When the world ends, we can begin to speak about hope. The world as we know it is ending…at least I think it is. Perhaps I should say at least I fear it is and I also hope it is.
I like the world as we know it. I have a comfortable position in it. I earn enough so that I have health insurance, I can send my children to school, I can buy enough good food to keep me healthy, I can maintain a nice house, I have a car that works well, my children have what they want and a lot of what they need, I have leisure time, and I can buy stuff that I like. I can live this way because I belong to the class that benefits from civilization as we know it. Thus, I am worried about the end of the world as we know it. I just actually got where I am. I am an upwardly mobile professor in a school that pays people like me well enough. I can purchase luxuries that make my life comfortable and make me feel pampered. And so, thinking that this world will end and that we will have to give up most of the luxuries that I have just began to be able to afford makes me feel sad. But more than that, thinking about what is to come and how we will have to face it also scares me. How will we deal with the scarcity of food when global warming hits hardest, petroleum runs out, water becomes difficult to come by and topsoil is depleted? What adjustments will we make when we can’t rely on mass production? How will life be when we can’t buy new toys and gadgets and we can’t rely on the constant novelty of consumer products to make us feel that existence is interesting and leading somewhere?
Certainly, compared to many people of my class and capacities, I don’t spend that much. What I earn is a mere pittance compared to what I could earn if I worked in a corporation. However, I began my adult life as a teacher with teacher’s aspirations and with most teachers’ modest dreams. So now that I earn as much as an associate professor who is occasionally able to engage multilateral organizations for modest projects with decent fees, I feel on the top of the world. I don’t have a really nice car. The one I love is already 20 years old. My bikes have always been second hand and never exactly fit my frame because I can’t really spend too much on them. My family’s computers are always the cheapest, most decent things that work and never cost more than Php 24,000. These gadgets are also always paid for in monthly installments. My books are mostly second hand or bought with grants. I have two pairs of formal pants that are at least 10 years old, my work shirts don’t usually cost more than Php 500, and my family doesn’t usually go on expensive vacations, and we rarely eat out in expensive restaurants. A Php 500 a plate place is really swanky for us and we haven’t left the country together at all. In fact, only one of us goes abroad for vacations. So, although I benefit from this world that we know, I don’t really need that much from it and we are even trying to lessen our impact on it.
In the last year, my family, with the leadership of my wife, has reduced our consumption of beef because it takes so much water, so much land, so much grain, so much fuel to raise cows. On top of that cows’ burps and farts significantly contribute to global warming. (Look it up!) We use organic shampoo and soaps because these are gentler on our water and the making of the products we buy support local communities. We compost in our home to cut down on solid waste and we grow vegetables in our tiny yard just because it seems like the right thing to do. We do these things because we like to cut down on our impact on the world. We really don’t want the earth or others to pay for the lives we live. So as much as we can, we try to support our local community, to put our savings into a small farming enterprise to help in food production, increase employment (for two people sad to say), and try to find betters ways of raising livestock. But it’s a real struggle because the world as we know it does not support lifestyles that consciously aim to serve nature and our neighbors or at least to mitigate our effects on it.
Although we have decided to live with a somewhat lighter carbon, water, and whatever you call the footprint that is left on your neighbor’s back because of your high cost lifestyle, I find myself still walking heavily on the earth. I use up perhaps enough electricity to power three households in Daang Tubo (and that despite living in an airconless home). I spend on entertainment a year as much as a family of five would for food in Esperanza, Agusan del Sur. We spend enough on food a year to house four urban poor families in Payatas. How do we earn this money? Thankfully without having to exploit anyone directly: my wife lawyers for the Supreme Court and I teach and do poverty research. But in the end, despite our desire to serve others with out work, live without exploiting those we serve, and not to destroy nature we are moved by our world to do so. How? My salary is probably sustained by people who may have earned their profits through the contractualization of labor, through the under pricing of produce of small farmers, or the overpricing of farm inputs. The affordable food on my table is probably produced in farms where pigs and chickens are bred in cruel conditions and seasonal workers are paid non-livable wages. If I wish to engage in leisure activities, it is easiest to spend time in a mall buying items that will end up as clutter in our home and to waste it on unfulfilling activities. It’s cheaper to eat junk than fresh and healthy food. It’s cheaper and easier to watch insightless films than to watch well-thought out, well produced theatre.
Our societies are structured in such a way that mass produced junk is made more accessible and more desirable than things that are healthy and perhaps more suited to human flourishing. Not only that, the way our societies are structured, we are taught to desire what is more destructive and more violent to the earth and fellow human beings than things that have less impact and are more creative. For instance, I could be easily drawn to obsessing over a computer game that will give me a headache and perhaps make me ill-tempered than to do some other thing more suited to me and can, on the whole, give me a greater sense of well-being: in my case working on my garden, reading a book, or writing. Eating junk that I don’t need to eat because I don’t really need to eat but can is easier than just being content with the nutrition I am able to ingest fruitfully. Making huge amounts of profit without having produced anything of lasting value is easier than long term investments in activities that will produce better food, sustainable development, or opportunities for human creativity. The world as we know it exists to amuse us, to feed into our need for accumulation, to stimulate our consumption, and to keep us busy with empty activities that leave us bored and restless. At the same time, it makes it difficult to live in a just way, to consume in moderation, and to tread lightly on the earth.
You might say, well then, isn’t that all about choices? Stop blaming society for the choices that we make. Just choose otherwise. However, more often than not, the choices for a better life are taken away from us. A destructive game of mass consumption and accumulation has been set up as the paradigm of modern economies and civilizations such that the default mode for living in the more “civilized” areas of our world means buying into mass farming, encouraging polluting processes of manufacturing, and being involved in enterprises that tend to exploit the exploitable. It’s not so easy to choose otherwise unless you choose to live in the margins of our civilization. Many people are doing that—most not out of choice. But that isn’t the answer because the world as we know it, the civilization that dominates our planet, has caused global warming, the scarcity of food, pollution, the destruction of nature, and it is just not sustainable for most of us, or even a significant minority of us, to live this way. But then, the world as we know it is ending. History is presenting us today or will be presenting us with a chance to rethink and rebuild our civilizations according to other values, other ways of being.
And so, scary as it seems, it’s the end of the world as we know it, and I’m sad and scared but it should be fine. After all, just as I am beginning to cash in on a life of hard work and saving, I realize that even with my modest dreams I am destroying my world and causing the hardship of others who are with me now and to come. And this is because the world as we know it, life as we live it, is structured in such a way that we are violent to our world, to each other and to our selves. And so it has to end—just when I got to the top of it. However, I can say that despite the cataclysmic shocks that will signal the need to transition to a better life, I am glad for it.
I like the world as we know it. I have a comfortable position in it. I earn enough so that I have health insurance, I can send my children to school, I can buy enough good food to keep me healthy, I can maintain a nice house, I have a car that works well, my children have what they want and a lot of what they need, I have leisure time, and I can buy stuff that I like. I can live this way because I belong to the class that benefits from civilization as we know it. Thus, I am worried about the end of the world as we know it. I just actually got where I am. I am an upwardly mobile professor in a school that pays people like me well enough. I can purchase luxuries that make my life comfortable and make me feel pampered. And so, thinking that this world will end and that we will have to give up most of the luxuries that I have just began to be able to afford makes me feel sad. But more than that, thinking about what is to come and how we will have to face it also scares me. How will we deal with the scarcity of food when global warming hits hardest, petroleum runs out, water becomes difficult to come by and topsoil is depleted? What adjustments will we make when we can’t rely on mass production? How will life be when we can’t buy new toys and gadgets and we can’t rely on the constant novelty of consumer products to make us feel that existence is interesting and leading somewhere?
Certainly, compared to many people of my class and capacities, I don’t spend that much. What I earn is a mere pittance compared to what I could earn if I worked in a corporation. However, I began my adult life as a teacher with teacher’s aspirations and with most teachers’ modest dreams. So now that I earn as much as an associate professor who is occasionally able to engage multilateral organizations for modest projects with decent fees, I feel on the top of the world. I don’t have a really nice car. The one I love is already 20 years old. My bikes have always been second hand and never exactly fit my frame because I can’t really spend too much on them. My family’s computers are always the cheapest, most decent things that work and never cost more than Php 24,000. These gadgets are also always paid for in monthly installments. My books are mostly second hand or bought with grants. I have two pairs of formal pants that are at least 10 years old, my work shirts don’t usually cost more than Php 500, and my family doesn’t usually go on expensive vacations, and we rarely eat out in expensive restaurants. A Php 500 a plate place is really swanky for us and we haven’t left the country together at all. In fact, only one of us goes abroad for vacations. So, although I benefit from this world that we know, I don’t really need that much from it and we are even trying to lessen our impact on it.
In the last year, my family, with the leadership of my wife, has reduced our consumption of beef because it takes so much water, so much land, so much grain, so much fuel to raise cows. On top of that cows’ burps and farts significantly contribute to global warming. (Look it up!) We use organic shampoo and soaps because these are gentler on our water and the making of the products we buy support local communities. We compost in our home to cut down on solid waste and we grow vegetables in our tiny yard just because it seems like the right thing to do. We do these things because we like to cut down on our impact on the world. We really don’t want the earth or others to pay for the lives we live. So as much as we can, we try to support our local community, to put our savings into a small farming enterprise to help in food production, increase employment (for two people sad to say), and try to find betters ways of raising livestock. But it’s a real struggle because the world as we know it does not support lifestyles that consciously aim to serve nature and our neighbors or at least to mitigate our effects on it.
Although we have decided to live with a somewhat lighter carbon, water, and whatever you call the footprint that is left on your neighbor’s back because of your high cost lifestyle, I find myself still walking heavily on the earth. I use up perhaps enough electricity to power three households in Daang Tubo (and that despite living in an airconless home). I spend on entertainment a year as much as a family of five would for food in Esperanza, Agusan del Sur. We spend enough on food a year to house four urban poor families in Payatas. How do we earn this money? Thankfully without having to exploit anyone directly: my wife lawyers for the Supreme Court and I teach and do poverty research. But in the end, despite our desire to serve others with out work, live without exploiting those we serve, and not to destroy nature we are moved by our world to do so. How? My salary is probably sustained by people who may have earned their profits through the contractualization of labor, through the under pricing of produce of small farmers, or the overpricing of farm inputs. The affordable food on my table is probably produced in farms where pigs and chickens are bred in cruel conditions and seasonal workers are paid non-livable wages. If I wish to engage in leisure activities, it is easiest to spend time in a mall buying items that will end up as clutter in our home and to waste it on unfulfilling activities. It’s cheaper to eat junk than fresh and healthy food. It’s cheaper and easier to watch insightless films than to watch well-thought out, well produced theatre.
Our societies are structured in such a way that mass produced junk is made more accessible and more desirable than things that are healthy and perhaps more suited to human flourishing. Not only that, the way our societies are structured, we are taught to desire what is more destructive and more violent to the earth and fellow human beings than things that have less impact and are more creative. For instance, I could be easily drawn to obsessing over a computer game that will give me a headache and perhaps make me ill-tempered than to do some other thing more suited to me and can, on the whole, give me a greater sense of well-being: in my case working on my garden, reading a book, or writing. Eating junk that I don’t need to eat because I don’t really need to eat but can is easier than just being content with the nutrition I am able to ingest fruitfully. Making huge amounts of profit without having produced anything of lasting value is easier than long term investments in activities that will produce better food, sustainable development, or opportunities for human creativity. The world as we know it exists to amuse us, to feed into our need for accumulation, to stimulate our consumption, and to keep us busy with empty activities that leave us bored and restless. At the same time, it makes it difficult to live in a just way, to consume in moderation, and to tread lightly on the earth.
You might say, well then, isn’t that all about choices? Stop blaming society for the choices that we make. Just choose otherwise. However, more often than not, the choices for a better life are taken away from us. A destructive game of mass consumption and accumulation has been set up as the paradigm of modern economies and civilizations such that the default mode for living in the more “civilized” areas of our world means buying into mass farming, encouraging polluting processes of manufacturing, and being involved in enterprises that tend to exploit the exploitable. It’s not so easy to choose otherwise unless you choose to live in the margins of our civilization. Many people are doing that—most not out of choice. But that isn’t the answer because the world as we know it, the civilization that dominates our planet, has caused global warming, the scarcity of food, pollution, the destruction of nature, and it is just not sustainable for most of us, or even a significant minority of us, to live this way. But then, the world as we know it is ending. History is presenting us today or will be presenting us with a chance to rethink and rebuild our civilizations according to other values, other ways of being.
And so, scary as it seems, it’s the end of the world as we know it, and I’m sad and scared but it should be fine. After all, just as I am beginning to cash in on a life of hard work and saving, I realize that even with my modest dreams I am destroying my world and causing the hardship of others who are with me now and to come. And this is because the world as we know it, life as we live it, is structured in such a way that we are violent to our world, to each other and to our selves. And so it has to end—just when I got to the top of it. However, I can say that despite the cataclysmic shocks that will signal the need to transition to a better life, I am glad for it.
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I got here through a link posted by Mariel Villanueva on Facebook. You have put my thoughts into words. Thank you for writing this.
ReplyDeleteI like this essay for the 'I' in it.
ReplyDeleteJames Lovelock begins his book, The Revenge of Gaia, contemplating why humans pee: "Perhaps we pee for altruistic reasons. If we and other animals did not pass urine some of the vegetable life of the Earth might be starved of nitrogen."
I find it helpful to think of humans as a potentially beneficial part of the system, if we are able to make peace with that role and perspective. Sometimes I pause when I see the terms 'low impact' as the language seems to suggest that we are some abhorrence and if we can get through this existence without much of a fuss it would be so much better for the earth as a whole :). Now while this may be true, it does little for my self-esteem. I prefer to take the view that we are here for a reason that does make sense to the system. Perhaps we are at a cusp of our evolution, or as you say, the end of the world as we know it. The dawning of a new one will take all that is truly human: blessed work, will, words and imagination.