The people that walked in darkness

Marcus Anthony speaks in a recent video blog (http://22cplus.blogspot.com/2010/05/other-side-of-hong-kong.html) about the beauty and tranquility of Hong Kong’s outlying islands, and how few citizens are willing to unplug themselves long enough to explore them: Shopping for clothes or the latest electronic gadgets is a much more popular Sunday pastime than hiking in those lush and soul-healing green hills.

But then, in order to acknowledge their need for that healing, people would first have to acknowledge that they have souls – that they’re not just biological gadgets, wired up and ready to serve the global corporations that constitute a kind of nightmare distortion of the benign world government that futurist thinkers dreamt of 100 or so years ago. And there’s an exact parallel between those soul-extinguished Hong Kongers and the tepid, slow-motion response of Americans to the Louisiana oil spill catastrophe – as if that black, sticky, toxic ooze had somehow got into people’s minds and hearts as well as destroying some of the country’s finest landscapes and killing millions of innocent fellow-creatures. (It will probably start to affect Florida – America’s no. 1 holiday playground – soon.)

It’s true that President Obama has reacted with characteristic restraint and caution to a situation which probably didn’t call for either of these qualities, but we can’t expect our leaders to feel the passion and reverence for life on our behalf that we’re not willing or able to manifest for ourselves. The problem is, as I mentioned in a previous blog, we’ve sold our souls for oil, and we can’t claim them back at a moment’s notice just because we’re feeling a bit queasy about the bargain – all those hocked souls are in safe deposit, well locked away.

The two most valuable corporations in America are, appropriately enough, Exxon and Apple: oil and gadgets, at over $225 bn. each of market capitalization – if the combined value of those corporations was shared equally among all Americans, every man, woman and child would have $1500 worth. But of course the value isn’t shared equally, or anything remotely like equally: a tiny number of people derive stupendous wealth from them, and the rest of us little or nothing. Only the negative effects are shared out equally: the oil when it’s spilled spills on everyone and everything, while the negative social effects of IT addiction are down to “society” as a whole to deal with.

It doesn’t look like a great bargain for what we’ve given away, does it? Maybe it’s time we started to reclaim our souls, even if we have to make do with fewer gadgets and less oil. We can only become wholer, saner and happier in the process.

Degrowth, Ungrowth, Anti-Growth

As Bob Herbert says in a very moving op-ed in the New York Times (nytimes.com/2010/05/22/opinion/22herbert.html?hp), “America has sold its soul for oil”. He might as well have said the entire world – with projected global oil consumption in 2020 three times the 1970 level, pretty much all of us are riding this juggernaut, and all too few seem to want to (or to know how to) get off.

The conventional “wisdom” (never was the word more inappropriate) regarding the current Eurozone crisis is that the continent needs economic growth of 3%-4%, plus increased “competitiveness” – as if economic competition hadn’t already created millions of human casualties, in the form of the growing numbers of long-term unemployed and unemployable. The same “wise” commentators point with admiration to China and India’s 10%+ growth rates, passing over if they mention them at all the extraordinary stresses developing in those societies – such as the recent knife attacks on small children in China.

Apart from the fact that endless growth on a finite planet must end up destroying its very fabric (that’s another topic), this obsession causes immense damage to our souls. Contentment with what we have becomes impossible; basic self-acceptance is undermined by a perpetual sense of insufficiency. Further and further from the path prescribed by all the world’s spiritual traditions, we invent ever more gadgets to become attached to – gadgets which need charging or they literally die on us; gadgets which after a few years become obsolete pieces of metal and plastic junk

In the overall timescale of human history “growthism” is a very recent phenomenon, and it pretty much coincides with the emergence of modern all-powerful mega-corporations and financial markets. It’s their need for ever-growing profit that drive the economic policy of nations and ultimately the behavior of individuals, via advertising and other media – even though most of the material rewards for this plunder of the earth’s resources and the human psyche accrue to a tiny number of people, who have not just more than they need, but inconceivably more than anyone could possibly ever imagine needing even if they were to live for 10,000 years. The pyramid of wealth distribution is perfectly matched by a pyramid of greed, ruthlessness and insecurity.

An interesting counter-initiative is starting to develop, based not on the chimera of environmentally sustainable economic growth – which doesn’t address the psychic/spiritual crisis at all – but on abandoning the concept of growth altogether. Under the clumsy English name of “degrowth” (the original French term, décroissance, is much easier on the ear) a conference was recently organized in Barcelona (http://www.degrowth.eu/v1/).

Not yet a movement as such, “degrowth” is still casting about for a sense of its own identity, and, judging from the papers delivered at the Barcelona coference (http://www.degrowth.eu/v1/fileadmin/content/press/Degrowth-_Abstracts_Book_1.0.pdf) and an angry and rant-filled magazine (http://www.ladecroissance.net/) I picked up on a recent visit to Paris, there’s a danger of its being taken over by the anti-capitalist left. It’s a danger because, though modern capitalism is clearly at the root of the problem, mere opposition to it won’t produce the solution – since no problem is ever resolved at the level on which it was created. “Degrowth” needs to start at the psychic and spiritual level where the deepest damage lies – damage which prevents us from even envisioning a different world – and to formulate and inculcate a vision of a spiritually rooted sense of sufficiency together with a deep reverence for the created world. As Joni Mitchell sang over 40 years ago “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden”’. There are no chargers in the garden, and everything in it that grows is balanced by something else that decays and passes away.

In a future blog I’ll try to sketch out something of what that world might look like.

The Wounded Heart of China

You’re familiar, I’m sure, with those times when you’re suffering inside: You know you need to stop, go inwards, check yourself out and be present with whatever’s happening – but instead you almost brutally pursue whatever practical tasks are uppermost, as if you could seal up the pain and never have to touch it, or as if it was simply less real than your everyday practical tasks and goals.

Now imagine a whole country which operates on that basis, and you have something like modern China. People have to deal with a level of competitive pressure unimaginable in the West, and are offered as role models characters such as Lei Feng (left: a Maoist icon of self-sacrifice refurbished in recent years). Self-sacrifice isn’t really the correct term: it’s as if there was never a self to sacrifice in the first place – identity is still largely mediated through collective symbols and activities, certainly throughout formal education.

So the self that starts to emerge in the pursuit of material success which characterizes today’s China is a raw, unformed self which doesn’t really know how to speak of its interiority, of its pains and frustrations – which generally wishes them away or if it expresses them at all, does so in the most spasmodic and unconscious way. Such, for example, are the recent terrifying and near inexplicable attacks on children (which Marcus Anthony has written about in a very illuminating post: http://22cplus.blogspot.com/2010/05/killing-bliss-in-china.html).

And of course China’s wounds themselves are both individual and collective: not only is it much harder for a Chinese person than for a Westerner suffering from inner anguish to find any useful way of addressing it or external support in doing so, but the immense suffering inflicted by the Cultural Revolution and more recently by the Tiananmen Square events has been explored, if at all, only on a superficial and factual level. The tools to deal with such experiences are not generally available in China and in any case their use would threaten the Party’s monopoly of historical interpretation – as official ideology doesn’t distinguish between experience and interpretation, any individual testimony which appears to contradict the officially sanctioned account of events is instantly ruled inadmissible.

There is a way out of this crazy-driving impasse, as I wrote in my previous post; and I was interested to read that the managers of the giant Foxconn company which assembles iPhones and iPads in Shenzhen has actually called in monks from Wutaishan to help deal with a spate of suicides by employees. It may or may not be relevant that Foxconn is a Taiwanese company.

A turning towards spiritual practice is a notable feature of modern China, but it’s a matter of concern that the public debate about this is so impoverished. No serious discussion of anything resembling “superstition” is possible in the mainland media, while all but the oldest generations have been brought up without any kind of appropriate conceptual framework.

Unless the Party is willing to start progressively loosening its control of public discourse and interpretation, these individual expressions of intolerable anguish can only become more frequent, eventually coalescing into collective outbreaks which will become harder and harder to explain away.