Nous sommes tous montagnards, vive la montagne!
We are all Montagnards, vive La Montagne!
Slogan used in an address to the Jacobin Club, 1793
I have been privileged to help publicize a growing club of bloggers known as the Mont Order or La Montagne.
Screen capture of the new trial appearance for the website lordre.net, proposed as a communal blog for Mont Order members
By helping to cultivate this club, my desire has been to help other authors wield the same kind of influence that I have found myself to possess through online media. However, I feel that this particular blog hosted by Beliefnet is too central to that purpose and makes me look unnecessarily important in all of this. I propose a remedy to that, and I will announce it here, as news both to the Mont Order’s participants and the public.
The similarity between this blog’s name, L’Ordre, and the name of the Mont Order, is purely a coincidence. I had no intention for this blog to be a central part of some kind of “infrastructure” of the Mont Order on the web. If we are to have any online infrastructure, it should be horizontal, distributed in form, with components at all members’ own blogs, social media accounts and websites. I believe control over the fate of this club should not be invested in an individual. The Wave Chronicle‘s own pages express this idea exactly, as Mike created a space dedicated to Mont Order resources at the Wave Chronicle. I am not asking for all our bloggers to make the same commitment (indeed it would look confusing if we all competed to offer the permier resources on the Mont Order), but to at least mention the Mont Order at members’ blogs is useful at contributing to our online infrastructure.
Urban legend holds that the Mont Order once existed as a secretive network, and has appeared in the pages of history before. At my bidding, we have broken with that tradition of dormancy and decided to surface, using the vast new resources and tools of the Internet to empower voices and make the Order known. As Pope Francis famously argued, in line with his desire to update the Roman Catholic Church to a more modern form, the Internet is a gift from God that cannot be denied as it builds bridges between diverse peoples, unlike any other invention.
Pope Francis: The internet is a “gift from God” that can build bridges between different cultures & religions: http://t.co/DsNFjQGDJE
— CatholicCharitiesUSA (@CCharitiesUSA) January 31, 2014
In a world of unlimited transparency, in which secrets have become impossible and archaic even for the most closed organizations and government departments, the time for humility and the denial of the Order’s existence is over. In order to be, the Order must be known.
Here is my proposition to undo this blog’s perceived centrality to the Mont Order and change the Mont Order’s infrastructure. Bloggers will be encouraged to highlight their membership in the Order, if they have not already done so, to help draw attention to the Order and make it a household name. Second, I propose a communal blog where members will be able to post links to their blogs and their most recent articles, announcing them, or logging the collaboration that they have participated in with other Mont Order members. To increase the effectiveness of this move, I am prepared remove the lordre.net domain name’s current redirection to this blog and direct it instead to the new communal blog, where my face will no longer be displayed at the landing page.
@Lukewearechange @WaveChronicle Hi Luke, I’d welcome We Are Change speaking to the @wave_movement via @MontOrder round tables
— Harry Bentham (@hjbentham) April 15, 2015
Above all the Mont Order should be a round table and collaborative venture. I am not “running the show”, because if I tried to do that, I would quickly be found to be a poor leader. Also, it is not a secret that I have anarchist leanings that make me averse to lording over anyone, but happy to be a broker.
As well as adding the following four new writers to the Mont Order’s lists both here at Beliefnet and the new Mont Order blog in the last few days, I am drafting a list of at least a hundred possible new candidates to join the club, as I envisage the club assuming an increasingly “elite” role among bloggers in the future. The list will soon be submitted before the Mont Order for approval.
- D. Helene (diaryofa99percenter)
- Rathorebaba (Rathorebaba’s Blog)
- Steve Topple (Mutterings from The Left)
- Deborah Dupré (National Human Rights Examiner)
I will be hoping to get the approval of the Mont Order on the communal blog idea. If there is a genuine desire by Mont Order writers to participate in some kind of communal blog, I believe the idea will hold and be very effective. At present, the blog will remain its draft form at lordredelamontagne.blogspot.co.uk, waiting for approval to be renamed lordre.net and for invitations to be sent out to authors.
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