Oikos - Household

This is a story about a house. Now everyone knows what houses do … they hold things … so we call each one a household.

Logos - Word

And whether a household is small and simple or large and luxurious, each thing which it holds has the same need … to find and occupy its proper place. So each and every household is built according to instructions which provide for all the things in it to be held together. And, cleverly, the household instructions for storing and using each thing are stored inside the thing itself, so they will never be lost. But this means the instructions are spread across every thing in the household … like puzzle parts that will only fit ONE way IF you consider them all. What fun! It is all very good.

Nomos - Rule

After the household is built and everything is in its proper place, it waits … until one day a family that needs a place to live comes to the household. It has every thing they need, but since they were not present when the house was built, they do not know where every thing goes … and they are not aware that the instructions are stored inside every thing. And since they are free to use and move all the things the house is holding together, over time they put some things back in the wrong place. And when just one thing gets put back in the wrong place, it causes alot of problems. First of all, the thing that really belongs in that place [according to the instructions] no longer has a place … and has to be put somewhere else … which means alot of other things have to be moved. And pretty soon, almost every thing has been moved out of its proper place. Then when the family needs to use one of the things, they don’t know where to find it … and so they use something else instead of using the right thing for the right task. It all becomes very confusing. And when it gets too frustrating, the family decides to make some rules about how every thing should be used and where it should go. And the rules seem to work great … for awhile.

Tyrannos - Ruler

But, as the rules get more and more detailed and some family members begin to break the rules more and more often, more and more arguments arise … until one day, the family decides that ONE of them will become the ruler of the household and just tell everyone else where things go. Over time, the household rules [like the original instructions before them] are lost because everyone just depends on and obeys the ruler of the household without thinking.

Adeianos - Empty

Then one day the ruler dies … and nobody knows how to live in the house anymore because the instruction and the rules are lost… so they all just leave. But the house is not empty … there are just no people left in it … and over time all the things begin to go back to their proper places and the house holds them all together once again … each in its own place … and waits for another family. The end.

Lessons

This simple story is OUR story … and each one of us has a part to play in it. It introduces us to three words that can help us make sense of our lives.

The household [oikos in Greek or eco in English] is any space … large or small … in which various things can be held together with people present. It can be a building in a suburb, a farm in the countryside, a city on a hill, a nation between oceans or even an entire planet. One large household can be made up of many smaller households. And as size changes, the design and operating features must also change accordingly. A condo can have central lighting, plumbing and HVAC … but a planet needs a sun, atmosphere and oceans for things to work.

The instructions [logos in Greek or logic in English] need to be present as the house is being built, because without them the builder does not know how to build it so that it holds everything together in its proper place.

The rules [nomos in Greek or normal in English] arise when the occupants move in and find they are free to use and rearrange the things the house is holding together… but that over time their freedom causes problems which they attempt to manage with their rules.

From these three Greek words … oikos, logos and nomos … we get two compound English words … ecology and economy … which tell us that there is a potential difference between the way any household is DESIGNED to work and the way it is being MANAGED by its occupants. And if we want to understand this difference, we need to educate ourselves … or lose our freedom … or even be forced to leave the household altogether.

“[T]here is something which moves while itself unmoved. ... Th[is] first mover, then, exists of necessity; and in so far as it exists by necessity, its mode of being is good, and it is in this sense a first principle. ... On such a principle, then, depend the heavens and the world of nature. ... We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God. ... We must consider also in which of two ways the nature of the universe contains the good, and the highest good, whether as something separate and by itself, or as the order of the parts. Probably in both ways, as an army does; for its good is found both in its order and in its leader, and more in the latter; for he does not depend on the order but it depends on him.

And all things are ordered together somehow, but not all alike,-both fishes and fowls and plants; and the world is not such that one thing has nothing to do with another, but they are connected. For all are ordered together to one end, but it is as in a house, where the freemen are least at liberty to act at random, but all things or most things are already ordained for them …” Metaphysics Book XII, Aristotle

PS. Is it significant that “oikos” means household but that our current oikos-nomos [Economy] seems to have financialized and centralized even home-ownership in the hands of corporatized Wallstreet bankers … while once autonomous Mainstreet families find themselves increasingly and practically “homeless” on public streets?