Less Is More Than We Think

We get used to everything; nothing stays entirely fresh. Not even natural beauty. Not even surplus. I've lived in places that could make your jaw drop, they were so beautiful. But then, after living there awhile, I found there was really no way to recover that initial awe, that first sharp print on the paper of the brain. I might have wanted to recover it, but I couldn't.

Or consider the written word. In information-soaked cultures like ours, a book (the actual item) is nothing special; it's a bagatelle to get your hands on one, a big so-what to own one. But in many parts of Africa, where access to the Internet is still a luxury, and where even books are rare enough, Anna Karenina might be something you'd literally hunger and thirst for, a story you'd walk miles through the dust and the heat to hold and to read. There's a marvelous address by Doris Lessing on this precise subject: a speech she gave on the occasion of receiving the Nobel prize. It is available here. 

It's probably an important adaptation--this ability to take things for granted, to allow certain overwhelming aspects of reality to depreciate in value in the economy of consciousness. We may like to picture ourselves living in a bliss of total consciousness, glowing diligently as angels with appreciation and gratitude, but I'm not so sure that in such a state, we'd get the laundry done. And the laundry does need doing!

Of course, as Lessing's address reminds us (with such beautiful cognitive intensity) the contrary premise is also true: that in the face of dearth or of a withering of supply, we tend to appreciate more whatever it is that's running short on us! We feel deeper gratitude for what we have less of.

• If you want to appreciate the beauty of your home, go camping for a week.
• If you want to increase your appreciation of travel, stay at home for a year.
• If you want to appreciate just what a privilege it is to have a car, ride on public transport for a month. 

There are a thousand variations on this theme. Consider living one of them out, and not just for the sake of your philosophical health, but for the sake of the planet too; for the sake of the re-balancing of the cosmic economy. 

Over and over again over the past several months on this blog, I've said that, if we want really to help the situation we're in (as a voracious species on a limited blue-green sphere), then many of us are just going to have to make do with less. I return to this theme so often because, after a great deal of reading and consideration of these questions, I've come to believe that it's the only strategy that offers any hope of success. To say it bluntly to myself: there is just no way that several billion people can live the lifestyle that I, for the last thirty-five years or so, have led; the ecology, as we know it, could not survive. So, for the sake of the planet, and for the sake of justice, I must change. I must change my life.

I suppose it goes without saying that most of us (including me) would like to avoid drawing such conclusions. Substantial lifestyle-change demands so much of us that, right away, by instinct, we're full of defensive questions: can't we just take the conventional cars and replace them with hybrids or electrics? Can't we just replace the coal-fired power plants with thousands of windmills? What about high speed rail, powered by solar? Such questions imply the hope that a greener world might be engineered without involving any pain for us, or any substantial loss at all in terms of living standard.

Unfortunately change without personal sacrifice is unlikely to improve the situation much. Consider the hybrid car. Yes once it's on the road, it consumes less carbon. Unfortunately, so much carbon is sunk into manufacturing a hybrid (the lithium batteries being the budget buster) that, before one of them can claim any credit against its conventional cousins (for saving any carbon at all) it has to be driven nearly 75,000 miles. There are similar limitations to almost every advance that the sustainability-tech movement has claimed or championed. Usually what we call green, is in reality only a little less brown, with a little camouflage of wishfulness included.

An even more serious problem, though, with the strategy of change-around-the-edges is this: what we save by means of efficiency in one area usually simply frees up more money for consumption elsewhere in our lives. So, say I've saved money on gas this year because I own a hybrid; well, I take that money I've saved and apply it to a new television set that I don't really need, or I replace the roof and the siding sooner than we would have otherwise. Since this alternate-vector consumption comes with its own environmental costs, it turns out that owning the hybrid serves no green purpose at all. There's a book on this subject. It's called The Conundrum, by David Owen, and it packs a lot of proof into a very small space.

I wish none of this were true, I really do. Life for us earth lovers would be a good deal less frustrating if we could just trust all this trouble to work itself out: trust the oceans to stay full of fish and the atmosphere to clear itself of carbon: trust the planet to supply us with fresh water and petroleum right on into the indefinite, ever-progressing future. But folks, it ain't gonna happen. Things are the way they are, and the system we live in is limited, not by the lack of human imagination or by a sudden down-sizing of good-old-fashioned Yankee optimism, but by the laws of thermodynamics and of mathematics, of geology and of resource distribution. We can't go on like this. We can't. What we need is a reconditioning of the human mind. And that, to say it again, begins with the acceptance that we just have to make do with less.

This can be depressing. But there's a hero to this story as well, a sort of knight that rides to our rescue: the realization that "less is more than we think." 

• What really matters to us, is what value our consciousness puts on a thing.
• Human consciousness tends to value precisely what is rare, what is limited in supply.
• Therefore, when faced with limitations and diminishings, we can deal with the change, because....
• Even as the supply decreases, the value of what remains to us goes up.
• We're proportionally happy with the remainder that we keep.

As a final thought, consider the ultimate resource contraction: consider what happens when we run short of time: I mean time with a capital T. The sensation of mortality. There are, after all, people who  know their time on earth is short: Older people, sicker people, and just plain wise people who have thought about mortality a lot. Now, many, many such people report that, in the face of the knowledge of the ultimate limitation, they savor every day all the more. Mind you, it's not that they wouldn't like to live in better health, or wouldn't like to be given a little more time, or even a lot more time to live! It's just that, now that they know and have accepted the truth (that their days really are numbered) they nevertheless deal with it, and find that somehow, remarkably, their flame of life burns brightly enough in spite of that knowledge, and yes sometimes even more brightly because of that knowledge. That flame seems to burn on a fuel of paradox and deliberate gratitude!

HB

Until Tuesday the 5th!