I try to imply in my language and the way that I structure my arguments - and perhaps I've explicitly stated it here and there - that I may have stumbled upon some things here in my limited experience that could be of some use, but I don't intend for these things to be prescriptions for everyone. Nevertheless, I thought it might be a good thing to write up a more formal post on it.
I make use of a lot of these simpler material metaphors as building material that I've come across in the course of my life, which I have direct experience of and which have taught me certain things and revealed certain things to me. The purpose of the metaphors in this case is to abstract from those more concrete and grounded experiences in order to produce transferrable knowledge that could potentially be used in other contexts.
This is the upside to the tools of abstraction, which although carry the danger of removing a thing from its context and changing its meaning and effects, can also confer a flexibility and universality to that thing as well.
When talking about addressing some of the more pressing problems of our modern world, for example, there are many ways to simplify and detoxify one's life, and to re-organize one's energies and priorities. I write from my direct experiences living and working in the woods on a homestead, but not everyone can do that. Not everyone wants to do that besides. It would be an environmental disaster anyway; there are a lot of people in the world.
To draw a direct contrast to the woods or any other rural environment, there are all sorts of possibilities for material, social, political, economic, intellectual, and spiritual revolution in the city, or somewhere in between, and indeed, much of what I've learned has consisted of moving back and forth between these worlds. And short of huge numbers of people suddenly dying off - a result our genocidal rulers might be fine with, regardless of its actual consequences - all of these people in existence have to live somewhere, and theoretically our dense and well-managed cities are the best way to do that.
Besides, as I've expressed before, a given stage of development of the built environment finds its way into the wilderness eventually, transforming it, just as the state of the wilderness itself affects the built environment, and one is living in that totality. One consequence of this is that the act of homesteading changes in its nature throughout history, just as the act of city-living changes through time as well. Neither of these pure concepts can exist in isolation in the real.
Part of the holistic thought here entails that the rest of the world is still out there, and doing its thing regardless of what one does, though one can certainly have good faith influence in small ways as well. For my part, I can only attempt to express the truths I apprehend in the particular sphere that I reside in and have a deeper experience of.
But the way in which one expresses those truths does matter. Abstracting from the grounded and concrete to share those relations, in the hope that those abstracted relations are responsibly received and processed, and then eventually reconfigured and re-instantiated in others' concrete contexts and lives, positively informing them, is one way to go about this.
I hope I've successfully expressed that I'm not all that interested in evangelizing some limited and particular lifestyle and ethic, to be forcefully adopted by the whole of creation. Such impulses can be quite arrogant at best, but they can also form the eventual building blocks of totalitarian thought and practice and well.
But there is a balance to be struck here as well, because if I were just to put out my two cents, and then shrug and say, "hey everything is relative, to each their own," with no real interest in the arguments and their results, then what is the point? There is ultimately a way in which things work: how to successfully get by and live a decent life in the circumstances one finds oneself in. And there are good and bad ways to use less energy and avoid ecological trashing. At the same time though, one should also cultivate a good sense of when one is just pissing in the wind.
