goddessing

A couple of Sundays ago I caught most of the CSPAN bookTV taping of Thom Harmann's September talk at Vox Pop Books in Brooklyn, New York.

I had been hearing some local buzz about Hartmann's recent book, Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class -- And What We Can Do About It, so I was glad to have the opportunity to get an audio/visual introduction to it.


The preview supports the buzz. I learned a lot I didn't know about class, and our founding fathers, and how the neocons have aggressively pursued the destruction of our country and our economy. It's a must-read. I scribbled a few notes while I was watching. Two quotes:


I've been reviewing my Pagan experience and doing some writings which may some day become a book, and the "democracy is the way of nature" quote has primed the pump for my observations about Pagan groups.

I've directly experienced three flavors of neopagan culture: overtly hierarchical; covertly hierarchical; feminist egalitarian/consensual. All three have their challenges, and to give credit all three have their strong points, but I experienced the two hierarchical models as fatally flawed in terms of their ability to foster fundamental, enduring personal and cultural change. I became involved in the overtly hierarchical group with eyes wide open, and with an agenda. I wanted to experience whatever merit that model might have. Here's my report -- it does get some things done better, some things done faster, but it fails, by its very hierarchical nature, to challenge within its own sphere the very paradigms it challenges outside its circles.

Disappointing, because the egalitarian/consensual group experiences were mixed. The coven experience was highly effective in terms of deep personal transformation, but never really addressed cultural transformation (or perhaps when confronted with the opportunity for that, it failed). The other experiences of this model were in larger, less intimate groups. Lots of talk, lots of struggling, lots of learning, some organizational successes, and possibly some cultural transformation, but more often than not the transformation was of the "I'm out of here" persuasion. How many Pagans do you know who are solitary by choice, by reaction to the challenges, flaws, disappointments, and sometimes nastiness of Pagan community?

Now let me back up by saying a couple of things: (1) I'm not talking about Paganism, but about group/organizational dynamics within Pagan communities; (2) I just boiled fifteen years' experiences down to about two paragraphs, so please take my words with a few large grains of sea salt.

That said, I feel pretty comfortable with these two statements:

1. Organized Pagan Religion is just like any other flavor of organized religion -- a model that can be extremely effective with certain issues at certain times, but that by its very nature is doomed to a conservative stasis.


2. Most of the organized Pagan Religion I've seen could be more precisely termed "disorganized." Nevertheless, there still lurk within me a few flares of optimism for a dynamic organization of Pagan community/communities based on the principles and realities of Living Systems.

And just to cover all my bases, let me acknowledge that we Pagans are like all other folk, religious or not -- most of us are doing our very best, often under very difficult circumstances.

If we look at nature for hints about effective Pagan community (and we are, after all, predominantly an earth-based religion), we see a striking model for organization: democracy.

Back to Hartmann. He talked about challenges to received wisdom, one being the culture's predominant view of nature (we confuse the breeding function of hierarchy within animal groups -- think alpha male/alpha female -- with a generally nonexistent social function -- leadership). Hartmann discussed studies done by Dr Larissa Conradt and biology professor Tim Roper (University of Sussex), studies of red deer populations. Red deer herds do have alpha males, but the research demonstrated that herd decisions were not made top-down by the alpha, but were made democratically. We're not talking voting booths, naturally: When three different watering holes were available to a grazing herd, the herd chose one over the other two based on this form of observable democracy -- at the point when 51% of the herd was facing in the direction of a certain watering hole, the herd moved together to the watering hole in that direction. The alpha male? He was somewhere in the back of the group. Similar studies in different animal groups have revealed similar results for democratic decision-making within animal populations. On a media page at the web site of the University of Sussex, we learn this about the research of Conradt and Roper:


Despot seems a pretty strong word when associated with red deer, or queen bees, but when it comes to humans we don't have such a hard time seeing despotism in our leadership, or at least top-down leadership gone bad.

As for the current political environment in the US, Hartmann predicts that we'll have another stolen election in November and another one after that in 2008. He makes some strong cries for US citizens to wake up, smell the coffee, and show up at the polls despite the situation. We have to show up, he says, to help drive a wedge into the denial that many of our brothers and sisters are still living in about the Bushocracy. It's pretty easy, apparently, to ignore the realities of black-box voting irregularities, and Republican Party hijinx, but it might be harder to ignore a huge herd of visible voters whose presence continues to be underrepresented in the vote counts.

For lasting change, Hartmann says we have to take back democracy, starting by showing up and getting involved in the Democratic party at the local level.

Egads! Two months without a word, and then an overflow. Better stop now, well almost now....

Thom Hartmann's book is on my reading list, but I don't own it yet and I'm in the midst of two fall traditions: (1) a major remaking of some part of the house or household; (2) some re-reading of favorite novels. I think the former is a call from the distant past to prepare for winter. The latter is something that resembles comfort food for the mind. Familiar, a known delight. Who knows -- Perhaps this is an exercise in the denial of the coming winter. In any case, I'm re-reading Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing right now. It's only my second reading of this novel (yes, it's been awhile), and I find it holds up well with time. If nothing else, it portrays an interesting model for dealing with despots, nonviolently, and fires hope in the Pagan heart for the possibility of a better world, or at least a better human animal.

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