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Modernity, complicity, and the unbearable bullshitness of being (II)

It was a Thursday last week when I read about the exhibition – Shifting Landscapes – on the South Bank in London featuring an immersive installation titled Breathing with the Forest (pictured above), and figured I needed to be there. It only had three days left to run. There were no commitments stopping me making a round trip to the city on the Saturday, and I was lucky enough to get a ticket online, which was free. I managed to book a discounted train ticket.

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Modernity, complicity, and the unbearable bullshitness of being (I)

Something about the frozen, pained expression on Chandler Bing’s face whenever he sensed the joke was on him or that he’d made a massive boo-boo — just before he restored the playful vibe with a self-deflating quip — captures the off-centre mood I’ve been in for the past few weeks. It’s partly personal and partly societal. I feel like a minor moving part in a huge, accelerating machine that’s veering off-track and beginning to tilt, and while my inner gyroscope is trying to right things it’s clear there’s nothing to be done.

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Seventh Generation vs. (sigh) ‘Longtermism’

It is said that among peoples of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederation, it was customary to have a spokesperson for future generations present for the deliberation of important decisions; someone to embody the concerns of descendants seven generations hence, at the far horizon of physical contact. (A youngster in the middle of a chain of seven generations could conceivably hold the hand of a great-great grandparent and then, in old age, the hand of a great-great grandchild.) That presence would provide emotional perspective, bringing the wisdom of hindsight perhaps, to a current challenge.

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Only connect…

Progress throws up some startling images, and for my money this is one of them. It’s a 26-storey pig farm and slaughterhouse in Hubei, China. In the supply-and-demand scheme of things it’s probably a very reasonable development. It makes good use of technological and engineering capacity, provides for cost-efficient protein production, and could be said to have an environmentally friendly footprint compared with more land-intensive ways of growing pork. But something jars, doesn’t it? Like a sourness in the viscera. Something’s not right, and it feels like a sign. A sign, I suggest, of catastrophic disconnection.

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Down at the dell

A luminous void for sky, not quite white and not quite grey. Wind, and a spattering of rain. A shiny gloss on the leaves, long yearned for. And a picture-perfect setting, down here, where the trail bottoms out.

Here is where the stream emerges briefly from a tangle and pauses alongside a great, gnarly, dragon-headed log, before wandering off into further tangles. The water is still, clear and shallow; the mud-bank reddish-brown.

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Ingredient X

I

I’ve been wondering for a while about Ingredient X. As in, the part of us, this human animal, that marks us out from the others.

You know all those “humans are the only species to…” (use language / make war / get high / mourn our dead / have the capacity to blow ourselves up / know God / laugh-cry-blush etc.) pronouncements? Most have been overtaken by zoological findings but new ones are continually being minted (…explore space / enjoy extreme sports / watch Bridgerton etc. etc.) What they have in common is an (insecure?) assumption that something very special separates us from the rest of creation.

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A totally absurd, utterly impractical wish-list for 2022

#1 Scrap nukes

Why? Ballistic-missile-delivered nuclear warheads are the biggest, fastest, meanest weapons ever, and today there are thousands of them locked in each other’s crosshairs all around the globe. It wouldn’t take much – an unforeseen system failure, a geopolitical miscalculation, a rush of blood to the head of some incompetent nationalist military-political leader – for all hell to be let loose.

Why not? They keep the peace, don’t they? Ukraine relinquished its USSR-legacy nuclear weapons in 1994, under pressure from all sides, and look what it’s facing now. Taiwan was forced to terminate its own nuclear programme in the 1980s and might be in a more robust position today if it hadn’t. Honestly, which world-bestriding military power in 2022 would feel more secure without its nuclear arsenal?

Yeah, but… weapons are made to be used, and a horrible logic dictates that The Bomb will once again be brought into play, humans being what they are when they have too much power at their disposal. Also, manmade systems designed to prevent accidental launch are, like everything else in the universe, subject to Murphy’s Law. Whether triggered deliberately or not, the planet as we know it simply won’t survive an escalating outbreak of nuclear attack and counterattack.

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Who says there’s no such thing as free will?

Who says there’s no such thing as free will? Quite a few people, it turns out. Philosophers, scientists and best-selling public intellectuals, some with real sway.

“This sort of free will [such as choosing between an apple or a banana from the fruit bowl] is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics” says an evolutionary biologist quoted in this considered article by Oliver Burkeman.

The article offers a scan of the field and comes down in favour of a more nuanced understanding of what free will entails. And it got me wondering, because underlying assumptions about what we are and are not capable of deciding and doing must have a big bearing on how we – as individuals and as a global community – relate and respond to cascading environmental breakdown. If we truly live in a clockwork universe, absent free will, then why sweat it?

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