Poets and Politicians

As I write this it has been two days since the Canadian election and in two days time the Australians go to the polls.

We have seemingly had elections and politicians for aeons. We have had definitions for politician ever since Samuel Johnson’s first edition of Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755. In that first edition the second definition Johnson gave for politician was ‘A man of artifice; one of deep contrivance.’ Many would argue that the definition still adheres.

With antecedents in the Roman Republic and in England in the 13^th century, it is only since the 17^th century that electoral democracy began to become the standard form of government throughout the western world. Just two and a half centuries.

During these last two and a half centuries where has electoral (aka representative) democracy (and its attendant politicians) got us? Much of the research into politics has shown that political representation greatly favours affluent sectors of society to the detriment of the population as a whole. Hardly representative. When one looks at the make up of politicians who do become elected, in most cases world-wide they are from the wealthy elite. Very few are those we would meet whilst out walking the dog or pushing a baby in a pram. (Although we will find them queuing up to pat the dog or kiss the baby come election time.)

Furthermore, with politicians at the helm over the past two and a half centuries the world has become a lot messier. Environmentally it is in a mess. Socially and culturally, it is in a mess. Individually too, we are in a mess. Politicians do not appear to have the willingness to tackle much of this, and some even exacerbate the mess.

Yet, we continue to vote for politicians, we continue to vote for a flawed system. Whitmore, we continue to listen to them. We continue to allow politicians to speak on our behalf, notwithstanding that most do nothing of the sort.

So, who could we listen to instead?

The avant-garde filmmaker and poet Jonas Merkas once quipped that, ‘In the very end civilisations perish because they listen to their politicians and not their poets.’ Maybe he is correct.

Another artist, the science fiction author Ursula K. La Guin enlarged upon Merkas’ remark. The author of the very popular Earthsea fantasy series emphatically suggested that;

‘I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.’

Merkas and La Guin could be onto something.

It may be as simple as William Blake reminding us of our connection to the cosmos: ‘To see a world in a grain of sand/ And heaven in a wild flower/ Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/ And eternity in an hour.’

Perhaps it is the Bard’s love sonnet that begins with, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?/ Thou art more lovely and more temperate;/ Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,/ And summers lease hath all too short a date.’

Or Mary Oliver suggesting advising a quietude of mind: ‘Every day I see or I hear/ something that more or less/ kills me with delight.’

These and dozens of other poems and poets have us asking the simple question, as Mary Oliver does; ‘There’s only one question/ how to love this world.’

I doubt that this is a question politicians ask very often.

I hear them answer it very rarely. If at all.

I think I’ll go find a book of poetry to read while the Australian elections are on.

Where Did Our Selves Go?

Around one in eight people globally suffer from at least one form of mental health issue. Whether it be anxiety disorders, depression, PTSD, bi-polar disorder, or schizophrenia, the costs of mental health are estimated at $2-5 trillion per year, and expected to rise to over $6 trillion by 2030 (just five years away.)

Surely, such a crisis raises the question of: how did we come to this? How did our selves become so lost and confused that so many of us suffer these conditions? As Gabor Maté notes, ‘In the most health-obsessed society ever, all is not well.’¹

Quite simply, I would claim that this disjoint in our psyches is because we have come to perceive ourselves as being disconnected from nature and from each other. I recognise, of course, that this claim is highly simplistic, yet if you follow through the implications of each of these two disconnections the threads joining it all together become evident.

Disconnection from nature is tantamount to a loss of Earth as our collective home. Disconnection from each other isolates us from our community. Together, these two disconnections mean that we have lost contact with our human support systems and our place of identity, resulting in a psychic disruption that varies from person to person.

Is it any wonder then, that over the past few centuries, we have become more and more disconnected from our own selves? We are homeless and have little sense of belonging. Both these disconnections cannot fail but fill our psyches with a toxic concoction of conscious and unconscious thoughts, feelings, emotions, and worldviews that serve to disconnect us from who we are, from our true selves.

Our mental health statistics show this. Over the past 50 years mental health issues have been steadily worsening, with the most severe disorders being depression, specific phobias (extreme fears of objects or situations that pose little or no danger but make one feel anxious), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and alcohol abuse. Ominously, a 2023 study undertaken by researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of Queensland involving respondents from 29 countries concluded that, ‘by age 75 approximately half the population can expect to develop one or more of 13 mental disorders.’² For both men and women major depressive disorder was one of the most prevalent disorders. The next most prevalent was alcohol abuse for men and specific phobias for women.

This is a serious disconnection within and from ourselves.

What has happened to our selves? Where did our selves go?

It is highly likely that we left our selves behind when we allowed ourselves to disconnect from nature. We left our selves behind in the forests, the mountains, the rivers, and the myriad other natural habitats.

If this is so, then it is no surprise that spending time in natural settings helps to reduce mental health problems and to restore balance in our lives.

Over the past 40 years a conscious practice of spending time in natural settings for health benefit has been spreading around the globe. Japan can be credited as the birthplace of this practice, where it is known as shinrin-yoku. The term shinrin-yoku (literally Forest Bathing) was coined in 1982 by Tomohide Akiyama, who was Director of the Japanese Forest Agency at the time. Since the beginning of the 21^st century the science of forest bathing has built an impressive research base.

Amongst the benefits of forest bathing that this research has shown are: Increased relaxation of the body due to increased activity of the parasympathetic nervous system; Reduced stress of the body due to reduction of sympathetic nervous system activity; Reduction in blood pressure; Lowering of pulse rate. These health benefits allow forest bathing participants to feel a sense of comfort, feel calm, feel refreshed, less anxious, and an improvement in their emotional state.³

If such health benefits can be experienced by just an hour or two of forest bathing, imagine the benefits that might ensure from reconnecting more completely with nature?

Another, associated, health practice has also been slowly spreading. Green prescriptions first began being prescribed by doctors in New Zealand in the late 1990s. Green prescriptions are a medical prescription to spend time in nature. In New Zealand it is now possible to self-refer to a green prescription. A number of countries, including Canada, the UK, Korea, Finland, the US, and of course Japan, are utilising this form of “medication” regularly as part of those nation’s healthcare services.

Sadly, at the very time we are starting to re-discover the benefits of spending time in nature we are also busy chopping down our forest, polluting our riverways, and mining the tops and sides of our mountains.

If we are going to find our selves again then we have to act with nature in a reciprocal manner. We must stop chopping, polluting, and mining.

Notes:

1. Gabor Maté, with Daniel Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness &healing in a Toxic Culture, Vermillion, London, 2022

2. Prof John McGrath et al., Age of onset and cumulative risk of mental disorders, The Lancet Psychiatry, 2023. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(23)00193-1/abstract  accessed 23 April 2025

3. Yoshifumi Miyazaki, The Japanese Art of Shinrin-Yoku, Timber Press, Portland, Oregon, 2018

AI and EI are Not Compatible

Chief Sealth (A man
with high EI)

AI (Artificial Intelligence) has its proponents and its detractors. Like most technology through the ages, there are benefits and drawbacks. I’ll go a bit further than that though. Throughout human history most technologies have had significantly more and greater drawbacks than have been the benefits.

A surface deep inspection or a cursory examination might induce one to dispute this claim. However, consider this example of the introduction of cell phones, in a blog from three years ago. Cell phones and their use have introduced problems of: depression, anxiety, cyber bullying, e-waste, increased electricity use, uptick in CO2 emissions, environmental consequences of mining, nomophobia (cell phone addiction), social isolation, and cognitive impairment.

AI is no different. Indeed, it is worse, as one of the purposes of AI is to optimise situations. The chance that AI will exacerbate every other single problem is highly likely. Yet, there is little or no discussion taking place around the likely consequences of AI. The proponents of AI are leading the charge, hailing the benefits, and drowning out the voices of those who wish to apply the cautionary principle.

I wish to highlight just one area of concern regarding AI – its environmental consequences.

The electricity and water usage of AI are both significant. In 2022 AI data centres were the 11^th biggest electricity consumers in the world. If they were a country, then they would rank just short of that of France.

Microsoft and Exxon Mobil have entered into a partnership in which Exxon plans to use Microsoft’s AI and claims that the use of this technology will enable them to increase production by 50,000 oil-equivalent barrels per day.

All of which contributes to CO₂ equivalent emissions.

Water use for cooling AI data centres is also sizeable. Researchers at Cornell University claim that the use of water for these centres has been kept a secret, and estimate that 4.2 – 6.6 billion cubic meters of water will be consumed by AI by 2027 – half the total usage of the United Kingdom.¹

A further environmental concern with AI is that of e-waste, with AI expecting to account for 12% of global e-waste by 2030.

AI at Odds with EI

When the environmental consequences of AI are considered we must conclude that Artificial Intelligence is incompatible with Environmental Intelligence (EI). A search for Environmental Intelligence will often land you on pages that speak of gathering information and data from the environment and then analysing the data gathered.

This is not how I intend using the term Environmental Intelligence (EI) here.

EI to my mind is better thought of as the intelligence innately found in nature and includes the intelligence with which we humans bring to our entanglement and inter-relationships with nature. Many have tried to capture this form of EI. One of the best is that of Chief Sealth (sometimes known as Chief Seattle) in a speech he gave to his tribal assembly in 1854. His speech is an excellent example of EI.

Many versions of this speech exist, all of which derive from second-hand sources, yet the underlying sentiment remains. This extract is from that of the film scriptwriter, Ted Perry, in 1970. I will not quote the whole speech (it is 5 pages long²); rather just two paragraphs that condense the ideas contained in Chief Sealth’s speech into the essential concepts.

‘This we know. The earth does not belong to humans; humans belong to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood that unites one family. All things are connected.

Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth. Humans do not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.’

This understanding of EI is clearly at odds with that of AI.

The two forms of intelligence are incompatible.

Yet, I read some highly visible so-called environmentalists utilising AI in their writing. This is disappointing. When I know that these authors use AI how can I be sure that what I read is their own thoughts or that of an AI-generated chatbot? I can’t.

Furthermore, it has been said that the easiest way to overcome a problem is to stop participating in it.

Just stop using AI! It is incompatible with EI.

P.S. This blogpiece has not been AI generated.

Notes:

1. Penfeng Li, et al, Making AI Less "Thirsty": Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models, Cornell University, 26 March 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271  accessed 16 April 2025

2. Chief Sealth speech cited in full in Seed, Macy, Fleming, Naess, Thinking Like A Mountain, New Society Publishers, Santa Cruz, CA, 1988, pp 67-73

Un-Reality TV

First, an apology to those readers expecting to read this week’s blog earlier than today. A cold kept me uninspired and unenthusiastic for much of this week. Now, on with the blog.

Plato's Cave

If you look up a word in a dictionary, you will usually find a definition and then a few examples of use of the word. If we look up the word oxymoron, we will find a definition such as this (from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary): ‘a combination of contradictory or incongruous words.’

Surely an example of oxymoron must be that of: Reality TV.

Not only is the term blatantly contradictory, but it also has harmful side-effects. Let us begin with its contradictory nature.

What is real and what is not real has been the subject of debate and conjecture within western thought since at least the times of Plato and his allegory of the cave in the 4^th century BCE. (Come to think of it, Plato’s allegory could be a very early precursor to Reality TV) However, most of us would agree that reality is what is tangible and exists in a sensory manner. Often reality is easier defined by what it is not. Reality is not imaginary, not something made up, not contrived, not fictitious. (I acknowledge that this short definition is debatable, but for the purposes of this blog I think it makes sense.)

Reality TV is not real. Reality TV programs are made up, they use contrived situations; then go and broadcast the program on TV which stimulates a very base level of imagination in our neocortex and thalamus areas of our brains.

Yet, between 60% and 70% (up to 80% in some places) of adults in western countries watch Reality TV!!

It is not simply that every night adults sit transfixed as if under the influence of Aldous Huxley’s drug – soma – in his 1932 dystopian novel, Brave New World. That state is bad enough, but Reality TV has some nasty effects. Without going into detail in each case, here are some of these harmful consequences.

• Many Reality TV shows seek to humiliate and exploit participants.
• Reality TV has a tendency to make someone “famous for being famous” – with otherwise no qualities of fame.
• Stand-offs and obscenities are often glamorised and elevated on Reality TV.
• Reality TV promotes materialism and a toxic individualism.
• Situations on Reality TV are contrived, although usually promoted as being spontaneous and unscripted.

What many viewers may not recognise is that Reality TV has been a vehicle for helping to normalise public surveillance. Reality TV intrudes, sometimes intimately, on the lives of participants in ways that would not normally be tolerated. With over 30 years’ worth of Reality TV having now been beamed into the homes of millions of viewers, this intrusion has become normalised, so that surveillance in the real world is similarly tolerated, accepted, and even welcomed.

If anyone knows the distinction between reality and non-reality, then an actor would be one of those people. Acting requires the ability to set aside one’s real life and step into the shoes of an unreal, fictional character.

The English actor, Gary Oldman, has done this many times in his distinguished career. He has played characters as diverse as Count Dracula, Lee Harvey Oswald, Sid Vicious, Sirius Black (in the Harry Potter series) and the spy George Smiley. In 2017 he won an Academy Award for Best Actor in the film Darkest Hour for his portrayal of Winston Churchill.

He knows the difference between TV and film acting, and the oxymoronic Reality TV. His caustic words bear musing on. ‘Reality TV to me is the museum of social decay.’

P.S.

Here is a question to ponder. If it had not been for the Reality TV program The Apprentice, in which Donald Trump appeared as the host, would he now be the President of the US? That show placed Trump directly in front of millions of American TV viewers and presented him as a successful and leading businessman (even though reality shows him not to be). Would the fateful words of that show – ‘You’re fired’ – not now be coming to haunt many of those same TV viewers?

At Work In The Ruins – Book Review

When I was a young lad my father would occasionally take me to “the tip” – the local refuse facility. There, we would sift through the rubble and ruined stuff discarded by local residents. (Trying to do this these days is not possible, because “tips” have been closed off due, presumably, to hygiene “science” – something Dougald Hine would possibly appreciate.)

Amongst those ruins I would search for, and often find, treasures and useful bits ’n pieces that could be transformed into a trolley. A trolley was a cart made of old planks of wood, discarded pram wheels, axles, and hinges. By way of a hand-held rope the trolley could be steered, usually down a hill, the steeper the better. I’m sure my mother despaired when I arrived home with scrapes and bruises after an afternoon of trolleying.

Something similar, although on a grander, global scale, is what Dougald Hine is writing about in At Work In The Ruins: Finding our place in the time of climate crises and other emergencies.¹ Hine searches for treasures amongst the discarded (or soon to be discarded) ruins of modernity.

Hine does this cleverly by posing a number of questions without fully answering any of them. And, nor should he. We cannot know the answers until we stumble upon them amongst the ruins.

But one thing is clear, and Hine states this on just the 3^rd page; ‘The way we talk about the trouble is making it worse.’ Pithy and crisp. The following 197 pages are Hine’s attempts at clarifying why this is so and some ideas for a different way of talking. One of the languages we have been using is that of science. Hine is clear that we need to use this language differently, not discard science will-nilly, but to recognise that ‘science can know many things; yet it cannot say, because it does not know, when enough is enough.’  

The point of departure for a new way of talking, according to Hine, is to admit that we are already amongst the ruins. Furthermore, he claims that ‘If hope exists, it lies on the far side of the admission of failure.’

Failure!!? Yes – failure. Writing about failure, and admitting to it, may turn off some readers. After all, one of the messages of modernity is failure is not an option, you cannot fail, you must not fail.

But, read on. There are many indications of this failure, two of which Hine points to; climate crises and covid. If I have any disappointment with this book, it is that Hine lingers too much on the covid pandemic as one of the indicators, spends a little time on climate crises, and hardly any time on the other emergencies, as promised in the subtitle of the book. To my understanding, it is the entanglement of all these emergencies that has brought us to the predicament we are in.

This disappointment aside, Hine’s book is an important read as it does provide us with a new vocabulary with which to talk about the troubles, predicament, and ruins we are in.

An example, and one well covered by Hine, of this new way of talking (and listening) is the way we talk about death. Hine addresses this in a lucid and useful manner. He quotes a critical care nurse working with those on the ’brink of death.’ The families of the dying tended to react in one of two ways: to become obsessed with vital signs and lab data, or to deny and avoid. There was a third, less common, path open to families that the nurse termed ‘the path of engaged surrender’ – a term reminiscent of Tara Brach’s radical acceptance.

Engaged surrender is the path Dougald Hine advocates as we are faced with the death of the ‘world as we know it, but not of the world.’ To help with this approach, Hine refers often to a colleague – Vanessa Machado de Oliviera, who’s incisive book Hospicing Modernity (see myreview here) can easily be read as a companion piece to At Work In The Ruins. To need to hospice modernity is one of the clear answers Hine gives to his questions.

Modernity, says Hine, has been on the Big Path for many years. This path leads only to a futile future. There is another path however, and Hine visualises this as ‘unpaved, hardly a path at all, and it will be made by those who walk it.’ Hine is under no illusion that this path will be chosen by many. Nor does he envisage that this path will be easy and pleasant for those who do walk it. He warns us: ‘Do not underestimate what such a choice may cost you.’

Getting hold of and reading At Work In The Ruins will be one of the lesser costs you may pay. I recommend it as one worth the price.

Notes:

1. Dougald Hine, At Work In The Ruins: Finding our place in the time of climate crises and other emergencies, Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vermont, and London, UK, 2023

How Close Is The Future?

This blogpiece is a little more personal than most of those on this page. It is personal with respect to my musing on how much time I have left on this Earth and my relationship with that time.

Let me start with a personal observation.

As I get closer and closer to my death, I find that my thinking about the future becomes more acute, and more fearful. Let me explain.

I do not mean fearful for my own death, nor do I mean fearful for what any afterlife (or non-afterlife) may hold. None of that do I find fearful.

But, I do discover that as I have less and less existential future, the more concern I have for the future per se. Yet, when I had plenty of future ahead of me (say, in my 20s, 30s and even into my late 50s) I had little to concern me about the future. How is it, I ask myself, that as I get closer to my death, the more I feel a distress and unease about the future that is to occur after my death?

Partly, I suspect, the answer to this paradox can be found in the book Future Shock,¹ written by husband and wife team, Alvin Toffler and Adelaide Farrell (often unattributed), published in 1970.

The basic thesis of Future Shock is that too much change in a short period of time leads to psychological stress and anxiety. Toffler and Farrell noted that previous generations of humans had dealt with major change about once (or less) in their lifetimes. Yet, by the time of their writing, each generation was now experiencing significant change twice, or even thrice, during their lifetime.

We are now 55 years on from the publication of Future Shock. The pace of change has accelerated in that time, so that now the amount of change in a person’s lifetime is much greater. We are now facing an ‘abrupt collision with the future’ as Toffler and Farrell predicted in the book.

Is this what I am facing and noticing in my unease? Have I collided with the future?

Yes, but it is only a partial answer. A further aspect is my own involvement with the environmental movement. This is a movement that has shifted and morphed into various identities since the early 1970s when I first became involved.

When I first became involved with the environmental movement the environment was viewed (by me at least, and I suspect most others in the movement) exactly as the words etymology suggests: the environment is what surrounds me, it is outside of me and is the medium through which I pass.

However, as the years and decades passed by my understanding of environment and the nature of the world has shifted. Indeed, the word environment is no longer useful, as my perception now does not recognise a difference between me and not-me. This shift passed through a stage of “I am part of nature” to “I am nature.” That is a long way from the understanding of my youth.

Alongside this spatial shift I also experienced a temporal shift. My part in nature is not confined to my lifetime. I am part of the entire cosmos. The atoms that make up me today have been part of the universe for millennia, they have been part of humankind since the stone-age and before, they have been ingested by wolves, beavers, and many other animals, they have been spewed out of volcanoes 13 billion years ago. These atoms in my body will exist somewhere in the universe in another 13 billion years.

We have learnt a lot about the world since the 1970s. We have learnt a lot more about how intricately entangled it is. We have learnt a lot about how the feedback loops that have kept the Earth in homeostasis are breaking down and the system as a whole is collapsing.

None of this was I able to see, or foretell, in the 1970s when I was much younger. Then I had no sense of a collision with the future.

But now I do.

The collapsing future will not only impact humanity. It will, and already is, impacting the more-than-human life upon this planet. Extinction rates are presently anywhere from 100 times to 1,000 times the normal background rate.

So it is that, although I can appreciate my spatial and temporal entanglement with the cosmos, the closer come to my death, and the less future I have personally, the more unease I have for the future of those to come (human and other-than-human.)

Do any other readers of my cohort notice anything similar?

Note:

1. Alvin Toffler (and Adelaide Farrell) Future Shock, Bantam Books, New York, 1970

Miracle Of A Smile

Spike Millagan penned a delightful poem titled Smile. In the first line of this poem Spike declares that ‘smiling is infectious.’ (The first stanza of the poem is quoted at the end of this blogpiece.)

Infectious – yes. Miraculous also. How so? You may ask.

It is miraculous through language. The words smile and miracle are etymologically linked.

Both words derive from the Latin mirari meaning “to wonder at, to marvel, to be astonished.” From this verb comes the noun, miraculum, meaning “an object of wonder.”

Prior to the Latin, the Proto-Indo-European word smey (or smei) can be translated as smile, or laugh. It can also be translated as wonder.

Looking at these etymologies the connections between the words smile and miracle can easily be seen. Other common English words that share this etymology include; admire, mirror, mirage, and marvel.

Often the word miracle gets attached to events associated with divine intervention. However, the word miracle simply means an inexplicable event, an even that cannot be explained by natural or scientific laws. However, attributing (or explaining) the event to a supernatural, or divine, cause does not follow. That is a logical fallacy. A miracle is simply something to wonder at, to marvel at. Explanation is not required.

A more common use of the word miracle is that of a statistically unlikely event occurring. Instances of this use are such things as; someone surviving an air disaster, or emerging from a blazing building hardly scathed. A statistician may describe such an occurrence as “falling outside the third standard deviation from the mean.” In common parlance, it is much easier to say, “a miracle.”

Miracles, and so-called miracle-workers, have been with us for millennia. The Roman god Hercules, and the Egyptian goddess Isis, were both believed to have been able to perform miracles. The Greek philosopher, Pythagoras (in the 6^th century BCE) is said to have been able to accomplish miracles.

Of course, in western culture, and specifically within Christianity, Jesus is attributed with having the ability to perform miracles. Within other religions too, miracle-workers are proclaimed. Muhammad and Gautama Buddha are both said to have performed miracles.

But, let us return to smiling.

Science can describe how our facial muscles work to shape a smile upon our face. Science can also describe the neuronal messages in the brain of someone else perceiving the smile of the other person.

But, science cannot explain a smile and it cannot explain how it becomes infectious.

A smile is a miracle.

Smile (Poem by Spike Milligan - first stanza)

A smile is infectious

You catch it like the flu

When someone smiled at me today

I started smiling too.

Are You Sick Of The Rain Yet?

We have had a lot of rain recently where I live. One day, after about a week’s worth of rainy days I was walking with my umbrella up and encountered a neighbour. After greeting one another, my neighbour asked, “Are you sick of the rain yet?”

Under the circumstances this may seem a logical and innocuous question to ask. It is also rhetorical; it seeks to find a common sense of experience, and a shared desire for sunshine and fine weather.

As I continued walking I pondered the question, and found that below the question lay some potentially troubling human psychology. I was reminded of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths.

Before continuing, a quick note about the word noble. We may often think of noble as pertaining to someone of the aristocracy, such as a Baron, Duke, Duchess, or Baroness. The Pali word ariya (translated as noble), however, suggests notions of valuable, precious, and not ordinary. With this sense in mind, it is possible to recognise something in the Four Noble Truths that is not normally considered and is a precious insight.

Back to the rain and the question.

The Buddha’s First Noble Truth tells us that suffering exists. It is a simple statement of how something is, a bit like a doctor making a diagnosis. Again, we must be careful with translations. The Pali word dukkha is often translated as suffering. However, the fuller meaning of the word encompasses such feelings as, dissatisfaction, un-ease, discomfort, disquiet. With this in mind it is possible to recognise that dukkha is not the same as pain. Pain is unavoidable, it is an aspect of life. Suffering (or discomfort, dissatisfaction etc) is our response to that pain.

The First Noble Truth was implicit in my neighbour’s question. A feeling of discomfort was embedded within the question, and a desire for that discomfort to be alleviated.

It is this desire for alleviation where the Buddha’s next three Noble Truths attain their preciousness. Many of us get no further than the First Noble Truth – viz. expressing discomfort, dissatisfaction, or un-ease. Then, once expressed, we might try to wish the discomfort away, or maybe want someone else to fix the problem, or pray for a miracle. Very rarely do any of these approaches work.

The next three Noble Truths, however, tell us that there are causes of our dukkha, that there is a remedy, and that there is a path (or medication if you like) we can take to relieve ourselves of the dukkha. I do not intend going into a complete explanation of these Noble Truths. I will simply make the following observation.

When we recognise that our suffering (not our pain) is a state of mind then we can see that suffering is caused by one of two prime states – aversion towards something, or grasping for something. Both cause us to suffer. And this suffering, declares the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield is ‘like a rope burn. We need to let go.’¹

Easy said, much harder to do. It is a practice that takes time to learn. We westerners, attuned to wanting quick results, find this difficult.

The Buddha was aware of this also and prescribed a path (the Fourth Noble Truth) that, if one travelled upon it, would allow us to let go. But, let us not delude ourselves. Letting go does not mean that the pain will go away, nor does it mean there is an end to suffering.

It does mean, however, that suffering no longer has a power over us.

Back to the rain again. The rain might have meant I got wet (a minor irritation of pain) resulting in my feeling discomfort. Yet, once I let go my aversion to getting wet then discomfort has no power over me.

I am reminded of a lovely story that illustrates this concept well.

Two people are going down the road in the rain. One is skipping along with a smile upon their face. The other is slouched over looking grumpy. The lesson here is that no matter which of these two approaches is taken, both get wet!

Notes:

1. Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart, Rider, London, Sydney, Auckland, Johannesburg, 2008

Scarcity, Plenty, Enough

Medieval grain store

Have you had a conversation with someone about inequality in the world and the unfairness of economic systems that privilege the rich and punish the poor? I have, and sometimes the other person responds by telling me that I am deluded because of my “scarcity belief.”

According to this person a “scarcity belief” is one in which no matter how much, or how little, there is, it is never enough. The corollary to this is that the scarcity belief is an error. Scarcity, according to this person, does not exist.

A quick aside: Have you also noticed that sometimes those who reject the “scarcity belief” idea are often also those who are praying for, seeking to manifest, or wishing for more abundance, more money, or more riches. It is odd.

Rejecting, denying, or attempting to overcome scarcity does not mean that there is, or must be, plenty. We live in a finite world, and no matter how much praying, manifesting, or wishing we do, that is not going to change.

Scarcity Origins

We might ask though, where the concept of scarcity originated?

I have not been able to track down any authoritative answer to this. However, it is likely that the concept arose some 10,000 – 12,000 years ago with the Agricultural Revolution. Prior to then, it most likely did not exist in our minds, except as a temporary sense of shortage or lack. Most likely, the response in this case would be to move, as hunter/gatherers, and other nomads did.

But, the Agricultural Revolution brought with it a lessening of the variety of food (via specialisation of crop growing and/or animal raising) and hence, a reliance on a much-reduced diversity of food sources. Regrettably, this reliance meant that food sources became prone to drought, floods, pestilence, and other ways in which the food supply could be reduced, or wiped out, very quickly.

In short, natural processes could spell scarcity for early agriculturalists and farmers.

The solution to this possibility was to hoard up supplies in expectation of lean times. But this too had consequences. Hoarding led to a stratification of society into those who hoarded and those who didn’t and may have resulted in a stratification of society into the owners of grain stores and those who worked for owners. (I know I am surmising here, but you may agree, that something like this is likely to have gone on all those millennia ago.)

Now, what might have happened in lean times? The hoarders may have felt protected by their stored grain (or wheat, or barley, or whatever) whereas others now became vulnerable to a scarcity. No longer able to move (as had their ancestors living a nomadic lifestyle) the non-hoarders most likely thought to themselves, ‘we cannot provide for ourselves, we’ll have to steal from the hoarders.’

How likely is this scenario, you and I may ask? My hunch is that it was highly probable.

Sketching out this possible scenario indicates where and when the concept of scarcity may have first arisen.

Scarcity Today

Today, scarcity is not a belief, nor is it a myth. Scarcity is real and has been for a number of decades. Ironically, it is the Agricultural Revolution, and the worldviews and paradigms that arose as a consequence of that revolution, which have left us in a world of scarcity.

By scarcity here, I am referring to what might better be thought of as limitation. Globally we began to overshoot the world’s carrying capacity around 50 years ago. The concept was neatly captured in the seminal report and book – Limits to Growth. We live on a finite world, which means that there are limits to how much we can exploit and extract from the world, and how much the earth can cope with our waste and pollution. Continuous growth brings us slap back up against limits. In short, growth brings us close to scarcity.

The antidote to scarcity is not its opposite – plenty.

It appears that there are only two means by which we can break out of the scarcity cycle. One, is a programme of degrowth, the other is to establish a mentality of enough.

One who knew the concept of enough was the author, Joseph Heller. I have written of this exchange between Heller and his friend Kurt Vonnegut before. It bears repeating.

When Joseph Heller died, his good friend and fellow author, Kurt Vonnegut (author of Slaughterhouse-Five,) wrote in his obituary of a party that the two of them attended. The party host was a millionaire. As the two of them talked, Vonnegut opined to his friend that the millionaire made more money in one day than Heller’s book (Catch 22) had since it had been published.

Joseph Heller looked at his friend and said, ‘Yes, but I have something he will never have.’

Vonnegut naturally asked, ‘What is that?’

To which Heller replied, ‘Enough!’

Heller knew the antidote to scarcity.

Domesticated Adults

Last week’s blogpiece asked whether our quality of life had improved as our quantity of life had increased. The answer suggested that it had not.

So, let us ask ourselves – why not?

The answer to that is not simply (as last weeks blog seemed to imply) that we now work longer than our hunter/gatherer days.

For years, psychology and the self-development movement were focussed on the human as an autonomous person responsible almost completely and solely for their thoughts, emotions, and behaviours. The human place in nature was largely missing from these endeavours.

Fortunately, this is changing. First, let us return to asking what happened that shifted us away from a greater quality of life.

For more than 95% of our (Homo sapiens) existence upon the Earth we lived in a manner intimately connected with and part of the natural world. Then, around 12,000 years ago, beginning in the Levant, Mesopotamia, and western Asia something began to dislodge us from that intimacy.

Many point to the Agricultural Revolution as that “something.” Although the advent, over many centuries, of agriculture was a significant factor, it wasn’t the only one. Whatever were the combination of factors, the outcomes of the disruption could be identified within the first few millennia. Today, 10,000 years later, the consequences are readily apparent, unless we have forgotten what happened and what went before.

Daniel Quinn calls this “The Great Forgetting.” Quinn claims that not only have we forgotten how our ancestors lived more than 12,000 years ago, but that we have also forgotten that we have forgotten. Hardly surprising, he notes, as it was not until a few thousand more years had passed before stories and memories got written down, and history was invented.

Unless we are willing to delve into this forgotten time, via archaeology, palaeontology, and pre-history, then we may be inclined to consider normality to be no different than it has been throughout recorded history, i.e. only the last 5,000 years or so.

But what is now “normal” is anything but “normal” when looked at over the course of 200,000 – 300,000 years. Even though the dislocation from nature took place over thousands of years, when viewed against our evolutionary journey the disruption was “sudden.”

As with many “sudden” disruptions the effects can be traumatic. “Traumatic” is how eco-psychologist. Chellis Glendinning, refers to the break from nature. ‘What could be more “distressing” than finding ourselves, out of short-term needs, locked into a cycle of abuse that insists we slash, dig, and burn the very Earth we have always respected and known ourselves to be made up of?’ she asks.¹

Drawing upon her work with post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers, Glendinning notes that culturally we suffer from PTSD collectively. And, as do individual sufferers, we collectively deny any trauma, and attempt to cover it up with addictions and justifications. In our westernised cultures we deny and cover up through addictions to technology, and the myth of progress. As with the individual, these addictions and myths only exacerbate the underlying problems.

The title of Glendinning’s book alludes to the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) introductory remarks in seeking recovery from addiction – My name is Chellis, and I’m in recovery from western civilization.

A person attending an AA programme will be offered a “sponsor” (or mentor) to assist them through the process and the recovery.

Who are the sponsors for those wishing to recover from western civilization? Who are the guides to facilitate the journey from childhood into healthy, nature-based adulthood and beyond?

Sadly, within westernised societies they are few and far between. Again, it is not surprising that there are so few guides. Our dislocation from nature had the flow on effect of also disrupting our “natural” succession from childhood, to adulthood, to elderhood. The deep ecologist and author, Paul Shepard, asserts that by ‘…spatially isolating the individual from the nonhumanized world, agriculture made it difficult for the developing person to approach the issues around which the crucial passages into fully mature adult life had been structured in the course of human existence.’²

The eco-psychologist and wilderness guide, Bill Plotkin, concurs. He declares that, ‘With the development of agriculture a new form of adolescent pathology became possible (in fact, inevitable), a pathology that begins with greed and eventuates in hoarding, domination, and violence.’  Furthermore, Plotkin claims that in modern societies ‘many people of adult age suffer from a variety of adolescent psychopathologies…’³

He then goes on to list examples of these psychopathologies: social insecurity, identity confusion, low self-esteem, few or no social skills, narcissism, relentless greed, arrested moral development, recurrent physical violence, materialistic obsessions, little or no capacity for intimacy or empathy, substance addictions, and emotional numbness. That’s quite a bit isn’t it?

What’s more, Plotkin notes that, ‘We see these psychopathologies most glaringly in leaders and celebrities of the Western world.’

It is a damning indictment, is it not?

Where are the guides and mentors then?

Just as humans have domesticated plants and animals, so agriculture has domesticated our adults.

Tame adults are never going to provide the necessary guidance for raising healthy humans in a healthy planet.

Notes:

1. Chellis Glendinning, My Name Is Chellis & I’m In Recovery From Western Civilization, Shambhala Publications, Boston, 1994

2. Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness, University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia, 1982

3. Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, New World Library, Novato, California, 2008

Quality of Quality of Life

One of the social indicators that many wish to extol about modern life is that life expectancy has increased. Indeed it has. By about 20 – 25 years since the Industrial Revolution.

If we consider an even longer timeframe, say back to Palaeolithic times then there has been a significant increase in the quantity of life that we now live. Although estimates vary, the consensus of archaeologists tends towards recognising that once a hunter/gatherer reached about 15 years of age then he/she could expect to live a further 35 to 40 years. That is, an adult living in the Palaeolithic would be likely to reach an age of 50 – 55 years.

So, yes indeed, the quantity of years that has been added to human life has increased markedly.

But – has the quality of life increased?

During the 1970s, I recall, there was much discussion about quality of life and how that should be the goal of personal life and that governments could play a role in facilitating that. However, in recent years I find that I rarely hear the phrase. It is as though something else has grabbed our attention and we have forgotten that quality of life may be a worthwhile goal.

Or, is it that we have conflated quality of life with quantity of life?

Let’s find out.

First though, how is quality of life defined? Philosophers, sociologists, poets, politicians, and spiritual leaders have all proposed definitions over many centuries. Herein, I am using a simple metric as a proxy for quality of life. That metric is the amount of leisure time we have, once we have accounted for work hours, sleep, and education. None of this is rigorous, and the arithmetic involved is very much back of a napkin computation.

The next thing that must be considered is how much leisure time do we have today compared to previous times. There are 8,766 hours in a year. Sleep (at 8 hours per night) takes up 2,922 of those hours. In the OECD (the richer nations of the world) the average working year consists of 1,900 hours. That leaves 3,944 hours for eating, commuting, and human activities that contribute towards quality of life.

We can factor in education. In the OECD most children go to school between the ages of 5 – 15 years, for 40 weeks per year. That is about 670 hours per year.

If all these numbers are crunched (I won’t bore you with the arithmetic details) then leisure time (quality of life) for people living today to the age of 75 is around 227,000 – 230,000 hours over the course of their lifetime.

Now, let us consider the quality of life enjoyed by our ancestors, both those who lived prior to the Industrial Revolution and those living much earlier as hunter/gatherers in Palaeolithic times.

These next figures may surprise you, yet they are the considered opinion of experts in the field. A peasant working before the Industrial Revolution is likely to have worked only some 1,440 hours per year – less than half the OECD average of today.¹

In 1968 Marshall Sahlins (an American cultural anthropologist) wrote an influential essay titled The Original Affluent Society, in which he claimed that hunter/gatherers “worked” far fewer hour per week than we tend to think. He termed this approach to life/work balance as ‘the Zen road to affluence.’ Sahlin’s essay has been much quoted, verified, and expanded upon by many researchers since then.² Sahlins and others show that for many modern-day nomadic tribespeople and hunter/gatherers of yore, work took up between 2 and 4 hours per day.

Now, for the interesting bit.

If we calculate leisure time per year with the lifespan of hunter/gatherers and modern-day nomadic people, then the total hours of leisure (quality of life) equates to around 202,000 to 205,000 hours over their lifetime.

That is not much less than the 227,000 hours of leisure that modern-day humans in rich societies obtain. Further calculation shows that the difference is only 2.5 – 3.2 years!

Is that all? Three years or less? Just that for all our vaunted increase in quantity of life.

And, what have we done with this extra three years of leisure time?

Wasted it!

Modern humans spend much of leisure time sitting watching television, or glued to the mini-screen of an iPhone, or playing computer games, or other mindless, and ultimately self-comatosing, pastimes. Statistics from both Australia and the USA show that well over 60% of leisure time is spent in front of the TV or a computer. Not much quality in this quantity of life.

Contrast this with the use of leisure time by hunter/gatherers and pre-Industrial Revolution peasants. Their time was taken up with dancing, storytelling, humour, music making, communal gatherings, feasts, arts, crafts, playing, ritual, and similar activities.

Let us then ask: Who has/had the greater quality of life?

Notes:

1. See for example, Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, Basic Books, New York, 1992

2. Glendinning, Chellis, My Name Is Chellis & I’m In Recovery From Western Civilization, Shambhala Publications, Boston & London, 1994. Graeber, David & Wengrow, David, The Dawn of Everything, Penguin Books, UK, 2021. Lent, Jeremy, The Patterning Instinct, Prometheus Books, Lanham, Maryland, 2017.

Observations of The Little Prince

First translated into English in 1943 The Little Prince¹ has been a firm favourite for all ages of reader. With more than 300 translations into other languages (including that of Klingon – the fictional Star Trek language) this small book is the most translated non-religious boo in the world.

The Little Prince tells of a meeting between an airman who has landed in the Sahara Desert with a damaged engine. The author of the book, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, is himself an airman, serving with the French during WW2. Whilst attempting to repair his plane the airman meets an extraordinary young traveller known only as the Little Prince.

The Little Prince comes from another planet (de Saint-Exupéry calls it asteroid B-612) on which there are three tiny volcanoes, a flower, and baobab bushes. The Little Prince must continuously uproot the baobabs for fear that they will take over his entire planet.

During his interplanetary travels and his time on Earth the Little Prince meets a number of characters. What he observes about each of them tells us something of the mindsets of grown-ups (as the Little Prince refers to them.)

After meeting each of these characters the Little Prince is left concluding that, ‘Grown-ups are very odd/strange’.

How does the Little Prince come to this conclusion? Let us look at some of his meetings and we might understand.

On one planet the Little Prince meets a king and notes that ‘to them, all men/women are subjects.’ In this encounter the Little Prince observes the need to reign supreme and without question so often displayed by rulers and leaders of countries.

On another he meets a conceited man and observes that this man never hears anything but praise. The conceited man shows the hallmarks of narcissism and listens only to those willing to heap admiration upon him.

Travelling further, the Little Prince meets a businessman for whom riches and ownership are all that matters. When the Little Prince asks the businessman, What good does it do to own so much?’ the businessman answers that ‘it makes me rich.’  The Little Prince pursues this with, ‘What good does it do you to be rich?’ A fair question you may agree. The businessman though, has an answer, ‘It makes it possible for me to buy more.’  In this encounter the Little Prince exposes the greed, and the circular arguments made for ever increasing wealth and riches.

One of the planets the Little Prince lands upon is so small that there is only room upon it for a single streetlamp and a lamplighter. The lamplighter’s job is to light and extinguish the lamp. When the Little Prince asks him why he is doing this, the lamplighter replies, ‘Orders are orders.’ Indeed, how often do we follow orders simply because they are orders?

Landing upon one planet the Little Prince meets a man who is poring over a book. The Little Prince queries him and is told that this man is a geographer. When asked to tell the Little Prince about his planet, the geographer says that he cannot do that, because I am not an explorer.’  Furthermore, when the Little Prince mentions the flower that exists upon his planet, the geographer informs him that ‘we do not record flowers.’ The Little Prince his aghast at this reply. But ‘the flower is the most beautiful thing on my planet!’ he exclaims. Beauty, to the geographer, is dismissed as ‘ephemeral.’ Welcome to a world where beauty is of little worth Little Prince.

Just one more example.

On one of the planets the Little Prince visits is a railway switchman. During the conversation between the Little Prince and the switchman we discover that the switchman has the job of shifting trains from one line to another, and then back again. When asked about this coming and going the switchman answers that ‘No one is ever satisfied with where he is.’ He further reveals that all the adults are asleep in the railway carriages and that ‘only the children are flattening their noses against the window-panes.’

With this observation the Little Prince then declares that ‘Only the children know what they are looking for.’ The switchman agrees. ‘They are lucky’ he states.

This small, allegorical tale is worth reading over and over and taking note of the Little Prince’s observations.

Certainly, the grown-ups are very odd and strange.

Note:

1. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, Pan Books Ltd., London, 1974