Thor Among the Giants: Part XI
/“Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.”
So sung a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle’s feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:
“Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”
William Blake
The world is made by how we look at it: the Pebble sees it as a place where you are either a winner or a loser, maybe noticing that in this race to the top we create a violent, loveless Hell. The humble Clod of Clay on the other hand, goes in for cooperation and selflessness, producing a Heaven where everyone can all relax and enjoy. When we take psychedelics we can become acutely aware of how easy it is to create your own Heaven or crash into your own Hell, and that the choice sometimes lies in our own hands. If that is true at the microcosm level of me, it could also be true at the species level as well – and as Blake points, the principles of the Clod and Pebble are both equally real. Today’s world is far too Pebbly for comfort, and it has been that way for so long we might take it for the natural order of things, but what if there is some kind of a Get Out of Hell Free card that we could use, to become happy, heavenly Clods of Clay?
Teilhard de Chardin, with his idea of the noosphere, the promised land of a next step in evolution, certainly thought so. As the biosphere and the atmosphere evolved out of a lifeless rocky planet, and as consciousness then emerged from among the life forms of the biosphere, so, in de Chardin’s vision, the noosphere will be an invisible sphere of human consciousness encircling the planet with the higher energies of love. In this Clod-based setup, the emergent property of our greater connectedness would lead to a superorganism composed of billions of “cells” of individual people’s consciousness, but it is a race against time, given our Pebblish penchant for drama and self-destruction. To de Chardin, the Pebble mentality is a half-step, or possibly a misstep, in evolution, and as our ‘business as usual’ lane runs out of space, we will either evolve into one more extraordinary flowering, or collapse under the weight of our own nastiness. So, next stop: Utopia or Dystopia? We decide.
In Part X, (no, not the thing that used to be Twitter) we started looking at people who are helping create that noosphere, a Clod-based Heaven of connected humans. The first of these was the economist Kate Raworth, who focused on a responsible economics, where nations neither allow their people to endure debilitating poverty, nor indulge in absurdly unsustainable luxuries. Surprise – zero nations so far are hitting this rather obvious target, though Costa Rica, as a matter of fact, is the closest. And now in Part XI we will look at another noosphere-promoting hero, Helena Norberg-Hodge. In her journeys to Ladakh, a province in the far north of India, she found a people who not only comfortably operated within what Raworth calls the “economic doughnut” of not too much and not too little, they also seem to have a key to Clod-based happiness as well. She calls her book about them Ancient Futures, I think because their old-timey lifestyle has some of the qualities we will need to make it into a Cloddy future.
Situated in the Himalayas and known as “Little Tibet,” Ladakh is, at the best of times, an inhospitable environment for humans to live in. The crop growing season is little more than four months while the rest of the year descends into frozen lockdown; the soil is thin, water is scarce and other resources are tight as well, with for instance, animal dung being the main fuel for cooking and heating. At least that’s how it was when Norberg-Hodge arrived there as an anthropologist in 1975, and the more she stayed there, the more she was impressed with how the Ladakhis thrived in this forbidding setting. In Ancient Futures she says:
With each day and new experience in Ladakh I gained a deeper understanding of what self-reliance means. Concepts like “sustainability” and “ecology” had meant little to me when I first arrived. With the years, I came not only to respect the Ladakhi’s successful adaptation to nature, but was also forced to reassess the Western lifestyle I had been accustomed to.
Here, where they ought to be desperately scratching out a living on the very edge of survival, the Ladakhis seem unencumbered by stress levels we take for granted in the West; in fact, up there among the glaciers, they seemed to be having quite a chill time of it:
I found the Ladakhis had an abundance of time. They worked at a gentle pace and had a surprising amount of leisure time…Even during the harvest season, when the work lasts long hours, it is done at a relaxed pace that allows an eighty-year-old as well as a young child to join in and help. People work hard, but at their own rate, accompanied by laughter and song. The distinction between work and play is not rigidly defined.
Remarkably, Ladakhis only work, really work, for four months of the year. In the eight winter months, they must cook, feed the animals and carry water, but work is minimal. Most of the winter is spent at festivals and parties. Even during summer, hardly a week passes without a major festival or celebration of one sort or another, while in winter the celebration is almost nonstop.
Ancient Futures
Wait a minute! If people living in one of the harshest landscapes on earth are relaxing and partying for two thirds of the year, how come I, in the rich industrialized West, have been slaving away my entire life just to make ends meet? What have I been doing wrong, (other than failing to be part of the 1%)? Aristotle once said, “We are only unleasurely in order to be at leisure,” and it was in that spirit that the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that 100 years on from his day that Western economies would be so well-developed that we would only need to work a fifteen hour week. (Think automation in factories, combine harvesters on farms, and computers everywhere.) Keyne’s main concern was with how we would adapt to having all that time on our hands, never imagining that as we increased efficiency we would contrive to become more stressed and burned out, and work longer hours. Here it is then: Hell-building in action.
Stupid Pebbles, it’s all their fault! With their mindset of mistrust, aggression, fear and competition, the rat race has to speed up, because everybody is in terror of being last among rats. But why do we fall for it every time, when leisure, apparently, is so close at hand? What great power fuels this neat self-entrapment? The answer is: stories.
The writer Yuval Noah Harari describes humans as the great story-telling animal and this seems to be the mechanism we use to build our Heavens and Hells. To make his point, Harari asks us, what is the best story ever told? No, it’s not Shakespeare or the Bible, or even some super-amazing blog about Teilhard de Chardin, instead Harari claims that the best story ever told is money. When I go to the supermarket and give a complete stranger a piece of paper with scribbles and numbers on it, that person does not judge my personal trustworthiness, they believe the money story and hand over my bacon, eggs, and cheese, etc. Without this unflinching universal buy-in to a story, society would cease to function, and all money would become Monopoly money. Given this, what story is it that keeps us Westerners in thrall to Pebble consciousness, and what on earth are the Ladakhis telling themselves that makes their Cloddish lives so much more manageable?
The Pebble story is that human nature is innately selfish and violent. When I take this for a fact, then if I don’t extract the oil out of the ground, knock down the rain forest, or save money by polluting the local river, then the next person/country/corporation certainly will. Since we all have the same expectation, I may as well get the jump on the rest of them and – and there you go – we have just made Hell in Heaven’s despite. Once we think that this is simply the way things are, like rocks are hard and two plus two equals four, it seems like sheer insanity to act outside of the paradigm. A lot of what people are trying to integrate after a psychedelic journey is the experience they had of falling into the vastness of a glorious and insuperable love, and then trying to deal with the rule book of the “real” world of normal consciousness, where in large swathes of our lives qualities like trust, vulnerability and openness are almost unthinkable.
Here in the Western world, whatever your belief system, your conclusion about human nature comes down to the same thing. If you follow the Bible, you will believe that we have been sinning ever since Adam ate apples, while if evolution is your gig, you will note that aggression and greed have been on the go since the first barnacle. And it’s not just us in the West who think so poorly of humanity, in almost anywhere in the world that was fertile enough to be worth fighting over, the Pebblish construct seems to hold sway.
The few exception seem to come from parts of the world not worth fighting over – the deserts, the deep forests, and the mountains – such as the Himalayan mountains of Ladakh. In these places that the empire builders can’t be bothered with, the Clod story has the chance to take root. It’s hard for us to believe a Clod story could even hold sway in a community, but then people who lived before the money story could have made no sense of the shopping in a store experience, it would have seemed like madness to them. So we, in our pre-Clod madness, might take on the lesson of Ladakh as part of a possible future where car bombs, hostile invasions and mass starvation are not part of the daily news. As you will see, Ladakh appears to have a level of social cohesion and trustability that is at first hard to credit. Norberg-Hodge describes it as a place where miscreants become too ashamed to get away with excessive amounts of selfish stuff, and their victims aren’t really all that bothered, because they know they will get their needs met anyway. Ladakh is an inconvenient truth for the pessimistic view of who we are.