The problem isn’t just that every place starts to look the same, or that you have to drive everywhere, or that not everyone can afford a car and people who can’t are basically excluded from civic life. The transportation system is responsible for a huge part of CO2 emissions that are changing the climate.
But we want our stuff, right? We want our plasma TVs and our fast foods and our fast cars and SUVs and gasoline, right? We want to flush toilets and run faucets and not worry about where the water comes from or goes, right? Until we stop wanting these things, aren’t we hypocritical to say they are absurd?
Well, do we really want these things? How could we know? People are adaptable to all kinds of situations. We have certainly learned not to miss things that we are missing – like time to spend with our loved ones, or work that is fulfilling, or being able to feel safe among people at night. We could probably adapt pretty quickly to life without plasma TVs and SUVs too. But I would go even further. One clue about what we really want comes from the advertisers. They sell fast food with images of families or friends eating together: community, human connection. They sell cars with images of mountainous, forested, and coastal landscapes: a connection to nature. They sell stuff by implying that it will increase your status, make you more sexually attractive, healthy, smart, comfortable. The stuff is a means to some end. They know this. But when someone points out the consequences of the way we get all our stuff, they are ready to point the finger at consumers and say – it’s your fault, you want the stuff. Our society is set up so you can’t do without it, and if you could, the systems would continue, unless they are consciously changed. More on that in a minute.
Means and ends
First, a little more about means and ends. We are in a church, so it seems a fitting place to talk about what the real ends are, what it really is all about. An important thinker on energy issues is Amory Lovins, who wrote “Soft Energy Paths” back in the 1970s. I thought of this means/ends distinction reading his passage early in the book, where he says something like – people don’t want electricity, they want warmth, light, and the comforts they get through it. We can take that analysis deeper. People don’t want things, they want the ends that come or that they think will come from having those things. What are those ends? I’d invite you to think about them. I came up with about seven. Mine are health, safety, knowledge, relationships (to people and nature), comfort, freedom, and meaning. You can play around with the list, subdivide the categories or come up with your own categories. But you’ll notice that when you look at it this way, there’s no particular technological level, no particular lifestyle, that is automatically better than another. Health can be served by high-tech medicine but harmed by high-tech chemicals, helped by clean air and water and food but harmed by parasites or predators.
If you accept that these (or some others) are (or ought to be) the real ends of life, then you can take these and use them to evaluate our system, our society. You can evaluate our society against past societies, or against some possible future. And you find that we are doing something other than serving our real ends, then we should change what we do.
And means? Again, I’d invite you to think on it more. But I came up with four. I was following the late Eqbal Ahmad, a Pakistani scholar and activist who taught at Hampshire College. He listed the four elements of nationhood as land, water, culture, and leaders. I am not talking about the elements of nationhood but the means of survival, so I would modify the list to be: energy, water, life (or land, or living systems, what I want to express is the self-designing, self-propagating aspect of life, that human and nonhuman life both depend on), and culture.
Look at this list of means, and I think the problem with our system becomes a little clearer. Our system is destroying the means of survival. We can go one at a time. Energy? Oil, and other fossil fuels, are being sucked out of the ground faster than it ever was, and the carbon from it is going into the atmosphere and wrecking the climate. There is probably enough fossil fuel to wreck the climate very badly before we run out. Water? Most of the surface water has been fouled and aquifers are being depleted everywhere. Climate change is changing the hydrological cycle, killing people both through droughts and floods. Life? Every year there are fewer forests, fewer fish, less agricultural land, more soil erosion and loss, more poisoned ecosystems, more wild species going extinct, more genetic pollution of plants. Culture? Measuring the loss of culture is a little harder. I have definitely had a feeling that people on roads and in routine bureaucratic interactions are becoming more antisocial all the time, that things like road rage just get worse and worse every year, and that people are losing their basic capacity to relate to each other as humans. But there are other ways of measuring cultural destruction. Languages with no speakers? Skills and techniques for making and doing things that no one knows how to do, because we can just buy a thing to do it and throw the thing away? Now maybe that is just progress, but what if we find out later that it might have been good to know how to store vegetables without refrigeration, or compost manure, or play an instrument?
The American system and change
The economic system we live in, capitalism, it uses these means. But it is dedicated to taking these means of life and turning them into money, in the process restricting access to them and killing them. Ultimately all of these things, the fisheries, the forests, the oil and minerals in the ground, people’s time and lives and sweat, they become money – paper or blips in bank accounts. We are asked to go along with this, and in return we get – stuff. I don’t think it is a good trade. How did it happen?
This is actually the American system, and it had some progressive aspects. When the twentieth century, also called “the American century”, started, there were several rival projects in the world. One was socialism, which was based on economic equality and solidarity and came to be associated with dictatorship and the Soviet Union. It is too bad, because there is no reason that economic equality and solidarity have to go with dictatorship, and I think they could exist with democracy. Many working people in Europe and elsewhere, even in America, stuck in poverty and debt at the bottom of a very rigid class hierarchy, came to believe in socialism and struggle for it. The American system offered a different solution, but like those who struggled for socialism, believers in the American system were also betrayed.
The American system was supposed to work like this. Instead of a rigid class hierarchy, there was some class mobility. Instead of mass poverty, there could be mass consumption. Good wages, plenty of jobs, low prices, lots of stuff, and the chance to rise in status, privilege, and education.
Anyone watch ‘The Wire’? I discovered it late and I’ve been devouring it over the past three weeks, wondering why on earth I find myself liking a cop show. Then I read that its creator says it’s not a cop show but a show about the betrayal of the working class, and I thought, ah, that’s why I like it. When people talk about the betrayal of working people in this country, they are talking about the erosion of the American system. Technological advances weren’t used to make workers more comfortable, but to automate jobs, move them offshore, unemployment increased, wages went down or stayed static, prices for stuff stayed cheap but prices for education and housing made class mobility less likely. This happened because of decisions by elites, not environmental limits. Naomi Klein writes about it in her book, ‘The Shock Doctrine’.
But as the system reaches environmental limits, the environment will become the scapegoat for the end of a system of mass consumption and mass privilege and its replacement with a system of elite privilege, in which access to nature will itself be a privilege from which most people are excluded. This kind of argument was used in forestry, for example, on the West Coast of the US during the Clinton years. The media presented a conservation plan as ‘jobs versus owls’. But the job losses weren’t coming from conservation. They were coming from automation. It was a false dichotomy then. But the idea was that either the environment or working people would have to suffer, so that elites could continue to profit. That is how it was presented and how it will continue to be presented, although the last part, “so that elites could continue to profit”, is never explicitly stated, just an invisible assumption.
I know this is not a catholic church, but my family background is catholic, and I am an environmentalist, so I know a lot about guilt. Environmentalism is too often about guilt. But, as environmentalist writer Derrick Jensen points out in his fine book, ‘Endgame’, being guilty about consumption choices or lifestyles confuses what we have choices about and what we don’t have choices about. The system we live in constrains our choices. We can feel guilty for not understanding or trying to change that system, but we shouldn’t forget how constrained our choices are.
I think that a defense of life, changing our society so that it allows people to work towards real ends and preserves and enhances the means of life, will have two steps. The first step, the harder step is to stop the system from destroying what is left and taking control, actual democratic control, of our societies. This is hard because, as insane as this ‘death project’ is, those in power and those who identify with it will defend it, and so turning it around will require a lot of thinking, a lot of courage, a lot of persistence and action. The second step will be, once we have the power to decide, to decide to be a part of a society that provides its members with health, freedom, knowledge, safety, comfort, relationships, and meaning, in ways that do not destroy the means of survival for us and other species.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
