See if you can answer a few questions. No cheating! You can look up the answers after you’ve had a go.
- What was the name of Scheherazade’s murderous king?
- Which Pope declared Galileo a heretic because his observational work confirmed Copernicus’ heliocentric theory?
- What was the name of the prince who didn’t bother to employ J. S. Bach despite those wonderful Brandenburg concertos?
- One of the wealthiest men of his time died in a great tragedy in 1912. What was his name?
So, who is more important in the scheme of things: the Sultan or the Storyteller? the Inquisitor or the Inquisitive? the Margrave or the Musician? And when that rich man went down in the Titanic, did he manage to take a single dollar with him?
Shelley said it all in Ozymandias:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—”Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Power, wealth and status are Monopoly currency.
Hildegard of Bingen was the greatest thinker of her time who wrote music we still enjoy, was one of the earliest practitioners of scientific thinking, and even invented a new language.
And yet, as she wrote, “I am constantly fettered by sickness, and often in the grip of pain so intense that it threatens to kill me.” The Pope of the time was impressed by her visions, but if she were alive now, those visions would condemn her to horrid antipsychotic medication.
So, health is also Monopoly money.
How about happiness?
Siddhartha Gautama had the choice between living a happy life as a great ruler, soon forgotten, or becoming a Buddha of immortal fame and great benefit.
But the role of fiction is to illuminate truth. Here is a little story about happiness.
The magic path
Kylie Knut looked with contempt at the panhandler. OK, there were plenty of them back home, and Thailand is a third world country, but did the fellow need to smile so brightly while begging? He was tall, wore a yellow robe that left his right shoulder bare, and his head was shaved so it shone in the all-too-bright sunshine.
An old woman approached the beggar. To Kylie’s surprise, she bowed to him, holding her two palms together in an unmistakable sign of respect as if she expected him to bless her or something. She then took a container from her cloth shopping bag and filled his bowl with rice and stew.
Shrugging, Kylie turned away and strolled toward her destination: the temple down the road.
Someone tapped her shoulder. In automatic terror, she grabbed her can of Mace from her purse while turning. Safe—it was the generous old woman, who said, “Parlez vous Français?”
Kylie knew that was French but not the meaning, so she shrugged.
“Sprechen sie Deutsch?”
She didn’t know what language that was. Dutch perhaps? “I don’t understand you.”
“Oh, English!” the old woman said with a laugh. “I knew we’d find a common language sooner or later!”
Intriguing. “How many languages can you speak?”
“Thai of course, Japanese, Mandarin, which is Chinese, Khmer, which is the language of Cambodia, Burmese, then English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian. I’m studying Russian online, just for fun.”
Amazing. “Sorry, I’m no good with languages. But what’s the point?” She resumed walking, and the old woman stayed by her side.
“You cannot understand a culture without knowing its language. I was an anthropologist before I retired.” She looked like somebody’s grandmother—a little, fattish, brown dolly with a wrinkled face, and her grey hair in a bun. Who’d have thought? “My particular field of interest is European cultures from an Asian perspective. You people provide a fascinating field of study!”
“I’m American, actually.”
“I know from your accent. Let me guess, California?”
They arrived at the temple as Kylie nodded. The old woman asked, “Would you like me to be your tour guide?”
“Oh, thank you. How much will—”
The old woman looked offended. “I don’t need your money, but you looked so lost, and well, foreign, I thought you needed some friendly company.”
Lovely, but how odd. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to insult you, it’s only…”
“Please take off your shoes.” The old woman did so, and Kylie followed. “I understand. ‘No such thing as a free lunch,’ and ‘there is a sucker born every day,’ and ‘let the buyer beware’ and other such nonsense. As I said, I am a student of your cultures.”
Why did she find common sense caution to be nonsense? “All right, ma’am, what do you find to be natural?”
“My apologies. My name is Sasiwimon. That means ‘The Moon,’ and implies purity. My father was a romantic person.”
“I am Kylie Knut.”
“How do you do. Anyway, to answer your question, some of my clichés are, ‘The more you give, the more you get.’ ‘Credit for karma beats credit in the bank.’ Let’s see… ‘Too much is worse than too little.’ Will that do?”
As they entered the central building, Kylie looked around at overdone gaudy magnificence. The little lady, Sasi-whatever, said, “When King Rama the First moved his capital to Bangkok, his first act was to construct this temple complex. So, in those days it was more a tribute to royal power than to the Buddha, but now it’s the holiest place in Thailand.” She led her to a little green statue of a man sitting in the lotus position. “This is the famous Emerald Buddha. It’s said that it really looks like him. And the statue holds a certain magic.”
Just superstition of course, but Kylie played along. “What’s the magic?”
“Close your eyes and ask him to talk to you.”
Kylie closed her eyes, but of course didn’t ask a stupid statue to talk to her. Nothing happened, so after a while she opened her eyes.
The Sasi lady stood there, eyes closed, and such bliss on her face that Kylie wished the superstition was real. Surely it was something like the placebo effect.
A pleasant baritone voice spoke behind her. “Greetings, Madam. Why are you so insistent on resisting?”
Kylie turned, to see the panhandler. This fellow certainly didn’t act like any beggar back home, but more like he owned the place.
The old woman opened her eyes and again made the sign of respect. The beggar returned the gesture, and the two Thais smiled at each other like old friends.
He said, in perfect English, “When Professor Sasiwimon referred to magic, she didn’t mean a rabbit out of the hat, or levitating up into the air or some such, but something internal. Look, madam, what’s life about? What is it you want?”
Kylie had never given such issues any thought. “Uh… I suppose a reasonable amount of happiness.”
The Sasi lady said, “Bhanthe, thank you for joining us.” Her eyes were open, but her face still shone with joy. She turned to Kylie. “You can find that, but it doesn’t hide where you westerners look for it. The more you try to buy happiness, the less you have. But I won’t tell you the secret.”
“Oh?”
The tall man in the robe waved toward the statue. “The Teacher told us, the only way to find Truth is to seek it personally, inside. We can show you a path, but you need to walk it yourself.”
This was somewhat annoying. “Right, show me the path already!”
“I don’t own anything. Even my robe and food bowl belong to the Monastery. Nevertheless, I have two jobs, as an accountant, and as a monk.”
What an upside-down world! “An… an accountant?”
“I’ve earned an MBA at Stanford and spend six hours a day teaching poor workers Sufficiency Economy Philosophy.”
“Never heard of it.”
The Sasi-whatever lady—a professor, yet!—said, “Our revered King Bhumibol has died, and all Thai people know that he need not come back because he was enlightened. As a young man, he developed a way to help starving subsistence farmers to improve their lives by following certain principles, and over the years those principles have been expanded, and applied in many fields. And they work.”
If he died, of course he wasn’t coming back. More superstition. “OK, but what’s that got to do with this path?”
The Bhanthe-fellow said, “Teaching poor people how to live better is the less important of my jobs. Being a monk is far more so. You see, my role in society is to give people like Professor Sasiwimon opportunities for generosity.”
Sa-si-wi-mon, right, who said, “That’s one of my clichés, remember, ‘Credit for karma beats credit in the bank.’ Monks like Bhanthe Khanthawong only eat if someone puts food in their bowl. I can increase my credit by offering him food.”
Another unpronounceable name, of course. “Oh, you know each other?”
The two Thais smiled at each other. “Bhanthe Khanthawong is a member of the royal family.”
“Oh, only a minor line,” the tall man said with a modest wave of his hand. “Anyway, what conditions you are born into makes no difference. How you live, what benefit you are to others is the only proper measure. Now, madam, please do me a favour.”
“What?”
“Agree to do whatever I ask before you know what it is.”
Kylie opened her mouth to make an automatic refusal, but… He wants to benefit me. She found herself smiling at him. “OK.”
“Close your eyes. Ask the Buddha to show you the path you need to walk to attain happiness.”
Magic happens.
Westerners’ desperate scrabble for happiness is actually a great source of unhappiness. It is one of the myths of society that has placed us in the sixth extinction event of Earth. My two Thai friends in the story have shown what is trivial and what is important. The desire for happiness, and looking for it by striving for Monopoly money is at the heart of consumerism, which is consuming our planet.
Don’t believe me? Consider what would happen if most people were happy with what they had. It is economically necessary that people should keep yearning, that they never become more than transiently satisfied. If my clothes fit me and look OK, and if I’m unmotivated by status and fashion to exchange them, then I won’t buy replacements. So, consumer society is built on unhappiness. Through planned obsolescence, deliberately shoddy design, fashion, identification with media heroes, false linking with sex, people must be made to be unhappy with what they have, or they’ll stop buying. Then they won’t be motivated to take part in the desperate scramble for money that keeps the treadmill wheels spinning ever faster, grinding up the future.
There are alternatives, including the Buddhist economics of the Sufficiency Economy Philosophy Bhanthe Khanthawong teaches to poor people (see for instance ‘Sufficiency Thinking‘). A good summary is to choose the Middle Way, too much being as bad as too little; live within your means; act with long-term consequences in mind; ethically; wisely; considering all available information.
I bought my wristwatch for $20 in 1985. Since then, it has had a battery every four years or so, and three new watchbands, but it still works perfectly. My wife and I appear to live an ordinary suburban life, but I have calculated various aspects of our environmental footprint, and it is way below one-quarter of our neighbours’. For example, the water company’s bill exhorts people to keep their consumption below 155 litres per day per person. Ours is 43. We did invest in solar panels and a battery. Our electricity bill is currently $324 in credit, at the end of the Australian summer. The shirt I am wearing was an opp shop buy (thrift shop to people outside Australia) forty years ago. We follow the Four Rs of Sustainable Usage: Refuse, Reuse, Repair, and if nothing else is possible, Recycle. By eliminating useless wants, we can have a less than modest income and live in contentment, satisfying our essential needs. We’ve been doing this since 1978, and feel we live like royalty. This lifestyle is a deliberate revolutionary action of sabotaging the Economy.
Why do we need a consumer society? Because it is necessary for “economic growth.” I put that term in quotation marks because it is not a correct description. It is the growth of one particular measure of economic activity, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). If I were an evil genius and wanted to design a system to cause maximum misery while destroying life on Earth, I’d invent the GDP as the measure, and develop economic mechanisms that collapse unless GDP keeps growing.
Suppose I waved a magic wand and eliminated all crime. This would collapse the economy, with suffering for a huge number of people. Examples are penitentiary guards, judges, lawyers, police, private security services, the entire set of industries providing security hardware of various levels of sophistication from padlocks to electronic surveillance through AI, mental health professionals like I used to be—the suffering inflicted upon a great number of my clients was clearly tied to criminal activity—social workers, homelessness support services, purveyors of services for addictions of various kinds including alcohol and gambling, on and on. The world would be a far better place without crime, but it does contribute to the GDP.
Another example is the plastics deluge that’s choking the oceans. It is a significant cause of aquatic and bird life loss, and may be poisoning all of us through microplastics. However, it is good for the GDP. It is a major market for fossil fuels, powers the mostly unnecessary packaging industry, and keeps all aspects of the waste disposal industry happy. Clearing it out of waterways is a necessary environmental action for our very survival—and a major business. Imagine the blow to “The Economy” if we stopped all throw-away plastic manufacture, use and disposal.
And this 100-word story sets out another problem with the GDP:
PRESS RELEASE
This year’s Nobel Prize for Economics has been awarded to Emma Smith of Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, for instantaneously doubling the global economy, an act of genius that has revolutionised the science of Economics.
She has evaluated the monetary worth of house cleaning, cooking, child care and early childhood education, dispute resolution and mediation services, taxi services at Uber rates, and information networking.
These services are provided within every family.
By assessing their value, she has managed to double the global Gross Domestic Product.
She has achieved this miracle without even including the monetary value of sexual services.
Doesn’t this suggest that we need to decouple economics from this monster measure, for example by adopting the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)?
John Kenneth Galbraith’s view of limitless economic growth is, “To furnish a barren room is one thing. To continue to crowd in furniture until the foundation buckles is quite another.”
Therefore, Sasiwimon could have added to her three clichés, “Live simply so you may simply live.”
What can we use to replace the fruitless consumerist striving for happiness? Friedrich Nietzsche has said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” To illustrate what is worthwhile to strive for, let me tell you a little story I’ve used with warring clients when mediating conflict:
We in this room are in a rowboat on a great river, carried along by the current. There is a roaring sound ahead, and hey, the water isn’t level but a slight V shape because the centre is flowing considerably faster than the sides. Someone shouts, “Waterfall ahead, row hard for the shore!”
Every second takes us closer to certain death, and the flow of water keeps speeding up. Our one chance is to row diagonally toward the shore, hoping to reach quieter water before we plummet.
Right. On a scale of 1 to 1000, how important is your current disagreement in comparison?
Guess what. Every living being on this planet is in this situation. It is official: we are in the sixth great extinction event of Earth. “Currently, the species extinction rate is estimated between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than natural extinction rates—the rate of species extinctions that would occur if we humans were not around.” And when we have unravelled the web of life, we also fall through the hole.
So, I am inviting you to replace “happiness” with striving for survival.
Recently, someone asked this question on Quora:
“How soon do you think humanity will reach a point where serious action must be taken in order to avoid large-scale damage to the environment?”
Here is my answer:
You would need a time machine to avoid large-scale damage to the environment, because that is history and current affairs, as well as what’s coming.
I know a woman in her 50s. Her town in Australia has suffered “100 year” floods three times in the past year, showing that the old rules no longer apply. The first flood damaged her house. It was being repaired when the second flood destroyed it. All her resources, all her life were tied up in that house, in that community, which are gone because of the climate catastrophe.
This has happened to 20 million people in Pakistan alone, in one monsoon season.
Our life depends on agriculture. Farmers in many climatic zones find their produce destroyed, their activities made impossible by drought, or repeated floods or fires, or unprecedented storms, or in some cases more than one of these.
Before I retired from psychotherapy, I did trauma therapy with a veterinarian who went to pieces when smelling barbecued meat. Why? That’s what animals rescued from wildfires smell like, and she has worked with hundreds. Again, where wildfire is a danger, it is more frequent and more savage.
Firefighters in eastern Australia and California used to help each other during their alternating summers. This is no longer possible because the two fire seasons overlap so much.
Ask the people of Pacific Islands like Tuvalu when we should do something about climate change. They will tell you what I am saying: in the past.
Ask the mother who has seen her last child starve to death because of the drought that has devastated her eastern African region for years. Drought was one of the major contributing causes of the terrible Syrian war that started in 2011.
Everything depends on the huge system of ocean currents that carry warm water to many places including western Europe, cools the tropics to habitable temperatures, raises nutrients from the depths enabling much of marine life… and is slowing down. The threat of its stopping is one of the major “tipping points” that will push all complex life on this planet to extinction if they happen. And a very recent research report shows the evidence that this is on the way, because so much of the Greenland ice cap has already melted that the North Atlantic part of the system is compromised. “This huge Atlantic Ocean current is slowing down.”
Change in a complex system like global climate has a time lag. The terrible storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires we are now suffering are the result of greenhouse gases released many years ago.
In 1972, the first Club of Rome report forecast exactly today’s situation. In 2014, a research study assessed global changes during the forty years since the first report’s publication, and found the “worst case scenario” to be dismayingly accurate: “Limits to Growth was right. New research shows we’re nearing collapse.”
But why didn’t humanity take action back then?
My favourite author, Dr. Seuss, has explained in The Lorax, “Business is business, and business must grow, regardless of crummies in tummies, you know!”
There is ample evidence, sufficiently strong to have been used as the basis of successful court cases, that already in the 1960s, the petroleum, coal and car industries were well aware of the consequences of their actions. They could have chosen to put their immense resources into working for survival. Instead, in an act of utter insanity, they have spent many billions of dollars in defending short-term profit that will kill them all—along with all complex life on this planet.
Is there hope? According to the best current evidence from the IPCC, we still have a little time: “The evidence is clear: the time for action is now. We can halve emissions by 2030.”
To answer your question, let us consider the Chinese proverb: “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.” If we were an intelligent species, every human would combine in a supreme effort to strive for survival, NOW.
The next question is how.
Replacing one technology with another will not do it. This was the conclusion of the Second Report of the Club of Rome, which history has validated: technology can solve any problem, but will then make one or more other problems worse. The current push for renewable energy is a major example. Yes, I do have solar panels and a lithium-ion house battery and a heat pump water heater, because renewable energy buys us time… time to transform to a truly sustainable world.
In order to see how, and what kind of new society we need to build, let us examine why we are unravelling the web of life on our beautiful blue jewel. Why do we persist in striving for the endless growth that is Gaia’s cancer?
We can return to Professor Sasiwimon and Bhanthe Khanthawong for the explanation. More without limit is worse, not better. We need to examine the long-term consequences of our actions, live within our means, considering all the available information.
The current global culture rewards and encourages the worst in human nature, particularly greed and division. We are racing toward the waterfall of global extinction because a few people accumulate more wealth than they could possibly need, and then do everything possible to grab more. Despite the damage humanity has already caused to our global life support base, there would be no starvation if sufficiency thinking replaced greed.
But also, there is a second mechanism at play. All mammals, perhaps all life, have automatic processes to reduce catastrophically large populations. John B. Calhoun has demonstrated this in his work with rodents. He established naturalistic rodent colonies. Food and water were always plentiful, and yet every colony died out within a few generations. A regular sequence of changes occurred as population increased. First were “diseases of civilisation” like cancer, asthma, eczema, digestive ulcers, and high blood pressure with its complications of strokes and heart attacks. Not every rat suffered, but many did, their numbers rising with population pressure. Rat behaviour is largely learned, and at the next level many mothers failed to properly teach their young, leading to rat “behaviour disorders.” The final crunch was depression and aggression. Many stopped eating, stopped all activity and just died. Others formed gangs that fought to the death. Some became so aggressive they killed their own mates and offspring.
Look around at our world. Suicide is the leading cause of death among Australians aged 15 to 24. This is not specific to Australia—it is merely a convenient reference.
War is wealth, so due to greed. But also, all that hating and aggression shows humans to be Calhoun’s rats. Only, we have the ability to consider what’s beyond our immediate circumstances. Both greed and hate are choices. Even in the worst circumstances, some people have chosen otherwise. Out of many thousands of examples, I have selected one: a young man in Britain who came to the aid of a couple of Muslim women on a train. Their attacker killed him. His dying words were, “Tell everyone on this train I love them.” Note that “everyone” includes his murderer.
Suppose all humans were like this enlightened spirit. If you love everyone on this train as it circles around the sun, you will value the welfare of every passenger more than those Monopoly tokens of wealth, power, status, even your own health and safety. If all sentient beings on this planet were your family, you would do everything and more to work for survival. This is sanity.
It is also the message of all the great religions. We’ve been told, time and again. Do unto others… Love thine enemies… You will find such statements in places that may surprise you, like Shintoism, Confucius’s legacy, Wicca, the Torah (Old Testament), the Qur’an.
Lest you think this is some religious appeal, Immanuel Kant presented it in a non-religious form (universalizability). We conceptualise two worlds, contrasting some opposing pair of actions. For example, in one world everyone follows Sasiwimon’s dictum of “credit for karma beats credit in the bank,” while in the other world everyone opts for unmitigated self-interest. Which one inevitably leads to the sixth extinction event of Spaceship Earth?
Imagine a society in which children’s upbringing, the social pressures on adults, and the role models you see all reward and encourage the best in human nature. This implies compassion, empathy, generosity, cooperation. It would be socially unacceptable to act from hate, aggression, and greed, with the welfare of all having greater personal value to each of us than selfish considerations. Such a global culture could survive.
Questions of survival aside, wouldn’t an enlightened society where we live in loving, compassionate harmony be more pleasant? It is worth striving for even if it is too late, and we are doomed to plummet over that waterfall.
If the IPCC is right, we still have a chance to save a tomorrow for the youngsters of today. This is what I work for. I am nowhere near enlightenment. I don’t claim to be a prophet. But all I can do is the best I can do, and I am inviting you to join my team.
While every critter, every plant has its place in the ecosystem on planet earth, there is perhaps none more important than the bee. Bees and other pollinators, such as butterflies, bats and hummingbirds, are increasingly under threat from human activities…
Wibble 