ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
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racism to be a primary necessity around which wider social change would
unfold. For many in these movements, the abolishment of one specific form of
hierarchy was viewed as necessary for radical social transformation. In such
movements,
people often reasoned:
“Once we dismantle this form of
hierarchy, other forms will dissolve as well.” In this way, what is necessary was
conflated with what is sufficient. And still today, we often believe that if we
succeed in the necessary task of abolishing one specific form of hierarchy, then
this necessary act will be sufficient to create a free society.
What is necessary is not the same as what is sufficient. For instance, if we
want to boil water, we need to fufill a few necessary conditions: water and a
heat factor which can raise the temperature of the water to 212 degrees. We
recognize that if we have only one of the necessary conditions, a pot of water
for example, it alone will represent an insufficient condition for boiling water.
In the same way, if we have only a heating coil raised to 212 degrees with no
water present, the heating coil will represent an insufficient condition as well.
Or, if we have a pot of water at one end of a room and the heating coil raised
to 212 degrees at the other end of the room, we will still lack the sufficient
condition for boiling water—even though we have organized the necessary
conditions for boiling water to occur at the same time. If we think only in
terms of what is necessary, we may spend hours staring bewilderedly at a pot
of unheated water, or at a heating coil, or we may move the heating coil and
the pot of water around the room, wondering why we are unable to make the
water boil.
Obviously, most people do not have to think critically about the
necessary and sufficient conditions for such everyday activities as boiling water.
We know intuitively and rationally through conventional logic that the
sufficient condition for boiling water represents the accumulation of the
necessary conditions for boiling water (water and a heat factor), arranged in a
particular physical and temporal relationship to each other. In this way, we
understand implicitly that the sufficient condition represents a holistic,
accumulative, and integrative whole comprised of all necessary conditions for
making water boil.
However, we run up against the limitations of the boiling water analogy
when we begin to think about the necessary and sufficient conditions for social
and ecological change.
For while the conditions that allow one to possess a
pot and a heating coil might be clearly social and arbitrary, the mechanics of
boiling water dwell largely within a world of physical, inorganic processes that
pertain to the movement of heated water molecules. Such an event can occur
independently of human action, as in the case of a forest fire boiling ground
moisture into wisps of steam.
In contrast, the event of revolution is a
distinctlyjoc/z?/ phenomenon existing within the realm of potential freedom