In any case they all want out, and I, the only one outside--I want to rescue them, and as many as I can. And I AM able to help. I can open the door and reach into the room and pull folks out by the arm or the shoulder. The trouble is that my rescues can only happen at a painfully slow pace. And here the doorknob is the obstacle--this awful round doorknob, which is brass and hot to the touch. For the most part it's locked, and only at certain random intervals does it unlock itself and allow itself to be turned. Then too, whenever I can turn the knob and open the door, as soon as I finally pull someone out the door slams shut and again I have to wait for the knob to unlock itself before my next rescue can take place.
Sometimes I wake out of this dream in a literal sweat. Why do I have it? What does it mean? I do not pretend to know for certain, but I think it has its roots in all the thinking and reading and considering I've given over the last few years on the theme of limits. Limits of perception, limits of knowledge, limits to prediction, limits to the limits of knowing our limits: all of which by the way are tied up in the grand predicament of not knowing our limits when it comes to nature. Incidentally I call this dream my Schindler's List dream, after the industrialist in Spielberg's movie who saved several hundred Jews from the Nazi murder machine, but who in spite of his work and the risks he ran in the end was in despair at the thought that he might have done more. "I could have done more. I could have done more" he yells out in some of the final moments of the film. And in my dream the essential problem is the same. What any individual has on offer as a force of rescue or repair is just completely outmatched by the scope and violence of the general predicament.
What is our responsibility in a time like this when the problems in the world are so overwhelming? When the forests are falling and the reefs are dying and the fisheries collapsing and the sea levels rising? How much trouble should we take to change our lives to undo or at least limit our contribution to the damage? At first it would seem as though a great deal of sacrifice would be in order, but then when the scope of the problem becomes clear and we pit the hugeness of the task against the actual good the individual can do, why, it's natural to ask if it even makes sense to try. Take that half ton or so of carbon I save every year by doing my laundry by hand. A half ton sounds like a lot at first, but when compared with the dozen gigatons or so released annually into the atmosphere by civilization at large, it's not even a drop in the bucket; it's truly a statistical nothing. Aren't there other things I can be doing with my time than plunging a plunger up and down in soapy water? Of course I still choose to plunge, but have to admit, sometimes I feel doubtful about doing so.
It's the aspect of doubt that that I want to speak to here today, this aspect of doubt that often masquerades as the voice of reason, even though it's not really moral reason but usually something more like utilitarian reason and usually a purely personally-focused one at that. But in any case the reasoning goes like this:
- Here I am making all these adjustments and changes to my life to keep from harming the planet.
- No one else I know is doing this. Or hardly anyone to speak of.
- The net effect of all my sacrifices, practically speaking, is zero.
- Why should I bother? Who am I fooling? I'm wasting my time. I'm wasting my life. Think of the fun I could be having. Think of the fun everyone else is having. Spending the carbon. Trying not to think about it.
- That's it. I'm buying a ticket to Cancun. Once I get there, I'm going to rent a Hummer for a week.
It's an extraordinary moment really, if you think of it. Here, in age of limits (and this is an age of limits!) we feel ourselves limited in our response to civilization's insistence that there need not be limits! And the source of that feeling is really let's face it social conformity, and the relief that it would give us just to be acting like everyone else. We know in our hearts that there are limits. We sense real destruction and grief on the other side of the wall. And we want to help. But the truth is, that what we want even more than the power to help is just to wake up and find that the predicament itself was all a bad dream, so that we can just get down to living the way that everyone else is living and leave behind all this worry, this burden of the knowledge of our collective slow suicide by consumption. It's a powerful thing, the power of suggestion, the power of our social nature to make us conform even to lifestyles that we know to be destructive. Other people really do exert pressure. Let me give you an example.
My son is entering college at the end of this month--at a school that happens to be some twelve hours away by car. Months ago we decided that in order to save on carbon and fulfill a pledge not to drive more than three thousand miles a year (and fewer the next) we would not take him to school by car. Instead he could make the trip himself on the train. Which of course does not zero out the emissions, but again, helps. And I promise this decision was never something we advertised or trumpeted or evangelized about; nevertheless news gets around and it has caused something of a flurry of commentary.
Now, a few of the older folks who have gotten wind of our decision, have gotten a little misty-eyed recollecting that they themselves went to college by train. That's been fun to see. But a good share of the responses have featured surprise and even consternation. In fact just this last week someone who had heard (by the grapevine) of our arrangement said: "What? you're not taking him? I'll drive him up!" Clearly it has become a cultural expectation in America that parents settle their children into their dorm rooms if they possibly can!
What's going on here? Well what's going on here is we're re-discovering the age old truth that conformity matters. That if you choose for whatever reason to transgress social norms, those choices will be commented upon and questioned, and attempts will be made to adjust your behavior. This was true about adultery in Hawthorne's America, and it is true today with questions of diet or politics or opinions about evolution and yes even about how you get around. Ask any bicyclist or walker who has been hooted at by folks in automobiles. Or heck ask the Amish farmer in Pennsylvania whose farm was recently the object of an armed federal raid because he was suspected of selling his milk raw-naked from the cow to customers who wanted their milk that way. I of course am not claiming victim status here. I only want to point out the very real alarm with which many people view contrarians, as well as the energy of concern behind some of their responses, though of course most of the time the disagreement, discomfort, and alarm will remain more attractively packaged in a wisecrack or a whisper of side talk.
"But why should anyone care about how I live?" you might ask. "I'm not living this way to be self-righteous. I'm just trying to do the right thing by my conscience." Ah conscience you say, but you see that's just it. The truth is that when you choose to take a train instead of a car, or choose the farmer's market for raw vegetables instead of driving an SUV to Walmart for cans and packages, others know why you're doing it and are going to interpret it as a judgement on their own way of living; which of course in a way it is! You may not be saying out loud "you're wrong" and you may not even feel that you are making judgments against them, but the action speaks for itself. It says "I do not wish to live in the same way that you are living." Well, why wouldn't some folks feel defensive about that? It's a natural social reaction.
Is there anything we can do about all this? Not really. Should it make us change our minds about how we decide to live? Probably not. In the first place because those who cannot respect your decisions about how to live probably do not deserve the time or the effort of your friendship, and in the second place, because in the end if we in the new simplicity movement are right about the way history is headed--deeply into an age of limits, it's only a matter of time before everyone is living more like us. And in the meantime, your real friends as well as you know that such lifestyle differences need not after all be the end of the world! All sorts of people meet and enjoy one another across all kinds of mental and cultural divides, and we either get used to being different from one another or we convert to the other point of view.
I want to say more about our boy going by train to his first year of college. There's a rich vein there to probe and to mine. The theme of social expectations. The theme of owning more stuff than you could ever carry onto a train. The theme of what blessings can accrue to the project of what, in my last post, I called "dying into simplicity." I'll leave all this for a different post though--maybe one for after the boy had boarded and the cord is cut. Which happens to be next week Friday.
Though now that I think about it, I may have to put off writing about any of that for a week or two and fit something else between now and then. The boy's departure is probably too big an event. Too much to think about. Too many emotions to feel. Some words are best left on the trees of Feeling and Intellect to ripen and fall naturally without being force-picked! In any case, for now dear readers, until my next post early next week, best wishes and sweet dreams of non-conformity.
HB
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