Natural Joe

The uniformity on Planet Norte is striking. Each person is a unit, installed in life support boxes in the suburbs and cities; all are fed, clothed by the same closed-loop corporate industrial system. Everywhere you look, inhabitants are plugged in at the brainstem to screens downloading their state approved daily consciousness updates. iPods, Blackberries, notebook computers, monitors in cubicles, and the ubiquitous TV screens in lobbies, bars, waiting rooms, even in taxicabs, mentally knead the public brain and condition its reactions to non-Americaness. Which may be defined as anything that does not come from of Washington, DC, Microsoft or Wal-Mart.

Yes, yes, we know, modern Western life is sterile, plastic, inauthentic, soulless, dark Satanic Mills, etc. Fill in the blank with your favorite ad-libs. It just strikes me as a composite of the same facile romantic critiques we’ve heard since, well, the Romantics. And aside from hardcore examples like Ted Kaczynski, hearing this sort of complaint from Westerners, even those who have expatriated themselves to a Mexican village, puts me in mind of something Edward Abbey wrote about Henry David Thoreau:

Henry was no hermit. Hardly even a recluse. His celebrated cabin at Walden Pond – some of his neighbors called it a “shanty” – was two miles from Concord Common. A half-hour walk from pond to post office. Henry lived in it for only two years and two months. He had frequent human visitors, sometimes too many, he complained, and admitted that his daily rambles took him almost every day into Concord. When he tired of his own cooking and his own companionship he was always welcome at the Emersons’ for a free dinner.

I’m not interested in hairsplitting debates over personal integrity vs. hypocrisy here; I’m just noting that there aren’t many people lining up to defiantly hand back their membership in Western Civilization in order to go native; most of them, despite all their bluster, seem to feel that the problem is just that there’s “too much” of our resource-devouring high-tech world, that there has to be some compromise, some way we can still have these things without guilt, perhaps if we just each reduce our personal consumption by some arbitrary percentage. And yet, and yet…everywhere I look, I see more houses being built, more cars being sold, and almost all my fellow thirty-somethings have babies on the way or a few toddlers underfoot. But who dares suggest that maybe the problem is that there’s just too many people, full stop? And what would we do about it even if we admitted that?

Look. Our Western consumer lifestyle is unsustainable in the long term. Most of us agree on this. It most certainly cannot be extended to the other several billion people on Earth. But there never was any Garden of Eden. We didn’t accidentally trap ourselves in a labyrinthine dystopia, we created it, step by step, as a way of escaping the drudgery of life in pre-modern villages. A whole bunch of those people unfortunate enough to be born somewhere impoverished couldn’t give a blistered fuck about Western notions of false consciousness or ecological disaster; they’d be happy to take a chance on suffering ennui with the rest of us if it meant they could have air conditioning, refrigerators, televisions and their own cars, even if only for a little while. Contentedness is not our natural condition, and it’s not exclusive to any particular way of life. Very few people manage to carry a sense of it around with them, wherever they happen to be. The rest of us project it somewhere else and continue the endless chase.