Sitting in the sun on a windy autumn day, the sun warming and the wind chilling. On the best days, when the textures of the season become leather and the colors creep into the real world from behind your eyelids, the warmth and the chill are in balance. It’s a comforting thing, balance. I don’t know that we’ll ever understand completely, but I have the sense that many people, living in villages and societies in ancient times, appreciated balance more than we do today. In many of those cultures a family or a clan or a guild might have charge of an area of the earth. It wasn’t ownership the way we think of it today.
These days if you own something, it’s a right to keep anyone else away. It’s your land, no trespassing allowed. The law we’ve decided to live by will back you up. But there’s no balance to it. You can do anything you please with the land; neglect it, spoil it, wreck it so it’s of no use to anyone else — and maybe harms them in some ways. Pollution can be like that, but if it’s your land, no trespassing allowed, you can do anything you please. There’s no corresponding responsibility. You might have to chip in some tax money, of course, and in some very limited circumstances there might be a few rules you’re supposed to follow. But you don’t have to be the land’s steward. You don’t have to sustain it or preserve it.
There was an older, more balanced notion of “ownership,” although I don’t think that’s what they called it. If you had the right to gather or hunt or fish or just contemplate in an area, it came with a responsibility to nurture that area. Keep the land healthy. Keep the waters flowing. Keep life in balance. Because it didn’t simply belong to you; you also belonged to it. You were part of the picture and part of the system. That you had the right to walk the land or swim the lake or climb the trees wasn’t free, and you weren’t going to last forever. Someday the land and water and life were going to be someone else’s, and someone else’s responsibility.
The laws that we’ve decided to live by left that kind of responsibility behind many centuries ago. Somewhere along the line “ownership” changed from a balance of responsibility to a one-sided expression of greed. Of control. In the process, which must have been slow at first, the idea that a person could do whatever they wanted and choose not to care about things outside themselves, grew like a parasite. I imagine it as a vast tendency enveloping peoples. It’s become part of us now; you even hear it amongst children. “You can’t make me.”
We seem to have collectively forgotten that it was never about “making you” at all. It was the way to be in the world. Nobody had to “make” you because you had a certain understanding and a certain ability to see what could come to pass in the event of your neglect. Or your greed. I imagine that everyone learned those things as they matured, maybe by watching the elders around them and listening to the lessons they were taught.
And then, in time, it became possible to grow rich without shame. I think the tiny nucleus of that idea may still be with us, even though the rich have learned new lessons in ignoring these echoes of the old ways. But even as we, as a people and nearly as a species, have turned away from stewardship and responsibility and balance, religions like Christianity have flourished. The thing about Christianity that’s always struck me is the emphasis on shame. Even the shame, though, is more to do with a focus on oneself as a unit, not as an interconnected part of a whole. Not as the responsible steward of one’s part of the world. It’s more abstract than that.
The abstraction, where did that come from? I’ve actually heard it said that it doesn’t much matter what happens to the world because “it’s an illusion.” As if a shared illusion is so different from a shared reality. As if the “shared” part of that doesn’t matter, because the important part is you, and your greed. We’re dedicated to illusions these days, following ghosts and notions and ideas that can’t be nurtured and can’t be tended to because they’re not really there. Just more reminders that you don’t have the responsibilities that long ago, were what people shared. What we share these days is the abstractions, so much so that war is declared on some of them. Those wars take up time and energy and attention and wealth, but can never be won and never end, even though the abstractions against which they are waged never fight back. They are not here, not in the same way we are.
There are still people who understand stewardship and see this time as no more than a moment among too many to know, but still connected to all the other moments. That “we” means more than just the few in your own family or clan or guild or company. That kind of “we” isn’t set in opposition to any “them.” There are no enemies at the gates…or if there are, they are also “we.” We have, as Pogo mentioned not so long ago, met them, and they is us.
