The
Ghosts of Misplaced Conscience
By
Charles Sullivan
27 November,
2007
Countercurrents.org
Everything about America is done
to the max—super sized—including ourselves. Americans are
fond of excess, fond of glitz and glitter, the bright beads and trinkets
of capitalism; the symbols of conspicuous consumption. Millions of us
live in McMansions, drive fast cars and hulking tanks and work at high
stress glamorous jobs that provide enormous financial reward but leave
us spiritually empty.
We tell ourselves
that these events signal that we have arrived and achieved greatness
worthy of respect and envy. They are a declaration that we have played
the game and won; that we have acquired economic power that results
in elevated socio-economic status and disproportional influence over
the lives of the less successful; and those who have utterly failed
or refused to participate.
We love to
consume and waste with an appalling sense of entitlement. Our lives
are enacted amid heaping mounds of swelling garbage and filth, while
some of our fellow human beings pass lives of quiet desperation in cardboard
boxes beneath our nation’s highway bridges, like beetles that
move beneath the bark of trees: out of sight, out of mind, inconsequential—or
so we think.
It’s
a jungle out there where only the fittest survive. Those who cannot
compete must not survive to reproduce; they must be expelled from the
gene pool. Modern capitalism is economic Darwinism carried to the extreme.
America is
a land of extraordinary contradictions. She has produced not only George
Bush and Dick Cheney but also George Carlin, Upton Sinclair, Eugene
Debs and Howard Zinn. This is a land of extremes; enigmatic even to
itself. It is a place of posh surroundings with all of the amenities
money can buy; but it is also a land of unknowable hardship and destitution
that often exists in close proximity to stupendous wealth.
Just as the
continent holds lush temperate rain forests, so it also harbors deserts
where only the strong and well adapted survive the harsh conditions
of heat and drought and oscillating cold.
Surely the
national pastime must be shopping, which has acquired the stature of
a genuine addiction; a disease on a par with alcoholism and played with
the passion of a competitive sport. Witness the insanity of black Friday,
the busiest shopping day of the year where people are annually trampled
at the doors of Wal-Mart in the quest for the latest incarnation of
the X-Box. He with the most toys wins and the losers are trampled underfoot,
ground into dust. Possessions matter more than people.
And we are
a restless, fiercely competitive people—constantly on the move;
a people that cannot countenance open spaces or unmanaged nature.
Hundreds
of thousands of shopping centers and strip malls bear ample testimony
to our excess, as do the mountains of debt that rise out of our spending
habits like a newly spawned volcano swelling above a rising column of
molten magma. Eventually they will become our gravestones—monuments
to our lack of empathy and testaments to our unbridled greed and contempt
for the earth.
The developers
cannot relax until every inch of the earth is urbanized and paved and
there is a McDonald’s and Wal-Mart on every street corner; a development
in place of every orchard and farm. We cannot relax until everything
wild and natural has been eradicated or imprisoned in zoos and admission
is charged. Imagine a continent sized gated community for the well-heeled
and the wealthy. The poor and destitute need not apply.
More than
democracy, more than liberty, more than life—give us our shopping
malls so that we can purchase happiness and fill our empty lives with
possessions. Our senses are incessantly assaulted by merciless commercialism—we
are programmed to consume and to be consumed by our programmers in the
advertising industry whose job it is to plant the seeds of want in our
all too receptive minds. Conspicuous consumption is the cornerstone
of mature capitalism and no people in history have been more prominent
consumers than we Americans—as measured by the girth of our waistlines
and the girth of our mounting debt.
But as much
as we are the products of Madison Avenue advertisers, we are also products
of arrested psychological and spiritual development. We exhibit extreme
pathologies because our lives are not rooted in nature and community;
nor are they rooted in reality. Like spoiled adolescents, we have locked
ourselves away with our box of toys and we call the world our own. We
are a danger not only to ourselves but to the entire world. Quarantine
should be drawn around us lest we infect the rest of the world with
our madness.
Oblivious
to the consequences of our own excess, our sphere of caring rarely extends
beyond the self and our immediate families to the communities in which
we are embedded that in turn spill into the great world beyond. We have
erected psychological and physical barriers that isolate us from the
rest of the world which have given rise to pathological visions of grandeur
and exceptionalism. And, like a run-away virus, we are replicating our
madness to the rest of the world which is, thanks to the disciples of
Milton Friedman, seeking to emulate our example.
Better the world turn away and run for their lives as if we were infected
with a new strain of pox or rabies. Better they should save themselves
and let us perish, as will surely occur when we are consumed by the
festering sewers of our swelling vanity.
We call ourselves
a free people but we are prisoners of our own petty desires; prisoners
of greed and excess and manufactured want; the products of capitalism
taken to the extreme—replicating with the ease of cancer cells
unrestrained by reason or empathy for others and for the earth. The
world cannot tolerate another America. She cannot much longer sustain
the one she already has. We have a carbon footprint vastly disproportional
to our numbers and we are not only blotting out the sun; we are stamping
out countless species of plants and animals and casting them into the
abyss of eternal extinction. The ecological cost of our excess is incalculable.
We go on
as if there are no consequences to what we do, ignoring the wolves baying
at our door and the grim reaper peering at us through the curtain. We
tell ourselves they are only apparitions of conspiracy theorists and
alarmists, the ghosts of misplaced conscience.
Millions
of Americans are experts at self-denial and delusional to the extreme,
while others are realists and components of active resistance. But,
cause and effect rarely enters our vocabulary. History, science and
ethics are not our strengths—we prefer to go shopping or watching
television, giving no thought to the kind of world we are leaving our
children and their off spring, much less the offspring of other species.
We hold that the universe turns on its axis and we are its center; but
it is not so.
As a result
of our excesses, terms such as ‘peak oil’ and ‘peak
water’ have come into existence. Gluttony occurs on one end of
the supply chain at the expense of the other; just as food webs are
affected by events occurring at all parts of an ecological web the size
of the world. One cannot pluck a flower without also troubling a star.
All things are interconnected.
How easily
we forget that commercial exuberance rests on the broken bodies of the
exploited worker; it rests on the scrolls of flora and fauna that have
been pushed out of existence because there isn’t enough room for
them and us with all of our precious, energy consuming toys.
Thus we live
in a world that is not enriched by our example but is diminished by
us. Injustice is a byproduct of commercial exuberance as manifested
by declarations of superiority through class warfare and other avenues
of inequality. And it is felt in the dimly lit sweatshop somewhere in
the belching slums of industrialized China, engulfed by the droning
hum of sowing machines that never cease behind bolted doors; and guided
by gnarled hands attaching Nike labels to athletic apparel destined
for upscale Target and Macy’s stores in the US.
True, capitalism
has made cheap products available to the voracious American consumer;
but it has also given the world preemptive war and famine, global corporatism,
pestilence and wage slavery; it has stoked the fires of mass extinction,
global warming and ecological collapse—all of which have acquired
an unstoppable momentum of their own with unimaginable consequences
that extend indefinitely into an already uncertain future. There are
consequences to everything we do, just as there are consequences to
inaction.
Yet it is
increasingly obvious that too few of us care enough to take action,
as long as we are free to buy and to consume. We keep the consequences
of gluttony out of sight and out of mind and pretend they aren’t
there. But they are present and they matter.
And this
brings me to the main point of my essay: it cannot go on. The age of
exuberance—like the age of cheap oil—is mercifully drawing
to a close. So I will say what was never meant to spoken aloud in the
land of excess; and I will say it loud and clear so that it cannot be
mistaken: Americans must dramatically simplify their lives to want less
and learn more. We constitute less than five percent of the of the world’s
population while usurping more than a quarter of her bounty. This is
not acceptable—nor is it ethical.
No one has
a moral right to take more than their fair share when that taking jeopardizes
the chances of others of living a decent life, or makes nil their chances
for survival—including other species.
Contrary
to what one might think, we do not have to live like third world nations
or like the hunters and gatherers of the past. But we must dramatically
reduce our consumption and shrink our carbon footprint. Not only must
we live within our own means but within the means of the planet to support
us.
The majority
of our food should be locally grown and mass transit must supplant the
gluttonous and polluting automobile that proliferates on our nation’s
highways. Moratoriums on development and urban sprawl must be enacted
in order to protect critical habitat and rainwater recharge areas. Cities
and towns must be redesigned and revitalized with sustainable industry.
Goods and services, including work and jobs must again, as they were
in the past, be rooted in vibrant, small scale local economies; and
free trade agreements revoked.
Technological
advances—no matter how boldly they are touted as saviors of humankind
cannot increase the world’s carrying capacity and they cannot
invoke justice. The latter is entirely up to us as sentient beings endowed
with conscience. And this brings me to a second point: we must reduce
the human population through adoption and cease to procreate for at
least one generation—so that the earth can recover her carrying
capacity. What better way to save the world, literally.
Simultaneously
simplifying our lives by wanting less and reducing the human population
will allow room for other people and other beings to share the bounty
of the earth. And it will almost certainly have a beneficent rather
than pathological social and psychological consequence: it will end
our isolation and reconnect us to the rest of the world. We could finally
realize our enormous potential to become world citizens and good neighbors
worthy of respect and love.
Rather than
an economy based upon savage greed and exploitation, let us create an
economy based upon justice and equality, need rather than excess; a
society that does not leave people behind but invites the full participation
of everyone and recognizes that, “An injury to one is an injury
to all.” Let it be all inclusive and worthy of respect: where
every woman, man, and child, every being of this earth is the same under
the law and equally respected and valued—a great global community
seeking harmony rather than competitive advantage.
In the end,
equality is beholden to the system we choose. Did we ask that the world
be run on the profits of greed, or the prophets of wisdom? Where was
that democratic choice? The profits of greed have given us voracious
greed, consuming everything in sight; but they didn’t give us
a choice; they took away our freedom and made us into lesser beings.
But, if we are to muster ourselves to call ourselves Human one last
time, where the prophets of wisdom really did have something to say,
where people and the planet are put before profits in the Golden Rule,
and where we have one large collective foot standing on the profit of
greed then maybe, maybe YES we will turn this thing around: http://www.planetization.org.
Charles Sullivan is a nature photographer, free-lance
writer, and community activist residing in the Ridge and Valley Province
of geopolitical West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at [email protected].
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