Public Policy and Global Cooperation

“Sustainable development may be achievable in theory but not reached in practice if public policies and market forces do not lead to the needed investments.

We can summarize in the following way: the world is facing enormous ecological and environmental problems, but running out of natural resources is not the right way to describe the threat. Earth has the energy, land, biodiversity, and water resources needed to feed humanity and support long-term economic prosperity for all. The problem is that markets might not lead to their wise and sustainable use. There is no economic imperative that will condemn us to deplete our vital resource base, but neither is there an invisible hand that will prevent us from doing so. The choice will be ours to make through public policy and global cooperation.”

–Jeffrey D. Sachs, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet

People Do Not Touch Each Other

“He felt the street around him, unremitting, people moving past each other in coded moments of gesture and dance. They tried to walk without breaking stride because breaking stride is well-meaning and weak but they were forced sometimes to sidestep and even pause and they almost always averted their eyes. Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational. Who steps aside for whom, who looks or does not look at whom, what level of umbrage does a brush or a touch constitute? No one wanted to be touched. There was a pact of untouchability. Even here, in the huddle of old cultures, tactile and close-woven, with passerbys mixed in, and security guards, and shoppers pressed to windows, and wandering fools, people did not touch each other.”

—Don Delillo, Cosmopolis

The Thing About Money

“That’s the thing about money: it doesn’t seem to buy any class.”

–Me, today in the park in reference to some old rich folk

Global Policy Interdependence

“As has been amply demonstrated in empirical studies, the nature of market outcomes are massively influenced by public policies in education and literacy, epidemiology, land reform, microcredit facilities, appropriate legal protection, etc., and in each of these fields there are things to be done through public action that can radically alter the outcome of local and global economic relations. It is this class of interdependences that have to be understood and utilized to alter the inequalities and asymmetries that characterize the world economy.” [My italics]

–Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny

Assessing what has to be assessed

“The consideration on which many of the debates on globalization have concentrated, to wit, whether the poor too benefit from the established economic order, is an entirely inadequate focus for assessing what has to be assessed. What must be asked instead is whether they can feasibly get a better—and fairer—deal, with less disparities of economic, social, and political opportunities, and if so, through what international and domestic rearrangements this could be brought about. That is where the real engagement lies.”

Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence:The Illusion of Destiny

Plural Identities

“A proper understanding of the world of plural identities requires clarity of thinking about the recognition of our multiple commitments and affiliations, even though this may tend to be drowned by the flood of unifocal advocacy of just one perspective or another. Decolonization of the mind demands a firm departure from the temptation of solitary identities and priorities.”

–Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence

Movement Towards Inclusion

“The bell jar [as described by Braudel, signifying the exclusivity of the capitalist sector of society] makes capitalism a private club, open only to a privileged few, and enrages the billions standing outside looking in. This capitalist apartheid will inevitably continue until we all come to terms with the critical flaw in many countries’ legal and political systems that prevents the majority from entering the formal property system. . .

Few seem to realize that what we have here is one huge, worldwide industrial revolution: a gigantic movement away from life organized on a small scale to life organized on a large one. For better or for worse, people outside the West are fleeing self-sufficient and isolated societies in an effort to raise their standards of living by becoming interdependent in much larger markets. . .

Like computer networks, which had existed for years before anyone thought to link them, property systems become tremendously powerful when they are interconnected in a larger network. . . .

Political blindness, therefore, consists of being unaware that the growth of the extralegal sector and the breakdown of the existing legal order are ultimately due to a gigantic movement away from life organized on a small scale toward one organized in a larger context. . .

The primary problem is the delay in recognizing that most of the disorder occurring outside the West is the result of a revolutionary movement that is more full of promise than of problems.”

—Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

De Soto’s insights are tantalizing: his essential message is that the poor are seeking to become a part of the larger market system, but are denied access through exclusive laws and fiscal policies. Faced with the inability to become a part of the global market, the poor then must operate within small-scale, community “extralegal” markets and negotiations. I have referred to this market activity, so visibly abundant and active within South America, as a “micro-economy,” not recognizing that this teeming market life was not necessarily included within the larger economy in a formal sense.

What I also like about De Soto’s vision is his recognition that the poor have always historically recognized the opportunities inherent in a larger market. The movement to urban centers during the Industrial Revolution is well documented, and the same movement is now occurring in developing countries daily. The poor innately recognize opportunity when they see it, and recognize that fundamentally, global markets can provide access to a wider network of capability and progress.

Of course, simply giving the poor land titles and opening up their economies to globalization does not necessitate a better life, due to the great imbalance of power and wealth in favor of developed nations and small populations within developing nations. De Soto’s simplistic diagnosis has thus been rightfully critiqued. But with corrected fiscal policy and global law, these imbalances can be addressed to become more inclusive. De Soto’s insights can very neatly be coupled with the insights provided by social entrepreneurs like Muhammad Yunus. With the tool of microcredit, the poor can be given the ability to become included within the wider market and use their properties as capital assets.

The wider the embrace of networks can become, the more powerful and effective they will be. A market that can include and embrace all of the teeming activity of the micro-economies of the poor (and thus raise them out of poverty) is a healthy and balanced market.

What I also appreciate about De Soto’s vision is his emphasis on the global movement towards interdependence. Accepting membership into a greater community is to shed a degree of self-sufficiency and isolation. There is a strong undercurrent within environmental activism as well as nationalist reactionaries towards self-sufficiency and isolationism. It is certainly important to have integrity and inner strength. But at a certain point, interdependence within greater networks provides a greater strength and resiliancy.

I can best phrase this within the context of death: when someone you are close to passes away, you can feel a humongous hole cut out from inside of you. It makes you realize just how interconnected you are with everyone else in your life, and of how illusory is the concept that you are alone and detached.

When acts of violence and terrorism are committed, they are best viewed as perverted and desperate attempts to become included into the networks that they have been excluded from. The answer, therefore, in fighting terrorism is not in utilizing weapons and occupations, but rather in fighting poverty, by seeking to include, in an effective and positive manner, the developing nations and those in extreme poverty into the global market and body politic.

It is no secret that those nations mired in extreme poverty harbor terrorists. So what should we do? Bomb them? Or seek to include them into the greater networks of which they so desperately want to become a part of and which they have been routinely denied. Isn’t the answer obvious?

Nothing to Lose, Nothing to Gain

“People with nothing to lose are trapped in the grubby basement of the precapitalist world.”

—Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

Thoughts on Money & Poverty: The Root

In my series of posts focused on confronting the existence of poverty and thinking through the issues behind it [Thoughts on Poverty parts I, II, and III], I came to a series of realizations which I will sum up as follows: 1) development, profit-generation, and gentrification is not necessarily a bad thing; 2) poverty is not spawned by the idleness and laziness of the poor but rather through structures of commerce and policy; 3) charity is only a symptomatic response, and does not in any way address the root causes of poverty; and 4) poverty is sustained by the lack of will and indifference on the part of those with influence and money. These are all poignant observations, but my thought process was stopped short continually when I hit the wall of what do we do to change this? This can be seen especially in my second post, in which I end it by stating that micro-credit doesn’t work in the US, and that I have a lot more to learn on the subject of poverty.

I do indeed have a lot more to learn, but the wall that I was hitting turns out to be a quite common perception within the US in regards to the problem of entrepreneurship/employment and the poor. That wall is welfare. I was getting at this idea in a general way when I discovered that charity is a manifestation of shallow perceptions of the problem and not the solution.

The fact is that welfare has created a powerful disincentive to those stuck in poverty from ever obtaining the motivation to succeed. It’s throwing money at the problem, and increasing the division between the poor and the rich. It’s a type of exclusion, a method of control. Any of us who has ever been bribed by our parents knows this.

I arrived at this understanding while reading Banker to the Poor, by Muhammad Yunus. I have talked about Yunus before, and posted plenty of quotes of his, but I had not yet actually read a book written by him. I would highly advise reading some of his speeches and his books, in addition to books written about Grameen Bank such as David Bornstein’s The Price of a Dream. In Banker to the Poor, he discusses the reactions of Americans to the concept of micro-credit, and the problems he encountered with welfare states in the US and in Europe.

“I was not prepared for the amount of skepticism I encountered. What struck me was not so much people’s doubt as to whether micro-credit would succeed in the United States but their pessimism about whether anything would actually raise people out of poverty rather than merely alleviating its symptoms. Many Americans argue that their welfare state has created a lazy underclass of dysfunctional individuals who would never be interested in or capable of starting their own businesses or supporting themselves.

. . . Almost everyone I spoke with dismissed what I said, arguing that the Bengali experience could not be relevant to poverty eradication in the United States. They claimed that [poor people] needed jobs, training, health care, and protection from drugs and violence, not micro-loans, and that self-employment was a primitive concept lingering only in the Third World. Low-income people . . . needed money for rent and food, not for investment. They had no skills anyway.  . . .”

That is essentially the argument that I had been making in my second post on poverty. I was talking about how the cottage industries in Bangladesh of weaving, making furniture, rickshaw pulling, etc, were all something ingrained in their traditions and way of life. In the United States, I thought, what could we do to start our own businesses? Isn’t it a lot of hassle and paperwork, and don’t you have to get some kind of training and a degree? However, the more that you think about it, the more that you realize that the problem isn’t that people don’t have skills or ability, it is that they lack will and motivation.

I wrote a post while in Colombia on the teeming activity of its micro-economies, and of how this was inspiring to see, something that we need in the United States. And that is exactly what we do need! We need more street vendors, more individuals starting their own taxi businesses, more food carts, more clothing makers, more strange and exotic retail shops, more corner stores, etc. This local, community based commerce is what makes for a stronger overall economy. We need small-time entrepreneurs.

As I was reading Yunus’ chapter on the United States while on the subway, I excitedly gripped the book and finally realized the biggest major obstacle both in my mind and in my nation in regards to poverty: the concept and institution of welfare.

“. . . I witnessed directly how welfare laws in the United States create disincentives for welfare recipients to work. Those who receive welfare become virtual prisoners not only of poverty but of those who would help them; if they earn a dollar, it must be immediately reported to the welfare authority and deducted from their next welfare check. Welfare recipients are also not allowed to borrow money from any institutional source.

. . . In the developed world, my greatest nemesis is the tenacity of the social welfare system. . . Recipients of a monthly handout feel as afraid to start a business as the purdah-covered women in Bengali villages.

. . . I believe . . . that providing unemployment benefits is not the best way to address poverty. The able-bodied poor don’t want or need charity. The dole only increases their misery, robs them of incentive and, more important, of self-respect.

Poverty is not created by the poor. It is created by the structures of society and the policies pursued by society.”

One of the problems with welfare is that it is staunchly defended by anyone who thinks that they are liberal and/or compassionate. It is thus defended because it is seen as a necessary means of address to the problems of poverty. But welfare is only a symptomatic address; it does not change the structures that create the conditions for poverty.

We obviously cannot just lop off welfare and expect the problem to be solved. Welfare must be reduced in tandem with the extension of financial services to the poor in the form of micro-loans. Welfare must also be altered to allow for the poor to have incentive to take out loans and start their own businesses.

Welfare as a concept and institution should not be done away with. Welfare is necessary for those people who are not able-bodied enough to help themselves. However, it needs some drastic changes in its structuring. Otherwise, all other actions we take to eradicate poverty in the United States will end up falling far short in the face of the lack of will, self-esteem, and motivation on the part of the poor themselves. Only they can raise themselves out of poverty.

Public Policy and the Poor

“. . . the poor, once economically empowered, are the most determined fighters in the battle to solve the population problem, end illiteracy, and live healthier, better lives. When policy makers finally realize that the poor are their partners, rather than bystanders or enemies, we will progress much faster than we do today.”

–Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor

Counterculture of Positivity

“After all these struggles [to extend credit to the poor in Bangladesh], repeated in thousands of villages, it is frustrating to hear people dismiss our accomplishments, arguing that Grameen’s success is due to cultural factors that cannot be replicated elsewhere. To succeed in Bangladesh, in many ways we have had to struggle against our culture. In fact, we have had to create a counterculture that value’s women’s economic contribution, rewards hard work, and punishes corrupt practices. . . Indeed, if one were to look for the country where it would be most difficult to have a program like Grameen Bank succeed, I think Bangladesh would come to the top of the list.”

–Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor

The Worm’s Eye View

Instead of traditional book learning, I wanted to teach my university students how to understand the life of one single poor person. When you hold the world in your palm and inspect it only from a bird’s eye view, you tend to become arrogant—you do not realize that things get blurred when seen from an enormous distance. I opted instead for “the worm’s eye view.”

–Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor

As Seen at the New York Botanical Garden

“What is a weed?

A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Overmind

“If we would understand the difference of . . . global Overmind Consciousness from our separative and only imperfectly synthetic mental consciousness, we may come near to it if we compare the strictly mental with what would be an overmental view of activities of our material universe. To the Overmind, for example, all religions would be true as developments of the one eternal religion, all philosophies would be valid each in its own field as a statement of its own universe-view from its own angle, all political theories with their practice would be the legitimate working out of an Idea Force with its right to application . . .      In our separative consciousness . . . these things exist as opposites; each claims to be the truth and taxes the others only as inferior truth-expressions. An overmental Intelligence would refuse to entertain this conception . . . for a moment; it would allow all to live as necessary to the whole or put each in its place in the whole or assign to each its field of realisation or endeavor.”

—Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Pure Essential Joy of Being

“The malady of the world is that the individual cannot find his real soul, and the root-cause of this malady is again that he cannot meet in his embrace of things outward the real soul of the world in which he lives. He seeks to find there the essence of being . . . but receives instead a crowd of contradictory touches and impressions. If he could find that essence, he would find also the one universal being, power, conscious existence and delight even in this throng of touches and impressions; the contradictions of what seems would be reconciled in the unity and harmony of the Truth that reaches out to us in these contacts. At the same time he would find his own true soul and through it his Self, because . . . his self and the self of the world are one. But this he cannot do because of the egoistic ignorance in the mind of thought, the heart of emotion, the sense which responds to the touch of things not by a courageous and whole-hearted embrace of the world, but by a flux of reachings and shrinkings, cautious approaches or eager rushes and sullen or discontented or panic or angry recoils according as the touch pleases or displeases, comforts or alarms, satisfies or dissatisfies. It is the desire-soul that by its wrong reception of life becomes the cause of a triple misinterpretation of the rasa, the delight in things, so that, instead of figuring the pure essential joy of being, it comes rendered unequally into the three terms of pleasure, pain and indifference.”

—Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Death as Subservient to Life

“. . . the natural opposition we make between death and life is an error of our mentality, one of those false oppositions—false to inner truth though valid in surface practical experience—which, deceived by appearances, it is constantly bringing into universal unity. Death has no reality except as a process of life. Disintegration of substance and renewal of substance, maintenance of form and change of form are the constant process of life; death is merely a rapid disinitegration subservient to life’s necessity of change and variation of formal experience. Even in the death of the body there is no cessation of Life, only the material of one form of life is broken up to serve as material for other forms of life. Similarly we may be sure, in the uniform law of Nature, that if there is in the bodily form a mental or psychic energy, that also is not destroyed but only breaks out from one form to assume others by some process of metempsychosis or new ensouling of  body. All renews itself, nothing perishes.”

—Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

A Whole in the Whole

 

“The divine soul will be aware of all variation of being, consciousness, will and delight as the outflowing, the extension, the diffusion of that self-concentrated Unity developing itself, not into difference and division, but into another, an extended form of infinite oneness. It will itself always be concentrated in oneness of its being, always manifested in variation in the extension of its being. All that takes form in itself will be the manifested potentialities of the One, the Word or Name vibrating out of the nameless Silence, the Form realising the formless essence, the active Will or Power proceeding out of the tranquil Force, the ray of self-cognition gleaming out from the sun of timeless self-awareness, the wave of becoming rising up into shape of self-conscious existence out of the eternally self-conscious Being, the joy and love welling for ever out of the eternal still Delight. It will be the Absolute biune in its self-unfolding, and each relativity in it will be absolute to itself because aware of itself as the Absolute manifested but without that ignorance which excludes other relativities as alien to its being or less complete than itself. . . . It will be able divinely to conceive, perceive and sense all things as the Self, its own self, one self of all, one Self-being and Self-becoming, but not divided in its becomings which have no existence apart from its own self-consciousness . . . It will be able divinely to conceive, perceive and sense all these existences in their individuality, in their separate standpoint living as the individual Divine, each with the One and Supreme dwelling in it and each therefore not altogether a form or eidolon, not really an illusory part of a real whole, a mere foaming wave on the surface of an immobile Ocean,—for these are after all no more than inadequate mental images,—but a whole in the whole, a truth that repeats the infinite Truth, a wave that is all the sea, a relative that proves to be the Absolute itself when we look behind form and see it in its completeness.”

—Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Nuclear Energy Now

“I think we have little option but to prepare for the worst and assume that we have already passed the threshold. Like paramedics, their first priority is to keep the patient, civilization, alive during the journey to a world that at least is no longer undergoing rapid change. We face unrestrained heat, and its consequences will be with us within no more than a few decades. We should now be preparing for a rise of sea level, spells of near-intolerable heat like that in Central Europe in 2003, and storms of unprecedented severity. We should also be prepared for surprises, deadly local or regional events that are wholly unpredictable. The immediate need is secure and safe sources of energy to keep the lights of civilization burning and for the preparation of our defences against the rising sea level. There is no alternative but nuclear fission energy until fusion energy and sensible forms of renewable energy arrive as a truly long-term provider. Nuclear energy is free of emissions and independent of imports from what will be a disturbed world. We would be right to cut back all emissions to a minimum, and this includes emissions of methane from leaking pipes and landfill sites. But most of all we need electricity to sustain our technologically based civilization.”

James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (2006)

The Backbone of a History

“For women like me, it seems, it’s not ours to take charge of beginnings and endings . . . Let men write those stories. I can’t. I only know the middle ground where we live our lives . . . Don’t dare presume there’s shame in the lot of a woman who carries on. On the day a committee of men decided to murder the fledgling Congo, what do you suppose Mama Mwanza was doing? Was it different, the day after? Of course not. Was she a fool, then, or the backbone of a history? When a government comes crashing down, it crushes those who were living under its roof. People like Mama Mwanza never knew the house was there at all. Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you’re a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democracy and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.”

Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

Change the Market to Reflect Reality

“While we derive a great deal of wealth from natural resources, we have not found an effective way to reinvest in or preserve that wealth. We are losing those resources, because they are either controlled by private companies or by the state, and neither has proved successful in establishing long-term strategies for ensuring the enduring well-being of the commons. Governments the world over give resources to corporations that are not required to take care of them, and therefore do not. The reason . . . is the failure of the market to internalize fully all costs. If the market is rewarded for externalizing costs and extracting wealth, then individual producers can be expected to leave to the state, wherever possible, the job of restoration and clean-up. On the other hand, it is quite impossible for a state agency to maintain ecosystem health when its main function is to deal with aftermarket degradation. When you then compound the problem with revolving-door relationships between regulator agencies and the very enterprises they are supposed to monitor, the viability of the ecosystem is hardly a primary concern.

To argue today that the free market should control the extraction and sale of natural resources ignores the state of the commons and the free market. The market works to the benefit of the whole of society when it includes all costs and benefits. Only when the market accurately reflects the replacement costs of a resource (a virgin forest or salmon or Arctic oil) and the social costs of its consumption (tobacco being the most obvious) will society begin to respond to the market in a rational way.”

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce

Good Design for the Marketplace

“In any endeavor, good design resides in two principles. First, it changes the least number of elements to achieve the greatest result. Second, it removes stress from a system rather than adding it. Bad design is pinning our hopes for environmental and cultural survival on a change in human consciousness and behavior alone, because we therefore depend on the highest number of uncontrollable elements—people—to undergo a great change. Likewise, bad design is having to institute several hundred thousand rules and restrictions under the jurisdiction of the government and expecting business to know them all, much less obey them . . . Good design for the commercial system accounts for and appeals to the innate behavioral modes of both governance and commerce. Let governance govern with a minimum of intrusion and with a genuinely “conservative” approach; let business be business at its best: humane and creative and efficient.

One of the ways to further this goal is to invert the old values and reverse the traditional cost-price incentives. We need a predictable and consistent market that recognizes the true, full costs of doing business and reassigns them to the marketplace, where they belong. We require a market economy that rewards the highest internalized cost, an economy in which business prospers when it is responsible both socially and ecologically. We need business to thrive by exceeding regulatory standards rather than by challenging or circumventing them. Businesses should literally compete to be more ecological, not only on moral or ethical grounds or because it is “the right thing to do,” but because such behavior squarely aligns them with their bottom line. In short, we must design a marketplace that obviates acts of environmental destruction by making them extremely expensive, and rewards restorative acts by bringing them within our means. If we do this, environmental restoration, economic prosperity, job creation, and social stability will become equivalent.”

—Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce

The Root of the Problem is Private

“However destructive may be the policies of the government and the methods and products of the corporation, the root of the problem is always to be found in private life. We must learn to see that every problem that concerns us . . . always leads straight to the question of how we live. The world is being destroyed—no doubt about it—by the greed of the rich and powerful. It is also being destroyed by popular demand. There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world; for that, the rich and powerful need the help of countless ordinary people.”

Wendell Berry

Knowing Nothing as the Center

“The path I have followed, this natural way of farming, which strikes most people as strange, was first interpreted as a reaction against the advance and reckless development of science. But all I have been doing, farming out here in the country, is trying to show that humanity knows nothing. Because the world is moving with such furious energy in the opposite direction, it may appear that I have fallen behind the times, but I firmly believe that the path I have been following is the most sensible one. . . .
In general, people are only concerned with whether this kind of farming is an advance into the future or a revival of times past. Few are able to grasp correctly that natural farming arises from the unmoving and unchanging center of agricultural development.

To the extent that people separate themselves from nature, they spin out further and further from the center. At the same time, the centripetal effect asserts itself and the desire to return to nature arises. But if people merely become caught up in reacting, moving to the left or to the right, depending on conditions, the result is only more activity. The non-moving point of origin, which lies outside the realm of relativity, is passed over, unnoticed. I believe that even “returning-to-nature” and anti-pollution activities, no matter how commendable, are not moving toward a genuine solution if they are carried out solely in reaction to the overdevelopment of the present age.

Nature does not change, although the way of viewing nature invariably changes from age to age. No matter the age, natural farming exists forever as the wellspring of agriculture.”

Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution

Formalism and Convention as Flimsy Band-Aids

“When you get right down to it, there are few agricultural practices that are really necessary. The reason that man’s improved techniques seem to be necessary is that the natural balance has been so badly upset beforehand by those same techniques that the land has become dependent on them.

This line of reasoning not only applies to agriculture, but to other aspects of human society as well. Doctors and medicine become necessary when people create a sickly environment. Formal schooling has no intrinsic value, but becomes necessary when humanity creates a condition in which one must become “educated” to get along. . . . To the extent that trees deviate from their natural form, pruning and insect extermination become necessary; to the extent that human society separates itself from a life close to nature, schooling becomes necessary. In nature, formal schooling has no function.”

Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution

Consciousness Beyond and Before Mind

“It is becoming always clearer that not only does the capacity of our total consciousness far exceed that of our organs, the senses, the nerves, the brain, but that even for our ordinary thought and consciousness these organs are only their habitual instruments and not their generators. Consciousness uses the brain which its upward strivings have produced, brain has not produced nor does it use the consciousness. . . Our physical organism no more causes or explains thought and consciousness than the construction of an engine causes or explains the motive-power of steam or electricity. The force is anterior, not the physical instrument.”

—Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Lawns as a Virus Symptomatic of Consumer Culture

“. . . every society that grows extensive lawns could produce all its food on the same area, using the same resources, and . . . world famine could be totally relieved if we devoted the same resources of lawn culture to food culture in poor areas. These facts are before us. Thus, we can look at lawns, like double garages and large guard dogs, [and Humvees and SUVs] as a badge of willful waste, conspicuous consumption, and lack of care for the earth or its people.

Most lawns are purely cosmetic in function. Thus, affluent societies have, all unnoticed, developed an agriculture which produces a polluted waste product, in the presence of famine and erosion elsewhere, and the threat of water shortages at home.

The lawn has become the curse of modern town landscapes as sugar cane is the curse of the lowland coastal tropics, and cattle the curse of the semi-arid and arid rangelands.

It is past time to tax lawns (or any wasteful consumption), and to devote that tax to third world relief. I would suggest a tax of $5 per square metre for both public and private lawns, updated annually, until all but useful lawns are eliminated.”

—Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual

Each Thing Is All Itself

“When we withdraw our gaze from its egoistic preoccupation with limited and fleeting interests and look upon the world with dispassionate and curious eyes that search only for the Truth, our first result is the perception of a boundless energy of infinite existence . . . an existence that surpasses infinitely our ego or any ego or any collectivity of egos . . . We instinctively act and feel and weave our life thoughts as if this stupendous world movement were at work around us as centre and for our benefit . . . When we begin to see, we perceive that it exists for itself, not for us . . . And yet let us not swing over to the other extreme and form too positive an idea of our own insignificance. . . Science reveals to us how minute is the care, how cunning the device, how intense the absorption it bestows upon the smallest of its works even as on the largest. . . To Brahman there are no whole and parts, but each thing is all itself and benefits by the whole of Brahman. . . The form and manner and result of the force of action vary infinitely, but the eternal, primal, infinite energy is the same in all. The force of strength that goes to make the strong man is no whit greater than the force of weakness that goes to make the weak. The energy spent is as great in repression as in expression, in negation as in affirmation, in silence as in sound.”

—Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

The Divine to Man as the Sun to Earth

“For the senses the sun goes round the earth; that was for them the centre of existence and the motions of life are arranged on the basis of a misconception. The truth is the very opposite, but its discovery would have been of little use if there were not a science that makes the new conception the centre of a reasoned and ordered knowledge putting their right values on the perceptions of the senses. So also for the mental consciousness: God moves round the personal ego and all His works and ways are brought to the judgment of our egoistic sensations, emotions, and conceptions and there are given values and interpretations which, through a perversion and inversion of the truth of things, are yet useful and practically sufficient in a certain development of human life and progress. They are a rough practical systematisation of our experience of things valid so long as we dwell in a certain order of ideas and activities. But they do not represent the last and highest state of human life and knowledge . . . The truth is not that God moves round the ego as the centre of existence and can be judged by the ego and its view of the dualities, but that the Divine is itself the centre and that the experience of the individual only finds its own true truth when it is known in the terms of the universal and the transcendent.”

–Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Evil as a Part of a Whole

“An omnipresent reality is the Brahman, not an omnipresent cause of persistent illusions . . . And if this Self, God, or Brahman is no helpless state, no bounded power, no limited personality, but the self-conscient All, there must be some good and inherent reason in it for the manifestation, . . . [there must be] some truth of being in all that is manifested. The discord and apparent evil of the world must in their sphere be admitted, but not accepted as our conquerors. The deepest instinct of humanity seeks always and seeks wisely wisdom as the last word of the universal manifestation, not an eternal mockery and illusion, . . . an ultimate victory and fulfillment, not the disappointed recoil of the soul from its great adventure . . . Brahman is indivisible in all things and whatever is willed in the world has been ultimately willed by the Brahman. It is only our relative consciousness, alarmed or baffled by the phenomena of evil, ignorance and pain in the cosmos, that seeks to deliver the Brahman from responsibility for Itself and its workings by erecting some opposite principle, Maya or Mara, conscious Devil or self-existent principle of evil. There is one Lord and Self and the many are only His representations and becomings.”

–Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

What is Love?

I use generalized terms such as “god“, or “love” often in my written discourse, of which I have sometimes unconventional personal definitions. I generally feel that it is more useful to glean meaning from the context of a statement rather than picking apart individual words, but sometimes it is good to pause and step back and ask what, exactly, is meant by such over-used and yet broadly defined and abstract terms. And as it is nearing Valentine’s Day, I feel that it might be a suitable meditation to pontificate a bit on the word “love” and its possible deeper implications.

Love as defined by Merriam-Webster is (1): a strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties (2) : attraction based on sexual desire : affection and tenderness felt by lovers (3) : affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests.

Don’t those definitions all seem rather far off the mark? Mere “strong affection”, “attraction”, “sexual desire” . . . no, no, not quite. True love is something much deeper. And yes, of course, how could one ever put such love into a simple, clean, brisk definition?

I was going to attempt now to try my best to define it myself, but I suddenly realized that I’ve already got a whole stack of writing on the subject. At the risk of seeming self-indulgent, I think I’d rather just let what I’ve already written speak for itself, define itself as collected fragments, like pieces of a candy necklace, strung together now by one single word through time. So I’m going to present a series of quotes from 23 selected pieces, extending back from the last 7 years of my life:

In the midst of the fragmented shards of war, desperation, and complacency, love is the flower that can break through concrete and connect together alien worlds. (1)

Love is not a complacent plateau of stasis; only through constant struggle and transcendence does it grow. (2)

Love is the flow of divinity through the vessel of you. Love imbues anything and everything with new light. Love is the only reason life has to exist. (3)

To love is to realize the myth of your solitude. The beloved is within you, at all moments, even when you are not touching, even when you are not speaking. It is only through selfishness that your suffering is created. (4)

The potential in every person for love is boundless. (5)

Love [is] found in giving yourself, the love which always awaits just outside of the door you are so frightened of passing through. And when you pass through, you look into another’s eyes–you do not see a friend, an enemy, a lover, a sibling–you see yourself. And then you see that person for what they are:
Everything. (6)

There is no love without suffering. (7)

Love, love is the only way to live.
It is the only way to die.
It is the only way to do anything worth something
in a world that is dying to live. (8)

Wonder, and wonder, and frightening joy. (9)

Amar una otra persona
es amar sí mismo,
es amar el viento, el cielo, los nubes,
es amar la tierra, la luna, la luz. (10)

Love in its deepest incarnations necesitates a form of death, a scraping of the insides to mold out a hollowness that could cradle divinity. (11)

Amor esta afuera todo, esta dentro de todo, esta incontenible, movimiento a través de todo, afuera palabras, se bastado solo con manos, con contacto de cascaras–palabras se amoldado de bocas sino allende de sonidos. Amor es un creacion de la luz buscando sí mismo. (12)

Love is like an ocean, somehow keeping you afloat in the midst of continuous swelling and ebbing change. Like an ocean, it accepts everything, the only rejection coming from the mind that fears the heart that is opening to suffering like a flower. (13)

Amor es el crecimiento mas profundo de la vida. Nuestras mentes y nuestros cuerpos son huesos huecos por el incontenible de la medula de la divinidad. (14)

True love is always worth the sacrifice of long periods of lonely suffering. Even if it might mean a lifetime of sadness. There is never a reason to hold back when love is near. We must give all, we must give everything for something that can never be possessed. (15)

. . . in love there is no control, & there is no turning back – but it places you in the center of the world. (16)

Rumi wrote that “the life of lovers is in death.” Because in order to gain everything that you desire you must lose everything that you possess. (17)

We love, we love, we love, and we understand, finally, that each and every love is the ultimate purpose for which we have been placed into our bodies. (18)

What brings me higher–when my heart is widened with new, unforeseen love–also breaks me open to a new realm of emptiness, a deeper, rawer despair. (19)

Love shows you the way into this place where no one can enter. You leave yourself behind. You leave it all behind. Everything. Everything. Everything. (20)

Love is the verification of everything that you have become. Love is the refutation of everything you have been. Love is here. Love is now. (21)

It was a rollercoaster, it was a movie, it was a cup washing over the rim into aether, it was ink sloshing into indecipherable patterns, it was beautiful, it was horrendous, it was shocking and powerful and new. (22)

Love is letting go. Love is letting it all go. (23)

 

Affirmation of Divinity Within Mundanity

“The affirmation of a divine life upon earth and an immortal sense in mortal existence can have no base unless we recognize not only eternal Spirit as the inhabitant of this bodily mansion, the wearer of this mutable robe, but accept Matter of which it is made, as a fit and noble material out of which He weaves constantly His garbs, builds recurrently the unending series of His mansions.”

Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Are You A Hypocrite Environmentalist?

“If we do not get our cities, homes, and gardens in order, so that they feed and shelter us, we must lay waste to all other natural systems. Thus, truly responsible conservationists have gardens which support their food needs, and are working to reduce their own energy needs to a modest consumption, or to that which can be supplied by a local wind, water, forest, or solar power resources. We can work on providing biomass for our essential energy needs on a household and regional scale.

It is a hypocrisy to pretend to save forests, yet to buy daily newspapers and packaged food; to preserve native plants, yet rely on agrochemical production for food; and to adopt a diet which calls for broadscale food production.”

–Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual

Subtle Degrees

subtle degrees
of domination and servitude
are what you know as love

but love is different
it arrives complete
just there
like the moon in the window

like the sun
of neither east nor west
nor of anyplace

when that sun arrives
east and west arrive

desire only that
of which you have no hope
seek only that
of which you have no clue

love is the sea of not being
and there intellect drowns

this is not the Oxus River
or some little creek
this is the shoreless sea;
here swimming ends
always in drowning

a journey to the sea
is horses and fodder and contrivance
but at land’s end
the footsteps vanish

you lift up your robe
so as not to wet the hem;
come! drown in this sea
a thousand times

the moon passes over
the ocean of nonbeing

droplets of spray tear loose
and fall back on the cresting waves

a million galaxies
are a little scum
on that shoreless sea

–Rumi

Millennial Life

” . . .in this new millennial life of instant and ubiquitous connection, you don’t in fact communicate so much as leave messages for one another, these odd improvisational performances, often sorry bits and samplings of ourselves that can’t help but seem out of context. And then when you do finally reach someone, everyone’s so out of practice or too hopeful or else embittered that you wonder if it would be better not to attempt contact at all.”
–Chang-Rae Lee Aloft

Know Yourself

The Prophet said: ‘Whoever knows themself knows their God.’ And he said: ‘I know my Lord by my Lord.’ The Prophet points out by that, that you are not you: you are God, without you; not God entering into you, nor you entering into God. And it is not meant by that, that you are of that which exists . . . but it is meant by it that you never were nor will be, whether by yourself or through God or in God or along with God. You are neither ceasing to be nor still existing. You are God, without one of these limitations. Then if you know your existence thus, then you know God; and if not, then not.

–Ibn ‘Arabi “The Treatise On Being”

Permaculture on Agri-business Methodology

“Here, we come to a grave impasse. There is no doubt that the once-off yield of a ploughed and fertilised monoculture, supported by chemicals and large energy inputs, can out yield that of almost every other production system. But at what public cost? for how long maintained? with what improvement in nutrition? with what guarantee of sustainability? with what effect on world hunger? on soils? and on our health? There is abundant proof that such forced yields are temporary, and that plough cultures destroy soils and societies.

These are some very akward questions to ask of the agricultural establishment, for very few, if any, modern agricultural systems do not carry the seeds of our own destruction. These systems are those that receive public financial support, yet they destroy the countryside in a multitude of ways, from clearing the land of forest, hedgerow, and animal species to long-term soil degradation and poisoning. We are thus obliged, by entrenched bureaucracies, to pay for the destruction of our world, regardless of the long-term costs to be borne by our children and our societies.”

–Bill Mollison

Permaculture on Swimming Pools

“Swimming pools have crept across the affluent suburbs so that, from the air, these ponds now resemble a virulent aquamarine rash on the urban fringe. The colour is artificial, like that blue dye that imitates an ocean wave obediently crashing down the toilet bowls of the over-fastidious. Chemicals used to purify the water are biocides, and we are biological organisms; if fish can’t live in our pools, we should also keep our bodies out of the water. When chlorine isn’t being used as a war gas, it is being dumped into our drinking, bathing and swimming water, where it forms carcinogenic chloroform.

Innovative pool designers now filter natural pools below a base pebble bed, using the pebbles as algal/bacterial cleaners, then cycle it through a reed-bed to remove excess nutrients before cascading it back, freshly oxygenated, into the pool. Such pools can be delightful systems with tame fish, crayfish, rock ledges, over-arching ferns, and great good health.”

–Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual

Permaculture on Streams

“In human systems, we have confused the order of hierarchical function with status and power, as though a tree stem were less important than the leaves in total. . . What we should recognize is that each part needs the other, and that none functions without the others. . . Thus, we can see how rivers change their whole regime if we alter one aspect. We should also see that water is of the whole, not to be thought of in terms of its parts. Thus we refute the concept of status and assert that of function. . .We need each other, and it is a reciprocal need wherever we have a function in relation to each other.”

–Permaculture: A Designer’s Manuel

“Order is found in things working beneficially together. It is not the forced condition of neatness, tidiness, and straightness, all of which are, in design or energy terms, disordered. True order may lie in apparent confusion . .

“Thus the seemingly-wild and naturally-functioning garden of a New Guinea villager is beautifully ordered and in harmony, while the clipped lawns and pruned roses of the pseudo-aristocrat are nature in wild disarray.

“Neatness, tidiness, uniformity, and straightness signify an energy-maintained disorder in natural systems.”

–Permaculture: A Designer’s Manuel

Love Is Reckless

Love is reckless; not reason.
Reason seeks a profit.
Love comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed.

Yet, in the midst of suffering,
Love proceeds like a millstone,
hard-surfaced and straightforward.

Having died to self-interest,
she risks everything and asks for nothing.
Love gambles away every gift God bestows.

Without cause God gave us Being;
without cause, give it back again.
Gambling yourself away is beyond any religion.

Religion seeks grace and favor,
but those who gamble these away are God’s favorites,
for they neither put God to the test
nor knock at the door of gain and loss.

–Rumi

Underworld–read it if you ain’t yet

When Matty was real small and his brother used to sit on the pot and read comics to a peewee audience, neighbor kids ages four and five supposedly being minded by a grown-up somewhere near, with Matty in the doorway ready to shout out chickie, which was the warning word, and there’s Nick on the pot reading to them from Captain Marvel or the Targeteers, his pants hanging limp from his kneecaps, and he did lively dialogue, declaimed and gestured, developed a voice for villains and for women and an airy stabbing screech for gangster cars and cornering tightly in the night, scaring the kids at times with his intensity of manner, then pausing to loose a turd that would splattingly drop, that would plop into the water, the funniest sound in nature, sending a happy awe across the faces of his listeners–it was the creepiest delight of all, better than anything he might deliver from the paneled pages.

Don DeLillo, Underworld

quote

It is senseless to claim that things exist in their instancing only. The template for the world and all in it was drawn long ago. Yet the story of the world, which is all the world we know, does not exist outside of the intruments of its execution. Nor can those intruments exist outside of their own history. And so on. This life of yours is not a picture of the world. It is the world itself and it is composed not of bone or dreams or time but of worship. Nothing else can contain it. Nothing else be by it contained.

–Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain

Proper Vocation

Nothing occupies us, Sir,
save service to that cupbearer;
Saki! Another round, please-
& deliver us from Good & Evil.
God, Sir, has created no one
without a proper vocation;
as for us, He has appointed the job
of permanent unemployment:
by day dancing in the light
like motes of dust;
by night, like stars, circumambulating
the moon-visaged beloved.
If He wanted us to work, after all,
He would not have created this wine;
with a skin-full of this, Sir,
would you rush out to commit economics?
What job could a drunkard do
other than the work of the wine itself?
That sacred vintage, transported across
earth & heaven to the Everlasting Refuge.
Drink mere worldly wine, sleep
one night & it passes;
drink from the flagon of the One & your head
will follow you to the grave.
The source of all mercy, Sir,
pours it out for free;
& these sakis treat us as sweetly
as nursemaids their children.
Drink, my heart, & go drunk,
introduce others to this pleasure
& God will keep you well supplied.
Where you witness some beauty
sit & be a mirror;
where you see ugliness
slip the looking glass back in its bag.
Wander happily about the streets
mingling with the young &
beautiful
reciting, “Nay, I swear
by this city. . .”
bravo!
. . .ah, but my head,
my head is spinning from this wine;
I will dry up & be silent,
I will not sit here & count blessings
which mathematics cannot
comprehend.

Rumi