Village Blog

08/24/2007

Home Work

Further to Ran’s discussion of roofing materials yesterday, I was indeed glad he bought the issue up, We will probably end up using a modern roofing material on the house we will build but I think we will make it steep enough so that long term some kind of thatch can be used over the top of it when it begins to fail, or else make the timbers strong enough that they can take homemade clay tiles if it comes to that.

Ran quoted an email of mine which ended with:

This roofing issue is hard, maybe we need to get away from attempting to go long term and look at what renewable materials are available locally so we know we can always maintain it.

If we’re looking long term then this really is our only option but I have to admit that it wasn’t my ‘position’ on sustainability that prompted me to make this comment. It was a combination of trying to think really long term along with a quote from a book called Home Work, by Llod Kahn. This quote got the point across to me in a way that no one had previously:

In the early 70’s I got on a charter flight to Ireland, crossed the Irish Sea and got a long ride with a salesman; when he learned I was interested in building he started pointing out buildings and showing us that each was built of materials from near the site. You see the slate roofs, there’s a slate quarry nearby…” and then, “Now the roofs are tile because there is clay in the soil here…” As we travelled through England, it was striking: the thatched roofs in Norfolk, land of marshes and reeds; the sandstone walls of the Cotswalds, where the light tan colours blend perfectly with the surroundings; cob in Devon; flint in Sussex…

I got the book because it has a photo collection of unusual and low-tech buildings in it. It will serve as creative fuel for when I get to designing our new place but it also has more than that. It's full of inspiration for dropping out and using non-mainstream methods of constructing homes. Plus it's great eye-candy. Here’s some of the pictures from the front cover. Note the house on the little island.

One thing that bugged me though was the collection of people in the book who had gone off the grid. The main focus for all of them was their wind and solar power generating systems. Clearly the issue of EROEI was never discussed but somehow it seems worse that in their attempts to get ‘away from it all’ they had actually bought ‘a lot of it’ with them. They had simply altered the energy equation so that they could maintain essentially the same lifestyle - except with the addition of more trees about the place.

A minor quibble though, it's a great book, not just for the know-how but also for the inspiration. 

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08/06/2007

Step One

This is the post I’ve been meaning to write ever since I started the blog. The first thing anyone should do if they mean to start any kind of community is get this book; Creating a Life Together by Diana Leafe Christian. That includes for people wanting to start Ecovillages, co-housing communities or even Palaeolithic tribes (are you listening Tribe of Anthropik?).

Diana Leafe Christian is the editor of Communities Magazine and has visited many, many intentional communities. She asserts at the start that 90% of intentional communities fail and then goes about explaining what it is that the 10% do differently.

In short the answer is mostly to do with the vision the community has and making sure that all community members are in agreement about it at the earliest possible stage. Her recommended way of creating a vision is for only 2 or 3 couples/individuals to form a core group and to work out a vision for the community they wish to start. Once the vision is set in stone only then does she suggest you go out and seek other members for the community.

With a clear vision document it should be clear to potential members what they are getting into and only people who are in agreement with that vision should come on board. Once a larger group has formed their job is to work out the details of the vision, learn consensus decisions making and to form themselves into a community.

Only at this point does she recommend that the community starts looking for land. Usually this is the very first thing that people do so there is a whole chapter devoted to why the purchase of land should be delayed.

Essentially Creating a Life Together is a bible for people looking to start a community and we certainly won’t be leaving home without it. Not only does it outline the steps but offers much more; from how to get to know people properly to processes that will help you unearth what your key values are so that they can come to the surface during the visioning process rather than years later when it’s too late.

It's a very comprehensive book that takes a while to get through but it is pretty essential, I can’t think of any other way an individual could come by the crucial information it contains about setting up communities except by reading it. I’d like to think that every member of a community I go into would not just have read it but actually own a copy of Creating a Life Together.

I’m intending for my next posting to be a rough form of vision document that we've worked up.

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07/27/2007

Unconditional Parenting DVD

We just got a copy of the Alfie Kohn DVD ‘Unconditional Parenting’. There’s a book by the same name but we got the DVD because we like the idea that we can easily hand it to other people and they won’t need to worry about wading through a heavy tome (I haven’t seen the actual book) and especially we can give it to people who are suspicious of our approach to parenting. Karen has given it a friend already.

The reason it’s good to give to those who doubt our sanity (but surely you believe in consequences Aaron?) is that Kohn’s work is backed up with some serious research, he repeatedly refers to studies throughout his talk and the whole thing probably feels quite safe to conventional people. Apart, that is, from the fact that he has an American accent which can be an issue for people around these parts.

Alfie Kohn shows that punishing children is a primary indicator for children who will later go off the rails and also that calling it consequences, or logical consequences or even explaining the punishment first doesn’t make a difference to the child who just feels hurt by their parent’s actions.

More importantly though he says that shifting to reward based parenting is not the answer either. People tend to see rewards or punishment as being opposites but in fact, says Alfie they are merely different sides of the same coin.

Both rewards and punishment lead to self centeredness in children – it leads them to think; “What do I have to do and what might happen to me if I don’t?” (punishment) or “What do I have to do and what do I get if I do?” (reward) It totally distracts a child from noticing, for instance, that their sibling is currently upset because of something they did.

Both approaches disconnect children from their inherent ability to know right from wrong and will likely turn them into the sort of people who only do the right thing because they think they will get in trouble if they don’t.

Alife also has strong criticism of praise. He argues (backed up by studies of course) that external praise disconnects the child from their own inner motivations and they become less interested in doing the thing for which they get praise – be it drawing pictures, helping round the house or being nice toward the little sister. This doesn’t mean they won’t do these things but it does mean they won’t do them if you aren’t there to hand them a sparkly dinosaur sticker.  Follow this link and click on the "Five Reasons to Stop Saying 'Good Job!'" article to read more about this.

This praise issue was discussed on a NZ unschooling list recently, one mother said her son at age five went to school for five weeks (by his own choice) and even after that short time he came back addicted to praise. He insisted on getting a sticker reward for everything he did. His mother refused and instead gave him a big box full of stickers. Even then he still wanted her to actually give them to him. She held firm and insisted that he could give them to himself - and it still took several months for it to wear off!

We hadn’t even realised we were doing much praise at our house but it soon became apparent that the kids want it from us when we tried to stop. Our oldest one insisted on knowing what we thought of her paintings and would follow Karen around badgering for a comment until she got one. We are struggling to come up with a solution because by now any positive comment will used to feed the need for praise, even statements that lack any judgement in them. We don’t want to go cold turkey because giving no comment at all is hardly natural and is kind of like withdrawing love so our plan is to just muddle through like everything else we do.

Speaking of love withdrawal, Alfie says that’s what time-outs are – they’re time out from the mother or father’s love – and here we all are thinking it’s a much nicer alternative to physical punishment. Actually it’s a much more effective alternative to physical punishment  - and that should set off alarm bells too.

Someone once made the comment that we shouldn’t need scientific evidence to encourage us to treat out children in a loving way and it’s a worrying sign of the state our society that we do but nonetheless it’s nice to have something like this on the shelf just in case.

Rating: Five Stars (with shiny glitter).

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07/15/2007

The Different Drum

I’m in the middle of reading a book by M Scott Peck called The Different Drum and it’s really knocked me over. I need to get this down so that I can move on to further chapters where no doubt I’ll have more to write. Basically though I think the book is going to be very important to me from here on in.

A Different Drum is about building genuine community. In the book genuine community is defined as being much more than people with common interests or geography, it’s about creating a place where it is safe to be vulnerable. From the description of what takes place in the community building workshops that Scott Peck has run I’d say the atmosphere created during the period the group is together is the closest thing I’ve come across to the preconquest consciousness that is discussed in this essay by E Richard Sorensen. Naturally I’m quite excited about it, not just because I’ve often pondered about how good it would be to get into that state but also because it sounds like a hell of a good time.

To be clear, what Scott Peck seems to be achieving is not the living in the moment aspect of hunter gatherer cultures so much as the creation of an environment where people are safe to let their defences down and where they can allow their true thoughts and emotions to interact with others.

All through my life there have been momentary flashes of true community where I felt unconditionally supported, maybe with a circle of friends, or a design group at university or for a brief time living with other single people. I think my interest in living in a village stems from my desire to get those moments back or even better to make them semi-permanent. Life in civilisation has taken me in the other direction but I think that  A Different Drum might be able to provide a blueprint for myself and anyone else who wants to change that. I’m sure I’m not the first to have said this though.

The book is reasonably old and I’m not sure if you will have heard of it or not. I’ve never seen any of Scott Peck’s books discussed in this circle of blogs although I have read two others (The Road Less Travelled and People of the Lie) which I found on my mother’s book shelf. I thought they were excellent books but I can see how they’ve gone under the anti-civ/primitivist/crashblogger radar. Scott Peck was an army psychiatrist who later became a christian and his  books were exceedingly popular, in fact The Road Less Travelled spent years in the NY Times bestseller list during the eighties - prior to reading the book I thought The Road Less Travelled was just a poetic phrase. Maybe it was.

Anyway, that’s the background. Here’s some specifics. Scott Peck says there is a 4 stage process to achieving community:

First is psuedo-community where everyone pretends to get along (I’m sure we’re all familiar with this) but it’s all quite boring and meaningless.  Then comes Chaos where people give up being nice and start to air their differences. It’s often characterised by people forcibly trying to help each other (something else we’re probably familiar with too).

Third comes Emptiness but only if people are prepared to give up their pet issues and ego-projects. I think the point of the Chaos phase is to emphasise what happens if people aren’t prepared to put their egos to death and to provide motivation for moving to stage three. This may have similarities to what people have been calling anomie.

Finally comes true community where all members are in complete empathy with each other regardless of the diversity of their backgrounds and any previous disagreements.

Scott Peck gives a multitude of examples of groups who go through his community building process and says that he can pretty much guarantee to bring any group (and any size of group) of people into community now that we have learned the rules that govern the process.

After writing the book Scott Peck set up the Foundation for Community Encouragement in order to realise his aspiration of spreading community. Part of the organisation’s philosophy statement has this to say:

There is a yearning in the heart for peace. Because of the wounds, the rejections, we have received in past relationships, we are frightened by the risks. In our fear we discount the dream of authentic community as merely visionary. But there are rules by which people can come back together, by which the old wounds are healed. It is the mission of the Foundation for Community Encouragement to teach these rules, to make hope real again, to make the vision actually manifest in a world which has almost forgotten the glory of what it means to be human.

Frankly I can’t think of anything that I could add to that.

As I said at the start this book appears to be unknown amongst this circle of blogs but I think it will have some application for all of us. The more thinking that is done about a post-crash future the more people are coming to realise that being in a community may be the most important factor in ensuring an individuals survival. Not to mention it’s place as an indicator of health and happiness in the here and now.

Derrick Jensen started talking about a future ‘rebirth of community’ a while back and it seems to be a growing theme in Jason Godesky's writing. I see it in his plans for the 2007 Mountain Festival unconference where they intend to use open source technology to structure the event - and in this quote from Tamarack Song which he has reprinted for a second or third (do I hear a fourth?) time, in the same article.

We come from a technological society, so we naturally think that substituting primitive technology for civilized technology is our doorway. The only problem is that Native people are not into technology. They spend only a couple hours a day providing for their simple needs, and they mostly use simple means. Look at their tools—few and crude, and their craftwork—basic and utilitarian. What a Native person excels at is what I call qualitative skills—how to sit in a circle with your clan mates and speak your truth, how to find your special talent so that you can develop it to serve your people, how to use your intuition, the ways of honor and respect, how to live in balance with elders and women and children, how to speak in the language beyond words, how to befriend fear and live love. Without these skills, you will surely die. Or else you'll go back to the life that shuns these skills.

That’s only a part of the quote. I reprinted more of it in this article which, upon re-reading, seems to have sparked some very interesting comments pertinent to this discussion. 

It’s hard to find a more compelling argument for community building in the entire primitivist back catalogue but so far there hasn’t been much action to follow the talk. I’m not accusing anyone of slackness here though, I think the whole things is a mystery to civilised people but A Different Drum could go a long way toward changing that and enabling us to ‘sit in a circle with our clan mates’.

In the book there were a number of comments by Scott Peck that mirrored what I have been reading from Primitivists including a comparison between the spiritual journey undertaken by healers in Fijian and !Kung societies and those taken by Christian nuns and monks, along with a brief description of the story of The Fall that made me wonder if he had been reading Daniel Quinn (or maybe it’s the other way around). Of course it’s not the main theme of the book at all but hopefully it indicates the potential cross-over here.

I know I could easily be accused of jumping on something that I’ve been desperate to find and building it up to be more than it is but it feels like the real deal. I also found an interview of Scott Peck done about five years after he set up the Foundation and he was still saying the same things then, albeit with a degree of refinement, so I’ll take that as a good sign.

And here’s another one. Reading this has triggered a memory of finding a website advertising the services of a couple who teach permaculture in New Zealand. I think I originally looked at it because these are the rather entrepreneurial pair who initiated the Eco-show in New Zealand. On the site they offer to lead a permaculture design course which spends some of the time focusing on building community using lessons learned from A Different Drum.

Brian Innes writes: The benefit of this approach is that it sets a basis for trust and risk taking which generates group unity and efficient decision making. This encourages flair and creativity in design and is reflected in the quality of output of the participants when doing design exercises.

I’ve written about the hard time I had at architecture school but there was one design group that I did enjoyed during my time there where we designed as an actual group rather than in competition with each other. It’s one of the glimpses of community from my past and because of it I had already been wondering if there weren’t possible application for doing awesome and effective design in community. But that’s another posting.

In any case I see serious potential to make use of this book. One of the recurring themes I am seeing, especially in the comments sections of anti-civ blogs, is the sheer frustration and loneliness that people are experiencing because they hold to a viewpoint that is so uncommon in our society. In fact it seems to be the one area in which we are all doing poorly.

This book won’t necessarily help with finding specific people but it does show that genuine community exists in spite of differences and that it may even build on those differences. If you get a chance to go to a community building workshop it would be well worth it, not only will it be a terrific buzz but in this situation people will probably be perfectly happy to hear your beliefs.

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07/22/2006

Material assets and other security blankets

I've been poking around Taognostic and found this talk by Richard Heinberg. It's a critique of civilisation that is comphrehensive and basic at the same time, the sort of thing you can give to your mother to explain where you're coming from these days.

OK, maybe that's stretching it a bit but as a first up reading the uninitiated could do a lot worse.

I had always associated Richard Heinberg with the Peak Oil movement so to discover an essay with this breadth of understanding is a nice surprise, especially as he wrote it back in 1995 at a time when I still thought left wing politics could solve the world's problems.

The most interesting part of the talk is where he compares our adult desire for material objects with the security blankets of our infancy.

The infant lives entirely in the present moment in a state of pure trust and guilelessness, deeply bonded with her mother. But as she grows, she discovers that her mother is a separate entity with her own priorities and limits. The infant's experience of relationship changes from one of spontaneous trust to one that is suffused with need and longing. This creates a gap between Self and Other in the consciousness of the child, who tries to fill this deepening rift with transitional objects--initially, perhaps a teddy bear; later, addictions and beliefs that serve to fill the psychic gap and thus provide a sense of security. It is the powerful human need for transitional objects that drives individuals in their search for property and power, and that generates bureaucracies and technologies as people pool their efforts.

This is an idea that for some reason I've never heard before and interestingly ties in with something else I read on Taognostic:

When people get mad about you messing with their car, or stepping on their lawn, it's not because they care for either, it's because they have (dangerously) expanded (or contracted might be more accurate) their identity to cover material objects. When you step on their lawn, you're threatening their false identity.

All the more reason to pick up your baby

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07/20/2006

Hard Science

From the Mother-Baby Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame comes this thorough paper on why letting your children Cry It Out is not a sensible option for parents. 

Interestingly someone on the Continuum Concept email list (the source of the link) made the point that there should be no need for scientific proof to dissuade people from leaving their babies to cry alone but that it should be considered a moral issue. I agree.

I also agree with her final point that despite this arguement, in our culture it is necessary to have the hard evidence close to hand.

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07/06/2006

The Continuum concept

There are several great postings on Mother Anarchy at the moment but of particular relevance to this blog is the essay on The Continuum Concept (book by Jean Liedloff). Of all the books I have read this probably has had the greatest impact on my attempts at parenting. It provides a kind of reference point by which I am able to compare everything that we do as parents and for me it is also proof that we can do a lot better than current parenting practices. I fully intend to write a review of it at some point but for now I can highly recommend you read Unhappy People.

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01/13/2006

Disciplined Minds

Disciplined Minds – A critical Look at the Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives.

Disciplined Minds explains why many of the most innovative inventions of our time come from people with next to no training, people who are supposedly just ‘tinkerers’ and who always seem to say after they’ve invented something wondrous that they didn’t realise they weren’t supposed to be able to do what they did. It also explains why these inventions are so easily suppressed.

There is also a letter that poeple can sign asking that Jeff Schmidt be reinstated to his old job at www.disciplined-minds.com/ . Just follow the 'Update and Plea for Help' link

01:25 Posted in Recommended Reading | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this

01/05/2006

An Undisciplined Psychiatrist

I’m reading an interview with Alice Miller who wrote ‘For Your Own Good’ and it has triggered off another connection with Jeff Schmidt’s book  ‘Disciplined Minds’, which is about why a professional’s first duty is to maintaining the status quo.
 
I wrote a while back about other connections with Disciplined Minds and I’ll use the same quote here:
 
“People’s mental problem’s often appear as deviations from social or legal norms and therefore are problems for the status quo as well as the deviant individuals.
The problems of both would be solved if troubled individuals abided by the values of the status quo, and of course the mainstream mental health system more often that not works to alter behaviour in that direction. But attempting to adjust people to the unhealthy society that caused their problems in the first place may not be the healthiest approach for either the individual or society”

He goes on…

“Evidently it is not the place of clinicians to question the health of the society to which the patient must be adjusted. Their ‘legitimate’ professional concern is how best to bring about the adjustment. In this alone, they are expected to use their creativity. The few who do raise questions are seen as getting political…”

In the interview with Alice Miller she is talking about how her theories break away from traditional Freudian analysis, which attributes innate destructive drives to the child, and instead says that it is trauma inflicted on the child by the parents that causes behaviour problems. Naturally our abusive society does not want to hear this and so the professionals refute the idea – even though it makes complete sense to the layperson.
 
There must be something in this. The patient loves it but the psychiatrist hates it. We’re taught to respect the psychiatrist as the expert but we need to remember the patient is actually the expert on their own feelings (as 'non-professional' counsellors tell their clients) and if something seems to click with them then we should pay attention.
 
Anyway, here’s something from the interview with Alice Miller(she starts off referring to her first book):

“In The Drama I'd hoped to reach the professionals, my colleagues; so I spoke in psychoanalytical language. Meanwhile I went beyond this language, and I don't use it anymore: I no longer try to reach people trained as I was. Even as they deny what I wrote, their patients say, "She describes my own experiences. I know what she is talking about."

OMNI
Why do some professionals deny what you're saying?

Miller
Because they are not allowed to face reality. You know, it was interesting. The first time I talked on these ideas was when I spoke to about three hundred analysts on the narcissism of psychoanalysts. They were so surprised, because it was very unusual to hear a colleague side with the child. First they reacted naturally, were just grateful and did not show much resistance to their feelings. They thanked me and said, "But how did you know it was my life you described?" And I said, "It was my own life I described." Many men had tears in their eyes. Then I tried to publish this article in a German professional review, but the editors refused it. Resistance was already established. They sent it back because they had to see everything as Freud would have; otherwise it is frightening or dangerous. The International Analytic Society published it in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. But the German review, Psyche, did not. It was too provoking for the Germans. “

Even when Alice Miller’s analysis of childhood trauma is so brilliant her explanation for the reason mainstream professionals reject her work feels a bit thin. I don’t know if other people have felt this but I have often thought the explanations for the vagaries of professional behaviour were always a bit lacking. Alice Miller says her fellow psychiatrists were “not allowed to face reality” and while this is true I feel that it’s not enough of an arguement to confront the entrenched mainstream view with. Fortunately with the aid of Disciplined Minds we can now say that the psychiatrists are responding to their first duty as professionals which is to maintain the status quo and fend off any challenges to it.

As we know professionals maintain the status quo so that existing power structures and the people at the top of those structures can remain where they are . What’s especially important here though is that the power structures are (by definition) abusive and in all abusive situations not only does the victim receive the blame (see Derrick Jensen for elaboration on that concept) but the abuse is actually one of the methods that the power structure uses to strengthen and maintain it’s position. This means it is doubly important that the professional psychiatric community represses Alice Miller’s writing. Fortunately she has turned away from them and is now attempting to communicate directly with us peasants. This is of course thoroughly unprofessional behaviour :-)

Please note that I am not trying to pick on Alice Miller for failing to have an in depth explanation about professional behaviour, until I read Disciplined Minds I had never seen an adequate rebuttal to their ‘normal’ attitudes anywhere.
Further evidence of Alice Miller’s lack of professionalism can be found in the same article:
“As her writing progressed, Miller's view of the child became more and more opposed to that of traditional Freudian theory. Miller at first dedicated Thou Shalt Not Be Aware to Freud on the one hundred twenty-fifth anniversary of his birth. "His discoveries of the survival of childhood experiences in the adult unconscious and the phenomena of repression have influenced my life and way of thinking," she says. "But I came to different conclusions than Freud when I could no longer deny what I learned from my patients about the repression of child abuse."”

Alice Miller clearly has respect for the opinions of non-professionals, but even worse (from a professional viewpoint) she has respect for the opinions of the people who have come to her for help. How she ended up being not just unprofessional but also nice to people who put her in a position of power over themselves is anyone’s guess. Most people in empire culture will automatically exploit any power imbalance as an opportunity to act out their own trauma and actually listening to 'weaklings' is most definitely not part of that scenario .

As a footnote;  I was reading this passage of the Alice Miller article: "It wasn't until I wrote my books that I found out just how hostile society was toward children," she says. "I have come to realize that hostility toward children is to be found in countless forms, not only in death camps but throughout all levels of society and in every intellectual discipline -- even in most schools of therapy."

I could hear my 3 year old daughter doing something in the other room to make our 1 year old cry. I immediately felt my anger rise as it always does in this situation - the chance to ‘protect’ one child is of course the prefect opportunity to vent anger toward the other one and although I can usually stop myself acting out this stuff I certainly can’t stop the feelings appearing as if by magic from the depths of my subconscious.  I’m pleased to say that this time I didn’t attempt to solve the problem by venting my anger.

As always the work of changing the world to be a better place turns back inward to our children and then ultimately to ourselves. It's hard work but I have to focus on making myself a better place too otherwise my attempts to make the world a better place will be nothing other than a hypocritical exercise in displacement – and very probably misguided as well.

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12/20/2005

Getting Adjusted

The problems of both would be solved if troubled individuals abided by the values of the status quo, and of course the mainstream mental health system more often that not works to alter behaviour in that direction. But attempting to adjust people to the unhealthy society that caused their problems in the first place may not be the healthiest approach for either the individual or society”

He goes on…

Evidently it is not the place of clinicians to question the health of the society to which the patient must be adjusted. Their ‘legitimate’ professional concern is how best to bring about the adjustment. In this alone, they are expected to use their creativity. The few who do raise questions are seen as getting political…”

It ALSO reminds me of this comment from an article on Ecopsychology by Robin van Tine about Separation Anxiety Disorder:

Seperation Anxiety Disorder is a “...disorder diagnosed for children if they have "difficulty at bedtime and may insist that someone stay with them until they fall asleep. During the night, they may make their way to their parents' bed; if entry to the parental bedroom is barred, they may sleep outside the parents' door". Who has the mental disorder here? What is the "normal" natural, healthy behavior? All social primates cuddle their young closely most of the time -- as do social mammals. In most non-Westernized societies parents and children sleep together. I believe that the diagnosis is misapplied here: the parental behavior of locking the child away at night time and punishing the child for wanting to naturally be with the parent is the unnatural and perhaps pathological symptom …“

I'm going to have a lot more to say about the various insanities we visit upon our children. In fact I’m probably going to end up concluding that our childhoods consist of the one seamless traumatic experience. But more on that later.

So here we have seemingly unrelated writing on professionalism, home schooling and what is probably considered a fringe branch of psychology and they all seem to be saying the same thing. The question is: Are we listening?

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