Let us take these in reverse order, coming back to Mansfield Park. Rowan Williams in a speech in Southark Cathedral to mark an Anglican push on climate change is waving the flag over Alastair McIntosh’s latest book.
In his splendid book, Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition, Alastair McIntosh speaks of our current “ecocidal” patterns of consumption as addictive and self-destructive. Living like this is living at a less than properly human level – McIntosh suggests we may need therapy, what he describes as a “cultural psychotherapy” to liberate us. That liberation may or may not be enough to avert disaster. But what we do know – or should know – is that we are living inhumanly.
Williams, of course, finishes by emphasising the spiritual origins of the problem.
The Christian story lays out a model of reconnection with an alienated world: it tells us of a material human life inhabited by God and raised transfigured from death; of a sharing of material food which makes us sharers in eternal life; of a community whose life together seeks to express within creation the care of the creator. In the words used by both Moses and St Paul, this is not a message remote from us in heaven or buried under the earth: it is near, on our lips and hearts. And, as Moses immediately goes on to say in the Old Testament passage, “You know it and can quote it, so now obey it. Today I am giving you a choice between good and evil, between life and death … Choose life.”
I think this is so true, resonating with what I have been reading in Marilynne Robinson recently. As Williams says, “We have seen growing evidence in recent years of a lack of correlation between economic prosperity and a sense of wellbeing, and evidence to suggest that inequality in society is one of the more reliable predictors of a lack of wellbeing.” The destruction of the biosphere truly seems to reflect the spiritual desert within.
Tyler Cowen summarizes one theme of Elinor Ostrom (recently awarded the Nobel memorial economics prize) thus: ‘we will need a great diversity of adjustment plans and that a “one size fits all” approach is bound to fail’. Folks like McIntosh, Williams, Robinson, and indeed the Dalai Lama, and many others, have been making detailed critiques of how the other crisis has its origins in the structure of our thought. These will need to be attended to.
Matt Yglesias has returned home to the delights of US cable TV and notices their insidious effect on his return.
I got to the office a bit before 9AM today and within 20 minutes I felt incredibly agitated. I was pissed off. I also had a feeling of despair about the prospects for health reform. I was mad, and I also felt helpless. What was wrong? Was it just a bad case of the Mondays? Regrets for being back in the cubicle after so many weeks on the road?
Matt goes on to say ‘It makes you think about the strange influence that daytime cable news has on American politics,’ reflecting on the fact that, for all intents and purposes, this is a beltway circus with little direct effect on the rest of the country other than in the way it distorts the political process. But nowhere does he seem to at all consider whether we should be trying to discourage this kind of mental poison. It is as if he observed a waste pipe disgorging toxic fumes into his office, made a note of it, wondered on its consequences and moved on.
Meanwhile, Jeff Mason at Talking Philosophy reflects on Epicurus’s warnings against sex, being a vain pleasure (reproduction apart, not meeting a need) yet too intense, disturbing the mind.
So is he right? I suppose that will depend upon whether or not one shares Epicurus’ view of what will make us happy in this life. If you think that peace of mind is the final desideratum and the essence of happiness, then it is true that one’s life runs more smoothly with fewer hostages to fortune, without erotic and then familial entanglements. If the avoidance of all suffering is the goal of life, then avoiding sexual relationships might provide some relief. However, if one deems it a richer life to have loving and erotic relations with others, and if one accepts the agitation that comes with them, then perhaps the advice of Epicurus is too bloodless.
So much modern moral philosophy seems to either pursue bizarre lines of enquiry, heedless of their consequences, or dismissing potentially productive paradoxes with the blandest of banalities. Sometimes it feels as if the modern academy has taken upon itself the task of destroying ethics under the cover of trying to save it.
A moment’s thought will reveal that Epicurus is right, that sexual relationships do cloud the mind and get people in entangled in full-time worldly commitments that leave little time for philosophising. The same insights are behind contemplative orders, especially celibate ones. Yet if we take Tibetan Buddhism as an example, there is a strong householder tradition for meditation masters, and some Buddhist and Hindu traditions make direct use of sexual intercourse to cultivate clarity of mind. Because of the power of the experience it is something that is difficult and requires training; anyone who claims to be using tantric sex for spiritual ends you can be reasonably confident is a fraud. Yet in a more common sense sex does get used to promote spiritual growth, through the selfless commitment and growth that comes through maintaining and raising a family. But to do that all the traps and confusion that get strewn in our path by romance and sex need to be faced, but this is not going to be helped by embracing a wilful ignorance of the problem!
All of which beings me to the motif of Mansfield Park, of the need to take care of the mind, that it is really a bad mistake to believe that happiness and wellbeing can come from perpetual distraction (or indeed a romantic view of the world).
Cowper catches it very well in the task.
He that attends to his interior self,
That has a heart and keeps it; has a mind
That hungers and supplies it; and who seeks
A social, not a dissipated life,
Has business; feels himself engaged to achieve
No unimportant, though a silent task.
A life all turbulence and noise may seem,
To him that leads it, wise and to be praised;
But wisdom is a pearl with most success
Sought in still water, and beneath clear skies.
He that is ever occupied in storms,
Or dives not for it or brings up instead,
Vainly industrious, a disgraceful prize.
Sex, Cable TV and the Ecocidal Moment (and MP)
Williams, of course, finishes by emphasising the spiritual origins of the problem.
I think this is so true, resonating with what I have been reading in Marilynne Robinson recently. As Williams says, “We have seen growing evidence in recent years of a lack of correlation between economic prosperity and a sense of wellbeing, and evidence to suggest that inequality in society is one of the more reliable predictors of a lack of wellbeing.” The destruction of the biosphere truly seems to reflect the spiritual desert within.
Tyler Cowen summarizes one theme of Elinor Ostrom (recently awarded the Nobel memorial economics prize) thus: ‘we will need a great diversity of adjustment plans and that a “one size fits all” approach is bound to fail’. Folks like McIntosh, Williams, Robinson, and indeed the Dalai Lama, and many others, have been making detailed critiques of how the other crisis has its origins in the structure of our thought. These will need to be attended to.
Matt Yglesias has returned home to the delights of US cable TV and notices their insidious effect on his return.
Matt goes on to say ‘It makes you think about the strange influence that daytime cable news has on American politics,’ reflecting on the fact that, for all intents and purposes, this is a beltway circus with little direct effect on the rest of the country other than in the way it distorts the political process. But nowhere does he seem to at all consider whether we should be trying to discourage this kind of mental poison. It is as if he observed a waste pipe disgorging toxic fumes into his office, made a note of it, wondered on its consequences and moved on.
Meanwhile, Jeff Mason at Talking Philosophy reflects on Epicurus’s warnings against sex, being a vain pleasure (reproduction apart, not meeting a need) yet too intense, disturbing the mind.
So much modern moral philosophy seems to either pursue bizarre lines of enquiry, heedless of their consequences, or dismissing potentially productive paradoxes with the blandest of banalities. Sometimes it feels as if the modern academy has taken upon itself the task of destroying ethics under the cover of trying to save it.
A moment’s thought will reveal that Epicurus is right, that sexual relationships do cloud the mind and get people in entangled in full-time worldly commitments that leave little time for philosophising. The same insights are behind contemplative orders, especially celibate ones. Yet if we take Tibetan Buddhism as an example, there is a strong householder tradition for meditation masters, and some Buddhist and Hindu traditions make direct use of sexual intercourse to cultivate clarity of mind. Because of the power of the experience it is something that is difficult and requires training; anyone who claims to be using tantric sex for spiritual ends you can be reasonably confident is a fraud. Yet in a more common sense sex does get used to promote spiritual growth, through the selfless commitment and growth that comes through maintaining and raising a family. But to do that all the traps and confusion that get strewn in our path by romance and sex need to be faced, but this is not going to be helped by embracing a wilful ignorance of the problem!
All of which beings me to the motif of Mansfield Park, of the need to take care of the mind, that it is really a bad mistake to believe that happiness and wellbeing can come from perpetual distraction (or indeed a romantic view of the world).
Cowper catches it very well in the task.