[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] How to be Free

[Bill Totten]

Going off your trolley

Still writing to your MP and trusting in Jamie Oliver to reform
supermarket culture? The time has come to choose another aisle.

by Tom Hodgkinson

The Ecologist (December 2007 / January 2008)


Now here is an ecological pub quiz question: who wrote the following
phrase and when? 'Many people are just awakening to the inexorable
destruction which present production trends imply for the environment'.
If it sounds like an editorial from last week's Guardian, think again.
It was in fact written by one of the most brilliant thinkers of the 20th
century, Ivan Illich. And he wrote it in 1970, in his book Deschooling
Society. That's 37 years ago.

Reading Illich's words makes me feel uneasy. It seems people have been
issuing warnings about pollution, over-consumption of oil, impending
environmental catastrophe and all the rest of it for decades. I reflect:
if Illich and other forward-thinkers like E F Schumacher, like
self-sufficiency guru John Seymour and indeed the organic gardener
Lawrence D Hills were all saying this stuff in the 1970s, what hope is
there for us today? Surely things have grown much worse since then? On
Sunday, for example, I very nearly found myself in our local Tesco -
horror! - as we were trying to find a copy of The Beano for my son. We
took one look at the traffic jams in the car park and mercifully turned
around. There were also giant queues at the Tesco's petrol station.
Everywhere - on a Sunday - cars were dutifully streaming into the
supermarket, like ants towards the nest.

If you go back further, you will find that similar sorts of warnings
were being issued by William Cobbett in the 1820s, William Morris in the
1890s and D H Lawrence in the 1920s, among many, many others. But still
the machine keeps turning and we suckers slurp its poisonous and
debilitating milk. It seems that we are shopping and spending more than
ever. People hurl themselves at the temples of consumerism; they undergo
absurd discomforts in order to unload money they've not yet earned into
the pockets of supermarket shareholders. Sheer insanity!

We know what the answer is: simply, it is to stop. Stop consuming. Stop
bustling around with our silly self-importance. Stop moaning. Stop
interfering. Stop working. Stop believing. We need to recreate our lives
and become dynamic participants and creators, rather than passive
consumers. That's obvious. The 'Thing', however, as William Cobbett
called it, seems to grow more powerful by the day. It seems the warnings
of the great thinkers of the past and of today are going unheeded.

I think one problem is that people in the so-called ecological movement
make a big mistake when they try to deal with governments and big
business. I wince when I read of a Green campaigner still recommending
an absurd technique such as writing to your MP, or talking about how new
laws need to be introduced to save the planet. And sweet Jamie Oliver
seems to believe he can make Sainsbury's change its ways. But government
and big business by their very nature - government likes doing things;
big business likes making more money - are unecological and anti-life.
Their very structures are wasteful and environmentally damaging. So by
talking to big business and government you feed the system and nourish
it; you give it air. Therefore instead of petitioning big business and
government to change their ways, they are best ignored. Instead you have
to set up new ways of doing things alongside the existing ones.

Some people I meet in the ecological movement could just as easily be in
orthodox politics. They think they are right and want to impose their
ideas on other people. They are terribly busy and rushed. As philosopher
Raoul Vaneigem warns, however: 'All ideologies are totalitarian'. Pigs
turn into men. Today's saviour is tomorrow's Lenin or Cromwell.

Some days, things look gloomy. Despite the warnings of the prophets,
millions of us are still shopping hard. Of the few who resist, many
appear to be working with the enemy. On other days, though, you read
about a community orchard or can be strangely cheered by the success of
Jamie Oliver's new book on the good life. Finally, whether or not things
change on a wider scale, you know you are living your own life well, and
that is surely the first step.

_____

Tom Hodgkinson is the Editor of The Idler (http://idler.co.uk/) and
author of the book How to be Free (Hamish Hamilton, 2006).

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/