Being (Fully) Human
I had been looking for stories that made me feel something other than just plain angry… not so easy these days. And then I had an idea.
The result was my audioblog, ecoreflections360, the text of which appears below, and which provides extended commentary on those stories that I found most meaningful and interesting and uplifting amongst those which I have tweeted during the previous week.
It’s really, really difficult to know how to begin, how to pick out the best stories in the news, especially when we are so bombarded with information on a daily basis. I think the journalist in me always wants to pick the biggest story or the brightest angle, to be seen to be staying on top of the news.
But the human being in me tends to look for those stories that connect either literally or symbolically with what’s going on in my own world in my own inner life. And because of that I was immensely grateful for an essay [Struggling to be ‘Fully Alive’] by Robert Jensen at the University of Texas at Austin, which was trying to get to the bottom of the feelings that accompany our intellectual understanding that we live in a world in collapse.
It was a fascinating collection of responses to his request that people write to him and tell him what they are feeling. Not just what they think, not just the facts about how enormous the national debt is, or much CO2 is in the atmosphere, or how much oil is spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from that giant hole in the earth, but what they feel when confronted with these things. And it renewed my faith in humanity that we are not, as we are sometimes portrayed, a race of desensitised individuals. I mean there’s always going to be someone who tells you that we need to be rational – whatever that is – that a feeling response to events is not practical, and there will always be people who are so out of touch with their own feeling response that they actively resent yours.
But what I was reading here were the sensitive thoughtful, complex responses to the grief that so many of us feel as we watch the world basically go down the toilet: hopelessness, sadness, a sense of amusement at the absurdity of it all, pressure, rage, guilt, a sense of being trapped and an enormous amount of anger at what Jensen called the ‘elites’; the politicians the multinationals and the media propagandists who promote, continue to promote, in spite of all the evidence, the same arrogant and greedy and ethically and morally deficient behaviour which is hastening this collapse.
And although there has been a lot in the press lately about how environmentalists need to stop being doom mongers, how we need to be more positive, more upbeat I tend to believe that we could be more effective if we could not just learn to communicate more effectively the urgency of our situation, but also help people embrace the emotional reality of it, to have faith that strong emotions don’t need to be paralysing. That they can be inspiring and motivating.
In fact, the more we deny or repress essential parts of ourselves the more havoc those parts can cause. The natural flow of human life is towards self expression and if the self can’t for whatever reason express itself positively it will express itself in destruction and chaos and envy and prejudice.
This was summed up better than I could have done it in an essay, a 2002 essay, by Thomas Moore posted on the Planet Waves website – a little more than a week ago. This wasn’t an essay about the environment – far from it. It was called The Temple of the Body: Sex in an Anti-erotic Age. And if that sounds provocative well it was, in part. It was certainly about what happens when we deny the instincts of the body, when make some sort of sterile purity and perfection in ourselves and those around us the main goal. But in a larger sense it was also about the felt experience, about what happens when we hack off bits of our common humanity, our spirituality, our deepest desires and the trouble that that causes; the havoc that a population of fragmented, partial people can cause. In the final paragraph Moore says:
“Every day we could choose to be intimate rather than distant, bodily rather than mental, acting thoughtfully from desire instead of from discipline, seeking deep pleasures rather than superficial entertainments, getting in touch with the world rather than analyzing it at a distance, making a culture that gives us pleasure rather than one that merely works, allowing plenty of room in our own and others’ lives for the eccentricities of sexual desire, and generally taking the role of lovers rather than doers and judges”
Well, amen to that.
The more I look at this issue the more I think that we humans have taken a rather strange path in our development. You know we are always striving for more, trying to push past our boundaries and somewhere along the line that message, that natural impulse has become distorted.
The self has an infinite, almost heroic capacity to give more, even when we think we are empty. But instead of pushing past our own personal boundaries to become smarter, more involved, more sensitive, more honest and more loving, we turn our attention outward, and exploit the finite resources of the earth instead.
And look at the damage that it’s done.
What is more creating a broken world to reflect our broken selves actually plays into the hands of those ‘elites’ that Robert Jensen was talking about, because when we are so broken, we are so much easier to lie to, so much easier to manipulate. I know that sounds like a challenging thing to say word but can there be any doubt that this is what we have allowed ourselves to become?
The evidence isn’t much fun at the moment, it’s scary and it’s complex, overwhelming really, and it’s the stuff I struggle with every day. You probably struggle with this stuff too.
The facts of our lives are challenging. But the answer, I think, is to strive, not to create the next technofix, but to become our whole selves again, to be fully human with all that that entails. I’m thinking now of Duane Elgin author of Voluntary Simplicity and his belief that simplifying our outer lives, living more lightly on the earth, has a knock on effect of creating much more space for a complex and fulfilling inner life.
© Pat Thomas 2010. No reproduction without the author’s permission.
