Original post from April 17, 2021
It’s hard to overstate the extent to which most of what characterizes our modern life is anomalous and unsustainable – a term that obfuscates its message of “to continue like this is suicide.” We automatically assume what we experience daily is normal, fine, reasonable. On the one hand, our daily routine is light years from that. On the other, it is almost impossible to mention it. People not only don’t want to hear, it seems they aren’t actually capable of hearing it. In this blog, I point out things I find incongruous, but I’m no exception. I have my blind spots too.
Every day, we get into our cars and drive on roads without for a moment considering how those roads vivisect the land, breaking habitats into untenable pieces. We sit all day studying or at work, inside buildings, not noticing how physically or mentally stunting the lack of complex stimulation is. We expect to buy any product any time, giving no thought to where it comes from and what damage is caused by the extraction of raw materials and production processes. We open packages and throw them away every day, because that’s how things are supplied. We use the internet without taking into account the energy cost of the giant servers that enable and maintain it. Unlike almost every human society ever, we take unimaginable economic disparities for granted, do not consider the life of the non-human world, and routinely destroy useful, edible, and even medicinal wild plants and trees that clean the air, manage the hydrological cycle, and cool the hot summers.
We are social animals. When our society does not recognize injustices, but treats them as natural and desirable, we have no compass to discern what is right and reasonable, what is harmful, and what is morally abhorrent. We accept the lifestyle we are accustomed to. If we cannot see what is unreasonable, we can’t correct it. It’s hard to motivate people to even want to change. We have to shake ourselves out of the obvious to see that it isn’t.
A society that conducts itself destructively every day corrupts not only the “environment”, but also the soul, which becomes less sensitive and alert and loses its ability to cultivate right relationship. And so it also corrupts itself, breaking into disparate and conflicted camps.
Maintaining good relations and balance among ourselves and between ourselves and the rest of life is not optional: It is the foundation of existence. To maintain right relationship, we first need to notice that relationship exists, and then learn to listen to the other to understand them and their needs, and try to live symbiotically.
Here are a couple links to some of what inspired this post:
The famous anthropologist Wade Davis on the end of the American empire
A story related by David Abram, as well as by Merlin Sheldrake in his excellent book Entangled Life.
Other inspirations are in Hebrew, and can be found at the bottom of the Hebrew version of this blog.