Fatalism and Free Will

The future is not fixed, but it is not completely unpredictable – a future cannot happen if the potential for it doesn’t already exist within Nature. There are a limited amount of possible futures from which to choose, but there are so many that it appears infinite from our limited viewpoint.

An omniscient God would know all possible futures and the likelihood of each one happening – as close to “prediction” omniscience could get. We are not omniscient, but at least we have imaginations that offer us possibilities beyond what we could otherwise expect.

The limits of the future are the limits of our imagination. If we conform to habit and past experience, the possibilities of the future becomes restricted and more predictable. But if we cultivate within ourselves imagination and confidence, opening ourselves to new experiences, a whole array of possible future opens up from which we can choose and free ourselves from a passive acceptance of cause and effect.

Even if free will is an illusion, I experience life as if I had a choice, so I “choose” that.

Triads of the Peasant

Three blessings of the peasant’s life: sustainable economy, community solidarity and connection to nature.

Three curses of the peasant’s life: parochial thinking, physical hardship and exploitation by the elites.

Three ways to free the peasant’s life: holistic education, development of technology and political self-organisation.

The Once and Future Peasant

When we think of history, it is largely based on the activities of a ruling, wealthy or literate elite. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, a very partial view of what happened in the past. They are the protagonists of history only because they’ve been written about, and a large portion of humanity has not been.

For the most part, the history of “civilisation” has been mostly peasantry, people living in a subsistence economy, close to the land with simple technology, and being exploited by a politically active elite – a sustainable arrangement for centuries. This puts a lot of history in a different perspective: ruling elites from pre-industrial times look rather parasitic instead of being the protagonists (sorry to fans of the Once and Future King).

This arrangement has been a constant; no matter how many times the rulers or their political systems changed, the peasant remained, unchanging. But no longer, industrial society has changed that: the proportion of urban dwellers to rural dwellers has changed dramatically, as well as living standards, education and politics.

But this arrangement isn’t sustainable; we have an economy that relies on perpetual growth inflated by finite resources of fossil fuels. If the Earth were infinite with inexhaustible resources, or if we could colonise space, perpetual economic growth wouldn’t be such a problem; we could just carry on expanding our economy indefinitely. The Earth isn’t infinite, and I honestly don’t see anyone colonising Mars or the moon anytime soon.

The future will be sustainable, by accident or by design, and I have a feeling that the “peasant” will be an important factor in this, that countrydwellers and their activities will once again become an important part of how the economy works as it has across history. Hence the title, “The Once and Future Peasant.”

If the economy collapses, we could end up in a neo-feudal world where underpriveleged peasants are exploited by an elite. Or alternatively, communities of “peasants” could self-organise, defending against exploitation and also maintaining today’s useful technology so that we don’t need to return to the hardships that peasants have suffered in the past.

Whatever happens, it will be a matter of choice.

Universal and Local Unconsciousnesses

What is the Collective Unconscious? Put simply, it is the psychological structures of which people are, collectively, unaware. But I think there should be a distinction made between a ‘universal’ unconscious that all human share – one which Jung spoke of – and a more local or cultural one that belongs to a specific group of people.

I’ll define each by three points that describe what it is, what it does and how it is established.

Universal (genetic/archetypal) Unconscious

1. It is the repository of the human species’ experience
2. It is innate (genetic)
3. It adapts itself to the specific historical, cultural and symbolic structure of a specific human group (which takes me onto the next “collective unconscious”)

Local (cultural/social/stereotypical) Unconscious

1. It is the collection of unquestioned assumptions (values, habits, etc.) of a human group.
2. It establishes itself early in life through our social experiences and reinforces itself through our social environment.
3. It ensures the conformity of beliefs, behavior and identity of a human group.

This is something I touched on long ago on my other blog The Grove of Quotes: Archetypes, Stereotypes and the Collective Unconscious. It’s certainly a theme that’s always interested me, and I my return to this again in the future, possibly with how they relate to ‘Individuation’.

Manifesto for Education

Amazing how children grow. My daughter is already enrolled in school! Me and my partner had chosen long ago to do homeschooling, and here we are, ready to start a new adventure. In preparation I thought I’d create a list of principles detailing my own ideas of the nature of education.

This is a tentative manifesto for home education; it’s always open to updates and improvements. I’m sure as time goes on this will go through plenty of revisions as we go through the process of our daughter’s education, which will in part be our own!

1. I choose a person-based education that is holistic, developing the whole personality – physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, social and ecological.
2. I choose an education based on principles of collaboration and solidarity.
3. I choose an education that is fun and enjoyable.
4. I choose an education that builds on and encourages the child’s own natural strengths and interests according to their own rhythm.
5. I choose an education that is integrated into everyday life.
6. I choose an education that gives an experiential and practical understanding of life.
7. I choose an education that is geared towards creating a sustainable world of social and ecological values.

Anarchy Status: obsoletion, not abolition

I think that if you abolish the nation-state, you’d unleash chaos with a rule of strong – people aren’t psychologically or socially prepared to take on the work and responsibility necessary to leave representatives and ministers twiddling their thumbs, feeling useless. And the power to decide cannot be abolished but only displaced into other institutions, corporations, communities or individuals. Just a couple of reasons why I can’t throw myself into the anarchist cause.
This is why I emphasise obsoletion, not abolition. A real democracy would make parliamentary democracy obsolete as people become self-organising without the need for ‘representatives’.
My idea of democracy needs psychologically autonomous human beings capable of peaceful cooperation. It is a far off utopian vision, not something immediately realisable – at least not on a large scale.
If people took democracy seriously, they wouldn’t be satisfied with universal suffrage or representatives; there’d be parliaments/assemblies in every village, town and city neighbourhood (hopefully organised into (con)federations so they can cooperate and pool their resources where needed).
I believe its important to create ‘utopian’ visions of the world as it should and could be, but I also see we have to deal with the world as it is and take practical steps with the political tools we currently have. For the time being, Liberal Democracy is the best we have so far, but the process of creating democracy is far from over. If we can imagine better, we should strive for it, step by step.

Biocentric Anthropocentrist

Years ago I attempted to reconcile anthropocentrism and biocentrism. Absolute contradiction, but it had to be tried. It went something like this:
A purely biocentric perspective is impossible for a human being. I am anthropocentric because I am human. I wake up human, I go to sleep human and everything I do in between is done as a human. I have an anthropocentric life because that’s the form my ‘biocentricity’ has taken, in much the same way a tree will be ‘dendrocentric’.
My ‘anthropocentricity’ is a perspective I cannot deny without destroying my very existence. It is ‘unnatural’ for an organism to desire its own extinction or that of its species. That goes against our survival instinct, and is life-denying, not life-affirming, so definitely not biocentric either.
Just because my life is ‘anthropocentric’, I am under no illusion that the rest of the universe should be – it isn’t. That would definitely be human arrogance.
But if my anthropocentricity is not biocentric, I will be denying the biosphere on which I depend to sustain my life. My existence should be of benefit for the biosphere as a whole; that’s just how the biosphere works.
The individual organism, its species and the biosphere as a whole have to complement each other, otherwise something is going to go extinct.

I shared this in a conversation and someone mentioned the term ‘ecological humanist’. That’s probably a better fit than ‘biocentric anthropocentrist’.