The new film from Helena Norberg-Hodge The Economics of Happiness was premiered in UCC last night to a full house, with Helena herself arriving in time to join a panel discussion afterwards.
I met Helena over 10 years ago in Dublin where I remember debating her on whether the people of Ladakh, where she has based her organisation the International Society for Ecology and Culture, really were happier than us in the west as she seemed to think, and whether their “consciousness” was really more advanced than our own, as she maintained.
Why I wondered, if that was the case, did they appear to have no premonition of the problems that might accrue once the Evil Modern World was let in. Apparently their culture was so fragile that not only could they do nothing to stop it but the whole fabric of their society fell apart as soon as it encountered consumerism, commercial advertising and globalisation.
In this new film, I was surprised to see some of the material from Norberg-Hodge’s earlier film Ancient Futures- Learning from Ladakh simply recycled as she recounts once again the story of an early visit to a Ladakh village where she asked a young man to show her the poor houses in the village. After thinking for a while he responds that there are not really any poor houses; but revisiting the same village 10 years later, after the arrival of tourism and their western values, she overhears the same man complain, “oh, we Ladakhis, we are so poor”.
It is a poignant story and the message is one of changing perceptions in a changing world. This must have made a particularly strong impression on Helena as she worked as a translator in Ladakh when visitors from the outside were rare, and had the unusual experience of seeing an ancient culture transformed almost before her eyes in just a few years as the modern world moved in for the first time.
ISEC has a twin approach to this issue of perception and the problem of dissatisfaction engendered by advertising: one is to take westerners to the villages where they can stay for a while and live with the locals on working on the farms. This brings in an income, but perhaps more importantly, helps with the Ladakhi’s self-esteem as they come to understand how valued their farming life-style, traditional community and local crafts are to disaffected post-modernists from the west.
More interestingly still, ISEC has arranged to take Ladakhis who had never previously left their villages to visit the west where they are wowed out by washing machines and other gadgets but also get the message that behind the bright lights and glitz the west has serious social problems unknown in back home. When they return their message is: “The west is not all it’s cracked up to be. Don’t go down that path.”
This is a very interesting take on East meets West and there is much to be learned from it but I’m not sure I take the same message that Helena presents in the new film. In fact, although there is a partial truth here, it is a blatant over-simplification with some glaring errors and misrepresentations.
Clive Hamilton is one of the interviewees and his message is: “Material wealth has never brought us happiness.” Excuse me? This is a central and prevalent myth of the environmental movement: poor people are happier. They have community, family, traditions- things we have lost and yearn for. There are certainly serious and real problems caused by affluence, which may include depression, but they are trivial in comparison to the problems of poverty. The Ladakhis do look very appealing to the neurotic romantic westerner who has so much mobility they are always feeling homesick, and a volunteer holiday working on a farm there for a few weeks could be a great thing to do, but we do not actually want to trade places with them. The lack of mobility in traditional communities would stifle us and we would I think find it more like a prison if we didnt know we had a plane ticket out of there.
(There are studies that suggest we dont get much happier beyond a certain level of wealth, but we still get a little happier; I think it may be the wealth of the wider society that would count here, the availability of expensive surgery perhaps when we need it, that would make a difference also.)
Nor would we be likely to admire the feudal political system, or the complete lack of any opportunities apart from those designated by circumstance at birth, the vagaries of the weather causing sporadic crop yields (shame about all that cheap subsidised food coming on the new road in smelly trucks, but it might save you from going hungry in a bad year) or the complete absence of that other Evil product of globalisation and modern technology, modern medicine and such things as hip replacements (my Mother just had her second at 85 years of age, now she’s like Riverdance).
(I havn’t been to Ladakh, but trekking in Nepal 20 years ago I was struck by how often I was stopped by locals who showed me wounds and sores or sick children and implored me for medicine. They wanted western medicine because they knew it worked.)
The film’s central message is: globalisation and the modern world are terrible; traditional communities are happier; we need an entirely new approach based on localisation. Not complete self-reliance, we are told, but local needs should come first, starting with local food, but also decentralised renewable energy in the form of wind and photovoltaic.
The latter point about energy is the most ridiculous part of the film. Who in their right minds in making general proposals of -not just renewables- but decentralised renewables? I myself do live off grid like that and I’m not advocating it!
Never mind that these technologies are absolutely the product of globalisation, they could scarcely be created locally, and mostly are manufactured in China using probably quite polluting processes that require rare Earth metals of which China has 95% of the world’s supply;
or that running decentralised energy systems to any extent is basically prohibited currently by limitations in storage- batteries- which is still very costly, and that such systems could only supply relatively very small amounts of power.
There is a big emphases on food of course. Vandana Shiva is there telling us that “our research” has proved that small farms consistently deliver 3-5x the yield of- what? large scale conventional farms? I think not, but one of the problems with films like this is that references are rather forgotten so it is hard to check. But anyway, all that “science” and “evidence” stuff is all part of the problem, innit? After all we are also talking a crisis of the Human Spirit, one really should try to avoid THINKING too much.
Conspicuously absent in the film was any mention of Genetic Engineering but in her brief talk afterwards Helena came out with the old canard about “for-profit seeds that have terminator genes in them.” Crikey, do these globe-trotting super-greenies not bother to read even basic information about the stuff they are promoting? Doesnt she listen to Skepteco??
Arch-doomer Richard Heinberg is also featured, claiming that globalisation is propelling us into a “universal famine”- forgetting perhaps that historically agrarian cultures have always been subject to intermittent famines, and the Green Revolution- which Shiva and Norberg-Hodge would be completely opposed to- has succeeded in more than keeping abreast of population and the incidence of famines has declined since the 1980s.
There are some contentious points about localisation made by Goldsmith in the film: “food miles” are not such a big component in food, especially if coming by sea (airfreight is another matter); but there are other difficulties with localisation of food: in a famine, you cannot just import food from somewhere else unless you have a global economy functioning; and some areas are better suited to some crops than others, so local food might lead to less choice.
Farmers markets are much promoted in the film of course and in the discussion afterwards, but it is questionable that lots of people driving to a farmers market as may be the case involves less “food miles” than them all walking to a central supermarket. And one other issue noticeably missing from any discussion: farmers markets, like organic food, tend to be more expensive, often supplying fancy artisan food rather than basics. Delicious, healthy, wonderful, I love farmers’ markets, but they are inevitably criticized as being middle-class and elitist, and cheap food is surely one of the great successes of globalisation.
Farming as a career is appealing to some, but I think of the essay written a few years ago by Heinberg himslef calling for 40 million more farmers in a post-peak oil world in America alone- this would completely reverse the trend of the last 50-60 years. Most people do not want to be subsistence farmers, it is too hard. I really wonder how many in the packed audience would really want to give up their electronic gadgets and all the other trappings of globalisation they benefit from and work on a farm for the rest of their lives, because for the localisation project to gain any real traction, must of them would have to do just that.
And would Helena really want to give up her jet-setting lifestyle of international travel as award-winning author and environmentalist and become grounded permanently and localised, perhaps in a remote village in Ladakh -or anywhere- herself rather than just romanticizing the lives of others?
There are important lessons to be learned from Ladakh, including issues around community, how we treat our old people and how to manage development; but this film has no depth and just regurgitates the same old over-simplified post-modern dirge we have been hearing for years.
I like to quote Daniel O’Donnell who I once heard say on the radio that, “money doesn’t make you happy, but it makes you comfortable.”
Graham, What a great analysis. Having worked in some of the remotest areas of Southern Sudan and more affluent rural areas of Sri Lanka, as well as visited remote indian communities in the Peruvian Amazon, I agree with nearly all you say.
The women and children scouring the land for firewood and water – or then bailing out their houses after floods were perhaps working too hard to be unhappy. Yes, the ability of many, to remain calm in the face of extreme poverty and recurrent natural as well as man made disasters was awe inspiring. Yes, I did meet people with an ‘inner calm’ who ‘transcended’ appalling conditions or who were content to live in isolated communities with few possessions. But even in the remote Imatong mountains, where there were no markets, let alone a regular supply of medicines, there is no way I would describe the man, who had just walked for 2 weeks with a sack of ground nuts to a village on the plain in the hope of exchanging it for Sorghum, as happy.
I see the same angst, calm, despondence and joy in inner city britain. Community projects relying both on modern means (social media, new buildings, CBT) and positive human attributes, can overcome appalling subcultures of violence, desperation and dependancy. But I don’t believe it’s through some spiritual energy, even if churches or other religious groups are sometimes involved.
Humankind has always included people with great resilience, and others who use their powers of reasoning and intuition (what happens in the brain subconsciously) to further themselves, their family, community and beyond; but sadly only a few communities, both in antiquity or the modern world have managed to create cultures where generosity, reciprocity, peacefulness and creativity are both dominant and enduring. While there may well be lessons to learn from the people of Ladakh, lets focus our attention on harnessing the best of both innate human qualities and modern technologies to address the problems of our modern world.
@ Madelene LOL! Yes and maybe it can buy things like time and choices and things that might also lead to some happiness.
@ Richard Thanks for your very interesting and thoughtful comment! It seems one of the problems of affluence is simply that many people in the rich world find it so difficult to imagine poverty. Best wishes Graham
Tom had written on the previous thread: Called by to see if you’d posted on the Economics of Happiness. Glad you did. I helped arrange the screening but was far less enthused than many by it, they really lapped it up! Will go through the points you raised over the next day or so, and look forward to introducing some of the criticisms to others who were there.
Hi Graham,
Going to move my response here as it’s a more relevant thread.
Can I just ask, just out of interest and although you probably have a valid justification, your off-grid living seems to some degree contradictory with your view that living on the land, self-sufficiency and removal of the supports/luxuries of the modern world are too hard and no-one wants to do it. Is it a vestige of a former opinion you held on that lifestyle? Or perhaps an experiment to demonstrate those difficulties?
The film screening was very much a once-off event, organised after a chance offer by Dieter, who you would have seen, to collaborate on it. Wouldn’t say it was in any way representative of how they portray the world. I mean, I’d imagine the film would have rubbed a few of the academics in the department (on the food “business” side, in particular) up the wrong way. From my experience, some of the lecturers are explicitly pro-”globalisation” as seen in the film, and others would take more of a Helena N-H slant. As ever, it seems likely to me that the truth lies somewhere in between..
Hope to re-read the blog post soon and get back to you on specific points.
Have a good day!
Hi Tom To some extent you are correct- my own lifestyle choices are partly a legacy of views I no longer hold so strongly, I would certainly have been much more sympathetic to views expressed in the film politically, and of course I have myself been for several years predicting imminent collapse of society due to peak oil etc and was influenced by a certain survivalist “head for the hills” streak. I like to think I am more pragmatic these days and see how I live really as just a lifestyle choice- one that I would still make, although inevitably as i grow older I start to wonder if I will still be here chopping wood in my 80s! Im certainly not in any way self-sufficient except in firewood; food wise i grow only a small amount of veg and a good bit of fruit, in total a very small amount of total calories. And I recognise that everything I do here is dependent on a van- see Hemengway on rural vs urban: http://www.energybulletin.net/node/3757
Specifically re. living off-grid, I started an interest in small-scale wind-and solar when I still lived in a yurt moving from site to site every few years. i was able to bring my small wind turbine and solar array with me and had very few power needs, living very simply. (I also lived for some time in a tipi with no electricity.) When I moved to Derryduff I invested in the first piece of expensive equipment, an inverter; at each point since then I have had to decide: invest more to upgrade the system or go on the grid? So far I have stayed off-grid, but that is partly becasue I dont have planning permission for the dwelling here, which means I cannot get a connection.
So, yes it is a contradiction, but the point is, we post-modernists have a choice: it’s one thing to spend a few years in a tipi when you are young as a drop-out; it is quite another to have no choice but tho live that way for your whole life. So we look at the lifestyles of Ladakhis’ from a very different perspective to how they see themseleves, and if this is translated into political pressure to prevent development I think it could become very dangerous, because we dont have the right to keep people in a state that we would only choose temporarily as a tourist.
But I dont mean to imply there is no role for off-grid living, obviously there are many remote situations in the developing world where that may indeed be the best option and will improve people’s lives- my point with regard to the film is that the technology is only a result of globalisation, and this approach is only relevant for a small minority of the poor. Technological breakthroughs in solar might indeed one day result in a huge breakthrough in renewable energy and be a vast improvement over fossil fuels, but this can really only happen I would argue in a globalised world where innovation can access the best materials from anywhere, the best technology etc., and requires enormous investment in R & D.
Jeez – Norbert-Hodge still around? Frightening memory rush of her droaning on 15 years ago about how wonderful everything is that she deigned to embrace. A very implausible presence.
This is an extract from an email conversation with Graham:
It’s very interesting to hear a critical analysis of the Economics of Happiness. In Ladakh, I spoke to one person who accused her of treating Ladakhis like an endangered species and romanticising them into parody. He directed me to Janet Rizvi’s book, The Crossroads of High Asia, that was pretty interesting and less sentimental than Ancient Futures. If you haven’t already read it, I would recommend it!
This might be a bit off topic, but I thought I’d share my observations anyway… In my opinion, Ladakh’s biggest threat is from the encroachment of Chinese armies and climate change. The latter is an area I became interested in from the perspective of Climate Justice after seeing Mary Robinson give a speech on it last October. As an area of climatic extremes (like the poles and the deserts and low-lying islands), places like Ladakh will feel the effects of climate change first. From an environmental management point of view, Ladakh is unique too in that the altitude, climate and inaccessibility make waste disposal difficult (no fungus, etc) and the old trucks that drive up from the mainland are not calibrated to run on lower levels of oxygen, and pump out some very filthy fumes. So it’s a pretty interesting place to study, which is why I’m going back in July (it also has the young Indus, the second most beautiful river in the world to me – I have a bit of a thing for rivers…!).
Ladakh certainly comes across in the film like a heavenly utopia that’s been shat on by globalisation and Western tourism. This, from my experience, is not wholly accurate. The young Ladakhis I encountered there seemed very proud of and secure in their culture, while simultaneously enjoying the benefits of the tourist trade. Ladakh’s tourist trade is not centred on Westerners either – it is an increasingly popular Indian tourist destination. Also, I think it’s important to note that Ladakh is not populated solely with Ladakhis. The poorest people that I met in Ladakh are Tibetan refugees (many of whom were killed and their houses destroyed in the village of Choglamsar during the Indus floods last August), people in the distant outlying villages, and Himank workers who rebuild the roads all year round while living in tents on the sides of those roads (which are built primarily, I understand, to facilitate the movement of the Indian Army rather than rice, chicken and coke for the tourists – Ladakh has the highest concentration of armed forces anywhere in India). As well, from my understanding, Ladakh’s culture and way of living grew from trade – not isolation. It was ‘the crossroads of high asia’ after all, the place where China met Russia met India met the West.
That said, I think The Economics of Happiness does have a lot to offer, but it’s important to remember that it’s a film that employs the techniques of cinema to get a very broad and digestible message across. While the message is a slave to the format, I find myself believing that increasing awareness and understanding of localisation (food-resilience particularly) is a positive thing from many perspectives. At the same time, I am aware that it is not and cannot be the be all and end all of our survival as a species. Many of the poorest people in the world live in localised economies. I lived in a small village in northern Tanzania for a couple of months and have spent some time in remote villages in India. I would not want to swap lives with any of the women I met there. And I can imagine there would be some very hungry tummies in the UK should David Cameron decide to feed the nation locally.
While we must champion the many benefits of globalisation – healthcare, education, etc, I do agree with Helena’s point of providing real information about the West and dispelling the common notion that our way of life is perfect. While travelling, I have been asked on numerous occasions how much I earn. In answering that question, I’ve always felt it important to counter it with a detailed breakdown of where my money goes: rent, taxes, bills, the price of a cup of tea, while – crucially – explaining the concept and implications of the welfare state. At the same time, I insist on telling people why I travel to their country and the things I have learnt from them and their way of life, and the bits I hope to take home with me, such as having enough time to have a chat to a stranger in a shop, or something. It’s always fun too to watch the shock on people’s faces when I tell them about my father, who grew up in rural Ireland in the 1930s in poverty, who didn’t have shoes till he was 13 and frequently went hungry. I do this to demonstrate that wealth, while not necessarily equating with happiness, does often equate with comfort, and that for many people in the West this is only really a few generations old.
I do fundamentally believe though that people in the developing world do not necessarily want our lifestyle lock, stock and barrel. They’re not all so insecure that they want to cast off their own culture completely, and it shouldn’t be assumed that they are. As one small example, a few Indians have told me they don’t think McDonalds will ever take over in India because street food is just too good! I feel that people in the developing world should be equipped with enough real information (such as examples of both the successes and mistakes made in the West) in order to make well informed decisions for themselves and the future of their countries. You can’t tell people what to do. Only help them educate themselves to make better choices, which I believe Helena is – in the right way or the wrong one – trying to do.
Anyway, spiel over!! I can’t wait to go back to Ladakh. It’s an incredibly beautiful place and the people are awesome
Oh and I reserve the right to amend any of the above opinions after my trip, I’m sure many will change… They have a habit of doing that whenever I travel.
In addition, to further clarify my point on the message being a slave to the format of cinema, I’d like to make the point that the film is emotionally driven rather than scientifically driven because stories move people further and deeper than statistics could ever drag them. Helena knows this, as does every artist, writer, storyteller and film maker in the world, and – I’d guess – every scientist as well.