Confessions of a Consumer Addict

admin April 25th, 2010

I’ve previously written in this blog and on my web site that there is a major misconception about “the fix” for our environmental problems. Actually I believe it is a misconception of mythical proportions that will do us a lot of damage in the years to come.

The myth is this:

We will be able to solve our environmental problems such as global warming with judicious use of new technologies such as solar and wind power, electric and hybrid cars, more efficient appliances, and so forth. This, then, will relieve us of the necessity of having to use less energy and buy less stuff, i.e., we will be able to go on living as we always have lo these many years, without having to give up anything.

“Oh I can buy all the toys I want and not worry about the power problem… they’ll think of something! We’ll be just fine!

My response to this has always been that there is no way that technology can dig us out of the hole we’ve dug for ourselves for several basic reasons:

1. The technologies we will need in order to make a substantial difference require, in and of themselves, even more non-renewable and renewable resources and power to design, test, manufacture, distribute, and maintain them. These costs are considerable, especially when most of these technologies use rare and expensive metals such as the rare earths, the mining of which are highly polluting, often mined in the third world under unjust working conditions, and many of which are only available through unfriendly governments. Even though these technologies may operate more efficiently than conventional technologies, their environmental and fiscal costs are in addition to the existing, huge infrastructure that will have to support our old stuff for many years into the future.We might use less oil and coal as a result of new technologies while freeing ourselves somewhat from our Mexican knife fight with the oil producing nations, but we will only have become much more dependent on other untrustworthy governments for these exotic new materials.
2. New technologies take a very long time to develop and get into mainstream usage. Some of them are twenty or more years into the future before they come on line as practical applications, and when they do, adoption by a majority of people will take even more years. Given the scope and severity of our problem, this is a day late and a dollar short.
3. Even if the new technologies were wildly successful in every way, we have to contend with human psychology which is perversely designed to defeat such efficiencies as we always have in the past. We are all like the dieter who eats twice as much because he/she is eating a special low calorie food. “Oh I can have another order of fries because I’m drinking Diet Coke!” And as soon as we have the electric, hybrid, or hydrogen car, we will immediately begin driving even more miles because we think we think it’s free. We will then not have reduced our energy consumption even after years of effort and billions of dollars in sunk costs. There is also the issue of broad-scale acceptance of the technologies by the public. A significant number will not be accepted as has also been the case in the past. For instance there has already been a large public outcry against wind farms at a number of locations across the country.

Adoption of many technologies will not be fast or certain, and we are running out of time.
The real solution, of course, is that we do in fact have to give up some things – actually a lot of things. There is no free lunch. We cannot have it all at no cost to ourselves. And having done so much damage already, we now have to pay the piper and we simply cannot escape him by hiding behind technology.

Our situation demands simple living of all of us.

I’m not naïve enough to believe that in our overheated consumer society there will be a sudden, massive switch to simple living, but I think it is entirely possible that a shift will occur incrementally over time as more and more of us get the message and make the commitment to make a real difference in the world.

But it could also be that the shift to simplicity will come suddenly and massively as our society hits the ecological/resource wall at some point in the not-too-distant future, and we are forced to live simply as we did during the great depression and WWII (if we’re very lucky).

I saw a glimmer of hope that the incremental version may be gathering steam even now, from a very unlikely source.

Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote a piece in the 4/25/10 Washington Post entitled 5 Myths About Green Energy. Of course he was probably trying to make the case that many of our green energy strategies are bound to be much less successful than predicted and we should therefore abandon such tree-hugging strategies and just let businesses do their jobs using whatever methods they see fit to use (my interpretation, not his words). But in doing so he made an excellent case for living simply as I outlined above.

His (condensed) points:

1. Solar and wind power have serious drawbacks. They “require huge amounts of land to deliver relatively small amounts of energy, [while] disrupting natural habitats.” This land demand led to the Nature conservancy, an extremely green organization, criticizing “energy sprawl” in its paper last year. He went on to provide even more statistics to bolster his point that these technologies aren’t going to give us the bang for the buck that we assume.
2. Green energy technologies will not reduce our dependence on foreign imports and erratic foreign governments to sustain our power needs. We have a choice among about 20 countries for obtaining our oil and natural gas supplies, but the rare earth necessary to build and maintain new power technologies are only available from… China, not the most reliable of partners in any weather. This will only make us more dependent on a country we desperately wish not to be dependent upon.
3. We talk a great deal about the new green jobs that will be created to support green technologies, however Bryce points out that we have the same problem here as we have had with shoe manufacturing – high American labor costs compared to many other Third World or emerging countries like, again, China. We simply will not be able to compete with them and we will therefore create far fewer green jobs than has been advertised.
4. Electric cars will not substantially reduce demand for oil because of the physics involved. Gasoline has about 80 times the energy as the best lithium-ion batteries which are famously finicky, short-lived, and which take hours to recharge. Although the electric motor is much more efficient than the internal combustion engine, the process of getting power to the electric motor is not, and there is little on the horizon to make us more optimistic along these lines.
5. America has actually been a leader in moving toward green technologies and has improved its energy efficiency as much as or more than, all other developed countries except Switzerland and Denmark. Bryce’s point here is that since American industry is already doing such a terrific job, we should just let them continue doing it.

   However I would apply another interpretation to this data: if we have done such a terrific job and we have hardly moved the needle after all these years of trying, then at best, it will be a very long time before our technology will even come close to solving our problem, if it ever does.

So I thank Robert Bryce and the Manhattan Institute for so brilliantly and so publically making my point for me even though they wouldn’t ordinarily cozy up to advocates of simple living like me!

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• Coping With Consumer Culture , Environment , Living More Simply
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admin April 13th, 2010

I’m coming closer to believing that the notion of Christian Anarchy (for a quickie refresher on what Christian Anarchy is, see my previous posts here and here) is a very good way to think about living the Christian life in general and Christian simple living in particular.

But there are problems too

It comes across as a very negative way of seeing the faith. Even the name, Christian Anarchy, is negative if not frightening. Many of the works discussing it spend much of their time on what’s wrong with human organizations (“the powers” in the Bible), or ‘arkies’ (Vernard Eller’s shorthand for any of the world’s ‘archical’ or hierarchical organizations). Tolstoy and Ellul were not a cheery bunch of writers either! And my own foggy musings are pretty negative as well.

It’s never a good idea to describe something by what it is not, or to sell a concept as a glass half empty!

It’s also a very complicated idea to understand as well as describe, which makes it difficult to translate into something practical and useful.

Part of the problem is that the classic works on Christian Anarchy (which I’ll refer to as CA from here on) like those of Leo Tolstoy, Jacques Ellul, SØren Kierkegaard, Vernard Eller, etc., are focused on the theology, philosophy, or sociology of CA rather than its practical application. And although Eller clearly says that CA is not ‘anti’ anything, but rather is just being not interested or impressed by the powers, some of these thinkers are very much anti- government, anti-capitalist, or anti-hierarchies in general, giving their views a radical twist.

Contemporary CA practitioners often organize social justice programs such as Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement (a very good thing) (http://www.catholicworker.org/) or promote radical political positions such as Graham Cameron’s (http://christiananarchy.com/articles/).

These are big thinkers and big doers intent on changing the world, or a significant part of it. But there are probably a lot of people who, like me,  don’t want to virtually take  sword in hand and march out to right the world’s wrongs, but merely want to live a good, and even occasionally courageous personal life where they are with the people around them. And most of us probably aren’t intent on tearing things down to do it.

And I just don’t agree that Christian Anarchy is primarily about being a social activist or political revolutionary. I believe that CA principles can apply to all Christians who are really trying to follow Christ, like Christian simple livers, and that we should be able to use the positive norms and values inherent in CA to help build-up ourselves, our congregations and our communities.

I also think that when you use the tenets of CA to create a social or political organization, you have already violated the spirit, if not the definition of CA by creating yet another arky. And since these organizations are created by mere mortals to carry out their own parochial visions, by definition they become just another worldly arky with all their natural human flaws.

… and so we’re right back to where we started – and we probably aren’t in the Kingdom of God yet!

So in an effort to see a practical and hopeful side to CA, I’ve started to think through the issue of practicality – and I emphasize the word started. I’ll keep you posted on my thoughts as they occur to me.

Here goes:

Life Among the Arkies

Christian Anarchy, as well as traditional Christian belief hold that we should live only according to God’s ‘Arky’ and not according to the world’s arkies or in Biblical terms “the powers” – rich and powerful people, organizations, and governments.

As I have defined CA in previous posts (derived from the writers mentioned above, particularly Eller), CA sounds a lot like The Kingdom of God as Jesus might have described it, in the sense that all of The Kingdom’s members would be joyfully living according to God’s law and Jesus’ teachings rather than the world’s values. That may actually be the simple definition of CA and its goal as well!

That would put Christian Anarchy adherents and its practitioners in pretty good company but, like The Kingdom of God as described in the New Testament, CA theory doesn’t give us a lot of help in figuring out how to actually live it as a practical matter. Jesus merely noted that various people were “coming close to the Kingdom.”

No membership manual! He basically said “just do it!” Of course He said a lot more than that, but mostly he taught by example and we have precious few of those examples in the Bible. It leaves me hungering for much more. I learn best through examples and I just get confused when I read things, and especially when I try to write.

So OK, how are we to behave in the arky known as the Kingdom of God? And how does that mean we should relate to, if we are to relate to them at all, the world’s arkies – our government, political parties, fraternal and civic organizations, the corner store and global corporations?

If these arkies surround us and we have to interact with them every day, and they are not to be trusted or followed per Eller’s view of CA, then what is left for us to do and how would our behavior be different from those who do follow the world’s arkies – often blindly or unknowingly – which would include a majority of folks in modern consumer culture?

As I first thought about it I really got bogged down in a long list of do’s and don’ts for living a CA life. In the end it seemed like hair-splitting legalism – and long.

So I took cues from the Gospels and my own meditation practice and things started getting simpler.

The World’s Arky Assumptions and Values

In our culture with its worldly arkies, we tend to pay attention, and often buy into, its arky assumptions, values, desires, and activities – often unconsciously and uncritically. Some of the biggest, broadest assumptions and values could be: “Growth is good (or bad);” “Look out for number one;” “You should always be or look young;” “Success is the most important thing;” “Make as much money as you can;” “The end justifies the means;” “Shoot for the stars;” “Everyone should take care of themselves,” “survival of the fittest,” “Cheapest is best.”

More specific assumptions might include: “Health care reform is good (or bad);” SUVs are good (or bad);” “People should always think you’re on top of things – buy the newest cell phone/PDA/computer/game/car/house;” “Conservatism or liberalism is good while the other is bad;” “The profitability of the company is more important than its employees.”

We believe these notions to be true only because we’ve heard them much of our lives. But where do they come from? We didn’t invent them.

These basic assumptions about life came to us via the thousands of arkies we know and love (or hate), whether they are political parties, corporations, the corner store, the Government, Rotary Club, Boy/Girl Scouts, or schools.

In the end most of these assumptions have a focus on ‘self’, what’s good for me or us, whether it is to be right, rich, powerful, beautiful, successful, or just happy. The arkies advertised these values to us pervasively, although often surreptitiously, and over the years we began to believe them. All arkies do this because the values they espouse support their goals and ultimate success, whether it is to achieve its mission, make money, have influence, “right wrongs,” (as defined by the arky), or “make the world safe for…”

So to a certain extent all worldly arkies are disingenuous because they aren’t primarily concerned about your, my, or anyone else’s welfare. Even when their goal is to be compassionate, like The Church (an arky if there ever was one), a social service or disaster relief organization, the arky itself takes on some of the less-than-compassionate characteristics of their founder’s and leader’s personalities.

An arky’s true goal, despite its hype, morphs toward promoting and maintaining the organization itself and the positions of those who own, manage, or work in it. Even in compassionate organizations, the goal is organizational success, and individual needs begin to take a back seat to the hierarchy (all organizations have them) and its arky goals. In arkies that don’t start with compassionate goals, things can be a lot worse if not blatantly immoral or illegal.

Living Under The Arky of God

So, after all this arky bashing, what’s so great about the Arky of God, and how would we live in it in contradistinction to how we live amongst the world’s arkies?

Simply put, we must live by the norms, values, and assumptions of God’s Arky (Kingdom) as found in such places as the Sermon on the Mount, the Ten Commandments, and the laws of the Pentateuch, and never equivocate or make accommodations with the arkies on these matters. We don’t put them aside if our employer arky, government arky, or our political arky sees it otherwise. We don’t ever allow arkies to be our proxies or stand-ins for God’s values.

This means that we live with equanimity and compassion about all things and all people whether we agree with them or even like them or not, seeing things as they actually are, not as we are told they are, and not judging but acting with compassion towards all people. Living this way can be easily inferred from Jesus’ teachings and it would be living only under the Arky of God, and not being led or controlled by other arkies of any stripe.

Living with equanimity means we don’t follow any arky’s predetermined philosophy, principles, rules, or hierarchical structures and organizations, none of which function purely with compassion. But it also means that we don’t hate, abuse, take advantage of, or misuse the arky and its people because we see things differently. We must be compassionate with them too. We just don’t buy-in.

Living with equanimity and compassion under God’s Arky would mean never consciously or unconsciously buying the “whole package” of any worldly arky’s mission, principles, rules, or advice. Instead we would try to see clearly, in an unbiased way, what the arky along with its hierarchy and rules actually does and how that affects people and the rest of the world. We ask whether or not any part of the arky or its actions are consistent with CA. When it is we can go along with it on an instance-by-instance basis. When it is not, we don’t “go along to get along,” and we may need to end our association with that arky regardless of personal consequences.

This, of course is not at all easy. It takes a lot of practice, honesty with ourselves and others, and support from our like-minded Christian community.

More important, it takes a reordering of our minds so we can see clearly with astute awareness and discernment – again a very tall order for most of us because we’ve spent our entire lives living according to what the arkies tell us while abusing our own psyches in the process.

I have found insight meditation practice in combination with deep prayer to be extremely helpful in gaining some amount of clarity in discerning my reactions and responses to the arkies and my personal relationships as well. Without this practice I’m not sure I’d be able to attempt it at all.

To close out this ramble, I’d like to add that I believe Christian Anarchy directly supports Christian simple living. Most of our self-centered consumer behavior is actually based on the messages and values the various arkies have fed us, and getting past those arky assumptions makes it much easier to live authentic, simple lives that are closer to Jesus’ teachings, and doing so without rancor or bitterness toward the world of the arkies.

God’s peace.

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• Christian Anarchy , Consumer Culture and Economics , Coping With Consumer Culture , Faith and Politics , Meditation and Prayer
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admin April 4th, 2010

Resurrection Sunday, 2010

Wonderful revelation this Easter morning in, of all places, The Washington Post business section!

Michelle Singletary, in The Color of Money column, reviewed a new book by Gail Blanke entitled Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life, (Springboard Press, $13.99) which of course I haven’t read yet, but will shortly.

The point of the book is that much of the stuff we have (junk and clutter, savings in the bank and mental junk as well), not only doesn’t make us more secure, as we have been taught, but rather when we lose these things as we inevitably will at some point, it causes us to feel very insecure, sometimes to the point of crumbling if what we lose is important enough.

All the while we are collecting and maintaining this stuff we are not free. We are prisoners to it because of the debt it creates in order to buy and maintain it, the pressure to make money to support it, striving to make more money to get out of our increasing debt or, worse, buying even more security blankies (my term) to bolster our sagging egos.  Then of course there is the need for either more space to keep it in, or suffer a loss of living space as we give it over to storage, not to mention having to live with our irritation, stress, and possible depression around having to live in the midst of it all. It gets in our way and slows us down.

On the flip side, you probably won’t be surprised to learn, when, as Gail tells us, we get rid of all those useless security blankies we miraculously find that we not only feel just as secure without them, we actually feel more secure because we are free of it and the burdens it creates for us. Getting rid of it frees us to begin finding out who we are or who we want to be, since we may not know who we or God wants us to be because we’ve been hiding behind our stuff, lo these many years.

Gail says we should throw away 50 things because throwing away our blankies is a cumulative experience in which success at throwing things away breeds still more success and leads to more and even joyful throwing away – our power over our stuff grows while our self-esteem and freedom grows along with it. We also begin to realize the real value of things, not the value we fantasize it will give us before buying it.

I won’t go into the details Michelle Singletary lays out in her review about how this all works because I want to get to the part about my Easter simple living revelation.

Simple Living Easter Resurrection

Easter is about resurrection and new life for all of us, and Lent is about sacrifice or “giving up.” Christian simple livers understand that living simply with less stuff opens a door to new life that is not contingent on physical stuff, and that new life becomes fuller as we deepen our commitment to living a life as much for others as ourselves.

Giving things up for Lent should not be an exercise in self-flagellation just for the sake of experiencing pain or loss. Instead it is intended to be a time of growth in which we re-discover ourselves by getting rid of the things in our lives that separate us from God and from others. For most of us that would mean our stuff and our irrational emotional attachment to it.

So, here’s my revelation, and I wish I had had it a couple months ago: The throwing out of 50 things would be an excellent Lenten discipline which would not only teach us something important about who we are, our relationship to God and to others, but would do something concrete and necessary for our neighbors everywhere by decreasing the size of our ecological footprints, and would allow us to give our stuff to those who need it much more than we do.

Then, Easter morning, we can wildly celebrate Jesus’ resurrection right along with our own. We will have completed our own Lenten hard work and will emerge from the tomb right along with Jesus.

There could hardly be a better Easter than that!

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• Consumer Culture and Economics , Environment , How To's , Living More Simply , Psychology , Spiritual Development
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