Sorry humanity, ambivalence is about all you inspire - at least at the moment

By the conclusion of this summer I see myself having a much more developed ambivalence about humanity than I did before. In the event any family or friends read this, I will immediately qualify the opening sentence by stating I’m talking ambivalence toward people generally, not any one of you in particular.

Over the course of the past three months I have been on the receiving end of acts of kindness by strangers, friends, and family alike. I have also been lied to by someone I consider a close friend, with little to no apparent regard for the pain caused or the circumstances in which that particular knife was thrust into my back.

More recently, and less personally, I’ve also witnessed a man by the name of Tim DeChristopher sentenced to two years in prison for his courageous act of civil disobedience in defence of the Earth. Meanwhile, in Washington, a significant number of the 'honourable' men and women making up the US Congress have been demonstrating humanity’s capacity for dogmatism, inflexibility, and disregard for those in need. All this is to say nothing of the spectrum of human behaviour on display during the so-called “Arab spring” halfway around the world or the events closer to home in Wisconsin. These examples and experiences, together with many more, have made me increasingly ambivalent about our species.

This attitude of mine has, I think, been interpreted by some who know and talk with me often as something of a callous absence of concern for human suffering. It isn’t. Rather it is merely an extension of my attitude toward nature to humanity as a whole. Nature is neither good nor evil. It simply is. Nature is as replete with examples of love, compassion and cooperation as it is with cruelty, suffering and selfishness. Animals have been known to deceive other members of their species as well as to put their lives on the line in the interest of the group. Humans, being as much a part of nature as any other animal, are no different - though we do tend to be both destructive and creative on a scale unmatched by any other creature. But it is a mistake to interpret a difference in degree as a difference in kind.

All of this is not to say we shouldn’t each strive to be on the side alleviating suffering rather than the side causing it. Just that taken as a whole we humans will always have our share of those on either end of the spectrum, and everywhere in between. Over the course of our lifetime we’ll all move along the spectrum ourselves, hopefully toward the more ethical end. But humanity, like the environment from which it arose, is neither inherently good nor inherently evil. It just is.

Lao Tzu wrote, “The greatest love seems indifferent.” Mary Chestnut wrote in her Civil War diary, “Forgiveness is indifferent.” Though ambivalence isn’t entirely synonymous with indifference, if Lao Tzu and Mary Chestnut are correct, my attitude is at least a bit healthier and more realistic than it used to be.

Zeus offers his two cents on the debt ceiling crisis

Zeus and I followed our usual routine this morning. After making myself a cup of coffee, I took him out for his morning pee and patrol around the perimeter of the yard. Everything was more or less as he had left it the night before. He detected no evidence any of the neighbourhood cats had invaded his territory. However, he did take notice of the robins tapping their feet on the metal roof covering the patio and exchange pleasantries with the squirrel in the corner pine tree.

After returning to our bedroom I sat down at the computer to check the morning news. This morning Zeus sat down next to me, watching as I looked anxiously over the reports of the continuing debt ceiling stalemate in Washington. After a minute or two of this he let out a little growl indicating his displeasure at something.

“What is it boy?” I asked, patting his head reassuringly.

“I don’t understand it” he replied. I wasn’t too taken back. Zeus often talks. This morning was only unusual because his voice was so clear.

“What don’t you understand?” I asked, now stroking his head to provide additional comfort.

“Why all this fuss about money? America is loaded with money.” He looked not just puzzled, but genuinely troubled.

“Well, if Congress allows the US to default then the dollar will fall in value, interest rates will go up…” He lifted his paw and set it on my leg to cut me off.

“Yea, yea. I’ve heard you talking to mom and others about all that. But we’re talking about paper here - or more likely numbers in a computer at a bank somewhere. Every dollar on Earth your species created and you can make trillions more in less time than it takes me to finish breakfast, and yet everyone seems worried you’re going to run out.”

“True” I replied. “But if we just make more some people are worried that could lead to inflation.” Zeus has never been able to roll his eyes, but he can glaze them into a particularly disinterested gaze at a moment’s notice - and he did. I’ve never been good at explaining macroeconomics, least of all to a species whose biggest concerns are food and the location of their ball.

“Don’t insult my intelligence,” he said as if reading my mind.

“I wasn’t”

“Yes you were.” He paused and tilted his head. “Let me ask you another question. If a giant asteroid was discovered that was going to slam right into the planet in a few years wiping out everything but a few bacteria and, perhaps, some lucky insects here and there would anyone be arguing against raising the debt ceiling to $50 trillion if necessary to finance the research, space ships and missiles needed to blow it into a million pieces or send it hurtling harmlessly past the planet?”

I looked at him for a long time, not sure what to say. Asteroid, eh? He must have been reading over my shoulder when I was logged on to the ScienceDaily website too.

“Well, would they?” he asked emphatically, raising his foot into the air and quickly thumping it back down on the ground.

“No. At least I’d like to think they wouldn’t.”

“Okay. Well just in this country you’ve got millions of people struggling to feed their families and living without health insurance. Outside your borders there are at least 2 billion more living on barely a dollar a day. You’ve wiped out God knows how many animals, plants and insects, and the climate is changing faster than most of us can keep up.” He placed his paw on his chest to show solidarity with his cousins in the animal kingdom. “Practically speaking, the asteroid is pretty damn close I’d say.” He let out a low “grrrr” as he finished, as if trying to scare away the looming threat he saw coming. That’s the most a dog can do under the circumstances I suppose.

As he turned to walk away he threw his head over his shoulder and tossed out one final thought. "As far as I can tell debt and taxes aren't the problem. The problem is you Homo sapiens foul everybody's nest, including your own, and then argue the cost of clean-up is the problem.” With that he flopped down on his blanket and began gnawing contentedly on a bone.

‘We never should’ve named him after a god’ I thought shaking my head before returning my attention to the computer. Then mumbling under my breath “I wonder what Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry have been saying these days” I typed in the address to The Huffington Post.

Waiting in America

Looking at this blog I realized today it has been ten days since I last wrote anything. But life here in the states seems to be in some kind of holding pattern, and I’ve gotten caught up in it myself.

The TV news each day and across the internet focuses with slightly more urgency than the day before on whether or not Congress will opt for a national suicide attempt by defaulting on August 2nd. The two sides of this issue are given more or less equal time to make their case. Like a debate between an astronomer and someone who believes the world is flat, this only adds to the surreal nature of it all.

No one quite seems to believe they are about to witness the most colossal failure of the US government since the Civil War, yet the fact they just might can almost be heard creeping to the font of everyone’s mind. The markets leap at the mere possibility of a breakthrough, taking it as an indication the unprecedented remains unthinkable, even as members of Congress think it out loud on the TV.

For my part, I watch as the value of my Canadian dollars slowly grows and the value of my US student loans slowly shrinks. At moments I find myself pondering what Chris and I might do should we wake up to economic collapse on August 3rd. Maybe we get the car fixed after all by some mechanic suddenly hungry for business and willing to give us a deal, then more slowly and deliberately than our earlier trip across Canada hit the road to record first-hand the cultural and natural transformation taking place in the formerly unsustainable and greedy America that brought all this about. Think Grapes of Wrath, only by a far less talented writer with a more ecological point of view.

But mainly I just sit and wait, like everyone else, knowing history is unfolding and all I can do is watch. Watch as a nation so committed to greed it would sooner die than tax wealth to help the growing ranks of the poor living within its borders. Watch a culture driven by consumption for its own sake fall on its sword before accepting regulation that might at least slow the hemorrhaging.

Perhaps the default question will be dealt with before the deadline. Regardless, the philosophical issues that brought us to this point will remain. Both parties still accept the capitalist premise, if to somewhat differing degrees, of never-ending economic growth in a world with finite resources. Whether it’s August 3rd or some later date, nature’s bill will come due, and what we are borrowing from the planet annually is a far greater crisis than what we are borrowing from each other. The seas are dying, the air is warming, and the clock is ticking. Only when we shift the debate to the question of how best to build and maintain a compassionate and sustainable society will we at least finally be asking the right questions.

A silver lining to a carless future - for us at least

So it looks like we’ll be returning to Canada later this summer without a car. It will be the first time in our married life we’ve gone without one. The nearly $2000 we were told it would take to fix it forced us to choose between jeopardizing our ability to return and stay in Canada or the car. While the decision caused us a day or so of angst, in the end it wasn’t that difficult and Canada won out.

However, facing life without a car did make me question my freedom. If you took a poll of Americans and Canadians asking what material possession they associated most with freedom, the car would likely get a majority of the votes. The sample size would probably need to be huge to find someone in either country who seriously questioned the premise of the question.

My own initial reaction was to make a mental list of all the inconveniences we would be enduring over the next two years or so without a vehicle. From trips to Costco to regular weekend hikes, the pending perceived decline in my own freedom was palpable. The “inability” to regularly escape into nature caused me the most dread.

But facing the inevitable can, if we let it, cause us to look at the situation from a different perspective. For one thing, the fact I had come to see regular walks to the store for a bag or two of groceries as an inconvenience, or nature as something necessarily far away and remote was, when I stopped to consider it, quite sad.

The idea we need to climb into a steel, glass, and plastic box resting on four synthetic rubber wheels and contribute to global warming in order to truly experience nature is, truth be told, insane. Humans have been around for nearly 250,000 years or so now. Automobiles are little more than 120 years old. It’s difficult to make the case they’re a necessity given those numbers. Add in statistics on the sheer tons of carbon dioxide emitted and almost weekly headlines about oil spills and the notion becomes even crazier. Besides, if we really want or need to go somewhere that requires a car we can rent one for far less than it would cost to own one.

The automobile has gotten untold millions of people that otherwise never would have gone to the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Banff and Jasper, just to name a few. But it’s not at all clear the thousands of kilometres of roads and hectares of parking lots built in those places to accommodate those people are an improvement. Nor is it obvious that 90% or more of those visitors have done anything other than park and walk a few hundred metres at most to the nearest scenic overlook or nearby attraction. One could learn more about nature and feel greater wonder by renting a DVD or reading a national park’s Wikipedia page. We’ve gotten a lot better at going places and a lot worse at developing a sense of place.

I’m not ruling out ever owning a car again, but not having one for the next year or so means I’m ruling in getting to know the world of southern Vancouver Island much more intimately. The worst possible outcome, as I see it, is only achieving a smaller carbon footprint for a year or two, and the experience is likely to prove more personally satisfying than that. Regardless, in this day and age, that’s justification enough for a silver lining to going carless for a while.

Celebrating the first bill of rights while forgetting the second

Well, it's that time of year again. Between Canada Day on the first day of the month and America's 4th of July holiday, everyone is busy celebrating freedom in North America. When we're not setting off fireworks we like to spend time congratulating ourselves for supposedly enjoying more freedom than anyone else, especially here in the states. But we've been taught to only look at one side of the coin when it comes to freedom. Negative liberty, the liberty provided by an absence of obstacles to action such as freedom from restrictions on speech or worship, gets almost all the press. Positive liberty, the freedom that comes with the ability to act, gets almost none.

The US Bill of Rights and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada have both done an excellent job of articulating the limits of government power when it comes to placing legal restrictions on our right to speak out on an issue, assemble, worship, or to vote for the candidate of our choice - however limited the choice of candidates may sometimes be. The trend, at least until recently, was an expansion of individual liberty and greater checks on government intrusion or obstacles.

While freedom requires the government be prohibited from putting us in jail for publicly criticizing the president or prime minister, it also rests on our ability to effectively do so. If the poor and middle class are shut out of the electoral process because elections have become so expensive they can't effectively participate as candidates, or even donors, what difference does it make if the Constitution guarantees them the right to run for office provided they have reached a certain age? If we have the freedom to pursue any employment we choose, what good is that freedom if the list of jobs providing a living wage continues to shrink? Does it matter that we have the legal right to attend university provided our grades are good enough if the cost of tuition is so high most of the population can't even consider attending without facing years of staggering debt? The government of the UK acknowledged recently in a memo never intended to go public that up to 40,000 British families would be rendered homeless by proposed austerity measures. What good is it to them to have the legal right to purchase or rent a home? That choice has been or soon will be denied to them.

By focusing on individual negative liberty and forgetting positive liberty, we haven't merely put the cart before the horse; we've purchased the cart and failed to invest in a horse to pull it with. The legal right to do something is meaningless without the ability to do it. If our letters to the editor, votes, and even our volunteer hours or campaigns are drowned out by the rich because the supreme court has equated money with speech, the freedom to speak is trumped by wealth's ability to be heard, even if we don't want to listen.

Toward the end of World War II, FDR articulated a second bill of rights. These included the right to earn a living and to provide food, clothing, and shelter for ourselves and our families, the right to healthcare, and the right to an education. These together, FDR said, "spelled security", and were essential to the long-term maintenance of the other freedoms we hold dear. In a society where negative liberties are enshrined as sacred but the ability to effectively act on those liberties is increasingly denied, cynicism and despair are the inevitable result. Who among us would deny both are increasingly visible in the body politic today?

The current recession and the election of Barack Obama filled many of us with hope something like the second bill of rights was around the corner, but with the word 'austerity' filling the air, Gandhi's reminder that "to a hungry man, God comes in the form of a loaf of bread" seems more apt than the promise of change that seemed everywhere just over two years ago. The ability of more and more of our fellow citizens to provide for themselves, let alone take advantage of the rights guaranteed in our most important documents, is slipping away, and that means today there is significantly less freedom than there was just a few years ago.

In praise of dogs

There are a number of things one can say about dogs to make the case they are indeed our “best friend”. The advantages of having them around range from the purely utilitarian to the more emotional benefits. From guarding our homes, helping us herd our livestock, and flushing out birds on the hunt, to greeting us as though we were a long lost friend when we get home from work, the value of our relationship with dogs is nearly impossible to dispute. But fundamentally, I think what lies at the root of our friendship with Canis lupus familiaris is purely and simply their consistent capacity for unconditional love.

Dogs are perhaps the one friend we have in this world that come with virtually zero risk. With more than one out of every two marriages ending in divorce, and God knows how many relationships that never even make it to marriage, it is obvious even love stories that start out with the greatest passion frequently have unhappy endings. Humans, no matter how good at heart or well intentioned, might as well come with a “love at your own risk” label.

Our capacity to hurt those we love or to turn molehills into emotional mountains is almost unlimited. Bookstores would go out of business were it not for the volumes of fiction inspired by this all too human ability, to say nothing of the contemporary non-fiction offering ideas about how best to cope with it. Best friends and lovers alike all seem to get on each other’s nerves sooner or later.

Not so with dogs. Even people suffering from the deepest and most complex neuroses can usually find love and companionship in a dog. If they can’t, it’s the neurosis and not the dog that gets in the way. A dog just loves you for who you are, even happily adapting to our mental hang-ups by becoming a kind of enabler, validating our quirks by adjusting its behaviour to accommodate them while the rest of the world just thinks we’re crazy. Who wouldn’t consider such an animal humanity’s best friend?

Obviously, our dog Zeus - whose name appears in the title of this blog - is the inspiration for this post. From days spent in the wilderness to endless hours in the car to Zeus the office dog, he rolls with the punches like no human I’ve ever known, myself included. Only the introduction of another dog to the mix ruffles his feathers, but he accommodates himself to even that fairly quickly. Unlike dogs, we humans have too many stories running in our heads all the time. Frequently contradictory and usually far less than accurate reflections of reality, they make it difficult for us to remain conscious of our own motives, let alone remain secure about the motives of others, even those we love.

For canines it’s a different story. In Zeus’ case life boils down to a few simple pleasures: a ball to fetch or rope to tug on, a good bone, an occasional swim, food and water, and a place to lift his leg or take care of other business. Being with us is important too, though he would no doubt quickly share his love with another family if it became necessary. But as long as he is with us, we know that even if we were homeless and without a penny to our name, we would never have to question his fidelity. He would love us to the bitter end. How many people do you know with certainty would do the same unconditionally - no strings, shame, or guilt attached? And to think we still cling to the notion we’re the superior species on the planet.