THE RETURNING OF THE LIGHT BEGINS TODAY

The world of science tells us that the winter solstice passed a week ago, having occurred at a precise moment, 12:30 a.m. EST on the 22nd of December.

This is a powerful example of the ability of scientific knowledge, provided to us in a selective and decontextualized way, to cause us to actually know less than we did before -- humans have traditionally been well aware of the extended period of maximum darkness, lasting more like 14 days than one day -- and then to stop trusting our own perceptions, and finally to stop even having perceptions because we have stopped noticing them.

The reality is that Solstice is not a moment; the sun stands still in the sky for two weeks. The naked eye can't detect a difference in the sun's position between about the 14th and the 28th of December; you would have to have special instruments to know that there had been any change during this period. Meaningful change in the sun's position, and therefore in the length of daylight, begins again on about the 29th, which is today.

A two-week festival at this time of year, with nobody working and everyone having fun, would make a lot of sense -- and is more natural to our race than taking two or three days off and then being thrown back into the grind.

New Year's Day is actually positioned (perhaps by accident) pretty correctly -- because the new solar year does begin just about now, with the days getting just slightly, but perceptibly, longer.

I am wishing everybody peace, friendship, and rebellion in the coming year. Live life fully and furiously, pouring out the best of your love and rage. May the sun accompany you.

Technology and Consciousness

I am walking along the shores of lovely Walden Pond outside of Boston, a natural site made more serene and significant for me by my awareness of the role it played in the life and reflections of Henry David Thoreau, philosopher of nature, peace, and resistance. But the magic of the moment is broken by a man who is walking along the beach in my direction, talking on his cell phone.

I am on a hike on the New York slope of the Berkshires with the Appalachian Mountain Club. We are ascending across a forest floor of red leaves, as the trees have begun to drop their autumn apparel. The trail gets steeper, and the trees shift to more birch and fir, fewer hemlock and maple. When we get to a plateau in the trail, the nine of us are ready to pause to catch our breath and look out over the beginnings of a view, which in another hour will have opened up wide and beautiful. Almost immediately, three or four members of the group whip out their cell phones and try to make calls or check messages. The conversation in the whole group changes to the subject of qualities of reception in different places and with different phones.

I am on an airplane flying safely outside of the reach of a thunderstorm, but with a stunning view into the canyon-like world of the huge clouds to the north of us, with forks of lightning flashing inside the depths every few seconds. There are tunnels, castles, mountain peaks, caves and labyrinths in the world of the storm, and we have a wide view of the entire celestial drama. The man sitting next to me is playing a hand-held video game, never removing his eyes from the tiny screen. I glance around and see that the other passengers are mostly watching the TV shows being broadcast on the screens above us. I don't see a single person watching the miracle out the window, to which I soon return.

I am on a wide, soft beach on the Long Island Sound, looking out over the sparkling water and running down to play in the waves. The sky is cloudless on this day. Two teenage girls (I'm related to one of them) are on a blanket lying down, their backs to the ocean, playing together with their cell phones, looking at photographs, sending text messages to friends, experimenting with different ring tones. An osprey flies by a little ways out over the blue water, soaring the entire length of the beach before disappearing in the distance.

Technology sucks the magic and wonder out of the world. A natural place is not the same place anymore once we are talking on a cell phone or checking our GPS, or even when someone near us is doing so. We get disconnected from our senses and our physical pleasures, and brought back to the world of machines and pollution; and for me, I get brought back to the awareness that nature is being destroyed.

I am reminded of Philip Slater, writing years ago in his indispensable book The Pursuit of Loneliness, words that were something close to, “Superhighways are making it possible for more and more of us to get faster and faster to places that are less and less worth going to.”

This insight, I believe, tears the cover off of one of the most ecologically and spiritually destructive myths of our times: That we can transform the earth, and human life on it, through the creation of technologies that have no relationship to nature and no respect for it, and yet somehow leave the world the same beautiful place that it was. This is a common theme in the ads on the walls of airports, countless images of technology as a source of freedom: We see a woman working on her laptop at a gorgeous lake, because the technology allows her to work from there and not have to go into the office; we see a man getting excellent cell phone reception at the top of a set of Mayan ruins. We pretend that these places are the same, that this laptop has not sucked the essential life out of this woman’s experience of the lake, that this man can still feel the awe of the ruins he has ascended.

Watch your experience carefully. Notice what creates distance, distraction, and superficiality, because these forces make us feel the gnawing emptiness that so many people struggle within the modernized world. Notice as you talk on your cell on the phone whether the landscape passes differently from how it does when the phone is turned off. Notice how time passes as you look at your laptop screen. And then, pay attention each day to what you can do to make a pretty place, a human interaction, a walk -- even a drive -- more deeply satisfying, more joyful, more connected, more ecstatic, more euphoric, more real.

The Lost Tribe

I feel that I was born in the wrong era. I don’t want to sleep on a bed that is sitting on wood high above the earth; I belong on a mat that touches the ground. I don’t want to spend the great majority of each day, and for that matter of each week and month, far from the people I love the most. I don’t want to spend a half hour out of each day outdoors, and the rest inside away from the sky and natural light and the wind and the sounds. I was meant to live in a tribe, putting our heads together often to strategize and solve problems, watching out for each other’s well-being, accompanied most of the time, alone only by choice and not by default.

An unspoken assumption exists in the modern world that our current way of living benefits people, and that there are only a few people who don’t like it. People who dislike technology are characterized as “afraid of change,” or “old-fashioned,” or “technophobes.” Yet almost everything about how we now live is based on technologies that pollute, and that disconnect us from nature, including the entirety of electronic technology and the entirety of fossil-fuel driven technology. The so-called “clean technologies,” such as the computer industry, are among the most toxic ever; if you would like to read a blow-by-blow about what the electronics world is doing to the natural environment and public health, I encourage you to read In the Absence of the Sacred by Jerry Mander.

So I need to be perfectly clear: It isn’t that I fear technology, it’s that I hate it. Or, to be even more precise, my fear is not the fear of the unknown; it is the fear of something that has proven itself to be horrifically destructive to the quality of life, and to consciousness, and to all the plants and animals that we share the planet with.

I long for life in the wild, living as an animal, the way human beings have lived through the vast reaches of our history. Civilization, which has been disastrous, is a phenomenon of the quite recent past, meaning three or four thousand years at most (depending on what part of the world we’re talking about). On this continent, most people were still living in the wild just 250 years ago, a tiny blip in the hundred thousand years or so that our species has existed.

So I am writing today less from a political perspective and more from a personal one. My heart burns for the tribe I lost – for the tribe that was destroyed – two dozen or more generations ago back along my family tree. I have come to believe that we all carry with us this heartbreak of what happened when our particular tribes were destroyed, and this bottomless-seeming grief has been passed down to us through the generations. We are all feeling broken hearted without realizing it. We all need to grieve the tribes we once lost.

And then somehow we need to find a new tribe to which we can belong, living in love with this beautiful world.

The Myth of Progress (Continued)

MYTH #2

"Technological advances have brought us greater comfort, leisure, health, and happiness – what we call our “modern lifestyle” – and have liberated us from mind-numbing, repetitive, boring work."

REALITY #2

You’ve got to be kidding.

We have to begin this discussion by looking at who exactly we are talking about when we say “we.” The march of industrialization, centrally controlled technologies, and pollution – in other words, the vast majority of what is termed "progress" – has had a sharply different effect for the world’s small, privileged elites than it has on everybody else.

The great majority of the world’s people have been forced by “progress” into longer and longer work hours at increasingly boring work compared to what their ancestors did, with less and less control over their work day, and with less and less right or ability to make decisions or use their creativity. Work has become more severely hierarchically controlled, and people are hired and fired at the whim of their employers. In addition, the general trend is for the world’s people to be forced to spend the bulk of their lives indoors or underground (in mines or basements). The human animal is left longing for the sky, the wind, the fields and hills, the air, that had been our surroundings most of the time through our hundreds of thousands of years of history.

So almost any celebration of what technology has supposedly done for “us” is misleading, because "us" refers to a tiny percentage of the world's population that has escaped the effects of "progress" that I've just described.

“Progress” has meant, above all, the forcing of people away from their land-based and communal ways of life, and into employment for a boss. In the process, we have also lost our extended networks of love, support, and companionship from relatives and community members -- our tribe. This is the essence of the change that has taken place over the past few thousand years, but most sharply over the past 500 years, and then more sharply again over the past 150 years, in how the human race lives.

I will not, for now, try to review further the global suffering that is, overwhelmingly, the primary impact that “progress” has had. Books and books have been written on the subject for those who can face the details of what has been wreaked in recent centuries. I will name just a few, for people who would be interested in places to begin: The West and the Rest of Us by Chinweizu (get it through your library -- it's out of print); In the Absence of the Sacred by Jerry Mander; Solar Storms by Linda Hogan (a novel, but in many ways brings the points home more effectively than pieces of non-fiction); The End of Nature by Bill McKibben.

But even for the more privileged…

Technology hasn’t really done for anyone what its promoters claim it does.

We are busier and more pressured than ever, and it is technology that creates this pace of life, so the claim of increased leisure is the opposite of the truth.

We do not spend less of our time in boring, repetitive activities – we sit for hours in chairs pointing and clicking, even on our non-work hours, and it’s making us all a little crazy. We spend parts of each day, sometimes many hours, literally strapped to our seats, like prisoners, as we sit in cars and airplanes. (I am strapped to my seat as I write this, and wishing I could get up to go the bathroom, but I’m putting off making the people next to me get up from their cramped, crowded seats and squeeze into the aisle.) We spend our days staring at screens. Life is getting more and more homogenized and repetitive, as more and more millions of our race spend our days doing the same thing – working at computer screens, and the screens of our cell phones and Blackberries.

We don’t have greater health. Besides the epidemic of cancer and heart disease, we have an increasing flood of mysterious complaints – fatigue, dizziness, aches and pains, that are hard to discover the origins of, because we are being exposed to so many substances and so many kinds of radiation (“waves”) that we have no way to know what’s causing what.

We – the privileged “we” – do have greater comfort, in the sense of less cold, less heat (for now), soft comfortable clean clothes, great mattresses. But new discomforts are taking the place of these, including chronic back and joint problems that result from our”lifestyle”, the health complaints I just mentioned, and intense restlessness from having to sit or stand in one place so much.

And anyhow, comfort isn’t everything. On the list of the factors that lead to a satisfying, meaningful, happy experience of life, comfort – except for the avoidance of severe discomfort – plays a pretty small role.

Which leads directly to the last failure of technology and progress: They haven’t made us any happier. In fact, there are numerous indications that the more industrialized and technologized the world gets, the less happy people become. But progress works like any other addiction, in that as it makes us more and more miserable, it also makes us more and more afraid to be without it. This is virtually the definition of how an addiction works, is it not?

What are the key factors that make human beings happy?

This is, in a sense, the most important – yet probably least asked and discussed – question of our times. So I will speak to it in detail in my next entry. The failure to look closely at this question is part of what makes it possible for technology to get away with marching forward, even when it is destroying our health, our land, and our communities.

The transition we have to make in the decades ahead will be, in many respects, a painful one, but it also has the potential, ironically, to be a transition back to a happiness, a subject to which I will soon return.

The Myth of Progress

We have been misled by a crushing weight of misinformation about our own history, in order to cajole and force us into accepting the modern world, or what I call The Climate Crisis Lifestyle. We have been steadily indoctrinated to believe that there is (and was) no good alternative to "progress" as it has been defined in the modern world, meaning ever-greater hierarchy, pollution, mind-numbing work, and destruction of communal ways of living.

In the weeks ahead I will examine the myths that I believe are most central to keeping us locked into this dangerous channel. Today I will begin with:

MYTH # 1

"Tribal people throughout human history have mostly lived hard lives of hunger, disease, cold, and other severe discomforts, and to cap it all off their lives were short. Industrialism and technology have saved us from this horror, making our lives more leisurely, more comfortable, more meaningful, and longer."

REALITY #1

Human beings are animals. Do you see any animal, living in its wild state, that spends most of its life starving, suffering pain, and working itself into unbearable exhaustion and boredom? Of course not -- for the most part animals do not live in this way, and there are certainly no entire species who live in bad conditions through the bulk of their lives. So why should we believe that wild humans did?

And the fact is that there is plenty of historical evidence to indicate that most tribal people, prior to being conquered by non-tribal invaders, worked far fewer days per year than we do, worked shorter hours than we do on those days that they did work, and devoted far more of their lives to leisure, festivals, crafts, and games. They suffered much less than we do from violence, loneliness, insecurity, and work-related illnesses and deaths.

My goal is not to idealize the human being in his and her natural, wild lifestyle. Tribal life included injustices, hierarchies, and violence (and perhaps even some boredom). But these ills were present at minute levels compared to what we endure in the current world with our supposed "progress." True human progress (which moved forward through most of the history of our species) actually stopped at precisely the point at which industrial and technological "progress" began, an ironic twist that I will be writing more about in the months to come.

A truly "wild" human being (who would never have survived alone, and so was always part of a group, tribe, or clan that worked partly or entirely cooperatively) was as magnificent, intelligent, skillful, and beautiful as any wild animal that we enjoy watching or learning about today, and he and she should be celebrated and revered by all of us. Those of us who long for the wild are actually longing for a far more interesting, leisurely, and accompanied life than the modern world allows us, our natural way of life that was taken from us long, long ago.

Can we find our way back to some version of that nature-based, wild way of life? It seems that we may have no other choice. The earth may not tolerate our presence much longer unless we can rapidly learn -- re-learn, actually -- how to live in full harmony with it. So it appears that we are beginning now, whether we like it or not, a transition to a new way of life, full of perils but also full of exciting possibilities.