kevintaylorburgess

Since the topic of blessing Canada came up in the comments on John Michael Greer's blog, ecosophia.net, and it has generated a decent amount of discussion, I think it's worth having a spot set aside for it. Thus, this post. Comments will be welcome for at least the next few months, and having them focused in one place will be helpful.

Please note: profanity and unrelated comments will be deleted, but otherwise, have at it!

Writing is always a social activity, part of a great conversation, with many participants long gone, some alive today, and many more yet to come. I’ve had a good reminder of the social element thanks to an anonymous commenter, who noted last week that in addition to the systematic loss of the skills of planning, another set of skills that have been lost over the past few decades is agency. This is a very significant point, and without someone else noting it, I would not have noticed it; nor would I have made the connections which will be developed in this post lacking that insight and the thoughts which came from it.

The link between planning and agency is quite simple, and in fact looking at this link helps point towards the underlying cause of the loss of both skill sets: both skills require responsibility. This is a simple word, but one of the consequences of how plenty of people have tried to avoid it is that it is going to take some discussion of the concept in order to clear up some inevitable misunderstandings. First then, according to the Merriam Webster Dictionary “responsibility” means nothing more than “the quality or state of being responsible”. Responsible has a number of definitions, but the most important for us is number 2a: “able to answer for one's conduct and obligations”, and 2b: “able to choose for oneself between right and wrong”.

Both of these assume agency; and in fact, agency is meaningless without these two qualities being present. In other words, agency is only possible if someone is responsible for their own conduct, and they can only be responsible if they have agency. Planning is also only possible for people who are responsible: there’s no reason to do it unless you are willing to answer for your conduct; if you aren’t, why bother planning at all? Or rather, why both following through on them? The refusal to take responsibility helps explain the odd pattern I’ve noticed with some people, where they will plan, but never follow through. The plans are able to get remarkably detached from what is possible, because the plan will never be implemented.

We have a large number of people who are refusing to take responsibility for their actions. This shows up in plenty of ways: the insistence that change is impossible; the insistence free will does not exist; the insistence on the part of many activists that government action is needed, so they don’t need to change their lives; the insistence progress will solve all our problems; and the claim that greed, violence, prejudice, or some other negative quality is hardwired into human nature and that therefore the problems we face can never be solved; among others. What makes all of these fascinating is that they are used in a very odd way: they are used to avoid addressing things which are within your control.

I’m going to make a personal note here, and say I used many of these arguments until quite recently as a way to justify why I refused to change my life, and that they effectively boil down to the claim human beings are powerless. It is absolutely true that the amount of power one human being has is very limited in the grand scheme of things, but of course this does not mean that we are powerless. What it means, rather, is that we are limited, and trying to solve everything is a recipe for disaster. Therefore, what can be done is simple: we can take responsibility for our own actions. That’s all we can do.

This is also something that a lot of people are trying desperately to avoid doing, for a very simple reason: taking responsibility for your actions means accepting that you are responsible for what you do. The two definitions of responsible given above are not as distinct as they may appear to be at first glance: if you can answer for your conduct, you are implicitly accepting moral responsibility, and thus accepting you have the ability to choose between right and wrong; between good and evil.

In a sane society, this would not be a problem: we would teach our children how to be moral, and as a result, as adults we would find the notion of taking responsibility to be obvious common sense. Of course there would still be bad actors: there always are, human nature being what it is; equally, everyone would fall short on occasions, for the same reason. The problem for us is that our society’s moral code is so strict as to be unworkable, and as a result in order to accept responsibility, you need to accept the fact that you are “evil”. This is because according to the understanding of modern western society, “good” is so difficult to achieve that it’s an utter impossibility.

The roots of this oddity is a very simple one: as Oswald Spengler showed in his masterpiece The Decline of the West, each civilizations “rationalism” is the mythology and religion of the culture it emerged out of with the serial numbers filed off. In other words, “rationalists” today can be thought of as an atheist sect of Christianity. I mean no disrespect to my Christian readers with that observation: Christianity is not my path, but it almost was; I can see the profound emotional and spiritual benefits to the faith, admire the delicate and intricate theologies, and have a deep respect for the rich and well developed ethical tradition of Christianity, while not partaking in it. Many of the positives to the religion were ditched by the atheistic and quasi-atheistic sects of Christianity which developed in the western world over the past few centuries, and one result can be seen with the broken and dysfunctional ethical system which so many people struggle with today.

As a general rule then, as a society, we define good much as traditional Christians do: it’s a state of perfection, where someone has attained purity of soul and is now perfectly generous, without fault. For Christians, there is a way to get there: Divine Grace. For those of us who are no longer Christian, or never were, it’s important to ask: How do you attain perfection? The unfortunate answer is that it is impossible for human beings to achieve without divine aid. For those who believe in Divine Aid, this is not a problem, but for those of us who don’t, this is a huge one.

In other words, the majority of people in the western world today, who have abandoned traditional Christianity but are stuck in a moral framework which doesn’t make sense without God, have trapped themselves in a terrible position: they still believe we are flawed beings; they still believe in the sinful nature of humanity; but they do not believe in Divine Grace, nor in the inner divine essence that many Christians believe we all have. Is it any wonder then that so many of them want to avoid responsibility for their actions, given that by their own beliefs, they cannot be anything but evil?

I’m in the process of doing something very unfashionable these days: I’m deliberately changing my life. I’ve made the conscious decision to shift from an upper middle class lifestyle towards something a little lower on the socioeconomic ladder. I could talk about how few of the comforts of that lifestyle are actually comfortable, or about how few of the privileges are actually anything more than a way for someone else to control us, but at the moment I feel like that would be a lie: at this point I miss quite a few of them.

There have been days where my apartment has felt like an oven, and I’ve wished I had the money for air conditioning; there are times where I’m grocery shopping and really wish I didn’t need to think through the cost of everything and could just buy whatever I happened to want; there are times when I really don’t feel like cooking and wish I could afford to be able to just decide to order something; and so on.

This is not to say that my new life is miserable: quite the opposite in fact. I’ve found certain pleasures to be had in it that my old life lacked: it’s far easier to be outside in hot weather; I’m enjoying trying out plenty of old recipes which I’d never think to use if I could buy whatever I wanted; there’s plenty of peace and quiet to be had without the TVs my family has blaring all the time; and even though I’m giving up a lot, I still have running water, electricity, shelter, and plenty of food. Furthermore, my new way of life has a future, and so I’m free from the psychological burden of justifying why I cling to a life I hate, that I know will be going away anyway.

This last point is worth discussing. It has a simple origin: anything unsustainable will eventually stop. This is a very simple concept, but it’s one which a lot of people are going out of their way to avoid grasping right now. The reason is very, very simple: the kind of lives which most North Americans live, or if they don’t have think they deserve, is utterly unsustainable. The lifestyles depend on the drawing down of massive amounts of fossil fuels, and the systematic impoverishment of the majority of the rest of the world, both of which rely on certain states of affairs which are going away as I write this.

Fossil fuels are a non-renewable resource over any timescale relevant to human beings, and so this means that each and every barrel of oil, pound of coal, or cubic foot of natural gas burned today is one less available for tomorrow, and so at a certain point we will start running out; and the current excess available for North America is the result of systematic imbalances funnelling a sizable fraction of the world’s wealth our way, which is under pressure due to the rise of other nations, such as China, Russia, India, and Brazil.

What this means then is that the kind of life I grew up in will be going away in the near future. For many, it’s already started to disappear, and for everyone else, it’s only a matter of time. One thing I think is worth noting as evidence this is already happening is that my siblings and myself, until I decided to give up the lifestyle, lived with our parents, as we don’t have the money to move out and maintain a middle class lifestyle. Twenty years ago, most people in their mid to late 20s in the middle class would have been able to find a job which payed enough to enable them to pursue the life independent of their parents. The fact my siblings couldn’t, I couldn’t, and that very few of my friends have been able to is because it’s a widespread predicament; and this says something about how the way of life is already going away. This leaves people in a nasty predicament: the way of life they have is going away right now, and most of them have no idea what to do if they lose it.

The way out of the predicament is quite straightforward, but it’s not one which a lot of people are willing to take: it is to embrace the sort of life that is possible on the income which you have. This is what I’m doing, and it’s incredible to realize the freedom and power which comes from this decision. Yes, I’m getting power from deliberately being poorer than I need to be. Self imposed limits is the only source of power, and this provides as good an example of why as anything else.

If I were to have continued to pursue the sort of life I was living, my parents would have continued to be able to control my life: if I’m dependent on them for the continuation of the perks and privileges which I need in order to function, then I have no ability to resist whatever they choose to do. Whether it be the TVs blaring all the time, or the way they like to keep the house colder in the summer than the winter, I’m powerless if I depend on their money. My parents are in a worse boat though, being utterly dependent on their employers. I’ve watched the way that they’ve put up with a great deal of injustice from their employers, utterly unwilling to do anything about it, because to do something means risking the paychecks they need in order to keep the lifestyle they’ve grown accustomed to.

The only way to stop depending on their money, then, is to change my life. This means embracing limits, and this means being poorer than I “need to be”. I have no expectation that they’ll come to the realization that they can stop working jobs they hate if they were willing to reduce expenses: these are people who fail to see the absurd extravagance of a trip to Europe for a long weekend. But the option does exist for them too: if they were willing to embrace limits, they could take control of their lives from their bosses.

The bitter irony is that at some point most of the people living middle class lives today will have to get used to being much poorer, whether they want to or not. Thus, it ought to be common sense for most people that one of the most important things to do is a deliberate downshifting towards a lifestyle with a future. The fact that this is not obvious, even to many people who grasp that the lives they live are miserable and don’t have a future, is fascinating, in much the same way that watching two trains smash into each other is.

The psychology of previous investment provides one piece of the answer: every single injustice someone tolerates; every time they refuse to take the plunge into a more sustainable lifestyle; every single time that they make the decision that it’s more important to pursue the life of absurd extravagance which the middle class has than to put their money, time, or muscles where their mouths are, make parting with that lifestyle that much harder. We’ll start talking about that next week.

Please note: all comments are moderated. Courteous comments related to the post are always welcome, especially if they challenge something in the post. Anything with profanity, rudeness, or which hammers on a point already addressed repeatedly will be deleted. Off topic comments may or may not be posted: it will depend on what kind of mood I’m in.