I had a good conversation with a Dreadlock Rasta about Babylon today. We were putting up shadecloths, at a native plant nursery in Virginia, a bit south of DC. The sun's been coming up hot for the last week or so, and it will burn up all the little saplings and flowers, until we get the shadecloths up, to simulate a forest understory.
Part of me was annoyed, that we were sitting back, and talking about Babylon, while all these little plants were waiting on deliverance. But the work will always be there, and another day or two in the sun won't be a devastation for them. It might be a blessing. And because this is a Zen Buddhist nursery, I let things happen. Sometimes I'm there to work, and sometimes I'm there to listen.
"Whole Foods is part of the evil that's happening. It's Babylon. I hate it, but I shop there." he told me. We were discussing the environmental movement, and my theory that within our current culture, making environmentalism a marketable commodity, a status symbol, was the best way to strengthen the movement.http://
"Babylon is greed. Babylon is power. Babylon is slavery. Babylon is confusion. It is when people don't understand that they are the world, that they breathe the world. They take their air from trees. They take their life from the world. How can they destroy something, and not see that they are destroying themselves? This confusion, where man fights with man, and takes from others, and destroys nature, is Babylon. It must be stopped."
he said.
I have been struggling for a long time over my role in the environmental movement. I remember being so outraged by the concept of nuclear brinksmanship in fifth grade, that I wrote President Reagan a letter. "How can you save the world, by destroying it?", I asked. No answer. When I learned in high school about the hole in the ozone layer, I imagined that there would be an immediate and dramatic change in how people chose to live. I thought that the outrage and commitment to living responsibly would be universal.
I never imagined that, 20 years later, we'd still be mired in so many ridiculous debates about the human impact on the environment. I never imagined that the Amazon rainforest would still be threatened by logging, in 2009. I never imagined that we'd still be destroying coral reefs and fish populations and hunting whales, 20 years later. I never imagined that what I was experiencing in the early 90's, wasn't the apex (or nadir) of irresponsible exploitation of natural resources.
I never imagined that the world that I now live in, 20 years later, would be so significantly worse off, despite better research, better science, and better public awareness. I believed then, that humanity was generally oriented towards justice, rationality, and responsibility. That was the world that I'd grown up in. That was the culture that I knew.
Now, I believe that people are primarily motivated by greed. By fear and desire. And that absent real things to fear (eg back when average mortality was 17 or so...), western culture has immersed itself in a self-indulgent, pleasure-sucking, miasmic rot of narcisstic willful indifference, that can only be adequately corrected by a super-plague, or a similar disaster that kills 99.99% of the population. Well, actually, that's what I thought back in high-school, as well. After realizing that I wasn't sufficiently committed to super-plagues, to be willing to actively or indirectly support behavior that caused harm to humans, I became buddhist.
It took me a long time to develop understanding of what that meant. But then, the Buddha died from eating rancid meat. Which suggests that even the Buddha had problems recognizing the implications of karma. I am now not much further along on the path of buddhism. But I am still an environmentalist.
Which does feel slightly ridiculous. I live hypocritically, drive a car, fly in airplanes, consume irresponsibly produced goods. If I chose to, I could reduce my carbon footprint 100-fold, by travelling to a place where subsistence/sustainable consumption is still operative. I could live from the land, within the weather, with minimal waste (and a machete) if I were so committed. Instead, I chose to live hypocritically. I can't say exactly why, but I do like hot showers.
So over the last year or so, I've transitioned from working for money, to working for pleasure. And I take pleasure in things I care about. I take pleasure in work that improves the world around me. I take pleasure in not working pointlessly, for things I don't care about. I don't expect that alone I can fix or improve things, but I prefer to work for things that I love and care about. I care about nature, and the future. I care about making things better.
There's an RFK quote that I've been carrying with me, the last few years, since I saw his grave:
"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
I work for that. I look to inspire change, on the most modest of levels. And I don't trust that my good intentions, will translate to good actions. But I do hope that is the case. And I realize that, over the last few years, I have become more complacent, more resigned to the human pace of change, and that has made me more tolerant of the general pedestrian indifference, of environmentalism. I hope to coax them into it gently, indulgently, like introducing a scared child to a slightly menacing dog.
Which feels pathetically inadequate, the actions of an enabler, from the perspective of this Dreadlock Rasta, and his lectures on the evils of Babylon. But I realize that this is the path I've chosen. I wonder whether Babylon really was as bad as everyone claims. Building a tower to heaven sounds like a pretty noble and engaging task. Like using space telescopes to stare into the past. I wonder about the Christian frame around Babylon, filtered through Judaism and the Old Testament, the generations of tortured mythologies of sin, consider the relative merits of a mono-lingual culture vs a poly-lingual one, consider the irony of slaves in the Americas learning concepts of equality and justice from their masters and tyrants, and upending them with it. I think about the strong and righteous path of justice. That sometimes takes generations. Or never arrives. Or hasn't yet.
It reminds me of the importance of my work. Which isn't important at all.