post-consumerism

my organization has a close connection with a local restaurant called the seva cafe. it’s an experiment in a different way of thinking about business. it’s reality that a business needs to co-exist with certain economic conditions; it’s not reality that a business needs to be bound by them.

seva cafe gives rise to an inspiring challenge: what other business models can be redesigned to encourage love for all over profit for few?

this short video explains more about the seva cafe concept. several of the seva cafe employees - servers, chefs, kitchen staff - are star teammates on our local ultimate team.

“You might as well ask if it’s natural to do up one’s trousers with zippers,” said the Controller sarcastically. “You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that’s philosophy. People believe in God because they’ve been conditioned to.”

-the controller, mustapha mond. from aldous huxley’s brave new world

i read a recent essay called ‘lies we tell kids‘ that astutely pointed out that there is nothing remarkable about our universal acceptance of telling lies. we may not like it, but we all know it, which is why any childish and otherwise curious probe into sex/drugs/religion/politics/anthropological differences is best handled with a curt “ask your parents”. parents are the resource to handle tough or uncomfortable questions, which means that parents are like the wikipedia for children, which must mean that wikipedia is so popular either because there are so many parents or so many children.

the problem with both parents and wikipedia is that most lies are so pervasive that they become buried in otherwise useless information and accordingly impossible to find. society tries to address this issue by constructing that uncomfortable mid-teens scenario between dad and jonny when we learn that little jonny has actually been watching hard core porn for 5 years and that dad is horrendously out of step with current slang. and so, with a brief few words on love, responsibility, drug abuse, and birth control, dad slaps jonny on the shoulder, discretely ignores the odd-coloured, misshaped sock half hidden under the bed, and exits the room, having finally off-loaded his final parental responsibility. jonny is now a man.

if only it were so simple. as children grow up, they become liars themselves, and the resulting self-analysis and guilt allows for an examination of what is and isn’t a lie. here is an example list that i recently created:

lies

history

baseball records

4 out of 5 dentists recommend trident

tom cruise is a good actor

being successful requires formal education

you can do anything if you set your mind to it

rich people don’t need god

carbs are bad for you

not lies

climate change

while vibrant debate could help explain the reasons behind the need to tell these lies, it seems obvious that lying is a widespread social pathos. in this line of thinking, that condescending sneer “you can’t change the world” seems to prove that awareness of these lies is so universal that even talking about their existence has become banal.

that’s another lie:

lies

it’s ok to knowingly accept a lie because everyone else does

not lies

it’s not.

lying is so widespread that sometimes lies are told by the best of people, like our parents, doctors, and superman. medical professionals, for example, lie when they say “saving lives”, because what they really mean is “postponing death”, which are two vastly different things when you think about it. but because we’re a society that is intensely focused on the short term, as neatly summarized in a 30-minute episode (or, at best, an 8 week series), we actively reduce the individual to an abstraction: “heroic man heroically saves baby from near collision speeding bus” is an easier story to digest when compared to “depressive, lazy, moderately abusive and slightly overweight man who doesn’t go to church, calls his mother only annually, and occasionally entertains himself by furtively masturbating in the change room at jc penney heroically saves a baby who will go on to post pictures of himself passed out drunk at high school parties on facebook until his late 40s.” details are purposefully kept outside the lines lest they interfere with what would otherwise be a simple moral judgement. thus we learn omitting details is tantamount to lying:

lies

not telling

not lies

the whole story

that moral judgements are so complex is a real, practical concern. take a simplified look at two complex global issues: climate change and global poverty. alleviating poverty though improving the economic circumstances of the poor (using current technologies) will increase the likelihood of climate change, which - due to the irony of geography - will have its greatest effects in the countries that are currently the most poor. so are we saving lives or just postponing death? this is a question worth thinking about. unless you are jeff sachs, your issues are probably less global, but equally complex.

and is death even worth postponing, both in the figurative and the literal sense? while we might vigorously debate the humanity of trying to save a given societies, most of us would very viscerally agree that, yes, individual death postponement is one of the qualities that makes us human, and that any society that doesn’t overtly protect its citizens - especially the weakest ones - is inhuman, if not downright evil, lending some clarity to the question posed at the beginning of this sentence. but most of us would also probably agree that universal immortality is not in the best interest of the whole: we’d probably run out of space, for one, and we’d also run out of old people to get bored of and marginalize. this means there is some age at which society believes it’s appropriate to die, which could probably be established somewhere between 70 and 90 for most people besides angst-ridden teenagers and bryan adams, who concur that there is a direct path from 18 to dying. this is something else worth thinking about, but generally held from in polite conversation.

lies

bryan adams is out of touch with today’s angst-ridden teenagers

not lies

bryan adams is not a topic for polite conversation

just because everyone shares the same opinion doesn’t mean that it’s in the best interest of either the group or even the individual. saving a life is good, unless the saved life goes on to become a murderous dictator, in which case, it was bad. saving lots of lives is good, but saving so many lives that the world becomes horribly overcrowded is bad. empowering women is good, but empowering women by creating a microfinance funded group that enables them to operate a women-run factory that takes them away from time spent with family, meaning their children grow up with a sociopathic deficiency for love is bad. this applies to life, but also to liberty and the pursuit of happine$$.

you get the picture, but if you don’t, i’ll make it clearer:

lies

moral judgements are easy

no one can predict the future. because we can never understand the consequences of our actions we can never decide in advance whether an action will be good or bad. in fact, we can’t even decide if past actions were good or bad without being given sufficient time to consider its impact. even establishing an appropriate time scale is difficult, considering that the goodness and badness of people like muhammed and christ are still variously debated hundreds of years after their deaths (or whatever). in fact, one prominent author claims that the human race made its worst mistake with the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, which means that the christ/muhammed argument might still have some legs yet. that leads to this inexorable and delightfully unpalatable conclusion:

lies

everything

not lies

nothing

if you’re waiting impatiently for me to get to the point, that’s exactly my point. there is no point and i doubt that there can ever be a point; people far more self-involved than me have dedicated a lot of philosopher-angst into these questions for centuries, in most cases without bryan adams. but in case there can be a point, it’s going to take a lot more external debate and internal soul searching to get to. our society seems so focused on fast forwarding past the reasons behind the moral judgement to get to the juicy part, but my hunch is that when we get to the eventual conclusion, it will be less fun than just beginning the process of fucking self analysis already. it seems to me that there is a lot more merit in carefully considering why we do, what we should do, and who we are when we do than just doing what we always do.

in order to make better moral judgements, we need to stop lying about everything. and if everyone isn’t going to stop lying, we need to look harder, with our hearts, minds, and souls. looking hard isn’t fun, but neither is being lied to.

lies

you can think too much

you waste your time trying to understand

you can never be better than you are right now

not lies

climate change

a story about a young texas family who decided to stop acquiring stuff:

Chasing a utopian vision of a self-sustaining life on the land as partisans of a movement some call voluntary simplicity, they are donating virtually all their possessions to charity and hitting the road at the end of May.

…

 Their rings — his gold band and her one-carat diamond — may be “red-paper-clipped,” Mrs. Harris said: bartered for something better that could in turn be bartered for something better still, as in the Internet celebrity Kyle MacDonald’s tale of a paper clip that ultimately produced a house.

“They don’t fit us anymore,” Mr. Harris said. Sure enough, his band was loose on his finger, but that was not what he meant. “They don’t fit our lifestyle,” he explained.

it’s easy to underestimate how subversive an act it is to voluntarily opt-out of consumption.  the mainstream left and right both agree on the value of economic growth, differing only on implementation.  but what if they held a sale and no one came?

gandhi helped bring an end to the most powerful empire the world has ever known by spinning khadi (thread).  martin luther king helped bring success to the civil rights movement through songs and storytelling.  massive change comes out of the smallest actions.

was this what you think gandhi meant when he said “almost everything you do will seem insignficant, but it is very important that you do it?”

i highly recommend jared diamond’s work: i find his perspective thought-provoking and engaging.  guns, germs and steel is a classic.

in today’s nyt, he writes about the growth of consumption in china and india.

A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.

ok, so why is that a big deal?

 People in the third world are aware of this difference in per capita consumption, although most of them couldn’t specify that it’s by a factor of 32. When they believe their chances of catching up to be hopeless, they sometimes get frustrated and angry, and some become terrorists, or tolerate or support terrorists. Since Sept. 11, 2001, it has become clear that the oceans that once protected the United States no longer do so. There will be more terrorist attacks against us and Europe, and perhaps against Japan and Australia, as long as that factorial difference of 32 in consumption rates persists.

he’s leaping a bit here. it’s hard to argue for a causal relationship between consumption and terrorism.  it also seems groundless to believe that equalizing the consumption differences between the West and the developing world will totally alleviate the problem.  this specious link takes away substantially from his argument.  he should focus on facts, not on scare tactics (although perhaps it’s a sad commentary on the state of the u.s. that every political issue needs to be related back to the war on terror).

this is the real crux of the problem:

Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies — for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy — they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people.

and the critical idea that needs to be sold to those of us who crowded the malls on boxing day:

The only approach that China and other developing countries will accept is to aim to make consumption rates and living standards more equal around the world. But the world doesn’t have enough resources to allow for raising China’s consumption rates, let alone those of the rest of the world, to our levels. Does this mean we’re headed for disaster?

No, we could have a stable outcome in which all countries converge on consumption rates considerably below the current highest levels. Americans might object: there is no way we would sacrifice our living standards for the benefit of people in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.

the thing i’ve always liked about diamond is how detached he seems: he seems to say “i’m not passing judgement, i’m telling it like it is.”  he draws his credibility from this voice.

i’ve been reading cradle-to-cradle, a book about reinventing the way we think about waste as it relates to industrial design, architecture, etc.  this is a quickly growing area of research: interesting, similar topics are biomimicry, natural capitalism, natural step, etc.   diamond touches on the key part of the cradle-to-cradle argument, which he refers to as his reason for cautious optimism:

Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Ask yourself whether Americans’ wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures.

while it may be overly idealistic, this is a much easier argument to sell to Western/American consumers.  the question has been reframed: instead of saying consume less, he’s saying consume smarter, and pressure governments and corporations to reduce the excess waste implicit in the way we approach the above problems.  in the u.s., one oft cited example is health care - check out the graph below.  it’s a great perspective to bring to your own life: don’t stop trying to be happy, even if that’s tied to consumption, but be smarter about the things that you consume, and be demanding and vocal about your choices.  idealism 101?

a nyt article quoting the pope’s appeal for peace on christmas and his comments on materialism:

In that midnight sermon, he said the fact that Jesus was born in a manger because there was no room for Mary and Joseph at the inn in Bethlehem had modern parallels.

“In some way, mankind is awaiting God, waiting for him to draw near. But when the moment comes, there is no room for him,” he said.

“Man is so preoccupied with himself, he has such urgent need of all the space and all the time for his own things, that nothing remains for others — for his neighbor, for the poor, for God. And the richer men become, the more they fill up all the space by themselves. And the less room there is for others.”

In the run-up to Christmas, the Pope several times urged Catholics to rediscover its religious significance, lamenting that the holiday had been dominated by materialism.