Simplicity

Posted on by Phila Back
Photo: bing.com

While the current state of the world – extreme environmental degradation, rising authoritarianism and now war – threatens to overwhelm our minds, there is a silver lining, and that is the replay of the 1970s oil crisis.  Then we earnestly conserved energy, advanced renewables and adopted more environmentally friendly living habits.  Although some benefits were preserved, excessive resource extraction, consumption and waste have since grown to reach their present astronomical level.  So much “progress” measured by GDP growth has not made us happy, but where should we go?  How should we even define the “good life”?  The growing back-to-nature movement upholds Indigenous ways as the alternative to current intensive technology, the two of which are the extreme poles of a continuous range of possible human cultures.  These should be assessed by the degrees by which we may affirm or deny our life by practicing them.

A debate goes on over the question of what, by nature, is man?  At a minimum, we find that humans are eminently adaptable, able to live, like vermin or roaches, in the most deplorable conditions.  A more fruitful way of framing the question is What is human life?  This brings us to the spectrum of cultures to which that of Indigenous people belongs and for whom the world is a living continuum that unites them with their environment.  Ecovillages and regenerative communities represent movement toward them, and although they are much more sustainable than the present larger culture, they remain far from the most primitive model.  An intermediate experience between the poles is that of Henry David Thoreau which he describes in his celebration of simplicity entitled Walden.  

As he lived a short distance from Concord, Massachusetts in the mid-eighteen forties, the author was no survivalist, for he purchased supplies, sold some produce, visited neighbors and interacted with a variety of folks passing through on and around Walden Pond.  While his writing consists largely of reflections on his experience of communing with the place and diverse things in it his principal theme is expressed in the words “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”  The simple life for him captured the innocence of nature and connected him with his main roots in the earth.  One and a half centuries of environmental degradation later Thomas Berry updated Thoreau’s sentiments, writing, “The natural world demands a response that rises from the wild unconscious depths of the human soul.”

The varieties of human experience represented by the three models – Indigenous, Walden and domination by technology – are degrees of attention to life ranging from the most relaxed to the most contracted.  For the first presents a continuous world in which individual things are not strictly separated from each other and the subject is aware of and acts as an indivisible part of universal life.  In the second the world is experienced as composed of a multitude of different yet interrelated living things such as those Thoreau described in detail, revealing his intimate awareness of their very lives through intuitions of their individual essences and essential relations with each other and himself. 

He dwelt among things, in contrast with modern life in general where we are conscious chiefly not of things but of appearances.  From direct awareness of the world’s volume in primitive consciousness to the selection of particular essences we move to a basically two-dimensional screen displaying images.  More intense cerebral activity further shrinks these to virtually extensionless mental entities, allowing some people to live to a large degree with “their head in the clouds.” 

A way to understand this hierarchy of modes of consciousness and things is offered by the philosophy of early twentieth-century philosopher Henri Bergson.  For him matter and mind differed only in their degrees of spatial and temporal extension as both were manifestations of a universal substance in which these attributes were indivisibly combined.  He stressed the self-evident fact of experience that sense perception is extended in three dimensions and that it directly unites a subject with an external object.  The body is one center of action among others in a continuously extended universe, and while he noted organic unity between members of some species and different ones displaying symbiosis, he stopped short of recognizing the full ecological structure of nature which we now accept as innumerable nested and intersecting living wholes.  This understanding makes the body both an individual and an organic part of so many increasingly extensive lives of which the most comprehensive is the whole biosphere that is the material base of each individual life.  Being an individual as well as parts of larger wholes gives us multiple identities, and, having a unique measure of free will, we can choose the identity in which we wish to act in given situations.  This reality is revealed in our common moral dilemmas: Do we act in the interest of some group to which we belong or the environment or just ourselves? In other words, Do we act as our largest, intermediate or smallest selves? 

Our actions arise from intentions relative to our different identities which condition our experience with, for example, the broadest intentions of the Indigenous person producing their unified experience.  This contrasts with the experience of modern people that is composed of images of countless separate and distinct objects. 

A person’s life can be represented by the figure of a cone, at the different levels of which they may chiefly dwell.  Its base is the whole universe that is their most extensive and fullest life, while higher levels are successive reductions of that life – actions and modes of life driven by more narrow intentions that literally shrink its spatial extension.   About mid-way up the cone is the level of Thoreau’s existence at Walden where he directly touched the local life around him in his activity and consciousness in a way that was a significant reduction of Indigenous life but still much fuller than civilization today.

As matter and mind differ in the degrees of their extension in time and space, the most reduced life is the least extended, and it is at this extreme where much of our lives are lived today, especially in so much information technology which is particularly immaterial.  Our intentions are embodied in our physical selves which are extended through our tools that serve limited purposes.  Using a tool restricts our intention, as a hammer can drive a nail but it can’t do anything else, least of all serve the good of the world.  Conversely, our intention restricts the function of the tool – until now, with artificial intelligence which can make its own decisions independently of us.

Our lives are presently lived close to the apex of the cone, extremely limited in spatial extension, intention and life content, at a very far remove from the fullest most universal life.  AI represents the apex point that breaks free from our intention and the cone of life.  This is not to say that it isn’t subject to the elementary forces of nature, but, like Frankenstein’s monster, it is no longer our abject slave.

Before the latest Middle East war climate change was enough of a reason to reject fossil fuels, and this reason is now amplified by more war for oil.  Our lives are so shrunken by modern culture that increasingly sickens our bodies with AI now driving the proliferation of data centers that pollute and threaten people’s water and electricity supplies.  We need to resist them while also digging in to conserve all natural resources.  Returning to Indigenous life tomorrow is not an option, nor can we go squat in the woods like Thoreau, but we can seek a large measure of simplicity and the joy that it brings by growing gardens and building regenerative local communities.

Although he disdained men’s hubris, Thoreau seemed to tolerate the environmental exploitation of his time, expressing no fear of escalating, much less apocalyptic degradation, which is precisely what we now face.  I liken AI to a point which is a tipping point and, I hope, also a turning point as people rise up against data centers in their communities. 

It is further like the golden head of the giant statue in Nebuchanezzar’s dream related in the book of Daniel. Below its head of fine gold were its chest and arms of silver, its trunk and thighs of bronze,its legs of iron, and its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. As in the dream the king watched, a stone separated itself without any human hand, struck the statue on its feet made of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces.Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold were all broken into pieces which became like the chaff on a threshing-floor in summer; the wind blew them away without leaving a trace.  

Data centers are AI’s feet of clay that support the promethean edifice while progressively undermining it with their extreme environmental impacts that might bring modern civilization tumbling down soon.

Justice

Posted on by Phila Back

https://flipboard.com/@axiosnews/a-look-back-at-the-march-on-washington-in-1963-u0rdsc85n4koblra

The case for limiting human population in order to maintain the natural resources upon which it depends was powerfully made for the public by the Club of Rome’s 1972 report The Limits to Growth.  Yet forty years earlier French philosopher Henri Bergson promoted the same idea along with returning to simpler living centered on agriculture in his final major work Two Sources of Morality and Religion.  That position is remarkable as evolution is a central theme in his work in which the human species is portrayed as the supreme product of natural history. Growing up in France during the Franco-Prussian War and then living through World War I however made Bergson realize that something had gone wrong.   

His philosophy is not a unified system but rather in his last three books represents the world and human experience in terms of four sciences as they existed in his time: neuropsychology, evolutionary biology, anthropology and sociology.  Accordingly Bergson successively defines the universe first as Becoming, then creative evolution and finally spirit, all of which are in fact facets of the same absolutely creative universal life.  Having arrived at the extreme point of evolution with the application of intelligence to material nature, he advocated that we next turn to the scientific study of spirituality.  I consider this an absolute Hail Mary move that can be replaced with a much more practical program.  

Before concluding with this disappointing prescription Two Sources of Morality and Religion makes some currently valuable points.  Following the social science of his day it asserts that human society is instinctively small and local – essentially tribal.  Humanity overcomes the character of this “closed” society when the force of creative evolution, the élan vital, produces an individual animated by universal life and love who then disseminates this spirit to the rest of the population.  Bergson thus explains Christian religion minus the myths of incarnation and salvation – relics of closed society – which clothe it.  The spirit of Christianity, which is the love of all men, animates the open society in which creative evolution continues on its course. 

Bergson’s élan vital creates the universe, but not uniformly, for most of what it creates proceeds to lose force, repeating its past in every new present moment of time.  Such static entities are matter which form hurdles for the life force to surmount.  The philosopher’s metaphor for this process is a fist pushing through a mass of metal filings, acting as a separate force that determines their arrangement.

Animal evolution has proceeded on two paths – instinct in the lower ones and intelligence in humans which has become ever-more technological, bringing us to the present moment.  Human evolution has been on a tear, so to speak, making relentless technological “progress.”  The universal spirit has solidified into established Christian religion with parallels in some Eastern spiritualities.  These two varieties, Bergson asserts, are based in mysticism, with the major difference being that Western mysticism is dedicated to action while Eastern forms are more passively inner-oriented.  He asserts that true mystics are intensely active, being fully animated by the universal spirit that is the élan vital.  Now, despite the historical emergence of universal spirituality and its spread, people are increasingly drawing together into closed societies whose very nature it is to exclude and even wage war against outsiders.

Bergson published Two Sources of Morality and Religion in 1932 as Nazis were coming into dominance in Germany.  The U.S. is facing a similar threat today plus growing climate breakdown.  As in past major historical upheavals, a spiritual revival is underway, but it is evident that Bergson’s answer to our material challenges is no solution at all.

Although each of his books examines the world from different angles like the blind men describing the elephant, there is a whole animal that all of his works reveal to us and which furnish a sounder response.  His principal theme is freedom, and he explains how the apparatus of human consciousness has evolved to progressively increase the scope of our freedom which is nevertheless subject to abuse.  In his works prior to Two Sources he denied evolutionary teleology, stressing that the myriad lines of evolution often come to a halt with some even reversing direction.  Still, as the past accumulates and is carried forward into the present, remnants of past forms of life are always preserved as potential resources for later ones.  This notion is shared by the systems theory of evolutionary biology’s view of DNA transmission.      

Conscious life for Bergson is a matter of projecting virtual past actions onto external objects which create images that reflect the subject’s potential action on those objects.  Ultimately the past of our individual lives and that of our species provides the material for our consciousness and the actions which proceed from it.  In the present crisis we need to make optimum use of this gold mine of resources.

The Enlightenment’s myth of progress rests on Newton’s First Law of inertia – that bodies ceaselessly move in a rectilinear path unless deflected from it by an external force.   With his later teleological thinking Bergson assumes this basic concept, but his earlier view was the correct one.  Progress through time is not continual improvement, rather there are also standstills, backtracking and regression. 

Many of our ills are attributed to the modern culture of the last four centuries, but another very significant historical development was the earlier shift away from the ancient Greek principle of the right measure that is neither too much nor too little.  For Aristotle determining the right measure was the goal of his practical wisdom and political wisdom which ideally select the golden mean.  For Plato the right measure was the harmonious ratio between things which constitutes justice.  Therefore health, the properly coordinated functioning of all the parts, is the justice of the body, virtue the justice of the soul and harmony of its parts the justice of the state.

Bergson stresses that the universe and consciousness are temporally and spatially continuous, containing an infinite multitude of different but not discrete qualities.  Distinct perception consists of a series of memory images laid over the continuum, creating a cinematographic-like experience of rapid succession of still images.  Everything related to quantities in our experience is derived from this function which is external to the fundamental nature of Becoming and life.  The philosopher’s account of these consequently excludes consideration of quantity.   

Elsewhere I have described freedom in service to the world as consisting of maximum use of past experience to identify and fulfill opportunities for positive action in the present.  However, one major thing was missing from it: right measure.  Thus I look out into my garden and see that my foxgloves are wilted, so I fill the can with water to pour on them.  But how much?  In the climate change-induced heat wave and drought mandatory water conservation has been ordered; some precipitation is forecast for later in the day; the roots are shallow, and jumping worms have destroyed the organic material in the soil.  So I have to make a decision: how much water should I pour on my foxgloves?  In nearly everything we do we make a decision as to how much – How high do we set the oven? How long do we cook the food? How much clothing do we put on? and so on.  In all of these decisions we seek the right measure.

I have contrasted the Enlightenment notion of inertia with the Greeks’ principle of right measure or justice.  Surveying our historical resources, it’s clear that it’s time to revive the last.  Natural history isn’t linear; organisms just make the most of their resources to sustain their lives.  Bergson emphasized care for all humanity, but equal regard for the environment is implicit in his work as he affirms the continuity of nature. 

In past works I have urged acting with the intention of advancing the ecological civilization.  However, as we desperately resist the “flood the zone” strategy, we must deal with immediate matters, prioritizing justice – peacefully protesting against injustice, contributing to mutual aid and upholding the principle of right measure.

Extreme wealth inequality is a great factor in all of our troubles.  The motto for our movement should be Bernie Sanders’ “Enough is enough.”  At the 2025 May Day rally in Philadelphia he said that the oligarchs weren’t satisfied with their billions.  “They want it all!”  One of the most effective Resistance tactics so far has been the boycott of ABC over Jimmy Kimmel’s firing which supports Arundhati Roy’s claim “The system will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling.”  Engaging in the Resistance is hard, but one thing we can all do that will serve it and the planet is to double down on conserving resources, especially energy.  Limit car trips; eat less or no meat; replace the lawn with a garden; buy much less stuff and finally, have conversations with people about how we must act now.