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The big miss on individualism

I get to speak with a great variety of smart people, as a side benefit to a day job that is actually its true and most durable point. Anyway, I share.

Just recently, a conversation with a philosopher led in some interesting directions. He came of age in Thatcher-era Britain, when he began noticing things not present just few years earlier.

“Beggars on the street most notably. A great rise in homelessness, and great rise in public ugliness as well. It was something that called itself individualism but to me was a mistaken form of individualism, a supposed form of individualism where everything is just about possessing things.”

Real individualism, real individuality, is about being a unique person – it’s not about showing off the fact that you along with 45K other people have managed to afford a particular item, he said. My deeper attention had been gained. He continued.

“To me it was sort of a perversion of individualism, and in tandem with the ecological texts I was reading, the two things came together.  It just seemed clear to me even back in the 1980’s that you can’t ultimately have a society based on infinite economic growth on a finite planet. On the one side we were prioritizing the wrong liberties and taking away a lot of people’s meaningful economic liberties at the same time in order to give extra ones for other people.”

“All of these things seem to be misconceived. Looking at the rise of liberalism in the broad sense, the rise of forms of society which placed the liberty of the individual first, and then you have the question of which liberties matter, how they are sliced up and how they are arranged.”

“Since that time, my core interests have been the concepts of nature in terms of freedom. And the flourishing of the individual. While I think of myself politically as being very left – people react to the word ‘individualism’ because it immediately conjures this 1980s concept of ‘greed is good’  because that language has been so thoroughly taken over.* But it doesn’t need to be like that.”

He brings up Oscar Wilde and his 1891 essay, The Soul of Man under Socialism. “Wilde says socialism will be of value solely because it will lead to individualism. What he means by that is if you make sure everyone has enough to begin with, people can actually express themselves as individuals when they’re no longer just scrambling for the basics.”

This is the road to any discussion about ethics. Can you imagine?

*There have been so many corruptions of language of this nature. Before we can take back the night, we’ll need to reclaim the day.

 

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Eco Hustle – climate change versus the recession

Sounds like a really long band name but no, it’s the gist of an Eco Hustle column from March 2011. From the archives of Flagpole and sadly, still relevant, to wit:

On the off chance that it is becoming possible to think about the climate crisis and our economic collapse as related events, consider the admonitions coming from the financial institutions, corporate media and political establishment of late. Is there any doubt that most of the talking heads on cable, along with an uncomfortable ratio of the professional politicians they report and comment on, do not know what they’re talking about when it comes to the causes for and ways out of our economic recession? Why does the picture seem so incomplete? What’s being left out of the discussion? Who, speaking through silence, bears the name of the one who signs the text?

Perhaps the most famous man to shed a tear in a television commercial was a Sicilian actor named Iron Eyes Cody. Dressed as a Native American of indeterminate tribal affiliation, he paddles a canoe through stagnate waters to a shore littered with all kinds of trash, smokestacks chugging away in the background, eventually arriving at a crowded highway. “Cannon” and “Bullwinkle” star William Conrad intones, “People start pollution. People can stop it.” The Keep America Beautiful ad left us with the salutary glimpse of the tear running down his face.

Maybe this very powerful ad seemed like a turning point when it aired in 1971, and maybe it was because we’ve been tacking the other way ever since. Instead of giving the crying Indian a reason to dry his eyes, we’ve spared no expense to design the perfect towelette to wipe his tear, while generally discouraging such public displays of disaffection. Rather than seeing it for what it was, this example is much more instructive in the service of what was to follow.

The reality show of the American energy future has continued apace, not unrelated to where we left the crying Indian with trash at his feet a few short years ago. Built on the distinct appeal of “tune in next week to see what happens,” it has evolved into an elimination of survivors where we’re making do with what’s left. Yet even as we’re all quite sure that cheap oil won’t last and that anthropogenic C02 emissions will alter the chemical equilibrium of the Earth, the pre-eminent question remains not how, but whether we will plan ahead.

We facilitate this down the line – from the shows we watch to the books we read to the politicians we elect. It’s pretty much an accepted fact that a singular hyperpower will eventually be ruled by an oligarchy. Pace Jefferson and Payne, no one knew how candid this transition might be under the direction of democratic capitalism. Corporatized masses looking to further their economic advantages any way possible foment a reality we are only on the lookout for more ways to showcase…

Read the whole thing, as the kids say.

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Coming Soon

Very dour outlook in Nevada.

The decay in Vegas doesn’t stay there: It reverberates throughout the state. “Coming Soon” signs have been pulled down across the city, because nothing is coming soon other than more foreclosures. The Nevada landscape is pockmarked by empty condos and casinos, some of them fully built and sitting there empty, others are shells frozen in time. When analysts talk abstractly about Wall Street sucking capital out of the real economy, these stalled construction projects are the on-the-ground reality. “60% Reduced Prices” promises one empty condo development.

The $3.1 billion Fontainebleau Las Vegas construction project sits nearly complete but the lender pulled out and everybody is suing everybody else. The first Ritz-Carlton in the company’s history to shut down is in Las Vegas.

And as the article title asserts, this is the future for much of the country. I wish I could say or you could think that this is wholly attributable to the economic recession and unrelated to the causes underpinning our crisis of ecology, but we can’t. Unsustainable growth, over-building, mindless reliance on cheap materials and energy, exacerbating resource scarcity… it’s all there. There is greed but also ambivalence about consequences that is too obvious to ignore, that allows for the kinds of rapacious development that built Las Vegas into what it is – which is a gilded yet crumbling metropolis, in the desert, no less. The human toll is tragic and cannot be quantified only by the number of empty subdivisions, but the region’s supposed rebound will be divined in corporate dividends and ephemera like new housing starts. Might as well be reading entrails.

And on top of it all… Fontainebleau? Really?