Month: February 2020

All change starts with the present moment.

All intentional change involves a comparison between a current state and a desired state that is imagined to exist in some future now. Unfortunately, the comparison itself can serve as a potent obstacle to change: the gulf between reality and desire can seem insurmountable. What is frequently lost in this comparison is that the space between the present moment and the imagined future now is not an empty void. It is a rich and abundant landscape, infinitely furnished, and filled to the brim with present moments just like this one.

The present moment is all we ever have, and all future present moments are grounded in what happens right now. So, we should act right now, in the present moment, as if the desired state has already been achieved. Some Buddhists believe the very moment that you sit, cross your legs, and assume a meditative posture, you have already at that point achieved enlightenment—the end is not something that can be separated from the beginning. And there is this, one of my favorite quotes from Nietzsche:

“If someone obstinately and for a long time wants to appear something it is in the end hard for him to be anything else. The profession of almost every man [sic], even that of the artist, begins with hypocrisy, with an imitation from without, with a copying of what is most effective. He who is always wearing the mask of a friendly countenance must finally acquire the power over benevolent moods without which the impression of friendliness cannot be obtained—and finally these acquire power over him, he is benevolent.”

OK, so that really isn’t a word—but it should be.

Ad hominem attacks are the weapon of choice for those who lack a strong counterargument. Among the simplest of ad hominem approaches is the appeal to hypocrisy. And when it comes to promoting primitivism and the re-inhabiting of authentically human forms of life, when it comes to refusing to worship at the sacred altar of institutional dependency, when it comes to technological heresy, when it comes to blaspheming the false orthodoxy of progress, the charge of hypocrisy is an easy one to make: to criticize civilization while simultaneously enjoying its many accoutrement benefits seems clearly hypocritical.

But there are no logical teeth to such a charge. First, even if I am a hypocrite, that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. That’s the problem with ad hominem arguments in general: the validity of what is said is independent of the character of the person speaking. I might in fact be a raging lunatic (and there is no shortage of evidence for this!). Even so, I categorically deny the charge of hypocrisy. Merely acting in ways that appear to be inconsistent with what I say is not sufficient. In order to be a hypocrite, consistency needs to be an actual option.

As an analogy, suppose a person is convicted and imprisoned for a crime she didn’t commit; does obeying the prison guards and eating prison food qualify as an admission of guilt? Of course not. And neither do I need to live a cellphone-free existence in a cave in the mountains to be able to point out the dehumanizing effects of civilization. The fact of the matter is that it is nearly impossible for me (or any of the civilized) to step outside of the civilized order in any truly meaningful way. I really have no choice but to play along, at least minimally. To do otherwise would mean unbearable social isolation if not an immediate violent death. The charge of hypocrisy simply has no traction.

The charge of heresy, however, cannot be so easily dismissed.

The shape of the space around me makes a difference. From the base of a ravine, the earth appears to contract, the trees lean inward from the ridge, threatening to shut out the sky, and the feeling is a strange composite of vulnerability and strength.

A short time later, perched on the crest of a hill, the land falls away from me in the distance, the vulnerability is gone, and my thoughts move quickly toward the horizon, seeking the very limits of vision.

My childhood was spent in a broad river valley, where the slopes and hillsides were overlaid with asphalt and the view was framed by windows and obscured by rooftops and powerlines, and the principle feeling was of insecurity and apprehension. The meat of my adult life, the muscular middle, was embedded in repurposed wetland prairie, where the land was annually scoured clean of all life, and then forced into surrogacy, an unwilling receptacle of the relentless mechanical impulses of corporate industrial agriculture, where the only distinction among directions was the shape of your shadow, and the feeling was of boundless and accelerating emptiness.

Where I sit right now is an amalgam of each of these. I am surrounded by wetland repurposed to accommodate highways and apartments and condominiums, sitting toward the top of a hillside, with my view framed by a balcony rail and obscured by chimneys. Although the bulk of my horizon is the roof of the building across the pond—like the looming edge of a ravine—through a small gap between the eves I can look down on the back of a crow hopping along the crest of the rooftop of the next building beyond.

My thoughts become black and feathery and start to move with her, seeking the limits of vision, using her eyes as proxies.