Tinsmithery
the art of social tinkering
Can you imagine a world without any borders and state monarchs or governments? Would it be a world which quickly descends into chaotic violence and disorder, or would it be one in which we learn to cooperate and live peacefully? In this state, would you trust or distrust human nature?
A state of being without governance is known in philosophical circles as the state of nature.
People, in a state of nature, according to a very dead philosopher, Tommy Hobbes, are ‘selfish, self-seeking, cunning, egoistic, brutal and aggressive’ and although enjoying a perfect state of liberty, you would always have to watch your back. Rather than get ourselves a little plot of land to feed ourselves and share any surplus with our neighbours, we’d instead arm ourselves with pitchforks and shovels, waiting to battle with the next marauder who wants to steal our things or to take over our little domain. Gaining a reputation for being a bit of your brute is one way to get your neighbours to leave you alone. Being in a state of nature is to be in a state of war.
It would be pretty stressful and dangerous having to look over our shoulder all the time. So, to avoid this, he said while supping on a cup of mead, we happily gave up this natural state of liberty to be part of a society in which we found protection. From ourselves, it would seem. In exchange for our natural freedom and rights we settled for rule by a divinely ordained sovereign leader instead. At least we don’t have to look over our shoulder anymore.
John Locke, who is also very dead, was more or less in agreement with Tommy on this ‘ill-condition’ of being in a state of nature, but was picky about the details. Whereas Tom believed we would be in competition for scarce resources, Johnny Boy believed there was ample to go round, so there would be no need to be in a state of war all the time. In fact, in this state we might even respect each other’s rights. But there’s always one, isn’t there? For the individual transgressor of the Natural Laws he believed to exist (much like the Biblical commandments), people who threaten our rights, like our right to property, life and liberty, he conveniently reasoned it is even our natural right to gang up on someone who isn’t playing fair and give them just punishment.
Trouble is, we started exchanging goods for money and then things went horribly wrong. With money, instead of producing only what we need to live, we discovered that by acquiring a bit more land we could produce more than we need and instead of altruistically giving away the surplus, we could sell it for a tidy profit and fix that roof that’s about to cave in. Suddenly resources were no longer abundant, but increasingly scarce. We’re back to where we started, in a state of war.
It was obvious that divinely ordained monarchs had suddenly fallen out of favour and were struggling to keep the peace, so who would? A government, perhaps?
A century later, Jean Jaques Rousseau, a man with attitude from Geneva, told them them they were wrong. Well, not completely wrong. Their reasoning was probably sound, but the premise, what it is to be in a state of nature was most definitely wrong. Tommy and Johnny wrote from a particular cultural bias. One in which we’d been socialised into competitive self-interest and greed, but that is not our nature. If you send us contemporary folk back into a state of nature, then you’d have a scene on your hands reminiscent of Lord of the Flies, but that doesn’t mean that was the original state of nature.
Of course, JJ recognised we are concerned with self-preservation, but what distinguishes humans from other animals is that we have the tempering control of compassion.
It is this compassion that hurries us without reflection to the relief of those who are in distress: it is this which in a state of nature supplies the place of laws, morals and virtues, with the advantage that none are tempted to disobey its gentle voice …1
For JJ, being in an original state of nature would be preferable to civilised society. At least until the population gets out of control and resources are more scarce. In this scenario, rather than war with our neighbours, we would innovate with tool-creation, and cooperate - making life less lonely and easing the hard work of food and shelter easier. It is at this point in our social evolution, we developed ‘corrupted needs’. These are a desire for things which we could perfectly well live without before we had them, but now feel a huge disadvantage if they are taken away. (I just told my partner when he was showing me the latest gadget he wanted to buy that he had corrupted needs.)
Moving from a state of nature to more civilised society brought about envy, jealousy, greed, and all the crimes against each other that eroded a formerly peaceful state of nature.
And here we are, back in a state of war, hoping there’s someone out there to give us a little peace and quiet.
The Social Contract
Which ever way they looked at it, being in a state of nature eventually turns sour, so that’s why we consent (whether explicitly or implicitly) to a social contract, in which we exchange natural liberty and some rights for civil society.
A civil society ruled by whom? On this our philosophers disagree. For Tommy, it was an autocratic, divinely ordained ruler; for Johnny, a government which can be held to account, and for JJ we should be ruled by laws, not rulers. Those laws should apply equally and be an expression of the general will of the people. The general will is best understood as what is in the best interest of all citizens equally and this will would manifest with a bit of universal education. He was a good guy at heart, our JJ, but if you hated Civics at school, then you can blame him.
While all this writing was going on, probably by a warm fire with satisfied corrupted needs, some posh toffs were a bit worried about the direction the general will of the people was taking.
For those who still hadn’t managed to make the mental leap (many hadn’t) from a regular Jo Smith as animal to a regular Jo Smith as rational, the idea was horrifying. Probably because the general will seemed to be quite revolutionary and could challenge the somewhat privileged position of a rich minority. With the French Revolution shortly following the American, the rich minority in Europe got scared and with the help of Alexis de Tocqueville (who was very good with words), declared the general will of the people to be a tyranny of the majority. Just to keep the message going, Alex found a friend in John Stuart Mill who, to be sure there was no such tyranny, suggested the will of the people might just work if we give the well-educated extra votes. I think he was a fan of Plato. Of course the well-educated just happened to be the posh toffs.
The idea didn’t quite gain any ground, at least not officially, but unofficially, the well-educated, wealthy sods were the only ones who ever managed to wheedle their way into anything looking like government office.
By now we’d gone through an Industrial Revolution because some very clever people created some rather ingenious inventions - creating social and working conditions that weren’t very fair to say the least. Not that they really ever were (except possibly in a state of nature).
They were so bad it was impossible not to notice, but it still took some young influencer, he called himself Karl, to point it out in some manifesto he wrote with his sidekick Fred, who wasn’t quite as popular. That was probably because when they were working out who went first in the credits, engelism wasn’t as catchy as marxism. Try saying, ‘I’m an Engelist’ to your best buddies and see how many of them you still have. It sounds more like you’ve found religion than become a respectable member of a labour union who has suddenly woken up to class consciousness.
Anyway, they spent a lot of their youth engaging in tinsmithery, the art of social tinkering. Despite their book being on the bestseller list and existing leaders being terrified of what it had to say about how the general will of the people proletariate would inevitably replace them entirely, the revolution didn’t materialise until after Karl had kicked the bucket, and even that wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for Vlad and his bolshy friends in Russia. Like a ping-pong ball it thereafter bounced into Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, and pockets of Africa and Asia. Now the posh toffs and a new brand of competitors, the nouveau riche, were really worried.
The initial authoritarian control predicted by influencer Karl should have given way to a proletariate-led democracy. But this didn’t come about, giving weight to the famous Lord Acton’s words which had something to do with power’s corrupting influence.
And even when it sort of did in the first communist state, the face of its democracy looks something like this:
Meanwhile, in the west, communism, as it came to be called, became a dirty word you wouldn’t say in front of your mother. Apart from obvious coercive state efforts to make your life hell if you were a member of the Communist Party (I know this because I watched Oppenheimer last week), dead German Marxists, and one Italian political prisoner while scratching days into the wall, scrabbled to find ways to explain the failure of class consciousness and lack of subsequent revolution. The one I like best is: the proletariate, while eating a bigger slice of the pie, forgot the real issue was ownership of the bakery.
So, we remain in an apparent social contract with our respective rulers and seem to think there are only two ways of doing things and each starts with ‘c’. With the triumph of one over the other, why would we need anymore tinsmithery? Aren’t we doing very nicely with all our corrupted needs?
Except we aren’t. The big winning C has brought us to a particular point of crisis, one which could make us extinct. Come to think of it, that would be a particular state of nature the planet might be satisfied with.
It’s time for a new manifesto, a new story, a new way of socially organising.
I’m with Julie and Duane quoted in the introduction above. I’ve never bought into a pessimistic view of human nature. We’ve evolved frontal lobes which curb limbic system impulses. If you’ve ever seen a baby try to imitate your expression, you are witnessing the precursor to empathy. We have mirror neurons which activate on observing the behaviour of others, enabling us to imitate their behaviour, but perhaps also to feel what they are feeling. In a state of nature, a state in which people are often placed after immediate catastrophic events, we see the best side of it.
If the social contract was to ensure our own self-preservation, to me it would seem it has miserably failed. The worst atrocities ever seen have been instigated by rulers of state. I also refuse to acknowledge that I have tacitly consented to rule by them and be bound by the increasingly arbitrary and inequitable rules to which we are expected to abide.
But a group of people together who see a burning issue of social injustice in their neighbourhoods manage to create a mini utopia, which suggests to me Jean Jacques had something right when he said being in a state of nature was preferable to civilisation.
And it just so happens that there are a lot of people thinking about this all over the world, and they’re not posh toffs, nor the intellectual elite, nor the top 0.1% of the top 1%, but people who seem to know how to get along and how to get things done. They see a problem and treat it as a solution.
The thesis of this newsletter is to propose a political philosophy for the future. It is one arising out of local tinsmithery and looks a lot like this (10 mins):
If you remember right back to my first two posts which focused on the Incredible Edible movement, one of the founders, Pam Warhurst, claimed that planting vegetables in vacant spaces around their town was the start of a revolution. She wasn’t the first to make this claim of the simple act of planting a spud or a turnip. When I first camped for two weeks in the Yorkshire Moors learning about permaculture, the course leader first told us that permaculture is a ‘revolution disguised as gardening’. I’ve since learned this claim is controversial in permaculture circles, but I still like to think of it in these terms, at least for the time being. We also met this idea with the homesteading family in Pasadena, the woman who planted trees, the Korean women’s kitchen garden movement, and the Greening the Desert project. They all saw what they were doing as a political act. They are each, in their own way, engaging in artful tinsmithery.
After reading Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael and The Story of B, in which he expounds the history and thinking that led to the crisis we are in, he published a book addressing solutions. I remember being a bit disappointed at the time when reading it, but one thing that stood out for me, which made me laugh at the time, was that the most powerful thing to do was to simply ignore governments.
That idea took seed, a bit like an idea in the dreamworld of Inception. In the examples given, no-one looked for permission to do what they were doing, they simply acted in a way that they felt was in the interest of their community and the planet. In doing so, they empowered powerless communities and realised the larger political implications of their action.
In Paco Ayala’s case, his political philosophy is built into the very design of the city garden project, using a seven-petalled flower to frame the heart of the huerto project.
The first petal is Social Organisation - a space for sitting down, thinking and discussing solutions to sources of conflict in the neighbourhood. The group isn’t isolated. By receiving other social organisations they are able to talk constructively about social, political and economic issues affecting the people of Mexico City and beyond.
The second petal is devoted to the integration of people with their environment, re-establishing their connection with the earth and promoting awareness of the rights of plants and animals. This segment also addresses local food sovereignty.
Essential Health is a segment devoted to preventative medicine, drawing from older, traditional herbal knowledge.
The fourth petal addresses Sustainable Housing. The huerto itself has a number of buildings, e.g. café, toilets, meeting spaces, which are integrated into the system, both in terms of waste and in terms of construction. All buildings have been created with recycled and natural materials.
The Skilful Technologies petal addresses ways to capture alternative energies, water and other ways to reduce the carbon and water footprint in favour of nature.
Biosocial Economy is the concern of the sixth petal in which the huerto tries to find ways to promote local trade, alternative currencies, cooperatives, barter and exchange with the aim of reducing mass consumption.
Resilient Culture of the final petal celebrates artistic and athletic expression.
As local social issues and social justice are at heart of the vision, Paco views the huerto as a space for developing a political philosophy for the future.
It is a very, very peculiar space that today has become a bio-social lab of innovation. We are an Occupy community. Part of this activism has to do with questioning land ownership. Emiliano Zapata said that the land belongs to those who work it; we say and sustain, that public and private spaces belong to those who occupy them for community purposes. One of the greatest acts of rebellion we can do is to become self-sustainable, to grow our own food, to start embracing matters such as self-management and self-reliance, and to teach people that we have to let go of this centralised vision where others, whether public or private, resolve our existence for us. We are able to do it.
Up Next
It is to this emerging political philosophy that will be the theme of the next series, but before I begin, I will close this series on the sacredness of trees with your comments and wisdom, for which I thank you as without them, next week’s post wouldn’t be possible.
Embers
I am still astonished by the convergence of views and content, and the synchronicities that appear here in Substack. I simply had to quote
and on their view of human nature which came out in the midst of my composing this letter. Here is the original post, so you can read it in context:
I would also like to wish
the very best of luck with the new approach she is taking with her newsletter. I absolutely loved the journey she brought us on this week to listen to the silence between the words. As it was my early morning read before getting out of bed, I decided to employ it for the day with respect to conversations with my partner. (I found corrupted needs lingering there.)
On the subject of early morning reads (the outcome of colder mornings), I’m making a habit of reading one post before making that trip to the kettle. If you’re also feeling the bite of that frosty morning feeling,
reminds us to admire its beauty:
and finally, I love to follow the creative process as much as see the outcome. In a daring act of courage,
gave her first public viewing of her workbook:
Rousseau, J. J. cited in Wolff, J. (1996) An Introduction to Political Philosophy. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
I’m sorry, I am in a quirky sort of mood and need to ask the question - what is the difference between a dead person and a very dead person? As an ex-nurse I find the idea intriguing. A partially dead person is perhaps only dead on Monday & Tuesday, whereas a very dead person stays mouldering in their grave?
Perhaps we should go back to the old ways, and attach a string to the big toe of a ‘dead’ person, with a bell on the end. Then, if the person was not very dead, they would ring the bell when they had a not-dead-day.
I appreciate ‘very dead’ means they died a long time ago, the sentence just tickled my funny bone. I do not intend to be disrespectful to your writing - which is always erudite and very interesting.
You've found another inspiring project. Ignoring governments is a good idea for getting small grassroots actions off the ground. When we see how bad actors abuse governments, it's hard to imagine small communities of practical people putting up with the same nonsense. Thank you for the shout-out! I hope you enjoyed the extra attention to silences and in-betweens. :-) I'm here in just such a moment right now.