Homeless in the Agora
A few years back, as we were “coming out” of Covid and everyone was rushing to get things “back to normal” I started to develop an odd form of agoraphobia. There were some events or meetings that I just couldn’t bring myself to attend, even though I’d been part of these groups for years. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, I just couldn’t get my body to move in that direction.
Agoraphobia is generally defined as a fear of open spaces or public places. But the odd part of mine was that it wasn’t in all public places — only certain ones. It wasn’t people in general, but a particular kind of interaction that I just couldn’t tolerate.
It made me dig a little deeper. What was I really reacting to?
The literal meaning of agoraphobia is more specific: fear of the marketplace. That seemed like a clue.
The marketplace has always been a dangerous place, full of con-men, pick-pockets, and cut-throats. Nothing much has changed. The pick-pockets own the banks now, the cut-throats are organized into corporate security forces, and the con-men have the added advantage of photoshop and the Internet. But the basic dynamics are still the same.
The big difference now is that in the past, the marketplace was a place you only visited occasionally; you lived your life in the oikos.
The oikos was something somewhere between a homestead and a hamlet. It represented a semi-self-sufficient organization of people centered on land. The oikos referred to both the property and the people who lived and worked it. It ran like a family, even though it included members who weren’t romantically or genetically connected. And it also ran like a business, but it cared more about quality of life than maximized profit. It represented a specific spot on the map, but in some ways it was the whole world, too.
The term is, I think, the classical Greek equivalent of what North American Indigenous cultures refer to as “the Land” and what European Indigenous cultures referred to as a commons. It simultaneously represents the land as a physical asset and the people who care for that asset.
I suspect that some of you just flinched when I referred to the land as an asset. But this is part of the both/and of the Oikos / the Land / the Commons. It is an asset — the most valuable asset there is — because it represents our sustenance. There is no separation between the work and care of the land and the livelihood of the people who do that caring work.
Today, many people think that we have to protect the land from the people, to set the land aside and think of it as so sacred and fragile that it can’t be touched by human hands, but this is just a reflection of the wounds of disconnection. It’s the result of centering the agora over the oikos.
In land-centered societies, the oikos / land / commons is the center while the agora is merely a diversion; a supplementation. The oikos is your home and your larder, where you work and live. The agora is just a place to exchange excess production for luxuries or needs you can’t provide for yourself or where it is more economical to let others do it — an evolution of barter and specialization. It’s “a bit of fun.”
Today, though, the oikos has been stolen from us; we are left homeless in the agora. We are left to fend for ourselves in a sea of cut-throats, thieves and con-men with no resources of our own, no tribe to call home.
Even land-owners have been conned out of their land. The Land as provider and sacred connection has been reduced to a thing that you “flip” to maximize monetary gain. We’ve been taught to think that the fundamental right of ownership is exclusion — to keep people off “our” land. But that disconnection is a wound that goes deep and affects everyone — the dispossessed and the “possessed” alike.
Etymologically, oikos is the root of economics. The term basically translates as “household (oikos) + management (nomos)”. Originally, economics was synonymous with right livelihood — what is the best way to steward the land for the benefit in perpetuity of the people and land together? Adam Smith’s understanding of capitalism had a similar base to it. Smith took for granted that one would steward the primary capital that the land represented. You would never degrade your most important asset.
What we now think of as economics could more aptly be called chrematistics, the study of wealth for the sake of wealth. It’s focused exclusively on the marketplace and what Aristotle deemed the illicit goal of making money without contributing value. The oikos has been reduced to a commodity. It’s rendered an inanimate thing; a bank of resources to be pillaged to feed the appetites of a marketplace with no boundaries.
Severing our connection with the oikos, separating the people from the land, leaves deep wounds. When the land becomes a commodity to pillage, so do the people. It transforms our view of others from fellow human beings into things to be exploited and discarded.
Generations of people living only in the marketplace has left us all traumatized and reactive.
Many of us are currently rediscovering what it means to reconnect to land and people. I have been lucky enough to sit in spaces where we can show up as whole humans, not just commodities. It’s an experience that is as transformative as it is hard to explain to those who haven’t had it yet. But it leaves one with a hypersensitivity to the pathological interaction styles that pass for “business as usual.”
I was in a meeting last week where someone admitted that it was unbearable for them to participate in these “normal” spaces. I recognized my agoraphobia in that statement. I can no longer bear living in the marketplace. My home is in the oikos. I can and do visit the market from time to time, but always with one hand on my valuables, looking to return to the care and safety of people who understand connection as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, in our current world, we must rediscover the oikos and reclaim the commons. There are a few living examples left, and they are threatened and hidden from view. If we are to survive the polycrisis / metacrisis, we must find ways to reclaim these spaces.
So, how do we rebuild the oikos in a way fit for the 21st century? We can’t simple “go back” nor would we want to. Previous versions of oikos / land / commons also contained major blind spots that we can’t unsee with our modern eyes. There were slaves in the oikos and sometimes tragedies in the commons. This is not some perfect past that we hope to return to. Our ancestors were admirable and wise in ways we hardly understand today, but they were also flawed humans, just like us. So, how do we build on the legacy and heal the wounds?
How do we honour all those lessons learned across the generations, passed down in Indigenous and other wisdom traditions and lived experiences?
In part, we do it by trusting that this agoraphobia many of us feel is rational. There is nothing wrong with you if you find our current exploitive, transactional, inhumane “business as usual” unbearable. In fact, it’s a sign that you are on the road to healing. It’s not pathological to sense that we are unsafe among cut-throats, con-men and pick-pockets.
Unfortunately, most people out there won’t understand what it’s like to be part of the oikos. They’ve never had the opportunity to show up as fully human and be welcomed home for it. But for those of us who have experienced it, we know that our natural state is as a member of the oikos, of the commons, a person of the Land.
So, how do we invite more people into this experience? How do we spark more people to demand to be treated as a fully human person and refuse to let themselves be treated as just another commodity to exploit? How do we create the spaces where the people can reconnect with the land in a meaningful and transformative way that heals both the land and the people?
How do we care for the land in a way that heals the people so that the people can heal the land? For me, this is the only question that will make a difference as we face whatever comes next.
