READING

from The Values of Belonging

Carol Lee Flinders

         There is a way of being in the world that recoils from aggressiveness, cunning and greed, and there is a constellation of values that supports that way of being, Rooted in a sense of interdependence so profound that it extends to even the smallest life-forms, these values were the basis for human existence everywhere for our first several hundred thousand years. They arose directly out of the relationships our hunter-gatherer ancestors had with the natural world, one another, and Spirit – relationships that are most accurately understood in terms of mutual reciprocity and even symbiosis . . . . I’ve chosen to characterize the values of pre-agricultural humanity with the word belonging. . . .

         While it’s correct to emphasize the stability of the pre-agricultural world, and the full integration of human beings into it, it’s also true that throughout those long stretches of time, the seeds of change were germinating: slowly, but irreversible, human beings were inching out of the realm of pure instinct. They captured fire, and they invented tools and weapons that gave them a widening edge over other creatures; they became artists . . . and they understood the basic concepts involved in farming long before they took it up in earnest. . . .

         The Agricultural Revolution appears to have had an exuberant, almost explosive quality. . . . Its adoption marked a radical shift in the relationship of human beings to their environment. . . .

         The trait of competitiveness suited a person to prevail in this new environment. So did acquisitiveness, ambition, recklessness, irreverence, and the ability to keep secrets – values that were anathema, all of them, in the world of hunter-gatherers . . .

         If the values that shaped the hunter-gather’s life reflect the need for connection, the values that fueled the Agricultural Revolution (and the subsequent rise of civilization as we know it) reveal disconnection – from nature, from other people, and from Spirit. The two constellations of values couldn’t have been more deeply at odds.  

         One eye looked at the world and saw relationship. The other looked and saw opportunity. So powerful was the emerging culture, and so magnificent the promises it held out. That it simply took over. In breathtakingly short order, one way of being in the world gave way to another. One way of seeing the world was closed down.

         A culture of Belonging ceded to a culture of Enterprise.

THE SERMON

         I happened upon Carol Lee Flinders’ book, The Values of Belonging, when I was at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Atlanta in November. I spent hours wandering among the displays of almost 200 publishers – I was particularly looking for ones whose books might suggest an openness to publishing my manuscript on the Ten Commandments, but I was also spending a large portion of my annual book budget on books that were probably not on display at Borders or Barnes and Noble. The only books that make it to those displays are those which have a potential mass market.

         The Values of Belonging was published by Harper SanFrancisco, a publisher in which I have been interested, but whose representative was not encouraging. I looked the book over and my initial interest was reinforced by the subtitle, “Rediscovering Balance, Mutuality, Intuition, and Wholeness in a Competitive World.”

         I am intrigued that the book, which came out in 2002, did not attract more attention. I was able to find only three reviews of it on the internet – one in National Catholic Reporter; one in Tikkun, the radical Jewish magazine; and one on the website of an Episcopal cathedral.

         Flinders has written what I consider to be a very insightful exploration into the conflicts in values that are part and parcel of life today. She is a feminist, but hers is in no way a male-bashing book. She came to the conclusion that gender discrimination is not the root of our problems, but a symptom of them. As the reading suggested, it is Flinders’ contention that the values that humans demonstrated during the hunter/gatherer era were very different from those which emerged as a result of the agricultural revolution and are still dominant today. The earlier values she calls “Values of Belonging” and the later set she refers to as the “Values of Enterprise.”

         Some feminist writers have been accused of creating a past for which there is virtually no evidence. The existence of a modest number of female idols does not prove that matriarchal religion was widespread in ancient times. While Flinders deals with prehistoric times, which means the evidence is limited, her conclusions seem to be supported by archeological evidence.

[values of belonging]

         We know that there was a time when our ancestors roamed the earth in small bands, hunting and gathering food. Each group had a territory around which it circled with the seasons, generation upon generation. It was a hand to mouth existence. There was no such thing as food storage, nor was there private property.

         Flinders refers to the values that were common to that time as values of “belonging” for a couple of reasons. She says:

The word [belonging] connotes the extraordinary dovetailing we see in any ecosystem –that special niche each life-form occupies in a perfectly functioning whole. But it prompts us, too, to consider how radically different two states of mind are: the one in which we look out across a forest or valley and say to ourselves, “This is where I belong,” and the other, so intrinsic to Western civilization in which we hear ourselves say, “This belongs to me.”

                   She then lists the values which she believes were associated with that first use of belonging – “This is where I belong.” They include:

         •        Intimate connection with the land – in order to survive, the people needed to know the land itself, where water was, where things grew, which animals could be found where.

         •        An empathetic connection with the animals – in order to hunt efficiently, those who depend on animals need to be able to anticipate what they will do – to get inside their heads.

         •        Self-restraint – in a small community which has little, greed does not work. You cannot kill more than you can eat, or the food will not still be there when you need it later.

         •        Custodial conservatism – there is evidence that the hunter-gatherers developed an operational understanding of ecology. Their religion was based on maintaining balance.

         •        Openness to Spirit. Religion was not a separate category of life for our ancestors. It was not something set aside for special places at special times – it infused their lives.

         •        Affinity for alternative modes of knowing. Reason was applied, but not only reason – all of the senses were engaged in processing the world, and intuition was honored.

         •        Egalitarianism. In the primitive tribes, all were considered equal – male and female, weak and strong.

         •        Generosity – Everything was shared; when one was fortunate to find food, all were fortunate, because you never knew when you would be the giver and when you would be the receiver.

         •        Mutuality – It was deemed important to be able to see oneself in others, and others in oneself, and to take differences lightly for the sake of maintaining the community which was essential to existence.

[romanticized?]

         Has Flinders romanticized our ancestors? Perhaps to some degree, but it is clear that in order to survive in their situation, there must have been values much like these in operation. It is hard to imagine that there were not times when these values were violated, but the survival of the community must have required strong measures in response.

         It is her contention that:

The values of Belonging were “adaptive” to certain conditions – specifically to a nomadic, subsistence level life supported by foraging and involving little contact with anybody outside one’s own kinship group. Yet while these values were “merely adaptive,” we lived by them for so long that they’ve formed the equivalent of a thick geological stratum in human consciousness: they’re deeply constitutive of whom we are and what we need, both as individuals and as a species.

[the agricultural revolution]

         It is, however, clear that these are not the values that dominate in modern society. So what happened?

According to Flinders, and archeologists, agriculture happened. No one knows exactly why, but those who had been nomads decided to settle down and, rather than hunt for food, to produce it. Flinders says:

Sunspots didn’t cause the Agricultural Revolution, and the Devil didn’t make us do it. Our own human desires and our own irrepressible ingenuity moved us along, and when the culture of Enterprise announced itself, it must have felt like the missing half of whom we were.

         One of the key events Flinders points to is the moment when the first farmer looked down at his plot and ripped out something he or she decided was a weed. Gatherers do not destroy or shape a field – they simply look for what they want and ignore the rest. But the farmer gets rid of those things which are in the way; some things are crop and others are weeds. He or she becomes God, deciding what will live and what will die. Flinders writes:

. . . human beings effectively re-imagined the natural world as if it existed solely for human use. They re-imagined it and then they remade it in the image of their own desires.

They settled down. They established property lines. They began to acquire goods. They could store food, and they could barter the excess. Settled people began to have larger families, and those families needed space as they grew up, and people needed to expand their holdings. Communities grew larger, towns and cities emerged, and with them, governments and laws. Archeology has established that the Agricultural Revolution took place in six different regions of the world independently. The old values no longer sufficed. The values of belonging were supplanted by what Flinders calls the “Values of Enterprise.”

[values of enterprise]

         •        connection with the land was replaced by ownership of it;

         •        empathic relationship with animals was replaced by ownership and control of them;

         •        mutuality was replaced by competition;

         •        community was replaced by rampant individualism

         •        balance was replaced by high risk;

         •        generosity was replaced by acquisitiveness;

         •        inclusiveness was replaced by exclusiveness;

         •        self-restraint was replaced by extravagance and exploitation;

         •        intuition and other ways of knowing were replaced by exclusive rationality;

         •        spirituality was replaced by materialism.

         Flinders does not suggest that this happened overnight, but it happened decisively. You will note that she does not label the Values of Belonging as “feminine” values, and the Values of Enterprise as “masculine” values, as some might. She sees the earlier values as shared by men and women. She also does not label the earlier ones as “good” and the later ones as “bad.”

[seeing with both eyes]

         The central thesis of Flinders’ book is that we must learn to see with both eyes. The metaphor comes from her experience as a child of having a very weak eye which required treatment. If there is not balance to the eyes, one can never see three-dimensionally. To be whole, one must see through both eyes.

         She acknowledges that the values of belonging are not sufficient. She does not suggest that we should try to set our clocks, or our values, back to the hunter/gatherer era. The problem we have, as she sees it, is that our ancestors took the easy way out. Instead of engaging in the hard work of combining the new with the old, they pushed the old aside.

         Something else was pushed aside – women. Whereas women were equal in the hunter/gatherer stage, in the Enterprise era, women were relegated to second class status. (We have tended to look back at women as relatively equal during the agricultural era and downgraded only with the coming of the industrial age, but Flinders links the agricultural and industrial under the heading of the enterprise era and sees the beginning of female denigration in the Agricultural Revolution. )

         As she sees it, the values which were pushed aside, were linked to the women who were pushed aside, and so women became identified with all those values that were no longer considered productive. Mutuality, compassion, generosity, intuition, inclusiveness, expressiveness and spirituality all became female, and dis-valued by the culture.

[the role of religion]

                   I am, not surprisingly, fascinated by how Flinders sees the role of religion in this process. For one thing, she suggests that the accounts of the creation in the Book of Genesis are symbolic of the shift to the enterprise values. In place of the Values o Belonging, we have a powerful male divinity creating the world not for co-operation, but for the purpose of human exploitation. Rather than a spiritual presence in everything, there is now a divinity “up there” - separate from the world, functioning as a patriarch. And then that deity, rather than being readily accessible to all, can be experienced only through the mediation of a priestly class.

         Flinders suggests that it was not really safe to leave women in charge of the old values of belonging without some control - who knows where they might have gone with them. Fortunately, there were some males who were not really well suited by temperament or circumstances to Enterprise, so they were set up to control the religious institutions to which the values of belonging were attached. Flinders writes:

As priests, clergymen, and religious functionaries of all kinds, these men would specialize in ceremony and doctrine. They would bring under strict scrutiny the more troublesome components of “religiousness” – mysticism in particular. There would be no place in the new scheme of things for the idea that ordinary folk could experience [the holy] firsthand. The one God would be worshiped now as Lord, King, and Master, from a great distance, and worshiped through appointed intermediaries.

         She goes on to suggest:

Understanding this dynamic helps us see why misogyny is so perennial a theme in institutional religion, expressed directly as hostility toward actual women, but indirectly too in the fear revealed by some religious leaders on occasion that they themselves might be seen as effeminate for embracing values that fall outside the ordinary masculine code.

         Formal religion, as Flinders sees it, has been used as a means of controlling the challenge to Enterprise values by the values of Belonging, rather than as a means of mediating between them. It hasn’t always been easy. Look at what we know about the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Do they support competition and exploitation and exclusivism and privilege? Clergy have often managed to interpret them as if they did.

         Flinders uses the examples of Homer, and Buddha, Ba’al Shem Tov, Teresa of Avila, St. Francis, William Blake, Gandhi, John Woolman (the Quaker abolitionist), Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Addams, John Muir, and Martin Luther King, as people who have worked to try to focus our attention on the importance of the Values of Belonging, but the supporters of Enterprise have not been readily open to compromise.

[seeking balance]

         It is Flinders’ contention that the challenge we face is the challenge of establishing a balance between the Values of Belonging and the Values of Enterprise. We cannot go back to the past, but it is clear from the lives we lead and the medications we need to get through the days, that there is something missing in the modern world, and she suggests that what is missing is respect for the values of Belonging. She writes:

. . . suppose that we really are wise enough and brave and resourceful enough to accomplish the melding of our two value systems that our ancestors did not. What would an ethos look like that honored the exuberant, innovative impulses of Enterprise (even while curbing Enterprise’s inclination toward dominance and exploitation) but never ever lost sight of the deep, earth-centered wisdom of Belonging?

In certain respects, it would look very much like the combined agendas of a great many people who’ve never heard of either Belonging or Enterprise: environmentalists; advocates for children, the homeless, the disabled, and campaign finance reform; feminists; peace workers; artists; educators; and civil rights activists – at the very least. . . .

. . .The absolutely all-important key to bringing Belonging and Enterprise into equilibrium is the spirit in which we approach difference itself and the particular issues that would seem to divide us.

         I do not know enough anthropology to know how reliable is Flinders’ reading back of the Values of Belonging into primitive times. What I am certain of is the validity of her description of the conflict in our times of the Values of Belonging with the Values of Enterprise, the domination by the latter, and the human misery that results.

[progress?]

         What she has labeled “The Values of Enterprise” have contributed to our progress, but the underlying question is the degree to which that progress means that we are truly better off as human beings. Each step in our supposed “progress” has caused new problems that we have tried to meliorate. The rates of cancer, heart disease and mental illness that plague us are linked inexorably to our so-called progress. Life expectancy has been extended in many countries, but are those lives worth living? To what degree has the “quality of life” improved for most people? I recently encountered and used the statistic that serfs in the middle ages actually had more leisure time for family and festivity than today’s executives. Is this progress?

         I began to wonder about the role that Karl Marx played in this process. He viewed religion as having failed the people and called for a radical change in the economy that would, in effect, reflect what Flinders has labeled the Values of Belonging. “From each according to his ability to each according to his need.” What was the response of Capitalism? Sheer panic. Marxism was a threat to the status quo! But the truth was, it was not something all that new or foreign: it was largely a restatement of the Values of Belonging – an affirmation of human responsibility for community. It failed of practical implementation. But would it have failed had it not encountered the overwhelming hostility of the capitalist world?

         And how did capitalism respond domestically to the threat of communism? Suddenly there was revolutionary social welfare legislation to protect the neediest among us; and there was protection for workers from exploitive employers; and in every industrialized nation but one, there was the implementation of universal health care. Great progress was made to stave off the threat of a worker’s revolution.

         But look at what has been happening during the last US administrations – and I do not mean only the present one, although it has accelerated the process. Government has decided that it is more responsible for rewarding the wealthy than caring for the weak. We have taken money from preventive programs and used it to build prisons; we have cut off welfare for the poor and reduced taxes for the wealthiest; now we are freeing employers to demand overtime work without compensation; productivity is up and wages are down, and jobs are being exported to places where it can be obtained even more cheaply. Look at the domestic and international policies of the American government and you see the Values of Enterprise writ large with no gesture, no matter how small, to the Values of Belonging – unless you include the funding of religious groups out of tax income, and those with their hands out are not, for the most part, those who are engaged in doing good.

[advocates for change]

         So who is to stand up for change?

         I believe the hope lies in religious communities which at least have a foot in the Values of Belonging. When you look at the Principles and the practices of Unitarian Universalist churches today, there is a clear commitment to the Values of Belonging. But we are always in danger of retreating from confrontation. It is controversial for us to stand for co-operation and community, for ecological responsibility and world community, for generosity and mutuality, for diverse spirituality rather than a single approved form. It is a threat when we affirm:

         The inherent worth and dignity of every person;

         Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;

         Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth . . ;

         A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;

         The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process;

         The goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all; and

         Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

         These, I suggest, are manifestations of the Values of Belonging, and they are out of step with the Culture of Enterprise. “Idealists” they say, and I beam. “Bleeding heart liberals” we are called and I wear the badge proudly. We are not here to make life easy for ourselves, we are here to do what we can to make life better for all people, in the belief that spending our energy in that way makes life better for us too.

         Reading Carol Lee Flinders’ book has helped me focus on the task we face. I commend it to you also.