Walking the Talk: Engaging the Public to Build a Sustainable World

Walking The Talk:

Engaging the Public to Build a Sustainable World

Bill Hulet

Published by Cloudwalking Press (Bill Hulet)

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014, Bill Hulet

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents:

The Example of Gandhi

A Brief Over View

The Crisis We Face

Faith

Duty

Right Wing Authoritarians

The Ethic of Self-Actualization

The Paradox at the Basis of Freedom

Practical Philosophy

The Community of the Dialogue

Learning In Your Bones

The Ivory Tower

Renunciation

Environmentally Based Ethics

Developing a Tradition

A Thought Experiment

Introduction:

The farthest back that I can remember being concerned about environmental issues was at age twelve or thirteen. I was at about the same time fascinated by politics. I subscribed to the parliamentary Hansard and wrote letters to local Members of Parliament about topical issues. I suppose that this was an odd thing to do, but my family---if not exactly supportive---didn't discourage these interests as long as they didn't interfere with work on the farm.

This interest in both the environment and politics stuck with me in later life. I ran for public office the first time as a Green Party candidate in 1988, and have been very involved in the growth of that institution from lunatic fringe to minor player in all levels of public life. This included being at the thick of developing a functional constitutional system for both the Green Party of Ontario (where I think I was quite successful) and the Green Party of Canada, (where alas I fear I was not so.) At the same time, I found myself very involved in a great many other projects that were political in nature, but not partisan. These included organizing watershed congresses, a slate of candidates for my local city Council, managing a local currency system, protests against MacDonalds, suing Walmart, and many other things besides. I think that all of these projects had at least some success and also a little failure. That is the nature of activism.

At the same time that I was involved in environmental politics, I was also involved in a process of spiritual struggle. I have read as many religious texts as I could get my hands on---Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, etc. I have studied with Jesuits, Catholic hermits, Zen Masters, Tibetan monks, Daoist priests and others. I also have put a lot of time on the mats in meditation, yoga and martial arts. I was initiated into a Daoist lineage and hold a Master's degree in philosophy. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that no religion and no academic path worked for me.

I freely admit that this is an odd and extremely eclectic background. But I do think that all these things put together have given me a somewhat unique vantage point to understand why the human race seems so bound and determined to not do anything substantial about climate change. Environmental degradation is more than just a concern for scientists and nature freaks, it is now an existential threat to human civilization. Why then, is society fiddling while Rome burns? I would argue that it is because at exactly the same moment that we face this danger, humanity has removed its strongest mechanisms for mass mobilization: faith and duty. These were the ways by which past societies used to rise up and face existential threats, but at this point in time they lie completely and utterly discredited. In their place we have been offered a thoroughly inadequate substitute: the individualistic credo of do your own thing.

The problem with faith and duty is that at their very core, they are not really much more than a philosophy of shut up and do what we tell you to do. When people were poorly educated it might be possible to pawn off decisions made by political elites as coming directly from God or being exclusively about the good of the country, but that dog just doesn't hunt anymore. People are all too aware of how they have been cynically used for generations. This is a good thing, but only if society can find something better to fill the void they leave behind, because existential crises like climate change do need some mechanism to organize humanity into a coherent response.

What I am trying to do with this book is to point out that there is a third way beyond faith and duty, which I call practical philosophy. The dividing line between the former and the latter is the foundation that they rest upon. Faith and duty are authoritarian and hierarchical in nature whereas practical philosophy is rational and communitarian. There is no God or supreme commander ordering people around in a practical philosophy, instead it offers a collective process of ascertaining closer and closer approximations of truth through the application of reason. This, I call the community of the dialogue. Through the institutions of practical philosophy and the community of the dialogue, I believe that leaders will be able to articulate a land ethic that they will be able to use to mobilize the population to take substantive action to protect our environmental heritage.

I've been involved with this activist thing long to enough to come to a couple conclusions that might bear sharing with readers. First of all, no effort is ever wasted. Everything you do is important, don't ask me why, but my experience is that in ways that you will never completely understand everything good you do will have some positive effect on the world around you. Secondly, the way to magnify the positive impacts of our efforts is to let go of them and let the world use them the way it sees fit. Trying to control your children just stifles their creativity. So here's a little more of my effort, which I am offering to the world. I hope that it does some good.

The Example of Gandhi

One of the defining moments of India's independence movement was a symbolic act when Congress Party members piled-up all their clothing that was made from imported English textiles and set it on fire. This was a public declaration that from then on they would wear nothing else but an Indian-made form of homespun, known as khadi. By doing so, these people were both supporting the economic independence of their country as well as providing much-needed work for the hard-pressed class of agricultural labourers. (Who wove the cloth on small looms during the rainy season.) The impact of this movement on the development of Indian nationalism cannot be under-estimated. As a token, to this day, the Indian flag is forbidden to be made of anything else but khadi.

Mohandas Gandhi, who was the leader of Indian independence, was a remarkably successful politician in large part because he understood the importance of symbols and symbolic acts as ways of creating consensus amongst and motivating large numbers of people. He did this by appealing to the values and emotions of the people supporting the independence movement. He understood that for most people the intellect is a lazy fellow who almost never gets off his couch and does the heavy lifting. Instead, the labour and risk of life is almost invariably undertaken because someone becomes emotionally engaged.

More to the point, Gandhi realized the importance of both the symbolic act and the lifestyle choice. People live their lives enmeshed in a symbolic milieu. All of us constantly look towards each other in search of cues that suggest that what it is that we are doing at any given time is right, proper, and fashionable. Are my clothes appropriate for my workplace? Is this joke appropriate for this meeting? Should I have dressed up just a little more for the wedding? Will my date fit in at this family occasion? Is my yard up to standards for my neighbourhood? Are my jeans cool enough for my crowd? Gandhi realized that while it is possible to change an individual person's opinion through reasoned argument (and he was a master at that), whole societies only change when the conventional understanding of what is right, appropriate and fashionable begins to shift. And the way to change those values is not done by argument, but by re-arranging the symbolic signposts that inform the community. And the way to do that is by creating new symbols to crowd-out the old ones and to weave them together into a whole new way of living.

Gandhi did this in several ways. First of all, he made a conscious choice to reject English-style clothing and adopted a traditional form of dress. He shaved his head, leaving only a scalp lock (shika), which identified him as an orthodox, if somewhat old-fashioned, Hindu. He also took to wearing a khadi loincloth (dhoti). The point was that up until that time most of the educated elite of Indian society (including Gandhi) took great pains to emulate the English in their clothing and much of their lifestyle. For a leader like the Mahatma to begin to dress and act like a lower-class, old-fashioned Indian was an act of great symbolic resonance. As such, he was trying to break down the barriers that existed between the small elite of cosmopolitan Indians who supported independence and the overwhelming majority of ordinary citizens who were disinterested. What this meant for the independence movement was that for the first time ordinary people began to see a nationalist leader that they could identify with as being one of them.

A second symbolic act that the Mahatma undertook was to create an Ashram, or spiritual commune, where people of all faiths and all castes lived together. Gandhi realized that the English had been able to govern their country by dividing the Indian people into different religious groups and playing them off against each other. As long as Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Jains, Parsis, etc, had more against each other than the British, they would never be able to throw out the imperialists. Gandhi attempted to move beyond these divisions by showing that people of all faiths could live together on his commune. More to the point, by publicly living with people from all religions, Gandhi dissipated any fears that non-Hindus may have had about supporting him.

Moreover, Gandhi knew that the majority Hindu faith was itself divided by caste oppression. As long as the huge numbers of untouchables (Dalits) were oppressed by the other Hindu castes, it would be very hard to accuse the British of doing anything worse than what Indians were already doing to themselves. Gandhi worked to short circuit this sense of untouchability by publicly displaying his unwillingness to take seriously any of the traditional cleanliness taboos (i.e. what specifically separated Dalits from higher castes.) In fact, at the first national conference of the Indian National Congress Party he ever attended he personally took on the responsibility of cleaning the latrines---a tremendously unclean task for a high-caste Hindu like himself.1 In addition, Gandhi's writings almost seem to revel in discussing toilets and latrines, and the poor state of Indian sanitation. Finally, on his salt march he had two porters walk behind him with a portable toilet. This is totally inexplicable to Western readers until one realizes that he was symbolically taking on the issue of untouchability by doing so.

One of the images that is most deeply associated with Gandhi is that of him sitting at a spinning wheel (charka). Not only are there many photos of him doing this, he used to spin at moments that would seem extremely inappropriate to Western audiences. For example, when he was the President of the Congress Party he once spent an entire 40 minute scheduled address in front of a huge number of supporters doing nothing else but silently spinning thread. Again, in the context of India at that time, this was a profoundly symbolic act. It was an act of clearly establishing the connection between the Congress Party leadership and the ordinary people of India. And of reinforcing Gandhi's policy of trying to support economic nationalism by cutting the nation's reliance in the mills of England. Finally, it was a way of suggesting his concern about the struggling poor (what he called the skeletons in his writings) who needed that thread to be able to work weaving khadi during the rainy seasons (that is, when no longer needed for agricultural labour.) Through the symbolic act of publicly spinning, Gandhi was literally making a thread that connected his political movement to the ordinary people of India and suggested a way for the country to cut itself from from the economic dependency that tied it to England. He was also making absolutely clear to everyone at the meeting how important he thought that the campaign for khadi was to the entire Indian independence movement.

I've written this book in an attempt to show how the same principles that Gandhi used to mobilize the people of India can be used to galvanize the public behind real change towards sustainability. Please note, however, that this is not about specific tactics such as non-violent resistance. Many books have already been written on that subject. This is something different, it is about how to see social change not through the lens of specific campaigns or individuals, but rather from the viewpoint of how ideas and emotions coalesce together and influence opinion.

A Brief Over View

It is not a book about Gandhi, either. I am just using him as an example of how these ideas could work and to acknowledge that he has inspired my thinking on this topic. But the ideas need to stand on their own feet instead of hitching a ride on his coat tails. As such, I am going to introduce very disparate ideas from the realms of psychology, philosophy and religion, and try to show both how they are interacting right now to create the world we currently inhabit and how people of good will could re-imagine and rearrange them to build a better world for us all.

When you read this book please remember that I intend all the elements to hang together. To the best of my ability, I am hoping that I can show how they do. But at times I suspect some readers will be scratching their heads trying to figure why I am going on such wild tangents. To that end, I am going to try and sketch out the broad frame of this book first. This will involve mentioning concepts that will probably be very foreign to you and not understood. Just stick this in the back of your head and it might help remind you about how this big argument fits together. As Noam Chomsky points out in his comments about the tyranny of conciseness, it is easy to make clearly understood brief statements when you are speaking in the language of cliché and conventional wisdom. Once you step outside of these realms, you find you have to start defining your terms and giving detailed examples, and that takes some time.

In the case of climate change the human race faces an existential crisis. Yet, society seems incapable of mobilizing itself in a significant way to deal with it. To a large degree, I believe that this has come about because one of the key ways in which human societies of the past have dealt with smaller issues has been through the mechanisms of faith and duty. These two methods of motivation and social organization have been discarded by the majority of citizens because through history they have been horribly misused. For the minority of modern people who are still motivated by faith and duty, research has shown they have allowed themselves to be controlled by a leadership with sociopathic tendencies. As a result, faith and duty are not only not part of the solution but also a very big part of the problem.

To fill the void left by their absence, our culture has invented the two related ideals of self-actualization and following your bliss. Unfortunately, these are incapable of motivating people for the sort of collective self-sacrifice needed to develop a sustainable society because ultimately they are individually-focused. Fortunately, there are other ways of motivating people. To understand these motivators, I introduce the ideas of practical philosophy and the community of the dialogue to show how people can find motivation through a collective process of public discussion and the development of a new ethical framework.

Finally, I suggest that there are practical campaigns that are possible to organize through the community of the dialogue that would allow individuals to build practical philosophies that would make building a sustainable society feasible.

The Crisis We Face

The human race currently faces an environmental catastrophe that has several elements that make it particularly dangerous. First of all, it is unprecedented in the dangers it presents to human civilization. Secondly, due to the mathematical laws that govern the way it progresses, the human race is almost predetermined to not understand and react until it is almost too