living on the land, their land inevitably now falls within nation states. The governments of these nations have a tendency to try to bring their populations under state bureaucracy, giving people ID’s, perhaps also looking for them to have a fixed address, so that administrative tasks can more readily be carried out. Up to a point, this is well-intentioned. We have already seen how Hernando de Soto understands this process as being essential to economic prosperity in poorer nations. Nonetheless, I think there is an argument for people to continue to live ‘wild’, and be exempt from the normal processes of government, if they wish. Let us protect those indigenous peoples who still survive, whilst we can.

This, in turn, raises the question of people who wish to live ‘off-grid’ from otherwise more ‘developed’ nations. It certainly gets difficult at this point, as we need to draw a distinction between what might be considered a suitably ‘organic’ lifestyle, and one that is too developed or technologically sophisticated. Perhaps there is room for some flexibility. For the truly intrepid folk who wish to go ‘back to the wild’, we might give people the means to live in the midst of wild nature. Why is it that so much of our dealings with government can only be achieved with a fixed address? We could make

 

261

Utopia Governance and the Commons

it easier for people to live off-grid by allowing them to have a postal address that is not where they actually choose to live — be it hut, boat or camper-van. People could then more easily choose to live in nature, yet still be able to interact with society where this is needed.

 

Seeking out the Wild

The dreams we have of our encounters with wild nature shape our relationship with the planet. If the story we tell of nature is only one of resources, or if we see the countryside or the mountains as just a theme park, then that is what they will become — first in our dreams, then in reality.

Our encounters with wild nature offer us some sense of perspective to our lives. Different types of natural landscape have their own specific qualities. Wild places that endure offer us a feeling for the fleeting-ness and insignificance of human life and the transience of our own lives in particular. What seems so important back home or at work, is shown up as trivial in relation to the stillness of the mountains or the crashing ocean on the seashore. Nature also has her cycles of seasons, of rain showers, trees budding, flowers opening, birth and death, the sun and moon rising and setting. These changing rhythms should be informing us — setting our own moods — but they are so often blotted out by our 24/7 culture of noise and ‘information’. I am suggesting therefore seeking out truly wild places as much as our life circumstances will allow.

 

262

Utopia Governance and the Commons

When we encounter the wild it is important to keep our footprint — even as visitors — as light as possible. If we cannot visit such places with a sense of responsibility then better to go to the touristy resorts than venture into the wild. There is a big difference between ‘experiencing’ nature on a jet-ski and experiencing nature in a kayak, or ‘experiencing’ nature on a quad-bike and experiencing her on a push-bike.

In the UK, the area of private gardens is greater than the total area of all of our nature reserves combined. So, those of us with a garden have another potential source of contact with wilderness, and one that can have a significant impact on how wildlife copes in the future. The recent trend, unfortunately, has been to cover gardens over with tarmac or paving slabs — thereby making it difficult for wildlife to get a foothold. We very much need to reverse this trend, and we’ll have a bit more to say about that in the next chapter.

Let me stress again, the matters I’ve raised in this chapter — and will be raising in the next three — are only suggestions. If we had a choice of what governance systems to put in place, then whatever system that choice led to would then have the say on all the issues discussed above.

 

263

Utopia Governance and the Commons

 

264

Utopia Governance and the Commons

 

10. Place

‘But a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.’

Patrick Geddes

‘Just as an individual person dreams fantastic happenings to release the inner forces that cannot be encompassed by ordinary events, so too a city needs its dreams.’

Christopher Alexander

‘Give up all other worlds except the one to which you belong.’

David Whyte

The second of four chapters exploring the themes of nature, place, compassion and

 

265

Utopia Governance and the Commons

pleasure. The focus of these chapters is to explore ideas that I feel are essential for discussion, if a system of deliberative democracy is to be established. As such, and once again, all that is expressed here is simply ideas and not necessarily proposals. If we had the chance, we would be allowed to decide on what kind of governance we might like. If we opted for a deliberative democracy, then we would have an opportunity of all being involved in making decisions about the subjects addressed in these four chapters. Until then, this is all just speculation. I hope, nonetheless, that the ideas explored will be by way of an incentive to see what we might all be talking about, if only the opportunity were given to us.

Right from the start, in this chapter, I have to stress that the notion of us being rooted in place, attached to place, settled in place and invested in place is an increasingly outdated one. The whole drive of Privatopia, leading into Cornucopia, is that place does not matter except as a ‘destination’, and the reason for the destination is mostly about entertainment and thrill-seeking.

In the past, all human communities were rooted to place. But the rise of technology, leading to our increased communication and mobility, no longer make it so. We are increasingly ‘abstract’ — in other words, removed from our physical location. Community, ritual, the enhancement of cultural and social wealth, are all related to place. To neglect place, and see all places as somehow equivalent — because our technology overrides the vagaries of climate, language and ethnicity — is, I think, a bad move.

 

266

Utopia Governance and the Commons

A lot of this hinges around the meanings associated with the word ‘community’. The various moves, in recent decades, towards some more community-based styles of living are often given the collective term ‘intentional communities’. Such groups use the term ‘community’ in a variety of different ways. Co-housing communities, for instance, often use the word community in a nostalgic sense — invoking memories of small village communities where people shared work and resources as well as gathering together for social events and entertainment that the community would provide for itself. The resilience of such historic communities came about as a result of shared responsibilities, trust and co-operation. But such was just the economic reality and social reality for the vast majority of people across Europe and for the early American settlers prior to the industrial revolution.

Often, the reason for invoking this idyll is because of the threats from climate change. Our international supply chains are precarious, and as situations worsen — it is argued — nations, and then small regions of nations, will once again be compelled to be self-reliant. The Transition Town movement, in particular, invokes local resilience as a key factor in a smooth transition to a zero-carbon world. I think the arguments have a certain merit, but I have some reservations. Firstly, if there were a sudden collapse of world economic order then it is very doubtful that any nation could move smoothly towards clusters of self-reliant villages. Collapse means zombie apocalypse, and it might take centuries to rebuild things to the state they were, in, say, the early 19th

 

267

Utopia Governance and the Commons

century. So to suggest that eco-villages and co-housing are trying to reflect the way a future society might live is rather untenable, on these grounds.

Secondly, ‘loss of community’ is often cited as a reason for closer social living arrangements — even without any reference to future calamities. But it has to be pointed out that this goes against the overwhelming move towards individualism and autonomy that is evident over the last several decades. Yes, people want to know their neighbours and to get along with them. But there are limits — very strong limits, I’d suggest — as to the level of involvement that is appropriate. Community is not friendship. Neighbours are not, by default, friends. It’s important to be clear about this. So if an intentional community were to see itself as a model of future social arrangements, then it needs to recognise this as not a return to something that people say they want, but as a counter-culture.

We could, of course, just say that an intentional community has no particular agenda towards being a model way of living. It might just be a group of folk who want to choose carefully where they live and who their future neighbours might be. They do not — as usually happens — want to take the chance of moving to a new place and risk living near to people they find undesirable or disturbing. However, there is an ambiguity here. For one thing, it assumes that, given the opportunity, we could sit down with our prospective fellow residents and be able to discern their future viability as friendly neighbours. It assumes that this would increase

 

268

Utopia Governance and the Commons

the odds of good neighbourhoods — let’s say. But I would question this logic. Actually, the closer ties and social arrangements of such a community can be a recipe for very deep disasters, as can be witnessed in private housing associations in the USA.

After my many years of involvement in such groups, as well as other clubs and societies, I’ve noticed that a small number of specific types of problems always arise. This does not mean the group will fail, or even that it is not enjoyable and productive, at least some of the time and for at least some of its membership. But I found the recurring problems stressful. I’ve long thought that there is probably some ideal character type and method of relating to groups that could allow a person to navigate such difficulties — and even to enjoy their participation. But, as yet, I’ve not struck upon it.

The odd thing about community is that it always exists. Even for people who live alone, they relate to the world through numerous forms of media. Co-housing is often a little embarrassed by the idea that it is a provision especially suited to ‘the lonely’. (And note, of course, that there’s a big difference between being alone and being lonely.) Instead, I think, a community would do well to embrace solitude as a very positive choice, rather than pretend that everyone is ‘normal’, jolly and easy-going.

Going back to the idea of an intentional community being a model for something. Western society has an overwhelming trajectory towards progress, expansion and growth. Those

 

269

Utopia Governance and the Commons

of us who simply want to stay home and tend our gardens are currently in the extreme minority. This is a further reason why it is difficult for an intentional community to act as a model for anything. There’s a further ambiguity around the meaning of the word ‘community’ here. One might expect that the drive towards individualism and autonomy — the other significant feature of Western society, noted above — one might expect that this drive would push us towards the ‘stay-at-home-and-tend-your-garden’ model rather than the expansionist model. But not so. The reason, I think, is that ‘community’ has changed. We now have ‘communities of interest’, which are increasingly free of geographical boundaries. It’s another reason why an emphasis on place-based community is so counter towards current trends.

It might be that, despite our reliance on technology and our insatiable urge towards expansion and growth, we will nevertheless be able to solve the climate crisis and continue with our expansionist dreams. But the odds are against humanity right now — precisely because of the current story of growth and expansion. All kinds of activism are needed, and welcome, of course. But I think the focus needs to be on changing that Western narrative. I get some hope from the fact that changing a narrative is probably easier than changing human nature! But still, the task is daunting.

So, despite my misgivings over an intentional community being a model, I still find myself wondering if my own personal mode of living could at least bear witness to this fundamental dilemma. I wonder if living a solitary life,

 

270

Utopia Governance and the Commons

quietly ‘tending my garden’, is still in some way meaningful, given all that I’ve said above. I don’t have any answers to this — and I recognise that I could sound even more delusional than those folk who want to be a model for future societies. But that’s where I’m at.

I think, as people, we are always longing for home, but that actually we never quite reach it. Life’s a quest for home that’s never accomplished. I think that this should inform our living and our building in some way, but at the moment I’m not sure how. Should we, for instance, try to build for eternity in order to defy the contingencies that life throws at us? Or should we accept the precarity of our existence and build with only the lightest of touches on the Earth? At the moment I am leaning more towards this lightness of touch option.

And, for the time being at least, I still want to try to bring us back to that sense of place that I fear we have lost. I still think this is worth fighting for, as a political ideal, if not actually through our own building or living styles. So the rest of this chapter looks at what we could do, if we could be convinced of the benefits of a return to a place-based mindset.

 

The Mystery and Joy of Place

Place, a sense of place, and a sense of home, are essential for human flourishing. The significance of place to the human psyche is reflected in the English word ‘entrance’, which, of course, is also ‘en-trance’. Just the notion of crossing a threshold in space is enough to make

 

271

Utopia Governance and the Commons

us feel that we are also crossing a threshold in consciousness — that we might be put under a new spell or dream that a different space can evoke. Can we make our own home towns and cities places of joy, beauty and excitement? In our wealthy Western societies so many people seem to want to escape and to jet off to somewhere more ‘exotic’. But why not bring the exotic to us — create it for ourselves — instead of seeking it in someone else’s place? Neighbourhoods, villages, towns, cities, woodland and farmland could be bringing joy to our lives and enabling life to flourish.

We also make powerful statements when we name a place. The native people of Australia can apparently cross vast tracks of land without map or compass (or Google Earth) because every feature en route is named and has a story attached to it. Similar traditions are reported of other indigenous peoples. By contrast, our own UK government seems intent on constantly changing the boundaries of old counties and the constituency boundaries for political leaders. We are reduced as a people when the names of places are changed or lost.

A return to a sense of place would, I think, add to the pleasure that we find in life. The commons is about physical place. Places, as they have developed over the centuries of human culture, are complex, and seeking to change them for the better will take a lot of wisdom and careful work.

 

Competing Interests in Place

There are competing interests involved in any

 

272

Utopia Governance and the Commons

human settlement. The most basic is the interplay of wilderness and city. Then there are the historic and current priorities set for certain kinds of developments — what the culture decides is most important for them — be it church, transport hub or shopping centre. Then there are the competing pressures from different interest groups — individuals looking for more space, businesses looking for prime sites to attract customers and/or to have good transport links and governments trying to balance all these often conflicting demands. As our human population increases, our towns and cities encroach on wild nature and on agricultural land. Meanwhile, outwith settlements, there are competing interests of wilderness with farmland, woodland and human interest in leisure.

Faced with all these conflicting elements, it seems it is often largely down to luck when a modern human settlement actually gets better by further development. The current situation in the UK and many other countries really does not lend itself to the creation of interesting townscape on a large scale. At first take, it seems that the only options available are either significantly greater state control or massive private investment. At the moment, when either of these does happen, the results can be somewhat mixed. The intention can often be aimed at helping business and therefore boosting employment, but this often only works in the short-term and often to the detriment of beauty and community.

 

The Importance of Beauty

Place is about the beauty of wild nature, the

 

273

Utopia Governance and the Commons

beauty of woodlands, parks and gardens, and the beauty of good townscapes. (‘The beautiful world our hearts know is possible’, in Charles Eisenstein’s words.) Considerations of beauty are often set aside when it comes to building a new road, a factory or power station. An established community with buildings that are admired and visited by tourists is compromised in the interests of ‘development’, usually with a short-term profit motive. Consider a town or a city that borders a strong natural feature such as the sea, a lake or a river, or perhaps one that is situated on a high promontory. If the buildings in such a settlement are in a good relationship with the natural location, then there is a certain harmony achieved — a balancing of the civilised and wild worlds. The threshold areas (seafront, lakeside, etc.) are places of interest and excitement, or at least they could be. So often, we see places with such special natural assets spoilt because of short-sighted profiteering or just careless and lazy regulation. David Fleming (Surviving the Future) described the importance of beauty and the enchantment of place thus:

‘And here is an intention: […] that every place is a sacred place; every ecology has its enchantment, its quiet music, its authority. At the very least, every town and village will need to be visible and communicative: places will have a meaning, giving signals of particular loyalties, of rooted obligations and belonging, of a cultural landscape. Public places and private houses will live up to the standards of urban designer Francis Tibbalds’ Tenth Commandment: “Thou shalt, with all means available, promote intricacy, joy and visual delight in the built environment.”’

 

274

Utopia Governance and the Commons

If a café or a balcony space looking over a town square does not offer a sense of joy, then something is wrong. If we don’t care about the town square a few streets away, will we care about the shanty towns around so many cities in the developing world, the impact of global trade and travel, or the flooding of coastal cities because of climate change? We don’t seem to care enough about our towns and cities to want them to be beautiful places above all else — which would surely be to our long-term benefit. The glamorous and romantic locations of the world are somehow not our own towns and cities, which we so often deride as bland and ugly. But that has been our choice (or at least a choice forced onto most of us by planners, councils and architects). There is no reason why priorities cannot change, such that we build for the long-term future in a way that is both practical, human-friendly and nature-friendly. There is no reason why every town that we build is not one that harbours places of genuine delight, which people will wish to live in or to visit. Beautiful places attract people to them and generate wealth. This wealth may be of the more normal material kind, through increased investment and commerce. But it may also be in terms of the more abstract forms of wealth we have been describing in earlier chapters — cultural, social and emotional wealth. It often seems that such things are almost too obvious to state — that solutions are right under our noses. Yet, somehow that planning for our longer-term benefit, and the benefits of harmony with nature, appears to be too difficult for our governments. And, of course, most of the time, and for most of us, we have no say in how things are done.

 

275

Utopia Governance and the Commons

 

I recognise that some might find this ‘connecting with nature’ and ‘beauty of place’ message as coming from a position of middle-class privilege. Poorer people, some might say, have neither the leisure or the advantages in life to be able to spend time considering such things. And climate change is sometimes bundled in with this too, as a middle-class concern. I recognise this complaint, but I think it could be turned around. Is it not patronising towards those very people that this stance is supposed to be defending, to suggest that they do not care about nature and the beauty of our towns and cities? I am not convinced by this too-busy-trying-to-make-a-living argument.

People of all ‘classes’ and all levels of ‘intelligence’ are equally likely to care about such matters. And as for climate change, we will all suffer if we let that problem go, so a class argument just does not cut it.

 

Taking Back Control of our Places

Our town or city, or the countryside around us, changes, and it seems that we have little or no say in what happens. If things change around us without our knowledge or consent, this is unsettling. Of all the matters that affect us today, I think this is the most direct. At best, there is a token opportunity to comment on local proposals — but often these are already just a done deal. Having a say in shaping our local environments would mean that we have a stake in creating beauty for ourselves and our communities. It would greatly help this process if we were to change our understanding of ownership of land and buildings so that ‘owners’

 

276

Utopia Governance and the Commons

are more custodians of our natural commons and civic spaces, rather than private speculators. Here again is where our circles of government, or Parapolity, have a part to play — to keep our special places special.

The centres of so many towns and cities are struggling here in the UK. Bold plans are needed to revitalise them that will bring life back into city centres and improve civic pride. It is very important, however, that everyone is involved. Why can’t communities have a very much greater say in the use of land? Good regulations — ones that we have all been involved in formulating — will lead to places that we will grow to love — places of which we can all be proud. An ‘order’ is being imposed on our towns and cities, but it is an order that suits big business, the car, the airport and the often dubious intentions of governments. Jane Jacobs told us:

‘There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and be served.’

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Jacobs’ quote reminds us that there is often an elite imposing their views on the rest of us, looking to ‘clean up’ our towns and cities. Darren Anderson — Imaginary Cities — warns:

‘The problem with building the mythic city of health was that it encourages a temptation to conceal or purge away the very people afflicted most by cities of plague. Malthusian horror

 

277

Utopia Governance and the Commons

comes hand-in-hand with puritanical repulsion towards the wrong kinds of people breeding (namely not ‘me and my kind’), from slums to housing estates.’

The chance to comment is almost worse than no chance at all, when we feel that our opinions are simply being disregarded. Sometimes it is big business that is moving in, with only a token process of consent, via the local government, and no voice for the local people. If we are not happy our only recourse is to mount a campaign. But why should we be put into a position of having to campaign over the use of land that is already rightfully ours? The current system, in most, if not all, developed nations, has things entirely the wrong way round. The land is ours. If there is something someone wants to do, they need to ask us first.

 

Places ‘Planned’ by People

When we look at some of the towns that have been ‘designed’ by experts — Cumbernauld in Scotland is a prime example — it is easy to conclude that ordinary people could do a better job. What if our towns and cities were genuinely about people, genuinely human-scaled? ‘Human-scaled’ is often a very apt description of places that have popular appeal. Unfortunately, the term is over-used today and applied to developments that are anything but. What would our human settlements be like if the people living and working there had a greater say in how they look? For one thing, many of the places that we now find attractive were never ‘planned’ — at least not in the modern sense of the word. People often find delight in

 

278

Utopia Governance and the Commons

more informal styles of development common in poorer countries. What may begin as jumbles of random buildings, starts to take on a form and character unique to place and climate, and starts to become ordered in terms of infrastructure and in terms of the communities that live there; that’s if they are left alone and not intimidated by government. A Parapolity, for the governance of society in developed countries, might achieve similar results.

So the concerns raised above might be resolved by seeing land as a commons and setting in place a system of deliberative democracy. If we were to have a say on land use as it affects us directly in our own neighbourhoods, then we might start to see real improvement. As mentioned above, it is regulation that shapes our environment — especially our built environment. And we all need to be involved in devising the right regulations, particularly for the place we live. A Parapolity needs to allow for large-scale infrastructure projects and national planning regulations, but at the same time be very much more sensitive to local needs and local communities.

 

Communities Shape Place

There is quite a contrast between how we feel about our towns and cities and how we feel about our own houses, if we are fortunate enough to own one. It is easy to see how today’s societies are very interested — not to say, obsessed — in private, as opposed to public, space. This is Darren Anderson:

‘”The house shelters daydreaming”, Gaston

 

279

Utopia Governance and the Commons

Bachelard wrote: ‘the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” Of all the utopias, the most practical then is that of maintaining your own sanctuary against outside encroachments.’

Darren Anderson — Imaginary Cities

The current culture — which I have described as Privatopia — is, in part, a response to the lack of control over our locality. We are dis-empowered with respect to our neighbourhoods, towns and cities, and therefore we settle for making our mark on a little piece of land over which we really can exercise control. No wonder neighbours fall out over tiny arguments about boundaries, hedges and driveways. The gated ‘community’ is becoming ever more popular in developed nations. But the more we shut out the rest of the world, the more chaotic the outside world becomes. We can only wonder if such places really do provide any sense of community. Are gated communities anything more than groups of wealthy people intent on protecting themselves from perceived threats from strangers? Perhaps there is a measure of contempt for the ‘wrong sort of people’ involved as well. This is not a solution, it’s a retreat.

By contrast, I believe we need to reclaim our neighbourhoods, towns and cities and make them places of joy and celebration for everyone! So along with beauty and sensible regulations, community is a further element towards the creation of good places. As I’ve explained earlier in the chapter, I think we should be very clear about the meanings we give to such words as ‘community’ and ‘neighbourhood’. Community usually takes in a larger swathe of a

 

280

Utopia Governance and the Commons

town or city and is about civic pride, the beauty of good townscapes and the infrastructure of roads, railways, shops, health clinics, schools and such like. Neighbourhood is the more social aspect of our towns — our immediate neighbours, the design of housing and, crucially, how we organise ourselves on this very local scale such that we all have a say in what shapes our immediate spatial environment.

At the community level, we might envisage a more dense urban environment and walkable city centres, to combat the sprawl of energy-wasting suburbs, but still with plenty of room for allotments, market gardens and parks.

The word neighbourhood can still seem like a very abstract concept. But it need not be so. Good neighbourhood is built not just by meeting people but also by people coming together to build something together. This can be a club or an organisation, but it can also be by way of the entirely literal meaning of building together our houses, our local surroundings, our towns and our cities. Something governments currently seem to encourage us not to do. In this most literal and practical sense, we are separated from our making and our re-making when we have no say in the building of our physical environment.

I know this is a big ask compared to shutting ourselves away in our own tiny bubble of private property. I hope, however, that the potential benefits are self-evident — safe, vibrant streets; friendly neighbours; places where nature can flourish; places where children are safe to play; places where we are happy to stay and just be

 

281

Utopia Governance and the Commons

ourselves, instead of always trying to ‘get way from it all’ on the latest exotic holiday that trashes the planet. It needs to be done with great care. When areas are ‘improved’ by councils or by big business — it can often mean that places become environments from which some people are excluded — see again, Darren Anderson’s quote in the ‘Taking back Control’ section above. The poor are locked out, often forcibly. Think of our shopping centres with their ever-increasing camera surveillance and security guards.

When it comes to housing, the design of new houses and the arrangements for social housing could form the ground of Parapolity. Building houses could be — first and foremost — about building new neighbourhoods. It is too much of an important task to be left to the market to decide on who lives in a particular location. Future residents need to be brought together first, as in co-housing and similar models prevalent throughout many parts of Europe. Then, not only can people be actively involved in creating their own physical surroundings, they will also be gathered as a group of householders that will take up an ongoing responsibility for their immediate environment.

 

Taking back the Commons

Laws relating to land and land use vary from nation to nation, of course. In the UK, ‘common good’ land represents only a tiny and

diminishing part of the total land area. Public space is generally not a commons. This goes for most parks, beaches, streets and town squares. All of these are usually ‘owned’ by the state, and

 

282

Utopia Governance and the Commons

the state places restrictions on what such spaces can be used for. Even land that genuinely is common land is often ‘managed’ by a local authority and often vulnerable to ending up under a road or a new school as the authorities simply appropriate common land without the necessary legal process. We also have ‘POPS’ (Privatisation of Public Space) — a policy guaranteed to exclude.

Why not then simply accept that all land has remained a commons? It does not mean that land and property would be seized by the state and re-distributed. Ownership, especially of land, is not a simple, all-or-nothing question. In Chapter 3, on ownership, we looked at the various ways land could be ‘owned’, and how more ownership (of the correct sort) can be an advantage. More detail about how this might be managed was given in Chapter 8. The shared ownership of the land could be acknowledged, and those currently owning it would become its tenants and custodians. Local communities would determine the balance of land use, types of development, infrastructure, wildlife, forestry, farming, water purity, noise levels and air quality, and make decisions accordingly.

The simple acknowledgement that land, water, air and different types of human activity ultimately belong to all of us, would have a significant effect on our attitudes to neighbourhoods, towns, cities and to the planet as a whole. Neighbourhood would become more than just sharing the occasional barbecue with the neighbours. We would all have a stake in what was happening in our neighbourhood and hopefully see it as a shared responsibility and a

 

283

Utopia Governance and the Commons

shared pleasure. Changing our relationship with place is also about our changing relationship with nature. Communities may take especial interest in gardens, wildlife corridors, parks and other open spaces like beaches, lakes and rivers. In the last chapter, we noted the immense importance such places have to our well-being. At the moment, we seem to divide land up amongst households and see a stockade of walls, fences and roads in most towns and cities. The idea of open spaces, where people, wildlife, food-growing, trees and recreation can all inter-mingle might seem like a recipe for chaos. But I suggest this is only because of what we are used to. There seems no reason why activities are not mixed around in much more interesting ways than they are at present. We need our quiet spaces and our privacy, of course, but we also derive great benefit from variety and vibrancy. A rethink might give us the best of both worlds.

 

Business and Place

Local infrastructure and local businesses will be of particular interest to any system of deliberative democracy. How can we meet people’s needs locally with respect to food, schooling and work? How can local business enhance rather than destroy the local environment, the local community and local neighbourhoods? If we are willing to participate, and our voices are really heard, then there is an opportunity to shape all of these things and to take pleasure over places that start to really belong to us. Small-scale local business can often survive better than big business, provided it is grounded in local

 

284

Utopia Governance and the Commons

industrial districts and strong communities. (A principle known as ‘flexible speculation’. See Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sable — The Second Industrial Divide.) Schooling can be more about doing than gaining abstract knowledge. This would give every child a chance to flourish, rather than those who just happen to have the skill-set useful for theoretical knowledge. Education could be linked to business more directly, with a return to the apprenticeships we used to have, rather than the proliferation of rather dubious degree courses. Apprenticeship is local, so this in turn links to place. As well as transient populations of students, we could have local young people interested in local jobs and local places.

 

The Nightmare of Cars

Finally, in this chapter, it is necessary to take stock of the enormous damage done to our built environment, our health and to nature by the private car. Nothing is quite such a symbol of Privatopia as the car — taking our own world with us as we travel around, whilst reducing everything outside to ‘scenery’. The car is a status symbol; a representation of personal freedom and autonomy. Cars make us feel like we are in control, and this is something valued highly in most societies, especially when we feel that we have little control over anything else. Again, this ties in with the idea of a Privatopia — controlling a small part of the world, because we lack any real control over our governance. Meanwhile, transport is, of course, a major contributor to climate change, a cause of air pollution and a major cause of death and injury through accidents. Roads have carved up towns

 

285

Utopia Governance and the Commons

and cities, making them noisy and dangerous, and often isolating communities. Cities, over the past half century or so, have been built around the car, and the result has been a blight on any joy and celebration and civic pride that they might once have had. Building a new road, to ease congestion, often means it just fills up with even more traffic. Making cars more fuel-efficient often has the effect that people will use them more. (Jevon’s paradox.) Electric cars and driverless vehicles will only solve a small portion of these problems, and may create new problems into the bargain.

Our obsession with personal travel is a difficult subject to tackle, but one of the most important when it comes to thinking about place. Few of the other things discussed in this chapter will be possible without, at the same time, thinking about transport. There are some signs of hope. Many cities are becoming increasingly pedestrianised, having traffic-free days or introducing congestion charges. We could just stop building roads. We could invest heavily in public transport and make it free or very cheap to use. But it’s also necessary to acknowledge the deep attachment people have for their own private vehicles — an attachment that is only growing in extent, as the people of more and more nations become wealthy enough to afford cars. But it’s here I have to take things on the chin. If we had a Parapolity and people had the chance to choose, it may be that people would choose to keep their cars above almost everything else. If we believe in true democracy, then we would have to live with this choice.

 

286

Utopia Governance and the Commons

Slow Cities

The ‘Slow’ movement, encompassing towns and cities, slow food, slow medicine, slow work and much else besides, is brilliantly explored by Carl Honore’s book, In Praise of Slow. The CittaSlow movement, which began in Italy and is described in Honore’s book, has a lot to teach us about place.

Let me stress again, these are only suggestions.

 

287

Utopia Governance and the Commons

 

288

Utopia Governance and the Commons

 

11. A Commons of Compassion

‘To tend the world in silence and keep the world safe from lethal storms.’

Sara Maitland

‘Cowardice asks the question, Is it safe? Expediency asks the question, Is it political? Vanity asks the question, Is it popular? But Conscience asks the question, Is it right?’

Martin Luther King

‘Out beyond the ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,

there is a field. I will meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, The world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”, Doesn’t make any sense.’

 

289

Utopia Governance and the Commons

 

Rumi – ‘Quatrain 158’ (from John Moyne and

Coleman Barks translation, Open Secret:

Versions of Rumi)

The third of four chapters exploring the themes of nature, place, compassion and pleasure. Once again, only suggestions.

How a government cares for its people is the most important question for any society. So questions of compassion should be paramount for any governance system. Principles then, are required in giving voice to those who are most marginalised in society and in need of the most care.

 

Sympathy, Empathy, Compassion

Let’s start by looking at the meanings of ‘sympathy’, ‘empathy’ and ‘compassion’. Different authors have different ways of defining these terms, and meanings have also shifted over time in how these words are understood in common parlance. To clarify how I am using the words in this book — I am essentially building from the ‘feelings only’ of sympathy and empathy, to a ‘feelings with action’ definition of compassion.

Sympathy is to feel for the circumstances of others — usually meaning sad when others are sad — but not really to fully identify with the other’s circumstances — to ‘walk in their shoes’. We could say that sympathy is the emotion at the root of empathy and compassion.

Empathy goes a bit further, and is about a more

 

290

Utopia Governance and the Commons

genuine sharing in the joy or pain of others. Empathy means to be able to imagine ourselves in another’s circumstances, and therefore to understand their feelings, and not simply feel happy or sad on their behalf. So empathy is to ‘feel with’ rather than just to ‘feel for’.

Compassion goes one stage further still. Compassion is rooted in empathy; it is about identifying with feelings in the first instance, and imagining ourselves into another’s circumstances and then to act on those feelings. Ken Robinson said:

‘I think of compassion as applied empathy, so to speak, the executive wing of empathy. It’s one thing to empathise … something else to do something about it… Compassion is the … cultural glue that holds us together as communities.’

Earlier authors referred to ‘sympathetic imagination’ or, ‘intelligent kindness’. So compassion means to be actively involved. This might be by way of helping out in times of difficulty, and it may also be in terms of sharing in another’s joy. Compassion is as much about ‘rejoicing with’ and ‘laughing with’ as it is about ‘crying with’. Compassion has been described as justice with celebration.

Compassion can be about caring for oneself as well as caring for others. If we can be aware of our feelings, then that allows us to understand what is needed to take care of ourselves and to extend care more thoroughly to others.

For the most part, I’m running with compassion in this book, and hope that the reader will keep

 

291

Utopia Governance and the Commons

in mind the broad definition of the word that I have explained here.

 

Why Compassion?

Why be compassionate? The most basic answer to this is to say that it’s about a natural instinct to care for others and also about a sense of fairness — of equity. As with hierarchy, we might have a lengthy discussion about whether the sense of care and the sense of fairness are innate to human nature or whether they are socially-constructed. Either way, these things are deeply ingrained. We see our own vulnerability and somehow that makes us a bit more human. We see others’ vulnerability, and — if we make the connection — it reminds us of our own vulnerability and we want to set things right.

Perhaps it is not necessary to look beyond questions of equity in order to decide on matters of compassion. Fairness, we might say, is the immediate reason for being compassionate. But remember what we said about compassion above. It is as much about celebration, shared pleasure and laughing with others, as it is about caring for needs. We are part of a wider world, and our pains and pleasures reflect, and are reflected by, the whole community of other people and of nature. Our shared life with others and with nature is the underlying concept. This, in turn, is the deeper reason behind compassion. It is interbeing, a re-connection with the wild nature that we all share.

Back in Chapter 5, on Polity, we noted that one definition of what government should be about

 

292

Utopia Governance and the Commons

is to protect us from things that might go wrong. To be ‘free from’ things that may do us harm. In later chapters, we have added the idea of being ‘free to’ — in particular, the freedom to make and to re-make are identified as ways that we may flourish as human beings. That is a freedom to shape our own story — ‘Each life is a fable of freedom’, as Theodore Zeldin reminds us. A wider vision of compassion then, takes into account these more positive elements. Along with others, (see for instance, Marjorie Kelly, Owning Our Future) I want to suggest pleasure, emotion, imagination and creativity as the value system that is the real undergirding of society, as we will explore below and in the next chapter.

The ‘feel’ of a society is very much about its level of compassion — between people and between government and its citizens. It would not be too much of a stretch to say that the story of a nation or a society is really a story about its compassion.

 

Compassion for Self

In Chapter 9, on Nature, we looked at how nature is not something just ‘out there’, but starts with ourselves — our own bodies and minds. As we share in the world of nature, so too, we share in nature’s joys and pains. The place to start with this is to have compassion for ourselves. This is not such an obvious policy to adopt. Looking out for ourselves in a largely selfish manner is not compassion. I’d suggest that compassion for self means taking a broader view of what our lives might be about and what might really be good for us, rather than just

 

293

Utopia Governance and the Commons

what might make us superficially happy in the short-term. Are we going to be people with a bit of wisdom, a bit of maturity, a bit of soul? When we look back at our lives from our old age, will we think that we have lived a worthwhile life in some way? Were we brave enough to try things? To strike out with new ideas of making things, creating and imagining new ways of being and of doing in the world? We can aim high and perhaps be some use to those around us, or we can aim low, settle for our own Privatopias, and let the rest of the world get on with its own business. As we will explore further in the next chapter, this all loops back to the body. Our physical selves know what is really going on within us. Our bodies know when our minds are frustrated and our hearts’ desires are not being realised. Likewise, our bodies respond in deep pleasure when we find fulfilment in our work, in our relationships and in our communities. So we are taking the ‘long view’, if you will, about what might make for a good life, and this is what I am calling compassion for self.

This section on compassion for self is the closest I’d wish to approach the idea that we might need some kind of personal change, and indeed spiritual change, in order to effect change in society. I recognise the suggestion of spiritual change might be unpalatable for many readers. An alternative might be to consider the Greek word eudaimonia — that is, ‘flourishing’ — or go for a more modern term, ‘generative’. Both of these terms include the ideas of growth, development and fulfilment.

Another aspect of compassion for self is being

 

294

Utopia Governance and the Commons

able to forgive oneself. Whilst shame serves as a warning against behaviour that may hurt ourselves and others, holding on to shame, guilt and remorse is ultimately destructive.

Compassion for self is the starting point for compassion for others. ‘All friendly feelings for others are an extension of man’s feelings for himself’, Aristotle told us. This is the idea of philautia — that if we are comfortable with ourselves, we can be comfortable with others.

 

Compassion for Others

We can apply what was said above in the previous section to how we might respond to others, on a personal level. For instance, in our relationships, we can just seek to fulfil the immediate needs of those around us. We can do whatever pleases them, just to keep them quiet. Alternatively, we might try to take a broader view of another person and try to figure out what might be for their long-term good (so far as that is reasonable, within the relationship). Parents, of course, face this dilemma through many years of a child’s wants, and know that to give in will mean a happy child in the short-term, but probably a spoilt, selfish and self-centred person in the future. We face similar dilemmas when we are a carer for the elderly or the impaired. And when we are wronged in some way, we can be angry, or we can try forgiveness, and maybe both of these things will fail.

In Chapter 6, Community on a Small Scale, we looked at the governance system called Sociocracy. There we noted in passing the

 

295

Utopia Governance and the Commons

benefit of having a bit of maturity as people in order to cope with all the stuff that is going on with others when we meet up to run a group, an organisation or a business. We can take the short view, just seeing people’s demands at face value, and try to deal with them literally. But actually, the people we are meeting with have broader needs. All of us have that need for the type of compassion I have described above, and most of us are not that good at providing this to ourselves. So we need others to fill in the gaps of our own blindness. To take a broader view of others then is to recognise that they too are struggling to realise a wider meaning and a greater depth in their lives. So applying a bit of wisdom, we will take them seriously, respect them and honour their needs.

Physicist David Bohm, as well as writing about physics, took time out to explore the interactions between people. He wrote about this in his book, On Dialogue. Bohm’s style of dialogue has since been adopted by a great many organisations as a tool for exploring relationships when straight-forward discussion might seem difficult or even impossible. The spirit of dialogue is just to talk, and see where that leads. The hope behind this is that people start to connect, and eventually see that there is more that unites us than divides us. There ceases to be a need to argue things out, debate things, deploy policies or schedules or committees. It may not always work, but the idea taps in to what we discussed above. At a deeper level, we are all connected. The things that divide us are only ever superficial. The poet Rumi summed this up well. He said: ‘Out beyond the ideas of right-doing and wrong-

 

296

Utopia Governance and the Commons

doing, there is a field. I will meet you there.’ (See the epigraph to this chapter for the full quote.)

Families and small groups often manage this quite well. Our development as a species has been in small groups. Charles Darwin seemed to touch on the importance of groups (what Peter Kropotkin called ‘mutual aid’) as part of evolution, but elsewhere seems to contradict this with the more familiar ‘survival of the fittest’ story. (Or at least the early popularisers of evolution seemed to present it this way. Darwin himself was always more nuanced.) It is when we get to larger organisations and more formal relations that things get more difficult. That is why the suggestion in this book is to start at the small scale and to keep things small. Big politics could still be about a few people in a room, and that is where compassion has the best chance. Once again we need to remember the importance of forgiveness.

We can note here, from Chapter 4, Massimo d’Angelis’ definition of the commons as ‘multiplying the gifts of others’. This is reflected in Hannah Arendt’s phrase, ‘Amo: Volo ut sis’ — literally, ‘I love you: I will that you be’, but taken to mean more exactly, ‘I want you to be all that you can be’. Compassion is responding to the beauty in others (their worth, their intrinsic value) with more beauty in return.

 

Government and Compassion

Some authors distinguish between ‘emotional empathy’ and ‘cognitive empathy’. The first recognises the feelings of another person, and

 

297

Utopia Governance and the Commons

may prompt us to respond, but our response may be just to alleviate immediate suffering (or share in immediate pleasure). It is cognitive empathy that is the more measured kind, taking the longer-term view that I have discussed above. Compassion — and especially the compassion prompted by cognitive empathy — has a more formal aspect to it when it comes to government. How then might governments go about administrating for compassion (setting aside for the moment the question of what sort of governance system is in place)? The usual approach is by way of a ‘welfare net’. John Rawls (A Theory of Justice) for instance, asks us to imagine that we are to be citizens of a society in which we have a ‘veil of ignorance’ about our circumstances. Given a choice, therefore, over welfare arrangements, we are likely to decide on very substantial help, in case, once the veil is lifted, we find ourselves as one of the more unfortunate citizens of this hypothetical state. (Rawls’ theory is based on two principles. Firstly, all citizens should enjoy equal basic liberties. Secondly, there should be a fair equality of opportunity and society should be so arranged that any unequal distribution of social or economic goods must be such that the least advantaged members of society would be better off under that distribution than they would be under any other. This final point he described as the ‘difference principle’.)

A welfare strategy, however, is always going to be something of a one-size-fits-all affair. If we throw enough money at it then it will be reasonably effective, but people’s needs are often very specific. The welfare net is a minimum standard. Paul Radin identifies an

 

298

Utopia Governance and the Commons

‘irreducible minimum’ of food, clothes and shelter. He says: ‘to deny anyone the irreducible minimum [is] equivalent of saying that a man no longer exists, that he is dead.’

Is there more that government could achieve on the compassion front? Let us go back again to the reason why there is government. Firstly, it is for the sake of protecting citizens against misfortune. But arguably it is also there to promote human flourishing, allowing everyone to meet their full potential. It is the accountability, and the rights of everyone to have a say at every level of government, that might afford us the best chance for these aims to be achieved. As such, a genuine Parapolity, where there is engagement from the smallest to the largest level of governance, offers an opportunity for more tailored compassion. In simple terms, neighbours can take on some of the responsibility of making sure that those with problems have those problems adequately addressed. As things move out to wider circles of governance, these smaller arrangements are the key to how the larger arrangements are organised. Of course, some people will always need professional help that the local community cannot provide directly. But then the local community can still feed into the wider circles of governance, to seek the right help for such folk, so again there is the opportunity for needs to be met more effectively than just with top-down big government.

As we’ve highlighted above, compassion is about shared pleasure as well as shared needs. So the community can also help to make people feel welcome and celebrated in the place they live —

 

299

Utopia Governance and the Commons

helping to address issues of loneliness, stress and depression, and adding to a sense of well-being. I recognise that such engagement can easily tip over into interference and patronising people who may prefer to have their independence and privacy. But as things stand just now, we have the balance wrong, with neighbours often hardly speaking to each other, let alone caring for one another’s needs or sharing in pleasures. If we could get the balance right, between seeing the needs of others, but respecting their privacy, things could be very much better.

 

Business and Compassion

Businesses need to be rewarded for their imagination and creativity. We can celebrate the know-how and technical skill they bring to our lives through their products and services. This might seem a strange point to be making — after all, the business is getting paid — but somehow it seems appropriate that this too should be considered part of compassion. At the same time, businesses need to take responsibility for the wider world and see themselves as a service to their communities. We saw in Chapter 7 that, as part of a Parapolity, business owners would be invited to take part in local governance, so there will be a great deal more accountability. Businesses may also be actively engaged in their local communities by way of participatory economics — Parecon. Businesses need to look at enhancing their locality, so far as this is possible. Considerate use of the natural commons needs to be a priority for business, and in particular, a business’s use of land will be

 

300

Utopia Governance and the Commons

something under close scrutiny by local residents. Careful use of materials and the opportunity for repair and/or recycling of their products is another consideration. (See, for instance, William McDonough and Michael Braungart‘s, Cradle to Cradle.) The key point from all this is the point about giving a service. I think that is where the social commons meets material capital. If businesses and business leaders were more determined to see their work in this way, then we would be making progress. Once again, we might change systems — forcing some of the changes that we would like to see in society onto business and others — through legislation. But the better way is for people to want to make changes — to see changes as a responsibility, but also something in which they take a pride and a joy.

Okay, so the reader may be thinking, this is pie-in-the-sky. Businesses are out for all they can get, and if they don’t keep chasing profit then they will go under, and then what use will their moral high ground have been? But to take this view is to say that business, and indeed, humans generally, are inherently selfish and cannot change. Or, as the ardent anti-capitalists would have it, the nature of the system forces business into ruthless competition in order to survive. But these views seem to close off hope, and in a way, it is a means by which people shut out the need to try to make changes themselves. If everyone is selfish, after all, then what is the point of even trying? But no, I think we have to reject that message. We have seen above that we can have compassion for ourselves without this being selfishness. It is certainly self-interest, but not the kind of

 

301

Utopia Governance and the Commons

destructive motives that the pessimistic view of human nature might take. In the next chapter, on pleasure, we will see similar reasoning. Granted, there are people who are badly off the rails, but the very fact that we point out such people and condemn them suggests that we already know better — that we see a better way to live.

 

Wider Circles of Compassion

In the wider circles of Parapolity and Parecon there are a few policies that relate to compassion on a much broader scale. We looked at business above, and noted that the ideas expressed there might seem to many a bit naïve, or, at best, only appropriate to small-scale, local concerns. Big business, critics might say, would not adopt such policies. The bigger the business, the more ruthless and the more reflective of the worst forms of capitalism. Business at the large scale tries to act independently of national government. This is what big business often means by ‘free trade’ — the freedom to do whatever it wants with impunity. At the same time, big business may lobby the support of governments where it can, to get policies adopted that will be favourable to its profits and to protect its markets — particularly against foreign competitors. Neo-liberalism is not really about no regulations, it’s about regulations that favour business. It’s also in the interests of neo-liberalism to encourage poor countries to have ‘free markets’ because their fledgling industries can therefore never develop to compete with the richer Western world. It keeps them in the place of supplying cheap labour and raw materials. So, poorer

 

302

Utopia Governance and the Commons

nations suffer by the protectionism of the big business of wealthier nations — that is the modern-day form of colonialism.

Real free trade — as we have seen in Chapter 8 on Economics — is something very different. Free of all tariff barriers, business could flourish in poorer nations, creating more employment there. Wealthier nations would benefit from cheaper goods. Granted, some industries and jobs would lose out in wealthy nations in the short-term. But the businesses of wealthier nations would adapt in time to provide goods and services that are, for instance, more specific to place. The governments of wealthy nations could help out where particular industries are under the more serious disadvantage. Again, I recognise that this might appear a very naïve suggestion. I only invite the reader to step back and consider this. If we are really interested in ‘development’ for poorer nations, then we wouldn’t be giving them charity and loans on the one hand, and then blocking the import of their products on the other. It’s often said that poor nations pay more back to wealthy nations in terms of interest on loans than they receive from the wealthy in aid. Are we serious about alleviating poverty? Are we serious about everyone, the world over, being given an equality of opportunity as well as social and political equality? If we are, then we desperately need to think about the way we trade. Compassion, on the big scale, is again not about little bits of help to address short-term needs. It is about treating poor nations with dignity and respect and working with them for their best long-term interests.

 

303

Utopia Governance and the Commons

What about big business that operates in poorer nations, exploiting cheap labour and sometimes having poor standards with regard to pollution and safety, so as to massively profit from their markets in wealthier nations? I’m not going to say that businesses should not set up on foreign soil. However, it is a question of accountability. The business needs to be responsible to its home government for what it does overseas. The business should respect and work with host governments to ensure that fairness prevails. The host government should not be lured or bullied into accepting poor standards from the guest business. The business needs to look to its ethics. On the broadest scale of Parapolity, the world should stand up for poorer nations and hold those who exploit them to account. It could well be that national governments are just no longer large enough to deal with these issues. We may need the strengthening of world institutions — and the establishment of a world government — to keep big business in check.

These discussions lead us to the related topic of the free movement of people. Similar arguments to the one made above apply here. If we are serious about helping the poor, then open the borders. Until we do, then all talk of overseas aid and development is simply nonsense. I recognise, of course, the chaos that would be unleashed in the wealthier nations that would be the likely hosts of vast numbers of refugees and economic migrants (and often it is difficult to tell the difference). I am only wishing to point out a possibility, which could, after all, be partially implemented rather than adopted wholesale. Governments — whilst

 

304

Utopia Governance and the Commons

sometimes adopting a stance of regulating immigration — often secretly welcome it, as it gives them a cheap, biddable workforce. So the issues around immigration are complex.

Free trade and open borders would, if they were ever adopted, ease the problems of poor nations quite considerably. But there remain some concerns. One is the question of development in poor nations that is often badly served by lending. The borrowing often goes towards large-scale infrastructure projects that benefit the wealthier citizens of the poor nation and might even harm the very poorest. The further concern is that open borders may mean the younger, cleverer citizens leaving to seek their fortunes in wealthy nations, whilst the poor nation is left with the older and less able citizens. It is difficult, of course, to be too prescriptive here. Poor nations need to make their own choices, and with that comes the possibility of making mistakes. However, sometimes people need to speak up for the poor, whose voices are so often drowned out. Maybe then, we need to lend our skills and knowledge rather than our money. A further alternative is for rich nations to simply give money directly to the citizens of poor nations, as a step towards Universal Basic Income (see below) in the recipient countries. Their spending would in turn boost the economies of the poor nations and allow them to develop under their own terms. There are already some very pragmatic methods being adopted to help poorer nations find their own ways towards happier and more prosperous societies. A balance of measures, agreed internationally, might be the best way forward. Compassion

 

305

Utopia Governance and the Commons

should be our default in our dealings with other nations. It should not be suspicion and having ‘interests’ (just meaning, what will benefit us).

If a genuine system of Parapolity were in place then any decisions on immigration and free trade would be open to public scrutiny. People might choose the opposite to these proposals — closing up trade and borders, and if we were to accept that a Parapolity is a better form of governance than a representative democracy then we would have to accept such decisions.

A further suggestion along compassionate lines is the adoption of a Universal Basic Income (see also Chapter 8), or UBI. A basic income for all adult citizens takes away the stigma of unemployment, allows people to explore options of more education and allows people to follow their hearts towards a vocation, rather than working to pay bills just to survive. UBI is not a replacement for the welfare state. There still needs to be a welfare net for the most vulnerable, as explored earlier in the chapter. But it is a system that would be easy to adopt, popular and fair.

Let me stress again that these are only suggestions.

 

306

Utopia Governance and the Commons

 

12. A Commons of Pleasure

‘Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.’

Joseph Campbell

‘Those who were dancing were thought mad by those who could not hear the music.’

Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche

The last of four chapters exploring the themes of nature, place, compassion and pleasure.

 

Joy, Pleasure and Happiness

I had thought to try to distinguish the meanings of joy, happiness, pleasure and similar words, as an introduction to this chapter. I have to say, it is a challenge. Their meanings shade into each

 

307

Utopia Governance and the Commons

other and there can be contradictory statements about what is really pleasure, or is ‘just fun’ or something more profound, or less profound… Pleasure is more in the moment, whilst happiness is a state with longer duration. Happiness has been described as pleasure and purpose extended over time. Joy, meanwhile, is a word used to describe both the emotion behind pleasure, but also taken to mean a more spiritual and resilient form of happiness — not dependent on circumstances. I’ve decided to stay with just the word pleasure, for the most part, in this chapter.

As I’ve suggested elsewhere in the book, society is built on pleasure; society is the social construction of pleasure. ‘It is in his pleasure that man really lives’, said Agnes Repplier, an American essayist. ‘It is from leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self’. (As quoted by Carl Honore in, In Praise of Slow.) So it is a mistake to think of pleasure as something added on to society, once we have taken care of the essential things in life. Rather, we are always looking to find pleasure, even in the most basic things in our life, like health, food, clothing and shelter. We are genuinely an economy of pleasure. This is often denied outright, or at least balanced by more ‘worthwhile’ goals. But I think this denial or awkwardness around pleasure is to make out that pleasure is simply selfishness by another name.

Another attitude to pleasure that has become prevalent is to regard pleasure as a commodity that we must strive to obtain. If we find ourselves unhappy then we are liable to blame ourselves for failing. Instead, we might see

 

308

Utopia Governance and the Commons

pleasure as a gift and it is at its best when it is a shared gift. In the last chapter, we saw that compassion for self takes in a broad view of what our lives are about. Compassion is not just about the smaller things of the present, but also about our aims, values, and meaning. It is self-interest, but not selfishness. This is similar to the view of pleasure that I am trying to get across in this chapter. So we should not strive for pleasure as if it were a product we hope somehow to afford. But we can be open to the gift of pleasure, whenever and however that might arrive. All the while we can be conscious that it is through pleasure, mainly, that the story of our lives is told. Compassion, or lack of compassion is the way that the stories of societies and nations are told. The two are very closely linked. Our individual pleasure relies on the compassion of community. (It is the rules of a community that keeps things peaceful and ordered and this is what affords us individual freedom.) The compassion of a community relies, up to a point, on people finding individual pleasure. A community of unhappy people may struggle to be compassionate. The long-term flourishing of individuals relies on the long-term viability of community. So it is in our long-term interest to look to the interests of society, community and nation. Good community enables individuals to flourish, to realise our full potential of pleasure, passion, vocation and satisfying work. The split between an individual and community is a false split.

 

Grades of Pleasure?

In my own blurb about utopia (Chapter 2) I identified some pleasures that are specific to

 

309

Utopia Governance and the Commons

me. Inevitably, I’m going to think that these are somehow ‘better’ than what other people may enjoy — that my pleasures are somehow ‘higher’ whilst other stuff is just superficial. Well, the reader will see the problem; along with my own pleasures, I have to agree that rugby, white-water rafting and darts are equally meaningful and profound — and, for those people who enjoy such things — it will equally feed their souls. Isn’t it a bit elitist to say that one type of pleasure is superficial and we should really be aspiring instead to something higher? How can one type of pleasure be better or worse than any other? It’s a question already raised by a school of philosophy known as utilitarianism. The philosopher who is usually accredited with devising the idea was Jeremy Bentham. Bentham considered all pleasures to be of equal worth, therefore, it is possible to calculate what is the best outcome in any situation, because it is simply the one that provides the greatest good for the greatest number of people. (In fact it is to Francis Hutcheson we can attribute the phrase, ‘that action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers’, but Bentham became the main champion of the idea.) So for Jeremy Bentham, all ‘goods’ are equivalent. Bentham’s nephew, John Stuart Mill, contrary to his uncle, tried to grade pleasure.

This is where we really get down to brass tacks, because if, as I’ve suggested, pleasure is so essential to society, then challenging people about their pleasures really hits home. One of the worst insults we can throw at people is to say that they don’t really know how to enjoy

 

310

Utopia Governance and the Commons

themselves. So, if at all possible, we must avoid being elitist about pleasure, but still recognise there are pleasures and there are pleasures! There is a balance to be struck, somehow, between judging pleasures in others or just accepting anything anyone wants to do as legitimate.

I’m not pretending to offer an easy answer to this. But, going back to what was said above about compassion for self, there may be a different way of looking at the question. Perhaps the problem with utilitarianism, and with grading pleasures generally, is that it is not reasonable to compare one person’s pleasure to another’s, as if there was some agreed rating system. Pleasure is unique to each individual life, and need not be compared. And the individual’s pleasure relates very much to those wider questions of meaning, purpose, human flourishing and vocational work — how an individual might view their life in broad terms — what purposes they see themselves working towards. And it is also worth stressing here the importance of our connections with people. Such connections seem to go beyond any concept of trying to grade pleasures. We might say that the heart knows what might ultimately lead to our deeper pleasure. But the mind is a bit more suspect. It can be swayed by wishing to create an impression to other folk, or to seek status, by finding pleasure in things that don’t ultimately satisfy. Perhaps then, the first thing to start with is simply to acknowledge our own pleasures.

 

311

Utopia Governance and the Commons

Abundance — What do the Utopias

make of Pleasure?

What we mean by abundance is another aspect of what we consider pleasure to be. Privatopia’s abundance is a material abundance. It is this that is the aim of progress, career and money — to build a safe world for ourselves — safe from the surrounding society that may be seen as indifferent, or even hostile. Material abundance is something that builds up our status, makes us feel that we are in control and are a success in the world. Materialism substitutes for other pleasures. This might seem to be a choice that people make for themselves. But consumer capitalism presents the message of satisfaction via materialism to us relentlessly, so it has become ingrained as the normal way of life. Our science too, being premised on a universe that is exclusively material — sends out the subliminal message that we are only ‘made real’ through material things. We often try — lured by the story of Privatopia — to make ourselves unique and different by the things we own, the clothes we wear, the houses and the holidays. But these ‘differences’ actually make us more like other people, not less. We are made to feel secure by our stuff, but it is a fragile kind of security. Poor health or bad luck could snatch those things from us in an instant. But also, it is an abundance that has to be won by the exploitation of the commons. Other people and nature suffer as a result of this kind of abundance. By contrast, when abundance is not seen in terms of materialism, it becomes an abundance of good relationships, satisfying work, and finding home in places and with

 

312

Utopia Governance and the Commons

people that really inspire us. It is also the sharing of ourselves, our gifts, our homes, our culture, that is the alternative form of abundance and the alternative pleasures. As Chapter 8 explored, abundance is often as a result of the gifts between economies. The material economy, by contrast, is usually premised on a fight against scarcity.

The Ecotopians can often seem a bit down on pleasure. There is so much wrong with the world, it is easy to portray the Western consumer capitalist lifestyle as greedy, selfish and irresponsible. Somehow, it is the individual consumer to whom most blame is attributed — perhaps we are just easy targets, or the profligate lifestyle is more obvious when we see people flaunting their wealth right in front of us. Arguably, yes, if all consumers decided just not to buy a particular thing, then the companies who produced that product would either fold or change their ways, and we would have moved towards a solution. But there is more going on, and I think we need to see that disapproving of pleasure — even of the most material kind — is not really helping. Likewise, calling people greedy, profligate and irresponsible is not helping the cause of working towards a sustainable future. Yes, there are greedy and thoughtless people, but for the most part, people are looking to care for each other, to raise families and look out for their friends. Someone has said that we need to heal our relationship with things. That’s not necessarily about getting rid of things — although it might partly involve this — but more critically, it’s about our attitude to things. Likewise, authors who write about simplicity are not always

 

313

Utopia Governance and the Commons

talking about selling everything and living in poverty. Some who we could include under the Ecotopian flavour of utopia have recognised this relationship to things as critical. It is a feature of being embedded in nature and in place, which I have tried to stress in this book. This is a discussion that we will return to in later chapters.

The abundance and pleasure of our current age continues into the future utopia that I’ve named Cornucopia. To an extent, the abundance of Cornucopia is an extension of the current culture, that is, material pleasures in an increasingly private and atomised world. But, of course, the future is open, and we might, with some justification, see Cornucopia taking a different tack. We could for instance, think of an abundance of nature (as discussed in the sections on re-wilding in Chapter 9). Desire may be infinite, but that does not mean we should try to satisfy it through an infinity of stuff. There is no reason why the abundance of humanity and the abundance of the rest of the Earth need be at odds. We are all one eco-system — humans do not sit outside of nature. So, we could view our future pleasure as about a far greater abundance of nature brought about by changes that are positive rather than by abstinence and sacrifice.

 

Different Pleasures

One simple message I’m trying to get across in this book is that we are already gloriously unique and strange! It is about being radically other. I hope too that the broader perspective I’ve mentioned elsewhere will in turn help us to

 

314

Utopia Governance and the Commons

appreciate that it’s other people’s uniqueness that makes them interesting. We are all wild of mind, body and soul. This is not a matter of race, religion or gender, which are really just superficial differences. I’m talking here about differences in character. Think of one’s friends and how strange and funny each one really is. Isn’t that why we value them? Sharing ourselves with others takes us to different kinds of pleasures. It takes us to more sharing, caring, conversation, community, celebration, carnival. As I said above, this is about connection.

When I say ‘different pleasures’ though, I’m not suggesting that there’s a whole set of pleasures that people haven’t thought of wanting for themselves before, and that now they might try. No, the suggestion is that a lot of us already want a different lifestyle, but concerns about the need to support others, or our financial security or just about appearing strange constrain us from realising those pleasures. I’m talking about that job or business idea that might really satisfy, about more time with friends and family, more time for making music, dancing, crafts, sport, time spent in nature. I’m talking too about our relationship to things — to possessions. So, different pleasures, in a sense, but not alien pleasures. Different pleasures are our heart’s desires.

We are often presented with the idea that ‘consumerism’ means we love things too much — but I don’t think this is quite right. The problem with consumerism is that it is often cheap junk that we neither need nor genuinely want. As we’ve touched on above, a problem

 

315

Utopia Governance and the Commons

with Western culture is not that we love things too much, but that we don’t love them enough. We don’t care enough to seek out the things that are beautifully made, durable and built with integrity. We don’t honour enough the hand-made things and especially those things that we make for ourselves. Society even tries to dissuade us from building our own homes. David Fleming told us:

‘Goods in our culture are losing, to some extent, their implicit functions — the symbolism, the social function which ought to travel with them. They are becoming, in a sense, invisible. Here are some examples: food, in addition to its overt function of providing nutrition, also has, or had, an implicit function of reciprocal giving and in the daily interaction around a table, without which the durability of the household in any structural sense is improbable. The implicit function of clothes as symbols of social belonging, courtesy and standing has waned. Sport has lost much of its implicit crucial function of ceremony and play, and is left with the overt futile business of winning. Perhaps sex has lost a bit of its implicit function of cementing relationships and has become a reduced proposition.

‘Paradoxically, we consume in great quantities but aren’t entirely comfortable with actually taking enjoyment in that consumption. Often there is some guilt in there — a tendency to explain fulfilled desires always as needs for which we had little reasonable alternative. There is a hesitation to celebrate goods as material artefacts in their own right. The effect of this disenchantment, this denial of the spirit and deeper significance in the currency of goods, services and behaviour, is to make it harder to recall anything about them at all. The object was eaten, worn, contested or had,

 

316

Utopia Governance and the Commons

but the implicit function — which is the only bit that engages the mind, emotions and spirit — probably did not happen at all. And if it did, you must have blinked at the wrong moment. Goods are finally becoming instrumentalised, invisible except for their instrumental purpose.’

David Fleming — Surviving the Future

 

Pleasure and Nature

In earlier chapters I’ve made a point of identifying our own bodies and minds as part of wild nature. Pleasure, in turn, is in the body. In this book (following Alexander Lowen’s, Pleasure) I suggest there are no purely cerebral pleasures. All emotions and their affect as pleasure are aspects of the body. The body knows what’s really going on, better than the mind. The body knows how to heal itself, if needed, and how to heal the mind — if given the time and space. But minds tend not to listen.

Conflicted as we are about our bodies in Western societies, I think this, in turn, leads to a conflict over pleasure. Perhaps we are a bit concerned about being considered ‘superficial’ if we were to only speak about a motivation towards physical pleasure. Perhaps we substitute possessions as a less direct form of pleasure because of this conflict. If we were more at ease with our bodies, maybe we would not see physical pleasure as somehow decadent or superficial, but as essential to life.

As we saw in Chapter 9, on nature, a new story would be about protecting and enhancing natural environments, so far as this is possible.

 

317

Utopia Governance and the Commons

The reasons for this are several, but one of the most important is for the pleasure that nature brings us. Our connection with nature is a deep source of joy. I can recommend such books as David Abram’s, The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal and Mary Reynolds Thompson’s, Reclaiming the Wild Soul as guides to this subject. It’s the beauty that we find in nature that feeds the soul.

Care of nature stretches between all scales, from the local to the global. At the neighbourhood level, we see so many spaces covered in paving and even fake grass. I would rather see a garden full of weeds than concrete paviours. With a little effort — and hopefully, the co-operation of neighbours — gardens can offer a haven for wildlife. Those little ponds, streams and trees that are so easily swept away by building projects, are deserving of our protection and also inviting our enjoyment.

At the slightly larger scale, parks, woodlands, hedgerows, lakes, rivers and beaches need our careful protection, and offer us great joy. With such features on our doorsteps, there is little need to always be jetting off somewhere else. Let’s enjoy what we have locally, and actively preserve such places as best we can.

At the national level, many countries legislate to protect areas of wild nature. These are a great source of pleasure for us humans. The wilder the wild place is allowed to be, the more the pleasure.

On the global scale, the oceans, rainforests, mountain ranges, savannahs, coral reefs and

 

318

Utopia Governance and the Commons

island chains take us back to who we are. They remind us of our fragility and the precariousness of human life. Without such places, we are doomed to a life of unremitting blandness. The big places of the world invite us to a life of adventure.

But we need to think about how such places steal all the headlines, whilst the smaller and less spectacular corners of nature are often neglected. It is often a mystery to me why small pockets of nature, easily reached by people living nearby, remain empty of human visitors. It is good for me, and for the few others who do choose to visit, but sad to think that so many people are presumably just preferring to go to the shops or to travel away to some place more ‘exciting’, than make the most of what is on our own doorsteps. Truly most of us do not love nature enough.

 

Pleasure and Place

In Chapter 10, on place, we considered how participation in local governance could bring about a transformation in our physical surroundings. Many of the ideas of Parapolity and Parecon are driving towards this aspect of local decision-making. Seeing local changes, and being able to influence them, is the thing that is going to get people to engage. It starts from the bottom up, so it is very much about seeing an improvement in our immediate surroundings. This is the direct consequence of a more engaged style of politics. It might sound, at best, like a necessary evil, to deal with these administrative tasks. But we could turn this around and say instead that our

 

319

Utopia Governance and the Commons

communities are dedicated to giving joy and pleasure to their citizens.

There is an awful phrase that says: Good fences make good neighbours. It seems to be saying that if everyone just looked after their own (perhaps their own personal business, as well as their own property) then life would be better. It could almost be the mission statement of Privatopia. Why not instead go for the mantra: No fences make better neighbours. There is, however, the notion that ‘good fences’ refers to the more abstract concept of having some boundaries in our relations with those who live near us. This, indeed, I wholly support. As I’ve mentioned earlier in the book, neighbours are not necessarily friends and there are often strict unwritten rules about the level of engagement that is appropriate with those who live near us. But yes, the physical boundaries may be something we could question and perhaps we’d achieve better physical surroundings if we weren’t so obsessed with walls and fences.

Enhancing the spaces we live in is partly about changing the very rigid and often stultifying spaces that we create around our buildings. The little patch of garden, surrounded by a wall or fence is something of a sad sight. Sometimes, certainly, a garden can be a beautiful space and an oasis from what might, after all, be less than brilliant surroundings. But what if, instead, all those little private gardens were opened up and neighbours shared those spaces in interesting and exciting ways? Think of the parties, the barbecues, the lantern lights, the fireworks — all shared, along with conversations, joys, sorrows, birthdays, weddings, music, speeches, flowers,

 

320

Utopia Governance and the Commons

vegetables, fruit. I cannot help but feel that the grumpy neighbour could be overwhelmed by the simple generosity and kindness of neighbours. The places and spaces we create are the backdrop to shared pleasures.

We can easily extend that concept from gardens and neighbours to bigger spaces like the streets and squares of our towns and cities. Here the parties are on a bigger scale. My own adopted home town of Edinburgh is transformed in August by the largest arts festival in the world, plus all the associated hullabaloo. Recently, once a month, many of the streets of the city are closed to traffic, and festival-style events take over for a few hours. Many cities around the world are doing the same and finding the great benefits that can be derived from streets given back to people instead of being clogged by cars. Those cities that have experimented with car-free days are leading the way towards a pleasure that is almost forgotten — streets that are for people.