This is an original piece, so I give myself permission to post it in its entirety. Happy Solstice Season, everyone.
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Shit Happens
As we look out into a world that is showing more and more evidence of the consequences of human actions, many of us feel a a visceral sense of revulsion and injustice that urges us to action. We express this in many ways: "Think of your children's children." "We are rational creatures, and so have a special duty of care to all life." "We broke it, we have to fix it." "We must assume responsibility for our actions." "It's bad karma not to clean up your shit."
Well, yes but. There is a opposing saying that is all too often associated with climate change deniers, industrious industrialists and heedless hedonists who live in a world of "I've got mine, sucks to be you." The phrase is,
"Shit happens." The implication is that things are screwed, there's nothing we can do, in the end we all die anyway, so even trying to fix things is pointless.
I'd like to look a bit closer at this idea of "Shit Happens", and explore how I see a possibility for it to be a positive response. “Shit Happens” sounds quite fatalistic to western ears, but there is a solid core of truth to the idea.
In the centuries since the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment the West has developed a cultural narrative based around control. The idea that we can and should take control of events has been embedded so deeply in our psyches that it seems like a law of nature – or at least a law of human nature. Control of the future through planning is a shibboleth of modern civilization. To relinquish this imperative seems tantamount to treachery, an abrogation of one of the sacred founding principles of our civilization, an open invitation to the forces of chaos, disorder and darkness.
There is another way to look at this attitude of relinquishment though, a lens through which it may be seen more as realism than defeatism. Our control over future events has always been tenuous at best. The military recognizes this reality in the saying,
“No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” It is enshrined at the most fundamental levels of our reality in Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory.
Of course plans are useful because they encourage us to recognize the truth of our immediate situation and think about future possibilities. However, risk enters the picture if we behave like an immature military commander and try to stick to “the plan” at all costs, as though it represents the only acceptable course of action. If we are too inflexible unforeseen opportunities may be missed, outcomes may be sub-optimal and people may suffer unnecessarily.
For example, when seen through this lens the question of climate change becomes one with a wide spectrum of legitimate responses. These responses can include: promoting the decarbonization of the global economy through energy substitution; reducing our requirements for energy through conservation and efficiency; changing the peoples’ behaviour to reduce their levels of consumption, travel and other impactful activities; and actively working to oppose and reduce our level of global economic activity either through policy or direct action (i.e. regulation, coercion or monkeywrenching).
The controversial part of my position is that I think the decision simply to decline to plan, to choose to sit back and watch the world unfold is similarly legitimate. Far from being a response from ignorance, this can be a response that’s predicated on a large body of personal knowledge and awareness. After all, holding knowledge and deciding to act are two very different things that spring from different places in the psyche. Curiosity does not automatically imply a desire to influence outcomes. Even discovering that there is a possibility of negative consequences does not mean that we must automatically work to avoid the collapse of that particular probability wave.
Personally, I don't believe either the world or humanity is in need of salvation. We have created some uncomfortable circumstances for ourselves, but I don't believe that anything actually needs to be done to try and change that.
Our situation is what it is. Change is inevitable. The outcomes are inherently unpredictable. The situation has always been out of our control. The idea that we are running the show is a conceit and an illusion embedded in our culture during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment.
My world view is founded instead on the Buddhist concept of co-dependent arising, or what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing”. In it there is no subject, no object, no cause, no effect, no control, no powerlessness, no victors, no vanquished, no free will, no predestination – just elements working together to co-create this shared reality.
As a result, I do not feel any need to try to change the course of world events single-handedly. The world exists because of all of us; its course can only be shaped by all of us together. I have no ability to change it on my own. The belief that one has such ability is an egoic illusion that can assume at most a temporary appearance of reality.
Shit has happened, shit is happening, shit will happen. In the face of that reality I prefer to let destiny take care of itself, because that’s what it has always done anyway. I’m no King Canute, and I see no disrepute attached to that perception.
Others, especially those who are fully embedded in the Cartesian mindset, may such a position odd, unacceptable or even intolerable. They may decline to accommodate the inevitable; they may choose to work to direct the future; they may even choose to work against positions and worldviews like mine. That’s fine with me – this
is our co-creation, after all.
It's a bit paradoxical. On one hand I see human civilization (and at a deeper level reality itself) as an emergent property that unfolds moment by moment from the aggregation of individual actions. From that perspective even the question of free will vs. predestination becomes somewhat nebulous. The current moment is all that we have access to, as the past is gone and the future hasn’t yet arrived. To make matters worse, the present simply is what it is, and even the plans we make in the present have no existence in the future we imagine they will influence.
The paradox comes in because it sure seems as though we can make plans that have an effect on the future. In a sense I consider the view that planning affects the future to be a useful illusion. Because it’s useful I partake in it, but because it’s an illusion I decline to believe in it completely.
The dynamic interplay among all our individual actions and plans here in the present is what gives the future its specific shape when it becomes the present. In a sense, civilization is a self-organizing neural network – hard to predict and even harder to control, but no less entrancing for all that.
This is a decidedly non-western point of view, perhaps more suited to inner exploration than to making stuff. However, I’ve found that it really helps when I see shit happening and I’m feeling torn up because I feel a need to control it yet can’t find the levers. I can remind myself that the idea that there are levers to pull is just another part of the illusion, and relax as the shit just happens.
Fortunately, one person who chooses simply to say,
"Hey, look at that! Shit happens! Isn't that interesting?" but not to
do anything about it isn't the one woodpecker that will destroy our carefully crafted global monument to Control. Unless shit happens, of course...
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