Lost Connections
I've been thinking about modern life and how as an unintentional result of modern convenience we lose our vital connections with the earth and its cycles.
I've been reading Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, which reveals
how thoroughly we've lost touch with the source of our food as a culture. We have little or no understanding of the places, processes, and full price of the sources of our food. Pollan particularly dwells upon the denial that is required for the current system of industrial processing of animals to be acceptable in our culture. He essential says that if we knew where our meat came from, we wouldn't eat it.
On another front, the political front, I've increasingly come across the dilemma that many local governments are facing. They are running out of revenues to perform the services their constituents demand, but there is increasing resistance to any type of tax increase. It seems we have lost ourselves in our own political rhetoric - we no longer connect the benefits we receive from federal, state, and local governments with the taxes we pay. The services we get are just there, just taken for granted background, while the taxes we pay have become in many minds theft, an unnatural taking by a corrupt few from the hapless many. We've lost the connection between the common wealth we create and build together and the dues that make that common wealth happen.
On a third front, I've been increasingly stymied by the concept of where all of our waste goes. We talk of throwing trash away, but there is no 'away' that I am aware of on this earth. What we mean by 'throw something away' is that someone else carts off our trash, someone else worries about where it goes and what kinds of problems it causes. If I've paid someone to haul my trash away, it's not my problem any longer. And this has resulted in a disposable society, where we buy new things rather than fix old, where it's easier to throw away a container than to clean a plate, where most people don't think twice about using something just once and then tossing it. We're truly disconnected with our physical impacts on the planet, oblivious to all the places and habitats downstream.
I don't have answers to any of these dilemmas. But it strikes me how all the virtues of the modern world - convenience, speed, mass production - serve to disconnect us from the consequences of our actions, and serve to make us less cognizant of our many interdependent relationships with the world around us. And it seems to me there is a relationship between our disconnection with the world around us and our dissatisfaction, our modern ennui. When we become primarily or exclusively consumers, optimizers, an audience, a target market, we lose much of what makes life gratifying and grounded. Ultimately, life is not a product and happiness is not found in maximizing comfort or convenience. Life is found in balance and in connection, and my suspicion is that it may be nearly impossible to enjoy life while plugged into the machine of the modern American economy.
I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to unplug. I strive for moderation in my consumption, but even so I'm overwhelmed with choices and even more overwhelmed with information. It seems to me part of the answer is to re-establish these connections - to know where our food comes from, to know what our taxes pay for and what our local government does, to know where our trash goes and take some accountability for these things. This would start to bring us around to where we can really see ourselves for what we are, to where we can really be in relationship to the world around us.
I've been reading Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, which reveals
how thoroughly we've lost touch with the source of our food as a culture. We have little or no understanding of the places, processes, and full price of the sources of our food. Pollan particularly dwells upon the denial that is required for the current system of industrial processing of animals to be acceptable in our culture. He essential says that if we knew where our meat came from, we wouldn't eat it.
On another front, the political front, I've increasingly come across the dilemma that many local governments are facing. They are running out of revenues to perform the services their constituents demand, but there is increasing resistance to any type of tax increase. It seems we have lost ourselves in our own political rhetoric - we no longer connect the benefits we receive from federal, state, and local governments with the taxes we pay. The services we get are just there, just taken for granted background, while the taxes we pay have become in many minds theft, an unnatural taking by a corrupt few from the hapless many. We've lost the connection between the common wealth we create and build together and the dues that make that common wealth happen.
On a third front, I've been increasingly stymied by the concept of where all of our waste goes. We talk of throwing trash away, but there is no 'away' that I am aware of on this earth. What we mean by 'throw something away' is that someone else carts off our trash, someone else worries about where it goes and what kinds of problems it causes. If I've paid someone to haul my trash away, it's not my problem any longer. And this has resulted in a disposable society, where we buy new things rather than fix old, where it's easier to throw away a container than to clean a plate, where most people don't think twice about using something just once and then tossing it. We're truly disconnected with our physical impacts on the planet, oblivious to all the places and habitats downstream.
I don't have answers to any of these dilemmas. But it strikes me how all the virtues of the modern world - convenience, speed, mass production - serve to disconnect us from the consequences of our actions, and serve to make us less cognizant of our many interdependent relationships with the world around us. And it seems to me there is a relationship between our disconnection with the world around us and our dissatisfaction, our modern ennui. When we become primarily or exclusively consumers, optimizers, an audience, a target market, we lose much of what makes life gratifying and grounded. Ultimately, life is not a product and happiness is not found in maximizing comfort or convenience. Life is found in balance and in connection, and my suspicion is that it may be nearly impossible to enjoy life while plugged into the machine of the modern American economy.
I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to unplug. I strive for moderation in my consumption, but even so I'm overwhelmed with choices and even more overwhelmed with information. It seems to me part of the answer is to re-establish these connections - to know where our food comes from, to know what our taxes pay for and what our local government does, to know where our trash goes and take some accountability for these things. This would start to bring us around to where we can really see ourselves for what we are, to where we can really be in relationship to the world around us.
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