Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything (10 page)

The choice isn’t an easy one; how should we live? Do we conform to the monoculture and align ourselves with the economic story, or do we exile ourselves from the story that defines so much of our culture? Asked another way, if life is going to exact a toll no matter what you do, what’s stopping you from living exactly as you please, telling your own stories, in line with your own deepest values?

Insight separated from practice remains ineffective.

—ERICH FROMM

THE TIME MAY COME when you find yourself drawn to move beyond the economic monoculture, its singular story, and its world of appearances. You may wake up one day, determined to live many stories, to live your life in a wider spectrum of human values instead of in a narrow channel of economic ones. Trying to move past that monoculture isn’t about trying to fix the world for anyone else. You’re simply trying to affirm your own identity, Václav Havel said, by rejecting what distances you from your own life. You’re trying to live with dignity, free from manipulation. The question then arises: what does that kind of life look like?

A decision to transcend the monoculture isn’t revealed by any one activity in particular. Havel pointed out that first attempts to move past the world of appearances might look like
not
doing certain things — not doing what others expect, not meeting certain demands. Instead, you gradually and quietly begin to live in a way that’s aligned with your deepest values instead of with the limited values of the monoculture. You begin to be more intentional about your decisions and purposefully open yourself up to a wider range of values in different areas of life.

As you begin to live aligned with your deepest values instead of solely economic ones, your actions from day to day can in time give birth to something more articulate and structured, something Havel called “the independent spiritual, social, and political life of society.”
¹
That independent life isn’t separate from the rest of life — it’s simply marked by a high degree of inner freedom that comes from moving past the economic story and the monoculture. The independent life can take almost any form. You don’t automatically have to quit everything you’re doing and move to the country to transcend the monoculture. The independent life can encompass whatever it is you do, wherever you are, in whatever sphere of activity you already happen to be in.

As time goes on, that independent life naturally begins to be organized in one way or another, heralding the development of what Havel called parallel structures. Parallel structures, he said, are about the daily human struggle to live in freedom, truth and dignity — an articulated expression of living within the truth of life. Parallel structures give you room to live a different kind of life and grow from the needs of real people, bubbling up from below instead of being mandated from above, and developing organically.
²

Parallel structures are not about dropping out of society or isolating yourself from the world. Instead, they invoke a sense of responsibility to and for the world, and so point to something beyond themselves. They’re open to everyone, available to all. They further free thought and alternative values and behavior. They do not represent a sure thing; you participate in them because you are compelled to, not because what you’re part of stands a good chance of becoming a mass movement. The structures ultimately demonstrate, Havel said, “that living within the truth is a human and social alternative.”
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Parallel structures are not counter-cultural structures; they are parallel precisely because they emerge
alongside
the monoculture. Even as you engage with them, you are still connected to the monoculture’s world of appearances in a thousand different ways, through economic structures and value systems that already exist, and which you inevitably will continue to interact with in your daily life.

Nevertheless, there are concrete ways to begin to transcend the values and assumptions of the economic story that are embodied in the monoculture. Three such parallel structures are the Slow Food movement, Christopher Alexander’s pattern language, and Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication.

Food is essential to life. According to the economic story, food represents a market. Buyers want to buy food that meets their needs and costs them the least of their resources. Sellers want to supply the best food they can for the lowest price possible so they can sell more; the more productive and efficient they are, the higher their profits will be. The economic story says that when the market for food operates at peak efficiency, there’s a balance between supply and demand; sellers won’t produce what doesn’t sell, and buyers won’t pay for what they don’t need. That kind of efficiency keeps everyone from wasting resources, which are scarce because there’s never enough of anything to go around. Peak efficiency occurs when markets and market competition are as widespread as possible throughout the world.

Applied to food, the economic monoculture says we ought to be as efficient and productive as possible in how we grow and produce food, and as efficient and productive as possible in how we prepare and eat it. From a monoculture perspective, industrial agriculture makes sense. It’s efficient. It allows us to mass-produce almost everything we eat — from chickens and eggs, to cows and pigs, to fish and vegetables, to corn and wheat. Through mass production, we achieve economies of scale that allow us to produce plenty of food for cheap prices. Tools and methods that allow us to increase food productivity, that lower prices and inconvenience for buyers, or that increase profits for sellers are positive from an economic perspective, whether those tools and methods include pesticide use, animal crowding in cages and pens, fish farming, genetic engineering, or seed patenting, because the economic story is a story about what is good for buyers and sellers — individuals, not group members, who are rational and who want to maximize their own self-interest. Economist E.F. Schumacher put it this way: “Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be ‘uneconomic’ you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.”
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A parallel structure approach to food, on the other hand, is embodied in the Slow Food Movement. In Italy in the 1970s, a group of young political activists wanted to rediscover the pleasures of food, the sensual experience of producing, preparing, cooking, and eating it. The Slow Food movement was born, then launched internationally in Paris in 1989 when 250 delegates from Italy met to eat a meal together. The movement, in other words, bubbled up organically through the lives of members around the world.

Slow Food enthusiasts say that food isn’t just necessary — it’s enjoyable. Because food is woven throughout our lives, how we approach it is a sign of how we approach life itself. Slow Food, as a parallel structure, gives us room to live a different kind of life — a slower, more pleasure-filled life that has itself come to be known as slow living. Slow living is not a retreat from daily life; neither is it laziness nor a nostalgic return to the past. Instead, say scholars Wendy Parkins and Geoffrey Craig, “slow living is a process whereby everyday life — in all its pace and complexity, frisson and routine — is approached with care and attention…is above all an attempt to live in the present in a meaningful, sustainable, thoughtful and pleasurable way.”
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In that way, the Slow Food movement, as a parallel structure, serves the human struggle to live more freely and truthfully.

The development of the Slow Food movement has not been smooth or certain, as is true of parallel structures. Two early adherents and central figures in the movement, one Italian and one American, both had nearly ruinous experiences with money; Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse, almost lost her restaurant, and Carlo Petrini lost funds in an early project — but for both, says author Geoff Andrews, “money was secondary to their wider purpose and rarely got in the way of their latest ideas.”
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The Slow Food movement is concerned for the environment of which it is a part, and values sustainability and the growth of food that is healthy for us and for the world. Because food and the environment are inextricably connected and food culture is linked to culture at large, the Slow Food movement, as a parallel structure, invokes a sense of responsibility to and for the world. The movement is also open to everybody, transcending political, economic, and cultural divides, and grows from the needs of real people. We all need to eat. Healthy food helps us thrive.

Breaking bread together around a table is also one of the great human traditions, one of our rituals for creating something that goes beyond physical sustenance. Eating together builds trust and friendship and gives us a chance to relax in each other’s company. Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche communities for the developmentally disabled, said, “[Meals] are times for laughter, because laughter opens people up, and a group which laughs is a group which is relaxed. And when people are relaxed, they can begin to grow together.”
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The Slow Food movement encourages you to rediscover the pleasure and wisdom of food for yourself and for those you love, to relearn simplicity, fresh ingredients, quality, and the communal feel of your knees under the table with others. The Slow Food movement promotes taking that time to prepare food and eat together and so represents alternative values and behavior to those of the monoculture.

An economic approach to the built environment says buildings should be modular inside and out rather than organic to the land the building is on and the environment the building is in, because modular components are efficient and cost-effective. The values and assumptions of the economic story also have little regard for how the physical space that emerges as a result of the economic story impacts those who use the space day after day. In the economic story, what future buyers might think about our space matters at least as much as our own needs. We must appeal to the market, whether we are planning to sell our homes right away or not. As designer Ilse Crawford put it, “In creating our homes we have failed to pay attention to many of our true needs, the ones that really make a home warm and nurture those that live in it. At times, the whole language surrounding the home reeks simply of the balance sheet. Think of those terrible dinner parties where the talk is of the property ladder and good investments, and the TV programmes that show how to decorate in order not to put off potential purchasers.”
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A parallel structure that exists alongside that economic approach to the built environment is the pattern language developed by architect Christopher Alexander. Alexander’s two most influential books,
The Timeless Way of Building
and
A Pattern Language
, lay out the theory and instruction for a new language of building and planning. The language includes detailed patterns for how to build towns, neighborhoods, houses, rooms, and gardens that are not in the least modular, and so make us feel more alive, more ourselves. In his work, Alexander found that while people may differ on what they like about a physical space, they almost always agree about whether the space
feels
alive or not. That sense of aliveness is the fundamental feature that makes a structure live, though buildings take on a thousand faces across the centuries. He explains, “There is one timeless way of building. It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it has always been…It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way.”
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Alexander’s pattern language literally gives us room to live a different kind of life, as parallel structures do, because a pattern language helps us create living structures to inhabit. Alexander and his colleagues worked for eight years to identify the patterns based on people’s feelings about what kind of space made them feel alive, more themselves. That means the patterns developed organically, as parallel structures do.

The patterns Alexander and his colleagues developed, all 253 of them, are connected. Each is linked to “larger” and “smaller” patterns above and below it, and to patterns of the “same size” around it. When you imagine or find yourself in a room that feels pleasant and comfortable, where you feel relaxed and most yourself, chances are at least some of the patterns are at work in that room. Given a choice, for example, people intuitively feel more comfortable in rooms where daylight enters on at least two sides, and tend to avoid rooms where daylight enters from one side only (the Light on Two Sides of Every Room pattern). The more conscious you are of the pattern language, the more you’ll understand how to shape your space in a way that makes you feel most yourself and most at home.

The pattern language aims to put the needs of human beings at the center of architectural design. Alexander calls this a genetic approach to creating an environment that nurtures human life. Though he called his theory “a new attitude to architecture and planning,” a pattern language isn’t meant to prescribe a way of thought to anyone — it’s meant to make you aware of your own pattern language and to improve it. The idea is that you know what you need from a physical space better than anyone else, even an architect, because you know your particular circumstances best. In public spaces, for example, we often wear paths in the grass cutting across from one point to another instead of staying on the sidewalks; the sidewalks are laid where builders wanted us to go, but the paths show how we actually use the space day after day.

A pattern language encourages you to think for yourself by telling you how the relationships between patterns of an environment work in an abstract way “so that you can solve the problem for yourself, in your own way, by adapting it to your preferences, and the local conditions at the place where you are making it.”
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In that way, a pattern language, as a parallel structure, involves free thought and alternative values and behavior. The language also explains why you feel more yourself in some places and less yourself in others, so you can make your own environment feel more alive.