The Tao of Christmas December 23, 2006
Posted by Graham in : General , trackbackAs we come up to the time of year which unfortunately has become a festival of Mammon - the high-point of excessive consumption of resources- it might be an appropriate time to contemplate an alternative path that we might consider.
Christmas was originally a mid-winter festival to celebrate re-birth of the sun after the Solstice, the darkest time of the year. As such, it was also a time to explore the dark side of things, to slow down and “go within”, following the natural rhythms of the seasons.
However, the successful rebirth of the Sun was essential if the crops were to grow and life to continue. At these latitudes, there must have been tremendous symbolism and significance attached to this point of the year amongst cultures that were intimately involved with food production for their survival.
It is this sense of dependency on the natural world around us that it is so dangerous to have lost. The job of carefully husbanding the local natural resources that farmers or hunter-gatherers would do is now managed for us by the effectively free-energy that fossil fuels deliver. The ability to turn night into day in our cities has removed the need or us to follow the change season and the rhythms of nature have lost their significance for us.
Powerdown is about returning to an awareness of this dependency both as a simple survival mechanism and as a positive choice. Many people in the West could still live very comfortably with far lower energy consumption. There is no reason why we cannot create a positive vision for what David Fleming calls The Lean Economy; healthier, more fulfilling, with less stress. Rob Hopkins of www.transitionculture.org been working as hard as anyone to present such a vision. He contacted me recently in response to my post about John Lane’s talk at the Emergence Festival. John Lane is the author of several books including Timeless Simplicity, and was a founder of the Schumacher college.
As it turns out, Rob is a big fan of the philosophy of “voluntary simplicity” that Lane expounds in Timeless Simplicity:
“The phrase embraces all of the following: a state of consciousness; those who are in retreat from industrialism; those making a personal response to what they see as an increasingly wasteful world; and those seeking to discover a deeper personal fulfilment than that which they are finding in their stressful work and extravagant life… To live a life of voluntary simplicity is an expression of the human freedom to choose rather than to be dictated to by the incessant reinforcements of consumerism”.
I have to confess that I only bought the book today so have not actually read it, but the theme is one I have always carried dear to my heart.
The idea of absconding from the demands of the modern world and return to a more low-impact, pre-industrial lifestyle of maximum self-reliance and community support, and trying to live sustainably within the renewable resources of the locality, is often criticised for being “romantic”: people will never “go back” to the times before machines and globalised trade, it is believed, because they will not willingly relinquish the supposed benefits of the modern world: the “convenience” of mass consumption.
In fact, as we approach peak oil of course this philosophy has never been more relevant, because it shows that the “solution” to energy shortages is to reduce consumption; in other words, to reduce dependency. If this is not done voluntarily we will in any case be forced to live with less in the future. To embrace this as a positive thing is the message of Timeless Simplicity- that we will be better off in every way, but especially, we will feel more fulfilled spiritually.
John Lane’s story about Virgil down-sizing during the collapse of the Roman Empire paints an appealing picture of someone successfully holding themselves apart from the chaos and destruction around them.
Lane was in fact quite adamant that choosing a simple life ourselves- not only as a rational response to resource depletion, but as a spiritual path- was really the only option.
When Davie Philip of the Cultivate Centre asked him: surely we have to campaign and work on the political level as well? Lane’s injunction to us was clear: Don’t do that. Just start with yourself. Be the change you want to see.
Now, this is all very well, but it seemed to me to skirt around a spiritual dilemma that is very ancient and may not perhaps be so easily avoidable, especially in today’s world: can we afford to just sit back and retreat into a simple self-reliant life-style, even if we wanted to? With the Machines of Mammon all around us and encroaching ever further into whatever piece of wilderness or rural idyll we may try to live in, with wilderness disappearing at an ever accelerating rate, do we really have the luxury of just working on ourselves, as if separate from the rest of society?
Lane was in a sense taking sides very clearly in the Powerdown or Build Lifeboats debate. He seemed to have a very pessimistic view of humanities chances of a successful cultural shift, but was advocating the simple life, I felt, rather in a spirit of resignation: activism is really a waste of time, it is just too late.
This put me in mind of another story, a book I read about 15 years ago in which the main protagonist faces something of a similar dilemma: to retreat further from the world, or to fight for what he believed to be right?
The book is called Chronicles of Tao: The Secret Life of a Taoist Master and is written by Ming-Dao Deng. I no longer have a copy, but remember it as one of my favourite books. It tells the story of Kwan Saihung, who is chosen as a young child to go to the remote mountain monastery of Haushan and be trained in martial arts and Taoist philosophy by the Grandmaster.
The monks of Haushan use their training to transcend the act of fighting itself and reach spiritual heights; but when the Cultural Revolution erupts in the country below their mountains and the Red Army eventually arrives, Saihung is torn: should he follow the Grandmaster- to whom he is completely devoted- deeper into the wilderness, or return to the world and use his skills to help fight for what he believes is right?
The dichotomy between the purity and spiritual elevation of the monastery and the chaos and squalor of the world was a big theme in the book as I remember it. The resolution was to find a way of being “in the world but not of it” as my yoga teacher used to say.
Maybe those of us who feel the need to build a more sustainable culture are called upon to make a similar choice between focusing on a personal lifestyle and practice, and playing a more pro-active role in encouraging those values to be more widely adopted.
So somehow we have to do both: to live the simple life ourselves as far as possible, while linking with others who are doing likewise where possible, and reconstructing the local networks that will support a low-energy lifestyle and make simple living more appealing and realistic.
I was also interested to read on Rob’s site the interview with Paul Mobbs, who apparently is writing a new book called Less is a Four-Letter Word , referring to modern societies’ addiction to endless growth and the need to create, as George Monbiot has written, “the first movement to demand less, not more.”
It is an especially tall order to package this as a Christmas message, but the mid-winter feasting itself need not be missed in a low-energy future, replete as it should be with an abundance of local produce and home-made wine.
Season’s Greetings.
Comments»
Thanks Graham - I really enjoyed that post - the dilemmas you discuss have been on my mind for a while and I’ve been re-reading my copy of Timeless Simplicity.
See you in January to plant some trees!
Tom
An inspiring posting, Graham, even though I’ve only just read it. Many thanks. Now the feasting and conspicuous consumption has subsided, it is a good time to reflect on our habits and lifestyles and at this time each year many people do a detox to clean out the excesses of Christmas indulging. I recently read about a group of people in the US - ‘Compact’ - who have decided to buy nothing new except food, medicine and underpants (!) for a year. It seems to be a kind of voluntary simplicity, a mammon detox if you like, and hopefully the idea will grow. Now I must read that book you mentioned.
See you at college.
K