Posts
Published in the Concord Monitor 10/18/17
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| Cape Cod sunset taken 4/1/13; reworked in Photoshop CC Jean Stimmell |
Back to the Future
Does our best
hope lie in the past?
Although pundits
warn that our wasteful, consumer civilization is unsustainable, we still revel
in measuring our wellbeing by how quickly we can grow our Gross National
Product. We even have the gall to elect
an avaricious, real estate developer as our president.
However, down
deep, we know end times are coming: It’s almost come down to flipping a coin:
nuclear incineration or climate annihilation.
Just as we, as
individuals, avoid at all costs the unpleasant fact that we will die, we appear
to have the same kind of denial about our nation’s fate and that of the world.
Like it or not,
the handwriting is on the wall.
Nuclear weapons
proliferate around the world at the service of a new crop of tinpot despots,
spewing schoolyard macho rhetoric, egging each other on to light the fuse of
nuclear war, resulting in the atomic doomsday clock ticking down to 2- 1/2
minutes from midnight. Meanwhile hurricanes of unheard of intensity and frequency
batter our coasts while forest fires rage out of control in the west.
No wonder we are
in denial: Getting bombed back to the Stone Age or thrown back there by Mother
Nature is the stuff of our worst nightmares.
Recently,
several books suggest a kinder, gentler transition: a back-to-the-future
scenario where we voluntarily return to a simpler, sustainable way of life,
using the lifestyle of the Bushmen of Africa as a role model.
What we call the
Bushmen are more properly referred to as the Kloisan. They may be the first
humans to inhabit the earth and have lived sustainably, at one with nature, for
at least the last 150,000 years, a length of time unfathomable to us.
It turns out the
Kloisan lifestyle is not such a bad way to live: they only have to work around
fifteen-hour a week. They live complex lives with deep meaning, attuned to
nature and highly skilled, a necessity in order to thrive in harsh desert
conditions.
James Scott,
professor of political science at Yale, suggests “the step-down in complexity
between hunting and gathering and domesticated agriculture is as big as the
step-down between domesticated agriculture and routine assembly work on a
production line.”
Antropologist Marshall Sahlins has characterized
hunter-gatherers as “the gurus of a ‘Zen road to affluence’ through which they
were able to enjoy “unparalleled material plenty— with a low standard of
living.” He reasoned that hunter-gatherers
were content by the simple expedient of not desiring more than their
environment could provide.
Here, it seems
are people – egalitarian, honest, peaceful, free – who are
living in
harmony with their natural environment, unconcerned with material wealth. Another quality they possessed, we now yearn
for, is mindfulness: They lived their lives in the present, trusting that
providence would provide.
James Suzman,
author of Affluence Without Abundance, seconds what Sahlin writes,
hoping that we, like our hunter-gatherer forebears, might learn to be satisfied
with having fewer needs more easily met, and in doing so break out of our
destructive spiral of endless growth and development.
After all, “if
so much of our species’ history was spent hunting and gathering, mustn’t there
surely still be something of the hunter-gatherer in all of us.”
Unfortunately,
at present, it’s almost impossible to conceive of us consumer addicted
Americans making even a token shift toward such a sustainable lifestyle.
Yet Suzman notes another fundamental aspect of Kloisan society that
appears even more unattainable: “a fiercely egalitarian society where
profitable exchange, hierarchy, and significant material inequality were not
tolerated.”
Okay, I admit that we are not going to morph into sustainable folks
overnight. But, as a first step, we could strive to reduce the extreme
inequality in our country – not seen since the robber baron of the 19th century rode rough-shorn over we, the people, and our government.
One might argue that such a solution is impossible to achieve because of
the increasing polarization in our country. Actually, that’s the best reason to
make it happen because recent studies have shown that polarization rises in
lockstep with income inequality.
Trump and his band of plutocrats, of course, are pushing a different
solution. Big tax cuts to the wealthy to be paid for by further slashing our
safety net, including deep cuts to Medicaid and Medicare – which, of course,
will only increase the divide between rich and poor.
All of this is happening at terrible cost: while our would-be emperor
tweets, Rome is burning. God have mercy on us all.
xxx
