The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (22 page)

The terrible things done, often in our name and thanks in part to the complicity of our silence or ignorance, matter. They are what wells up daily in the news and attracts our attention. In estimating the true makeup of the world, however, gauging the depth and breadth of this other force is no less important. What actually sustains life is far closer to home and more essential, even if deeper in the shadows, than market forces, and much more interesting than selfishness.

Most of the real work on this planet is not done for profit: it’s done at home, for each other, for affection, out of idealism, and it starts with the heroic effort to sustain each helpless human being for all those years before fending for yourself becomes feasible. Years ago, when my friends started having babies, I finally began to grasp just what kind of labor goes into sustaining one baby from birth just to toddlerhood.

If you do the math, with nearly 7 billion of us on earth right now, that means more than 7 billion years of near-constant tending only to get children upright and walking, a labor of love that adds up to more than the age of this planet. That’s not a small force, even if it is only a force of maintenance.
Still, the same fierce affection and determination pushes back everywhere at the forces of destruction.

Though I’m not sure I could bring myself to watch yet again that Christmas (and banking) classic
It’s a Wonderful Life
, its premise—that the effects of what we do might best be gauged by considering what the world would be like without us—is still useful. Erase all the groups at work on the environment, hardly noticed by the rest of us, and there would be far more disasters we’d notice.

THE ALTERNATIVES TO “THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE”

We not only have a largely capitalist economy but an ideological system that justifies this as inevitable. “There is no alternative,” as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher used to like to say. Many still argue that this is simply the best that human nature, nasty to the core, can possibly hope to manage.

Fortunately, it’s not true. Not only is there an alternative, but it’s here and always has been. Recently, I had dinner with Renato Redentor Constantino, a climate and social justice activist from the Philippines, and he mentioned that he never cared for the slogan “Another world is possible.” That other world is not just possible, he pointed out, it’s always been here.

We tend to think revolution has to mean a big in-the-streets, winner-take-all battle that culminates with regime change, but in the past half century it has far more often involved a trillion tiny acts of resistance that sometimes cumulatively change a society so much that the laws have no choice but to follow after. Certainly, American society has changed profoundly over the past half century for those among us who are not male, or straight, or white, or Christian, becoming far less discriminatory and exclusionary.

Radicals often speak as though we live in a bleak landscape in which the good has yet to be born, the revolution yet to begin. As Constantino points out, both of them are here, right now, and they always have been. They are represented in countless acts of solidarity and resistance, and sometimes they even triumph. When they don’t—and that’s often enough—they still do a great deal to counterbalance the official organization of our country
and economy. That organization ensures oil spills, while the revolutionaries, if you want to call them that, head for the birds and the beaches, and maybe, while they’re at it, change the official order a little, too.

Of course, nothing’s quite as simple as that. After all, there are saints in government and monsters in the progressive movement; there’s petroleum in my gas tank and money in my name in banks. To suggest that the world is so easily divided into one hand and the other, selfish and altruistic, is impossibly reductive, but talking in binaries has an advantage: it lets you focus on what is seldom acknowledged.

To say there is no alternative dismisses both the desire for and the possibility of alternative arrangements of power. For example, how do you square a Republican Party hell-bent on preserving tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans with a new poll by two university economists suggesting that nearly all of us want something quite different? A cross-section of Americans were shown pie charts depicting three degrees of wealth distribution in three societies, and pollsters asked them what their ideal distribution of wealth might be. The unidentified charts ranged from our colossal disparity to absolute equality, with Swedish moderation in between.

Most chose Sweden as the closest to their ideal. According to the pollsters, the choice suggested that “Americans prefer some inequality to perfect equality, but not to the degree currently present in the United States.”

It might help to remember how close we had come to Sweden by the late 1970s, when income disparity was at its low ebb and the Reagan revolution was yet to launch. Of course, these days we in the United States aren’t offered Swedish wealth distribution, since the system set up to represent us actually spends much of its time representing self-interest and moneyed interests instead. The Republicans are now being offered even larger bribes than the Democrats to vote in the interests of the ultra-affluent, whether corporate or individual. Both parties, however, helped produce the Supreme Court that, with the
Citizens United
decision in January, gave corporations and the wealthy unprecedented power in our political system, power that it will take all our energy to counteract and maybe, someday, force into retreat.

By the way, in searching for that Thatcher no-alternative quote, I found myself on a page at Wikipedia that included the following fund-raising plea from a Russian woman scientist: “Almost every day I come home from work and spend several hours improving Wikipedia! Why would I donate so much of my free time? Because I believe that by giving my time and effort—along with thousands of other people of different nationalities, religion, ages—we will one day have shared and free knowledge for all people.”

Imperfect as it may be, ad-free, nonprofit Wikipedia’s sheer scope—3.5 million entries in English alone, to say nothing of smaller Norwegian, Vietnamese, Persian, and Waray-Waray versions with more than 100,000 articles each—is an astonishing testimony to a human urge to work without recompense when the cause matters.

BUTTERFLY SPOTTING

The novelist and avid lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov once asked someone coming down a trail in the Rockies whether he’d seen any butterflies. The answer was negative—there were no butterflies. Nabokov, of course, went up that same trail and saw butterflies galore.

You see what you’re looking for. Most of us are constantly urged to see the world as, at best, a competitive place and, at worst, a constant war of each against each, and you can see just that without even bothering to look too hard. But that’s not all you can see.

Writing my recent book about disasters,
A Paradise Built in Hell
, led me to look at the extraordinary way people behave when faced with catastrophes and crises. From news coverage to Hollywood movies, the media suggest that, in these moments of turbulence when institutions often cease to function, we revert to our original nature in a Hobbesian wilderness where people take care of themselves alone.

Here’s the surprise, though: in such situations, most of us take care of each other most of the time—and beautifully at that. Perhaps this, rather than (human) nature red in tooth and claw, is our original nature. At least, the evidence is clear that people not only behave well but take deep pleasure in doing so, a pleasure so intense it suggests that an unspoken,
unmet, enormous appetite for meaningful work and vibrant solidarities lives within us. Those appetites can be found reflected almost nowhere in the mainstream media, and we are normally told that the world in which such appetites might be satisfied is “utopian,” impossible to reach because of our savage competitiveness, and so should be left to the most impractical of dreamers.

Even reports meant to be sympathetic to the possibility that another better world could exist in us right now accept our social-Darwinian essence as a given. Consider a November
New York Times
piece on empathy and bullying in which David Bornstein wrote,

We know that humans are hardwired to be aggressive and selfish. But a growing body of research is demonstrating that there is also a biological basis for human compassion. Brain scans reveal that when we contemplate violence done to others we activate the same regions in our brains that fire up when mothers gaze at their children, suggesting that caring for strangers may be instinctual. When we help others, areas of the brain associated with pleasure also light up. Research by Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello indicates that toddlers as young as 18 months behave altruistically.

Are we really hardwired to be aggressive and selfish, as Bornstein says at the outset? Are you? No evidence for such a statement need be given, even in an essay that provides plenty of evidence to the contrary, as it’s supposed to be a fact universally acknowledged, rather than an opinion.

THE COMPASSION BOOM

If I were to use the normal language of the marketplace right now, I’d say that compassion and altruism are hot. It might, however, be more useful to say that the question of the nature of human nature is being reconsidered at the moment by scientists, economists, and social theorists in all sorts of curious combinations and coalitions. Take, for example, the University of California’s Greater Good Science Center, which describes itself as studying “the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being, and teaches skills that foster a thriving, resilient, and compassionate society.” Founding director Dacher Keltner writes, “Recent studies of compassion
argue persuasively for a different take on human nature, one that rejects the preeminence of self-interest.”

A few dozen miles away is Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, which likewise draws on researchers in disciplines ranging from neuroscience to Buddhist ethics. Bornstein’s essay mentions another organization, Roots of Empathy in Toronto, that reduces violence and increases empathy among children. Experiments, programs, and activities like this proliferate.

Independent scholars and writers are looking at the same underlying question, and stories in the news this year—such as those on school bullying—address questions of how our society gets organized, and for whose benefit. The suicides of several queer young people generated a groundswell of anti-bullying organizing and soul-searching, notably the largely online “It Gets Better” attempt to reach out to queer youth.

In a very different arena, neoliberalism—the economic system that lets the invisible hand throttle what it might—has finally come into question in the mainstream (whereas if you questioned it in 1999, you were a troglodyte and a flat-Earther). Hillary Clinton lied her way through the 2008 primary, claiming she never supported NAFTA, and her husband, who brought it to us, publicly apologized for the way his policies eliminated Haiti’s rice tariffs. “It was a mistake,” Bill Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10. “I had to live every day with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did.”

Think of those doing the research on altruism and compassion as a radical scholarly movement, one that could undermine the philosophical and political assumptions behind our current economic system, which is also our political system. These individuals and organizations are putting together the proof that not only is another world possible, but it’s been here all along, as visible, should we care to look, as Nabokov’s butterflies.

Do not underestimate the power of this force. The world could be much better if more of us were more active on behalf of what we believe in and love; it would be much worse if countless activists weren’t already at work, from Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma and the climate activists in Tuvalu to the
homeless activists around the corner from me. When I studied disasters past, what amazed me was not just that people behaved so beautifully but that, in doing so, they found such joy. It seems that something in their natures, starved in ordinary times, was fed by the opportunity, under the worst of conditions, to be generous, brave, idealistic, and connected; and when this appetite was fulfilled, the joy shone out, even amid the ruins.

Don’t think of this as simply a description of my hopes for the future, but of what was going on right under our noses; it’s a force we would do well to name, recognize, celebrate, and enlarge upon now. It is who we are, if only we knew it.

December 2010

INSIDE OUT, OR INTERIOR SPACE

(and Interior Decoration)

MUDDING AND TAPING

There are times when it’s clear to me that by getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, and times when, say, the apricot velvet headboard against the lavender wall of a room in an old hotel fills me with a mysterious satisfied pleasure in harmonies of color, texture, atmospheres of comfort, domesticity and a desire to go on living among such color and texture and space and general real estate. There are times when I believe in spiritual detachment, though there was a recent occasion when I bothered to go take a picture of my old reading armchair to the upholsterer’s around the corner to see if can be made beautiful again and worry about whether charcoal velveteen would go with my next decor. There are times when I enjoy the weightlessness of traveling and wish to own nothing and afternoons when I want to claim every farmhouse I drive by as my own, especially those with porches and dormers, those spaces so elegantly negotiating inside and out, as though building itself could direct and support an ideal life, the life we dream of when we look at houses.