After my write-up on the philosophy of Hinduism, I got a fair bit of interest from people wanting to know more on the issue. Wendi was preparing to do an ethics presentation on Hinduism and stumbled across my article during her research. She sent me a few questions she had on Hindu beliefs, one of which was about the Hindu take on spiritualism and the afterlife.

More recently, I was chatting with a friend in Mexico who had a similar query. The amount of Spanish literature about India seems to on the rise in recent years, so a curiosity about the culture is a natural side-effect. She wanted to know about the Indian belief in past lives, and my take on it. My replies to both these questions, one academic and one more personal, was broad enough to be of general interest, so I thought I’d share my thoughts here.

The Hindu view on the afterlife is that the essence of life is immortal and cannot be destroyed. As with all things in the Indian belief system, this basic idea can be interpreted and understood on many levels. The very religious view is that the individual soul survives intact and is reborn in another form. The more philosophical interpretation could be that that life energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but can only be converted from one form to another. How much of each of those opposing ingredients you wish to put into your own personal afterlife sauce, is entirely up to you.

Rebirth is said to be based on the concept of Karma — a distillation of past actions, behaviour and thought. In the most simplistic way, you could think that your next birth depends on whether you’ve been bad or good. That’s how many understand it, but the philosophical thought is more complex. It considers all of physical life to be a sort of audio-visual-experiential tempering ground for the soul. The soul is born and reborn in various forms and as various things, so as to gain all the experiences it needs to come to a true realisation of the nature of existence, i.e. enlightenment. This is also thought to be based on Karma, but here the process is not considered as one of punishment, but rather of evaluation. The soul decides what experience it requires as a next step in its progress towards enlightenment, and then takes that step.

All generally agree that once enlightenment is reached, the soul is freed from the imperative to be reborn and take physical form. It is then finally one with the ultimate soul/God/the universe/or whatever you want to call it. That’s where the Buddhist concept of Moksha come from. Liberation.

When chatting with my Mexican friend, her questions about what I was describing brought up some interesting contrasts that don’t come up in detached philosophical musings like the one above. I was telling her about the Hindu belief that people, animals, and all life is born and reborn, depending on your thinking and behaviour in your current life. For example, predominantly greedy and inhuman thoughts might lead to a birth as an animal, a creature of instinct. But, nothing is permanent, with each life you learn, hopefully improve, and are born in higher and higher forms until you achieve nirvana &mdash the same enlightenment I described before &mdash you understand how it all works, and you are freed from the cycle.

This was a more ground-level description of what regular people believe, free of philosophical detachment. Her counter-question was interesting. She said that if you´re reborn as an animal, for the animal´s life you would not be aware, as animals don´t think. So how could you behave well to be reborn in human form? Or are you just a human in an animal´s body? That’s a question that would have never occurred to me, but it is a very valid one if you believe that the human soul is unique, which is the basis of all the Abrahamic religions (Catholicism, Judaism, Islam). By contrast, most Eastern religions generally believe in the soul being common and equal across all life. Human beings might largely be more developed souls, but other life has a soul too. This fundamental difference in thinking is part of why there are so many vegetarians in India. It comes from that belief that ending any life too early, and especially an animal one that is closer to the human level of consciousness, is to stop its development prematurely and prolong its time in the cycle.

Of course, there is much commonality in the thinking about the afterlife across all religious thought, even if the details vary. It all comes down to your behaviour in life, with the afterlife serving as reward or punishment. My friend had the same thought about her beliefs and the concepts of heaven and hell. She did, however, detect the abstractness of what I was saying in comparison, so she wondered whether I thought I would be reunited in any way with my loved ones when I died. Now, this is one of those points where what we believe depends on how comfortable we are with the dissolution of ourselves in the larger scheme of things. It’s safe to say the the philosophical stream of Hindu thought thinks of reuniting of souls after death in a more abstract way. That is to say, the specific personalities we take on in life may not survive the transition, but souls that have been close in their lives will recognize each other. Maybe not always thinking of each other as mothers and fathers and sons and daughters, but just as kindred spirits. It comes from believing that the soul or spirit is the real thing, and the person is merely a temporary costume.

I myself am not completely sure of what I believe, because I like to think beyond blind belief. Either way, I look at all the different ways of seeing and interpreting this existence of ours, and I find it all very fascinating. While being part of Life, what life is remains one of the greatest mysteries, not just to the philosopher but even to the most rigorous scientific minds. So it comes as no surprise that the end of life garners so much attention from us. How do we understand the end of something that we can barely begin to explain in the first place? A mystery within a mystery, and perhaps so it shall always remain, no matter what we choose to believe.

Samir

Questions of philosophy vs religion are as old as the human ability to question. Today people wonder about the balance of power and reconciliation between science & religion. It’s a valid issue to think about, but to get a better handle on the subject, it might help to look at the relationship between religion and science’s great-grandfather, philosophy.

My friend Paul always puts interesting questions to me. After tackling truth, this time we were having a conversation about how I reconcile religion and philosophy from an Indian or Hindu perspective. Some interesting points came up, which I have not seen expressed often, so I thought I should share my thoughts here. Indians take much of our own way of thinking for granted, but the fact is, the relationship between religion and philosophy in India has always been quite unique when compared to the West.

There are many levels of religious devoutness in every faith. I do come from a Hindu family, but this is where definitions get complicated because “devout” is a nebulous term when it comes to Hinduism. If you look at the Hindu faith from the eyes of someone from one of the other major religions or the majority of the modern followers, then devout would mean people who are strict followers of the ritual side of the religion. By that measure my family is not devout, although my Dad’s family (at least at the time of his parents) was from that vein of the faith.

The question of reconciling philosophy with Hinduism is a tricky concept to communicate, but I will try. If you have any Hindu friends of the kind who will not look at you strangely if you asked them about religion and philosophy in their culture, they will likely tell you that connecting with philosophy is easier to deal with in Hinduism. But, that “easier” is their particular understanding of their faith. As far as my personal understanding is concerned, in Hinduism, there is no reconciling to be done with philosophy at all. The thing about Hinduism is that at its core it can barely qualify as a faith or religion in the same mould as the other major faiths, especially the Abrahamic religions.

In some forgotten past, Hinduism might have started as simple nature worship but it soon grew into much more, and ultimately into a complex philosophical system. The strange and slightly unique aspect here is that it didn’t do so by discarding its more colourful naturalistic and mythological aspects, but rather by simply building upon them. The idea of philosophy and logic as being this sterile discipline separated from belief, parable, and faith was a Greek concept and not an Indian one.

The term Hindu is actually a descriptive label coined by the Arabs for the people who lived beyond the River Indus. So the very concept of the “religion” of Hinduism is an external imposition which has eventually become accepted by even the “Hindus” themselves. The original name for this philosophy or belief system or whatever you wish to call it, was Sanatana Dharma. Dharma is the same concept as, and the source of, the Buddhist idea of duty, but really that word just does not have an adequate translation in English. It means duty, belief, life, and in its broadest connotation simply “the way”. So Sanatana Dharma would translate to something like “The Ancient Way” or “The Eternal Way”, and even those are gross simplifications.

The Indian culture has always been pluralistically monolithic, if that makes any sense. Let me explain. In India before the coming of the Islamic invasions and Catholicism, we don’t really seem to have had a very strict idea of Religion-A, Religion-B etc. Rather we just had one large body of belief we simply called “Dharma”, which encompassed the vast variety of supporting and conflicting belief systems. They were still all part of the greater Dharma, and the concept of there being many valid paths was one that held great importance.

You can see a similar phenomenon in the sciences. Today the common wisdom is that Yoga is a bunch of bendy exercises from India that are good for you. In the original Sanskrit, it was simply Yog which translates to science or knowledge. This encompassed all scientific knowledge, specifically to do with human beings. One of the multitude of sub-topics in Yog was Hatah Yog meaning the Science of Discipline. That in turn comprised of various systems, one of which were the Asanas, the body positions and exercises that have today become popular as Yoga.

I hope you’re beginning to see what I mean. To try to understand Indian knowledge systems through the lens of Western faiths and philosophies is futile and only leads to misinformation. Sanatana Dharma became “Hinduism” over the millennia, possibly because the Indians kept getting asked by visitors what their religion was, their dharma. They probably didn’t quite understand the question because there was only one Dharma. So the concept of Hindusim took root. Then the Abrahamic religions came and asked them what their religious book was, and they didn’t quite understand that question either. To the ancient Indian, all books were “dharmic”, from the medical volumes of Charak to the love manuals of Vatsayana. So in later times, the Bhagavat Geeta was shoe-horned into the proceedings as our one true book. It is not.

The main thing to understand about Hinduism is that there is no minimum entry requirement, and you can forget what a few extremist zealots might say on the subject today. You don’t have to do anything in particular to be a Hindu. No specific prayers, no rituals, no mandatory temple visits. You cannot really be made a Hindu ala baptism (although in the last 2 centuries a Hindu “conversion” was invented as a counter balance to all the missionaries that went on a converting spree through the length and breadth of the land), nor can you be excommunicated (other than on a purely social level). At its core it is a highly evolved philosophical construct with an almost relativistic, quantum mechanical view of the universe, but at its surface level, you can satisfy yourself by simply paying homage to the Sun and the God of Rain. You can subscribe to either of those belief structures, or the vast range of mediums in between, and you’re still a Hindu, and no one can say otherwise.

Some ancient Indian literature actually tackles this subject. It mentions how some people only have the capacity to worship the creative force as humanised idols, all the way up to understanding the entirety of creation as one singular and differentiated entity, which is beyond the comprehension all but the most adept. The recommendation is to let each one worship, believe, and understand as per their own capacity, and using their own models and metaphors. An elegant system, I think, and one that has resulted in one of the longest continuous and unbroken systems of knowledge and faith in existence. The reason it never broke was because it was always adapting.

I don’t know if I’ve actually answered the original question about reconciling religion and philosophy, but I hope I have created a vague summary of the landscape of traditional Indian thought, a landscape where that question is simply irrelevant. India and everything to do with India is commonly misread and misunderstood by many, because unlike many other cultures you cannot grasp what makes it tick by scrutinising the details. Once you train yourself to see the forest for the trees, while also admiring that line of ants on the earth at your feet, simultaneously, you might begin to start seeing the world through Indian-coloured glasses.

Samir

Since when did everyone expect to get paid to be nice and do the right thing? Look around you, it’s happening as we speak. It’s not new, of course, it’s been going on a for a while. Right from the beginning of time, religion has been promising you good karma, a luxurious after-life with an attached bath, or at least a favourable promotion in the next life as compensation for being nice. That was all fine and good in a slightly abstract way, but the moment doing the right thing started to become worth your while in cold hard cash, we were doomed.

Just a few days ago I was at one of the large hypermarkets in town and saw some examples of this misguided strategy. The shop in question has started charging the customer a small token sum of money for every plastic bag they take at the checkout, to encourage the use of reusable bags. Also, to make it seem like they are doing it purely for the betterment of the environment, they offer you the money for the plastic bags back if you return them for recycling.

Sounds perfectly reasonable on the surface. But think about it. Most people are still going to pay the extra token money for the plastic bag, and consider it a small service charge. Then, very few people are actually going to take the trouble to collect up those specific plastic bags and return them to the shop for recycling. Even if the customer gives in the bags for recycling through other channels, the shop still gets to keep the money for that bag, which while small, is way too much for a single plastic bag produced in the hundreds of thousands. So the shop makes a good profit. Small amounts add up when multiplied by thousands of customers per day. All this rather than switching to more expensive biodegradable bags at their own initial expense, and then charging the customer. That would be really environmentally friendly.

In the same place they also have the system where you need to insert a coin to free a shopping trolley. The coin is returned to you when you deposit the trolley into the correct receptacle in the parking lot. This to prevent people from wandering away with the shopping trolley to carry heavy shopping to their nearby homes. And this is where the flaw in this ‘money saved or given for doing the right thing’ system becomes clear. If you’re living close by, maybe that one lost coin in the shopping trolley is a reasonable service charge to have the convenience of using a trolley to your doorstep, rather than lugging your shopping in many bags, which you also might have paid for.

As soon as you put a monetary value on doing the right thing or being nice, being bad now acquires a cost, which tells the average person that it’s ok to be bad as long as you are willing to bear the cost. It’s ok to use lots of plastic bags when you’re paying for the privilege. It’s ok to kidnap unsupecting shopping trolleys beyond supermarket parking lots when you’re paying for it with a coin. It’s ok to speed dangerously on the highway, as long as you’re willing to pay the fine.

And why not, really? After all, it’s ok to be a polluting industry as long as you are willing to pay for your institutional laziness and irresponsibility with carbon points. How can any of the above examples be considered any different when they are so much more harmless in scale?

Wake up zombie hordes! Being nice or doing the right thing was never meant to be worth your while. You do it because it’s the right thing to do. As soon as you incentivise good behaviour by charging bad behaviour, you are legitimising bad behaviour. When it’s ok to do the wrong thing as long as you pay the price, how can doing the right thing be priceless? And if being nice isn’t priceless to us anymore, then we’re doomed, because even the birds, the animals, and the trees understand that concept, and so much of nature works on that basis. The universe doesn’t do monetary penalties, green incentives, or karma points, it just sees the hand you were dealt and looks at how you dealt with it.

Samir

Is there such a thing as truth? A very complex question if you really think about it, and quite impossible to answer without trying to define what truth is. Ask a random group of friends the question “What is Truth?“, and you will be greeted by a variety of replies ranging from blank stares, to utter confusion, to concerned queries about your love life. After all, the truth is just the truth and that’s all there is to it.

A Question

I have always wanted this site to be a conversation rather than a lecture. I’m happy to say it has worked out quite successfully so far, with many people asking me questions through the comments and the contact form. Mostly it’s practical advice on photography, cameras, design etc., and it’s often something that requires a personal reply. But sometimes it gets more esoteric, and of more universal interest. A few days ago Paul J. Richardson left me this doozy:

Most formulations of shareable “knowledge” since Plato’s original JTB definition, are just knit-pickn refinements – ignoring of course, magical and illogical ones, such as implantation by God(s). How can we avoid circular reference back to knowledge when ‘proving’ (arguing) that truth exists or is possible?

Thanks for the question, Paul. I had to mull over this for quite long before deciding on how to answer it, so here goes.

A Story

A spider sits on a small web in the dark corner of a closet. Instinctively it awaits its prey. While it waits, it starts looking around and trying to make sense of it all. It is not a creature of the light, and is quite accustomed to stunning, killing and devouring any insects that get entangled in its trap without the need of light, but on occasion its world is bathed in brightness. It has found that almost like clockwork, twice in what we know as a 24 hour period, its tiny world is flooded with blinding yellow light from the star above. Immediately, one side of the heavens open and a large creature as tall as the universe appears, and seems to rummage through the heavenly bodies that hang in the sky. The creature’s vast limbs often eclipse the star, and then it goes away, either inserting or removing a heavenly body from the heavens. The fracture in the sky is then repaired, the star goes out, and darkness reigns again in the universe until the next cycle.

The spider in the corner doesn’t quite know what to make of it. It has spoken to some other spiders who have formed a cluster of webs on the other side of the small universe, and they believe this is all based on the laws of physics, the cycle of light and dark, the movement of the the heavenly bodies in and out through the fracture in the sky, and yes, even the creature itself. They have found that the cycle is not completely regular. There are some periods of long darkness when the skies never part, and at other times the fracture appears often and the universe is lit for long periods. They are still trying to come up with a formula which would explain all their observations. They figure once they find that single, all-encompassing formula for explaining it all, they will know the whole truth about existence itself.

The loner spider in the corner is not completely convinced by all this, especially since one half of the other spiders have started to worship their formulas, and the other have begun to worship the creature, while a small group continues to claim there isn’t actually any creature, just natural forces at work. The loner spider has his own theories and he likes to keep them to himself. He’s convinced the sky is alive. He is sure that if he deciphered the working and behaviour of the sky, it will all be clear. He will finally know the ultimate truth.

Jane Smith has different concerns. For one, she never gets a chance to clean her closet. She keeps her coat in there. Every morning she takes the coat from the closet before she goes to work, and puts it back in when he gets back in the evening. She’s always planning to clean the closet over the weekend, but since she rarely opens it during those days, it always slips her mind, and the closet remains untouched. She’s spotted some spiders in there a few times, but they don’t bother her too much. She believes in live-and-let-live and is actually thankful they’re getting rid of some of those insects for her. It must be such a simple life, she thinks, to live on instinct and natural drives alone, and not need to worry about the complications of life and work. No thinking, no questioning, and no wondering about the meaning of it all.

A Truth

My fragment of a story above was meant to put our search for Truth into perspective, and those of you who are masters of reading between the lines of tales have already spotted most of the issues the story of the spider in the closet brings up.

But first, some explanation of the question for those who aren’t familiar with philosophical jargon (I myself am only partially adept at it). Western philosophy is pretty much all based on the fact that the philosopher Plato had too much time on his hands to think of life, the universe, and everything, and he bothered to leave behind written records of what he thought of it all If not for him, this entire field would either be very different or simply not exist in any formal way.

Philosophers have many ways of defining and explaining truth, all of which are confusing, counter-intuitive and contradict each other, while using co-opted terms such as correspondence and coherence. I’m not going to go into that because it doesn’t much matter. Needless to say a lot of the explanation of what truth is has to do with facts. Things that are. You need to know facts to know the truth, which brings us to the question: What is knowledge?

This is where we come back to our good friend Plato. His explanation of knowledge has been the accepted official version for millennia in western philosophy and it is usually referred to as JTB. According to Plato, knowledge is Justified True Belief. He explains further, that for you to know something 3 conditions need to be met:

1. What you know is true
2. You believe it is true
3. You are justified in believing it is true

Have you spotted the problem that Paul is talking about? Truth is related to known facts, i.e. knowledge. But, Knowledge is defined based on what is true. If truth is factual knowledge and knowledge is based on truth, how does that explain anything? It’s a circular reference.

Now we come back to the story of Jane and the spiders and why I wrote it. If you apply Plato’s knowledge formulas to what each of the protagonists of that story think they know, you will find that they will mostly meet all the criteria with flying colours. Yet, the spider in the corner, the other spiders, and Jane, all seem to know a different version of things, and so they have different facts. Since they are all justified in their belief of these facts, they must all be true. But isn’t there supposed to be the one Truth, rather than the multitude? A sort of philosophical monotheism?

The problem is that philosophy hasn’t embraced a now basic fact in science. The universe is relativistic. Our experiences of the universe, our observations of it, and therefore our knowledge of it and truth itself is relative to our senses and our frame of reference. That doesn’t make the things we know less factual, but none of these facts individually can be considered the ultimate truth. You see and feel a solid computer in front of you, and yet for an electron your computer is a vast field of empty spaces it can stroll trough. Does that mean the computer isn’t solid? Well, it’s certainly not liquid! From your frame of reference it is absolutely solid. From another, it is not. For both you and me, and the electron, there can be no ultimate truth if we can’t agree on such basic facts. And we can never agree on basic facts as long as we are trapped within limited frames of reference.

Can Truth exist? Is an Ultimate Truth possible? That was Paul’s actual question and I have to say it is possible in a theoretical thought-experiment sort of way. But as far as I can imagine, it can exist in only one every special situation. We can never see the truth because we exist as a subset of existence as a whole, and so our frame of reference is limited. The same goes for the humble electron and the mighty Milky Way galaxy. We are all trapped in limited frames of reference no matter how vast the differences in scale.

If you want to believe in a personal God, a creator who some how created the universe and all that exists, then you must believe that he/she existed before the universe, which means there is more to existence than the universe. In which case, even such a God might not necessarily know the ultimate Truth. But if existence is the universe, and the universe is so complex as to be sentient in some way beyond our comprehension, and if this sentience is omnipresent in the entirety of itself, then the universe might know the ultimate Truth. The only way I can think of for Truth to exist is for a frame of reference to exist which is all encompassing and cannot itself be observed by anything external, because nothing external exists. Only existence itself being sentient and internally self aware in a way free of all scale, reference, and time can meet this criteria.

So, I would say the ultimate Truth is beyond us. We can strive for it, as we must, we can seek it, as we all should, and we might even touch upon it, glance it with our meager intellects and feel it in some vague way for a fraction of a second. But, I seriously doubt we can ever completely posses the truth. That possibility just doesn’t fit with the facts, or with anything we know and understand. And that at least is a truth, if not the truth.

Samir

The traditional definition of holistic health

Dictionaries and encyclopaedias define holistic health in a variety of ways to encompass different things, depending on how close to scientific and medical orthodoxy the editors stood. It comes down to looking at human health as the health of the whole individual rather than the well-being of parts. The variations come in while defining what makes up a whole individual. Some say it’s the whole physical human being who is so much more than the sum of various biological systems. Some claim it also includes the psychology of the individual. And some go further in wanting to heal the whole being, which involves the body, the mind, and the spirit.

These are all good descriptions, but what I’ve said here is a distillation down from a lot of mumbo-jumbo you will find everywhere. Some of it is good and true, but it’s all description and doesn’t tell you much about the essence of holistic health and why it’s a good or bad thing for you to take it seriously and practice it. When it comes to the less orthodox views of medicine, another term rears its head which must be dealt with, and the question that needs clearing is …

Is holistic health another name for alternative medicine?

Short answer: no. Once again definitions limit us, and this one is even more complicated. The term ‘alternative medicine’ is a pretty bad one, not only does it not describe anything, but even the semi-description it contains only tells you what it’s not. Alternative medicine is simply everything else. Here, of course, we are talking about everything else other than what can officially called Medicine: Allopathy, Western medicine, scientific medicine, modern medicine. You know, people in white coats, syringes, pills and stuff.

Alternative medicine encompasses all manner of wonders and blunders. It is true that many disciplines which fall under the umbrella of alternative medicine do take a more holistic approach to human health. Whether or not you believe in them, systems such as herbalism and homoeopathy take the mental state of the patient as much more of an important diagnostic input than modern medicine usually does. You can look further and find more esoteric arts like transcendental meditation and yoga which go further to consider even the elusive human spirit in their quest for health.

However, alternative therapies are not automatically holistic in their approach. While many encourage the holistic view, most succumb to the the need for human beings to look at everything mechanistically and find one-to-one relationships between health problems and solutions. For this reason, today herbalism and homoeopathy are often practised in a symptomatic way, to cure symptoms rather than curing the whole person and the root causes of disorders, as was their original mandate. So while part of the puzzle, alternative therapies are not equivalent to holistic health.

What it actually means to be holistically healthy

Holism is the belief that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That belief is the basis of holistic health, and we have adequate descriptions of what makes up this whole that must be treated: body, mind, spirit, and whatever lies beyond those pieces of humanity. We have also seen that therapies which integrate some of this holistic view of health do exist, but what is holistic health in practice, and how does one achieve it? That answer would give us some insight into this beyond the definitions.

With the development of scientific thought, we have learnt to divide and subdivide the universe into ever smaller and smaller slices, so that we might understand these pieces in isolation. This is what has lead to the symptomatic treatment of human health as the orthodox way. Systems, organs, tissue, cells, and enzymes can be measures, tested, and found to be within or outside the standard parameters. The psyche, the ego, the id, and above all the spirit are less obliging to our need to observe and measure. This makes holistic health very difficult, if not impossible, to completely outsource to experts.

All our advances in physical medicine have come by relinquishing the individual responsibility of our own health to others. If you want to talk of the whole, mind, and spirit, there is only one ultimate expert in the details of your health: you. There is only one person who can look at the big picture of your health, watch your diet, practice due diligence in what you eat, how you eat it, when you sleep, what you think, and how you feel. It’s all on you.

This can either be a scary though or an empowering one, but if you want to get any real insight into what holistic health actually entails, this is it. Holistic health is about you taking responsibility for your own health. Without that there’s nothing holistic about it. Modern medicine and the many other possible therapies at your disposal are irreplaceable tools in your arsenal, as are nutrition, hygiene and common sense. You can try to describe it in large complex terms all you want but that is what it comes down to. Holistic health is your health in your hands, with the guidance and the help of others. That is how it is meant to be, and that is how it can work well, but only if you take up the mantle as captain of your own well-being.

Samir

A big thank you to Pearl for the writing nudge.

Indians are festival gluttons. That’s not to imply that we all eat too much during festivals (only most of us do, not ALL of us), but rather that we have more commonly celebrated festivals that you can shake a large decorated Christmas tree at. Speaking of Christmas, the Indian equivalent in the realm of noise, public participation, and pornographic commercialisation would have to be Deepawali or Diwali (as it is more commonly referred to in the north of the country). That is what we celebrate today.

Now, as is customary for any writer or speaker introducing the topic of Deepawali to a general audience, I am obliged to incessantly repeat what the festival is about and regale you with a few canned phrases that will enlighten you about the significance of something distilled down from a few thousand years of history and culture. But wait, I needn’t bother because the honorable President, Vice President, Prime Minister, Shadow Prime Minister *cough* big cheese of the ruling party, and probably a miscellaneous collection of other political types have been so kind as to release statements meant for the Indian public that repeatedly tell us what that festival we all seem to be so compelled to celebrate is all about … in one or two redundant sentences. The generally agreed version seems to be that it celebrates the victory of light over darkness, which in turn symbolises the victory of good over evil. Yes, I know. It’s deep. I’m so glad the leaders of our country think it important to educate us on these matters so repeatedly. I am very much expecting to find a multiple choice question about the significance of Diwali on the ballot papers during the next election. After all, how can we be truly Indian without fretting over irrelevant exams?

While the politicians assure me the correct translation of the phrase “victory of good over evil” is “communal harmony”, down south people are celebrating their individuality and the preeminence of their ancient(er) culture by reminding us once again that while they are good sports and wish you a Happy Diwali today (The day of Laxmi Pooja – more on that later), they actually celebrated Deepawali yesterday (Naraka Chaturthi by the Hindu calendar). On that day, eons ago, Krishna killed the evil Narakasura, or maybe it was Kali who killed the evil Narakasura, or maybe it was the Goddess Durga who did the dispatching. No one seems to be quite sure, except about the fact that their version is more righteous than everyone else’s. Not to be out done, people in the North insist on calling Naraka Chaturthi “Choti Diwali” (Mini Diwali). My Diwali is bigger than yours.

Speaking of North India, aka Macho Land, they wouldn’t dream of basing their main festival on the victory of some vengeful superhuman woman over miscellaneous evil guy, so they insist it is the very day that Ram, of Ramayana fame, returned to Ayodhya after his many adventures and misadventures in the wild South. On the television news today I was informed that it all started when the people of Ayodhya lit up the city to welcome home their returning king and to celebrate his victory over the Demon King Ravana. I love it when people make unfortunate translations such as this one and eventually come to believe it themselves.

In the original Indian mythos, life exists in three realms (whether physical or spiritual is up to each person to decipher). Swarga (often translated as Heaven but not really) is the home of a race of super human beings called the Devas (often translated as Gods but not quite), Patala (often translated as Hell but not even close) is the home of the equally super human Asuras (often translated as Demons but not exactly), and Bhoomi (the Earth) is home to both human beings and all manner of other beings included the Rakshasas (also confusingly translated as Demons) who are actually meant to be nature spirits who inhabit the forests and the wilds. You can see the influence of Christian thought here, which made the Devil out of the playful Pan, but for Indians themselves to now consider the Rakshasa King Ravana as a “demon” while celebrating our wonderfully ancient culture (which we know nothing about) is truly sad and hilarious.

To confuse matters between Ram, Ravana, Krishna, Kali, Narkasura et. al., the second day of Diwali is also celebrated as Laxmi Pooja. For those who don’t know, a pooja is a ritual, usually directed at a particular deity. The Goddess Laxmi (pronounced Laksh-me) is the Goddess of wealth. Unfortunately, in our modern “enlightened” times, she has been reduced to the Goddess of riches, a major demotion from wealth, which signified so much more. On the day of Laxmi Pooja, people quite literally pray to and for money. The hardcore followers of the practice go so far as to not make any major purchases on the day, and hence keep the money from symbolically flowing away. Fortunately for the free market economy, they make up for this day of token level-headedness by going on a buying binge on all the days preceding it. Like Eid for the Muslims, or Christmas for the Christians, and Xmas for the cool folk, Diwali is an excuse for the urban Hindu to dig into their collection of fine vintage credit cards and live a life of blind consumption. And then there are the noisy fireworks that I am assured are “tradition” (that warrants a separate discussion).

This is the reality of Deepawali through most of the modern Indian world today. But, I have never considered myself a pessimist. Some where deep down in the dark recesses of the buying public there still exists some kernel of light. For what more do we need Deepawali to celebrate than light itself. We can marvel at the myths and revere the legends all we want, that is a healthy thing as long as we go beyond the fast food versions of the tales. But, do we really need Diwali to mean anything more than a few days in the year when we make night into day with our oil lamps and decorative kandeels(lanterns), our strings of cheap Chinese lights and faux LED oil lamps, and pay homage to the divine photon? It brings light into our lives, life into our universe, and beautiful sunrises over our horizons.

Happy Deepawali

Samir

Assuming this question is speaking in terms of physical eventualities rather than abstract philosophies, let us plot the course of human detritus when it leaves our homes. Let us suppose we are talking of a specific item, a plastic toy of some sort, maybe a little yellow “rubber” duck. So, we’re talking of a soft plastic toy which has outgrown its welcome.

If I were a conscientious person, I might add it to my plastics pile of recycleable wastes. Or I could give it away and it would have a new life as a second-hand toy to some grateful kid who doesn’t have any better … but that route still leads to the eventuality of it being disposed, so let’s stick to the first track. The duck is transported to a sorting plant. If the material in it is deemed salvageable, it is sent to the actual recycling part of the process, and if not it goes back into the garbage fork of this great journey (more on that later).

To be recycled, the plastics are chemically modified, broken down, melted or otherwise changed into a more maleable form of basic material. In this process energy is expended, and some part of our now quite unrecognizable duck wafts out of an industrial chimney somwhere, its complex molecules polluting the evening breeze and creating a stunning many-hued sunset. There they will remain, either rising to new heights to be broken down by the harshness of Sol’s ultraviolet radiation in the upper atmosphere, or by the bombardment of cosmic rays that still manage to pierce through the Earth’s magnetic shield. In the end those broken down molecules and even the heavier original molecules will find themselves washed into soil or sea by precipitation.

But that was merely the story of our dead duck’s ephemeral ghost. The main mass of plastics in the bird will join into the large molten vats to be molded into plastic raw materials for other processes, or become useless debris which is of no industrial use. These wastes will once again find themselves dumped into soil, water, or garbage, for lack of laws preventing the same, or the lack of any truly permament solution to “safely” storing dangerous industrial wastes. The remaining plastics will go on to other uses, and our friendly duck will eventually be a proud constituent in a new low-quality plastic bucket, or a beach ball, or a fake wood substitute in a recycled plastic park bench. There our favourite bird will feel right at home in the water, or be bashed around a lot, or sit around and watch the trees, until it has once again outgrown its usefulness. Then this cycle will start all over again.

If I were a less conscientious person, or the duck was not judged worthy by the recycling Gods, or most of it just didn’t quite make it to the boiling vats, then to the garbage it will go. Garbage is a very strange beast. In most modern cities now, it is first put to a trial by fire where a large portion of it is crushed and burned in those monster garbage trucks that prowl your streets at night and devour the contents of entire industrial-size garbage skips in one gulp. During that process, some of our bird would once again bellow out of the garbage truck as smoke to pollute breezes, decorate sunsets, and generally consort with the wafting ghosts of other dead plastic ducks.

What remains in the truck would finally reach the hell-on-earth that is an urban garbage dump. Here millions of archeological piles of human ignorance stand triumphant over millions of older layers that have been pressed further down into the Earth with time. Eventually better sense, or laziness will prevail and the garbage dump will be covered over and the dumping will move on to another site, leaving the old one open to exciting development work on parking lots, or luxury resorts, which ever happens to be more profitable in the prevailing economic cycle. The melted mass that was our late ducky will still be there, somewhere deep in the earth, and its flesh will melt into the soil and be washed by the rains into the waters. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Water to water.

Maybe in a million years some of the super compressed debris that was once a city dump will be converted by the tectonic forces into some exotic form of super-efficient fossil fuel that we have not yet dreamed of in our philosophy, but more likely it will slowly break up in time, clogging the natural systems for thousands of years to come. What the waters carry away will reach other places and other soils and at some point what’s left of our yellow rubber ducky might actually make it down to some farm of the future. There the crops, not knowing what to make of the weird substance clogging their systems, will dump it into leaves, seeds, and fruit, which will eventually be eaten by you.

Finally all those juvenile tries to gnaw at ducky’s beak will have come to bear fruit. Ducky is with you again, and also on a farm, along with toxicity, cancer, and a few other friends we might not have been introduced to yet. … Or I’m completely wrong and by the time ducky’s molecules are reincarnated in a pumpkin, the human race would have been driven to extinction and the environment would be nursing a nasty hangover, but recovering fast.

Either way, I love a happy ending.

Samir

At long last it is here, and the waiting is over. Blog Action Day has been on the cards for a while now, and it has grown from strength to strength since it was first introduced to the world. This site has also grown from strength to strength through this event, because I chose to take on the daunting task of writing an entire series of articles on, what I felt were, the failings of the environmental movement, and more specifically, the communications that it engages in. Now I am finally at the end of my journey with this discussion, and I thought it was simply not right to critique without suggesting solutions to the issues I have brought up over the past eight articles. Considering this blog is meant to be a record of my activities in online enterprise, it was only fitting that I tackle what kind of online presence would solve some of the communication shortcomings that are facing the ecological movement.

These are general traits which could very easily be used in any medium, online or off, but the elements that would make for an effective ecological website are:

1. Originality
2. Irreverence
3. Entertainment
4. Recurrence

1] Originality

For a movement that is supposed to be inspired by nature and the life on Earth in its infinite variety, the content and approach found in material about the ecology is devoid of originality. The same set of dry facts or sensational ultimatums are presented in the same way by almost everyone who tackles the communication of these issues. The tone is a studied, intellectual, and factual, all of which would be perfectly valid ways of dealing with the issue if they were not the only ways they were always dealt with. The same lack of variety can be seen in the content as well. Everything is academic non-fiction with a smattering of casual tips and friendly advice thrown in for good measure. Why is every environmental site about the latest news? I’m not saying that is a bad thing, but it can’t be the only thing all of us have to talk about on this vast and complex topic.

The ecological message needs a diversification of genres. Just imagine if every thing the human race ever produced on the subject of love was in the form of a bodice-ripping romance novel — there would be no romantic comedies in the cinema, there wouldn’t be any literary fiction about people in love, Jane Austen would have never been born, no Japanese animation about young love, no Russian epics about tragic romances, no fairytales, no documentaries, no research papers about pheromones, no sitcoms, no news, nothing. In a situation like this, would any one of us like to pick up a pulp romantic novel to read about love? Absolutely not! We would be so bored, and put off by the monotony of the subject matter that we might very well avoid anything to do with love altogether. Now answer me this. Why is everything about the environment green and white with the picture of a tree/leaf?

2] Irreverence

Part of the “green and white” dilemma is the religious and utterly reverent side of the environmental movement. Like every organised religion, the ecological initiative seems to have picked up certain norms and standards of appearance and behaviour which we all follow blindly. Also, like the more traditional religions, any material about the ecology and the environment automatically assumes a very reverent tone of voice about the subject. This de facto veneration is not a healthy sign, especially when it masquerades as understanding. The word reverence comes from a Latin base that means “to fear”. Respect can be a positive emotion, but fear never is. Nothing good ever came out of fear. Fear leads to stagnation of thought and narrowness of vision, and those are exactly what we don’t need when we are all supposed to be coming up with solutions to planet-wide issues such as pollution and climate change.

The green movement could use a good dose of irreverence. We need to respect nature but not fear it, because it is precisely this blind fear that has resulted in many of our misadventures against the planet. When I talk of irreverence, I do not mean a false bravado, because that is simply fear in disguise. What I mean is a truly open and free-flowing thought process about the subject of the environment, unfettered by such crippling restraints as political correctness or deification. If there is to be a new originality in discourse about the ecology, we must lose our fear and habitual reverence. Once we do that, new thoughts will flow, and new people will understand. It was thoughtless behaviour that landed us where we are, and thoughtless reverence will not solve the problem or win over any cynical hearts.

3] Entertainment

You have to make them laugh. Or cry, or shout, or whatever — anything that will engage the mind of the reader and prevent them from sinking into a state of indifferent disinterest. That’s entertainment. Entertainment is possibly the most effective means of communication when it comes to changing people’s minds and leaving a lasting impression. This doesn’t mean all entertainment needs to be propaganda, but positive messages that need to be disseminated into the public consciousness need to have a certain level of entertainment-value mixed in for them to be accepted and remembered by the majority. How much do you remember from your history lesson in school? And how much do you remember of your favourite historical movie? That is the difference which worthy messages like those about the ecology need to be making use of.

The issue with most current and past material about the ecology is that it strays towards the academic. That automatically exempts most of the population from the audience, because if they were all in the mood for so much thoughtful discourse they would already be, well, thoughtful. And then we wouldn’t be having this entire discussion. There have obviously been plenty of attempts at including “environmental messages” into popular entertainment. After all, considering the high social acceptance of all things green at the moment, it was a natural result. But these attempts have been shallow, simply retrofitting environmentalism into existing structures. Yesterday our intrepid hero was fighting “commies” and today he’s fighting polluters. That’s not really helping the ecological cause any, because it’s just an after thought. Not only does that sort of material provide zero information or education to the viewer, but it actually excuses them of all responsibility and blames the “bad guys” for all our problems.

Wake Up! We’re the bad guy! Not some smarmy suit-wearing corporate type in a lofty office, but each and every last one of us. Now bring this little fact to the notice of the general public and make it entertaining. That would be a real environmental message.

4] Recurrence

It is a well studied and researched fact that people need to see an advertisement or an offer from a company an average of 7-20 times before they decide to buy into whatever is being sold. It also takes about 20 days of doing something continuously before it becomes a habit. This sort of periodic repetition is a must if human minds are to be enlightened and human habits are to be changed. There is plenty of repetition in environmental messages, but when the messages themselves are often not reaching their audience or engaging them completely, the repetition is moot. There is plenty of repetition and periodicity in the average newsy environmental site, but the problem with news is that it is usually all over the place and never presents an consolidated idea of things to the reader. One day neon lighting could be good because of lower energy usage than incandescent bulbs; The next it could be bad because of heavy metals used in the tubing. Both these pieces of “new research” would appear side by side on a newsletter or blog and they would both be treated with journalistic equality, without any framework of what the reader should be doing about it. This sort of repetition is great for staying informed but not very good for convincing, because it leaves the average person confused.

There are some environmental messages and communications which succeed in bringing into the mix a strong dose of originality, irreverence, and entertainment. Unfortunately, there are often one-off things. They are memorable, just like some amusing commercials on TV are memorable, but did you actually buy what was being advertised? For that to happen, or for people to buy into eco-friendliness there needs to be a consistent and continuing periodic repetition of messages and material, which still qualify to be called original, irreverent, and entertaining. If we manage to bring all these elements into synergy in more of the mediums and messages that we put out about the environment, you can be sure that more people will sit up and notice, and more people will not notice as they gradually have a change of heart about their polluting and damaging daily behaviours. That is the sort of change that is required for real progress and that is the sort of effect that these elements can produce in the public consciousness if used well.

Action

It is called Blog Action Day, and I have no delusions about a lot of talk being anything close to action. That is precisely the reason I felt it was essential to take on this mammoth series of articles rather than posting a perfunctory short bullet-pointed post on the 15th of October. That doesn’t really say action to me, and as much as I am very pleased with the amount of effort that went into this series of articles and the illustrations, I don’t think I have done enough yet or followed all the advice I give above. There needs to be more.

So today, Blog Action Day, 2007, I announce the imminent launch of a new website on the environment: The Cows Made Me Do It.

I have not yet begun to build this site, but now that this article series is completed, that is what I move on to next. I do have a pretty clear idea of what I want to make of it — that should be quite obvious considering I registered a strange domain name like TheCowsMadeMeDoIt.com. There is a plan, and I will execute it over the coming weeks, keeping in mind all I have talked about over the last month on the subject, and also the elements I mention above in this article.

Originality, irreverence, entertainment, and recurrence will be the cornerstones that I build this site on, and I invite you to join me on the journey. I will continue to post updates on this blog about my progress with the site, so I strongly recommend that you subscribe to my full RSS feed to get the latest news and teasers. I have also set up a basic page on TheCowsMadeMeDoIt.com which includes a free newsletter signup form. If you liked this series of articles and would like to see a slightly new take on the environment grow with your help, please sign-up there with your email address. The newsletter will play a continuing part in the future site, and will currently give you exclusive sneak peaks into the content as I create and design it. You can be rest assured that there will be no spamming, and the list will not be used by anyone else but me.

The Environmental Movement and Why It’s Not Working thus ends on this very positive and “action”-oriented note. I thank everyone for their support and their interest in this series. Please continue to read and browse whatever parts you missed. I would love to read your comments and feedback on the various articles and I encourage you to share this with your friends by bookmarking or emailing it using the Share This link below. The more the merrier.

Thank you all. I hope you enjoyed this series, and I hope you sign up to the TheCowsMadeMeDoIt.com newsletter and subscribe to the RSS feed here for updates.

Take care and be green.

Samir

Human beings can be very lazy creatures. That fact bears repeating because it is ultimately the core influence behind many of the numerous, seemingly distinct, issues that plague our species and our culture. In fact, we are a strange bunch indeed, as we will often go to any lengths to fulfil our never-ending quest for in-action. So much so, that the things we choose to do to feed our laid-back nature often end up being more arduous and involved than the thing we try to avoid. We can get very serious and single-minded about it, this avoidance of work. And anything we take that seriously must have some significance in the world we build. In this world we build, a lot of the stumbling blocks the environmental movement has to put up with are a result of laziness.

This slothful nature does a lot of harm, and messes up a lot of situations in our world which could have been averted or rectified given a smidgen of attention and a modicum of effort at the right time. But alas, the misdeeds have been done and the monster is out of the bag. The best we can do is to understand this fundamental human behaviour and its causes. The major causes of human laziness are:

1. Laziness
2. Yet more laziness
3. I’m too lazy to come up with a third bullet-point

Laziness is just laziness

That’s right, laziness is just laziness. I might have gone ahead and carried out the charade of intended analysis and further study, but you and I both know that laziness can rarely be understood, or analysed, or itemised. Laziness is possibly the only fundamentally fundamental human emotion – it cannot be divided into any more refined or rarified reasons for its existence. It simply is.

Taking action is so much work

There are a thousand responsible little tasks and gestures that we could be doing in our passing lives that we choose not to do, purely because we can choose not to do them. When we wake up in the morning and brush our teeth, we could choose to run the tap only when required, but instead we keep it gushing for the entirety of our dental cleansing performance, because it’s easier. When we are throwing out thrash, we could separate out the recycleable materials from the rest, but instead most of us dump everything into a single garbage bag, because it’s easier. We could, we might, we should, but the ground reality is that we don’t.

I’m a method writer

So strongly do I believe in seeping yourself in the subject matter of your writing and really getting into the head of the subject, that I might have caught the laziness bug myself. Just look around, I didn’t come up with clever bullet points, nor did I come up with witty illustrations to lighten the journey through this material. I’m just completely living my subject matter, and like most human beings out there, I’m sleeping on the job. Only because it’s appropriate to the task at hand, of course.

The point I’m trying to make through all this is that laziness doesn’t do anything quickly. In fact, it doesn’t do anything, period. Perhaps it is the smallest, indivisible mass of human behaviour, a sort of atom of the mind. But really it’s not. Rather, laziness is that vast empty space that separates the other basic and indivisible building blocks of the human mind. Laziness doesn’t qualify as a human behaviour, because even a behaviour is an action of a sort, and laziness is the complete lack of action. We all suffer from this to varying degrees, but this factor I reserved for the end of this series, because it is the one demon that we must each tackle on our own — on our own time and with our own tactics.

This lack of action might have you, me, and the rest of the population of the planet sleeping in a blissful stupor, celebrating our self-proclaimed greatness, but the planet’s ecology hasn’t been sleeping. It is continuing to react to the messes we are making and continuing to throw all its forces towards balancing out every imbalance we have thrust upon it. It is doing things the only way it knows how, so we better wake up before we have that cozy pillow snatched out from under our heads. They don’t call it a “force of nature” for nothing. Lazy or not, here it comes.

That brings us to the end of the reasons why I think the green movement is not quite working. In the next and last article in this series, I pick up from here and look into how these environmental communication issues can be tackled. I will do this by laying the foundations of a new project of mine, through which I wish to address some of the issues gleaned through this series.

Stay tuned.

Samir

Once a school of thought, such as environmentalism, becomes fashionable, the next logical step is for people to impose upon it even more systematic and organisational elements. Very soon the “thought” is far removed from the school and rules and beliefs take over. Who comes up with the rules? Whoever has enough power as the movement congeals into an amorphous mass of people who all believe in, what they think is, a path to enlightenment or meaning of some sort. Beliefs are often open to a little embellishment and a lot of short-hand over time, and the collective faith in the common cause keeps them alive and thriving no matter what their constituent percentage of truth. People accept because they want to belong, to believe, to be part of the club, and they want to be told what to do. This is how schools of thought are slowly transformed into belief systems. Slowly, but surely, the green movement has started down this slippery slope. All the signs exist and all the signature behaviours are rearing their ugly heads. It is only a matter of time before all these human components drive the environmental movement towards its inevitable destiny and it takes its first steps into becoming a religion.

Why am I so sure? Because a lot of the popular following of environmental concerns never troubles itself with such unnecessary luxuries as understanding and factual information. Most of the popular environmental movement is based on hearsay, and if we didn’t live in such a noisy world of information glut, we would probably have had some charismatic environmental messiah appear to seal the deal by now. That’s all that is missing to transform this loose collection of beliefs and mores into a more rigid construct. Every organised religion requires a certain set of behaviours amongst its followers before it can truly be a religion in the traditional organised sense. Remember, I am talking about religion here, not spirituality, or philosophy, or even theology, all of which are very different and less cumbersome beasts. The popular environmental movement has already begun to exhibit some of these proto-religious elements which include:

1. Blind Faith
2. Dogma
3. Ritual
4. Moral Superiority

1] Blind Faith

Faith is a very powerful thing. So powerful, that it helps us through times when all seems hopeless. Any belief system relies to some degree on faith, but when faith starts playing a major role in an urgent and logical matter like the environment we must start to ask difficult questions, because faith untempered by understanding is a dangerous thing.

There’s a lot of blind faith involved in the popular environmental movement. That comes from it being a current fashion statement in urban society to be “eco-friendly”. When a lot of people without a deep understanding of a subject become involved in any field of endeavour, they need to depend on given information, even if that given information might not be completely accurate. There is also the fact that blind faith is easier, and removes personal responsibility. All of these factors combined have resulted in a reality where there are plenty of products and practices labeled “green”, or “eco friendly”, or “energy saving”. Masses of people blindly put their trust in these labels without understanding what they mean or imply. It makes them feel responsible, but such blind faith results in nothing of value at best, and at worst it can be the cause of much harm and regression.

2] Dogma

Eventually blind faith must always be followed by the short-hand distillations of semi-truths that is dogma. If people are not willing to take the effort to gain an understanding of the ecology to begin with, it is little wonder that they like to reduce “best practices” in the ecological realm down to easy little prescriptions. What starts as a suggestion or an idea soon becomes written law. The cult of green will follow it because as in all cults, the greatest sin is questioning. What is written is law, and what is law is truth.

This sort of straight-jacketed thinking is already common amongst people who consider themselves great proponents of environmentalism. Blind faith in everything we see and hear in the media combined with our need to be green to fit in results in many of us accepting dogmatic ideas of what is good environmental practice. How many times have you heard someone saying that their LCD screen is eco-friendly because it consumes less energy than their old CRT screen? Now how many of those people are aware of the fragility and chancy nature of the LCD production process that results in very high percentages of defective pieces which need to be discarded? Maybe LCDs are eco-friendly and maybe they are not, but how many people actually know this as fact and how many accept it as truth because they read it somewhere as a “rule”. We are all taken in by the marketing and the rhetoric, which is why many such dogmas about environmental friendliness go unquestioned and unthought. Energy saving bulbs are better. Hybrid cars are the answer. Minuscule amounts of recycling can save the world. How many of these do you believe in and how many of these can you actually prove to yourself with full understanding to be true?

3] Ritual

Contractions in ideas often lead to contractions and summarisations of deeds as well. Dogma handed down to us makes us believe we have the answers, and rituals complete the picture by making us believe we also have the tools to solve the issues of the world. The example about recycling I mentioned above is a great place to start. We have been made to believe that every small piece of recycling we do is significant because it helps the environment. Around this particular piece of dogma is built your weekly or maybe daily ritual of taking your segregated wastes to your local recycling centre. Do you drive there? How much fuel do you consume on your recycling run? Is that more than compensated for by the amount of material you recycle? Would you actually save more energy by sitting at home and not recycling your wastes?

A similar questioning would be appropriate for many of the quick tips that we accept to be good environmentally conscious behaviour, things we are proud of. The environment is not a simple game of arithmetic. You save so much energy or you recycle so much material, and you have helped the planet so much. It doesn’t work that way. Human beings are always affecting the environment and we are always consuming energy, no matter what we are doing. We might not always see it because the causes and effects are often indirect and hidden behind the veneer of modern industries and production. Rituals might help us feel better, but do they do anything for the planet? Lets not forget what all this “green”-ness was meant to benefit in the first place.

4] Moral Superiority

When you have faith in the laws you were given and the rituals you follow, you feel pretty good about yourself. Since all this didn’t come from understanding but from the need to follow a trend, it is only natural to compare your fashion sense with that of your neighbours. That can only lead to you feeling every smug. This smugness comes from taking your blind faiths and your beliefs in prescribed rituals very seriously, to the point where you bravely declare that you are better than the rest who do not happen to agree with your particular view of things. This happens in religion all the time, and the same can be seen in the ecological movement.

For one, there is a runaway sense of moral superiority over people who don’t do exactly what you do, who don’t recycle, who don’t use the right type of lighting etc. But very soon there is also then a sense of moral superiority over those who while in the fold might not be as zealous as you in their practices. Again, mathematics pokes its nose into environmental matters and people begin to compete based on rules they made up for themselves anyway. Just such a practice is all the rage today in the green movement. Today people are earning and striving to gain “carbon points”, an imaginary currency of environmental friendliness, if you will. Like all imaginary currencies, trading and marketing are an eventuality that cannot be avoided, which is why you now have a healthy trade of carbon points in the world. Perhaps if you got some really good people to pray for you on a regular basis, you can continue sinning like there’s no tomorrow. After all, the numbers never lie.

Atheism

This discussion of the religious side of the environmental movement will not be complete without a consideration of atheism. The environmental atheist is the cynic, the naysayer, the one who doesn’t believe in Mother Nature. According to this group of people, there is no ecological problem, at least not until the Earth sends us an official letter of protest in triplicate. Where the rest might suffer from unbridled faith, these people suffer from a lack of it. The reason I mention this side of things in this article is that if you apply the above indicators to the cynical view of environmental issues you will find that the environmental atheism qualifies as much as a religious belief system as its opposition. The same blind faith, the same dogmatic beliefs, the same rituals, and the same sense of moral superiority exist just as strongly in the atheist side of things as well. There is as little understanding there as anywhere else, and questioning is equally looked down upon, that is unless you are questioning the opposition.

I have no issues with religion per se, but what I do have reservations about are its methods and its results. If the purpose of regular organised religion is to save our souls, one must wonder how many of our souls are saved because that would be a good measure of the effectiveness of the religious transformation of a belief system. Add to that the fact that the environment is not a matter of changing inner beings and emotional satisfaction but more a matter of cold hard physical change, and you have to question how effective an increasingly religious environmental movement is going to be in achieving what should be its ultimate goal: to save the planet and get humanity to live in harmony with the ecology. Anything less than that would be a failure, and in this case you would not need to depend on faith to know that we would definitely suffer the consequences of our trespasses.

Short-cuts of thought and deed are beginning to plague the green movement as it becomes more main stream. Perhaps it’s natural. Life is so much easier when you are given the answers. Not only are you saved the trouble of understanding, but you’re also given quick and painless ways to supposedly deal with the problem. Who doesn’t want that? At the end of the day human beings as a group can be very lazy creatures. So to end our discussion of the reasons why the environmental movement is not working, my penultimate article in this series will deal with the factor of laziness in the ecological equation.

Samir