On Goats and Freedom

What could you do without, if doing without made you whole again?

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We live in a society that is built with, and upon violence. Violence, though it is usually carefully sequestered beyond our sight and awareness, is ubiquitous and virtually unavoidable to any of us. This violence, as it exists between humans is wearily familiar in terms of gender, class, race, age and so forth. But we are no longer able to pretend that terrible violence is not extended by humans upon all of nature, including ourselves.

The costs of this violence are now becoming starkly evident, and utterly enmeshed in a system none of us like but few of us can escape, we can use terms like “anthropocene” and “sixth great extinction”, in the abstract, without a shudder, without feeling the horror that must accompany an appreciation of those realities as realities.

Society as we (post-modern folk) have known it will unravel in our lifetimes. It must, because the society of all life, on which our (industrial) human world draws parasitically, is unravelling before our eyes. Fictions of endless growth and technocratic solutions, fictions of human exceptionalism have conjured only the illusion of prosperity and security, whilst eroding, no, strip-mining the very basis of life. Even as we strive for, and gain ever more control over the details of nature, the whole lurches and veers into forms and patterns that we cannot predict, cannot even recognize.

A reckoning lies ahead for humanity. Few who have been paying attention would argue with this proposition. But what is one to do about it? We make “sacrifices” to simplify our lives; reduce our footprints; we seek to feed and clothe ourselves in a way that minimizes our complicity in the ‘machine’. But we fail. We fail because the ‘machine’ is us. The ‘software’ that invokes, drives and makes coherent this creaking machine of violence and indifference we call industrial society is our culture: Our dreams; our aspirations; our insecurities; our fears; our ambition; our sense of manifest destiny – the idea that we are going somewhere; our sadness; our belief that in the end we are nothing more than a tiny fragile self, alone, in an unspeakably vast universe: our emptiness.

How could it be otherwise? Can we hope to eradicate centuries of accreted pathogenic culture and ideas, bound as they are into an alluring alloy with ideas of individual freedom, escape from drudgery, material wealth and the excitement of ‘progress’ with it’s Mars colonies, Artificial Intelligence, electric cars and shiny new gadgets? Many writers have called for a life-serving or life-centric way of living, and as clearly right and necessary as this is, finding that way-of-life remains elusive. We live in a world where, even if your home has not been stolen from its indigenous owners, it has (probably) been stolen from its indigenous animals and plants. The food you eat is (probably) produced by the ‘machine’, using machines and delivered to you by the machine (yes, even your lentils). You (probably) cook it using fuel provided by the machine, and your wastes are probably swept away in various streams to be dealt with according to the dictates of economic efficiency by the ‘machine’.  And you pay for all this by selling a big part of your short life to the machine. The machine offers us stuff. It offers us mechanized ease. It offers us contentment wrapped in plastic. It promises us resonance with the world, and delivers only a facsimile, in short-lived, bite sized pieces, paid for on credit. It promises freedom, though who knows what exactly, is meant by that slippery idea?

Can we extricate ourselves, even for a short time from the machine? Can we even begin to imagine ourselves without stuff and distraction and ambition? Addicted to stuff, and driven to acquire ever more by our crushing emptiness, can we really claim to be anything other than in thrall to, nay, part of the rapacious hunger that is destroying our world?  What would it take to create enough freedom for ourselves that we might learn (or even just glimpse) a different way of being? A different way of being human? Only then could we know if we truly want to be free. Pat McCabe writes of the “Thriving Life Paradigm”, suggesting that we do not even know what it is to be human beyond the hegemony of ‘power-over’. This is a vision that might look a lot like communion: a rediscovery of our one-ness with Earth and cosmos, and to find this, we need to strip back our material ‘needs’; to put our ambition (and a lot of other pathologies) aside, and to expand our ‘self’ to encompass, or at least include, our fellows and the ‘natural’ world. But who, amongst the multitude of post-modern humans on this planet could imagine having almost nothing, could be comfortable in the faith that nature will provide tomorrow’s needs tomorrow? Is such not the condition of the destitute or the foolish? A victim of war in Tigray or Yemen? Is not such an orientation identical to what we have called ‘under-developed’ for seventy years, and ‘backward’ for three-hundred years? In the ‘developed’ capitalist world, such an orientation is understood reflexively as tragic: a tragic waste of human potential. A state of curtailed possibilities. Such a view rests firmly in the materialist orthodoxy (some would say fundamentalism) that has dominated European-derived thought for centuries. In that vision, ‘real’ reality is material, and the maximization of control over the material (and the maximization of our share of it) are our true and only purpose, and the measure of a worthy life. All else: spirit, meaning, resonance, are illusions.

Post-modern late-capitalist society has a lot to say about freedom. Freedom from oppression. Freedom from drudgery. Freedom to do what I want. Freedom to worship the God of my choosing. There is this: if spirit, meaning and resonance are illusions – if material is all there is – then what I experience as my ‘self’, is necessarily the expression of my mind – of my brain. ‘I’ exist as a flickering candle in a vast universe, (actually, yet another illusion, this one made of electrical impulse and jelly, but one I can’t help but accept as a provisional truth). ‘I’ exist, as a fundamentally separate being to you, and to all else, living or ‘dead’. The architecture of materialism contains herein, the inevitability of the Individual. Or more precisely, the ‘free’ individual. And as much as this point is laboured in political discourse, it is something we all know (at some level) to be wrong: As David Foster Wallace wrote:

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.” David Foster Wallace

Freedom, somewhat paradoxically, comes with some onerous conditions. If you are reading this, you are probably human, and therefore a social animal, and there is the first constraint. Humans can only be truly free (aside from certain pathologies) if they are part of a community, quite simply because community is our part of our essential nature. Now this is tricky. Traditional societies have always included some degree of hierarchical structure, based perhaps on gender, age, or origins, and these structures prescribe social roles to a great degree. Some people were or are a lot less ‘free’. ‘Free’ as in liberal-style social mobility and lifestyle choice. ‘Backward’ societies, we in the industrial West call them. Now, whilst it is impossible to certify that all people at all times have been satisfied with the life that was available to them, those constraints were often (if not nearly always) inseparably bound up with inclusion. I am a part of this band of hunter-gatherers the way my hand is a part of my body. ‘We’, in such a society, is more important than ‘I”. The self, in such a setting, is not coterminous with the body. For many indigenous societies, those constraints told a person who they were and to which group they belonged – just as in industrialised society, our freedom tells us that we do not belong, indeed, that there is nothing to belong to.

For those of us living in and shaped by industrial society, self-as-ego is very much more tightly understood, felt and defended. We are dismembered: hands, feet and livers all going their own way and rarely seeing, let alone seeking, common cause. Where we share values, it is to applaud the attainment of individuality. To be ‘mature’ in industrial society is to be financially and emotionally independent, functionally separated from birth family, origins and the messiness of ‘nature’. Given the degree to which our society functions on an ideology of scarcity, that same individual almost inevitably finds him or herself competitively opposed to other individuals, in a never-ending struggle for supremacy (or just security).

Freedom in a group, if it is not to destroy the group, must be based in shared values. These may be inherited or discovered. They will be constantly negotiated. But writing from and (for the most part to) a society that talks a lot about ‘freedom’ but knows very little about it, what do I mean by freedom?

Political philosophers have used a lot of ink arguing between ‘positive freedom’ and ‘negative freedom’. What I want to suggest here fits neither well. I am talking about freedom to walk away. Freedom to not be implicated in oppression and destruction. Freedom from indifference. Freedom to be bound in obligations rooted in the natural world and a covenanted community. Freedom, thereby, to be fully realised as a human. (In the opposite sense of a factory-farmed pig or chicken, which cannot express its pig-ness or chicken-ness, as so lives a tragic half life, with constant access to feed and controlled temperatures, and a certainty of slaughter at the appointed, optimised hour). Not the empty human of individualist freedom (who can do anything, but cares for nothing), but the human whose freedom comes from embodied participation in Creation, in the World, with all the responsibilities and constraints that that implies. Belonging is never entirely ‘free’, but to be entirely ‘free’, one must be cut adrift, one must lose a quotient of humanity.

To taste this type of freedom, to even know there is a choice to make, one must strip back the material and psychological padding of industrial society, of everything one knows, everything one has always thought indispensable…face the world and make one’s way in it. Ironically, it may not be the hardship that is hard. Fear more the contortion of the self as it transitions from ‘human doing’ to ‘human being’. Not that we have not all been four years old and expert in ‘being’. We just ‘grew up’ and forgot.

In Goatwalking: A Guide to Wildland Living and a Quest for the Peaceable Kingdom, Jim Corbett asserts – based on his own extensive experience – that a human can obtain almost all of their nutrition from the milk of two goats. All that is lacking is Vitamin C and a few trace elements, both of which can generally be obtained through astute foraging. The relationship works well even in quite arid settings as the goat ‘purifies’ poor-quality water, turning it into milk, or even renders otherwise unavailable water from vegetation into water-as-milk, available to the human. The human-goat relationship can be largely violence free because the milking doe recognizes the regular milker as offspring – an honorary goat. Moving freely in open range situations, the goat is able to express its full range of goat-ness, whilst becoming emotionally bonded with the human, and the milk is given willingly. The human for their part uses their ecological understanding and higher-order thinking to manage grazing pressure – keeping the herd moving and taking care to protect particular communities, species and individuals.

Some violence is inevitable, to avoid the greater violence of environmental destruction, in that excess male kid goats must be slaughtered, but even this offers a way into deeper communion, for this killing is not the impersonal economic activity of the industrial meat-machine, but potentially a relationship of sacrifice – something most of our ancestors understood well.

Corbett comments that in human affairs, worthwhile discoveries usually turn out to be re-discoveries. One of his most important insights involves the Old Testament concept of Sabbath. Leaving aside specific details and prescriptions, and approaching the concept ecumenically, Sabbath, Corbett reminds us, is a state (as much as a time), of reflective appreciation.  In the state of Sabbath, a person understands that all the World is the work of God, and as such, is perfect as it is. In the state of Sabbath, no human should seek to improve that which cannot be improved.

Corbett’s further contention is that people wandering in small groups, accompanied by, and depending on goat’s milk for a significant part of their sustenance, are enabled to live in a state of sabbath – not just on Sundays, but almost always. This then, might be one path toward Pat McCabe’s Thriving Life Paradigm. So radical is this idea – to we post-modern folk at least – that few indeed can contemplate such a life without a degree of horror, and a slew of adjectives that would include ‘boring’, ‘hardship’, ‘deprivation’, ‘isolation’ and so forth.

But in this state of deep communion, a human becomes something startlingly greater: a co-creator. There is time to think, to make music or poetry, to sing and tell stories and to dream. There is time to know all the living beings of the land, and to contribute care where it is needed. One might be tempted to object that what is being described amounts to a perpetual holiday. And indeed it would. Holy-days.

In short, by living in such radical simplicity, humans can turn away from the inherently violent lifeways into which we were born. By taking today, only what we need, and trusting that tomorrow will provide sufficiency also, we may find ourselves living something a lot like an Arcadian state of nature. Destroying nothing, creating according to our nature.

Until the advent of major societal upheaval, it is vanishingly unlikely that the practice of Goatwalking will find even a shadow of popular uptake in any wealthy nation. The value-shifts, life-practices and privations are simply too great, and too foreign and are diametrically opposite to almost every value and understanding of the world we post-moderns have been brought up in. At a practical and political level, the enclosure of common lands in countries like Australia makes such a lifestyle necessarily fugitive. The value of the goatwalking experience is, nevertheless, manifold and powerful.

The experience of radical simplicity opens the way to radical self-reliance. Given our uncertain future, everyone should know how to look after themselves independent of society, because there is no certainty that the future will have a society that we recognize.

A ‘goatwalker’ learns what they can do without. The simplicity experienced through the course of the journey, transforms from (feeling like) deprivation layered on boredom, to a blossoming of possibilities. The experience is not (just) of asceticism, it also expands one’s understanding of what life can be and changes one’s ideas about what actually matters in the world.

It is a story for another day, but I have lived a life that resonated at least in part with Jim Corbett’s goatwalking. I have travelled with camels over extended periods of months and years in the deserts of southern Australia. It was a life that, alas, fell well short of Corbett’s Sabbatical standard. My family and I certainly sought to avoid the ‘epic’ thinking of the adventurer, and to ground each day’s travel in the day and the place, still, we made no real attempt to provide for ourselves either through the camels or from the land through which we passed, and so we travelled more like expeditioners, carrying our supplies of food with us. I certainly regret that it took another thirty years before Corbett’s Goatwalking came into my life! What did I learn from that time? I learned that I can do without almost everything. I learned that the simplest of lives, built around the rhythm of movement and animals could be delightfully full. I learned that Country delights in the slow passage of the walking traveller, and cannot resist making itself known. I learned that the '“middle of no-where” is very much somewhere. I learned that the kindness and help of strangers can be crucial at times, and that the people most likely to help are those with the least. I learned that there is another way to live.

Small group living, centred around the behaviours and needs of a herd of animals requires a de-centreing of the human, but also invites a de-centreing of the self. When the human has no-where they need to be, nothing they need to do, the self can (perhaps, and with a struggle), expand to encompass far more than is typically possible in industrial society. This opens the way to deeper connection to place, nature, (goats of course) and fellow humans.

The uncertainty of the future adds a further urgency to the experience: Several thousand years of ‘development’ has led too many humans to a state of separation from nature which has enabled mass exploitation and degradation of the world. Societal and ecological collapse is only making these pathologies worse, and the dire outcomes regularly depicted in American visions of apocalypse such as Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” can feel worryingly plausible. The best insurance against such inhuman futures is the continuation of alternative lifeways – those of indigenous people the world over – but also of lifeways such as goatwalking that can resonate with, and perpetuate the better parts of ‘western’ culture. Even as forces beyond our control push us ever closer to the edge, we have the capacity, and the responsibility, to find and elaborate better ways of being in the world.