behavior–it is these lived standards of
meaning to the concept of “value.”60
In order to realize this common bond, people must be able to turn and speak to each other over a common, public table. They must, in other words, be within the same geographic
location and same geological orientation, in order to realize their commonly shared values.
Kemmis was/is a Jeffersonian (pre-Louisiana purchase) democrat, who saw/sees the political crises to be resolved through a simple political means. Simply ask the question, he said:
Whether those of us who call ourselves liberals and those of us who call ourselves conservatives, all of whom are inhabitants of the West, can begin to turn to each other and begin to recognize what it is we have built together in terms of shared patterns of inhabitation and therefore of shared values.
That is the challenge of the West. If we can begin to understand how we have been shaped by this country, shaped in similar ways, not so that we think alike all the time, not so that we believe alike, but so that we in fact have developed some shared values that give us the capacity to do difficult and important work together, then on this basis we can begin to contribute to democracy and to the history of civilization.61
True representative he was, Kemmis suggested the answer to be the West has a response to the modern political crisis: it is the politics of local, inhibitory, agricultural-based communities, where people are forced together to face issues. It is the politics and community one would experience in Montana, if only the Feds would leave them alone.
While Kemmis’ response is in many ways attractive, it is also naïve. The Jeffersonian notion of politics was addressed by participants at the Constitutional Convention, and it was dismissed for good reason: Jefferson’s eclectic sampling of ideas (equality
from the Scottish Common Sense School,
epistemology from Locke, states of progress model of social development from Quesnay and the Scottish Enlightenment, and the idea primitive stages produced happier and more virtuous men from his own study of Indians) produced “in theory at least, very near to a stateless society under the benevolent leadership of what he called the natural aristocracy … that could have been used to justify the traditional societies of the Scottish Highland and Island clans and the Irish Tuaths as well as the Virginia society in which Jefferson lived.”62 In essence, Kemmis’ model moved against constitutional protections, without substituting any institutional means for testing and determining whether collective values are in any sense good or proper. This resulted in two further problems, both of which are related to bioregional theories in general.
First, as Lev Cherney notes in a critique of Sale’s argument, “the parameter of scale tends to be related to the level of reified power in a society as a largely dependent variable."63 In other words, these naturally occurring communities will be determined in large part by the existing power structures within the existing place, resulting in potentially isolated communities where citizens have experienced the same “hardships” or in potential dictatorships based upon “natural aristocracies.” This leaves open the question of whether minorities or less educated individuals will be allowed to contribute to the democratic process.
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A more solid, and therefore more confident understanding of how place-centered practices could transform public life would do much to make re-inhabitory politics more credible.
- Dan Kemmis, Community and the Politics of Place