I find my seat on the flight, seat 17D, an aisle seat which is my favourite. I sit down, get comfortable, take a couple things out of my bag and place it under the seat in front. The air is blowing into my face and I can feel my eyes drying up. The scent of plastic plane interior and exhaust fumes is present in my nose. The cabin is preparing for lift-off and flight attendants pace up and down and people pile in with their bags, finding available gaps in the overhead lockers.
I feel a bit hungry so I take out a banana which I peel and eat. I pull out my laptop and look at the woman next to me watching a TV series on her tablet. The engines fire up. The shiny plastic covering of the seats and armrests surround me in colours of navy and grey. The lady next to me sips on her takeaway coffee. Things are going smoothly.
As often happens for me on planes, my brain lurches out of its default mode of thinking. It is such a foreign environment, so far removed from the everyday, and beyond comprehension that my body is suddenly 30,000 feet above the ground in a metal can.
I find myself thinking about the origin of all of the objects and infrastructure and ‘stuff’ in my vicinity. The banana. The laptop. The seats. The plane. My clothes. My books.
The banana came from far off soil and different air, from a far off tropical country. The laptop: carrying traces of minerals mined by slaves in far-off African countries. The plane: using compressed dinosaur and plant fuel formed over millions of years to form petrochemicals that will be burned over the next 2 hours to lift 160 humans.
There is plastic everywhere, from the seats to my headphones to the lids of the takeaway coffee cups on the tables. The plastic was made in a high temperature fractionation columns that compressed more oil into other chemicals and that are then reacted together to make plastic pellets, melted into new shapes.
The guy next to me is eating frankfurters.
It hits me full-force.
We are living off automated cruelty.
Plastic. Fuel. Meat. Minerals.
What makes us think we are so special that we deserve these things, at the cost of our environment? What is the narrative that runs through our societal operating system, that allows us, the human species, to do this? It’s as if we lack the narrative that we live on a planet that has scarce resources. But what if that *is* the true narrative?
We understand that this is important because the alternative is that we knock our planetary ecosystems into overdrive with feedback loops which could lead to their destruction. And we know that the destruction of those ecosystems ultimately means death and destruction to us, our families, our descendants and everything else that constitutes our living community on earth.
Now I fully understand why Buckminster Fuller referred to the planet as ‘Spaceship Earth’. Just like on a spaceship, we have limited supplies, we are travelling through the universe and if we destroy our supplies we will fail our mission to explore the universe and move towards great universal goals like the discovery of all of science or the mysteries of spiritual practices and the possibility of enlightenment and peace all over the solar system.
Did we really give this up so that we could grant everyone the chance to fly from place to place? Or to eat the banana fruit instead of the apple? Or to be able to drink coffee while walking so we don’t spill from the mug? Or any of these daily affordances, which on the one hand feel so completely woven into the fabric of everyday life and the “normal” and on the other hand we would give up quite easily if we understood the sheer magnitude of what we were putting at risk.
Funnily enough, I get a sense that it is exactly because of the inner hunger and ambition inside many of us to uncover more knowledge, quest towards new frontiers, experience more, see more, consume more, connect everything together, experience higher levels of consciousness and allow free movement of people around the planet that led us to this situation. But we’ve misunderstood.
We’ve been tricked, actually. We can’t see that this is a spaceship, and that we have far bigger goals than simply consuming everything or experiencing everything in a short life. We are a multi-generational species, we are here not to burn brightly and burn up everything we have in the course of a few generations, after so many generations survived in a continuous string of life before.
Sure, we can make individual choices differently. But what difference can that make. I’m talking about megastructures and automated manufacture and so many decisions woven together that they are impossible to unpick. There is seemingly nobody who can un-do what we have done. There isn’t any one person or even a handful of people who can reverse what we have set in motion.
This is no one person’s fault. We can think back to the 100s of years of history that have led us here. The discovery of electricity. The invention of the lightbulb. Of the printing press. Of coloured dyes. Of manufacture. Of the scientific method. From science to engineering. Of transcontinental trade routes. Of massive scale colonialism. Of slavery, and war. Of the steam engine. Of the limited liability company. Of pollution. Of the health impacts of pollution. Of plastics. Of nappies. Of medicines and vaccinations. Of the patterns scientists were finding happening in the atmosphere. Of plastic, a new, durable, light and long-lasting material which was able to take the place of wood, metal, glass. Of the aeroplane. And helicopters. The lives saved thanks to plastics, vaccinations and precision surgery.
It seems very clear that in fact the current crisis is no one person’s fault, yet some demographics are historically more at fault than others. When I think of the bodies that made all of those inventions and many of those discoveries, I notice that there is a narrative that could be told about those inventions and projects mostly run by male-bodied humans. Would it have been different if they were female? Or would we also have proceeded with excitement, passion, determination, and persistence to create and discover more, convinced it was for the good of humanity? Convinced it was the ‘right’ thing to do?
How could we have known that we were on the wrong side? That each step we took towards manufacturing and automating and abstracting and producing was a step towards the consumption of everything we had left? Did it ever occur to us that there might not be enough? That we were pushing and accelerating in the wrong direction? When was the off-ramp from our current trajectory to a different one? Did we miss the boat? Or is it still yet to come? Who decides? When?
Is it right that it is all available and created and then it is our choice whether we buy it or not? I think about other situations in life where people attempt to apply self-driven change of the will in line with their values to their life choices. Diets. Think of all the diets that have failed. Think of how much harder it is to diet when you live in an area or household that is full of fast food joints and other unhealthy foods.
We’re living in a world of automated cruelty and asked to self-regulate our choices, to fight automation, to sacrifice speed, ease, taste, nutrition, variety, colour, experience, discovery, travel, for an abstract concept that it would be ‘better for the planet’.
Our inner compasses have atrophied, and we are disconnected from the suffering and damage we cause by our actions, and incentivised to continue polluting, pillaging and damaging.
We need reconnection
Part of what we need is reconnection - to ourselves, each other, and the planet, which can naturally reawaken an ethic that originates from within.
If the imagination is an organ of perception that can help us reach alternative, imaginal worlds, the moral imagination is an organ to help us imagine the worlds we so deeply year and wish for.
The writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic G. K. Chesterton once said:
“It is the great peril of our society that all its mechanisms may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle… A man's minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals. But with us the reverse is true; our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change.”
In a world where injustice, pollution, environmental degradation and cruelty (“its mechanisms”) are so fixed they become automated, what we need is a strengthening of the capacities to make wise, morally coherent decisions.
In this way perhaps we can throw off the automated machine of cruelty and design new systems based on our principles, our ideals - our sense of who we truly are and want to be.