Olympia
Institute
Quarterly

Editor
   Ben Colodzin, Ph.D.

An Interview With Bob Luitweiler

The summer after my first year at Antioch College in Ohio, we organized a seminar, and the basic question was, "why hasn't the world recognized the validity of a nonviolent way of life?" And in that process, we discovered the teachings of Mahatma Ghandi, which I found inspirational. And that was one reason why I took the stand that I later did as a conscientious objector during World War Two and served two years in prison - it was a kind of civil disobedience. Not only against the war, but against the draft system.

I don't think that government should conscript people to do anything, on the other hand it would be good for people to have the opportunity to go and serve, as in the Peace Corps. In fact the Peace Corps was patterned on a Quaker plan, and I met an awful lot of people in the Peace Corps, in other parts of the world, who got a whole different view of the situation. Of the terrible things that our imperialistic world is imposing on the weaker peoples of the world. Have you read Rigoberta Menchu? You also want to read BITTER FRUIT. That is the story of the Americans booting out the elected president of Guatemala, and instigating the totalitarian government which is responsible for 6 to 10 thousand Guatemalan Indians being killed. You know, we use the term "civilized", which means belonging to a civilization, which usually means belonging to an imperialistic form of government, and I am increasingly convinced that mentality and materialistic attitudes are the seeds of self destruction of the civilizations that spawn them.

Ben: What are some of the inspiring examples you have witnessed?

Bob: The one thing traveling did for me was to drive home the innate goodness of human beings. I often went to the part of the country where people would say it was dangerous. And it was amazing, the spirit with which you go to a place, brings out that spirit. And so, a recognition of that desire in people to be human, and to be kind, which my Quaker friends inspired in me while in high school, has colored my whole life.

What I saw in Denmark, for example, was that they had a government that was representing family farms... the whole economy of Denmark was controlled by the farmer's cooperatives, and it was the most democratic society in the world. This was Denmark in 1948, it's not so strong today, they face the problems that modern civilizations face everywhere, the power structures, and greed, and some people using others to rise to the top.

Anyway, at that time, the Danish folk high school movement was a nonacademic program that was inspiring to me, because the young people didn't come there to earn more money or to get a degree, the came there for the inspiration of the outstanding teachers that created the most democratic society in the world.

The Gandhian movement in India is one that has impressed me deeply. I traveled around India and visited Gandhi's rural development centers, which he called ashrams. And here were people from relatively well-off middle class homes in the city, who had moved out and build a mud hut in the village, and turned that into a center where they had schools for the children, and programs for the improvement of the agricultural practices, improvement for women's conditions - it's a long story to describe how complex the Gandhian rural development was. People talk about being "born again" - but I've never seen anything that fit so well as these middle-class people who were inspired by Gandhi and went out into some of the poorest villages in the world to make the rest of their lives, and they lived very humbly themselves. They didn't have the worst parts of poverty: they understood the basics of sanitation, they perhaps had a little better nutrition, and they had a little money to fall back on; other than that they lived very humbly.

Ben: And what happened to this movement?

Bob: Any social movement has a time and a place. I've learned that you cannot transpose one social movement to another time and place. It just doesn't happen. It's sort of like planting a plant in an environment it's not adapted to. And so the Gandhian movement was in a time and a place. It was at a time when India was stuggling to get its independence. It was in a place where they had a certain religious attitude. And one of the real problems in India is that the Indians can be a hero-worshipping people. And the "guru" is a person they may give their mind to, and follow the guru blindly. Guru meaning religious teacher. And when the guru is gone, if someone has given their mind to the guru, they don't know which way to turn. And this is part of the problem that happened in India, as I seet it. Although there were a lot of people who DID understand Gandhi, these people who ran those ashrams all over India... the vast majority of Indians simple followed Gandhi blindly, and then the guru was gone. And of course there was also the impact of the development of a capitalistic system in India, which wasn't village -oriented at all.

Ben: Have you heard about the "terminator seeds", the genetically designed food seeds that grow into food plants that do not reproduce seeds? The multinational corporations have recently been trying to bring them on line in the Third World, to make agriculture dependent on buying seeds rather than saving them, and India apparently is the focus of Gandhian-like resistance to this plan.

Bob: I have not, but I'm sure that plan won't work. The ordinary people of the world are not fools. I was talking to a fellow who lived in Ethiopia, and he said that one year he planted those "fancy seeds", and that nobody liked the corn. And that was the end of that. He didn't plant them again. I think the peasants of the world are quite intelligent. They are not going to be fooled. I don't think the book-learned corporation managers understand the wisdom or ordinary people. And this is one of the reasons for the great failure of community development programs of foreign aid, where some technical expert goes into another society... in the first place, they can't communicate with the local peasants. When I tried to start a school in Zanzibar, I was the only outside person in the whole country that was living with the rural people. The other outsiders came out of the cities to give them lectures and tell them what to do...

I tried to learn some of their language. I went to school and studied Swahili, but I didn't do as well as I would have liked. I got to a point where I could converse in it. What was amazing to me was to see in Zanzibar, these United Nations experts come rolling through, one after the other, and they had a whole office full of their reports, about how Zanzibar could pull itself up by its bootstraps if it could only learn how to grow food it could process, or develop this or that thing. But none of it reached the ordinary farmers. And this division between the intellectual, word-oriented people and the people who have their hands in the soil, is a chasm. And the failure, for example, in helping the Africans with the expanding Sahara desert is terrible. One reason they failed is that they didn't start out by learning what the peasants already knew. I've heard stories of groups going into northern Kenya and trying to introduce modern forestry methods, and then after they had been there for several years, discovered to their amazement that these people had a very deep forestry culture - they hadn't even bothered to listen to them.

I spent months studying the situation in Senegal... I talked with everybody in this country I could find who I thought was dealing with their needs and problems. I talked with people from CARE, with people in Peace Corps, people in organizations of all kinds... I think the one group I found that was understanding was the Rodale Institute, who worked with organic farming, and had a real understanding of the disruption of their whole economy as a result of the breakdown of their traditional agriculture. Chemical farming. The dams on the Senegal River, for example: what happened was that because the river was so flat, when the dams came in, the ocean salt water that had annually come up the river and killed the disease bearing snails stopped coming up. The liver disease became so bad if someone just put their hands in the water to wash clothes they could catch it.

Ben: What was your idea for the school in Zanzibar?

Bob: I was inspired by the Danish folk high schools, and I thought that in Zanzibar, where the imperial powers had done an outstanding job of cutting people off from their own history and their own traditions, and their self respect in the process, in the effort to "modernize" these children's thinking, they undermined their faith in their own parents, and their parents traditional values. And as a result they turned their society, which had been fairly integrated, into a society that was totally coming apart... A long story, and you've seen it among the American Indians, you see it everywhere in the world. Civilized people are trying - sometimes insidiously and sometimes honestly - to get indigenous people to give up their indigenous customs and become civilized. It's another aspect of the evils of civilization, that we're blind to other people's culture because we don't know our own. And this is a terrible thing. When we don't know our culture, don't know our roots, we don't know the beautiful things in our roots, and that they are precious and valuable to them, and to their whole value system in life, and their relationships with their parents and their community. And I think this is one of the reasons that our world is coming apart.

That's one of the things that Danish folk schools achieved, taking a group from the peasantry, that had suffered from the feudalistic period, adn trying to help them discover that they had a history that was something to be proud of. What it did for those Danish peasants was to give them a sense of pride in their own roots, to such an extent that they developed this extraordinary cooperative movement. The average Danish farmer belonged to several cooperatives, adn cooperatives was their life. And I worked on a farm in Denmark while I was learning Danish, and the young men after 9 hours of hard labor in the fields, would ride their bicycles into town to a youth group where they folk danced and read poetry. Can you imagine these young men, children of neighborhing farmers, reading poetry for recreation after working harvesting in the fields? This is the youth movement that came out of the folk high schools.

I see people learning how to grow plants, how to grow themselves, and out of this learning, how to grow communities.

In Zanzibar, my attempt to start such a school did not succeed. Actually, it was mostly the racism in that society with four cultural layers... it was a difficult environment to work in, and I didn't stick with it. I guess some people have to have somebody to hate, don't they?

Ben: What have you learned about how to live well on the earth?

Bob: You know, I've found that in every society there are some people doing that. In every society, I see two strains: one is trying to make more money, and get more power, and the human strain, which keeps coming through, and may be guided by their human sensitivities to build a stronger neighborhood, and has an eagerness to create new forms of cooperation.

Shall I share my vision? As a result of being inspired by the Gangdian movement and what I've seen in other parts of the world from the effects of imperialism, I would like to see little centers where families of leaders from depressed villages could come and live for a few months to a year, where they could learn how to run a cooperative, how to build and strengthen their society to withstand the impact of commercialism and materialistic values, where they could learn from each other organic methods of agriculture, and village industries, and get ideas on improving their homes, and so on... and they'd go back to their village - perhaps even with a volunteer from a wealthier nation, if they wanted one - and that volunteer would be somebody who could try and help them introduce some of these things in their local village. And I'd like to see one of these villages in every ethnic center in the world. But I'd like to just see one, at this point.

One of the things I felt as I studied the Senegalese struggle through many adversities, is that there is not a comprehensive approach to community development. Foreign aid organizations might work on a problem, like a health problem of one particular disease, or one particular agricultural technique, planting a little forest or something - and because these are not comprehensive programs, they mostly fade into nothing.

And that's what the Gandhian's had, you see - a program with everything from the children's education, to the conditions of the women, and the conditions of their agriculture, home industries... how to reawaken the best in on'e own historic ways of life. And that is also what the Danes did. In India, though, not enough of Gandhi's followers were INTERNALIZING his teachings; they followed him blindly. That was disappointing.

The real problem here is that we have grown up in a society which has indoctrinated us with rugged individualism, living for self, to such a high degree that when we try to live in a communal group, we can't let go. The people that I've seen who have gone to live in a communal group because they wanted to find a better way to live for themselves took their strong individualism with them and so failed. The communal groups that have developed in order to serve others - and one of the most interesting communal groups I've lived with is called Gould Farm in Great Barrington, Massachusetts - was a halfway place for people who had psychological disturbances. It was a place where they could live without being impacted by the city life. And then later they could go back to their city homes. And for many, their lives were so transformed by this experience that when Christmas came, they would to there for Christmas. They came from New York and Boston and so on.

Now they succeeded because they were serving others. Many of the leaderss were very fine people, but I don't think they could have stuck together if they didn't have their sights focused on serving others who were in more need than they were. And I believe that communal groups today - and I'm not speaking of those that have embodied some dogmatic religious point of view, that's a different question, those who may have given up their critical faculties in order to partake in some religious dogma - success seems to be connected with a communal society that has a focus on serving more than itself. And if it isn't, it won't work. That's sort of a dogmatic statement, but that's the way I see it.

Ben: Why is that so?

Bob: It's because of our individualism; it's not easy when you're used to living and making your own individual decisions and going where you want to when you please, in a communal group you give over some of those decisions to the group, and people need to be ready to go to work on the farm in bad weather even though you don't feel like it... to give up some of the material things that your used to in order to make the community succeed. But above all it's a question of empathy I think, we've forgotten how to empathize. We've forgotten how to, as the native Americans say, walk a mile in the other guy's moccasins. And because we've forgotten that, it's very difficult to relate to each other, because we see things only thorugh our own ego and not through another persons' sufferings and struggles.

Ben: Well then, how do you get an intentional community going? In this money-based society, it seems very difficult.

Bob: I think it's more difficult now than it's ever been, and it's getting increasingly difficult. I wish I knew what to say. When I look at all the communities I've visited in my life, I feel terribly frustrated at all the people who have tried and failed to keep it going. And they try again, and they fail again.

Despite these difficulties, it is still true that human beings are not just social beings, they are community beings. And the optimal environment for human beings - just like every species has an optimal habitat - is community, and by community I mean not just a simple superficial association, but one where people relate to each other on a very deep level.

And what I see in the future is the possibility of communities which belong together - maybe not because they've lived together for many generations, but because they know the value of community is so precious, they're not going to do things that destroy that relationship. They're going to learn how to appreciate each other for their differences, they won't be closed, like too many traditional rural communities are, that judge people who are different than themselves, but accept them. Accept the value of diversity. Maybe that's expecting a lot of people, but I know people who have that feeling, and it's a beautiful thing. And I think that we can develope communities like that.

Ben: What glimmers do you see, of communities in the future?

Bob: I see people who see that beauty is worth more than money, that sharing is more fun than competing, that appreciating diversity is an enrichment that is not comparable with any kind of towing the line approach. I see people who have discovered that working in the soil doesn't have to be a burden. One can grow intensively with organic gardening all the food one needs, with only a short amount of work. One can live with neighbors, so that everybody doesn't have to have the same tools, but they can share the tools. One can enjoy life on a non-spectatoritis basis, because one makes one's own music, one knows the meaning of singing and folk dancing and reading poetry together. And realizes that one can have a very full and rich life, without having a lot of land, a lot of possessions, or a house much bigger than they need... where one can simply enjoy being together.

In Wales they used to have village groups that would get together and read great literature. They didn't pay somebody to put on a show, they just got together and read great dramas. You can find these people - especially in non-mechanized societies - who appreciate quality and beauty because they do it themselves.

In the modern machine-driven world, we are often cut off from out innate desire to create something beautiful. We don't know what we're missing. And one thing I've seen from visiting non-industrialized society is that there is always art, that almost all villages express their artistic inclinations . Whereas modern people will say, I'm not an artist. We don't realize that civilization has almost completely destroyed our innate ability to create something beautiful. People are beautiful, and we just don't know ourselves. And I wonder what would happen if people were put into a society where that beauty was brought out. I think it would change the world. That's my vision.

In the book I'm writing now, set in the year 2010 after the economic system collapses and people are brought down to their knees - like a person who has a heart attack, they suddenly stop and look at themselves and say, if I want to live I'd better change my ways - I see a whole society that has a heart attack. In the depression I saw this. The cooperative movement in this country flowered as a result of the depression. The WPA artistic movement was amazing during the depression. Young people traveled around the cuntry, living together as brothers and sisters.

So anyway, I see this collapse in the middle of the next century - just as a suggested scenario, I'm not predicting - and out of that collapse, comes a movement of women that have the qualities of women like Coretta King and Jane Adams and Helen Caldicott. Those women are there now, but they're barely listened to, and I see these women coming together and forming what I call the Wise Mom's movement, and their symbol is a package, or a pod of seeds that germinate, and they encourage a whole movement of growing seeds, growing on the roofs and balconies, and growing a whole new culture of each growing their own, and growing together, and the little groups they form, the pods of young people, start to form a new society, and out of their learning to grow plants, they learn how to grow themselves. And out of learning how to grow themselves, they grow communities.

People ask me, this society you're talking about, how do you think we are ever going to get from here to there? And I thought about it, and that is how I see that we may evolve into a new direction.