mandarine

So, here’s where the LETS project is right now: we’ve had the first information meeting yesterday evening, and there were around 50 people. Among those, 30 are sure to join the initiative, and the most important success is that there are 10 volunteers who want to be in the launch team. I was right to bet that I was not the only one considering that starting a barter network was a good idea.

The next step will be to define the structure of the network (especially the legal aspects of the association), as well as the name, the ambitions, etc.

Meanwhile, there is an awful lot of work to be done in the garden to put it in its spring tracks before we have to leave for two weeks (we fly across the Atlantic to visit NYC* and Martha’s Vineyard in late April, because my brother is getting married in New England). Therefore, as far as wisemandarine.com is concerned, it’s going to be a thin dotted line for a while.

(*) we’ll be visiting Emily, Dorr and Hobs (and apparently we’ll miss Becky).

When I was a kid, my brother, after perusing too many history books, used to speculate about which period and place he would have preferred to live in if he had had a choice. Depending on his mood, he would choose the Roman empire, New Zealand before the arrival of European settlers, Victorian England, etc. Sometimes, he would inquire what my choice would be. My answer was always ‘here and now’. Maybe I lack imagination. Or somehow I felt that life had never been so fine, at least around here. Food, health, democracy, justice, knowledge, comfort, leisure: it was impossible to find a time in history when even the most powerful emperor could have had such an easy life as that we were having.

Now that I am gradually changing my lifestyle and my project of life, I sometimes play the same sort of game and wonder if such a change could have been easier before, for instance in the late sixties. And the answer is no.

It has never been so easy to change one’s life, because the surrounding mentalities have probably never been so open. Nobody is going to come and lynch me because I dress differently, or because I worship another God, or because I am eating less meat, or because I ride a bicycle, or because I have unclassifiable economic activities, or because I take a nap on weekdays. I cannot imagine how a black, lesbian, hippie, unemployed, communist single mother could have managed back in the seventies. I am almost sure she could come to my village now, and at least half the people would stand up for her if she came into trouble with the closeder-minded minority. This trend is the delayed effect of the big mentality change of the sixties and seventies - human rights, civil rights, women rights, sexual freedom, freedom of speech - now getting new momentum from environmental concerns.

However, there is a strong opposing trend: the buildup of conservative ideas, probably associated to a wealthy and aging dominant culture. People who see terrorism as a greater threat than global warming; people who believe one molested old lady or one abused child is a motive for putting surveillance cameras everywhere and everybody’s life into electronic databanks, while cutting on education spending because we need to reduce taxes; people who say we have to work more and earn less because this is globalization, idiot.

So my take is that now is the best of times to choose to do something different, to choose an uncommon lifestyle, or even to go against mainstream cultural habits (before it’s too late). Maybe not for artists or intellectuals - the golden age of total freedom was probably twenty years ago for them. But for ordinary people, now is probably the right time.

In fact, even if we feel there are still too many shackles in our lives, I guess the word ‘freedom’ in the declaration of human rights and our (French) constitution has probably never been so meaningful than here and now. I can travel, I can work or not work, I can live with whomever I want, I can say whatever I think and read whatever I like, I can vote or even run for President, I can get a divorce, I can make friends with whomever I choose, I can go out after hours, etc. So many things I can do that were impossible a hundred years or even fifty years ago.

Conversely, there are few things I have to do. In fact, contrary to what some people will say, today’s western lifestyle is not only negotiable, but mostly optional: I do not have to watch TV; I do not have to buy stuff in a supermarket; I do not have to own a car; I do not have to have a full-time job; I do not have to have a large house with central air, three bedrooms, a living-room, a kitchen, a bathroom and a garage; I do not need a lawn or a swimming pool; I do not even have to have a phone or a computer or the internet.

Once I decide I can let go of some of these (maybe I’ll keep my internet connection, though…), then comes a breath of fresh freedom that makes everything possible.

Summary

People need three things: land to grow food, energy to make stuff, and information to interact. In the old model, it was easier to pack people together so they could make stuff and interact more efficiently, and move food and energy around. But now that the information and energy can be everywhere, we had better live where food grows. [more]

Preamble

French singer Renaud wrote a song in the 1980s entitled Miss Maggie, in which he signifies his utter disgust at men’s violence, stupidity and vanity by praising women’s lack thereof, “except perhaps Mrs Thatcher”. The words have Renaud’s trade-mark slang vulgarity and poetic touch, and the song was acknowledged by many as a great feminist manifesto, while it also aroused somewhat of a diplomatic row by taking cheap shots at UK’s then female yet stiff neoliberal PM.

(listen to the song)

[…]
It was not from a woman’s brain
That arose the nuclear bomb;
And no woman’s hand has been stained
By a drop of Amerind’s blood.
Palestinians and Armenians
Witness from the depths of their graves
That “genocide” is masculine
As are “SS-man”, “bull-fighter”…
Because in this whorish mankind
The murderers are all brothers.
There’s no sister to rival them
Except, perhaps, Mrs Thatcher.

Woman, I love you above all
For your weakness and for your eyes
Whereas the man’s strength only rests
Within his tail and his gunfire.
When doomsday’s come, eventually
You’ll find Hell crowded with he-fools
Playing “who has the longest pee,”
Playing with footballs and war tools.
But I would like a dog to be
And to keep on earth for ever;
And by way of streetlamp, daily
I would choose Mrs Thatcher.

translation by Christian Souchon

I used to love the song, and I still do, but now only for the words, not the manifesto: I believe that fueling the feminist cause with underlining alleged essential qualities women have over men can in fact dangerously backfire. Here is why.

Dead End Feminism

Famous French philosopher and feminist Elisabeth Badinter wrote a short book in 2003, entitled ‘Fausse Route’ (’Dead-End Feminism’) explaining that feminism was heading into the wrong direction, especially the radical ‘neofeminist’ views of Andrea Dworkin or Catharine MacKinnon in the US. To make it short, she deplored the fact that feminists there and the mainstream media (and law decisions) were beginning to go too far in presenting all women as essentially good, caring, peaceful, innocent, therefore victims, while men were systematically pictured as evil, careless, violent, guilty, therefore torturers. Because it can be easily amplified by the media, and because there are still unfortunately too many examples to ‘prove’ it right, this simplistic notion that genders are irreconcilable and that women must always be protected from men is rapidly spreading in the US, then to Europe and even France.

And yet, original feminism (at least in France) was not about differences, it was about equality. Elisabeth Badinter knows it well, as she’s been a pionneer for the feminist cause, along with Simone de Beauvoir or Françoise Giroud. But it seems that the message was lost along the way. The simplified “woman good / man bad” motto is gaining ground, and turning the once fundamental philosophical debate over equality into a sour farce of counting points through court rulings and inane laws.

Admittedly, the dualism emanating from the arguments of some [female] supporters of equal access to political careers never assumed the provocative shape of separatism. But through repeated statements that women are less warlike, less vain, more concrete, more concerned than others, more dedicated to the fight in favor of life and liberties, they are depicting a caricature-like negative image of men.

Translation by yours truly

She is particularly critical of how this simplified feminist battle has pervaded the university campuses in the US, where all the shades of human and boy-girl social interactions between near-adults are gradually replaced by black-or-white interpretations of sexual intentions, and where the only means of prevention against abuse is emotional or even physical segregation. Instead of letting girls and boys untangle the emotional, social and sexual mess of late teenagehood; instead of teaching girls to fend for themselves and confirm first-hand the effectiveness of a righteous slap in the face, the new paradigm is surely steering the feminist movement away from any chances of future equality.

Equality means equality

By underlining the differences between women and men and by making them look as if they were intrinsic; by pretending that women are natural angels and that the women who do infanticide, murder, theft, procuring, or bad-ass politics are all either forced or corrupted into it by males; by dismissing most cases of male victims of female abuse as weakly and pathetic while never urging women to just hit back, this simplistic feminism is barring the way towards equality, while opening wide the gates for complementarism or differentialism. All the minor forms that the same sort of feminism can take, be it through Emily’s post or endorsed by men like in Renaud’s song, encourage this complementaristic view.

And I believe gender complementarity is patriarchy under a disguise, as it contains two major pitfalls:

1. If there are fundamental, essential, intrinsic differences between men and women, they must be a consequence of sexual differences. The essential sexual difference is that women can give birth. Therefore, the normal destiny of a woman is to be a mother and thus take care of the kids, the nest, etc…
2. Once you begin to admit that men and women have essential differences, why would you want equality? And even if there were natural differences, is it not mankind’s fate to rise from its natural state?

In my opinion, the immediate and practical implications of sexual differentialism are even more dangerous. By making biological differences the distinctive characteristic of women, they justify in advance the specialization of genders we have tried to fight against for more than thirty years. Under the pretense of opposing ‘horrible neutrality’ and ‘abominable lack of differentiation’, they are giving back undue strength to old stereotypes, masculine and feminine alike.

Therefore, I strongly resent all manner of speech going along the lines of “equality in complementarity”. It sounds too close to “the world needs floor cleaners as much as it needs rocket scientists”. This is why you will see me jump at your throat if you go that way, even when you are as dear a friend as Emily is.

You see, I have stakes in this too. While all along feminists have been fighting so that women could be equal to men, I have been thinking that I would love a world in which men could be equal to women. I’d love a world where it would be socially acceptable to be a stay-at-home father, while the wife runs a computer repair business; I’d love a world where a man could say (without you smiling): I’ve never touched a screwdriver - I leave it all to Tessa, she’s so clever with DIY stuff ; I am more into crochet and knitting - I love it with my herbal tea while watching major league baseball on TV with my buddies.

The feminine and the masculine

I am not much into Yin and Yang stuff, but I am convinced there is a feminine and a masculine side to everyone. The words feminine and masculine are misleading, as they make it sound as if femininity was intrinsically attached to women, and masculinity to men. I do not think so. I believe the level of femininity and masculinity in men and women is 90% cultural (you do not have to agree there, but bear with me for the sake of the argument). Just like a small imbalance in a chemical mix can gradually segregate two compounds, likewise it does not take a lot of initial difference in testosterone levels to kick-start the cultural chain-reaction and lead to the appearance of biological determinism through millennial delusion.

I strongly believe that the world would be a better place with more femininity in it; it does not mean that women should take over. It only means that femininity should take over, and men have (almost) as much of it in them as women do. Hardcore neofeminism just does not leave them a chance to find it out.

Epilogue

Now, it does not need a lot of straightening up to make Renaud’s song and Emily’s post acceptable. Just change ‘woman’ with ‘femininity’ - and forget you ever believed feminity was womankind’s own, and you get very convincing literature. I am not too much of an extremist after all.

Cross-posted at What We Said

Along the same lines

Men are, women are
The gender meme
Statistical gender equality

Barter vs. gift

We often think that when currency did not exist, most societies relied on barter for economic exchange. This is the main argument in favor of the use of money, which essentially allows to delay both halves of barter by materializing debt. In a barter economy, you can only trade what you have, whereas with currency, you can trade what you will (probably) have later.

When the seller (or the lender) realizes later that you cannot in fact honor the debt, then you get a financial crisis, in which everybody starts to question the value of everybody else’s debt (i.e. money loses its value), therefore nobody wants to sell or lend (i.e. accept someone’s debt as payment), therefore many people stop working (nothing to sell), therefore economy grinds to a halt.

But this is not true. Barter may have been the rule for merchant trade (i.e. rare and foreign stuff like beads, salt, silk, spice, etc.), but for daily economic exchange, barter was the exception and gift was the rule.

Somehow, we have been brainwashed into believing that any exchange should be reciprocal. But we must not look very far to find perfect examples of a gift behaviour which is as old as life itself: one expects no quid pro quo when one raises a child or takes care of a family. Obviously we do not ask a newborn baby to give something or do something special in return for nursing or shelter. We do not ask a newborn baby to sign a debt certificate. It is true that some parents have great expectations (you’ll be a famous lawyer, my son), but most parents only want the best for their kids, regardless of what the kids will do to them in the future.

Savings and credit

Savings (and then credit) is what you have when you have worked more than what it takes to fulfill your short-term needs (or wants). You can either stash this surplus as hard goods, like a squirrel hides nuts, but most people hoard it as money (or investment). Money (or invested capital) is someone else’s debt. When an insane economy forces goods onto impoverished people in exchange for debt, and then realises that the debt cannot be honored, then people’s savings are hit. Your surplus has melted just like hazelnuts can rot. It seems fair enough, but the crisis goes far beyond simply telling the rich that their surplus has vanished (bummer). And the poor are also hit, first when they get squeezed (e.g. evicted) so that creditors can get crumbs back, then when the economy slows down and they lose their jobs.

What if I had just given my surplus away?

Now imagine we have our brains intact and can live in an economy when we never expect anything in return. If I have surplus, I will give it away, for whatever I feel deserves it best. I will probably think twice before giving my surplus to the rich and old, and instead, it will feel natural to give it to the young (and generally poor), especially if someone had done the same for me when I was young and poor myself.

I do not expect anything in return, I do not think of the surplus as mine and to be returned one day; therefore, there cannot be a financial crisis. But society does get the full benefit of this ‘investment’ in any case, and I will get my interest directly through social recognition (there were rich people before money existed), and obviously indirectly via the healthy society I contributed to.

Note that the people who get gifts from me, even repeatedly, should not consider that they owe me anything nor feel uncomfortable in any way as a consequence of my largesse. In today’s world, only children can do that well.

If you think hard enough, there is no more nor less ‘justice’ in this system than the current one. But it is more robust, and certainly more humane. Probably, a gift economy does not work when you do not know the people. Instead of seeing it as an obstacle against my utopia, I see it as a good reason to get to know my neighbours and make tons of friends on the web. Who knows, maybe I will have to give something to you one day.

Epilogue

We have a saying in France, which goes like this: “Les bons comptes font les bons amis”, which means “Good accounts make good friends”. My personal belief is that “Les bons comptes font les bons comptables, c’est tout”: “Good accounts make good accountants, period”.

An announcement

#2 will celebrate its zeroeth birthday sometime around end October.

This is an opportunity to recycle an old post that probably not everybody has read. If you have, you are welcome to read it again.

Introduction

A couple of years ago, I heard a heated argument between my brother-in-law and his cousin. The young mother of three had hinted something about my in-law still being single at age 35+ and having no active plans to found a ‘real family’. The accused righteously retorted that the cultural model of the normal family with kids is slowly drowning our planet in overpopulation, and that his choice was the reasonable one. He was this close to saying something like ‘as far as sustainable development is concerned, having kids amounts to owning a SUV’.

[more]

Warning: I could not resist a little doom and gloom.

When we are burning fossil fuels, we only see the environmental impact. There is supposed to be a Kyoto quota, and when we consume more, we feel some sort of hypothetical environmental guilt regarding global warming. The concept of future generations is very abstract, and very uncertain, and it does not make for easy arbitrations in everyday’s life.

Digression on market, non-renewables and future generations

As a side-note, just note that market price is fixed just with today’s supply-demand balance. Future generations cannot stake claims on today’s market, while today’s sales will deprive them of their share. Imagine a group of ten friends camping together in the wilderness, with so much tea for breakfast. Four early-risers sit down for breakfast at sunrise, and drink as much tea as they wish. Four others wake up later, find that there is only tea left for three. Two of them agree to drink just half a mug each in exchange of cookies from the other two. The two late-risers get nothing. Had we placed all ten together with the global tea and cookie problem, the share would have been quite different.

For non-renewables, day-to-day supply-demand market rules are a total nonsense.

An unfair negotiation

But let’s not consider future generations. Let’s just focus on today’s market. What does the price of fuel reflect? It reflects the market and the law of supply and demand of today. The more people want fuel now, the higher the price will get.

I want fuel. Fuel price rises. I can afford it. I pay my fuel. Why should I feel guilty of burning it? Because a sky-high price is just a way of saying that somebody else forsook their expected share of today’s fuel supply. It would be OK if it were my retired neighbor in the same affluent neighborhood who said: “OK, you need to drive to work, I will stay at home instead of going fishing, so you can have my share of today’s gas”. But it is not like this. The negotiation power on a market is money, not importance. Therefore, the final share will not reflect an arbitration in terms of what’s more important to humans considered equals (e.g. trading comfort uses for vital ones), and the rich will always get more of the share, however futile their intentions.

Economic theory says that the rich will pay more, therefore get poorer, while the poor save money by not buying the stuff, therefore things even-out in the end. This is only true if the rich do not get richer with what they get to do with the stuff. And if the poor do not starve before that. Because in the meantime, rising gas prices are also pushing food prices upwards.

In a world of scarce resources in which the power scales are already all the way to our side, something has to break somewhere if we want more for us. Whenever I drive my car for a week-end excursion, whenever I turn heating on, whenever I eat a juicy steak, I can only do this because someone else forsook their share of today’s driving to work, their share of today’s stove, their share of today’s food.

My macabre illustration

Imagine yourself and a small child fighting over a blanket while camping out in a blizzard. The colder it gets, the harder you have to pull to keep warm and cosy. You have more strength, therefore you get more of the blanket, although you do not need it as much as the kid does. At some point, the child is too weak and lets go of the blanket altogether. This is called price elasticity in an unfair market.

The factory has admittedly greatly increased the creature comfort of mankind. Innumerable articles now in general use were luxuries enjoyed only by the gentry and quite above the aspirations of common folk before the factory system was established. The factory has enabled the masses to live under conditions, and to consume “goods, wares and utensils,” which otherwise they could not have afforded. Rich and poor both have been enabled to purchase more goods and more kinds of goods and to consume and destroy them more freely than was previously possible.

It is, of course, difficult to determine how much of the credit for all this is really due to the factory itself and how much to the fact that scientists and inventors directed their efforts to the development of factory machinery and factory methods to the neglect of improvements in domestic production. We have always to bear in mind that the well-being we credit to the factory is based upon comparison between the low prices and high consumption made possible by the factory after it has had the advantage of all the inventions and the increases in scientific knowledge of the past century and a half, and the high prices and low consumption which prevailed under a relatively primitive system of individual production.

in This Ugly Civilization, Ralph Borsodi, 1930

And he’s been proven right in at least one respect: personal computers completely wiped out mainframe computing. I am ready to wager that there are tons of other examples where we believe a centralized model is more efficient when in fact it is not.

I could have named it the ‘gnôthi seautòn’ meme, or the Socrates meme, let’s just call it the ‘why’ meme. The rule is the following: pick any number of big life choices you have made or are about to make, and recursively ask ‘why’ until it makes no more sense. I believe that we should do this for almost every choice in life, so that we make sure we are aware of our true motivations.

- I want out of the treadmill of wage-slavery and leave the insane train of industrial production and gdp growth to reinvent a homesteader’s peaceful life.

why?

- Because I think the world is going nuts and that the insane race for quantity instead of quality is already banging against the limits of our small planet.

why?

- Because I think that science and technology can now give us comfort with very little work, but the human mind cannot easily adapt to the new paradigm of plenty. But instead of all rethinking how we want our lives to be, we are prevented from enjoying this by a work ethics which equates ‘more’ with ‘better’, and we have invented the economic structures that concentrate plenty into the hands of few, so that plenty is artificially out of reach from the majority, therefore giving more credit to the work ethics of penury. Always running for more leads to exponential growth. Continued exponential growth in a finite world is not possible, so this race will stop sooner or later anyway. However, I think I should step aside and leave the race before it crashes.

why?

- The obvious answer is that I hope I can make a Noah’s ark for my family and me, but this is at best improbable. If it crashes, we’ll all be in the same boat. But if it does not, I still believe that the ‘race’ is making everybody miserable, even the ones who are not denied a share of the plenty. By stepping out, I can pause and think and invent a life of quality instead of quantity. Ever since I started to work part-time, I have seen how much more quality I could put into my life while relinquishing only a tenth and now a fifth of my income. In fact, I think the best life is the one where the amount of one’s monetary work is not set by conventions but by exactly how much monetary income I strictly need, and also how much good it does the world if I work one extra hour.

why?

- We have all been trained as mercenaries, and now hardly anyone questions the validity of one’s job, whatever the job. But as I have said, it is quite certain that the world does not need more stuff, so I have to be really careful about what good it does the world if I work more at what I do. For instance, if I work for the armament industry, the tobacco industry, the chemical industry, the aircraft industry, the automobile industry, the bioengineering industry, there are serious doubts as to whether more of my work actually makes the world a better place, given the circumstances. Now if I can find a job which is useful to the world, how much of it should be paid and how much of it should be volunteer? If it is paid, it participates in the ‘race’ of money flow, GDP growth, wealth concentration, etc. If it is volunteer work, it profits the world, period. I want to live the best life without having to walk over other people’s bodies, so I have to make the volunteer/commercial work ratio as high as I can afford.

why?

- Because I feel my life has already profited too much from walking over other people’s bodies (especially people in the so-called ‘South’), although I am convinced that the new ‘paradigm of plenty’ (even in the absence of cheap oil) makes slavery of others an optional contributor to one’s comfort. I am not sure that I can ever repay the debt I have, especially if we count in terms of inheritance of the colonial times, but I can at least relieve the pressure our economies put on the world at large and on the poor in particular. Therefore, if I am to earn the least money, I should make my own stuff, grow my own food, and try to rely more on the local economy than on the globalized economy. Hence the homestead. In addition, I wish that my experience can serve as an example to other people and show that other life patterns are possible outside the commercial race.

why?

- Because I think that as soon as one is locked as a nameless mercenary in the economic treadmill, having to beg every penny of one’s needs from the globalized economy, freedom discreetly leaves the scenery. How free am I when all my livelihood relies on the economic welfare of my boss’s shareholders? How free am I when less work means less food for my family? Imagine if all the people in the world were homesteaders who could make their own food, clothing and shelter, would they not represent the kind of ideal free citizenship which was the foundation of the US of A? In addition, if people return to the land, they’ll tie new bonds with the Earth, and instead of being abusers of Nature, they’d all be stewards of the Earth. I owe that much to my son.

why?

- Because messing up the Earth unknowingly is one thing, but carrying on when we know we are is another thing altogether. How is my son to understand if I did not try my best to make his world livable. And by being around nurturing the land he lives on, I believe I give his life the best quality.

why ?

- Because I am certain that he cares more for a mouthful of homegrown strawberries, a walk in the forest, a game of ball in the garden, or wrestling on the lawn than he cares for a large bedroom, a brand-new TV set and a comprehensive collection of Disney DVDs. When kids can count on their parents being around (though not always on their back), they develop the kind of security that makes balanced grown-ups. When people are not afraid they might be abandoned, or loved less, they do not see the world as a battlefield against their neighbours, but as an adventureland with their friends.

why?

- Because I am certain that human aspirations, once the means of survival are provided for, are often the unconscious ripples of unsoothed childhood wants. Nobody is ever rich enough to compensate for an archaic fear of poverty; nobody is ever powerful enough to exorcise a history of humiliation; nobody is ever famous enough to erase a childhood of apparent lovelessness. When one seeks power, wealth, or fame, the goal is always just over the horizon. When one seeks love, happiness, health, one can take them by the hand from birth to death, and walk the walk of the good life. I picture the good life as a hike in the wild, with each step requiring a slight effort but rewarded with new sights, sounds and smells, each step bringing me a little further along whatever path I choose. A walk which is so beautiful in itself that I would have no regrets if I had to stop anywhere.

why?

- Because we have but one life, and we never know when it will end. I am not going to sacrifice now for tomorrow because there could be no tomorrow. But I will not sacrifice tomorrow for now either, because there might be a hell of a lot tomorrows ahead.

why ?

- Because I might live long for one thing, and also because although I fully embrace a purely materialistic viewpoint, I cannot completely discard the possibility that something in people is immortal, whatever it is

why?

- Because I find believing gives a special light to the world.

why?

- Because it sort of answers the final why.

why?

- Why not?

Through the very excellent soil and health library website, I have discovered a fascinating author, tackling the contradictions of our industrial model 80 years ago, and forty years before Ivan Illich.

This author is Ralph Borsodi, and his social and economic insight is very sharp ; extremely sharp when you think that he had come to his conclusions in the 1920s.

I will be telling more about the author as I carry on reading his works, and there will be several quotes finding their way into my blog, for there are views I could not express better.

[…] the idea that mankind’s comfort is dependent upon an unending increase in production is a fallacy.

It is more nearly true to say that happiness is dependent not on producing as much as possible but on producing as little as possible. Comfort and understanding are dependent upon producing only so much as is compatible with the enjoyment of the superior life. Producing more than this involves a waste of mankind’s most precious possessions. It involves a waste of the only two things which man should really conserve–the two things which he should use with real intelligence and only for what really conduces to his comfort. When he destroys these two things, he has destroyed what is for all practical purposes irreplaceable. These two things are the natural resources of the earth and the time which he has to spend in the enjoyment of them.

in This Ugly Civilization, Ralph Borsodi, 1930