At right: new digs: shores of Lake Michigan

Welcome to 2010! This is it, definitely: the future.

The new year has brought a rather abrupt change for your faithful blogger: I moved to Chicago exactly a week ago. It’s incredible how quickly it’s come to feel like home. Not that I love this city, though it does have character. But there is a sense of rightness, of inevitability, to this latest coordinate shift. I’m not quite sure what it is I’m to do here, but I’m here to do it.
I suspect, as confirmed by a recent session with the I Ching, that this time is about building inner resources, of biding my time and working behind the scenes. Of laying foundations. Of being inconspicuous, flexible, and patient. Not exactly a recipe for excitement, I admit. But thus spake the oracle, the venerable Book of Changes: “Hide your light. Voluntarily do what is beneath you.”
And so yesterday I found myself--Swarthmore alumnus, Fulbright scholar, blah blah blah--at Kennedy-King Community College, registering for a class. It just happens to be within 2.5 miles of my new address and has the advantage over the other nearby places of being 1/10th the price. I may not learn a great deal of organic chemistry, but as the only white face on campus, I may learn a lot else. My first lesson came early on, during registration, and put crudely runs something like this: black folks don’t expect good service. Registration was set up in such a way that hundreds of new students had to wait while one at a time squeezed through an advising bottleneck. The striking thing was not so much the inefficiency of the system as that no one seemed the least bit surprised or annoyed. A second lesson was harder to digest, and it had to do with my own discomfort in the situation. After 10 months in Nepal I’m not unused to being the only white person in a room, so it wasn’t that. It’s that I’ve been socially conditioned with some success to see black skin and baggy pants and think ‘alert, alert.’ After a few minutes I mastered myself and was able to recognize that this was a potentially valuable cross-cultural experience. More on that as the semester unfolds, if my under-enrolled chemistry course isn’t cancelled.

Living on the edge of the University of Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park, I find myself on a very different sort of campus frequently, and the differences couldn’t be more striking. ‘No Hats or Headgear of Any Kind’ signs to discourage gang behavior at Kennedy-King; Hogwarts-style banquet halls with stained glass windows at U of C. (Oh, life of contradictions.) It was in this gothic study hall that I sat myself down this morning with a stack of periodicals in order to gauge which might welcome writing submissions from the likes of me. Instead, I quickly got caught up in an incisive essay by Curtis White in the midwest journal Tin House called “A Good Without Light.” (The piece is available in its entirety http://www.tinhouse.com/mag/issue41/current_nonfiction_white.htm) It was one of those moments where I went “I could have/should have written that!” The last time I had such a feeling was when I read Michael Pollen’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. But this time as that one, the writer goes farther and deeper than I’d have been able to in pursuing his devastating and essential thesis.

White starts by calling our attention to the fact that the term ‘sustainability’ has been adopted by the corporate world, and he for one is not fooled. Much as we might like to believe in the possibility of happily “greening” the status quo, the radical change that is in fact necessary is also incompatible with the workings of our culture and economic system. The new marketers of sustainability (who are, lest we forget, last decade’s marketers of the Hummer) and the vast forces that stand behind them are fundamentally unwilling and unable to challenge the most basic assumption of all: that what it means to be “free” and “prosperous” and “developed” is to consume, consume, consume.
The corporate movement for sustainability will never be geared towards creating a society that is sustainable in the true sense of being able to replicate itself indefinitely without, say, exhausting any of the resources it depends on. Rather, this is one more chance to sell us something: to sell us the preposterous assurance that not only can our way of life continue, but that is must, and that it will save the world in doing so.
White delves into the roots of our collective psychology, and comes up with a nasty little pearl of insight.
He identifies the “Barbarian Heart” of our culture. The barbaric in us assumes implicitly that might makes right. Ours is cult of violence; specifically, of “artful violence.” Thence comes our continuing worship of athletes, marines, the president himself: all are victors over some field of competition, warrior figures in some sense. “For the barbarian, so long as someone suggests to him that he can continue to be violent and willful but mitigate the self-destructive consequences if he’s shrewd about it, well, he’s more than willing to listen and believe. And that is what the logic of sustainability does” (Tin House No. 41, 81).
So much for our moral context, which White reduces to “violence masquerading as virtue.” What about our great hope, that technical expertise--science, engineering, enlightened economic or public policy--will save us? But science is incapable of delivering us a shiny technological answer to global warming, just as modern medicine can’t find a magic-bullet cure for the cancer that is one of the quintessential (by)products of modernity. White again: “What I want to suggest, not to put too fine a point on it, is that the act of trusting these experts--whether economists or scientists--to provide us with a sustainable future of ever-growing capitalist enterprise is not to place faith in the subtle capacities of the engineer but to indulge in the primitive longing of the barbarian in his moment of despair” (80-1). And finally, and most devastatingly:

“We are a culture dominated by a rationality that is the equivalent of thoughtlessness. We are dominated by a form of logical intelligibility (science) that insists that what is not intelligible to it is not intelligible at all. Strangely, what is most dramatically unintelligible to science is itself. Especially hidden to it is the degree to which its own habit of logical orderliness prepares the way for the progress of the Barbaric, just as Rome’s system of roads proved a great convenience not only to its own legions but to the barbaric armies that for once didn’t need to “swarm” but could proceed in an orderly and direct fashion to their bloody destination: the final sacking of Rome” (83).

I could go on. White, for his part, ends his piece with a reminder of what lies at the other end of our gallon of gas or sirloin steak: hand-grenades into an Iraqi home; underpaid workers standing in a pool of blood. The fact is, it’s easy and sometimes even fun to critique modern corporate culture. But what’s at stake here is nothing less than our way of life. Mine and yours and Curtis White’s. Whether it is beloved to us or not, it’s all that most of us know. Despite my sojourns abroad and interest in alternative lifestyles, I am an American. I drive a car and use lots of energy. It’s lifestyles like mine that have to change, but we seem powerless to effect this change on an individual level as much as on a political one. Of course, sustainability as a concept is much more profound than the current marketing buzz-word realizes: sustainability means that which can’t continue indefinitely will die eventually. The question is, can we bring it to a timely and transformative end, or must we watch in horror as our culture only grows fatter and fatter, finally expiring of a massive heart attack only after it’s eaten up all the food, breathed up all the good air and destroyed the last patch of habitable ground.

To sum up: out there in the world at large, things are Not Good. Whether by the standards of justice or of life expectancy, things may never have been good--that’s the good news, I guess. But now our Not Goodness is multiplying exponentially in scale. There are a lot more of us Not Being Good. Or--and this is what’s so frustrating about being a relatively conscientious and informed participant in the modern affluent world--even if we try to be good, we know that it doesn’t much matter. We can assuage our bruised consciences by buying recycled paper towels, growing our own potatoes, turning off the water while we soap up in the shower, giving some money to charities that buy goats for struggling subsistence farmers in Africa; we can do what we believe to be the good work all day long, and not only does it not matter on global warming’s all-consuming scale (or that of genocide, war, etc. etc.), but, despite our best reasonable efforts, the chances are we’re each doing just as much to promote 450 ppm of atmospheric carbon and oil-driven blood frenzy as to forestall it. In this sense, in order to be ethical citizens of the modern world, we would have to drop out of society. I’ve flirted with this idea, but even the commune-esque off-grid sites I’ve lived on don’t go nearly far enough to set a sustainable standard. Not to mention that dropping out remains a prerogative of the privileged classes. (And let it be said: in a meaningful sense, privilege is the perspective of this blog: culture, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, education--short of being a Rockefeller, I’m about as privileged as they come.)

It’s amazing, every three or four months I go through a re-awakening to the story I’ve just been relating. It’s partially that it’s too heavy to keep in the forefront of one’s mind all the time: we are talking about the essential fucked-upedness of our time and place in history, after all (or, if you prefer, of the entire history of the world). Gradually the outrage, anger, confusion, despair fade in the face of mundane concerns and the necessity of not being a huge downer all the time. But remembering, re-realizing the facts of the world we live in, serves as a jolt out of the featherbed of complacency and helps reset my orientation in the world. May this vitriolic rant do the same for you.

Happy new year.