Fleming, David, and Shaun Chamberlin. _Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy_. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2016. # Progressive Summary This book is about "how to recruit the intelligence and purpose of the people in the extraordinary task of investing a future." # Key Points ## Three Principles ### Manners Manners are about "treating ideas with the respect, attention and good humour needed to hear them. They open us up to encounter with nature, with each other and with our own thinking minds, and encourage the reflection that may uncover, over time, practical and astonishing responses to a fiercely difficult future." ## Carnival Carnival declined in the 17th century with the first stirrings of capitalism, which brought habits of soberness and a fixation on people turning up for work. Carnivals were potential sites of unrest. Robin Hood's career began as a carnival king. Firearms also required discipline. It took 43 steps, done exactly and at speed, to load and fire a musket. Therefore, self-awareness and self-control became crucial to trade and armies. This is related to the separation of head intelligence which Phil Shepherd identifies in [[Reference Notes/Radical Wholeness]]. Barbara Ehrenreich wonders if the loss of carnival in the 17th century is related to the rise of the awareness of depression. Carnival was a way to introduce slack into an economy. As the modern economy decomposes, we have to build a slack economy to take its place. Slack is necessary for resilience. Medieval England took about a 3rd of the year for leisure. This reminds me of Michel Bauwens' idea that the Middle Ages (and commoning in general) are best seen as a phase of regeneration after a period of extraction (Roman Empire). [[Commoning has gone through four historical stages]]. > ... agreements on self-denying measures—such as shorter working time, or a deliberately in- efficient technology, both of which require people to forgo immediate advantage—are hard to sustain. Everyone who stays within the limit, forgoing the opportunity to be more competitive, is a potential sucker. That is the core, enduring ethic of the market. - This, by the way, is why Low Tech Magazine is a tough sell. https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ > Living in a slack economy, sup- ported by the culture rather than by opportunism, is a skilled task. Many of the abilities needed for it are best learned in childhood. The potential for play, judgment, imagination and manners must be activated early in life if they are to develop properly, but the narrow targets-based education of the market economy passes them by. This means that more leisure could short-circuit miserably into poverty and resentment. Or it could be sucked up by addiction to television and its related media, through which the time available to make a personal commitment to social capital or to a new political-economic order is diminished. Having to build society anew from its very foundations is a challenge. When the builders don’t turn up, the challenge is greater. ## Eroticism David Fleming identifies sexual energy as the most important energy source that feeds all the emotions. Barry Lord, in [[Art & Energy - How Culture Changes]], also identifies sexual energy as the first form of energy that human civilisation tapped into. ## Needs vs Wants The puritanical ethic in society says that we should focus on our needs. To want things is to be greedy. It has no place in an environment of scarcity. The Lean Economy argues that wants are equally important. In the first place, things that seem purely decorative might serve important signally purposes, or hold sacred value. Also, the idea of need in a modern economy can extend to a whole host of things which we don't actually want. Do we want burglar alarms, sewage systems, heavy-goods transport, police forces, etc? This discussion makes me think of [[Your Dog Is Your Mirror]], when he says that we like talking about needs because we have been made to feel ashamed of our wants. We all learn to justify our wants in terms of our needs. But society would be so much better if we could all simply attend to each other's wants. ## Small vs Large Scale > However, the advantages that large scale does enjoy come at a high cost. The key to this is that a large system has a rela- tively short boundary (border, edge, surface) across which it can obtain its needs. Large animals and societies have to go to a lot of trouble to import sufficient nutrients and energy which then have to be distributed over larger distances in their bodies, with waste having to travel all the way back to the boundary. His analysis of the problems with large scale solutions makes me think of Systemantics. How each solution creates its own problem. Economies of scale work up to a certain point. That's why we use shopping bags to carry apples back, instead of in our hands. But if we were to bring back a whole crate of apples, then we need transport back. We need a fridge at home so they won't go bad. He has a great history of our energy transitions from firewood to coal to steam, and how each transition forced us to use more and more unwanted intermediaries. ## Intentional Waste > Fertile ecologies have one big problem in common: they are too productive for their own good. Surplus is produced that— unless checked, managed, destroyed or removed—will even- tually destroy the system. Lakes can become so rich with life that they die; many forests rely on periodic fire to clear out their choking abundance; the spruce fir forests of North America, left undisturbed for long enough, become so richly and closely entwined that the birds can’t get to the spruce budworm which, left to breed in peace, will in due course destroy the forest. > If growth capital is allowed to accumulate unchecked, it will produce more than can be contained in a closed-loop system, and the system will in due course break down.³ However, if part of that capital is intentionally discarded (in sufficient quantity), or used up in carnival and play, folly and fun, this will reduce production to a level at which it can be kept within the limits of a closed-loop system, making it possible that the ecosystem (or community) will endure. > The medieval cathedrals and the astonishing churches—big works of art in little villages—used up the excess wealth which is the curse of a stable society. Cultures have to a large extent been organised around the task of finding celebratory ways of destroying la part maudite—“the accursed share”, as Georges Bataille describes it—the capital which would otherwise endow resilient societies with the curse of growth. - This would be an interesting point to put in conversation with Jason Hickel's [[Reference Notes/Less is More]] > A modern demonstration of an ancient version of this comes from people who are not famous for their profligate lifestyles. At the Royal Academy in London in 1995, there was an exhibition of Tibetan art. In one of the rooms of the exhibition, four monks in their saffron robes toiled for weeks at a large and complex work of art: a sand mandala, made in intricate geometric shapes of coloured sand, guided by written instructions which they were translating from words into pattern. There was a sense of gravity, intense concentration, even reverence, in the room, and the great pattern, still unfinished, had a meaning for those who could read it, and beauty for the rest. The climax of this quiet festival was to throw the whole lot into the Thames. - I like the idea of practices like this, such as rock balancing, as practices of "intentional waste". > The new market state, therefore, has not recognised surplus as a problem and destroyed it accordingly. Instead, its surplus has been conserved and valued; in fact, it has been reinvested. The modern economy has turned the problem of surplus into more surplus, to be used, in turn, in the production of even more, at compound interest. Capital—including human capital (population)—breeds capital. But a system that breaks free of constraints on its growth is the curse of an ecology; this is the sin that won’t be forgiven. The resulting exponential growth postpones the necessary process of destruction, ensuring that human society loses control of its inevitable unleashing. Modern society doesn’t understand surplus; it carefully conserves it, invites it in like the Trojan horse. It stores up this excess—this accursed share—ready and waiting for the crash. > The inhabitants of the Lean Economy of the future could, perhaps, build cathedrals and pyramids, but there are probably enough of those. It would be better if they concentrated on being interesting. If so, they will have moved beyond the primitive ethic of competitiveness. Relations between inhabitants of these enduring and resilient lean cultures will not be reduced to their ability to compete, but enriched by their talent for surprise. He refers to things like social capital. He clearly believes that capital is whatever can produce surplus. A good counter-point to this is the view of capital as proposed in [[Conceptualizing Capitalism]] ## Truth and Religion There are 5 types of truth - material: everyone can observe this - narrative: resides in fiction and religion - implicit: everyone discovers their own through reflection - performative: created through statements that do something (eg Eden Project below) - self-denying: opposite of performative, a statement that makes itself untrue The word "belief" comes from the ancient Germanic root galabjan (to hold dear). The Latin for "to believe" is credere, which comes from cor dare (to give one's heart) #etymology > So if it’s not focus that breeds success, how do you get a project as vast and ambitious as Eden off the ground? Simple: you just announce you’re going to do it. I discovered a technique that revolutionised my life. It’s called lying—or rather, the telling of future truths. It’s about putting yourself in the most public jeopardy possible and saying “I am going to do this”, so the shame of not doing it would be so great it energises every part of your being. > – Tim Smit, Executive Director and Co-Founder of the Eden Project, Cornwall, 2009 > Religion (Latin: ligare to bind + re intensely) is the binding-together of people with stories, music, dance, emotion, death, spirit—all really about the celebratory making of community, and real enough to give your heart to. #etymology ## Hydraulic civilisations Hydraulic civilisations were ones built on the need for mass irrigation projects that diverted water or prevented flooding, such as Egypt, China, and Mesopotamia. They were in areas that didn't receive enough rainfall to support small-scale farming. These were civlisations that achieved a steady-state economy for over 6000 years, based on autocratic rule. > The government of a hydraulic regime would have no trouble in keeping economic output within the limits of zero-growth. There was no pressure to keep surplus labour employed—they could simply be directed into a mega-project with a low survival rate. Or the containing walls of some dikes protecting a floodplain could be breached. Or there was the well-established do-nothing option of allowing the surplus population to starve. Because rain-fed agriculture is the exception rather than the rule, the emergence of parliamentary democracies in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe was an anomaly that we cannot count on to endure. The climate crisis will probably bring on "green authoritarianism", governments that resort to autocratic rule to handle the crisis. > We should not forget that our brave and truculent insistence on local lean autonomy is, in some serious senses, taking on by far the biggest and most autocratic form of resilience that the world has ever known. # Resonances # Oppositions # Questions / Comments # Quotes ## Introduction > It will not be from the impersonal price-calculations of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from the reciprocal obligations that join a community together, and the benevolence among its members.