On destructive development, on food that isn’t food, on two-legged sheep, on the demise of thought and the war for the future
Food is a misnomer for 90 per cent of what supermarkets sell. But do I hate the people who consume without thought, who get fat on fast food and look for rescue to fast diets, who don’t seem to care about themselves or anyone else? Of course not. But it can be said, admittedly, that in pitying their stupidity and the fact that their lives are ongoing tragedies with only one assured destination, I am guilty of something unpleasant. It isn’t a sense of being superior, or more evolved. I’m neither of those things. I suppose it’s a feeling that they’re asleep and I’m in the early stages of waking up. Perhaps that isn’t so unpleasant; it’s certainly, in my opinion, true. And maybe, just maybe, the compulsion some of us feel to wake up is, after all, an evolutionary imperative. There’s plenty of talk to be found online of the Great Turning, the New Age.
Maybe I was born an eschatologist, for I certainly am a believer in the idea that a singularity is approaching in the 21st Century that will fundamentally change the course of human history. What we experience today are ripples travelling backwards in time, warnings if you will, events we are well advised to anticipate and prepare for if we hope to survive. And I believe that if–if–I live to be an old man, that life will be so different to the life I live today as for the two to be irreconcilable. Perhaps that future could be a better fit for many of us than the artificial constructs of today which squeeze and suffocate, destroy and oppress.
It’s like that film, The Matrix: some of us have unplugged ourselves, taken our first real breath and looked around to find ourselves surrounded by lies and machinery and toxic waste. Most people remain locked in the system, and there are those we might term Controllers whose vested interest is in keeping them confined. Do we know who they are? Do we know what can be done? Do we wage a war of words and non-violence—for if we do, it must be a different kind of war—and if so, how: slowly and with subtlety, or with the kind of radicalism that leads to the powerful marking us as dissidents, terrorists, criminals, slackers, hippies, deviants? The war of which I speak is happening, right now, and there are those whose ways of fighting tie in with both the possibilities presented in this paragraph. One thing is certain: we will all, sooner or later, have to take sides and when we do we will have to decide how we intend to fight.
The questions raised above I don’t want to posit answers to right now. But I do want to encourage thinking, and debate. Without those we are, most definitely, lost as a species. If thinking is on the way out, we deserve nothing less than extinction. But to suggest that, to believe that, is not to hate humanity. It is, if anything, to grieve in advance of what will happen to us for everything we once were and could have been.
This is a multi-page entry: page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4
tags: activism, affordable housing, developments, eco-towns, environment, eschatology, extinction, food miles, green spaces, hope, local authorities, politicians, radicalism, self-sufficiency, supermarkets, the matrix
1 comment on “On destructive development, on food that isn’t food, on two-legged sheep, on the demise of thought and the war for the future”
May 11th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Powerful post Andy, and much good food for our thoughts.
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