Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything (11 page)

Still, the success of the language hasn’t been absolute. William Saunders, editor of
Harvard Design Magazine
, acknowledged that while Alexander’s pattern language work has been immensely influential in the design world and in fields outside of architecture such as computer programming, “in the architecture schools I know,” he said, “it is as if this book did not exist.”
¹¹
Alexander himself admits that over two billion buildings make up our built environment around the world today; most of those are not built according to a pattern language and so we experience them as dead space. He confessed, “When I started at twenty-five, thirty, years ago, I really thought that I would be able to influence the world very fast. Especially when I got to the pattern language. I thought, boy, I’ve really done it. This is going to work. No problem. The patterns are self-evident and true. They will spread. And, as a result, the world of buildings will get better. Hey presto. But it hasn’t worked out like that. In practical terms I’ve done almost nothing…A few thousand buildings have been influenced…But meanwhile, we’ve still got this gigantic amount of construction out there which is defining the world that all of us live in, that is still going on, in exactly the same fashion.”
¹²

Nevertheless, the pattern language is powerful, a living language rooted in our very nature and behavior. The patterns grow from the authentic needs of real people because they combine to build structures that focus not just on aesthetics, but on what it feels like to live in a space day after day. Because we all exist in the world in a physical space of some kind, a pattern language is open to all of us and can be shared. We can each join in shaping our environment, Alexander says, because the power to create something alive and beautiful lies in each of us.

Because the pattern language teaches us how to create environments that make us feel more alive and more ourselves, it serves the human struggle to live more freely and truthfully. Alexander says, “It is a process which allows the life inside a person, or a family, or a town, to flourish, openly, in freedom…”
¹³
The root question, he points out, is under what circumstances is the environment good? Will this pattern make human life better? Will it make people more whole in themselves? A pattern language, he says, in its essence, is a fundamental worldview: “It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.”
¹⁴
In that way, a pattern language, as a parallel structure, invokes a sense of responsibility to and for the world, holding out an alternative to the monoculture.

An economic approach to relationships and human interaction says that your relationships are transactional. The economic monoculture says the world is made of markets, and people are buyers or sellers in those markets. Your relationships with others are arms-length and impersonal, and in those relationships you each try to maximize your own interests as rational individuals. You expect to have few obligations to each other (if any) outside of what’s involved in the transaction at hand, and try to minimize your long-term commitments.

A parallel structure that exists alongside that monoculture approach to human interaction is Marshall Rosenberg’s method of Nonviolent Communication. Nonviolent Communication is about communicating with people in a way that leads to better outcomes. It represents a way of speaking and listening that helps us exchange information and peacefully resolve our differences instead of defending ourselves, attacking others, or withdrawing when we are judged or criticized. It is a set of alternative behaviors based on values and assumptions that differ from our usual methods of communication.

Nonviolent Communication assumes that the most satisfying motivation you have for doing things is the enrichment of life, and that you can communicate from that basis instead of from fear, guilt, blame, or shame. The method values language that contributes to goodwill instead of to resentment or lowered self-esteem. It supports freedom of thought by encouraging you to take personal responsibility for your communication choices and for improving the quality of your relationships.

By focusing your attention on four components of the Nonviolent Communication process, you can learn to reframe how you express yourself and hear others.
¹⁵
You can move from responding to others automatically to responding consciously based on an increased awareness of what you’re hearing and saying. In that way, Nonviolent Communication, as a parallel structure, creates space for you to live a different kind of life. Too, because we all communicate and have differences to resolve, Nonviolent Communication is open to everyone and grows from the needs of real people, as parallel structures do. It aims to “strengthen our ability to remain human, even under trying conditions.”
¹⁶

The method of Nonviolent Communication developed organically out of founder Marshall Rosenberg’s own life experience. As a Jewish boy growing up in Detroit in the 1940s, Rosenberg was bullied and beaten up at school for being a “kike.” Those experiences led him to ask what disconnects us from our compassionate nature, leading to violence, and what allows some of us to stay connected to that compassionate nature no matter what our circumstances. Rosenberg was struck by the central role words play in those experiences. In graduate school, he developed an approach to speaking and listening that helped people stay connected to compassion in their communication style. By 1984, he had founded the Center for Nonviolent Communication and was training people how to use the method to help prevent and resolve conflict.

As a method, Nonviolent Communication has, in some ways, been very successful. Many testify to how the communication style has changed their relationships, and the method has been used in conflict zones in Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Burundi, Bosnia and Serbia, Columbia, and the Middle East. Rosenberg himself tells how he had a chance to use Nonviolent Communication on the spot in a mosque at a refugee camp in Bethlehem while he was speaking to a crowd of about 170 Palestinian Moslem men. He recalls, “Attitudes toward Americans at that time were not favourable. As I was speaking, I suddenly noticed a wave of muffled commotion fluttering through the audience. ‘They’re whispering that you are American!’ my translator alerted me, just as a gentleman in the audience leapt to his feet. Facing me squarely, he hollered at the top of his lungs, ‘Murderer!’ Immediately a dozen other voices joined him in chorus: ‘Assassin!’ ‘Child-killer!’ ‘Murderer!’ Using Nonviolent Communication, Rosenberg immediately and publicly started a dialogue with the man that lasted for over twenty minutes. Rosenberg said, “I received his words, not as attacks, but as gifts from a fellow human being willing to share his soul and deep vulnerabilities with me. Once the gentleman felt understood, he was able to hear me as I explained my purpose for being at the camp. An hour later, the same man who had called me a murderer was inviting me to his home for a Ramadan dinner.”
¹⁷

But despite the success of the method, conflict in communication obviously continues around the world, demonstrating that the success of a parallel structure does not lie in eradicating other structures completely, though reform is certainly possible. As a parallel structure, the method serves the human struggle to live more freely and truthfully, focusing on our shared values and needs. It invokes a sense of responsibility to and for the world by reminding us that how we communicate affects others, sending out ripples far beyond us for better or for worse, reminding us each day that we have another chance to communicate for the better. In that way, Nonviolent Communication exists alongside the transactional, impersonal, and short-term approach to communication represented by the economic monoculture, holding out a peaceful alternative based on compassion and a belief in the intrinsic merit of human beings.

These three examples of parallel structures — the Slow Food movement, Christopher Alexander’s pattern language, and Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication — speak to the power and presence of parallel structures in the world. But the visibility of these examples obscures the most important thing about them: the vibrant independent life of society that precedes parallel structures is the 90 percent of the iceberg that lies hidden in the water. That hidden independent life happens quietly all around us, day after day, as thousands of people struggle to live freely and truthfully in their own way, in their own lives.

A small, quiet decision to live within a wider spectrum of human values is easy to overlook and dismiss as unimportant, as negligible. It’s easy to believe that unless a mass movement develops, nothing will ever change, that unless society wills something en masse, the world will go on as it always has. Albert Einstein observed that while we are what we are as human beings because of our membership in the human community, the valuable material, spiritual and moral achievements that we receive from society — paradigm-shifting achievements like the use of fire, the cultivation of edible plants, and the steam engine — are brought to us throughout the generations by creative
individuals
. “Only the individual can think,” Einstein said, “and thereby create new values for society, nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms…The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close social cohesion.”
¹⁸
It’s easy to believe that a quiet, obscure life that is little known and little seen makes little difference. But it is individuals living quiet lives who mobilize their inner resources to break with the social order. It is individuals living hidden lives who stand their ground and act. It is individuals living unseen lives who give birth to change, who risk retribution, who nurture independence.

That independent life begins with discovering what it means to live alongside the monoculture, given your particular circumstances, in your particular life and time, which will not be duplicated for anyone else. Out of your own struggle to live an independent life, a parallel structure may eventually be birthed. But the development and visibility of that parallel structure is not the goal — the goal is to live many stories, within a wider spectrum of human values.

That is what it looks like to live free from the economic monoculture’s manipulation, to live the breadth and depth of all of our stories, to live with dignity.

Once we’re thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost; but it’s only here that the new and the good begins.

—LEO TOLSTOY

Go out in the woods, go out. If you don’t go out in the woods, nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.

—CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS

STORIES TELL US WHO we are and what the world is like. When you hear one story often enough, you come to believe it’s true. When that single story becomes our only story, a monoculture emerges. A monoculture changes everything, shaping how we think and how we live. It comes to seem like the only reasonable reality. Our other stories, the ones that told us what life was like beyond the monoculture’s values and assumptions, that a kind of life even
exists
outside of its values and assumptions, fade. We come to believe that the economic story is the story of life itself, that being rational, efficient, productive and profitable are the ultimate expressions of being in the world.

As you now know, the economic story is changing how we think and act in terms of our work, our relationships with others and with the natural world, our community, our physical and spiritual health, our education, and our creativity. Now that you know what to look for, you’ll see evidence of the monoculture and the economic story in the books and magazines you read, on television, at work, and in conversations you overhear and have yourself. The diversity of values and stories that once sustained us in different parts of life are giving way. That loss puts us at risk. Once you lose the diversity of stories that sustained you in different parts of your life, shaping who you are and how you live, it’s hard to even think beyond the economic story, harder still to recognize how a monoculture constrains you. You struggle to make decisions that go against its tenets. Conformity seems like an easier, more realistic choice.

But though the monoculture is incredibly pervasive and powerful, it’s not the whole story, no matter how much it tries to be. What it means to be human will always encompass more than economic values and assumptions. If you fail to transcend the economic story, you risk paying a heavy internal price. If you do transcend it, you risk paying a heavy external price — but you also gain a chance to live a different kind of life, a chance to help create and sustain the independent life of society that comes from living in a wider spectrum of values.

Your decision matters, because without those other values that have informed humanity for hundreds, even thousands of years, what will happen to us? What will happen to the public interest and the common good? To library faith and intellectual freedom? What will happen to nurturing human dignity, regardless of someone’s economic situation? What will happen to how we work for and with each other? To science as the pursuit of the good and the true? To schools and students as teachers and upholders of the civilized society? What will happen to our physical and spiritual health? What will happen to art and to our creativity?

The extent to which these alternate stories and ways of life sound idealistic is the degree to which you’ve already been influenced by the monoculture. In these other realms of life, as little as thirty years ago, these alternative stories — now derided as idealistic — were objective realities. Today’s “idealism” used to be the norm. Now, through the monoculture, we’re trading our old aspirations for economic ones.

It’s not that the economic story has no place in the world and in our lives — it does. But without these other stories that express other values we have found essential throughout history, we imprison ourselves. When the languages of our other stories begin to be lost, we lose the value diversity and creativity that keeps our society viable. We’re left trying to translate something vitally important to us into economic terms so we can justify even talking about it. We end up living a caricature of life, skimming the surface without tasting the fullness. We end up missing what it means to be truly human.

Disconnected from the wholeness of life, we become disconnected from ourselves, from each other, and from the natural world. We struggle to find the meaning in life that we once expressed in non-economic ways. We’re left wondering, is this all there is? Because according to the monoculture, only one set of values exists, and those values set the boundaries of the world as we know it.

The monoculture may be overwhelming in its intensity and boundless in its appetite, but its constraints are not inescapable or inevitable. No matter what it tells us over and over about who we are and how we ought to live, we are made of more than one story. Telling a wider truth about where we have come from, who we are, and where we are going lets us live beyond the monoculture’s boundaries. Imagine, for a moment, what your life would be if you widened the stream of stories flowing through you, lived beyond economic values and assumptions. How would you experience yourself and others? What kind of work would you choose to do? What would you choose to learn? How would you convey your spirituality? How would you relate to the natural world? What would you create out of the depths of your being?

The story of what has been and what is yet to be lies within each one of us. Wherever you are right now, whatever situation you find yourself in, you have a chance to reflect on your own experience with the monoculture. You have an opportunity to consider how the monoculture is silently shaping the trajectory of your life as you go about your work day after day, interact with others and the natural world, participate in your community, nurture your physical and spiritual health, and continue to learn and create. You have an opportunity to decide, from moment to moment, whether, in your own life, the monoculture’s influence will grow or fade. Weigh your options carefully. The decisions you make about how to live and move in the world are the catalysts that will either intensify the monoculture or silently spur other ways of life into being.

The choice is yours.

What stories will you live?

What stories will you tell?