I began to question what constitutes happiness. I had this idea that happi-ness would consist of falling in love. If I just met the right woman everything
would be okay. And if I were just successful in my career, then I would be
happy. On one level I already knew this wasn’t true, because my own par-ents had money, and their friends were successful in conventional terms, but
when you got past the false-fronts there were huge amounts of alcoholism,
nervous breakdowns, and pills. So it began to dawn on me that the official
version of success might actually be a sort of failure, another deception of
the kind I was seeing with regards to the environment.
Money is dead, as Marx said. And if you’re motivated by something dead,
you become dead yourself, and you kill the world as well. What’s wrong for
me is wrong for the planet. Saving the planet isn’t about trying to be nice
and righteous and green. It’s about saving your own life, and the life in the
world in the process. And vice versa.
We can begin by challenging the idea that a life motivated solely by
desire for personal gain can lead to good things: point to the obvious, re-ally clear, collapse of the environment, the terrible suffering of the Third
World, alienation, the utter deadness of work life and much Western cul-ture. Then when people have started to see that working for greed leads
to all kinds of actual and metaphorical death in themselves and outside,
then you can maybe begin to consider the remarkable argument proposed
by Buddhists: that your life and happiness, all life and happiness, are best
served by working for the benefit of others, not yourself
.
I’m interested in the Eastern idea, which I think fits perfectly with what
we’ve been saying about selective inattention, that some emotions actually
help you to perceive the world more clearly. Others do not. Another way to
say this is that if greed, ambition, and selfishness create blockages to per-ceiving the world as it is, to clear away those blockages would help you to
perceive the world more accurately. That leads to the next question: How
do you clear those blockages?
Compassion is the desire to remove the suffering of others, and love is
the desire to reinforce and preserve their happiness. So the two are related.
Anyway, by reinforcing our capacity for compassion and love, by concen-trating on other people’s needs rather than ourselves, we can remove this
sort of energy system which creates this selective inattention, which creates
this capacity for self-deception. This is what the Buddhists have been say-ing for some two and a half thousand years: compassion and kindness and
love empower reason, because you’re taking away the energy that drives the
selective inattention. I think that’s important not only personally, but espe-cially for dissidents.
None of this is to say that you should just sit there and say, “I’m going
to have compassionate thoughts” but then live exactly the same way you’ve
always done—your compassionate thoughts need to be reflected in what you
actually do, how you behave. How can you aspire to compassion and yet work
for an arms manufacturer? You need to help other people, to experiment
with working in that direction. You need to find out what the real problems
are. And that for me means gaining some sort of awareness of compassion-ate movements and compassionate philosophies. I think we Westerners have
got a lot to learn on this, we need to try hard to be humble—which is hard
because we are very proud, very arrogant. I am, and I find reflecting on my
ignorance helps.
One of the things I think that stops a lot of people from doing any of this
work is a kind of helplessness: the problems are so big, what can one person
do? I have two answers to that. The first is that once you realize that helping
others is also helping yourself, the size of the overall problems becomes irrel-evant. You’re not doing it as a one-man, one-woman army to save the whole
world, but simply because it’s good for them and good for you, and it feels
good. And incidentally it is good for your physical health. There are studies
now that show that caring for others, even just having affectionate thoughts,
is good for you in quite crude, measurable physical and mental health terms.
It’s no secret really: anyone who has watched their little two-year-old niece
unselfconsciously absorbed in her games, and felt that wonderful warm affec-tionate sense that she’s a wonderful, dear little thing who you would die for,
knows that kindness and personal happiness go together, whereas grasping,
hate and arrogance make us thoroughly frozen and miserable—it’s clear but
our values are often based on a very different view of happiness.
The second part of the answer is that actually one motivated person can
accomplish a disproportionately large amount of good. Selfish illusions are
based on nothing, just lies, and even one moment of honesty based on a de-sire to relieve suffering can destroy vast numbers of lies—that’s why power
is so paranoid about controlling what we know and believe.
The question becomes, how do we get there? If our culture is based on
necessary illusions, then the first thing we need to do is expose those illu-sions. If the first rule of a dysfunctional system is “Don’t,” then the first thing
we need to do is “Do”: Speak!
I think that people underestimate the power of somebody willing to tell
the truth, because in fact very few people are: How will I pay the rent? How
will I eat? Where will I publish it? But the universe is more magical than that;
it doesn’t work like that. People think they have to identify a market, what
people want—even radicals do this—but that’s exactly wrong. What is true?
What really inspires me, excites me? What will really help people, really take
away their confusion and suffering? Write about those things and to hell with
what people are supposed to want. It’s sort of a funny, crazy, bloody-minded
way, but I think it’s the only way to bring water to the Wasteland we’ve talked
about. When I read something truthful, something real, I breathe a deep sigh
and say, “Thank you so much—I wasn’t mad or alone in thinking that after
all!” So often we are all left to our own devices, struggling in the dark with
this whole external framing system and internalized propaganda system, and
then for someone to tell us the truth is such a gift. In a world where people
are bullshitting all around us, confusing us—and confusion is a cause of huge
suffering—it’s a great kindness to be honest.
We can say the same for places as for moments. To be fully human is to
fully experience the spectacular formations of the planet: particular moun-tains, particular rivers, certain rock structures.
We no longer do this. We don’t experience the natural world surrounding
us. We deny ourselves our deepest delight by not participating in the dawn,
the dusk, the solstice, the springtime.
All that is left to most of us these days is the possibility of gaining a kind
of romantic fulfillment in going to the seashore, the mountains, or traveling
to wilderness areas. But this has progressively tended to become less mean-ingful, and more separated from our day-to-day existence. In our day-to-day
existence, our workaday existence, we are no longer present to the natural
world in any manner. We no longer see trees as other beings to be communed
with. Nowhere are we taught how to do this. Nowhere is it encouraged for
us to speak of this. That is why we live in this world of concrete and steel, of
wires and wheels and mechanisms. That’s the tragedy of our children. They
don’t see the stars because of light pollution, they play on grass poisoned with
pesticides, they experience the world as circumscribed by so much human-made material. Our children have been taken away from any kind of normal
human/earth relationship.
We maintain that disconnection as adults. At one time we depended di-rectly on the earth for our life support. We recognized this dependency, gave
praise and thanks for it, as do indigenous and agricultural peoples. By now
most of us have no idea where our food comes from.
The way humans lived before civilization was a lot less work, because
the planet naturally produces, naturally renews itself. It offers itself to us
not only for food, but in the sense of offering wonders, and its presence.
There’s none of this separation of the sacred and the secular in the natural
world, both spiritual and physical well-being are offered at the same time,
because—and this is what is most important—the physical and the spiritual
are two dimensions of the same thing.
Why are we so happy being with trees, other
animals, hearing birdsongs, seeing the colors of flowers, the flow of riv-ers? Why do these inspire us so? Well, that is what might be called the
large self, where we experience our fulfillment. We are not ourselves
without it.
Another thing people can do is try to relate more to what dollars are
supposed to bring us, instead of orienting themselves toward the dollars
themselves. What’s the point of working and then of money? It’s not to
collect some green pieces of paper, or to shuffle electrons on a bank’s
hard drive. It’s to get us things. But we need to ask ourselves what we
really need. We need food, clothing, and housing. Can we get by more
cheaply, so we don’t have to sell so many hours? How much sense does
it make to work extra hours to pay for a car that we use to drive us to
where we work in order to pay for the car?
Or here’s another thought: we all need love, which of course dollars
don’t buy. Maybe it’s easier to find love—not just romantic love but
love of ourselves and our communities—if we’re not stuck all day in an
automobile or in an office. So when people talk to me about needing a
car to get to work, I urge them to change the terms of the debate: to
think in terms of personal liberation, and maybe living better without
so much money. Having more time. It’s a real simple equation: if you
don’t have a car, you have more time. And you have better health, which
means you’re better able to enjoy the time you have. I’ve met so many
people who live well and are happy without a lot of material possessions,
without a lot of money. Now, by and large these people are young and
free, but there are a lot of clever people who have learned how to benefit
from intelligent choices. It all boils down to what you value.
This leads us directly to what is often called anarchy, which is really
all about taking care of each other on a community basis, without the
necessity of structured work or government regulation. We raise our
kids communally. We take care of each other. We share. That’s an alien
concept in this materialistic culture. Why is it that when you go down
any residential street in this country every family has its own separate
oven? That’s a terrible waste of energy. One oven could be baking a half-dozen loaves of bread, instead of one.
If happiness is what we really care about, we realize very quickly that
we don’t need money, we don’t need cars, we don’t need government.
We don’t need pollution.
But it’s hard to achieve any of these—to get rid of money, cars, gov-ernment, pollution—when we’ve got so many people. To be honest, the
number of people, and the fact that our entire system is based on pe-troleum and automobiles, sometimes makes things seem hopelessly dif-ficult, and leads to a conundrum for any activist trying to be honest yet
trying to get a message out. The conundrum is this: How do you speak
the truth while still seeming “realistic”? “Get rid of car culture?” the
mainstream media says, “You must be joking.” But we continue with
our form of activism and our message because our hope is that when the
big wrenching socioeconomic adjustment comes—and it will come—we
may have helped to pass on some helpful concepts, a body of experience,
and even some technical knowledge that will help the people who come
after to rebuild some kind of human cultural system, and not make the
same mistakes again. To help them to not start building new roads. In
a sense we see ourselves as writing off the present culture as being un-reachable, too tightly caught up in its materialistic death urge to salvage,
and so we’re looking past that to do what we can now to help the hu-mans and nonhumans who come after.
What resonance is lost—because we don’t allow ourselves to respond
to weather, for example, thinking we have to maintain a constant 72 degree
emotional state throughout the entire day? Or because we have jobs that
require us to be precisely intellectual, poor climate-controlled souls never
looking out the window? Or because we live so separated from nature? I live
in a house where hardwood floors, acoustical tile, eight feet of damp base-ment air, a layer of concrete, and a six-inch footer of gravel fence me off
from the earth. If I dug under all that, under the philosophical, emotional,
and physical house I live in, I would find myself—literally—in an ancient
riverbed of round boulders, and below that, among sea animals so old they’ve
turned to stone, all floating on a lake of molten rocks. Astounding facts we
never think to wonder about.
We lead lives of relentless separation—comings and goings,
airport embraces, loneliness, locked doors, notes left by the phone—and
the deepest of all those divides is the one that separates us from the places
we inhabit. My work takes me from place to place and everywhere I go, I
pass people who came from someplace else and left their knowledge of the
land behind. Universities, which should be studying connections, specialize
in distinctions instead. Biologists in their laboratories forget that they are
natural philosophers. Philosophers pluck ideas out of contexts like worms
out of holes, and hold them dangling and drying in bright light. We lock
ourselves in our houses, in our cars, and seal the windows and watch nature
shows on TV. We don’t go out at night, or in the rain. Unless we have Gore-tex jackets. And mace. No wonder we forget that human beings are part of
the natural world, members of a natural community. I think we are only
reminded, if we are reminded at all, by a sense of dislocation and a sadness
we can’t easily explain.
What Descartes did do is immense. Now we have thinking substance—
res cogitans—spirit, consciousness, human thought. This we know for sure.
And we have everything outside the mind—res extensa—matter, physical
things, plants and planets, animals and ancient forests. These we know uncer-tainly. We have thinking self (meaningful, knowable, subject) and unthinking
other (nonrational, material, knowable only as object).
If someone asks me, “Who are you?” it is not enough for me to say, “I
am Kathy, or I am Dora’s daughter, or I am a professor.” The answer is that I
am—at least partly—my memories: I am the person who remembers a flock
of white pelicans over Thompson Lake, and the apple tree in the backyard
of my house. So every time I notice something, every time something strikes
me as important enough to store away in my mind, I create another piece
of who I am. These pieces of the landscape are the very stuff of my ideas—
sense impressions and memories of what I have seen and heard. In this way,
I am—literally, at the core of my being—made of the earth.
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