This Is Not Funny
Or: Something Sad Which We Might Be Rather Embarrassed About Later
I am 26 years old and I might have a problem with not taking my life very seriously. My generation might have the same problem. It seems to me that most us simply do as we wish. I think this constitutes a grave diagnoses, one that won't just embarrass us in front of our grandchildren but will ruin our health and the soil from which we grow our food, deplete our finite resources and dissolve the social ties upon which our vast apparatus of technology and comfort was built.
Admittedly, I've got a small sample size to work with. I see very few people day to day and so I'm relying on second and third hand accounts. Alongside the twenty-something year olds who are my friend's friends, I take notice of the wider culture; trends in fashion from people on the street, memes shown to me by friends, music played on the radio, and the obvious and unspeakable rise of Funko Pops.
Without the requisite statistics to prove it, it feels as if we don't protest, read, cook, grow, marry, pray or run for local council as much as we used to. A sociologist might explain each of those away in isolation—information has taken a new form in the internet age and so scrolling is the new reading. An economist might call the decline of these things a part of economic progress (another reason not to listen to economists). A decent consolation wouldn't simply describe, it would provide a replacement activity for each that we take just as seriously.
We do not put as much time into signing or creating online petitions as we used to put into local politics. We don't care for Ubereats as we used to care for our home-cooked meals. Polyamorous relationships don't supplant marriage and tarot readings aren't a substitute for the Bible or the Upanishads. How lovingly we engage with life—which is to say how seriously we engage with it—could be a valuable interpretation of all, or at least most, of the failures of modernity. A beautiful doorway into thought about our serious and loving attention comes from Wendell Berry, who asks a simple but potent question: "what are people for?"
"I know it don't seem difficult to hit you up
But you not passionate about half the shit that you into
And I ain't havin' it"Earl Sweatshirt
You might think I'm being a bit harsh on young people here. After all, they've got high levels of anxiety and talk about personality types and how to avoid being 'toxic' on Tik Tok. They even organised the school strikes for climate change. That all sounds rather serious. I'll be clear, I'm not suggesting they're doing the worm in their exam rooms or blowing off corporate jobs to go to clown college. We are all born with the magnitude of life upon our shoulders, but this is not sufficient to achieve virtuous action. We must align our heads, hearts and bodies. The younger generation aren't shirking sober moral systems that coherently explain their responsibilities. Rather, the systems of thought that they've been handed, haven't been able to provide any.
"If you are too clever, you could miss the point entirely"
Tibetan saying
We could label it scientific materialism, physicalism, the subject-object metaphysics (as my hero Robert Pirsig wrote in Lila) or The Rational Mind (described by Wendell Berry in his essay Two Minds). The system of thought believes in no God, no affinity between man and nature, no mystic experiences, no spiritual callings, no fate and no morality. The experience we have of these phenomena is simply in our heads. Unmeasurable and unverifiable, they are simply preferences that get in the way of being objective. They get in the way of experiencing reality. Reality, of course, is simply physical matter which behaves in predictable and predetermined ways. The laws of nature are set and everything; including churches, this article you're reading now, human rights and spongecake, are all simply the playing out of the initial conditions of the big bang. The system of thought reduces our psychology down to the chemicals in our brain. Our social and political thought reduces us to individual units, kindly atomised as to maximise individual freedom as a consumer. Dad can't make me an accountant. Grandma's going in a home. If I know Ralph Lauren make their clothes in China and I buy them from the DFO, I didn't make those women work for 15 hours a day. I didn't make battery hens legal. I'm just me, baby.
"Imagine if the buddhas were looking down on us now: How they would marvel sadly at the lethal ingenuity and intricacy of our confusion!"
Sogyal Rinpoche
I wish not to blame the generation that passed us these modes of thought either. The parents of millennials or Gen-Z were themselves raised in a time when scientists and governments really were expected to save the world. Things were right on track to be catalogued and measured, regulated and incentivised right to the doorstep of tomorrow's utopia. As a six year old boy, my father walked up the street to one of the three TVs in his neighbourhood, sat on the floor and watched human beings walk on the moon. Who'd have believed that the UK would write 72 million prescriptions for anti-depressants each year? Who'd have believed that two thirds of us would be overweight or obese?
And so we're left in a strange time. It is a time of transition. The systems of thought that built this world have been accepted as having failed it. We watch as the free market tap dances on a tar pit. Religion stumbles while Burning Man is simultaneously deified and commodified. New-age spiritualism complete with crystals, saris and star charts transmutes into doublethink as soon as we're drunk enough to desire the obscenity that is KFC. The contradictions of the vegan who works as a corporate lawyer are accepted as inevitable. At least he's doing something. No one can do everything. We take our minuscule consolations prizes home with us, where we aid and abet the rape of our mountains, oceans and topsoil, a rape that the system of thought declares 'a necessary trade off'.
It's true that we can't be fully ethical or fully off-the-grid. It's true that the solutions are imperfect but that is no reason to stay where we are. When faced with what we still do, what we have become complacent in, we should ask again the question; what are people for? It reveals the ridiculousness of our participation in modernity and our blatant lack of seriousness for our lives and the lives of others.
Are we here to eat food cooked by corporations that include unregulated toxic chemicals? Are we here to outsource our manufacturing of clothing to those who have no political rights? Are we here to submit to myths of inevitability of technology? To pay people to wrap our food in plastic, plastic which is made on another continent? Are we here to take mind-altering medicine to help with our loneliness or suffering? Are we here to make excuses for our unethical conveniences?
"Apathy is one of the great tools of the ruling class"
Cheryl Harris
A few days ago I was on a short hike in Berowra Waters. It was hot out, about 35 degrees and 90 percent humidity. After a swim in the shallow but wide creek, I laid on the ground and began to read John Ruskin, who I'd never read before. I chose the small, only about 100 page, Ruskin volume because it was light in my pack, had a pretty cover and a quote that reminded me of Wendell Berry. The quote reads: "You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both." On the contents page I was given a choice between The Nature of Gothic and The Work of Iron and chose the latter. It didn’t take long before I was feeling puzzled. Ruskin spent 23 pages talking about the beauty of rusted iron and how without the oxidisation of iron we wouldn't have many of the fabulous colours that we take for granted. He spoke at length about spiked iron railings and bars that surround some houses in England. "Your iron railing always means thieves outside, or Bedlam inside; – it can mean nothing else than that." I read on, somewhat ironically enjoying the strangeness of the piece by an Englishman unknown to me, in part because I had nothing else to read and in part because it was refreshing to read someone who took the enclosure of front gardens with such seriousness.
In the section called Iron in Policy and under the subheading The Plough, Ruskin made a sharp turn.
"The law of nature is, that a certain quantity of work is necessary to produce a certain quantity of good, of any kind whatever. If you want knowledge, you must toil for it: if food, you must toil for it: and if pleasure, you must toil for it. But men do not acknowledge this law; or strive to evade it, hoping to get their knowledge, and food, and pleasure for nothing: and in this effort they either fail of getting them, and remain ignorant and miserable, or they obtain them by making other men work for their benefit; and then they are tyrants and robbers."
He continues (this is a lecture given to the public, by the way) even more directly:
"…Remember this is literally and simply what we do, whenever we buy, or try to buy, cheap goods – goods offered at a price which we know cannot be remunerative for the labour involved in them. Whenever we buy such goods, remember we are stealing somebody's labour."
The man who takes the oxidisation of iron seriously enough to speak about it publicly and at length, also takes the ethics of labour very seriously—enough to directly accuse his audience of stealing labour in full knowledge of the necessary distress that had "forced the producer to part with it" at the improper price.
Ruskin is confronting the same question as Wendell Berry. Beneath his accusation is a firm ground, an assertion of what we are for. Ruskin speaks with the same clarity as Berry too, the obviousness of his answers butting us away from selfishness and pointing us—or rather helping us to point ourselves—toward our duties and responsibilities instead. The accusation would be indefensible if it weren't true, and it is perhaps truer today than it was then. In the face of an epidemic of loneliness bathed in blue light, a meaning crisis medicalised by a floundering psychiatric profession, online gaming until we shit ourselves or die, war profiteers Lockheed Martin lobbying governments and the looming environmental disasters too numerous to list; the question 'what are people for?', accuses us of exactly the crimes we've committed both as participants and bystanders. It pierces the confusion of fickle justifications and excuses. It unveils where we've been and redirects our focus moving into the future, aligning our actions with what we know, in our hearts is beautiful, and just, and good.
The sharpest line I read on the banks of Berowra Creek, and the one that best illuminates our present predicament and the first steps on our path out of it, was this:
"There may be hope for the man who has slain his enemy in anger; – hope even for the man who has betrayed his friend in fear; but what hope for him who trades in unregarded blood, and builds his fortune on unrepented treason?"
We should set perfection aside, along with the future and where the path of consideration and seriousness will lead us. We should think not of the conveniences that we may lose or the labour required of us. We should think not of the region or the nation or the globe or about the practical impact our actions will have. Instead, we should begin by regarding the blood which is washed from our conveniences before they arrive at our door. We should accept the fact of and repent for our ignorant treason. I am sure that the path is not easy. I am also sure that it is necessary. Before the struggle against evil can begin, we must first meet it at the mirror and look it soberly in the eye.
W.
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