DEATH TO THE CITY!

Spending time in nature, having some time away from the distractions of life simply to be with myself, my mind is calming down, the internalised noise of the city is dying away, I am becoming aligned with the sounds and rhythms of the natural environment. My heart is opening, my dreams are becoming richer, I am starting to have realisations about who I am and how I am.

The natural world isn’t just something you look at and think ‘that’s pretty’. It infects you and affects you deeply. You drink it in and it awakens the wilderness in you. And in this way, it alters your perception. It is like a de-hallucinogen. You start to see what’s really going on.

We tend not to realise the impact that being surrounded by a human-made, human-controlled environment has on our awareness. We walk on tarmac, we see straight lines everywhere, everything around us has been designed by humans, to benefit humans in some way. If there’s a problem, there’s someone you can call to complain about it. We can hardly see the sky. The weather can be a mild irritant, but it doesn’t affect us much – we turn on the heat (designed and installed by someone else), close the curtains and turn on the TV, mentally inhabiting a world that has been designed and scripted by humans. It has the look of reality about it, but really it is just the product of someone’s mind.

Where is the god in all this? Gods have become irrelevant. I’m not surprised Big Brother is so popular. I am not a Christian, but I know that this universe is majestic and immense, and it is a miracle. Right down to a single leaf falling from a branch in the forest, as the wind breezes past to carry it to the floor. Right up to the magnificence of the roof of this world – a million stars every night, away from the pollution of street lights and exhaust fumes, you can never get bored of looking at them. Every hour they are different. No wonder the druids built Stonehenge. No wonder the Egyptians found their gods in the stars.

Humans cannot possibly match this magnificence, no matter how clever their creations. And in surrounding ourselves with the built environment we lose touch with our place in the universe, and with that feeling of being blessed that wells up all the time when you are surrounded by miracles.

We are supposed to be happy. That’s our natural state. I am becoming increasingly militant in my belief that the city makes happiness difficult.

I went to the city this week. When I have been away from it for a while and then I go back, it is always a bit of a shock. It’s like there has been some enormous national disaster while I was away and I didn’t get to hear about it. Everyone looks so traumatised. And then I remember, no, this is just the city.

The other thing I noticed this time was that life is hard for the vast majority of people. The current economic system is not working in their favour. We are taught that anyone can make it in the Western world, but when I look around I start to think that maybe this is propaganda being floated by the few people at the top with the money. When you look at it as a whole, from the outside so to speak, it just doesn’t seem to be the case. There are lots and lots of tiny apartments, loads of people working hard to pay for the privilege of living in them, and there is crime and litter and overcrowding and ill health. It seems to have all the attributes that people think of when they think of a non-Westernised, non-‘civilised’ life: it’s dirty, it’s dangerous, it’s uncomfortable, it makes you ill, it requires a lot of hard work just to survive. Hello? Is anyone actually looking at how things are in the modern world? Do we really want to fuck the environment beyond repair just to keep living like this?

The thing about not living that city life is that, yes it might well be all those things, but at least you have some autonomy. There is a self-respect that comes out of making your own place (to your own design, based on how you actually want to live), gathering your own wood and water, etc etc. This self-respect is the birthright of all of us – not just for the people who have managed to score some high-paying job selling shares in battery hen futures or something. Buy buy, sell sell, fuck off.

The more I think about it, the more it becomes clear to me that the future should be, and probably must be, about scaling things down. The economy is so complex it allows credit crunches and global exploitation. Would we really buy trainers made by kids in sweatshops if those kids lived on our street?

Schumacher wrote a book called ‘Small is Beautiful’- I have probably written about this before, but he’s right. I am thinking about this not just in economic terms, but as a way to structure society too.

So death to the city. We need small. We need local. And when things are small they don’t need so much policing by external bodies, and they don’t need so many bureaucrats, and that means we don’t have to be bullied by them, and we don’t have to pay them for the privilege. We can run our own lives, and help our own neighbours.

And don’t think this can’t happen either. I’m reading a history of Britain at the moment and, as far as I can work out, things started to go downhill round about the end of the Stone Age. But the other interesting thing is that when Britain was ruled by the Romans there were cities. When the Romans buggared off to play elsewhere, the cities broke down. And then the Vikings came and built them up again, but that was a few hundred years later. In the meantime people got back to having a less sophisticated economy – more local, more village-based. You have to do without your fancy trinkets from Rome and your spices from Africa, but you get to work from home and you don't have some twatty Roman robbing you. Sorry, I mean 'taxing' you.

Anyway, that’s it from me for 2008CE. I shall be back in 2009 with more opinions and news of how I managed to spend the Christmas period without seeing the Queen’s speech and without watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Ho ho ho (said the hallucinating shaman from Lapland) and have a lovely festive period.

Padma

YOU HAVE TO BUCK THE MARKET

Ok so, I know I was supposed to be writing a follow-up to the thing on The Secret, and that will come. But given the events of the week, I feel compelled to put in my two penneth.

Now normally I wouldn’t actually be that aware of the events of the week. I have no TV, so the emotional rollercoaster that is The News usually passes me by and I get along just fine. But this week I was interviewed on radio 2 so I thought I’d better take an interest, with a view to not coming over like a babbling, out-of-touch fool. Ha. Fooled em.

And I didn’t swear either.

Anyway, I might be wrong but…

… during the foul reign of Demon Thatcher, one of the quotes I remember her coming out with was ‘You cannot buck the market’. This became gospel. Even the Labour party acted as if this was as obvious as the law of gravity. Until this week.

This neo-conservative approach to economics is, and always has been, a foolish position for a Government to take. The idea that people with nothing on their minds but self-interest and short-term gains can somehow, between them, bring economic well-being to all is preposterous.

It’s like putting a bunch of kids in charge of a sweet shop and then being surprised when you get back and find a bunch of fat kids lying in pools of sick and no sweets left on the shelves. The ‘invisible hand of the market’ is flicking the rods at the vast majority of the people on this planet, and ripping the innards out of the planet itself. But it gives us our choice of grande iced flappa-wacker-skinny-chino on rye to go, in like, two minutes, for only five quid, so we don’t really mind. Like the kids in Pinocchio, we don’t realise that, at this very moment, we are becoming donkeys.

This week even Bush and Brown had to wade into the market. They bucked it right up the arse, to the tune of billions of dollars (which is our money by the way, and we will be paying off the debts of the bankers for years to come – now who’s bucked?). So apparently you can buck the market. Big time. Even when you are a neo-conservative glutton living in the post Reagan-Thatcher political wasteland of the Now. But this time the bucking was in the interest of the bankers, rather than the people, so I guess that’s different.

Anyway, not to dwell, moving on. As Schumacher, the Buddhism-inspired economist said, the economy should serve the people, not the other way around. And economics needs to once again take it’s rightful place among a range of factors on the table when any decision is made. At the moment, if something is considered ‘uneconomical’, it is tantamount to saying it is a bad thing to do. Well, a school is uneconomical – it costs society money – but I think it’s a good thing. Leaving coal in the ground is uneconomical – it’s free money just lying there. And yet to dig it up and burn it is to bring a swifter end to life on this planet.

Let’s get our values straight. As one Buddhist ruler (the king of Bhutan) said, let’s measure our nation’s wealth in terms of Gross National Happiness, not Gross National Product. Happiness and ‘stuff’ are not the same thing. And this is even more true when that ‘stuff’ is only owned by 5% of the population.

We need to develop an economy that can look further ahead than the next AGM, or the next election. We must invest in sustainability now. All that money that has been shovelled into the banking system – let’s have an equivalent amount pulled out of the hat for renewable energy projects. Let’s have the Western world running on solar, and let’s have that powering our electric cars.

We must let go of the idea of economic growth. We must look at re-developing small-scale, local economies, not international conglomerates. Why have your apples shipped in from New Zealand when you can grow them in your back garden? How healthy can an economic system be in which such a thing is considered economical???

And we must learn to trust our local networks again. The move towards needing a standardised certificate in order to do anything is a move towards robotism and anonymity. If you want to know whether someone will do a good job, ask the people in your community who have used them. And if you don’t know people in your community, get to know them. This is the way to stabilise the international markets. When things are small again, when they cannot be standardised and homogenised, then we will have balance.

And those aspects of our economy, and society, which need to be on a large scale should be, gasp!, run by the Government – that is, we allow others to run our businesses on our behalf, and for our benefit. If they are not run well by the Government, this is not a sign that public institutions cannot run well, it is a sign that we need to change those in power to others who are more competent.

The utility companies, the health service, the transport and communications infrastructure, and so on do not need to be profit-making, they just need to break even. Looking after this (and defence) is all the Government should be there for, as far as I can see. The rest of it only really works if it happens on a fairly small scale, in our own communities. As Thoreau says (who I am re-reading at the moment for an upcoming project – of which more to follow), "That government is best which governs least."

Now this idea is a dangerous one for sure. It has been hi-jacked by the right wingers to mean that we should let those with no scruples do as they please, and make preposterous sums of money in the process. But really, we must educate our children so that they grow beyond such things before puberty, or at the very least before they choose a career. We are a nation of infants, and thus we require a Government to act as our parent. And what a bad parent the Government is. It sits half of us in front of the telly all day, while the other half wreck the house and steal our toys. No, this is not the way. We must be reared, and matured. We must self-parent and parent each other. And the Government must relinquish its power over us and shrink away, as we become capable of taking on that power ourselves.

But of course, as is the case with most teenagers, this is not a mature handover to a mature young person. It is a power struggle; an ongoing negotiation which takes place over many years.

There is no perfect system, but as systems go, democracy is as far as I can make out, the best. And real democracy – rule by the people – happens at community level. And in the end it happens at individual level. If we police ourselves, why would we need police? If we censor ourselves, we can confidently do away with the censors.