Photo Source: Canva
There’s a hydraulic model of San Francisco Bay in Sausalito. It’s the size of two football fields, housed inside a building where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used to simulate conditions in the bay to test the effects of building dams, oil spills, storms and shoreline activity. Inside their small theater at the model’s entrance, I watched a video about the Bay’s history. We’re in the land of the Gold Rush, in the mid-1880s. Old photos showed miners wielding high-pressure hoses, blasting the tops off mountains, the rock and dirt washing into rivers that fed the bay. So much, it nearly filled in the bay. To only 18 feet deep. This bay isn’t a pond. It’s big!
Suddenly, 150 years of American progress snapped into sharp relief. “We’re like locusts!” I thought, with a shiver. In the lifespan of four generations, we’ve built intercontinental train tracks, interstate highways and airports, strung electric and telephone wires across the continent, run cables under oceans, dammed rivers and diverted water to build mega-cities like Los Angeles.
Any non-human animal or plant species we saw ripping through the environment at this speed, we’d exterminate.
But we’ve not put any brakes on this behavior. Why not? Because it looks like progress, like a good thing. In many ways, it is. It’s certainly made contemporary life in developed countries convenient and comfortable. I text and talk from my cellphone, take and send pictures, any time to anyone anywhere in the world. Planes and ships can carry me almost anywhere on earth, and rockets can rocket me to the moon. I’m not hot or cold unless I choose to be. And if I get sick, chances are good that medicine or surgery can cure me. It’s extended our life expectancy by decades. But we’re so immersed in this view of progress that we don’t recognize it has put us in chains psychologically and emotionally.
It’s locked us into a machine mentality and culture that’s anti-human.
Many years ago, in a workshop for evaluators, someone who was working for an international development agency talked about the difficulty they were having introducing dairy farming to island people. The organization gave them cows that they were supposed to feed and milk. Instead, they killed and ate the cattle or let them run loose. Eventually the development workers asked the people why they weren’t accepting the progress being offered them. The answer: they enjoyed their fishing and foraging life and community and leisure the rest of the time. They didn’t want to be driven and locked into a routine, required cycle of milking and feeding and maintaining another species and becoming dependent on that artificial system.
In our highly developed, routinized society, we hardly even notice what we’ve given up, the trade-offs we’ve made
it’s been so long ago that we made them and we spend so much of our lives maintaining them. We’re bound by timelines and timeframes and milestones and outcomes. We expect to see an end product, something that’s new, no matter how slightly, no matter if needed or not. We compete with each other; it’s baked into how we live. Who owns what, where they live, and what they drive, and who they associate with, and what kind of work they do, and where they are in the hierarchy.
I’ve worked in higher education for decades, where the academy is supposed to be a collegial community of scholars. It’s not. A professor once told me, the fights are so bitter in the academy because there’s so little to win. Even with less resources to fight over than in large companies, the competitive ethos turns into a battle for status, prestige, and control over minute academic and administrative decisions. In the last couple of decades, as large amounts of money have flowed into STEM disciplines, the divisiveness between disciplines and between faculty and administration and governing boards has deepened with collegiality and community as casualties.
This competitive push for progress is a system of control and domination, of others and of the natural world.
To keep it intact and keep everyone marching along that line, culturally we devalue any human needs and traits that don’t fit this worldview. If the islanders don’t want to milk cows, they’re lazy or backward, we think. If we don’t want to rush from one meeting to the next, from one project to another, we’re labeled undependable or undisciplined. If we’re not energized by the frenzy and franticness, we must be an isolate or an introvert—said derisively. And we may well be those things since more reflective people are the ones who notice the lack of attunement with this cultural way of behaving and experience its abrasiveness.
By denying those parts of our human nature that don’t fit, we’re not only destroying ourselves, we’re destroying other species, and our natural environment, our home—all that’s essential—that nurtures us and needs nurturing.
It’s as if we shouldn’t even need nurturing, at least not once we pass our early teenage years. Some of the crustiest among us are likely those who need nourishing the most, but aren’t receiving it. They may be the most sensitive among us, but covering it with rancor as a way to protect themselves in a world made hard and harsh by this demanding, controlling worldview in which we live.
A highly trained artist said to me, while we were having lunch together, that she paints what’s inside her and often it comes quickly and easily. But that feels wrong somehow, like it’s not valuable if it comes too easy. This is another way the rapaciousness our Western culture cultivates bleeds over from the physical to the psychological and emotional. We can come to suspect our own talents, undermine our own contributions to the world. Unless it’s a struggle, unless it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort, perhaps even suffering, how can it be worthwhile? And why should we be paid for it?
Culturally, we seem to think that about the arts and human services professions. What do they produce that’s valuable to society and deserving of remuneration? They are their own rewards—in the case of the arts, self-indulgence and emotional or intellectual expression. In the case of human services, a sense of helping and doing good for others. If people want to follow their aesthetic or compassionate nature, American society punishes most of them financially.
But beauty, and joy, and compassion and empathy are all deep human needs and qualities that make us kinder, gentler individuals and make a society and a culture softer, richer, deeper, and more humane.
As a society, we cannot see and value those qualities and needs when rapaciousness runs amok. The positive parts of our culture of progress, the parts that have made us more physically comfortable, are like a curtain, blinding us to its backside. Or if we do see that side, we’ve been willing to accept the trade-offs. But how do we know when we’ve traded too much?
© Christina Leimer 2020 Contact for reprinting permission.