Society
Nations Fall, Communities Rise
Saturday, January 28th, 2017: Problems & Solutions, Society.
In childhood, our schools taught us the version of history told by the victorious conquerors: the myth of progress from savage, superstitious tribes to civilized, scientific democracies; the heroic quests of explorers, colonists and pioneers seeking freedom from oppression and a better life; the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, Lincoln freeing the slaves, modern medicine conquering disease, the democratic Allies saving the world from fascism, the environmental movement saving the planet, and science and technology making our lives safer and easier and liberating us to seek our highest potential as individuals.
Now that we’re adults, the corporate news media – romanticized as the “free press” – demand our full, uninterrupted attention to the President and his national power structure, threatening that if we turn away, we risk apocalypse. And urban consumers, dependent on the massive support systems governed by those talking heads, believe in the threat. The media predict what consumers want to hear, and consumers rejoice. Then the media report the opposite, and the shocked and saddened consumers return to the same sources, now seeking solace, enlightenment, and guidance. Consumers come to believe they have actual, important relationships – however dysfunctional – with strangers they will never meet, who are known only as talking heads on the screen.
Peaceful societies like the Amish of North America, the Piaroa of South America, the Ju/’hoansi of Africa, the Rural Thai of Southeast Asia, and the Ifaluk of the South Pacific, are burdened with none of these misapprehensions. They know their existence is always subject to disruption by external powers beyond their control, but they remain self-sufficient, independent, and vigilant, and they have learned to adapt to crises peacefully, avoiding conflict and migrating away from it when necessary.
Likewise, minorities with a history of persecution know better than to depend on kings or presidents for survival or salvation. The self-sufficiency of the North American Anabaptists is the result of generations of violent persecution in Europe. Mormons encourage self-reliance and often require their children to learn indigenous survival skills. And while the Black Panthers were seen by the centralized power structure as violent revolutionaries, the majority of their work consisted of peacefully providing social, health, and subsistence services to their local communities.
Consumers’ dependence on the centralized nation-state derives from their belief in the nation-state as a bastion of security and stability, and their fear of chaos and apocalypse should it collapse. But this is a myth perpetuated by the power structure. A reality check on history shows that the nation-state is continually destroying itself and its environment. The United States was founded in violence: the conquest of Native Americans, a revolution against the British, the establishment of borders and the defense of them. The story of its growth to a world power is the story of traumatic conversion of resilient rural subsistence communities to cities full of isolated, vulnerable consumers, and the continual, ongoing destruction of healthy natural habitat and its replacement by toxic industrial tracts and urban sprawl. Consumers remain mostly unaware of this, since they seldom leave the city and are habituated to artificial environments.
During the Third Reich and World War II, the democratic Allies allowed fascism to spread and failed to prevent the Holocaust – nor did they save the world from fascism; they increased the devastation with a world war and millions more deaths, while the Nazi regime and the Japanese empire self-destructed through hubris, militarism, and overextension. Likewise, the democratic nation-states of Western Civilization pursued a policy of imperialism leading to the Rwandan genocide, and after more than a century of “progress” and “enlightenment,” the same nation-states failed to prevent it or stop it while it was happening.
The myth of societal collapse and apocalypse stems from the misrepresentation of the European “Dark Ages,” the misnamed period after the collapse of the Roman Empire which was in reality a Golden Age of local freedom and autonomy after centuries of oppression by the imperial nation-state. Citizens of modern democratic nation-states blame the ongoing failure of Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria on religion and superstition, whereas these failed states are themselves the artificial inventions of the European democracies. The destruction, misery, and refugee crises resulting from these societal collapses demonstrate the ultimate vulnerability of urban populations and the danger of depending on centralized, hierarchical power structures.
When the citizens of Western nations begin to sense their own vulnerability and begin to fear the apocalypse, they manifest their naiveté in dysfunctional movements like libertarianism and prepping – fallacies common to even the wealthiest and most powerful citizens. These ideologies result from historical Anglo-European competitive individualism and widespread ignorance of anthropology and ecology, holistic sciences which reveal the superiority of communal societies. When centralized societies collapse, people who selfishly hoard resources and weapons to defend their families are doomed to repeat the cycles of self-destructive violence, whereas people who cooperate and peacefully nurture their local communities, adopting the lessons of the peaceful societies, are likely to thrive.
How the Middle Class Destroys the World
Tuesday, January 31st, 2017: Problems & Solutions, Society.
The Accountability Problem
You depend on many resources, products, and services to survive and stay healthy and happy: clean air and water, nutritious food, clothing, shelter, heating, cooling, communication, transportation, healthcare, and security. Do you know where all these things ultimately come from?
If not, how do you know whether someone or someplace is being harmed to provide for your basic needs?
The urbanized middle class – the bourgeoisie of Marxist theory – is considered the foundation of stable, peaceful society in the modern nation-state, and it’s what the lower classes aspire to. I was raised to join the middle class, and all my peers are raising their kids to be middle class – who wouldn’t?
But whereas the foundation of traditional societies is the local workers who provide basic needs, the modern middle class consists of consumers who depend on a global network of products and services that is so complex it is virtually untraceable and unknowable – and hence unaccountable.
In fact, you don’t know whether someone or someplace is being harmed to make your lifestyle possible.
How the Middle Class Destroys Society
Intimidation, Punishment, and Slavery
The security of the middle class depends on a nuclear arsenal capable of rendering the planet uninhabitable, a global military empire intimidating and sometimes practicing covert warfare against foreign civilians, a largely covert arms industry dominated by U.S.-based multinational corporations, and a domestic security apparatus resulting in mass incarceration of citizens, who are largely hidden away from public access in high-security prisons.
Military bases, defending the economic empire of American consumers, are imposed on the populations of much less powerful, economically disadvantaged societies, resulting in intimidation, economic dependency, and resentment.
Defending the middle class: Pakistani children killed by U.S. drone strike:
The U.S.-dominated global arms industry profits from violent conflict and human suffering:
U.S.-made weapons commandeered by ISIS:
Throughout history, traditional communities practiced restorative justice, which helps the victim and heals society. But middle class consumers depend on the punitive justice system of the modern nation-state, which harms society without helping the victims. The punitive justice system and its prison network reinforce ethnic and racial inequality, perpetuate domestic slavery, and foster social dysfunction.
Growth of the U.S. prison system during the past 40 years:
Work crew at Angola Prison, Louisiana:
Economic Imperialism
The middle class consumer lifestyle is sustained by mass-produced products and services made affordable by large corporations and long-distance distribution networks exploiting economic inequality. Products are manufactured, and services are directly provided, by blue-collar laborers whose labor is generally valued far less than that of middle-class consumers, and who live in poor neighborhoods with a lower quality of life. Middle class waste products are transported to, and imposed on, poor neighborhoods for processing and disposal.
Since major products like food, fuel, clothing, phones, computers, appliances, cars, and building materials are typically manufactured in poorer foreign countries from components and raw materials which in turn come from other, even poorer foreign countries, workers sometimes live and work in virtual – or even actual – slavery. And the supply chain for consumer products is virtually untraceable.
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Raw materials for consumer products needed by the middle class come from distant rural communities all over the planet, where workers and their families endure dangerous conditions, toxic environments, war, or slavery:
Mining for the electronics industry in the Congo:
The urban middle class depends on services – housekeeping, childcare, food service, transportation, repair and maintenance, waste disposal, etc. – provided by lower-class workers living in poor, often gang-dominated, neighborhoods.
Gang members in East Los Angeles:
Social Division, Fragmentation, and Isolation
A college education, one of the defining requirements of the middle class lifestyle, is intended to lead to a professional career, freeing the consumer from manual labor.
Thus the primary function of “higher education” is to train young people to become office workers – people who work indoors at a computer, an inherently unhealthy artificial environment – and to condition them for a consumer lifestyle which is dependent on a disadvantaged lower class of manual laborers and service providers and the destructive global network of manufacturing and distribution. Higher education is an integral part of the vicious cycles in which dominant societies deteriorate from generation to generation.
Middle class youth are generally expected to leave home for higher education, then to migrate again, possibly multiple times, in pursuit of a professional career. The move to higher education deprives them of their roots and deprives their family and home community of their social services; henceforth they are “floaters,” generally uncommitted to any local, face-to-face community. They rarely get to know their neighbors, and become temporary members of cliques of similarly isolated peers, without the intergenerational commitment and accountability that ties real communities together.
Technologically-assisted communications – email, texting, voice phone, and social media – likewise encourage the dispersion of individuals from their families and communities of origin, by allowing an impoverished form of remote interaction that takes the place of face-to-face interaction. Without the support of extended family and a tight-knit community, urban consumers fall prey to stress disorders and mental health problems such as depression, self-medicating and enriching the multinational pharmaceutical corporations. Thus are communities fragmented and disempowered, and individuals isolated and rendered vulnerable, by education, mobility, and communications media.
How the Middle Class Destroys Natural Habitats and Ecosystems
Habitat Destruction
The media have taught urban consumers that climate change is the biggest threat to our environment. But habitat destruction, which often results in species extinction, is the primary form of ecological damage resulting from the middle class consumer lifestyle. Climate change is only one long-term form of habitat destruction – other forms are much more catastrophic in the near term.
Urban Sprawl
Urban sprawl, providing housing for the middle class and the blue-collar workers they depend on, is one of the most extreme forms of habitat destruction, in which productive ecosystems are completely destroyed and replaced by machines and impermeable surfaces which concentrate wastes and toxic materials, increasing erosion and spreading the damage to the surrounding areas.
Since cities are dependent on a network of infrastructure delivering resources from the surrounding countryside and other distant trading centers, their damage extends outward globally to infrastructure and industry located out of sight and out of mind.
Industrial Wastelands
Industrial sites such as dams, mines, commodity farms, and factories, created to provide resources for consumers, also completely destroy productive natural ecosystems, replacing them with concentrations of toxic materials.
Tesla “gigafactory” destroyed a large area of wildlife habitat in the Nevada desert:
Infrastructure Barriers
The infrastructure required to deliver resources to urban areas and facilitate communication and mobility between them results in transportation and communications corridors which become toxic wastelands and barriers to wildlife.
Toxic Innovation, Toxic Materials
The continual improvement of middle class comfort and convenience through technological innovation results in a short product life cycle and rapid obsolescence. When obsolete products are discarded, few are recycled, and many, such as batteries and electronics, add toxic materials to the environment. Innovation is incredibly wasteful.
…high-tech products are usually composed of low-quality materials–that is, cheap plastics and dyes–globally sourced from the lowest-cost provider, which may be halfway around the world. This means that even substances banned for use in the United States and Europe can reach this country via products and parts made elsewhere….They can be assembled into, say, your treadmill, which will then emit the “banned” substance as you exercise. (William McDonough & Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle)
One of the most revolutionary scientific inventions of the past century was disposable containers which were intended to be dumped in landfills after a single use. As time went by, these containers came to be made almost exclusively of plastics, which take centuries or even millenia to degrade. Since the 1950s, the use of plastics has accelerated, especially by the middle class, in the form of food packaging, shopping bags, clothing, storage containers, disposable water bottles, phones, toys, furniture, appliances, cars, etc.
As these items age and erode, often imperceptibly, into the environment, they break down into microscopic particles or “microplastics” which spread throughout aquatic and ocean environments and are ingested by wildlife, interfering with animal and plant life cycles in unpredictable ways. The microplastics catastrophe is just beginning and may eclipse other problems we are now more concerned about.
Microplastics disperse in the aquatic environment:
Microplastics damage aquatic life:
Toxic Mobility
Technological advances in human mobility – travel and distribution by land, water, sea, and air – ensure the rapid spread of disease and invasive species, accelerating ecosystem damage and habitat destruction worldwide. Most destructive species are spread accidentally, but many are introduced intentionally: rabbits in Australia as a source of meat, pythons in Florida and bullfrogs in the American West by irresponsible pet owners.
This map of global ship traffic shows how invasive species have been spread from continent to continent historically, as nations and empires have used technology to enrich themselves and subject native ecosystems to collateral damage:
Container ships delivering products and raw materials to American consumers also bring destructive invasive species:
Scientists estimate that technologically-enhanced human mobility has historically delivered 4,300 destructive invasive species to the U.S., ranging from Burmese pythons driving native species extinct in Florida to nutria destroying native habitat in Louisiana, from feral hogs devastating ecosystems in the South to European starlings starving native birds nationwide. The economic cost of damage by invasive species in the United States is estimated at $120 billion per year and will continue to grow as a result of technological innovation increasing human mobility.
I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 30 years, and during that period, like most residents, I came to accept a landscape dominated by invasive plant species as “nature.” Invasive eucalyptus trees covering the hills, invasive ice plant along the coast, invasive yellow star thistle blanketing the inland meadows. It was only after I moved to southwest New Mexico, far from the coast and its ports, that I began to experience relatively intact, and far more diverse, native ecosystems.
Cheatgrass, an Old World species introduced to North America in the 19th century, has spread across most of the U.S., displacing native plants, encouraging destructive wildfires, reducing the nutrient quality of rangelands, and impoverishing native ecosystems.
Contemporary distribution of destructive Asian cheatgrass:
Rangeland devastated by fire after cheatgrass invasion:
Asian zebra mussels have been spread across North America by boaters since the 1980s:
Crayfish encrusted with zebra mussels:
Energy Consumption
Technological innovation and consumers’ insatiable demand for gadgets ensures ever-accelerating consumption of energy, resulting in increasing destruction of natural habitat for mining, manufacturing, and the siting of energy production. Fossil fuels and nuclear energy require oil fields, mines, raw materials and manufacturing for plant components, industrial sites for energy plants, and disposal sites for toxic waste. Solar and wind energy require mines, raw materials and manufacturing for plant components, industrial sites for energy plants, and disposal sites for toxic waste.
This solar power plant in the Mojave Desert destroyed many square miles of wildlife habitat and continues to kill thousands of birds and pollinators:
False Hopes of the Middle Class
Politics
The centralized nation-state is made possible by a hierarchy of wealth and power. It functions primarily to enrich and empower elites, and is inherently destructive. And when the fundamental institutions of society – the ecological and social values and practices – are destructive, as described above – then political reform is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Middle-class society depends on the global economic and military empire maintained by the elites, and to give these up would be class suicide for either group. To paraphrase Karl Marx, politics is opium for the masses.
Green Energy and Electric Cars
So-called “green” energy is an industry like any other. Its function is not to save the planet, its function is to enable middle class consumers to continue consuming more and more energy with their devices – devices which rapidly become obsolescent and are discarded and replaced, devices whose operations add waste heat to the environment, devices which concentrate toxic materials in the environment, devices which harm society in many ways, some of which have been described above.
Electric cars are machines assembled from thousands of components whose global supply chain is untraceable, via a manufacturing process and distribution network which are energy-intensive and wasteful just like that used to produce conventional fossil-fueled cars. The function of electric cars is not to save the planet, it’s to perpetuate the already destructive mobility of middle class consumers while making billionaires even richer.
Recycling
As technological innovation accelerates, more waste is produced. The vast majority of our waste is not recycled, and when it is, recycling degrades the quality of the materials. It also requires more energy and labor on top of that required to manufacture the original products. So recycling increases our already destructive consumption of energy.
As we have noted, most recycling is actually downcycling; it reduces the quality of a material over time…the high-quality steel used in automobiles…is “recycled” by melting it down with other car parts, including copper from cables in the car, and the paint and plastic coatings…Downcycling can actually increase contamination of the biosphere. (William McDonough & Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle)
Space Colonization
Some tech billionaires, and many engineers and science fiction fans, believe that we should, and will, save the planet we’re destroying by abandoning it to colonize other worlds. This fantasy results from their ignorance of ecology and human social behavior. Who gets to emigrate? Middle class American consumers? Agribusiness billionaires? Mexican farm workers? ISIS militants? It’s our dysfunctional behavior that’s destroying the earth – transplanting that behavior to another world solves nothing.
Even if some colonization happens, it won’t be sustainable. A healthy environment for humans isn’t engineered from scratch, by “terraforming” another planet. It evolves with the participation of uncountable wild organisms in a terrestrial ecosystem, and humans adapt to it just like their nonhuman partners. This is the only planet we have, and it will survive with or without us.
There is some talk in science and popular culture about colonizing other planets, such as Mars or the moon….But the idea also provides rationalization for destruction, an expression of our hope that we’ll find a way to save ourselves if we trash our planet. To this speculation, we would respond: If you want the Mars experience, go to Chile and live in a typical copper mine. There are no animals, the landscape is hostile to humans, and it would be a tremendous challenge. Or, for a moonlike effect, go to the nickel mines of Ontario. (William McDonough & Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle)
To me, the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable – the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self-inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth or heal our sick planet is evidence of our immense capacity for self-delusion. Rather, we need to protect us from ourselves. (Lyn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet)
How Local Providers Renew the World
Producers Not Consumers
Dominant, large-scale, centralized societies are destructive by nature. They have their own life cycle and exist primarily for the short-term benefit of the rich and powerful. They are not successfully managed or reformed for the benefit of local communities and ecosystems. The best we can do is minimize our dependence on them, transitioning from globally-dependent consumers to locally-accountable providers.
The best we can do for the earth and its people is to become successful producers and providers of basic needs for our local communities, conserving and re-using as much as possible of what we do consume, learning to do all this sustainably, and sharing what we learn so that future generations will succeed as well as us.
Local Heroes
Wherever we live, we can usually find people and organizations that are focusing their efforts on providing locally for local needs: farms, food co-ops, childcare centers, healthcare clinics, restorative justice services, churches, etc. These are the groups and people we should support and emulate, to rebuild our communities and thus take the load off the rest of the world.
Small-town farmer in New Mexico shows school kids how corn is re-seeded:
Urban youth learn to serve their community with restorative justice in Kansas City:
Traditional aboriginal skills are needed by the community to adapt to environmental crises, from crop failure to fire, flood, and war.
Students learn to process meat from an animal they killed on an indigenous skills course in Utah:
Peaceful Societies
While our dominant society destroys itself, there remain many little-known peaceful societies that offer the best hope for a sustainable future of humanity. These societies exist in the margins where they have been more or less successful at resisting the dominant society’s destructive impacts, perpetuating time-tested traditional practices and adapting to crises while our society continues to innovate and engineer itself to death. They are our best teachers.
Amish farmers in North America resist the destructive effects of technological innovation:
Unlike American middle-class consumers, the Piaroa of South America manage their natural resources communally and sustainably:
Instead of leaving their families to learn to be office workers and consumers, Ju/’hoansi children of southern Africa join their parents on foraging expeditions, learning to be providers for their community:
Like whales and other ecosystem partners, the Ifaluk of the South Pacific fish communally:
The Original Organic Abstraction
Saturday, May 13th, 2017: 2017 Trips, Indigenous Cultures, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips, Society.
In my earliest childhood, I was surrounded by the organic abstraction of midcentury textile patterns:
When I started experimenting with Sumi ink on paper in 2011, organic abstraction flowed spontaneously from my brush:
Then, a few days ago, I visited perhaps the most interesting rock art in the Mojave desert, in a lush canyon oasis on the sacred mountain of the Colorado River tribes, where their creator god began his journey down the river. During my visit, I encountered the kitsch of white peoples’ religion, I picked up their abandoned plastic trash, and I convinced an Anglo family to stop desecrating the site with their loud pop music.
Wednesday, May 17th, 2017: 2017 Trips, Colorado Plateau, Indigenous Cultures, Regions, Road Trips, Society.
Art on the Rimrock
From the Mojave Desert, I traveled northeast to the Colorado Plateau, where I camped among pinyon and juniper near the rim of a sandstone canyon. My campsite faced the setting sun across a broad, shallow basin blanketed with sagebrush.
In the morning, I drove farther into the back country, passing prairie dog colonies with their popup lookouts, and followed a trail down from the top of a mesa to a rimrock escarpment. Hundreds of feet below, a creek opaque with grey-green sediment raged, carrying water down from snow on distant peaks.
Near the end of the escarpment, ancient people had made pictures in the sandstone. These pictures are attributed to farmers from a thousand or more years ago who lived in earth houses, whose remains are found all across Utah, often under modern towns and cities.
Village in the Canyon
During completion of an interstate highway, a boy who lived in a canyon in its path told his father about ruins he’d seen on a hill that was being attacked by bulldozers. Eventually, the bulldozers were temporarily halted and a team of archaeologists surveyed and excavated the hill, finding the largest known village site of the mysterious farmers who are believed to have created much of the prehistoric rock art in Utah.
After the village site and its house ruins were excavated and artifacts removed, construction of the interstate highway resumed, almost completely destroying the hill and its ancient village. In partial compensation, the state opened a museum to store and display artifacts and educate the public about the vanished community.
The Canyon
The Art
Anglo settlers have always known this canyon to be rich in rock art.
The People
Apart from the rock art attributed to them, the ancient farmers are known for their earth houses, which archaeologists misleadingly call “pit houses.” This term reflects the Anglo-European bias in favor of technologically advanced societies that attempt to “rise above” nature and dominate the earth. Anglo archaeologists considered the ancient farmers more “primitive” than their Anasazi neighbors who built cliff dwellings far above the ground; in comparison, these primitive farmers seemed to be living underground in pits like animals.
But as I noted last fall in Closing the Circles, these “pit houses” were actually mostly above-ground, and both spacious and comfortable. Unlike the “pueblos” of the Anasazi and modern Indians of the Southwest, these earth houses were not defensive, indicating that their populations had achieved a peaceful existence. The boxy, densely populated “pueblos” with their dark, cramped rooms would more accurately be termed “fortified apartment blocks,” built and inhabited by a society that was out-of-balance, and fearful, like ours.
But most importantly, the earth houses of the ancient farmers were supremely adapted to their environment. These people did not try to engineer their habitat on an industrial scale like the Anasazi – or like our own society.
Of course, the best evidence of this society’s success would be seen not in their houses and other artifacts, but in themselves, their gardens, and the health of the natural ecosystems they inhabited, all of which seem to be lost to us now. But maybe not completely lost – modern tribes may be directly descended from the ancient villagers, and recent excavations in other parts of this area are showing that some of the ancient farmers’ fields and irrigation networks were used continuously into historic times, when they were appropriated by early Anglo settlers.
As the museum exhibit asks, “What can these ancient people teach us?” Unlike us, they put the well-being of the community above that of the individual. They lived in harmony with nature. And instead of trying to control nature, they adapted their way of life to changing conditions in a challenging environment.
As a result, they thrived for a thousand years in this place, sustaining a larger population than we do there, even with our advanced technology and vast wealth. But, also unlike us, they sustained their traditions of hunting and gathering, so that when conditions changed dramatically, instead of fighting nature, they could temporarily set aside their village farming way of life and became nomadic foragers and hunters.
The Girl
For me, the centerpiece of the museum was the multi-media story of a farmer girl who had died at the age of seventeen. From her damaged skeleton, forensic scientists had reconstructed the girl’s appearance and her likely life history, archaeologists had added cultural and societal context, a sculptor had created a life-size likeness of the girl, and a girl from a nearby modern tribe had voiced her long-forgotten story.
I’ve taken the liberty of creating this abridged version of the girl’s story, omitting some technical details and modern perspectives that can be found in the full museum version:
The Modern Nation
Anglo homesteaders came in advance of the modern nation, but within a century the nation had caught up. Its bulldozers razed the hill of the village, and its freeway paved the floodplain where the villages kept their farms, so that now the valley and its once-bustling community is merely a passing glimpse from the closed windows of the racing metal boxes rushing urban Americans from city to distant city.
I was told in the museum that Native Americans in the surrounding areas were outraged, and a native elder placed a curse on the Department of Transportation, leading to a series of mishaps and tragedies, and pleas from the government that the curse be removed. And later, laws were passed to prevent this sort of cultural destruction. But laws can be overturned, and arrogant, domineering nations seldom last as long as this community of People Who Adapted.
Homeward Bound
On my way home, I stopped in one of my favorite mountain ranges, at the far eastern edge of the territory of my favorite Indians, the heirs of the ancient farmers. I pushed my little truck dangerously through a raging stream to a clearing under tall green cottonwoods, below a cliff of layered sandstone.
When I got out of the truck, I discovered the ground was covered with shelled pine nuts. The modern Indians had used this very spot to process their harvest, a harvest they’ve sustained for thousands of years!
Crossing the last range of mountains toward home, I drove through a sleet storm at 8,500′:
Wisdom vs. Happiness: A Eulogy for James Sayre
Wednesday, October 10th, 2018: People, Society.
House in Rockridge
In summer 2011, I had my last phone conversation with my old friend James. He was ten years older than me, and had had a profound influence on me when we first met, more than thirty years earlier, so that I came to consider him part of my small circle of honored elders and mentors.
In the early 2000s, James had moved into the dilapidated house in Oakland’s Rockridge district where his younger brother had committed suicide, and within a few years James had contracted diabetes. The interior of his house had become a dusty maze of clutter, combining odds and ends he’d picked up at yard sales with stacked boxes of the books he’d self-published but couldn’t sell. There was only a narrow path between the clutter allowing movement between rooms. When I visited, we sat in a tiny cleared space in front of the fireplace, as James broke up pieces of old furniture to burn, to take the edge off the chill, since he was no longer using the house’s heating system.
In keeping with his lifelong practice of “voluntary simplicity,” James refused to fix things when they broke. The kitchen sink leaked, so he’d taken to washing dishes in the bathtub. His focus was on the small yard outside, the tiny patch in front and the larger, fenced area in back. There, he cultivated a profusion of exotic vegetation, including his beloved Australian eucalyptus, a jungle that was gradually engulfing the house and hiding it from the street. Some of it was edible – he had a rapidly expanding blackberry patch.
The mainstay of James’s diet had always been the heavy unleavened bread, full of nuts and dried fruit, that he had baked as long as I’d known him. On his weekly forays to libraries and yard sales by bike and public transit, he carried chunks of this bread in his pockets, so that he was always snacking for sustained energy instead of concentrating his intake at regular meals. Self-reliance and thrift were a family tradition, part of James’s DNA.
We’d both maintained regular contact over the years, through frequent emails, regular calls, and sporadic visits. I moved to New Mexico in 2006, and on my first visit back to the Bay Area, I called to arrange a visit.
When I showed up at James’s house, his parents’ old Buick was in the driveway, but there was no response to my knocks and shouts at the door. I kept trying for a half hour, then left. And shortly after I drove off, my cell phone rang. James apologized, saying that he no longer felt able to allow people into his house. He seemed embarrassed, but otherwise in good spirits.
We continued emailing and talking regularly, and James seemed a little more down, a little more discouraged, each time. His family were all dead, and he’d gradually lost touch with all his other friends – he got in an argument with the last of them, a former Stanford classmate who was a computer consultant in Berkeley, and stopped communicating. I was the last friend standing. By 2011, he admitted he was running out of the last of the money he’d inherited from his parents, and he didn’t know what he was going to do to survive. And after that last call in the summer, he stopped responding to my calls and emails. His web site went offline, and when I called a second or third time, his land line had been disconnected.
I called a friend who lived nearby and asked her to check out James’s house. She reported that there were young people living there now, so I really freaked out. I sent a letter to his address requesting information, but shortly afterward, I called his number again, and got his answering machine. And his web site was back online.
I continued to send email inquiries and leave occasional phone messages, and I downloaded his web site to my hard drive in case it went offline again. But I never heard from James after that.
I visited the Bay Area several times, always stopping at his house, pounding on the door and yelling his name. My neighborhood friend had apparently gone to the wrong address – James’s house never changed, always hidden behind a screen of vegetation, always silent, with the old Buick parked in the driveway. I was of two minds about harassing someone who’d chosen to be a recluse. Should I respect his decision and leave him alone? But I always left a note saying I missed him.
Every six months or so I did a Google search on his name and location. He continued with his practice of writing letters to the editors of the Berkeley Planet and San Francisco Chronicle, fighting capitalism, imperialism, and corruption, through 2012, but after that there was nothing. Finally, before visiting the Bay Area in 2018, I did an online tax search in county records and found that someone had paid a big supplemental tax at his address, indicating improvements to the property, which I knew James would’ve never done. A friend did a real estate search and found that his house had indeed been partially renovated, and it was listed for sale at $1.2 million.
We drove over, and a neighbor informed me that James had died a year earlier from complications of diabetes. I took BART to the Berkeley Court House and waited an hour to request probate records that ultimately put me in touch with James’s nephew, the son of his younger sister who had died much earlier.
Voluntary Simplicity
I met James because Pake, my best friend in grad school at Stanford, had met him earlier, and had stored his belongings in the attic of James’s group house while we were tramping through Mexico and Guatemala after finishing our studies. James let me store my stuff there, too, and when I returned months later, let me camp out in his attic. I came up with the idea of building a new room, an extension on the back of the house, and James thought it was a great idea. He showed me where to steal used lumber, late at night, from the site of a building that was being demolished a few blocks away.
James and I had both studied engineering at the graduate level at Stanford, but ten years before me, he’d dropped out to help organize anti-war and environmental movements. Like many in our society, James was addicted to politics, but he was also suspicious of those who seek or hold power, and was more comfortable with local, grass-roots, communal efforts. Politics on higher levels was a game to him, a spectator sport just as entertaining as baseball. He had an old black-and-white TV in his room and we roommates could hear him yelling behind his closed door, throughout the day and night, but we never knew if it was sports or politics that were setting him off. Whatever – he nudged me out of my long academic isolation, just as our world really seemed to be going crazy.
Within a few weeks after I moved in and finished building my room, there was the People’s Temple mass suicide, followed immediately by the Moscone/Milk assassination, and then the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown. James enlightened me about the shameful hidden history of our society that we’d never been taught in school, what Howard Zinn would summarize in his People’s History of the United States a few years later. The brutality of capitalism that made people poor and drove them into cults like the People’s Temple. The brutality of imperialism that had caused generations of suffering in Central America, with death squads, revolution, and civil war in our own time. James and I went to what Ralph Nader called the largest-ever anti-nuclear protest, in San Francisco’s Civic Center. My art and music changed to reflect the current events, and the history behind them, that James was educating me about.
James was a tall, dashing, long-haired hippie who looked like a swashbuckler out of Elizabethan times, but he introduced me and my friends to punk music and changed the course of my life. I’d grown up in a small, conservative farming community in the Midwest, and until I finished grad school, I remained uptight and inhibited, isolated from and oblivious to much of what was going on the world. James became my first guide to this new world. I remember when I first heard the Modern Lovers and the Ramones playing behind the door of his room, and got a history lesson on the Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop. The Sex Pistols followed shortly afterward, and there was no turning back.
Stealing lumber in our affluent suburb was only part of James’s larger program of sticking it to the Man, exploiting the loopholes of capitalism, and living simply and cheaply. He got me started dumpster diving for food at the upscale supermarket a couple blocks from our house, and within weeks I was getting most of my sustenance for free. There were now five of us living at the group house and rent was super cheap. James taught me and my friends his Book-of-the-Month Club scam. Using a transparently false name like Bill Melater, he’d join the club and receive a box full of free books and records “on approval” which he would immediately sell at local used bookstores, raising $100-$200. The club would then send invoices for a few months before giving up, and James would start over again under a new phony name. With a cheap enough lifestyle, you could live like this indefinitely.
Inspired by the news, the history, and the punk music James had turned me onto, I joined the post-punk arts underground. I rented a loft in San Francisco that my roommates and I – a group house inspired by James’s – turned into an underground arts center. James collected admission at my experimental band’s first show, and he was a frequent visitor at our loft throughout the 1980s as he came and went between his travels across the world.
From the beginning, even before I moved into James’s group house, I was the beneficiary of his torrents of correspondence. I have more letters and packets of clippings from James than from anyone else, including my family. For more than thirty years, James sent me postcards and letters continually, sometimes several times a week, from wherever in the world he happened to be, always signing them “Love, James.” He was interested in almost everything, and everywhere he went, he protested against corruption, capitalism, and imperialism. He collected folk and ethnic music and dubbed it from vinyl to cassette – I have James’s compilations of Tahitian music, Australian country and western, etc. etc.
To support my creative work, I’d landed a very flexible job with an engineering firm, and in the mid-80s when James needed more funds for travel, I hired him as a clerical assistant. There really wasn’t much for him to do, but he did it conscientiously and it allowed me to take more time off for my band. Later, as the digital and dotcom industries took off, he found work as a tech writer in Silicon Valley.
In the 1990s, his younger sister and brother died, and James met a new girlfriend who encouraged him to write and publish. His first book, on bird names, was well-received, so he wrote and published a second, on herbs, that resulted in neither reviews nor sales. That experience, and James’s frequent letters to the editors of local newspapers, inspired me to share my own writing for free, to sidestep the competitive, hierarchical culture of capitalism and consumerism and stop dreaming of stardom in the market economy.
A lifestyle of self-reliance and voluntary simplicity meant that James, by dropping out and setting an example wherever he went, did more for society and the environment than many people who seek to “make a difference” through the use of money and power, or by otherwise working within a system that is fundamentally unjust. He certainly did more, by consuming less, than people who buy electric cars and fantasize that they’re “saving the planet” through increased consumption of electricity and the energy and unaccountable raw materials that go into advanced technology.
By thinking beyond the cliches of liberalism and patriotism, by opposing war and imperialism and speaking truth to power, James reinforced the lessons I’d gotten from earlier mentors, like the radical pastor who’d encouraged me to question authority and think critically, and the radical college professor who encouraged me to challenge the fundamental assumptions of our society and culture. Unlike many of my well-educated friends, James never stopped thinking critically and questioning authority, and to the end, he resisted the capitalist consumer lifestyle and addiction to technology that they all ultimately accepted.
Wisdom vs. Happiness
A few years ago I was visiting an old friend when he said he needed to have a heart-to-heart talk with me. He sat me down and told me that there must be a flaw in my criticisms of our society, because my conclusions had brought me nothing but loneliness and unhappiness, and my life had become a miserable failure.
I try to avoid knee-jerk reactions and remain open to my friends’ feedback, so instead of responding directly, I continued to reflect on what he’d said. None of my other friends had said anything like this – most of us had lively discussions, learning from each other and agreeing on many points. I eventually concluded that my friend’s “heart-to-heart” said more about him than about me.
But there was a belief nested within his message that seems widely held and is worth examining: that true wisdom, true enlightenment, bring serenity. And the converse, that the lonely, unhappy person has failed to find the wisdom that would enable him or her to be content.
Beyond this, there’s the unspoken assumption that individual happiness is the goal of life, and the acquisition of wisdom is just the means to that end.
All of these fundamental beliefs can be traced back to Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher I studied in my freshman year of college. Some people now replace “happiness” with “well-being,” but in our individualistic society, the emphasis is always on the individual.
There are actually people who live such cloistered lives that they believe true enlightenment can protect us from suffering. As if the desperately poor, the sufferer of chronic pain, the tortured prisoner, the victim of rape or other violence, can be happy and serene in the moment if they’ve achieved true wisdom.
I thought of all this as I contemplated James’s final years. We have no way of knowing how he experienced them, but what impact did his withdrawal have on his friends and neighbors?
I remember dilapidated, “haunted” houses from my childhood, old widows and widowers who were recluses, and eccentric outsiders and outcasts who came and went in the background. People who would now be considered dysfunctional or mentally ill in one way or another. Was it that they’d turned their backs on the community, or that the community had let them down in some way?
In any event, we could say these dysfunctional recluses were setting a negative example. Don’t let yourself end up like them, lonely and miserable! But there would be a lingering curiosity, especially as we all age and develop more and more doubts about our own paths through the rat race. Withdrawing from the world could have its attractions. I have a reclusive older neighbor who admits he’s happy by himself – not miserably lonely as you might expect.
Peaceful societies like the Amish and the Ifaluk place their emphasis on the well-being of the community rather than the individual. If the community is not thriving, how can an individual member be happy? If the individual’s environment is full of dysfunction and suffering, how can wisdom bring him or her happiness? Many of my urban friends move daily through streets reeking of piss and teeming with diseased homeless people, breathing polluted air, their ears assaulted by mechanical noise. Can they tune all of this out by meditating? Should they?
Following James’s example, I eventually decided that happiness should not be my primary goal. As an artist, I need to see things as they are, no matter how ugly or frightening. I want to understand what’s happening, no matter how discouraging. What I see and understand will not make me happy. Enlightenment will not bring serenity, and if you keep saying things that make people uncomfortable, you may end up alone. So be it.
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