Andreas Lloyd

Last Thursday I attended a showing of a documentary on the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf. After the film, there was a concert where Ida Bach Jensen, who composed the score for the film, performed.

It was a magic 40 minutes, and it gave me time to digest some of the themes and thoughts of Ekelöfs poetry. The following is a sort of summary of my thoughts.

Ekelöf writes:

Seeking stable ground in life.
Everything is fluid. Everything deceives us. Everything lures us into traps. To misunderstandings. Misconceptions. The only thing that does not waver is death. To think of death. To see life through death is to provide a pedal point to the dizzying uncertain melody we live.

Elsewhere he writes something along the lines of:

She staggers to stay upright

I find that intensely poetic. A condensation of a greater truth: That to be in balance you are always moving towards a disequilibrium. Always compensating to stay upright. Staggering back and forth. Like a tree in the wind. Like a child learning to ride a bicycle. Whether it is staying put or moving forward, maintaining balance requires constant work. To remain flexible.

In the same way, a major theme in Ekelöf’s work is how the good and the evil, the ugly and the beautiful are intertwined. They depend on the juxtaposition, the contradiction. They can exist only through each other.

Nothing can exist by itself. Nothing is pure and clean. Everything is raw, mixed and implacably honest. Like punk.

We may try to ignore it. Filter out the ugly and inconvenient. But it will only make us less flexible. Less in balance.

Instead, we have to see the ways in which the ugly highlights the beauty.

At the concert, the clean, clear almost crystalline spirituality of the music was deflated by the laughter, conversation and clinking of plates and cutlery from the café outside.

At first it annoyed me. But then I realized that it was the very dissonance of the ambient sounds of the café that gave the music its depth. And the ethereal spirituality of the music was underlined by the mundane chatter from which it sought to escape.

The beautiful and ugly complemented each other. It resulted in a calm sense of wholeness. Of balance.

It is the unpredictable, the unfinished, which creates the magic of the moment. We are never ready. We are always caught by surprise. It forces us to recalibrate. To stagger or fall.

On Saturday, I went to see a play that revolved around stories of the sea. As the play ended, they projected big photo of the wide open blue sea onto the stage.

I looked out at the sea. Exploring my newfound sensibility of the imperfect, I sought out the unexpected. The ugly. That which is set apart and breaks the harmony. The crack in the mirror. The matter out of place. That which is not in balance.

At first I couldn’t see it.

The sea is quiet, mirroring the sky in a plethora of blue nuance.
So beautiful. So pure.

Then I realize that the thing that doesn’t belong is me. The man. The boat. The attempt at control.

A tiny speck of intent merely tolerated in this vast aimless flow.

I’ve started a new writing project over at the Borgerlyst blog. It is a longer essay on the development of democracy. Of course, there is no one model and understanding of democracy that can match all of the ideas that are related to democracy. So I’m trying to focus on a Danish context (the essay is written in Danish, too).

I’m writing the essay in installments, and there’ll probably be around 15 installments in total. I’ll publish two installments a week, and the first post in the series is up on the Borgerlyst blog now.

So why am I undertaking this project? I think we can learn a lot from how our current understanding and use of democracy has developed. It can help us explore the values that we have come to take for granted. But it can also help us see that the only constant element in democracy is that fact that it has undergone development and change throughout its history. Constantly evolving to match the values and conflicts in our society. And I hope such an exploration can help initiate a bigger conversation on the development of democracy in 21st century.

It is with great humility that I undertake this project. I’m no democracy expert. I am not writing this to expound some great truth. I am writing this to learn. And I hope that you’ll come along and learn with me. The text is in a continual state of beta. In development – much like the democracy that it endeavours to describe.

I’m writing this to show that democracy is not some single and simple model and solution to be implemented and maintained. It is an unending process that we have to develop together, learning from our mistakes as we go along. And as this history also will show, democracy can easily be lost once we begin to take it for granted…

A month ago, my old colleagues at Socialsquare posted a short video interview with meon how the internet is changing business. The interview was an edited excerpt of a longer interview where I also talked about KBHFF as a concrete example of a networked, open source organisation. To me, that was the most interesting part of the interview.

So I’m very happy to find that they’ve put up another edited excerpt from the interview, focusing on KBHFF:

I completely forgot to mention this here. But it is definitely still worth mentioning: My remix of Kevin Kelly’s book Out of Control has been published as a kindle ebook on Amazon.

Kevin Kelly contacted me last summer to hear if I’d be willing to have the remix published for the Kindle, and I said I’d be thrilled. I did want to make some smaller, cosmetic changes to the text – but being away travelling, I didn’t have the time to do so. Maybe some other time.

Full disclosure: I won’t make a penny off this remix being on Amazon. All the money will go to Kevin Kelly who did write the whole thing. I merely rearranged some of the words.

Recently, I went to visit my old colleagues at Socialsquare to catch up. They also did a little interview with me about KBHFF, the Copenhagen food co-op I’m involved in, and how I see that the internet is changing business in general.

Yesterday, they posted this little video of some of the main points from the interview:

I must admit I find talking about “how the internet is changing business” in general to be rather diffuse subject matter. Business is such a broad field that it’s pretty difficult to claim that all of these trends are equally applicable to all sectors. I prefer very concrete examples and stories that can elucidate these new trends in a manner that’s easier to grasp. I did talk a lot about the food co-op in the interview. But as Kim writes in his blog post, they used that part in relation to a project with Aarstiderne. Who knows, maybe they’ll share it later on…

It is the repressed that is expressed in art. In this way, art has the same function in society that dreams have for the individual — even though we don’t always remember or understand the symbols of our dreams.

- Niels I. Meyer, K. Helveg Petersen & Villy Sørensen: “Revolt From The Center” (1978)

One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as ‘that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you’re right.’ If you don’t have that, if you think you’ve got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated.

- Saul Alinsky

As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Humankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.

- Abraham Joshua Heschel

Living and working in the kibbutzim of the Arava, it’s easy to forget the outside world. The kibbutz world is quite small, especially in Neot Semadar.

In Neot Semadar, there is no radio or television. No mobile phones in public. Newspapers are available only in the newspaper room. Internet only in the internet room. The outside world is only available to the extent that you seek it out and bring it with you into the kibbutz.

There is no money inside the kibbutz because there are no places where you can spend money. And so there is no reason to carry money with you. No doors are locked. Trust is abundant.

There is no pomposity. Everybody is equally poor. Everybody works 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. Everybody eats the same food in the dining hall. Nobody seems to shirk or complain. Everybody is there because they want to be there. It is the life they want to lead at this point in their lives.

There are no advertisements. No banners or billboards or signs or flyers or stickers. No unexpected grabs for your attention. No hi-jacking of your train of thought. You learn to be with your undistracted self. You calm.

Living in Neot Semadar reminded me of the anarchist society described in Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction novel The Dispossessed. The anarchists live on an arid and desolate planet called Anarres. They migrated there from the rich and fertile planet Urras on the condition that they would be left alone to develop their own kind of society on their own terms. They accepted the devil’s bargain of moving away to Anarres in order to be able to live according to their ideas and values, accepting that they would leave behind everybody else to the war, insecurity and oppression of the regimes they opposed on Urras.

The parallel to the Arava kibbutzim is pretty striking to me: They live an isolated, quiet life far from the conflict. They have resigned from relating to the conflict. They have given up taking any active part in the peace process and attempting to solve the conflict. Instead they focus on making their own communities as peaceful, beautiful and serene as possible. They live in peace in a land at war.

These are people who have grown up with the fact of the occupation of the Palestinian Territories and the Golan Heights, which has lasted for almost 45 years now. To most of them, the conflict is a fact of life. Unsolvable and bitter. Even though they all want peace, they don’t see how it can ever be achieved when extremists are so thoroughly entrenched on both sides. Rather than spending their energy fighting for an impossible cause, they have chosen to live in a beautiful parallel universe where a small community live in trustful, loving cooperation.

At first, I was fascinated by the strength of their community. Of how much they have achieved out there in the desert. And I relished the opportunity to be part of such caring, tightly-knit communal life. I enjoyed the undisturbed peace of the desert immensely. It is something that I would wish that everyone could experience. It is the perfect counterpart to balance the stressed-out, over-exposed, too-busy experience of living in the city. I think a lot of people would be much happier living in a place like Neot Semadar.

But looking back on my experiences there, I wonder whether it will ever really be okay to give up and ignore the conflict like this? When resourceful, intelligent and caring people like these have given up working to resolve the conflict, how can it ever be resolved?

It highlights the delicate balance between being true to your values and fighting for what is right on one hand, and taking care of yourself, exploring your interests and leading a good, peaceful life on the other. I know a lot of people who have been very dedicated activists, and who have taken it upon themselves to fight to resolve great systemic issues. And at some point, it has become too much for them, and they’ve collapsed with stress or depression or exhaustion from the never-ceasing crush of the fight.

The question is, how much should you be willing to sacrifice for peace? Is it ever possible to balance your desire for a better world for all with your desire to live better life yourself? Can you lead a good life when so many people don’t have equal opportunity to do so?

I guess most people can. Even the most dedicated idealists eventually mellow out and focus on the small scale of their own life and their immediate community. They tire of the constant struggle. They aren’t saints. They want to raise their kids in peace and they want to eat good food and laugh and drink and sing songs just like everybody else.

What irks me when the kibbutzniks ignore the conflict is the sheer proximity of it all: All Israelis have their share of the responsibility of resolving this conflict. Just like all Palestinians have their share. But when Israelis choose not to work to resolve the conflict, they indirectly accept the status quo. A status quo that leaves them free to live the lives they want to live but keeps the Palestinians unfree and unable to do the same.

It doesn’t really matter how beautiful and egalitarian a life you choose to lead if you refuse to relate to a political situation that keeps your neighbours unable to do the same. I’m not blaming the kibbutzniks for the fact that the conflict is still unresolved. Far from it. The extremists on both sides are obviously the biggest culprits on that account. But as Edmund Burke is supposed to have said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

How close do you need to be to a problem to feel an obligation to help solve it? When we look around and see other people engaged in solving that problem, does that make it okay for us to step away? Can you give up relating to a problem without even trying to solve it?

Once we give up trying, we give up hope. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is suffocating from lack of hope. They haven’t given up but only because they don’t have any other options but to keep going. They need our help to restore that hope. I hope we have some hope to spare.

My initial interest in going to Israel and Palestine was driven by my fascination with the kibbutz as a unit of community. A weird 20th century socialist utopian sort of colonial settlement where people live together, sharing livelihoods and living in an state of acknowledged interdependence. In a century marked by a string of failed utopian experiments, the kibbutz was “an exemplary non-failure” as Martin Buber called it. And as I am a leftist with a bit of a weakness for utopian fantasies, I wanted to experience the kibbutz myself and learn from kibbutzniks’ experiences and mistakes.

From the beginning of the kibbutz movement (the first kibbutz was founded in 1910), the kibbutz was in part a military tool used to claim land in Palestine. Many of the early kibbutzim were built as part of the so-called “tower-and-stockade” campaign in the 1930s. Basically, the settlers arrived in the morning and had one day to set up tents, a watch-tower with a spotlight and a stockade for basic defense. Because that very night, they would be attacked by local bedouins or Palestinians who saw the kibbutzim as yet another landgrab.

Examining the history of Israel, I realized that the country is the last colonial power. It has used 19th century colonialist tactics of settlement, immigration and defense to establish a 20th century Jewish colonial settlement in the Middle East (there are, of course, marked differences from the establishment of other colonies in that the Jewish people didn’t have a state of their own before, and were fleeing from terror and genocide in both Europe and the Middle East).

Throughout the early history of the Jewish settlement of Palestine and the foundation of the state of Israel, the kibbutz has stood as the archetypical Israeli settlement, and thus an symbol of Israeli independence and resourcefulness. But whereas the settlements of earlier colonial eras typically were built to mirror the conservative values of the empires that funded them, the kibbutzim were built on socialist and even anarchist values.

There are now more than 270 kibbutzim in Israel and the occupied territories. But since the big kibbutz debt crisis of the mid-1980s, more than 75% of the kibbutzim have been privatised. This means that these kibbutzim no longer have collective economies. Rather than following the old socialist credo of everybody working according to ability and receiving according to need, the individual kibbutz members now own their own houses and some shares in the kibbutz farm and factory, and are not under any obligation to work in the kibbutz. These kibbutzim have become ordinary villages where the villagers happen to co-own the local industry.

Following my utopian slant, I was interested in the 25% of the kibbutzim that still have collective economies. A fair number of these are among the last wave of kibbutzim that settled the Arava desert in the early 1980s. The Arava desert is an extremely inhospitable place. Annual rainfall is around 20 cm, and there are around 350 days of sunshine each year. Summer temperatures easily reach 45 degrees celsius. Very few people have been living there for the past 3000 years. But it is part of the state of Israel, and as such, the Israelis are dedicated to making the most of even these barren parts of the country. To make the desert bloom, as David Ben-Gurion put it.

Like other waves of kibbutz settlement, these Arava kibbutzim received support from the Israeli state (and the Jewish National Fund before that) to get started. But even so, settling the most remote and unhospitable part of the country would only attract the most idealistic and/or foolhardy people. Thus, the kibbutzim in the Arava are mostly populated by a mix of idealists. From the reform jews of Yahel and Lotan to the socialists of Grofit and the anarchists of Samar to the ecologists and bird watchers of Lotan and Ketura to the self-learning organic farmers of Neot Semadar.

In short, the Arava is the freaky fringe of Israel. A place so remote that it provides space and shelter for some of those social experiments that there is no room for in the rest of the country. And that’s where I ended up spending most of my three months in Israel.