5

You, Me, and We in This Troubled World

WHEN SOMEONE ASKED ME recently, “How are things?” I blurted out, “Everything’s good—for me anyway, if not the world.” If you are in the same boat, please don’t assume that it will remain afloat. And if you believe “Somebody ought to be doing something about this,” then please understand that this somebody had better be you. And me. And us—really we, as subjects, not objects. The problems of this world are a lot closer to our own doorsteps, and a lot further from resolution, than most of us care to realize.

When Kofi Annan (2013) called for a “global grass-roots movement” to tackle climate change, he meant you and me, every time we take out the garbage or exploit some other convenient externality. “Green thinking cannot be the sole responsibility of a few environmentally minded activists, while the rest of us go on living as if there were no tomorrow,” he said. It is not the tar sands that create the pollution, but those of us who drive its consequences, in our cars and our votes.

Let me repeat: Our world is dangerously out of balance and we require radical renewal. People will have to do it. Not “them.” You and me, individually and together. Not by focusing on what they do to us, but by recognizing what we can do for ourselves. And not by having to expend so much energy fighting exploitation as by using our resourcefulness to circumvent that exploitation. Restoring balance in society will have to be our legacy, if we are to have any legacy at all. The alternative is the end of our history.

Opening Our Eyes

Look around: At a capable friend who lost a job because her company “downsized” for the sake of some executive bonus, or at another who kept his job in a mercenary workplace and gave in to alcohol or drugs. At a relative who succumbed to the epidemic of cancer, thanks to the toxic environments we tolerate. At the lives of people just outside some gated community in which you may be living, and at your own life for having to so imprison yourself. At the gangs of unemployed youths in our streets who are aping the violence they see in our local movie theaters.⁵² At homes not far away that were destroyed by freak weather, likely brought on by global warming. (“Not proved,” claim the studies sponsored by industries benefitting from that warming, and echoed by those economists [e.g., Klaus 2008] who say, in effect, “How dare the environment challenge the supremacy of our theory?”) One or more of these troubles may be coming our way—not on our TV screens, but in our personal lives.

The angst in today’s world is not incidental. Like those nervous dogs before an earthquake, many of us seem to be sensing what we do not yet understand. So in the meantime we carry merrily along. When it comes to the environment, for example, we spend a lot more time pointing the finger at others than considering our own behaviors. My little car hardly pollutes compared to your big car (it still pollutes). Our American coal is “clean” (compared with your Canadian tar sands, I suppose). Our Canadian oil sands are responsible for only 0.15 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases (so let’s target those polluters responsible for 15 percent). Why should we in the developing world bother about all this when you of the developed world created these problems in the first place? And on and on it goes, ad nauseum, each of us blaming someone else as an excuse for our own inaction.

We Montrealers have reveled in some unusually warm dry summers recently while watching televised clips of great floods destroying other places. Yet every time I go into a restaurant, I have to take a sweater to fight off the air conditioning. Down the garbage chutes of this world go our convenient bundles of externalities—out of sight, out of mind—while financial institutions make more money trading our carbon trash: more markets to correct other markets, instead of just stopping the devastation. Are we prepared to explain to our children the state of the world that we have borrowed from them?

Getting It

It is amazing how few of us, including some of the most concerned, get it about our own behaviors. It’s convenient not to get it. After all, if the markets don’t get it, why should I? If the tar sands only contribute a fraction of 1 percent, what can I possibly do?

This is the perfect formula for disaster. All we have to do is stay on course, a course we have been on for a long time: each of us for ourselves, each of our institutions and nations for itself. Why not, if greed is good?

People are supposed to cooperate when they have an enemy in common. Well, we have an enemy in common, and that is our problem: the enemy is us—specifically, our own individuality, self-interest fatefully misunderstood. It has been said that “each snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty” (Stanislaw Lec). We are all guilty—so please, no more pleading.

The Irene Question

Irene is a Canadian finance manager who has worked in the private and plural sectors. In reading the pamphlet version of this book, she had two reactions. First, “I did know what’s been going on … but not the extent to which it’s embedded in the laws that I thought protect us, the companies that ‘serve us’ and the governments that are powerless to help.” Second, “I’d like to do something; I just don’t know where to start.” I call this “the Irene question”: what can I do? It’s the question that I am getting all the time now.

One obvious answer is to consider what other people are already doing, to join them or else emulate them. Another is to take a good look at the needs nearby that have been obscured by our own busyness. And by our own mindset, too: we see what we believe. Once we believe differently, we can see differently, and so act differently. Hence, the best answer I can give to the Irene question is not any particular prescription, but the description that I have already offered here.

I can, however, suggest some guidelines. The place to start confronting the exploiters of this world is in front of our own mirrors. Now! We shall have to rebalance ourselves if we are to rebalance our societies. Doing this should make confronting the bigger exploiters easy! They function in all the sectors, and so do we—as consumers, voters, and members, as well as workers. We have a direct line to each and every one of them: we need to use it.

So let’s hit that “off” button and press “pause” on those other distractions, so that we can look past our personal entitlements and see what is happening on the ground—down the street, across town, around the world, in the mirror. Then, when the next little indulgence comes along, instead of giving into it, we can do something different—just as simple as putting on a sweater instead of turning up the heat. This is good for the environment and even better for discarding an attitude of business as usual.

From this it may be natural to offer help to an infirm neighbor, and then to join a community group that helps many such people. Next thing we know, we might find ourselves on the street protesting the neglect of such people. Better still, we could be starting an initiative to put a stop to such neglect, locally and then globally. The answers, you see, are all around us.

Living the Decent Life

Those of us who live the good life certainly wish to maintain it. But there are a lot better ways to do that than indulging in more consumption. “You can never get enough of what you don’t really need” (attributed to Huston Smith). What a waste of the good life. What a waste of a beautiful planet.

The economically developed world is in dire need of social redevelopment. Many of us who live in it have more wealth than our ancestors could possibly have imagined, yet we have made an awful mess in using it. When do we get to cash in our chips to live the decent life?

And when do we start setting a different example for those people intent on imitating our “development”? By our casual indulgences, we are perpetuating a massively destructive scenario. Who are we to say to them, “Sorry, it’s too late. This planet can’t take any more.” We have no choice, therefore, but to set a different example, by cutting back on our own excesses while ceasing to cheer on the hyperexcesses of the superrich as some kind of perverse spectator sport. How about celebrating modesty for a change?

Changing the World Over Again

Margaret Mead is reported to have said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” But changing this world will require a great many such groups, acting alone and together, every day, everywhere.

Will we be wise enough to use our resourcefulness to act anew, before revolution takes us to some worse imbalance? Are we ready to act on a scale that will be unprecedented, for a planet whose problems are unprecedented?

Tom Paine told the American people in his pamphlet Common Sense, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Paine was right in 1776. Can we be right again now? Can we afford not to be?