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The Ghosts of
Misplaced Conscience
By
Charles Sullivan
11/28/07 "ICH"
- --- 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
csullivan@phreego.com.
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