Sandbox Politics
Volunteering at a kids camp last summer, I got to do all sorts of fun jobs. One of them was lifeguarding during the free swims. This is an interesting time, when kids are no longer told where to go and what to do. They are constrained only by the intense safety procedures in place. So the little loveable rascals are beautiful objects of anarchy in a very constrained space.
My favourite place to guard was the digging beach. The digging beach would normally be the place where you put the novice lifeguard. Or, alternatively, you put the old guy who is comfortably lazy and has no other ambition but to observe the riotous interaction of little people in the mini-desert that is the digging beach. I fall into the lazy category. In all of the other zones, you have to do head counts all the time. You have to be constantly vigilant for epiletic episodes, and the potential cost of screwing up is a drowning. Being entirely capable of handling that pressure, I chose as often as I could to guard the digging beach. The digging beach is composed of a 30 foot frontage of roped-off beachfront, with a buoy line two feet into the water. There is just enough water access to fill up the buckets, and not enough to actually swim (although there is enough water to drown, which I'm told can be reliably done in a couple inches of water).
I would come to the beach, lather on the sunscreen (always ensuring a nice backrub), don my trademark straw hat and sunglasses, and put on my uniform. The lifeguard ballcap went on top of the straw hat, which ensured that nobody accused me of not wearing my uniform. I would "call" the digging beach, which was fine with everyone else (they were all racing to get to the big action zones where they could count lots of heads, many times over).
I would install myself at the centre of the digging beach, with overwatch over my little desert kingdom. With a torpedo-buoy safely strapped to my body, in case anything went awry in the 10 inches of water under my supervision, I would begin supervising the daily digging.
Perhaps it doesn't occur to the average city-dweller the intense joy that can be derived from beach digging. Many of my clients in the digging beach never swam the entire summer. They were diggers. They dug. That's what they did. That's how they made their mark, and that was the extent of their beachly ambition. And what an ambition. It was not long before ambition and rivalry set itself upon the young people as they went about digging their way to freedom. The diggers began in small groups or individually creating their engineer-works in the sand. Before long, the tragedy of the commons had run its course. The individuals and small groups soon began competing for space to extend their dig-works. The drive for expansion forced groups and individuals to merge together until larger groups were formed. These groups rapidly took on hierarchical values, with an older or wilier little person dominating and directing the strategy of the group. Two groups emerged. The Alliance was presided over by a tall young boy with more chin than hair to cover it, and the unique fashion of wearing formerly white socks in the sand. He commanded his troops with the conviction of a Hannibal crossing the Alps. A division of labour quickly emerged. There were the water-bearers, the fixers (who shored up the failing walls of the sand structures), the miners, the diggers, and at the top of the pyramid stood the strategists who directed it all with the expertise of a master mason. Complex problems called for complex innovation, and the engineers were up to the task. They adapted their structures using straw and clay. The clay had to be dug specially from the mines that had been dug deep into the beach. The constant need for water to run through the dig works kept an entire group of young people employed and entirely satisfied.
The overlord, which everyone refused to call me, but which I insisted on being called, supervised the emergence of a bi-polar inter-alliance rivalry that allowed us to believe that the Cold War had never ended. The occasional violent eruption provided the overlord with just cause to intervene with my coercive power. I exercised my jurisdiction by exiling the offending agressors... Equivalent to ejecting a player for one game. The offenders would return the next day, chastened and wary of the overlord's watch. A pax romana emerged, enforced ruthlessly by the overlord. The overlord, content to allow a stable peace to exist between the Alliance and the Confederacy, applied a laissez-faire ideology and allowed his interventions to be the exception rather than the rule. Smaller, non-violent conflicts were allowed to persist. However, I always retained the option to entirely wipe out all of the dig-works as soon as the kids had to leave. Thus, when things got out of hand, I waited patiently for the kids to leave the beach. As they were putting on their shoes and cleaning the sand out of all of their nooks and crannies, I would entirely destroy all of the dig-works of the offending parties. The nuclear annihilation of the sand-societies on one occasion was enough to convince the Alliance and the Federation that mutually assured destruction was the only possible outcome of bi-polar conflict. Luckily, these sand-societies would rapidly rebuild in the vacuum left by the nuclear annihilation. The lessons learned from prior conflict were not lost on the leaders of the two groups.
Conflict was expressed by children destroying each others works, taking sand from mines that didn't belong to them, pouring water where it wasn't wanted, and in the more extreme form it expressed itself by the sand jumping into the hands of children and then miraculously launching itself into the faces of other children. This inexplicable sand property was quickly brought under control.
This walk down memory lane has served to demonstrate some principles of human organization in the hands of the little people who have grown up in a big world, with big people showing them how the world works. Domination, competition, cooperation, negotiation, hard work, conflict, division of labour, social organization were all in varying degrees demonstrated by the little sandbox experiment that was never intended as such. Rather, it existed as an alternate reality to the swim-centric values of a beach-going child society. The non-swimmers found their raison d'être in the earthy reality that was the digging world. They constructed an alternate playground, rejecting the the axiom of sink or swim and revelling in the opportunity to work for play and to play with work. The game began as an expression of the American dream, the desire for realty and the constant improvement the human condition in their living-space. The evolution of said game revealed the extent to which children are both a continuation of the dominant socio-political values that prevail, and the purest expression of human nature in a confined and constrained social environment.
To conclude, I got a good tan.
My favourite place to guard was the digging beach. The digging beach would normally be the place where you put the novice lifeguard. Or, alternatively, you put the old guy who is comfortably lazy and has no other ambition but to observe the riotous interaction of little people in the mini-desert that is the digging beach. I fall into the lazy category. In all of the other zones, you have to do head counts all the time. You have to be constantly vigilant for epiletic episodes, and the potential cost of screwing up is a drowning. Being entirely capable of handling that pressure, I chose as often as I could to guard the digging beach. The digging beach is composed of a 30 foot frontage of roped-off beachfront, with a buoy line two feet into the water. There is just enough water access to fill up the buckets, and not enough to actually swim (although there is enough water to drown, which I'm told can be reliably done in a couple inches of water).
I would come to the beach, lather on the sunscreen (always ensuring a nice backrub), don my trademark straw hat and sunglasses, and put on my uniform. The lifeguard ballcap went on top of the straw hat, which ensured that nobody accused me of not wearing my uniform. I would "call" the digging beach, which was fine with everyone else (they were all racing to get to the big action zones where they could count lots of heads, many times over).
I would install myself at the centre of the digging beach, with overwatch over my little desert kingdom. With a torpedo-buoy safely strapped to my body, in case anything went awry in the 10 inches of water under my supervision, I would begin supervising the daily digging.
Perhaps it doesn't occur to the average city-dweller the intense joy that can be derived from beach digging. Many of my clients in the digging beach never swam the entire summer. They were diggers. They dug. That's what they did. That's how they made their mark, and that was the extent of their beachly ambition. And what an ambition. It was not long before ambition and rivalry set itself upon the young people as they went about digging their way to freedom. The diggers began in small groups or individually creating their engineer-works in the sand. Before long, the tragedy of the commons had run its course. The individuals and small groups soon began competing for space to extend their dig-works. The drive for expansion forced groups and individuals to merge together until larger groups were formed. These groups rapidly took on hierarchical values, with an older or wilier little person dominating and directing the strategy of the group. Two groups emerged. The Alliance was presided over by a tall young boy with more chin than hair to cover it, and the unique fashion of wearing formerly white socks in the sand. He commanded his troops with the conviction of a Hannibal crossing the Alps. A division of labour quickly emerged. There were the water-bearers, the fixers (who shored up the failing walls of the sand structures), the miners, the diggers, and at the top of the pyramid stood the strategists who directed it all with the expertise of a master mason. Complex problems called for complex innovation, and the engineers were up to the task. They adapted their structures using straw and clay. The clay had to be dug specially from the mines that had been dug deep into the beach. The constant need for water to run through the dig works kept an entire group of young people employed and entirely satisfied.
The overlord, which everyone refused to call me, but which I insisted on being called, supervised the emergence of a bi-polar inter-alliance rivalry that allowed us to believe that the Cold War had never ended. The occasional violent eruption provided the overlord with just cause to intervene with my coercive power. I exercised my jurisdiction by exiling the offending agressors... Equivalent to ejecting a player for one game. The offenders would return the next day, chastened and wary of the overlord's watch. A pax romana emerged, enforced ruthlessly by the overlord. The overlord, content to allow a stable peace to exist between the Alliance and the Confederacy, applied a laissez-faire ideology and allowed his interventions to be the exception rather than the rule. Smaller, non-violent conflicts were allowed to persist. However, I always retained the option to entirely wipe out all of the dig-works as soon as the kids had to leave. Thus, when things got out of hand, I waited patiently for the kids to leave the beach. As they were putting on their shoes and cleaning the sand out of all of their nooks and crannies, I would entirely destroy all of the dig-works of the offending parties. The nuclear annihilation of the sand-societies on one occasion was enough to convince the Alliance and the Federation that mutually assured destruction was the only possible outcome of bi-polar conflict. Luckily, these sand-societies would rapidly rebuild in the vacuum left by the nuclear annihilation. The lessons learned from prior conflict were not lost on the leaders of the two groups.
Conflict was expressed by children destroying each others works, taking sand from mines that didn't belong to them, pouring water where it wasn't wanted, and in the more extreme form it expressed itself by the sand jumping into the hands of children and then miraculously launching itself into the faces of other children. This inexplicable sand property was quickly brought under control.
This walk down memory lane has served to demonstrate some principles of human organization in the hands of the little people who have grown up in a big world, with big people showing them how the world works. Domination, competition, cooperation, negotiation, hard work, conflict, division of labour, social organization were all in varying degrees demonstrated by the little sandbox experiment that was never intended as such. Rather, it existed as an alternate reality to the swim-centric values of a beach-going child society. The non-swimmers found their raison d'être in the earthy reality that was the digging world. They constructed an alternate playground, rejecting the the axiom of sink or swim and revelling in the opportunity to work for play and to play with work. The game began as an expression of the American dream, the desire for realty and the constant improvement the human condition in their living-space. The evolution of said game revealed the extent to which children are both a continuation of the dominant socio-political values that prevail, and the purest expression of human nature in a confined and constrained social environment.
To conclude, I got a good tan.
posted by Lt Smash at 8:20 PM
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