"Behold, my friends, the spring is come"

While at a thrift shop in Wisconsin not so long ago, I picked up a book called "Great Speeches by Native Americans," figuring it would make decent bathroom reading. You know, lots of stuff a page or two long, no complicated arguments, no plot. It's turned out to be quite interesting, though. \ Also, infuriating. I never really knew much about the Native Americans until I started reading Derrick Jensen, who talks quite frequently about how so many tribes managed to live in more or less the same places for thousands and tens of thousands of years without depleting them. Somehow my high school textbooks managed to omit this stuff, in addition to most of the stuff about how westward-bound settlers and the Army that cleared the way for and protected them deceived, pillaged, killed, etc, in order to expand. Maybe it was in there, but not much? Or maybe not much attention was given to it? Or maybe I just wasn't ready to hear it? Not sure, but I think that if more students were exposed to the words of the conquered and vanishing Indians, and encouraged to think about them and look for modern parallels, we might become a more humble, considerate, content country.

So, here's an especially striking speech from Sitting Bull, chief of the Hunkpapa Sioux, from around 1875:

"Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has glady received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love! Every seed is awakened, and all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even to our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this vast land.

"Yet hear me, friends! we have now to deal with another people, small and feeble when our forefathers first met with them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possessions is a disease in them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break, but the poor may not!  They have a religion in which the poor worship, but the rich will not!  They even take tithes of the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They compel her to produce out of season, and when sterile she is made to take medicine in order to produce again. All this is sacrilege.

"This nation is like a spring freshet; it overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threated to take that from us also. My brothers, shall we submit? or shall we say to them: "First kill me,before you can take possession of my fatherland!"

This one in particular struck me as relevant because of the clear connections to Occupy Wall Street. I also recently downloaded a movie called "Nonpossession," about the life and thought of Venerable Beob-seong, a Korean monk whose obituary I wrote about here. I'm thinking of doing the subtitling myself and showing it downtown this month or next. 

Growth and Scarcity; Wisdom #12

Again, a response to a comment. After my first post about the Upo camp, Andy wrote the following:

"One thing you said really struck me, and probably is/could be the subject of books, "...and environmentalists need to protect the land and animals that can't protect themselves (and, because we depend on the ecosystem, this amounts to protecting us, too).[end of Andy quoting me]"

How absurd is it that the only people who care about whether or not we destroy the planet are labeled environmentalists, and often viewed as a little crazy? As you mentioned in your parenthetical comment, it is about much more than protecting plants and animals, it is protecting the way we have lived for thousands of years. How is it that the general population doesn't get it? Even more confounding is very smart people in politics actively campaigning against protecting the environment. WTF are they thinking?"

There are a few books that I know of that address this conundrum; some of them are explicitly about it. I've mentioned most of them before, but two are particularly relevant: Jensen's Endgame and Slater's The Pursuit of Loneliness.

(Fortunately or unfortunately, the question seems to have everything to do with everything I've been reading and thinking about lately, and I'm not confident I can present my would-be-views coherently. Here's a shot:)

The absurdity Andy so rightly points out doesn't look so absurd if you buy into one thing that we all, at some level, buy into: growth is good. A tenet, an assumption, a piece of dogma, a pathology; call it what you will, it takes a brave and willing-to-be-ostracized soul to deny it. If you were to ask an alien watching us from above, an alien trying to divine our motives by analyzing our actions, "What is our society's primary goal?" it would be impossible for him/her/it to give any answer other than "to get bigger."* Presidents can weather the storms of infidelity discovered, lies exposed, debt expanded, soldiers lost; but can we doubt that if a president ever so much as whispered the phrase "GDP growth might not be an unmitigated good," (under his breath, to the First Lady, in the privacy of their own bedroom) we'd hear immediate calls for his impeachment? If there's one thing that the Blue States and Red States can all agree on, it's that a good year is a year in which the GDP grows, and a great year is a year in which it grows a lot.

GDP growth translates, on a personal level**, to an increase in the amount of money earned, and thus the amount of money available to spend. Thus, as crude as it may sound, a good year is a year in which we earned and spent more money than the last. Spent on what? On products that have themselves grown, if figuratively. As delightful, as expected, as natural as increases in the GDP are: increases in the size of our monitors, increases in the capacity and compactness of our iPods, increases in the speed of our processors, the length of our buffets, the horsepower of our engines, the range of exotic fruits available at the supermarket, the number of functions on our wristwatches, and the shininess of everything from refrigerators to pumpkins to BMWs.

To make more things available to more people - isn't this a noble goal? Isn't that the meaning of Democracy? Aren't we more free if there are more things that we're free to choose from? If you say yes (and we almost all do, implicitly), then of course you can't help but see people who want to slow, limit, or stop growth as ideological foes.
How can environmentalists claim to be defending people's well-being, when doing so depends on reducing the amount people consume and the amount people consume determines how well-off they feel?

I think most Americans are already aware, at some level, that their level of consumption is unsustainable. Even if you haven't seen the most powerful statistics - things like how it would take five earths for everyone to consumer like us, how we as five percent of the world's population use twenty-four percent of the world's resources***, how one American consumes as much as three hundred Ethiopians, how increased technological efficiency has historically led to more consumption of resources, not less, how getting calories from wheat is about 200 times more water-efficient than getting calories from beef, but how intensive wheat/rice/corn/soy production it itself a major cause of of our environmental crisis****, and the rest of the "dreary litany," as Gatto calls it - it's not too hard to figure out that fossil fuels are limited and depending on them for everything from necessities like food, heating, and transportation to luxuries like electronics and travel isn't a good idea.

So, the obvious question is, where does this "growth is good" mentality come from? Why is growth regarded as so good that we are willing to pursue it in the face of mounting evidence that it may just kill us all? It's too easy, too self-serving, to pin the blame on "human nature," theories of innate selfishness, or man-as-virus metaphors; such universal claims strike me as ways to dodge guilt, to avoid dealing with an issue which is, at bottom, a cultural one, one that we're responsible for. It's not true that all people, in all times, have been as ravenous, acquisitive, and growth-focused as we are. It's not true that our current dilemmas, however intractable they may appear, were predestined. Rather, they've come about as the result of certain decisions made and strategies pursued by political and business leaders in decades and centuries past.

Slater highlights one in particular: scarcity. In order to deal with an overabundance of goods and productive capacity, capitalists (I apologize for the vaguely, or, to be honest, overtly conspiratorial tone. I'm not well-versed enough in history to back up everything with names and dates, so if you want to know where I'm coming from, in addition to sources I've already mentioned, do check out footnote no.5*****) had to turn people away from the easily-satisfied desires, towards more evasive ones:

"Hunger, thirst, and sexual desire in pure form can be slaked, but the desire for a body type that never existed but was invented by cartoonists cannot be slaked. Neither can the desire for fame, power, or wealth as such. These are inherently invidious needs; they are satisfied only in relation to the deprivation of others. Furthermore they are purely symbolic and hence have no logical consummation. A man hooked on fame or power will never stop striving because there is no way to gratify a desire with a symbol. One cannot eat, drink, or copulate with a Nobel Prize..."(100)

Desires for things like sustenance, community, friendship, sex, and love are relatively easily satisfied; all you need is another person, or a group of them. Furthermore, in contrast to the "invidious needs" above, these desires might be called "altruistic", since satisfaction of any one of them for one individual results in satisfaction for another as well. In this case, satisfaction of desire is free, complete, sustainable, and maybe even infinite. Now, though, in the interest of business, these desires have been largely - well, is there a word for "sublimated" but with the opposite connotation? "Displaced?" "Mediated?" "Alienated?" In any case, it is now products that promise us many of the satisfactions that, in reality, can only be granted to us by other humans - try to think of one product or one advertisement you've seen recently that doesn't play on the desire for sex, love, warmth, or pride, and how ridiculous the advertisements look when not done subtly enough.

Once we've fallen into the trap of identifying possession of and interaction with products as the source of satisfaction, we've implicitly accepted that, since the number of products isn't infinite, there's not enough happiness to go around. And, again, to quote Slater, "Once the concept exists that there is not enough, people will begin to deprive each other of what there is."(96) People are now willing to work - to do things that nobody in their right mind would ever do, if unconstrained - in order to get what satisfaction they can; and, even so, it isn't enough. Thus, we need Economic Growth, which provides a sort of temporary relief: insofar as we understand it as "lifting all boats," it allows us to believe that everybody must have become a little bit happier.

Of course, this is a farce, because we are trying to use symblols to satisfy real desires, we can't help but fail - the same desire we thought we had just satisfied will surface again next time we see another advertisement preying on the same perceived lack. And, because we perceive the amount of satisfaction to be limited, every winner generates a loser (my purchase of a 2011 Lexus decreases the value of all 2010 Lexuses, and I'll get my comeuppance in 2012). Lastly, even if our entire society wins by increasing GDP, this growth is only ever achieved by depleting natural resources, and generally by destroying the livelihoods of the people who live near them.

I don't believe that this kind of analysis is beyond most people. (Maybe I just don't want to believe it.) Even before I could articulate it, I remember feeling a vague, uneasy kind of emptiness when shopping for clothes in middle school; when fighting the hordes at Best Buy at Christmas; when thinking about what I wanted to buy with my money, and why I wanted it. We all recognize the shallowness, the silliness, the fruitlessness, and most of all, our own complicity. (I hope.)

So, to go back to Andy's question - why are environmentalists sometimes seen as a little crazy? If, as I just asserted, everybody has some inkling of it, why aren't those who articulate the problem and attempt to confront it hailed as speakers of truth rather than as wackos? Slater, one more time, writing about the 70s but strikingly relevant today:

"The same emphasis surrounds our fear of radicalism today. Draft resistance, peace demonstrations, black militance, hippie communes, and student protest are disturbing not because they provide a serious physical danger (equivalent to, say, driving a car) but because we fear having our secret doubts about the viability of our social system voiced aloud. It is not what happens abroad that generates hysteria, but rather what appears to be happening within ourselves....these considerations suggest that the fear of radical movements in America derives much of its intensity from the attraction that such movements have for their opponents - an attraction that must be stifled." (4,6)

If the environmentalists are right, if growth is wrong, then everything is wrong.
How you've been brought up has been wrong; the work you're doing now is wrong; the life you'll give your children will be wrong; and so on. Perhaps worse, if things are wrong, they need to change. Work needs to change. School needs to change. Food needs to change. Technology needs to change. Social arrangements need to change. If these are the real implications of environmentalism, the burden, in terms of cognitive dissonance, may just be too much to bear.

It's worth noting that this is not just an attack on conservatives or deniers; many environmentalists are caught up in this, too. In my opinion, anyone who thinks that sufficient change will be achieved by encouraging people to purchase new, "environmentally-friendly" or increasingly efficient products, is still failing to see the whole picture. A Prius is better than a Hummer, but a society in which people need, want, and expect Priuses is doomed just the same, if not quicker.

Does that bring us any closer to beginning to answer Andy's question? There're a lot of pretty brazen, controversial assertions in there, and perhaps even some leaps of logic. Call me out. I don't want to be right!
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*This reminds me of the beginning of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: After observing the Earth from a distance, an alien comes to the conclusion that the world is primarily inhabited by automobiles, and names himself "Ford."

**Almost. Actually, as I think just about everyone reading this blog knows, the benefits of increased GDP accrue primarily to the people who already have extremely high incomes. Nonetheless, if the passage doesn't reflect the truth of the lower- and middle-classes, it represents their aspirations.

***Kudos to you if you noticed, as I just did, that those are actually the same statistic.

****Please read Lierre Kieth's The Vegetarian Myth. Don't swallow everything she says, but do read it.

***** At the risk of recommending one (four?) too many references, I suggest Adam Curtis' documentary series "The Century of the Self," which covers the ways that Freud's theories of the unconscious, by way of his nephew Edward Bernays, became the underpinning of modern marketing.

Wisdom# 11

A selection from one of my recent favorites, John Taylor Gatto. The book is called Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, and the essay "We Need Less School, Not More."

Almost all of my free-thinking-time this semester has been spent reading things in this vein and trying to figure out how to incorporate them into my work and life.

"Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important: how to live and how to die.

"What’s gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is one right way to proceed with growing up. That’s an ancient Egyptian idea symbolized by the pyramid with an eye on top, the one that’s on the other side of George Washington on our one-dollar bill. Everyone is a stone defined by its position on the pyramid. This theory has been presented in many different ways, but at bottom it signals the worldview of minds obsessed with the control of other minds, obsessed by dominance and strategies of intervention to maintain that dominance.

"It might have worked for the Pharaohs but it certainly hasn’t worked very well for us. Indeed, nothing in the historical record provided evidence that any one idea should dominate the developmental time of all the young, and yet aspirants to monopolize this time have never been closer to winning the prize. The humming of the great hive society foreseen by Francis Bacon, and by H.G.Wells in The Sleepeer Awakes, has never sounded louder than it does to us right now.

"The heart of a defense for the cherished American ideals of privacy, variety, and individuality lies in the way we bring up our young. Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important; force them to plead for the natural right to the toilet and they will become liars and toadies; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.

"Individuality, family, and community, on the other hand, are, by definition, expressions of singular organization, never of “one-right-way” thinking on a grand scale. Private time is absolutely essential if a private identity is going to develop, and private time is equally essential to the development of a code of private values, without with we aren’t really individuals at all. Children and families need some relief from government surveillance and intimidation if original expressions belonging to them are to develop. Without these freedom has no meaning.

"The lesson of my teaching life is that both the theory and the structure of mass education are fatally flawed; they cannot work to support the democratic logic of our national idea because they are unfaithful to the democratic principle. The democratic principle is still the best idea for a nation, even though we aren’t living up to it right now.

"Mass education cannot work to produce a fair society because its daily practice is practice in rigged competition, suppression, and intimidation. The schools we’ve allowed to develop can’t work to teach nonmaterial values, the values which give meaning to everyone’s life, rich or poor, because the structure of schooling is held together by a Byzantine tapestry of reward and threat, of carrots and sticks. Official favor, grades, or other trinkets of subordination have no connection with education; they are the paraphernalia of servitude, not of freedom.

"Mass schooling damage children. We don’t need any more of it. And under the guise that it is the same thing as education, it has been picking our pockets just as Socrates predicted it would thousands of years ago. One of the surest ways to recognize real education is by the fact that it doesn’t cost very much, doesn’t depend on expensive toys or gadgets. The experiences that produce it and the self-awareness that propels it are nearly free. It is hard to turn a dollar on education. But schooling is a wonderful hustle, getting sharper all the time."

I highly recommend everything I've read by Gatto (Dumbing Us Down, A Different Kind of Teacher, and various essays online) as well as by John Holt (How Children Fail, Freedom and Beyond, and more), who was writing about similar stuff forty years ago. Even if I weren't a teacher, I would still find it all very illuminating. After all, who can reject the idea that the way we educate our young reveals what we hope they'll become once they're grown? Don't all of our political, social, and environmental issues have some root in the way that children in our society spend their fifth through eighteenth years?

I'm now off to Seoul to exchange some more books at the Seoul Nat' Uni library, hang out with old friends, and spectate upon the Buddha's Birthday festivities. Peace!

When It Feels Like I Am Too Small

True or false: it's ok for one to beat a dead horse if the horse is asking for it.

Once again, a thought-provoking and inspiring post from Causabon's Book: What Does It Matter?.

When talking with friends and acquaintances, whether of like mind or not, there is question that often comes up, one which is disheartening both in its frequency and its content. The question is - surprise - what does it matter? What does it matter if I eat one less egg, plant one more tree, forego one more luxury, volunteer for one more hour, or even inspire one more person? Isn't it true that whatever good I do today will be just about cancelled out by whatever my neighbor does tomorrow or whatever Coca-Cola will do in the next two minutes*? Isn't it true that even if all 7 billion of us went organo-vegan, changed our light bulbs, abandoned fossil fuels, composted all our poo, and stopped supporting corporations, it would still be too late to save the planet as we know it? Even if we as a species just up and vanished.

Some people ask the question because they're exceedingly clever and feel it justifies them in buying and using and consuming whatever they want, or at least can afford. Maybe it does. Some people say it because they're exceedingly scared and honestly feel like no matter what they do, it won't be enough. It probably won't. Some people say it when they're just too tired of feeling like they're opposed to everything about the system they live in, when they need to give themselves a break, just for a minute, or for a bite, when they need to feel like they're not asking too much of themselves, which of course they are, and which of course they have to be. I say it most days and have said it in each way, and probably in other ways as well.

It was this sort of frustration, this thing that deep-down I hate to acknowledge but can't get away from, that pushed me from recycling to hounding others about recycling; from taking shorter (and colder) showers to eating less meat (which saves water); from eating less meat to not eating to meat to eating (almost) no animal stuff to growing and buying as much local, organic stuff as I can; from riding a bike to agreeing to volunteer with Daegu's Eco-bike group; from whatever I do now to whatever I can think up to do next.

As stated above, the problem is that the problem is** (or problems are, depending on how you want to look at it) so bad that none of these are enough. This is why I want to involve others. This is why I am trying to start Daegu Green Living. This is also one of the reasons I feel like I ought to be more involved in protests. While direct confrontation is tough for me - I'd rather quietly go about doing my best, and I'd rather go about thinking I'm an example, and I'd rather go about writing blogs, and I'd rather go about showing movies - I am coming around to the idea (thank you, Derrick Jensen***) that it really is necessary. What good is meek and modest silence in response to the wholesale slaughter of the planet and so many of its species, to the mass victimization and immiseration of entire peoples and cultures and, to the ceaseless destruction of any chance of fairness, equality, peace, or perpetuity? Shouldn't people be upset? And noisy? And nuisances? I have a friend who hates PETA for their tactics, but will going vegan ever put an end to factory farming or vivisection?

This idea - that protesting is more valuable than "merely" attempting to live a life consistent with my ideals - fills me with a certain amount of guilt (as if I needed more). Am I trying hard enough? Am I directing my energies and using my privileges in the most effective ways? Could I be doing this or that instead? Or, better, in addition? Am I a wuss? It was with these kind of thoughts as (ever-present) background noise that I found Astyk's words powerful:

"This prioritization of protest over the emergence of an ordinary, sustainable life is understandable in a society that prefers the large and shiny to the small and domestic, and that demeans daily personal actions and ways of life as unimportant. I have in much of my other work attempted to articulate the ways in which our personal actions are in fact, political and the conventional distinctions between personal and political intellectually bankrupt, and while I may have made a modest fame in doing so, I've mostly failed so far. This is problematic because it is precisely the emergence of a life worth living - and that can be lived by all the 7-9 billion people who will share our planet in the coming years that is most urgently necessary. If creating and modelling some sort of preliminary life of this sort is my project, I come to it well after Berry, and less gracefully. Still, such a vast project with so few participants can always use one more.

...

"This is the best that will ever be said of even our most successful efforts to preserve a world in which people can go forward - that we will fail to do enough. Despair, the logical companion of failure is part and parcel of the project - Carruth's poem, Berry's essay are both fundamentally about despair, about failure and the responsibility of those who fail. The odds are good that changing our way of life will not result in anything that we can call success on a world scale, that it is too little, too late. I don't think there's any point in denying this. Nor do I feel it is worth denying that most of the time, even if we succeed in some measure, it will feel as though we aren't doing enough, are paying too high a price, are losing the wars and all the battles. Most of all, we won't get the credit we would for marching and waving our signs, because such things emerge in part as a shorthand for the work of daily action. Without the shorthand to signal our protest, many of the unimaginative won't see it - some of us may forget to see it.

"It isn't an easy project in a world that assumes a great deal of energy and emissions, that says freedom is consumer choice and that participation is mandatory and that wealth is our goal. So when you are in the garden, when you ride your bicycle or walk, when you explain to your neighbor yet again why you don't want their lawn chemicals on your yard, when hang your laundry, when you deliver a meal to a neighbor who is ill, when you say "no, we don't do that," when you teach your children who you are and why you do the difficult thing, when you try and convince yourself that you aren't too tired, when you get up in the morning and it looks like all you've done is pointless remember this - you are doing something hard and vast and new. Without your work and courage there is no hope at all for all of those with the courage to chain themselves at the gates. Without those who chain themselves at the gates, enough people will not know what you have done. With both together, change begins."****

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* If that.

** No typo.

*** Can I beg you again to read Endgame?

**** If I deleted the quotation marks, could I trick you into believing that I had written that?

Wisdom #10

Am I allowed to deem myself wise? Here's something I wrote for Daegu Green Living (my eco-pyramid scheme)'s page on Vegetarianism. I was quite pleased.

------------------------------------------------

Anyone who's spent any time here is familiar with Korea's seemingly endless varieties of meat cuisine. Kalbi, Bulgogi, Samgyeopsal, Makch'ang, Bosintang, Ch'obap, Sannakji, Spam. Land-based, sea-based, air-based, dirt-based, can-based. Ribs, spines, wings, drumsticks, fat, intestines, organs, wombs, whole. Grilled, stir-fried, steamed, battered, skewered, marinated, raw, still squirming. On a mountain, on the street, on the floor, on a stick, in a chair, in a tube, in a paper cup, at a buffet. Innumerable animals, along with most of their parts, prepared in various ways, eaten in various settings requiring diverse prepositions; avoiding meat in Korea may seem like an impossible task. There's good news though: going (or staying) vegetarian is easier than you think.

Wisdom #9

I have a boatload of photos to upload and a few posts I've been meaning to do for months but...it's easier just to transcribe a little Chomsky.

"Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that "private vices yield public benefits," in the classic formulation. Now it's long been understood--very well--that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist--with whatever suffering and injustice it entails--as long as it's possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage can. At this stage of history, either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others or--alternatively--there will be no destiny for anyone to control."

From the documentary, "Manufacturing Consent."

Wisdom #8

"I have finished this book in April 1962, in the tenth month of my sabbatical year. The earth looks good from my window: the last protective brown leaves are falling from the oak and little yellow-green ones start from the twigs and branches of the willow; the Japanese quince is fully of tiny leaves, and the tinier buds of the quince blossoms are already pink among them. The peach tree that my wife planted from a pit is ten feet high this spring, and the dogweed is grey with a foam of new buds. It seems scarcely possible that the world should be in the state I describe in this book."

Jules Henry, Culture Against Man, Preface

Wisdom #7

I once again wrote an introduction that was far too long and just about ruined the post. Now it's a footnote. Read this!

"This is a strange and rather perverse story. Just to put it in very simple terms, it's a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about."
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*Though I watch them every now and again, I don't link to too many TED talks. This is partially because I figure people can find their own way there if they want, partially because I feel lazy if I post a link without analyzing it but don't generally feel up to analyzing them, partially because I don't trust "solutions," and partly because I have a hard time trusting anything I see on a screen.**

That said, I just watched a pretty good one, in which Tim Jackson, an Economist from somewhere around England, talks for 20 or so minutes about our lifestyles, economy, environment, and future. Vague description, I know. Here's the official blurb:

"As the world faces recession, climate change, inequity and more, Tim Jackson delivers a piercing challenge to established economic principles, explaining how we might stop feeding the crises and start investing in our future."

The whole speech is good and worth listening to, though I'm not sure if it's any better than going out and playing in your garden for twenty minutes. If you did that, though, you'd miss the following zinger, which he lets fly while discussing the functions of conspicuous consumption:

(insert above quotation)

**Interestingly enough, Jackson also appears to share my skepticism about video media. Why don't people do many of the "blindingly easy things" we could to help the envirnoment, he asks?

We're too busy "putting the kids on the bus in the morning, getting ourselves to work on time, surviving email overload and shop floor politics, foraging for groceries, throwing together meals, escaping for a couple of precious hours in the evening into prime-time TV or TED online..."

Wisdom #6

Wow! Way back long ago, before I had even read a Michael Pollan book or The Shock Doctrine, heard of WWOOFing or succeeded in not eating meat for a week, while visiting Kristin in San Fran, one of her roommates introduced me to the works of Wendell Berry. I bought a few of his books at the same time that I bought the Derrick Jensen, but hadn't got around to reading them until yesterday, enmeshed as I was in my DJ-inspired book rampage.

Yesterday, I finished Richard Heinberg's "The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies," and I won't be going to visit Julio at Seoul National University for another week or so to pick up other stuff on my list. So I decided to pluck something off my shelf. It's been so long since I've read with pen in hand!

Without Further Ado:

"In promoting an agrarian culture...it is imperative that we not understand Berry to be saying that we must all become farmers. This is neither practically feasible nor desirable, since there is not enough land, nor does everyone have the appropriate temperament for farming. What is possible, however, is that people, urbanites included, adopt agrarian responsibilities and concerns. Just as we have adopted in our thought and practice the assumptions of an industrial mind-set without ourselves becoming industrialists - we are still teachers, health-carer providers, builders, students, and so forth - so too can we integrate agrarian principles without ourselves becoming farmers.

...We must learn to resist those practices that further isolate us and turn us away from the earth. This can begin practically by cultivating a new relationship with food. Food, rather than simply being fuel, is the most concrete and intimate connection between ourselves and the earth that exists. We often have little sense of where food comes from or under what conditions it is produced. Educating ourselves or, better yet, participating in the production of our own food, as when we tend gardens, or getting to know and working with farmers more directly, will enable us to appreciate a variety of concerns - medical, economic, political, religious - from an agrarian point of view. It will force us to reconsider the meaning of health, and prompt us to see that the context of health extends beyond our own bodies to include rural communities and the land."

- Norman Wirzba, "The Challenge of Berry's Agrarian Vision," introduction to Berry's anthology the art of the commonplace: the agrarian essays of Wendell Berry

Wisdom #5

I had two nectarines after dinner and didn't want to go to bed on a full stomach, so I started killing time by looking up Umberto Eco on wikipedia. The minute I saw the following quotations, I knew I had to share them. For anyone who reads my blog (or David Pekema's) and wants to know...what's with the lists?

Well..Umberto Eco says:

1) "We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die."

and

2) "I like lists for the same reason other people like football or pedophilia."

The two statements strike me as a little incompatible, but then again, Eco is a billion times smarter than me. Anyhow, I like 'em both.

Both from an interview in SPIEGEL in 2009 regarding Eco's (then) upcoming Louvre exhibition on the essential nature of lists, poets who list things in their works and painters who accumulate things in their paintings. Fascinating!

I wonder if there's another writer out there who can tell me why I like parentheses and footnotes?

Wisdom #4

"At the moment our only choices are personal ones. Though we may not be able to do anything whatever about genetic engineering or neutron bombs, individually we can say "no" to television. We can throw our sets in the garbage pail where they belong. But while this is an act that may be very satisfying and beneficial, in making this act we must never forget that, like choosing not to drive a car, it is no expression of democratic freedom. In democratic terms, this individual act is meaningless, as it has no effect at all upon the wider society, which continues as before. In fact, this act disconnects us from the system and leaves us less able to participate in and affect it than before. Like Huxley's "savage," or like today's young people who drop out to rural farms, we find ourselves even further removed from participation in the central processes that direct our society, our culture, our politics, and our economic organization. We are struggling in a classic double bind."

Jerry Mander, "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television," postscript.

My Decorations

In case you were curious about my Buddhist corner, here are translations of two of the short ones.

Sound: (Big letters:) Chimmuk. (Right to left, top to bottom): Chimmuk-eun in-gani jagi jashini doeneun girida. Uriga mu-eo-shi doegi wihaeseoneun ddangsok-eseo sang-neun ssiaseui chimmukeul baeweoya handa.


Word for word translation: (Big letters:) Silence. (Right to left, top to bottom): Silence[topic] human[subject] self[subject] becoming way is. We[subject] what[subject] become in-order-to ground-inside-at growing seed's silence[object] learn must.


Putting it naturally: Silence. Silence is the path by which a human becomes himself. In order to become anything at all, we must learn the silence of the seed growing underground.

And the middle one:

Chinese characters: 無 (Mu, None) 言 (Eon, Words) 道 (Do, Tao/Road) 心 (Sim, heart) 長 (Jang, long).

Meaning: Only if you sit quietly and without words will your heart come to understand the Tao.

Ponder that while I go have some cool bean noodles.

Wisdom #3

This one came by way of my old buddy Jack at Sadhana Forest. One night, at a group meeting, in front of 100 people or something, another "buddy," Tobin, called me a "lovable curmudgeon" or something. The lexicographer in me got all excited when I noticed a trend - most Americans and Canadians were familiar with the word, but most people from the rest of the English-speaking world weren't. I explained to Jack, who is from London or thereabouts, that he was my brother in curmudgeonry, curmudgeonhood, and curmudgeonosity. A few months later, this showed up in my inbox. It still makes me feel all squirmy inside, despite the fact that M-W defines me as "a crusty, ill-tempered...old man."

HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY JACK, who is too busy planting trees and being Vegan and helping at Sadhana Forest's Haiti project to be reading crap like this.

---------------------------------------------

"A curmudgeon's reputation for malevolence is undeserved. They're neither warped nor evil at heart. They don't hate mankind, just mankind's absurdities. They're just as sensitive and soft-hearted as the next guy, but they hide their vulnerability beneath a crust of misanthropy. They ease the pain by turning hurt into humor. . . . . . They attack maudlinism because it devalues genuine sentiment. . . . . . Nature, having failed to equip them with a servicable denial mechanism, has endowed them with astute perception and sly wit.

"Curmudgeons are mockers and debunkers whose bitterness is a symptom rather than a disease. They can't compromise their standards and can't manage the suspension of disbelief necessary for feigned cheerfulness. Their awareness is a curse.

"Perhaps curmudgeons have gotten a bad rap in the same way that the messenger is blamed for the message: They have the temerity to comment on the human condition without apology. They not only refuse to applaud mediocrity, they howl it down with morose glee. Their versions of the truth unsettle us, and we hold it against them, even though they soften it with humor.

- Jon Winokur

Wisdom #2

"Hundreds of people came to see us and our farm in Vermont. The thousands of young people who now come to our farm in Maine are the same type of seekers. They have heard or read about our Forest Farm and are curious to learn what it has to show or teach. They are ready for anything that makes an idealistic appeal and that is fairly far from standard community practice. They are unattached except in the very limited sense of selective mating. They are apolitical, impatient of restraints - especially when governmentally imposed.

"Increasingly they are turning their backs on a world community that has tolerated war and is preparing for the contingency of one in the future. They are ardently in favor of peace in a braod sense, but are not ready to accept a commitment to any organizaion that works collectively for the cause. Almost universally they favor "freedom": that is, the pursuit of their personal goals and fancies. They are not joiners and genreally not members of any group more specific than is implied by the adoption of a specific diet or the pratice of some yoga exercises.

"They are wanderers and seekers, feeling their way toward an escape from orthodoxy and superficiality, with the nervous dissatisfaction that characterizes people who do not have a home base in any real sense. Perhaps they can best be described as unsettled. Never before in our lives have we met so many unattached, uncommitted, insecure, uncertain human beings."

Helen and Scott Nearing, Continuing the Good Life (1979), Chapter 15.

Wisdom #1

"There is surely a word—in German, most likely—that means the state of active non-accomplishment. Not just the failure to reach a specific goal, but ongoing, daily failure with no end in sight. Stunted ambition. Disappointed potential. Frustrated and sad and lonely and hopeless and sick to death of one's self.

"Whatever it's called, this is what leads people to abandon their goals—people do it every day. And I understand that decision, because I lived in this state of active non-accomplishment for many years."

From the Slate article "What Took You So Long?The quiet hell of 10 years of novel writing" by Susanna Daniel

New Blog Category: (Wisdom 0)

Perhaps I just have way too much time (5 posts in 2 days?), but I've decided to put a new category up on the blog: quotations.

I can't count the number of posts that are inspired by some quotation I see, but which wind up either being nixed or left in perpetual limbo because I don't have the time, energy, honesty, ability to decide whether my take on the post is straightforward or ironic or only faux-ironic, or whatever, to explain what exactly draws me to it and what I think it means. Add to this the number of posts that start off strong and then dwindle/piddle/whimper to a close, often with a remark like "I'm sorry to have wasted your time with this," and you have a whole ouvre of stuff that would have been better off simply presented in the nude.

While I am aware that this will throw off the post count (since it's not fair to count these things as real posts, due to the fact that I didn't even write them), I think it's worth it in terms of bringing quality content to the blog. Solution: I will number each post in the title so that future yearly post symmetry inventories are not disturbed.

I think I will deem the section "Wisdom." Enjoy.

David Foster Wallace

apparently killed himself a few days ago. I've only sporadically read some of his stuff, but what I have read, I have really liked, and what I haven't read, I've always sort of felt like I would really like. Poking around some obituaries tonight, I've found a couple really nice pieces of his. One comes from an essay on Kafka:

"That the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It’s hard to put into words, up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell [students] that maybe it’s good they don’t “get” Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens . . . and it opens outward–we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komish."

Apparently the German at the end means "that is amusing."

I had never thought about Kafka in quite those terms, and since Kafka is so difficult to grasp and evaluate, it's a really useful analysis, as well as striking me as fairly accurate and beautiful in and of itself.

He also did a pretty nice commencement speech at Kenyon College in '05. I don't even remember the speech or speaker from WU, but I don't think I would have forgotten this one so quickly. Does anyone else happen to remember who it was, or what he talked about? No researching!