What binds you?

A conversation with myself...

I have written elsewhere about our need to love the World. It’s somehow strange that I felt the need to write such things, since it seems obvious that I, and ‘the people’ do indeed ‘love the world’. Even hardened city dwellers must have moments when they notice dew drops on a spider’s web, or a beautiful sunset framed by the city skyline. Everyone loves to learn about the wonders of the world from David Attenborough and his team of superhuman cinematographers. Everyone likes the feel of grass under their feet, and the thrill as the first drops of rain hit the face before a storm. And people are the world, and so they love their grandchildren, and their dog too. Some people even love their cat!? Wonders!

I’ve written elsewhere about the urgent need for change – for us in the wealthy industrialised world to rein in our consumption of resources so as to protect the world. I suspect that there is nothing left to say here. No analogy, no metaphor that can be usefully employed to stress this point that has not already been used in an effort to encourage, worry, terrify people into the change that is required. If your house was on fire, if your ship was sinking, you’d do something, right? You’d know how to act. But here we are, in this complex world, unable to do anything because no-one else is.

Our love for the world would be enough, you’d think. I’ve written elsewhere that our freedom is an illusion if it is not grounded in deep belonging. You can emancipate yourself to death – cast off every tradition, constraint, obligation – and you might just float away like a hydrogen atom freed from its connection to two oxygen atoms, making it light enough to float ever upwards until it escapes Earth’s atmosphere. If enough hydrogen atoms emancipate themselves, Earth’s oceans will be gone. It’s the same with humans. We need to weight ourselves down. Tie ourselves with cords of love to the things that give life meaning. Or we float away in a bliss of solipsism, to become…nothing. Not that we really need ‘to tie ourselves’, for we are already tied. We need to not untie ourselves.

We industrialised folk have suffered – or enjoyed – a lot of untying since the enlightenment. Our communities have been smashed and reconstituted as cities. Our rural ways of life have been smashed and we reconstituted as wage-labourers, the benefits of our efforts extracted by someone more powerful. Our world has been smashed and reconstituted as industrial ‘factors’. As in ‘factory’. Our forests smashed and reconstituted as cubic metres of lumber and hectares of ‘improved pasture’.

Our ‘selves’ once reached out, way past the physical body, to include our kin and our place. With those ties sundered we were freed to float away to other continents and visit the same violence upon other peoples and lands. There was a time when we could experience the divine – when Spirit in whatever form we came to know it, was the best explanation for an inexplicable world. A time when the world outside our doors was possessed of a mind of its own, and we humans had best approach it with care, humility and generosity. We untied ourselves from all but our closest kin. No longer do we belong to the mist in the morning valley. No longer do we belong to that ancient tree down by the creek. No longer can our ancestors guide us in life, for we have disowned them, even if they have not disowned us.

If you want to dwarf a tree, you confine it to a pot and prune its roots regularly, restricting its access to water and nutrients. Then perhaps you can tell it a story about how now it is free…about how deep roots were such an encumbrance, and an expansive canopy such a burden, and how we can take the pot to another spot in the yard or another city even. See…free.

Probably one needs to be careful about idealising life in the middle-ages. No doubt it was tough, and there were a lot of things to die from. Not too many people would willingly go back, even if they could. I’m not sure that I would. But by now we should all be able to see the limitations of modernity very, very clearly. In the Black Death, perhaps 50 million people died in Europe – 30 to 50 percent of the population. Within the next five decades, 4 to 5 billion people – 50 percent of the world’s population will almost certainly perish due to climate catastrophe. Wither then, humanity?

Catastrophe. I’m getting good at spelling it. It rolls out onto the keyboard as though I am familiar with it. I never used to use the word, though I was of the generation that grew up with the expectation of nuclear holocaust. The ultimate catastrophe. That threat made me who I am. A lifetime shaped in preparation for catastrophe. And now it is come, though in another form (not that the nuclear threat has ever gone away). For our ancestors, catastrophe came in the form of leopard or snake, or a dry waterhole and too far to walk to the next. For my younger self, it was stupid Americans or Russians: Ronald Reagan and his belief in a ‘winnable nuclear war’. Now it is me. Me and all the other humans. Disaster is encoded in our behaviours, in our very human love of comfort and security. We have all cast off the ties that bind us to the world, that oblige us to care, and now we float upwards and away, and every day, the oceans of the future are a little smaller, a little sadder.

There is another type of binding. The binding that ensnares us, holds us in serried ranks on this death-march. Binding that paralyses us. What is this? I’ve already mentioned solipsism – the cultural epidemic of modernism. That’s a starting point at least, that tells us how we got here. But however destructive selfishness is culturally and ecologically, it should not preclude protecting one’s precious self (and everyone (and everything) else) through some serious action. But it does.

Thinking about myself, life seems to be lived in a state of dissonance a good proportion of the time. I do things. I get in the car and drive places. I could ride a bike. I could walk. I could just not go. I buy things that I could do without. Light the fire in winter when I could just put on a jumper. By Australian standards, my household lives in poverty. I am shocked when I hear what other people are earning. What other people need to earn in order to be secure. I have chosen throughout my adult life, a materially frugal but nevertheless rich existence, and yet I know that I need to do better. If most people need to shrink their demand on resources by 90 percent, I still need to reduce mine by 50 percent. And I fear that the first 40 is the easy part.

I remember a time when I set forth into the world. A young man on an adventure. I had an old car and a bag of clothes. And yes, I was ‘free’ in all he ways I have just criticized, but my eyes were wide open and I was hungry for what the world might give me. I did not have security, oh no, security would have felt like suffocation. I was embracing life, and security was the opposite of that.

What stops me? What binds me? Laziness. Self-indulgence. Habit. These things are undeniable. The idea that I’m the only one ‘doing without’? That I’m the only one doing it hard, and I’m everybody’s fool? Is that not a bit pathetic?  Can I not sacrifice for the World? Is my sacrifice only worthwhile if it is seen by other humans? Can a sacrifice even be ‘worthwhile’ (never mind performative), and still be a sacrifice?

What would help? What would help most is a community of practice. A community that really lived the life we need to live. Which is to say, it would help to be bound to a community wherein these values of frugality, or even frugal hedonism, were normal. A community wherein I am not forced to work in a distant town in order to pay my mortgage. A community wherein I feel solidarity with my peers – in labour, in hardship and in celebration.

Actually, living here in Central Victoria, I sometimes think I am halfway there. Certainly, when I go to Melbourne, I am appalled by the madness and the disconnection of that (nowadays) deeply foreign life. But there is a long way to go, and such a community will be insufficient to make change on its own. There is a world out there, marching relentlessly to nowhere good. We need to ‘be the change that we want to see’, but at this late hour it is insufficient to be passive exemplars: we are going to have to be a bit evangelical – with all the risks inherent in that.

So. 1500 words, give or take. Did I convince myself? Did I gather even this lowest of low hanging fruit (myself), to change my ways? Probably not. Not without my family. Probably not without my community. And so we see the world’s predicament in microcosm.

We have to change.

But we can’t.

We have to change.

But we can’t.

We have to change.

But we can’t.

But we have to.