I promised I would take you for Teatime at Marshbeck. The first instalment was a week ago on Sunday 9th April 2006. This is the second of three instalments. The story first appeared in the revised 1983 edition of The Sane Alternative by James Robertson. It is the afternoon of 5th January 2050. It’s difficult now to imagine how things must have been when life for most people was empty of meaning - before they were seized, as we are, by the commitment to develop our potential as persons, in society, as part of planet Earth. Everything must have seemed quite different for them - much emptier, you would think - and yet they used the same words - like sane, humane and ecological - as we do to refer to those aspects of life.’
Emily interrupts, ‘Yes, and human potential is another good example. A lot of people used to think that developing human potential meant escaping to places like ashrams in India or beaches in California. There was even a ‘human potential movement.’ Whereas we now take it for granted that developing our potential as humans means living our ordinary daily lives in creative, productive, enriching ways, including our relationships with other people and the natural world around us.’
Indira chips in, ‘Those old people must have seen what was coming, don’t you think? After all, history makes it pretty obvious that by the early ‘80s a change of direction was taking place. Here in England they had celebrated the bicentenary of the Industrial Revolution - two hundred years of fantastic progress on the material side of life - and all their good writers and thinkers had begun to discuss what post-industrial society was going to be like - the ‘coming age of human growth,’ ‘psycho-social invention and innovation,’ ‘personal self-development in an eco-planetary culture,’ and so on - maybe they still felt a bit awkward with these concepts and phrases, but their vision corresponded more or less to what actually happened.’
‘That’s not correct historically, you know,’ says Eskimo. ‘We tend to remember now only the people who got it more or less right, and whose books and recordings still have something interesting to say to us. But most of the experts and spokespeople seventy years ago were firmly imprisoned in an altogether different set of assumptions.
Take a simple example, which I happen to know about. Many people, like me, have a natural capacity for healing, in the same way as many people have aptitudes for swimming, or music, or whatever. No-one today doubts that most people have some capacity for healing which can be trained and developed with practice. But in the early ‘80s almost all the accepted people in medicine and science, including medical and scientific writers, ignored or rejected it. It wasn’t until about 1990 that they really began to take it seriously and to train healers in a big way. It was then, of course, that they began to conquer the killer diseases of industrial society like cancer.’
‘Exactly the same was true of economics,’ Pik says. ‘You have to put on a different mindset to understand what people then thought economics was about. It’s fascinating to hear and watch the speeches and discussions on the old tapes and videos. Even in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s one of the main aims - this is what ‘full employment’ meant - was that as many people as possible should work away from their homes, and should do their work for people and organisations, and on tasks, unconnected with their own lives. That seems crazy to us, I know. But for people then ‘employment,’ ‘unemployment,’ ‘jobs’ and so on, were passionately important.
‘Some historians of the transformation argue that all the debate and discussion about that kind of economics was just a complex tangle of empty quibbles and sophistries, with which the ambitious and clever people blinded the rest and achieved power and privilege for themselves.
‘But the riots of the 1980s showed that these questions were real and relevant to people’s lives. It must have been a bit like the theological debates (how many angels can stand on the point of a pin and all that) which mattered so much to people six or seven hundred years ago and then seemed such nonsense as soon as the Middle Ages were over.’
'I suppose all this was connected,’ says Herbert, ‘with what we see as the over-masculine psyche of people at that time. I mean, they always wanted to push outwards and spend their energies on someone else’s patch, not on their own - working in jobs outside their home, sending their children out to school, trading with people in other countries, converting people with different beliefs, sorting out other people’s problems instead of their own.
‘It was only about sixty years ago, you know, that people in the so-called ‘developed’ countries realised that putting their own way of living on a permanently sustainable footing was the most effective way of helping people in the ‘less developed’ countries to do the same. When my grandfather joined the Nigerian representatives at the U.N. just over fifty years ago, the old hands were still recalling the panic which had hit the place in the late 1980s when that simple fact began to sink in.’
