by Lael Ewy
A recent
article in National Geographic noted that exposure to the natural
world increases human health, reduces stress, and increases critical
thinking skills. This is all fine and good; we need more appreciation
of the ecosystem on the whole and our local environs in particular.
But the major bent of the article was what nature can do for us and
how it can make us better able to return to our soulless offices,
shallow relationships, and consumerist ways of being. In other words,
the article is about how exposure to the natural world can make us
better equipped to perform the business of destroying the very
natural world that has prepped us to the task.
The article points
out a major philosophical problem in the western world, one that
floods in from many different streams of thought. Rationalist thought
insists on mechanistic explanations and direct means of causation.
Using the rationalist ways of thinking that still dominate the
sciences and all other “outcomes based” human activity, we insist
that all things happen for a reason and that all things that happen
therefore must have reasons for being allowed to happen.
Thus a means of
inquiry becomes a method of being; a way of doing science drifts into
a way of making value judgments about what humans ought to do.
By imposing this
rationalistic value judgment on human activity, we lose the idea that
anything we do has an inherent value: there always has to be a why,
and that why always has to be justified within an interlocking system
of causations.
The ultimate limit
of this way of thinking appears when we start to ask questions about
prime movers, ultimate causes, the first event in the great chain
that leads the universe inevitably to us, at the present moment,
contemplating how we got here, thinking about how the universe was
gracious enough to lead up to us, a set of beings so smart as to
contemplate how it was the universe’s duty to create beings who can
think about how they got here.
Only recently,
string theory, ideas contemplating multiple universes, and quantum
mechanics have begun to dissolve some of these first mover
quandaries, but they have yet to devolve into popular thought.
In the lives of
those living in the United States, this problem is compounded by
puritanism, which underscores the lockstep linearity of rationalism
with a very specific goal: eternal salvation. By focusing only on
those activities deemed holy, we both assure our places in heaven and
avoid the temptations of those things we do for fun, because fun
things lead us to inevitable perdition.
But neither science
nor puritanism are quite as powerful in our lives as the free market
business model. While it is true that organizations like The American
Enterprise Institute, backed by laissez-faire billionaires such as
Charles and David Koch, have done a lot to promote free market
thought in the last 40 years, the ideas go back much farther than
that. After all, Charles Dickens was already savagely critiquing the
point of view that every human activity must be geared toward the
bottom line in the 1840s through works such as “A Christmas Carol.”
Dickens’s writing was informed by the conditions of early
industrialism, and we’ve gone a long way toward denying those
conditions are still with us, primarily by offshoring to other parts
of the world the nasty work to be done by people of whom we don’t
think much.
But the rationality
of industrialism still dominates our new, supposedly more creative,
and “knowledge-based” economy. Instead of being part of a literal
machine, we use strict schedules, quality assurance measures, and
monitoring technologies to make sure people are not goofing off at
their desks. The Taylorist factory has given way to the open floor
plan office. The 12-hour factory shift has given way to smartphones
and laptops that assure constant contact with the people at work.
Pressure on
lawmakers by business-backed groups such as the American Legislative
Exchange Council have turned what was supposed to be a government
by, for, and of the people into one dominated by business interests
and interested only in maintaining the bottom line. Changes to work
rules, taxation, and even the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the
First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech have oriented the
purpose of American society entirely toward the generation of profit.
These changes have devolved social power ever more towards employers
and financiers and away from those who actually do the work.
As the National
Geographic article implies, all of this has been devastating to
our health. Rates of stress-related diseases such as diabetes, heart
disease, and hypertension have skyrocketed. Rates of depression,
anxiety, and suicidality are also on the rise. At this point in
history, nearly one in four American women are taking antidepressant
medications, as they are asked to do all of the aforementioned work
underlining the bottom line, plus clean the house, raise the kids,
cook for the family, and put up with sexual harassment, all for 30%
less money.
“Helpful”
websites abound, full of techniques for busting stress and overcoming
the blues, full of advice for simplifying life and streamlining our
vanishing personal time. But few of these sites promote such things
for their own sake; we meditate and do yoga, journal and run
marathons not simply to do them but because doing them makes us
better workers, more “highly effective” people,” “better”
moms and dads. All of this desperate chilling out and throwing out,
pumping up and efficiency creation exists against a backdrop of
genuine existential threat: in the United States, in particular, one
is only allowed to be fully human when gainfully employed or
independently wealthy. Everyone else is sanctioned by legislation,
internally displaced, forced to live in squalor, incarcerated. For
those deemed “disabled,” a life of poverty and medication awaits.
For those able-bodied folks who happen to be un or under employed,
benefits are tied to a progression of increasingly demeaning and
intrusive tasks and to standards of employability that only exist
within the delusional and paranoid thoughts of the legislators who
enstated the rules. And for too many there is homelessness,
increasingly made illegal by laws ostensibly about “cleaning up”
the civic landscape, as if the bodies of the unfortunate were so much
misplaced refuse cluttering up the view of yet another Tuscan styled
strip mall.
In other words, when
our lives are bent entirely toward the cause and effect relationship
posited by industrial capitalism that has as its end point greater
profits and increased market value, most people suffer. It becomes
not just immoral but impossible to think of anything worth doing for
its own sake, and those things we do to “recharge” become
distractions from our misery: mindless and violent video games, awful
blockbuster movies, increasingly sensationalistic television, and any
number of mind-numbing substances of varying degrees of legality (and
lethality). These latter chemicals, when dispensed by physicians, are
purchased through a system that is itself driven by market factors
and not person care, no matter how well-intentioned the caregiver may
be.
Environmentalists
have long argued that industrialized capitalism is unsustainable. At
some point, it will deplete the finite resources it relies on for its
model of continual growth, if it doesn’t first so poison the
ecosystem or so warm the planet that civilization becomes impossible
to maintain. But there’s another, deeper reason it can’t go on
like this: it demands that people devote themselves to nothing of
inherent value; it demands that most of us devote most of our time
and all of our usable energy to helping other men hoard wealth.
Another
article comes to mind as I write this, this one from The
Guardian, warning against a newfound interest in the western
world in ancient, eastern meditative practices. Mindfulness, the
article warned, is not always pleasant. It doesn’t always calm you
down or chill you out. Bottom line, it’s not for everybody, so
don’t throw out that bottle of Paxil quite yet.
But, of course,
calming you down or chilling you out is not the point of mindfulness
meditation; mindfulness is. If you’re looking to it to do those
other things so that you can be a better worker, more well-adjusted
to a crappy system, you’re doing it wrong. We have become so
devoted to using such tools to become better worker bees that we have
forgotten about the hard (and sometimes unpleasant) work we need to
do to become better people. We have lost sight of becoming —and
maybe even lost the ability to become—fully engaged in those things
we do as fulfilling activities in and of themselves, of entering
those places where judgments about being “better” employees or
even “better” people tend to fall away.
So,
Meditate for the
sake of meditation.
Work for the sake of
work.
Create for the sake
of art.
Rationalize for the
sake of clarity.
All else falls unto
the worship of false gods.
