Hmmm. Thanks for the responses. Here are some related thoughts, left somewhat loose, for your consideration:
Let us not regress to the past, but push on, further, to evolve to the fullest potential which we have as a species, not retreating to old hills of conquest, or hiding behind the skirts of the old ones.
Is returning to an ancient way of being necessarily a regression? To use the word "regression" is to make a statement about returning to some lesser state of development.
I've always felt a strong pull towards the wild, the untamed. I've always wanted to run away from civilization as it has been practiced by the dominant culture. It has always seemed to me, a child of the late 20th century, that the pushing ever forward into tomorrow, this ever-repeating refrain of material and even social progress, is patently absurd. It seems to me that everyone is always talking about progress, evolution, or where we will be in twenty years, without ever articulating a clear goal: what is it that we are aiming at? What is this future-oriented civilization striving for?
This same absurd trajectory of the future is traced on the micro-level of our society in the individual quest for careers and accumulation of goods, ultimately climaxing in an orgy of retirement.
No thanks.
In the professional worlds of Career Land, if you are just out there working without articulating a five-year plan, you appear aimless; yet there seems to be no five- or ten- or twenty-year plan left for civilization as we know it. There is no destination and no direction. But this seems to be accepted as foundational; it's almost as if the whole of society believes that the Grand Project of Civilization is going somewhere, but no one can tell you where.
When you begin to look backwards at what propelled us into this mess, it's really quite disgusting, and has everything to do with racism, greed, imperialism, and religion, but it's not considered polite to bring that up.
Anyway.
I want to live a rich life, not stuffed with material wealth, but rich with scents, sounds, experiences, relationships, and other things of intrinsic value to human beings. It seems like this sort of paradigm is what Russell Means is talking about in his 45-minute extemporaneous monologue that he has shared with us.
dauer said:
I'm not certain either a patriarchal or matriarchal system are the answer.
I mean, I think for a lot of hetero- men on the board, there is probably the experience in relationship that women aren't so much about "a celebration of all the sexes and their differences". Rather, I argue, they subtly try to impose their will upon us: trying to change the way we dress, break us of our bad habits, decorate our living spaces and so on.
I don't think matriarchy is much more than an equivalent answer to patriarchy.
Perhaps the words "matriarchy" and "patriarchy" are too loaded with cultural baggage and accumulated meanings from our individual personal and collective political experiences. Perhaps we do need to find a more holistic word for this idea of living "Mitakuye Oyasin", in harmony with and respect for each other and all of the manifestations of life and divinity immanent in the natural world.
Yet the way that Means is using the terminology, it's clear that he is
not offering "matriarchy" as an equivalent system of dominance to "patriarchy". No, what he is offering and hoping that we will consider is the nullification of dominance in our relationships with each other and with other beings. He is suggesting respectful co-habitation; community in the truest sense of living together, working together, playing together, and making decisions together. Please note that by using the term "matriarchy" he is not suggesting that women hand down decisions from on high or from bureaus and governments offices. What he is suggesting is that women, givers and generators and supporters of life, tend to naturally work to preserve life.
Perhaps this is no longer accurate in our post-modern society, though. Perhaps what he is trying to say would be better stated as feminine ways of relating, such as nurturing, bonding, supporting--"soft" ways of being rather than the "hard" linear and hierarchical ways associated with masculine energy.
But masculine energy is important. This "paradigm shift" would not nullify masculinity or emasculate men, but it would bring them back into the community, instead of sending them out into the work world to dominate the social sphere and the land, reap their financial benefits, and then drag their dollars, pounds, pesos, or euros back to the nest where mama waits with the children. This is of course an oversimplification, and many women also go out into the work world--which is like this external field of battle, in a way--where they pull in their share of riches to bring back into the isolated nest.
Part of that is just fine. It's natural to work and to benefit from the labor that we do. But the isolation is the part that doesn't sit right with me, and I think this is also something that RM focuses on in the clip: there is a part where he talks about helping his neighbor, a Mormon, get his firewood into a dry place during a rainstorm. From his perspective, this is just part of life, this is just what human beings do; but for his neighbor, it was an unusual act: "a good turn" that required payback. It was almost a commercial transaction. And that is where the problem lies: everything has been compartmentalized into economics. Natural social events have been broken down into economic transactions. You want to eat, you go to a restaurant or to the grocery store. The most natural thing to do, to go out hunting or fishing, requires a permit, and requires you to conform to the seasonal constraints handed down from above; or farming requires ownership of land, or the rental of a garden plot. You cannot go pick apples or strawberries or whatever from the land without risking being busted for trespassing. When you really think about this stuff, does it not begin to seem absurd? The most natural things...
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