Play with life

I spend a lot of time thinking about how we might live differently (better) than we do. What this usually means is trying to imagine some other arrangement of property, production, education, etc. that would be stabler, happier, more sustainable than the one we live in. I know perfectly well that it’s hopeless and really misguided to try to dream up a way of living, that forms of life must evolve gradually and ad hoc through the working out of practical problems by living people. But I also know that the way we’re living now is bad and getting worse, and we seem to be trapped in it: it keeps evolving but always in the direction of more dehumanization, mechanization, alienation, waste, destruction, hysteria. It seems clear that, without some radically new idea, things will keep going the same way. So I keep dreaming and scheming, even though I know that’s the wrong way—because what’s the right way? 

 

This same dilemma is expressed in the debate between the radical and the reformer: the radical (nowadays—I don’t pretend to speak for the past) sees that things have gone terribly and irrevocably wrong, that all the efforts of reformers at most retard, or only reduce the acceleration of, a relentless movement towards dystopia. The reformer knows that there’s no such thing as tearing down and starting from scratch, that this is not merely impossible but really meaningless, and that attempts to do it produce nightmares if they don’t just fizzle. They’re both right.

 

This dialectic longs for a synthesis.

 

Graeber and Wengrow’s book on the history and possibilities of human society, The Dawn of Everything, contains many oversights, hasty conclusions, and suspiciously loose argumentation, but it is full of good ideas, of salutary thoughts, of things that feel like they must be true, and if they’re not, well, they ought to be.

 

One of the central claims of the book is that we typically imagine “primitive” humans (hunter-gatherers, say) as living in fixed, static social and cultural conditions, conditions that are “natural” to homo sapiens, are not chosen or theorized by their inhabitants, and which differ from place to place mainly just because of differences in available resources, weather, terrain, etc.; and that this image is wrong. According to Graeber and Wengrow, prior to the development of the kinds of political structures we’re familiar with (kingdoms, empires, bureaucratic states, etc.) people had great freedom to choose their social and political conditions and exercised this freedom with plenty of conscious intention.

 

The primary mechanism of political choice was movement: if an individual or a group didn’t like a particular legal system, authority, set of laws—they would just go somewhere else. These societies were generally mobile anyhow, there was usually plenty of unoccupied wilderness, and no authority had a long enough reach to stop anyone from leaving.

 

Even if you didn’t opt out, pre-state societies typically had a lot of social, political, and economic experimentation built into them. Many were highly variable from season to season, with people living in large settlements during one season and in roving foraging bands in another. The social structures, political systems, mores and laws were often radically different in these two environments, with, e.g., a rigid authoritarianism prevailing in one and a highly anti-authoritarian horizontalism prevailing in the other. People moved comfortably back and forth between these, accepting each in its season.

 

Graeber and Wengrow argue that these societies were playing with notions of authority and social structure: putting them on, taking them off, obeying them within their purview and season, openly flaunting them or forgetting about them altogether in other times and places. And they argue that a lot of innovation, not only in political structures but in economic arrangements, modes of production, settlement, tribal affiliation, etc., were developed and persisted for hundreds or thousands of years in these modes of play and experimentation, without becoming fixed and inescapable. If there is something G & W see as “natural” to human societies, it is this flexible, playful relationship to socio-political structures; what is peculiar, what needs explaining, is how we got “stuck” in one particular arrangement.

 

Whether or not the anthropological claim here is true (and, from what I’ve read, this is not one of the claims under attack by critics), it suggests a useful way of thinking about projects for social and political change in the contemporary world. If we are trying to live differently (start a commune, a collective, a school, etc.) we should think not of building one thing to last into the future, carefully crafted and ideal, but of trying out an arrangement, of playing with social relations, child rearing, pedagogy, organizational structure, values, obligations, etc. We should think of whatever we’re undertaking as the first of many experiments, as the beginning of a way of life based more on experiment and less on accepting (feeling trapped in, at the mercy of) fixed and dysfunctional forms and institutions.

 

There is no question of fighting against or destroying worn out forms and broken institutions; we will simply pass beyond them and render them irrelevant. 

 

But how do we acquire the power to do this?

The first question

Where do I find these parents, who will risk their children’s futures on my school?

 

This is the first question facing any project of building community or alternative institutions: where do you find the people? Many schemes are never begun for lack of an answer to it; and of those that are begun, most fail for lack of a good enough answer.

 

I do not mean to answer it now. At the moment, I only want to point out that there is no question whether the people are out there. There are plenty of parents who would like to abandon the anxieties and obsessions of mainstream education, just as there are plenty of people who want to build communities, plenty who are fed up with mainstream culture, plenty who believe our institutions are broken and want better ones, plenty who long to step off the path into the wilderness. 

 

The people are there but there is a problem finding them and convincing them that here at last is something real, something worth trying. And why shouldn’t they be skeptical, amid this perpetual clamor of false promises? Anyone who is not wary is not to be trusted: they lack critical faculties.

But before I can pursue this problem any further, I need to frame the issue in a more general way. The school is a real example (in that I do really want to start a school) but it is still only an example. What exactly is it an example of?

Overcoming Mistrust

A group of people may at any time choose to enter into agreements, agreements that are not legally enforceable, whose basis is trust.

Take the example with which I began: say I’m a teacher with particular ideas about education, and I want to start a school. I don’t want to start a big, highly funded, world-class school for rich kids. I want to start a little, odd-ball school for kids whose parents share my values and like my ideas. (All this is in fact true.)

 

As we've seen, there are major legal barriers to this—but if the parents were prepared to trust me, and I them, it could be possible. The kids could be officially homeschooled, so that the school would, legally, be only a learning center, which means a lot less regulation. If it was small enough, it could be run out of someone’s home—mine or one of the students. If it got larger, we’d have to rent a space. But if I trusted the parents—trusted them not to sue me—maybe I could do without all the insurance.

 

- Trusted them not to sue you? You’d be a fool to do that.

- I think what you’re calling a fool is just what I want to be. And if, god forbid, a kid gets injured or killed, and their parents break their word and sue me, and if it ruins me, then let me be ruined. Ruin is something we need to be less afraid of if we want to begin to trust, if we want to live differently. A precondition of trust will be a different way of looking at misfortune. Ruin—especially financial ruin—is a holy state. I can’t choose it, but if it chooses me, I’ll try to learn to be glad of it. When Jesus tells the rich young man, “Give away all your possessions and follow me,” he is not recommending charity but poverty itself; and the man goes away sadly not because he lacks the will to help others but because he had great possessions and cannot bear to give them all away. Everything I think I own is a burden and a lie: nothing is mine for keeps, and when I know that I’ll walk lightly over the earth.

- It’s easy to talk about the holiness of poverty when (a) you don’t have any dependents and (b) you have family and friends who can bail you out in an emergency. 

- True. But we all should have people to fall back on in a crisis. This is part of what it means to be in community with others. Imagine you were sending your kids to a wonderful weird little school, and then one of the students got injured in an accident, and a parent sued, and the school was in danger of going under—wouldn’t you do what you could to keep the place and the people who ran it afloat?

 

But it’s stupid—or it’s wrong, it’s nonsensical—to trust someone to keep a promise they never made, so the parents would have to take a kind of oath not to sue in the case of an unforeseeable accident. But doesn’t that sound like a weird thing to ask people: give me your children, let me educate them off the grid, and promise not to sue me if something goes wrong. Who would agree to that? Well, only another fool: the kind of fool who knows that a pile of money will not heal their child nor bring her back from the dead, that it will only profane, degrade and mock their grief. These parents must be fools anyhow to risks their children’s futures, their college prospects, on a weird little home-school run by a nut like me.

 

So, I must find a group of parents as foolish as I, and as affirmed in their folly, as determined to persist in it, to see it through. 

 

But where do I find these parents? That is the question.