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WHY BOTHER? GETTING A LIFE IN A LOCKED-DOWN LAND

POSSIBILITIES

Chapter Five: WAYS OF BEING

We'll return to our present circumstances in a moment. But first, let's go to a time and place so distant that no one knows when or where it was, a time and place whose importance is as infinite as its obscurity.

The moment we are seeking is the one during which a single individual, or a small group of individuals, did something so unusual that it helped free their ilk forever from the shackles of the environment and genetics -- grabbing destiny from the tree of nature and making it human.

According to conventional theory it may have happened as long as 400,000 years ago in a place still -- and probably forever -- uncertain. This extraordinary coup against the unknown was the simple taming of fire, the stealing of light and heat from a cryptic, tyrannical universe, transforming it into a matter of personal choice. No subsequent human event would be more important yet the names and descriptions of the suspects are still unknown.

Since we have been told so little, however, we are free to imagine. It might even help in what follows if we do. Give him, her, or them a name, a height and weight, a face, a way of moving, a home, a time of day. A high bluff? A small cave? Under a lonely tree in the savanna?

And then the act itself. A flame accidentally born from a struck rock's spark, the memory of how this accident happened never to be forgotten? Or the gift of lightning preserved forever? Then the next steps: The cooking. The carrying of the flame to camps which had never seen such a thing. The gathering of others around the incredible creation and the sharing of the mystery.

On the first day of my freshman anthropology class, the professor drew an invisible evolutionary time line on the wall of the lecture hall. As we twisted in our seats the earth's eras, periods, and epochs of musical name and mystical significance boldly circumscribed the room. Finally we came back to where the professor stood and when there was nearly no place further to go, he announced that this was the beginnings of us. We were only inches from the fire maker.

I became an anthropology major and my relationship with the fire maker, and with the creator of the stone ax, the inventor of the spear thrower, and the first potter, would never cease to be both humbling and glorious. Humbling because our true evolutionary insignificance daily mocks our pretensions. Yet also glorious because without the endless random reiteration of individual creation, choice, and imagination, we might be shivering in the dark instead of reading a book with our feet up and wondering whether there's another beer in the fridge. We are nothing and everything, inexplicably and inseparably bundled together.

Though not inclined to scrounge for shards or delineate kinship systems for a living, I nonetheless enjoyed the anthropologists and their teachings. I even began to play anthropologist among the anthropologists, noticing, among other things, that they tended to be somewhat out of sync with their own culture. These teachers did not talk or act like other scholars. I suspected that many shared with me the fantasy that in our studies we might uncover a society whose idiosyncrasies matched our own. Even the musty old museum in which they carried out their business sat, like an Amazonian tribe, distinctly away from the main campus.

Elsewhere at the university, students were being taught about great men and great revolutions and great thoughts, receiving in Talmudic fashion the master truths of the American establishment -- those approved categories into which all of life's experiences could be safely stuffed along with the proper meanings and words with which they could be explained.

Once inside the anthropology museum, however, this greatness became but a tiny part of the total greatness of the human world; the master truths of America began to shrivel and not seem that great after all.

I didn't know it then, but I had joined not so much a discipline as a rebellion. Under the guise of studying the often rigid rules, customs, and traditions of different human communities, anthropology was actually opening a benign Pandora's box of choice, laying before the world its own wondrous variety, opportunity, and concomitant pain and joy.

It was not a popular rebellion. Only one or two of my courses had more than 20 students. Years later, academics and media would discover something they called multiculturalism or diversity. They would speak of it in ponderous tones and as their discovery, and they would describe it as a problem and demand that we do something about it. Too few would notice that what we were talking about as a problem was really a gift and an opportunity and a potential source of our own happiness and freedom.

***

For nearly all of human history, the dilemmas that cause people to write books like this, visit psychiatrists, or take philosophy courses in college, were largely moot. In the West, the idea that humans could have significant control over the definition of their own morality gained popularity only a few centuries ago, spurred by the spread of the Enlightenment and other subversive ideas. With it, humans were no longer depraved, unworthy applicants for post-mortal celestial immigration. "With it, they could have virtue, knowledge, power, and possibility, all within their present existence. And with it came choices and the responsibility to make them.

Similarly, those things some call "issues," such as personal freedom, individual character, and dreams of success or power have not always been problems for most. Throughout most human time, the individual has either been assigned a role or allowed to choose from a narrow menu of choices.

Yet even within such constraints, the range of culturally defined behavior has been remarkable. Consider, for example, the Ojibwa of Canada, described by Brian Morris in Anthropology of the Self. These Indians, a group of nomadic hunters and fishers,

do not make any categorical or sharply defined differentiation between myth and reality, or between dreaming and the waking state; neither can any hard or fast line be drawn between humans and animals.... A bear is an animal which unlike humans hibernates during the winter, but in specific circumstances it may be interpreted as a human sorcerer.... The four winds are thought of not only as animate by the Ojibwa, but are categorized as persons.

Not only may a culture define the four winds as persons under certain circumstances, it may also define a slave or someone from another tribe as not a person at all. Nonetheless the slave or the outsider really exist so at some level are treated as a person anyway. Hence people in such societies may trade goods with the stranger or attempt to convert the slave to Christianity even though they are not considered human. Or the society may try to quantify such anomalies as Americans did when they declared a black legally equal to three-fifths of a white person. Or it may create a hierarchy as Aristotle did when he confidently declared that "the deliberative faculty in the soul is not present at all in a slave: in a female is present but ineffective, in a child present but undeveloped." Or it may declare that "all men are created equal" but really mean only white male property owners. Or it may fight a revolution for liberty but leave women as chattel. Or the culture can painfully change such values over two centuries and still have to go repeatedly to court to fight over what was really meant by the change.

Cultural vainglory doesn't help us wade through this. For example, in this book there are a number of quotes from the past that use the word man or men where today we would use a word such as people. In some cases this is merely an archaic convention, in others it reflects the substantial cultural blinders of the writers and their times. We tend to be smug and critical about such matters but consider this: the median age of Americans in 1830 was 16. Teenagers ran businesses, farmed, and captained ships instead of being regarded as problem dependents or potential criminals and mass killers. Similarly, many cultures have treated older people with far greater respect and honor than does our supposedly enlightened country. Just as racial segregation seemed normal to Southern whites before the civil rights movement, so today our prejudices against the young and the old are sufficiently ingrained that we don't even talk much about them.

In such ways do we suffer from a little noted form of prejudice one might call aerobicism, which is to say the assumption that the living are morally superior to the dead. As the historian Barbara Tuchman has noted, "To understand the choices open to people of another time, one must limit oneself to what they knew; see the past in its own clothes, as it were, not in ours."

***

Here is how anthropologist Morris describes his own Western culture:

It is individualistic, and has a relatively inflated concern with the self which in extremes gives rise to anxiety, to a sense that there is a loss of meaning in contemporary life, to a state of narcissism, and to an emphasis in popular psychology on 'self actualization.'

Bad as this sounds, though, you will probably get along better in New York or Chicago with a loss of meaning, state of narcissism, or overflowing self-actualization than if you try to escape your angst by acting like the Ojibwa. In the Big Apple, to lack a sharply defined differentiation between myth and reality, between dreaming and the waking state, or between humans and animals, risks not only ridicule but actual legal sanctions. Our culture claims to celebrate the power of the individual, but the restraints on that individualism are substantial and we, like peoples everywhere, go about our daily business regarding them as largely normal.

If you try to break this pattern -- as the deconstructionists of postmodernism have -- you may find yourself in the awkward position of understanding just how silly society's existing rules are yet being unable to replace them with anything better because your own rules declare this to be impossible. The result of shattering truths, meta-narratives, and communal myths can be a form of anarchy in which only power and propaganda rule, and the 800-pound relativist gets to do just what it wants.

In fact, while the range of choices, values, and constraints among cultures is stunning in its variety, it is impossible to find a functioning society in which choices have not been made. Similarly, though individuals may reject society and even design their own micro-cultures, they are no less dependent on their decisions, whether conscious or not. To not make them is to drift aimlessly and lifelessly, pushed this way or that by others quite anxious and ready to make choices for you.

Unfortunately, we receive little instruction in how to deal with this. Anthropologists, other academics, and journalists prefer to aggregate individual variety into something both grander and simpler, politely known as a culture, paradigm, ideology, or trend, or (if you don't care for the resulting generalizations) a stereotype. Thus we have little sense of what it is like to be a punk Buddhist, a Hindu convert to Unitarianism or a follower of both Confucianism and the Dallas Cowboys. The mere number of cultural traits and values available for adoption in a world in which the grandchildren of Margaret Mead's anthropological subjects watch MTV has engorged us with possibilities.

The embedded individual

For most of human existence, though, the individual was thoroughly embedded in one culture, sometimes so deeply that what we think of as individualism seems to disappear. For example, in India, writes Agehananda Bharati,

When any of the Hindu traditions speak about what might be like the individual, like an empirical self, it is not to analyze it but to denigrate it ... The self as the basis of such important human achievements as scholarship, artistic skill, technological invention, etc., is totally ignored in the Indian philosophical texts.

For the traditional Hindu, family and caste leave little room for individualism and personal autonomy. Does this mean there is no Indian dissent? Gandhi and his followers certainly proved otherwise, as does the Indian cab driver grilling you about job opportunities in your profession or the Indian doctor feeling your pulse in the Kansan hospital. Every immigrant is another saga of cultural insurrection, a tribute to the enduring human capacity for individual choice. Even for Indians in their own country, writes Morris, "achieving a degree of personal autonomy is an important theme of adult life and this is often associated with rebellions against the caste hierarchies."

Such a highly sociocentric approach to life is far from unique, but can occur in many ways. Among the Gahuku-Gama of New Guinea, for example, there is no clear distinction between individuals and their cultural status. Kenneth Read observed that for the Gahuku-Gama, people are "not conceived to be equals in a moral sense; their value does not reside in themselves as individuals or persons; it is dependent on the position they occupy within a system of interpersonal and inter-group relationships."

Which, in turn, is not that far from a culture described by C. Wright Mills:

If we took the one hundred most powerful men in America, the one hundred wealthiest, and the one hundred most celebrated away from the institutional positions they now occupy, away from their resources of men and women and money, away from the media of mass communication ... then they would be powerless and poor and uncelebrated. For power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power, requires access to major institutions, for the institutional positions men occupy determine in large part their chances to have and to hold these valued experiences.

On the other hand, if you were a Balinese Hindu, you would find yourself in a banjar, a community association around which much of your life would revolve.

Bali's topography, with its rugged slopes and gorges, has encouraged the self-sufficiency of communities, producing, among other things, the subak, a cooperative that plans rice irrigation projects, builds and repairs aqueducts and dikes. As with the banjar, membership and fees in the subak are mandatory. Fail to show for a meeting of either one and you will be assessed a fine.

This is not some regulatory scheme imposed by the state, but part of a cultural tradition that goes back at least 11 centuries. Banjar members can be called to do manual labor for the village, attend and help to organize weddings and funerals, work in a restaurant as a part of a festival, help maintain the temple, or play in the village orchestra. Said one banjar member quoted by Fred B. Eisenman Jr. in Bali: Sekala and Niskala:

In a small town, one's absence is quickly noticed. And next time you require help from others, it may not be forthcoming. There are usually two or three times as many people in a work group as are required for the work to be done. One is not really needed. No matter. One must be seen participating. Good reputations are important when people are shoulder to shoulder.

An American present at a wedding noted a group of attendees not wearing traditional Balinese dress. They were, it was explained, from the local bank, which had closed for the day to fulfill its workers' responsibilities to the banjar. In fact, some tourist hotels hire Javanese rather than Balinese workers because the former's community duties are not so time-consuming.

***

In African culture, the individual may be subordinated to outside forces in complex relationships where, reports one scholar, "subject and object are no longer distinguishable." In other words, the force may not only be with you, but in you. One anthropologist describes the Bantu as never being isolated individuals but always part of a chain of vital forces.

Some of this can get pretty heavy, even annoying. Morris notes that if you were one of the Tallensi of Northern Ghana your primary obligation would be to your ancestors who, if unhappy with your conduct, might spread trouble in your path or even kill you. On the other hand, the Ashanti of Ghana, while sociocentric and sharing their souls with spirits, have a more benign, almost Quaker-like, approach. They possess okra, described by one anthropologist as "the small bit of the creator who lives in every body" -- much as the Friends believe that there is something of God in every person.

Of such African cultures. John Mbiti has written:

Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual. The individual can only say: "I am, because we are, and since we are, therefore I am."

Such a view is not unknown in Western thought, witness Hillel's oft-quoted questions:

If I am not for myself, who is for me?
But if I am only for myself, what am I?

Another anthropologist has described the African approach as more as a matter of dual responsibility to oneself and to the group. Such a dualism can be manifested in a number of ways including a modesty and lack of self-assertion that Americans might find odd. Robert Le Vine writes that among the Gussi of Western Kenya, for example, it is "conventional for individuals to conceal from others any information about one's advantages, good fortune or positive events that would portray the self in favorable terms.... Our [i.e., American middle class] 'healthy self-esteem' is conceit and selfishness by their standards."

Similarly, Matt Ridley describes a highland people in central New Guinea who have taken up football but, "finding it a little too much for the blood pressure to lose a game, they have adjusted the rules. The game simply continues until each side has scored a certain number of goals. A good time is had by all, but there is no loser and every goal scorer can count themselves a winner."

And here is Ruth Benedict writing of the Zuni of the Southwest:

The ideal man in Zuni is a person of dignity and affability who has never tried to lead, and who has never called forth comment from his neighbors. Any conflict, even though all right is on his side, is held against him. Even in contests of skill like their foot races, if a man wins habitually he is debarred from running. They are interested in a game that a number can play with even chances, and an outstanding runner spoils the game: they will have none of him.

The ideal Zuni described by Benedict avoids office. He may have it thrust upon him, but he does not seek it. When the kiva offices must be filled, the hatchway of the kiva is fastened and all the men are imprisoned until someone's excuses have been battered down. The folk tales describe good men and their unwillingness to take office -- though in the end they always assume it, much as Benjamin Franklin professed that he had never sought a public office -- nor refused one.

Beyond cultural constraints, there's also the environment to consider. Taoists are subordinated not to parents, caste, the past, or mysterious forces, but to nature, as suggested by a Taoist song:

As the sun rises I get up
As the sun sets I go to rest
I dig a well for my drink
I till the field for my food.
What has the power of the emperor to do with me?

Similar ecocentrism can be found among the Yupiaq, of whom Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley of the University of Alaska has written

For the Yupiaq people, culture, knowing, and living are intricately interrelated. Living in a harsh environment requires a vast array of precise empirical knowledge to survive the many risks due to conditions such as unpredictable weather and marginal food availability. To avoid starvation they must employ a variety of survival strategies, including appropriate storage of foodstuffs that they can fall back on during the time of need. Their food gathering and storage must be efficient as well as effective.... To help them achieve this balance, they have developed an outlook of nature as metaphysic.

Not only are humans endowed with consciousness, but so are all things of the environment. The Yupiaq people live in an aware world. Wherever they go they are amongst spirits of their ancestors, as well as those of the animals, plants, hills, winds, lakes and rivers. Their sense of sacredness is of a practical nature, not given to abstract deities and theological rationalization.... Because nature is their metaphysic, Yupiaq people are concerned with maintaining harmony in their own environment.

***

Yet another approach is that of a Buddhist, who, writes Walpola Rabula, gets along without a soul or a god, and seeks to transcend the absurdity of the universe and the suffering that goes with it. Morris sees Buddhism as an extreme form of individualism "for there is no recourse to a deity or savior, no prayer or sacrament, no religious grace, and not even an enduring soul." Each individual carries personal responsibility for things thought, done, and spoken. The Buddha, it has been said, provides the raft of enlightenment from which to depart suffering and impermanence in order to get to the other shore of bliss and safety.

But this is an unusual form of individualism because, as Rabula points out, "according to the teaching of the Buddha, the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of 'me' and 'mine,' selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities and problems."

Breaking free

It is tempting in a time when our society seems so destructive of its own kind and when we have such easy access to alternatives to treat culture as just another commodity.

The Buddhist nun Pema Chodron warns against this. In The Wisdom of No Escape, she recalls being invited to speak at a weekend program that was a kind of "New Age spiritual shopping mart ... There was this big poster, like a school bulletin board, that said Basic Goodness, Room 606; Rolling, Room 609; Astral Travel, Room 666; and so forth."

She cites one of her teachers as having said that shopping is about trying to find security, always trying to feel good about yourself. Instead, "when one sticks to one boat, whatever that boat may be, then one actually begins the warrior's journey." The danger in the alternative is that "the minute you really begin to hurt, you'll just leave or you'll look for something else." We stop rowing and seek yet another craft to carry us onward.

As we become more aware of our options -- or more sophisticated, as we like to call it -- the choices we have already made, or have been made for us, may lose their allure and we can find ourselves wandering in a cultural void somewhere between the Trobriand Islands and Trenton.

A detachment from one's indigenous culture can set in, a trait observable in diplomats, military personnel, international business executives, and anthropologists. It is not that they are without a culture; rather, theirs becomes a culture that lacks place. This can have some odd results, such as the anthropologist's high school daughter who begged that the family at least stay in the U.S. her senior year so she would have a room to remember as "home" when she went to college.

One of the things driving such restlessness is an assumption that our own culture must inevitably be locked in combat with our own nature. In drawing this conclusion we may place inordinate emphasis on the faults of our parents, the sins of the marketplace, racism, and the "oppression of the system." This is not to say that these wrongs do not exist and need not be confronted, only that they hardly define the whole of our culture's influence on us. As Americans, for example, it tells nothing of values of pragmatism, fairness, reinvention, and freedom that have survived the worst years of our collective experience. Ruth Benedict put it like this:

In reality, society and the individual are not antagonists. His culture provides the raw material of which the individual makes his life. If it is meager, the individual suffers; if it is rich, the individual has the chance to rise to his opportunity. Every private interest of every man and woman is served by the enrichment of the traditional stores of his civilization. The richest musical sensitivity can operate only within the equipment and standards of its tradition. It will add, perhaps importantly, to that tradition. But its achievement remains in proportion to the instruments and musical theory which the culture has provided.... No culture yet observed has been able to eradicate the differences in the temperaments of the persons who compose it.

Which doesn't mean cultures don't try. Writing more than 60 years ago, Benedict cited homosexuality as the kind of non-conformance to which cultures can react in different ways:

The American Indians do not make Plato's high moral claims for homosexuality, but homosexuals are often regarded as exceptionally able. [When] the homosexual response is regarded as a perversion, however, the invert is immediately exposed to all the conflicts to which aberrants are always exposed. His guilt, his sense of inadequacy, his failures, are consequences of the disrepute which social tradition visits upon him....

And she concluded her discussion with words worth keeping handy in today's America: "Tradition is as neurotic as any patient; its overgrown fear of deviation from its fortuitous standards conforms to all the usual definitions of the psychopathic "

Killing culture

Far worse than cultural neurosis or nomadism, however, is the destruction of culture itself. There are still, for example, about 6,700 languages in the world but only about 200 of these are official tongues of a country or carry with them enough cultural force to ensure their survival. According to Guy Gugliotta in the Washington Post, at least one language disappears every two weeks and many linguists believe that at least 3,000 will vanish over the next 100 years. Reports Gugliotta: "In Australia, linguists estimate that 90 percent of what used to be 250 languages are moribund. In Alaska, Siberia and the rest of the polar North, 56 of 72 languages are disappearing. In the Amazon jungle, 82 of 100 to 150 languages appear doomed."

The death of these languages is not just of scholarly interest. Each lost tongue is a form of genocide by amnesia and a contraction of human possibility. As Mitchell Kraus, director of the Alaska Native Language Center, puts it, "Every time we lose a language, we lose a whole way of thinking." And a whole different way of being human.

Languages can also disintegrate internally. David Orr, writing in Utne Reader, reported that "in the past 50 years, by one reckoning, the working vocabulary of the average 14-year-old had declined from 25,000 words to 10,000. This is a decline not merely in words, but also in the capacity to think. We are losing the capacity to say what we mean, and ultimately to think about what we mean, about the things that matter most."

Part of this is the inevitable result of improved communications, creating a paradigm-rattling assault on both culture and individuality -- what the semiotician Marshall Blonsky calls the "semiosphere, a dense atmosphere of signs triumphantly permeating all social, political, and imaginative life and, arguably, constituting our desiring selves as such."

Even our own words become just another product foisted upon us from the outside; we learn to adapt and restrict our language to that of the commercial and technocratic systems that control so much of our lives. And as our words contract, so does our world.

This semiosphere -- bombarding us with the UV rays of advertising, propaganda, or just interminable sounds and sights devoid of meaning -- is controlled in large part by multinational corporations whose intentions include the destruction of both culture and individuality. Their goal, well described by the French writer Jacques Attali, is an "ideologically homogenous market where life will be organized around common consumer desires."

This new world is unlike any in human history, a world in which the destruction of cultural and individual variety -- from the nation state to the remnants of the Objibwa -- is high on the agenda of the earth's political and business leaders; the very heart of our human nature being to them not a reason for existence but just another obstacle in their path to power.

Recovering culture

One response to society's assault of human variation is the creation of an "identity," around which the icons, values, and artifacts of a culture are consciously built. Identity cultures -- such as the black, lesbian or disabled "community" -- are intentionally designed to end discrimination but perhaps also are unconsciously part of a broader reaction to the threat against culture itself. Many may feel the need for an identity not merely because of prejudice against their own ethnicity, but against the biggest race of all, the human one.

The obvious advantage of identity culture is the protection of a group. The less obvious disadvantage is that over-emphasis on one's status, sex, or ethnicity can be just as much an obstacle to individualism as, say, loyalty to the corporate culture. It converts context into classification. When someone stands up in a meeting and says, "Speaking as a gay Jew..." they are defining themselves as far less than they really are.

This is a point that Star Trek's Captain Jean-Luc Picard understood. Lt. Commander Data, the android officer aboard the starship Enterprise, had a vision of his creator, Doctor Soong. He tries to get Captain Picard to help him interpret the vision:

DATA: I have analyzed over four thousand different religious and philosophical systems as well as over two hundred psychological schools of thought in an effort to understand what happened.
PICARD: And what have you found?
DATA: I've been unable to find a single interpretation of the images I saw during the time I was shut down. The hammer, for instance, has several meanings. The Klingon culture views the hammer as a symbol of power, however, the Tapo tribe of Nagor sees it as an icon of hearth and home. The Ferengii view it as a sign of sexual prowess.
PICARD: I'm curious, Mr. Data. Why are you looking at all these other cultures?
DATA: The interpretation of visions and other metaphysical experiences are almost always culturally derived and I have no culture of my own.
PICARD: Yes, you do. You're a culture of one. Which is no less valid than a culture of one billion. Perhaps the key to understanding your experience is to stop looking into other sources for meaning. When we look at Michelangelo's David or Seme's Tomb we don't ask what does this mean to other people. The real question is what does it mean to us.

Anthropologist Steve Mizrach, explained Picard's comments this way:

Symbols, icons, signs, and all the other things that go to make up a culture come to have meaning to an individual because of past life experiences and everything is interpreted through filters. But what are some of these filters, these past life experiences, through which everything is interpreted? The filters through which everything experienced is interpreted can be thought of as the individual's culture.

***

Of course, we don't have to do it all alone. One of the most fascinating and unusual examinations of how culture can be redefined is contained in a strange book, T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, by Hakim Bey. Bey argues that the world fundamentally changed with what he calls the "closure of the map" -- the end of terrestrial discovery:

Because the map is an abstraction it cannot cover earth with 1:1 accuracy. Within the fractal complexities of actual geography the map can see only dimensional grids. Hidden enfolded immensities escape the measuring rod.

For example, there is the map one might draw of the Internet, whose nomads may never leave their office or room. They are like Thoreau who said he had "traveled much -- in Concord." Says Bey:

Lay down a map of the land; over that set a map of political change; over that a map of the Net, especially the counter-Net with its emphasis on clandestine informationflow and logistics -- and finally, over all, the 1:1 map of the creative imagination, aesthetics, values. The resultant grid comes to life, animated by unexpected eddies and surges of energy, coagulations of light, secret tunnels, surprises.

Bey's temporary autonomous zones are uncertain and undulating communities of the rootless and the alienated:

The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the state, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the state can crush it. Because the state is concerned primarily with simulation rather than substance, the TAZ can "occupy" these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace. Perhaps certain small TAZs have lasted whole lifetimes because they went unnoticed -- like hillbilly enclaves -- because they never intersected with the spectacle, never appeared outside that real life which is invisible to the agents of simulation.

An example is the pirate utopia:

The sea-rovers and corsairs of the 18th century created an "information network" that spanned the globe: primitive and devoted primarily to grim business; the net nevertheless functioned admirably. Scattered throughout the net were islands, remote hideouts where ships could be watered and provisioned, booty traded for luxuries and necessities. Some of these islands supported "intentional communities," whole mini-societies living consciously outside the law and determined to keep it up, even if only for a short but merry life . .. Fleeing from hideous "benefits" of imperialism such as slavery, serfdom, racism and intolerance, from the tortures of impressment and the living death of the plantations, the buccaneers adopted Indian ways, intermarried with Caribs, accepted blacks and Spaniards as equals, rejected all nationality, elected their captains democratically, and reverted to the "state of nature." Having declared themselves "at war with all the world," they sailed forth to plunder under mutual contracts called "Articles" which were so egalitarian that every member received a full share and the captain usually only 1-1/4 or 1-1/2 shares ...

The business of building cultures within, beyond, and without existing ones is fraught with possibility, disappointment and danger. It has led to the Montana Militia, secret cop fraternities, intentional communities, even more intentional dictatorships, religious orders, feminist affinity groups, the Crips, the civil rights movement, Alcoholics Anonymous, and Woodstock.

The 1960s, in many ways, was a huge temporary autonomous zone, as are many periods of great social and political change. The fragility of such chronological cultures hurtling through a small window of opportunity is often missed by their members. In the 1960s, Bobby Seale presciently warned, "seize the time," but for many, it seemed no more likely that the Age of Aquarius would disintegrate than it might have seemed possible to post-Civil War radical Republicans that their work of reconstruction would be undone barely a dozen years after it started.

Still, history favors eruptions more than steady processions, and these uprisings, brief as they may be, are the major seasons of social and political change. For example, though few remember the Dutch Provos of the 1960s, they laid the foundation for the Green Party and for the anti-drug prohibition and shorter-workweek movements. They offer a good example of how even during the most recalcitrant eras, there are tools of change available if individuals use their imaginations without awaiting the grace of power and if they can, as Carlos Baker said of Ralph Waldo Emerson, help create the culture that will nurture them.

Writing of the Provos in High Times magazine, Teun Voeten said. "They were the first to combine non-violence and absurd humor to create social change." Their provenance could not have been more puerile: disaffected Dutch teens known as Nozems: "Part mods, part '50s juvenile delinquents, they spent most of their time cruising the streets on mopeds, bored stiff and not knowing what to do. Their favorite past-time? Raising trouble and provoking the police."

A timid and introverted philosophy student, Roel Van Duyn, saw their political potential, proclaiming in 1965. "It is our task to turn their aggression into revolutionary consciousness." Meanwhile a former window cleaner and "original clown prince of popular culture," Robert Jasper Grootveld, was already laying some of the foundation:

Grootveld staged Saturday night happenings, wearing strange clothes and performing to growing crowds of Nozems, intellectuals, curious bypassers, and police. Writer Harry Mulisch described it this way: "While their parents, sitting on their refrigerators and dishwashers, were watching with their left eye the TV, with their right eye the auto in front of the house, in one hand the kitchen mixer, in the other De Telegraaf, their kids went out Saturday night to the Spui Square ... And when the clock struck twelve, the high priest appeared, all dressed up, from some alley and started to walk magic circles around the nicotinistic demon, while his disciples cheered, applauded and sang the Ugge Ugge song."

The Provos created various "White Plans," including the White Bike Plan which called for replacing cars in the inner city with white bicycles, to be provided by the government. The bikes would be left unlocked so anyone could use them. Among other White Plans:

• Anyone causing a fatal car accident should be forced to paint the outline of their victim's body on the pavement at the site of the accident. That way, no one could ignore the fatalities caused by automobiles

• The White Chimney Plan (put a heavy tax on polluters and paint their chimneys white)

• The White Kids Plan (free daycare centers)

• The White Housing Plan (stop real estate speculation)

• The White Wife Plan (free medical care for women) ...

The Provos eventually became so influential that they could no longer pass as the consummate alienated. Voeten describes their end:

The reason for Provo's demise, which was totally unexpected by outsiders, was its increasing acceptance by moderate elements, and growing turmoil within its ranks. As soon as Provo began participating in the city council elections, a transformation occurred. A Provo Politburo emerged, consisting of VIP Provos who began devoting most of themselves to political careers. Provos toured the country, giving lectures and interviews ... The division between the street Provos and the reformist VIPs began growing wider. Some Provos returned to their studies, others went hippie and withdrew from the movement ... Provo held one last stunt. A white rumor was spread that American universities wanted to buy the Provo archives, documents that actually didn't exist. Amsterdam University, fearing that the sociological treasure might disappear overseas, quickly made an offer the Provos couldn't refuse....

The Provos' politics revolved around symbolism that mocked, reversed and distorted the official symbols of the state. Their heirs include Abbie Hoffman, and the turn-of-the-century protesters against the IMF and World Bank.

***

"What does all this have to do with you and me? For one thing, it means that our own culture, for all its wonders and faults, represents but a tiny fraction of the choices humans have collectively made over time and space. These choices, distant as they may be, beckon us towards possibilities lying dormant within ourselves. They also mock the self-assurance with which we run our little corner of the world.

Secondly, the nature of culture is drastically changing from being something into which the individual is indoctrinated and absorbed, towards something the individual must preserve, restore or recreate in order to avoid the destruction of all culture save that of the corporate market and the political systems that support it.

Finally, the strategies by which this can be accomplished depend on no small part on the imagination, passion, obstinacy, and creativity of ordinary people who refuse their consumptive assignments in the global marketplace, who develop autonomous alternatives, and who laugh when they are supposed to be saluting. The business of constructing culture is no longer an inherited and precisely defined task but a radical act in defense of our individual and collective souls.

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