Tendentiousness Challenged · Monday June 8, 2009 by Julie
I have a vast audience, it appears, of Other Bobs. One of them asked me what, specifically, is so great about living here?
Good question. Like Other Bob, I do get a little weary hearing about great spiritual and social advantages that obtain here which are not robust enough to be examined. As a personal religion, I trust experience and analysis as a way of attaining depth. It makes me suspicious when it’s claimed that at the very heart of the magic is a core that is not only unknowable, but that will be harmed if it is examined. So I’ll try.
Valuing non-human nature: Sure, there was a bear somewhere in Seattle last week, but on the whole, it’s the built environment that dominates the senses in town. There, it’s possible to move entirely within human mediated systems, and from there, to jump to the conclusion that our comforts are infinitely expandable. It’s possible to talk about “empty land” or to blandly use up several lifetime’s worth of carbon footprint to go on an eco-tour. In contrast, what you learn here is that every bit of land and sea has a prior claim on it from untold generations of bugs, thrushes, lichen, sculpins, blackberries, otters, and salamanders. Any human improvement is at their cost.
Urban people can go for generations without quite understanding why we should care. What claim do opossums, cockroaches, or poison oak have on us? Well, Other Bob, it’s by being physically in the presence of non-human life that their voices can become audible. People don’t work well in the abstract. Until you’ve whistled at a harbor seal and it cranes its neck and swims closer, you’re not likely to care one way or another about its role in our fisheries. If you don’t care, you’re not likely to make decisions based on their welfare.
Urban blindness to the immanence of nature leads to philosophical and practical pitfalls: If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one to hear it, does it make a sound? Without an observer, is Shroedinger’s cat alive or dead? Avoid anthropomorphizing animals.
These are all bullshit. Forest creatures hear, a cat observes, and we are demonstrably on the same emotional and behavioral continuum as animals. In the same way, focusing only on human profit and social justice leads to deforesting Brazil, depleting India’s water table, and pumping more carbon into the atmosphere than it can digest. Anyone who lived with and listened to nature could have told you what a dumb idea things like the Green Revolution are
Access to solitude: True, you can find solitude anywhere, but in practice, people seem to need conceptual as well as actual solitude. A park or chapel simply doesn’t feel as silent as a rock on an isolated cliff. Since people are primarily tribal, our need for varied human interaction can sometimes drown out our less insistent need for contemplation. Many of my neighbors are practicing contemplatives. After weeks in their (occasional) company, it becomes clear that there is a difference between them and many urbanites, quite apart from non-measurable depth of soul. They’re not that interested in status symbols. They tend to eat low on the food chain, have fewer possessions which filter direct experience of the world, and be more interested in how the universe unfolds than in deciding how is. Birders, wildcrafters, poets, writers, and artists outnumber the yahoos.
Which brings me to my third point, social competence: On an island, it’s clear that, short of leaving, you have to deal with your problems. So, social interactions tend to be more skilful. People will always have difficulties with each other, but in a small community, there’s less of a tendency to sue or shoot. People, on the whole, forgive without in any way forgetting. Conspicuous issues between people become part of island gossip, a fairly good teaching tool. This point is brought home when I watch non-islanders with differences. Since it doesn’t seem to matter as much if the relationship is broken, they tend to take risks that make win-win less possible. Rather than working with their opponent, they try to force or punish them. Here, people often say, “How can we make this work for both of us?”
More in the next post.
