About The Book
Lean Logic does not conform. It is a community of essays about inventive, cooperative self-reliance in the face of great uncertainty. Lean Logic acknowledges, with honesty, the challenges ahead in finding our way out of an economy that has all but destroyed the very foundations upon which it depends - the climate, the complex ecological system and the community and culture which gives meaning to life. But rather than inducing despair, Lean Logic is rare in its ability to inspire optimism in the creativity and intelligence of humans to nurse our ecology back to health, to rediscover the importance of place and play, of community and culture, and of reciprocity and resilience. It is not a book to read from start to finish. Begin in the middle, with something, anything, that sparks your interest, and let the signposts pull you through a chaotic web of ideas, brimming with humour and originality, with elegance and contradiction. Lean Logic is a dictionary of empowerment.
My Thoughts
Lean Logic is a doorstop. A giant collection of what are essentially notebook entries on topics of concern to Mr. Fleming. That alone, its status as a hefty paper Digital Garden, drew me to it. Also of interest is his staunch defense of the need to relocalize life in preparation for the large-scale changes that will be wrought to human society across the next century.
Many of the entries are both thought-provoking, and high quality. Many of the practical prescriptions that can be extracted from the morass of hand-waving and implemented directly in small communities now are of high quality, and I have brought some of them into operation here in our local community.
Some of his arguments, perhaps most by volume anyway, are niggling, needling, and exhibit the unearned haughtiness of the self-proclaimed expert. I am particularly amused by how spectacularly wrong he is about anarchist thought, history, organization, ideals, and praxis, while ending his entirely misguided entry with the snide schoolboy taunt:
Lean Logic will borrow from it, and will mix it with other lines of enquiry which most anarchists would have been horrified by. But, then, anarchists have always had trouble with their allies
This is of course easily explained by his professional position as an economist. One can hardly be expected to be sympathetic to a group of people who call your entire professional life illegitimate…it does cloud his arguments a bit.
Much of what Fleming has to say on any subject larger than the village or neighborhood is merely a restatement of a decidedly incoherent Brexit fanatic. For instance, in his entry on NationSee https://leanlogic.online/glossary/nation/ and sepcifically the section on the “Tragedy of the Regions” he expends quite a bit of ink (and thought) on defining a nation as:
…an identity which connects the people who live there to a particular place, and to each other. There is a landscape which many generations have shaped and defended, and there is an endowment of culture, language and institutions which, though they can be betrayed, cannot be denied. The nation is a located, bounded, particular homeland. If defeated, it often manages, eventually, to come back into being, with a sense of renewal and justice. It exists in the mind of its people
He then goes on to dismiss sub-national regions anywhere in Europe as if those endowments; culture, language, habit, food, institutions - somehow do not exist there. As if Asturias and Andalucia were homogenous or interchangeable, or Wales and Scotland were…
And he uses what can only be described, when deployed by someone as well-read and informed as Fleming, a bad-faith argument to support his position. The French counties that were abolished by the Revolution and replaced with Départements were so treated in order to build a Nation, not a local region. Perhaps if he were arguing (as many including myself do) that the locality should have primacy in all things, then he might see that the Nation-State is an unnecessary middleman between the local and the very large federation, such as the EU could be turned in to if it were representing hundreds or low thousands of regions instead of the economic interests of ~30 nation-states.