Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [32]
On the other hand, we are in the midst of an enormous social revolution. As Paul Hawken has found, millions of organizations, not to mention people, are doing good work of one kind or another worldwide to rectify the looming disaster: ecological, economic, and conflictual. They are experimenting with local currencies, agitating against wars, buying into community-supported agriculture (CSA), learning alternative medicine, living communally, going off to offer humanitarian aid, learning something about nonviolence—the myriad projects acknowledged each quarter in YES! magazine and elsewhere.
However, all this activity, laudable as it is, is not—or not yet, anyway—a movement. It does not have a common sense of its overriding goal (we know what we’re against more than what we’re for), an agreed upon strategic plan, or—the importance of this should not be overlooked—a name.
In the light of these features we need to stop asking our fellow Americans (or whomever) to make do with less. Instead we should be offering them the prospect of shifting their aspirations to something higher, something that will in fact make them happier, more fulfilled, much more efficiently than the consumption of unnecessary goods or services that brings in its wake the inevitable alienation from and competition with others that we see around us.
Martin Luther King had it exactly right:
“We must change from being a thing-oriented civilization to a person-oriented civilization.”
As one of the ancient Upanishads states very simply, “Man [the human being] can never be satisfied by wealth.” A variety of studies are now proving this on the scientific level, and many people have reached the point of satiation where they are dimly aware of this truth though there is nothing, no support from the surrounding culture to help them acknowledge, much less deal with it. On the other hand, people are turning to voluntarism and service in unprecedented numbers.
After the disastrous tsunami in Southeast Asia, a United States Marine who had been handing out relief supplies throughout the day was asked how he felt about that kind of work, and he said, “I have been serving my country for thirty-four years and never got any fulfillment until today.” What kind of civilization have we built, that makes us spend thirty-four years going in the wrong direction and (if we’re lucky) one day of doing something useful? King was exactly right: fulfillment comes from ever-deeper relationships, not from things. And most of us are actually aware of that; in survey after survey the number one thing people say they are longing for is community. This became clear to me in an almost visceral way in just a few weeks that I was able to spend recently in India. Despite the wreckage of the physical environment there, you never feel that people are isolated from each other as they are here. Even a very rich person walking past a beggar does not shrink away; even the beggar, if he or she has failed to get a handout, does not glare at him or her in anger. Everywhere people feel that they are part of each other.
I propose that we dare people to rebel against the advertisers and entertainers who are leading us down this empty road of materialism; that we harness American rebelliousness and individuality precisely to overturn the predominant culture in favor of one based on humanity.
Gandhi, after all, built his whole scheme for the world order on this central value: the individual serves the family, the family serves the village, the village serves the district, the district the state, the state the nation, and—important not to leave this step out—the nation the world community. Life will not be a pyramid, he proposed, but “an oceanic circle whose center will be the