I’d been watching too many shed design and refurbishment shows on cable, and mentioned a longstanding daydream about building a shed/reading room/art space/introvert cave to a friend who’s been a realtor for years.
“Having to run A/C through those old houses in D.C.? Changing all the windows? Oh, no. Build it right the first time.”
I love this principle. And if societies were more like sheds, this is exactly what we’d do.
The problem is that what’s considered “right” in both shed- and society-building changes with each generation. Engineering and ethical standards evolve. And in so many spheres, from technical design to human rights, yesterday’s good is barely today’s average.
Retrofitting two-hundred-year-old national value systems provokes so much backlash, so much violence. That violence isn’t just the frustration of the long-unheard, as King said of rioters during the 20th Century’s civil rights movement. The violence is also and largely the dominant culture rejecting what it perceives as outsiders attempting to change the rules under its nose.
The rules, the status quo says, are fine.
But all is not well. The insulation is shot; the windows are draughty; the AC keeps breaking down; people are killed fast and killed slow. The root of the status quo keeps producing rotten outcomes because everything, everything, bears after its kind.
So how do we proceed? Reformists and radicals have disagreed on this in every historical movement and still do today.
Reformists imagine that less energy is needed to tweak, twist, or redirect what already exists than to create from scratch. I get it. Radicals look at the root, recognize it’s got to go, and want to dig it out: for them it seems less trouble to build from scratch than to manage the resistance of everyone who’s already attached to the present. I get it.
Our writers and prophets tell us we can build new worlds while still in the midst of old ones. It must be possible: there’s no way to live in a house we’re tearing down. Whatever the appearance, though, we have to keep molding the world we have so it can become the world we want. And whatever the outcomes―we aren’t promised anything―we have to keep pressing. Octavia Butler put it thus:
The weak can overcome the strong if the weak persist.” ―Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower