I walk away from the evening entitled ‘The Extraordinary Story of Human Beings, Energy and Happiness’ feeling gloomy and alienated. I’m not quite sure why this is. The speaker was Paul Allen of the Centre for Alternative Technologies, a place I’ve been multiple times, whose history I’m inspired by, and where I’ve had some great and inspiring interactions. I have had the distinct feeling in more recent visits though that the neoliberal is creeping in even here. Paul presented a story, sometimes accompanied by music, and containing great imagery, voices, rhythm, drama. It was compelling, if not new, and importantly it ended on a hopeful note. Many members of the audience said afterwards that they felt hopeful and positive. I wanted to as well, I really did. I almost felt like it was being required, even demanded that we feel hopeful, that we imagine positive futures in which the problem of climate change has been solved. I really wanted to believe, to come along on the journey.
But, I just couldn’t. And that left me feeling even more dejected and alienated than I had been before. Something just didn’t feel right, and I don’t know what it was. Maybe I’m just a gloomy person. Maybe as people have sometimes said to me, I’m attached to my gloominess. Maybe somehow I’m Marvin the robot from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, but in human form. Or maybe I’m just suffering from the alienation that was talked about in the presentation, and before that by Karl Marx. Maybe it was the fact that it actually seemed such an elite bunch of people. Maybe it was the fact that it didn’t seem radical enough and so it didn’t seem to really challenge the insidious and powerful problems that we face. Maybe it was the fact that I’ve been to lots of events like this, populated with an elite class of people, middle class, educated, well-meaning bourgeoisie? People in the room are doing lots of good things, working with youth, mindfulness and mental health, renewable energy community groups, etc. There’s an awareness that individual changes is not enough, that change needs to happen structurally. People say useful things about involvement with boring policy as well as group organising. There’s lots of talk of arts and culture and the possible change that can happen. People say glowing things about Bristol and the positive green stance, Bristol Green Capital and so on…
I think, but don’t say, that everyone is just trying to make themselves feel good in different ways, it’s a different sort of consumerism, the green or do-gooder brand. I know it, I’ve done it, I do it, but I’m aware that I’m just trying to fill a slightly different void, a different emptiness to the hunger for fulfilment that drives people to overeat or drink or shop or buy sports cars. I feel people are still speaking and acting from a place of ego. Halfway through questions in particular, Paul suggests people identify themselves when they make a comment. There’s a shift. Now everyone is their profession, and what a lot of do-gooding (or spin) there is. I don’t want to denigrate anyone or anything, but just prior to this happening someone said something wise: that we all need to try to get away from this individualistic sense of meaning that is to do with our professions and working (and also making money and consuming). I think it’s true, but I see little sign of it happening any time soon. Someone else (an older man) harks back fondly to the years after WWII when food was rationed and there were barely any cars around and he rode his bike on the main road to London, picked up rationed amounts of cheese and milk, and there was no meat and everyone was healthy and felt good. Paul says it was that people had a common sense of purpose. But I think it’s more than that. People were more equal by default. There were limited resources to be distributed. There wasn’t a restaurant selling £100 bottles of wine and tiny morsels of delicacies imported from around the world, outside of which stand desperately alienated homeless people.
Before the talk I had walked down through Stokes Croft, then the Bear Pit, and past the entrance to the mass consumerism shopping district. Along the way I’d been thinking about cities and the mash of people (and animals and plants and water and trees, as well as concrete, and cars – I wouldn’t mind if there were none of the latter though). Walking a route like that is devastating. There’s something terribly emotional about it. I used to find it in Vancouver as well, only it was worse there. I used to find it more devastating as well when I was younger. The wealth and opulence and vapidness of affluent spending and conversations. And right up next to it, destitution, desperation, dejection. And in the midst of both, sometimes, deeply beautiful and moving soulful connections between people. I find my heart being pulled and pushed and the experience of walking the city fills me with… something… a kind of aliveness, a kind of energy, but also something else, this feeling that something is terribly wrong and disconnected, that collectively we need a major shift, maybe the shift of consciousness that Eckart Tolle talks about in the book I randomly picked up in a charity shop: A New Earth.
At the event, in which there were maybe a hundred or so people, and maybe two who were younger than 35, there was a lot of talk about the younger generations and how important it was to engage them and to get them to imagine positive futures. Well, I agree, and I was thinking about how I took the Fulbright students to CAT and also to Lammas, and at least one of them was inspired. And now I have my students at UWE (and next week at UoB), and though I don’t feel this is really the future of my engagement with young people (as I’m increasingly feeling that universities are not the place to be for real positive action and creating…) it’s something for the moment, and a place where I can convey some sense of something… can tell them about social inequality, and injustice, and environmental damage. And some of them care. And some of them will be inspired.
And yet I find myself thinking, feeling, that all of this is just idle entertainment that will not change anything and that we are on a trajectory now that can’t be stopped and won’t be stopped. Yes, it’s apocalyptic in some ways, but it also seems inevitable. And from the ashes I feel, maybe, perhaps, there will be a chance for something else to grow and emerge, humans might factor into it, but they might not. It doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s thinking of the future in general that is getting me down. Bless Paul Allen and the well-meaning do-gooders, but my fragmented soul is going to look for a bit of solace in the present.
Human Being Natural 