The Absence of Village and Its Restoration

The absence of village makes it incalculably more likely that you will cause harm to others in your life.

That harm might be from something you do. It might be from something you refuse to do; something you find yourself, to your horror, capable of doing or something, perhaps with more horror, incapable of doing.

It is almost impossible to overstate the vastness of this thing we all intuitively understand: it doesn't only take a village to raise a child, it takes a village to end the childhood of those little ones who would prefer to go on being children forever and craft humanity and village-mindedness from where there was the appropriate selfishness of childhood.

Because we live in a culture where this crafted ending of childhood and initiation of adulthood never occurs, we have less humanity amongst us. We have uninitiated children, in adult bodies, living together in condos or in the Whitehouse.

That's what we have now.

No village, just scenes. No real community, just networks.

We are so utterly and completely free and untethered to anything (elders, the non-human world, and the unseen) that would grant us our humanity. And, surely you would grant that this would all be bad enough but it is orders of magnitude worse because the unravelling of village life also unravelled the means by which to ravel it together.

It was the village that would, when trespass had occurred, intervene to ensure the one hurt was safe and tended to, that the one who did the hurting was held to account and that the village, as a whole, designed the means by which the wholeness of the village might be restored.

Each infraction - every lie, every piece of abuse, every neglect, was a tear in the fabric of mutual life and I think our old timers must have known that things can get too torn; they can reach a point at which restoration becomes unlikely or, even, impossible.

The lack of belonging we live with has us craft a world to which no one would want to belong. 

The urge to run from that world crafts a world from which everyone wants to run. The urge to 'fix' it, is, in fact, ‘the fix’ that was in a long time ago. Our solutions become further vectors for the problems are keep trying to solve.

And I would suggest that this is precisely, in the dominant civilizations of the world, where we are.

The very thing that causes our inhumanity also prevents the humanity from re-appearing. The very thing that tore a rip in that ornate tapestry of kinship prevents the sewing it back together. The civilization in which we live does not craft humans anymore, it lets children grow up and run the show.

This is the vicious cycle in which we find ourselves. Inhumanity begetting more inhumanity. Damage damaging and then damaging the capacity to repair the damage.

But I'll tell you what it looks like from the inside, from the vantage point of those who benefit from it the most, because its PR team is superb: it looks like progress.

It looks like freedom.

It looks like the internet and Facebook, like Netflix and the best TV shows you've ever seen.

It looks like a steady supply of any drug you want. It looks like affordable travel around the world.

It looks like tourist friendly destinations.

It looks like smart phones and well-paved, straight, long roads (to the extent that we can differentiate those two).

And, when we see all of that, and how very good it is, then all of the dysfunction in modern society must, we tell ourselves, come from us.

And the complete solution, we are assured, is to work on ourselves some more and that our salvation will be found on the yoga mat or, if we are particularly insightful, evolved and advanced, the even smaller, introspection demanding, leave-the-body-behind-and-go-within-to-the-real-you, meditation cushion.

Or ‘take this pill’.

Or ‘do this process’.

By yourself.

But this doing everything by ourselves is not the solution, it's the fullest expression of the deep, deep ancestral trauma of the unravelling of the village.

It’s us coping.

It is the problem attempting to solve itself by creating more of itself.

And yet, every day, so many of us are encouraged to worship at the altar of the Self, who is sitting on the throne where God used to be with the DSM where the Bible used to be.

And when we cause harm, and of course we do, the response is the response of the very individualistic, puritan culture we've been told is the product of four billion years of evolution: It is to punish.

It is to excise the offending part and get rid of them. Which shatters our scenes even further.

There is no community to do the healing and so we end up with less community. And that 'less community' is less able to do the needed healing and so it crumbles further.

And I don't know where it begins to turn around but I know it has something to do with village-mindedness. I know it has something to do with the impulse to restore wholeness rather than to enforce purity.

And I know that the individual is not the enemy of the village nor vice-versa. I know there’s such a thing as toxic individuality but there’s also toxic community (e.g. the madness of crowds, the mob mentality, cults and the like). And there are healthy versions of both which need each other.

I know it has to do with reframing safety as coming from not the absence of those things that would harm us (as we wash our hands with the anti-bacterial soaps of salvation), but a way of coming into some better relationship with their presence amongst us.

I know it has to do with a willingness to be undone and broken hearted for all the things done to us and that we did, all of the things that were never done to us and that we never did for others. 

There is so immense remorse and grief as we come to our senses just in time to see the wake of the speeding boat of our personal and collective lives tearing away at the shoreline of the people whose property we claimed to admire.

I know it has to do with being willing to get up and walk away from that altar of loneliness without knowing where else we might worship or what worshipping even means anymore.

I know it has something to do with our stopping running.

It has something to do with ceasing to make the ones who have caused harm run away on that road out of town to the next town where they do the same thing to more people because they never healed from what drove them to cause the harm in the first place.

Maybe instead, it's got to do with all of us looking at the long road that's made getting what we want so easy and getting what we need so difficult, and tearing it up to plant fruit trees in hopes of a life that is harder but more human, where we trade our growth for depth and our freedom for friendship. And maybe that's what true freedom is anyway.

I don't know if you're with me in this or against me on this but I'm glad to be alive today to have a chance to do something about the damage that I've done and that you have done and that was done a long time before we arrived on the scene, and to make as much beauty as I can while I am still granted days.

May you be granted the strength and support you need to turn your deepest shames into food to feed the ones to come so that they don't devour the world like you did.

May you see, from a great distance if needed, the ones who hurt you become utterly heartbroken by what they've done and become the greatest defenders of people like you.

May we all be granted some small portion of redemption and might we spend it like mad

Might we build a little fire that draws people together for some fine conversation about how we might proceed more beautifully.

Might we all be granted the days long enough to stand there together, not heroic, but utterly defeated by the freedom, progress and vast unending potential that we thought we always wanted.