Maria Worton writes in Montreal but reckons freedom is in an action rather than any place.
“Thousands have lived without love, not one has lived without water.” W.H. Auden - First Things First
“Quo warranto?” I read the other day, “By whose authority?” “Not mine!” I muttered. I never agreed to sell the garden. The seeds, the air, the water. Now it may have been construed by this Canadian system that since I partake of a certain standard of living, I also agree to a price. However I am deeply disturbed by the spectre of a price fast turning out to be nature itself. And this standard of living? “One of the best in the world” we’re told. Yet there are people I know of made miserable by this strange standard, the survival of the fittest, or, lets face it, the biggest or the meanest, right look. Healthy or not? And yet the other month, so as to gain and never lose my status here I pledged my allegiance to the Queen. As I did so I could not shake that rhyme taught me by my grandfather, a man who actively disliked the sanctity of unearned privilege: The queen is on her pot, her nose is full of snot, who shall blow it who shall wipe, the queenie’s nose and bot? … I don’t know… perhaps such rhymes, those jokes about Bush the fool, give an edge to my conformity. I conform in a fairly mechanical way. I conform but I do not agree. I did not agree to sell the garden. I never clicked on that in any net poll. No government agency has asked my views on life and death questions. So if I’m not asked, then what is this “consent of the governed” this “will of the people”? What am I conforming to? Can I conform and not agree? …What is it like sometimes?
This consensus. What is it made of? An acceptance of anythingness…an okayness to unknowingness...a waitingness for the revolution...for the rescue…for the rising sunness, for rebirth, for resurrectionness for heavens sake? Buddhism helps stem the panic. As the concentrated way advertising has us differentiate ourselves keeps us looking and checking each other neurotically for the colour and cut of the hair. Large similarities and tiny differences appear very important.
It’s a highly strung balancing act, it seems, between inner, outer and other. Required to self file our soft porous biological forms with their constant movement, hidden behind fashion and not seeing how the air tastes. The hard surface of glamour is more opaque than transparent; dowdiness and dinginess readily fill the vacuum of its absence. Even pictures of poverty and human distress can look beautiful in the sunlight and from above. And unless you read the caption you’d never know she’s washing in the gutter. The child appears well fed. Never having had dysentry…it’s very quick though…every eight seconds. This delicate balance called homeostasis. The way we’re all 80 % water. But what with all the affections lined up on the family sideboard (our inheritance): happiness and holidays, consumer satisfaction, money back guarantees, funny advertising that lures you with a giggle…..the Volkswagen Bug. The niceness makes it all very confusing, like having an abusive parent, we want to love and trust but…
In theory, it’s difficult not to agree with the biologist R. Lewontin.
“The environment of an organism is constructed and constantly altered by the life activities of the organism.” The Triple Helix
In practice it is difficult to take the environment quite so personally. I abuse it every day, though I love it dearly. I shudder at the fact oil and plastics still drive this giant combustion chamber called civilization. A water intensive process that is largely responsible for the loss of 50% of the planet’s fresh water in the last fifty years. Apparently when it’s gone it’s as good as gone.
In his millenium declaration, the UN Secretary General pledged to halve the number of people without access to drinking water, an estimated 1.5 billion, by 2015.
I have to wonder whether 50% is an agreeable target, a target I’m prepared to agree upon, a cause for celebration? It’s a figure that seems to imply a great sea of people are to be forsaken. Some people take consolation in the popular notion that the essence of life resides in the genes, not the culture, the system, the environment, but the genes.
Many people agree that humanity’s progress is to be measured by the breadth of its technological advancement, and dwell at length upon the growing capacity of the world to communicate across vast distances by virtue of the quick click. Clicking can feel like hoping; there appears to be a general consensus that hoping is good. Charity is also popular.
The other day I received an urgent appeal soliciting another 400,000 clicks needed to reach the 4 million mark whereupon the charity Water Aid, sponsored by Thames Water, would give water to 10,000 thirsty people in Africa and Asia. There was a desperate edge to it all. People’s lives were at risk.. I really wanted to click! I really did. The will to niceness is so strong, it’s hard to ask what’s in it. A kindly, consensual click to people’s water being owned abroad, and occasionally donated. 4 million votes in favour of that relationship between us and them. An abstraction, that relationship, like the water in the air. The impersonal made personal…a service presented as a solicitude; a kindness of sorts….an industrialized, institutionalized kindness…so that on a bad day, a day of disconnection, ‘have a nice day’ can seem the loneliest sound.
I have since read that Thames Water is Britain’s biggest polluter. Bechtel charged Bolivians for the rain in their barrels, buckets and cups. People protested they couldn’t pay and five of these people were shot dead. Bechtel is now suing Bolivia for its right to the rain. In The Chek Republic water went private and rose 4000%. Poor people have sold their kidneys before, now poor people are selling the rights to their water. Corporations hoard it, price it, then hire it out. Which is rather like making a fish pay for water, isn’t it?
Who or what said this was okay? The collapse of the USSR?. The fall of the wall? We’re being rocketed into space and we click; perhaps we are part machine by now. And perhaps we do occasionally dream of electric sheep. Yet our lungs fur and eyes run here in the cities where over half the planet’s people now live. We don’t know what we’re breathing, on any given day at any given hour. Though they keep calling it air, there’s more to it than that. Most of us cannot trust the water we drink. Environment and organism change each other, act upon each other. Why can’t we agree upon that?
“Major progress towards reducing world poverty will falter until water and sanitation problems are urgently tackled.”
“Access to water and sanitation is a necessary precursor to other forms of development.” Water Aid
Yes, it is hard not to agree that people, like fish, do need water. But I’m still reading about those official helping bodies such as Water Aid, World Water Council, The Global Water Partnership, all of which, in the final analysis, insist water must satisfy considerations of profit before thirst. They, funnily enough, make no mention of where the water went in Asia and Africa. Where the economies went. Where the histories went. I’ve tried, so I know, that it’s difficult to disagree with what you’re not told.
An OECD/ World Bank study found that the industrialized countries would receive 70% of the profits from the increased trade brought by GATS. That by 2002 Africa would lose $2.6 billion. It is not commonly known that the Third World has already repaid a trillion dollars of principal over and above US$771 billion in interest.
No politics and little philosophy in school, I was taught the meaning of religion, not citizen. I was taught to be nice and sociable, to say no to strangers. Disagreeing became a discomfort. Disagreeing became disagreeable. I was quietly troubled that critical thought could fly in the face of forces that controlled my habitat. I struggled with the death swoon of Hollywood, urging me to dream of heros, the legitimacy of kings and queens, life as a shortcut to a happy ending. And what with the coercion, or cooption of our conscience by the corporation… made so nice and ineffectual, I hardly had it in me to ask what to do when corporations are not made nice, when they make laws to enforce the primacy of profit before the right to life, the right to our nature. I sometimes wonder if the way we insist upon the delicious flavour of our freedom may be saying more about our captivity, our helplesness.
POCLAD ‘The power held by even honestly run corporations is bad for us all.’
Often the conundrum put simply is: How can we save ourselves and the planet when we have to earn a living? When earning a living is so often, environmentally and socially speaking, a dirty business? It’s bewildering, so much so, that I have often thrown my hands in the air in exasperation only to bury my head in a fashionable moment.
Our motivation to find and treat root causes is seriously thwarted by the inevitable collusion that comes with this being steeped in half truths and bogged down by wants and needs. All the signs are, however, that if humanity is to have a life worth living, or any life at all, we must think very carefully about what we really need. We need to live very carefully. We need to travel light.
To paraphrase R. Lewontin, “realistic confrontation with the conditions of human life” requires that distinction be made between what is cause and what is agency. With this distinction in mind it follows that poor sanitation, lack of water are not the causes of the degradation of the conditions for human life, they are its agencies. “Agencies are alternative paths of mediation of some basic cause, a cause that always operates although through different paths.” Why do millions of people continue to perish in the Third World whilst cancers run rampant in the First? Why is this true after so much struggle? Could it not come down to “the narrow rationality of an anarchic scheme of production, developed by industrial capitalism and adopted by industrial socialism.”
There have always been people, naturally, who search out root causes. You hear about people working to amend or revoke the charters of corporations. They teach history, economy and law. They challenge the legitimacy of a Rule of Law made by lawmakers persuaded by the jingling in the corporate pocket and the notion that big is best. They challenge too the strange and fearful right of corporations to be “legal persons”. They tell the emperor he’s wearing no clothes, that he’s no democracy. They shout in the streets, “Not in our name!” “No blood for oil.” More helpful than hopeful perhaps, these people hold a candle to the way in which my silence is used against me. The way my silence is renamed consensus for this status quo.
© Maria Worton 2002