Some passages from Believers by Lisa Wells

Some passages from Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World by Lisa Wells:


*


One of the ways we humans organize and make sense of our experience is through the telling of stories. And the stories we tell, in turn, have profound effects on how we relate to ourselves and to those entities on which our lives depend. Many of us are learning that the stories we inherited are not only suspect but in large part responsible for the threats we now face and will visit upon our heirs: the story of infinite growth, of survival of the fittest; the story of human supremacy, and, incongruously, an innate human selfishness and propensity to destroy. Chiefly, the story that tells us that we are separate from the whole, at once alienated from the broader community of life and above its laws of ecological reciprocity.

New stories are in order, but often the dominant culture responds to the crisis at hand by replicating old themes. Features about doomsday preppers, Silicon Valley tech bros with “go bags” and ATVs, million-dollar compounds in decommissioned missile silos in central Oklahoma (my particular vision of hell) – stories about life support systems devised to keep self-interested individuals alive while the rest of us burn. Stories that are, of course, no deviation at all from the dominant narrative. Perhaps the fullest expression of this lack of imagination is the techno-utopian dream of colonizing other galaxies, as if colonization wasn’t at the root of our trouble but its solution: the ultimate geographic cure. Even if some eccentric but benevolent billionaire invented a machine to spirit the human race to outer space (big if), it’s delusional to think we wouldn’t take our problems with us.

It seems to me there is a surplus of terror and delusion in the ether, but spare few visions of how you and I, relatively ordinary people, might live otherwise. I believe the future of the world depends on those visions. If our descendants are alive and well in a hundred years, it will not be because we exported our unexamined lives to other planets; it will be because we were, in this era, able to articulate visions of life on earth that did not result in their destruction.


*


Put bluntly, one of the greatest barriers to realizing energy independence is our addiction to stuff – to having what we want whenever we want it. It may be true, as Finisia and her crew sometimes said, that it’s easier to jump off a structure that is standing than a structure that is collapsing, but so long as the structure stands, most people will – in ignorance or out of fear or habit – return to its eaves when the rain arrives. This is why some frustrated rewilders I’ve spoken to doubt very much that consciousness-raising will create lasting change. Change will come when the collapse of our current way of life demands it. Communal subsistence living inevitable results in periods of discomfort and strained relationships, and so long as warm beds and Netflix and grocery stores exist, most people will return to those comforts when the going gets tough.

That’s why Peter believes social skills like cooperation and conflict management are far more crucial than the so-called hard skills of wilderness survival. And that’s why Todd Wynward believes that that if it’s just up to us, we’re fucked, that spiritual conviction is required to bridge the divide.


*


“Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul,” wrote the seventeenth-century philosopher-priest Nicolas Malebranche. If we believe him, it follows that whatever commands our attention will determine the form of our god. If we mainly train our attention of the screens of our devices – that’s one kind of prayer. If we train it on the dirt, or the birds, or the faces of those we love – that’s another. Most of us run a gauntlet of rotating concerns, with little agency over the convulsions of our minds. Or else we forgo agency entirely and remit our attention, via any number of substances, to a high. In any case, our preoccupations become objects of worship.


*


Human beings are social animals, and it’s a central paradox of human life that other people should confront us with our most difficult problems while possessing our only hope for a solution. “That’s life,” to quote Sinatra. A cynic might call it pharmakon – we are, at once, each other’s poison, scapegoat and remedy. However you want to cut it, we require other people to survive, to love, to be loved by, to reflect that we exist in time. Or at least, we used to.

In a technocentric society, isolation – or the illusion of isolation – is not only possible, it is increasingly unavoidable. But for most of human history, isolation meant death; so human cultures, by necessity, developed ceremonies, laws, rituals, and stories to redress common conflicts that arise between people and to teach their members how to live in accord. Metabolizing conflict while maintaining the bonds of the group was not so much a moral endeavor as a practical one.

What becomes, then, of a people who invent a way to live without relying on others directly? I think we’re finding out.

As is true of other survival skills we’ve lost, social skills atrophy with disuse, and once our survival no longer depends on our togetherness, what impetus do we have to tolerate the conflict, confusion, and vulnerability that are the price of relationship? I’m not certain that it’s possible to sustain communalism long-term based on ideas alone. So long as there exists a more comfortable world to defect to – even if that world is laced with depression, anxiety, and isolation – we will be tempted to take the out.

This goes for noncommunal endeavors as well. Time and again I hear stories about idealistic people, wholly devoted to worthy causes, who wind up tearing one another apart over relatively minor disagreements before retreating to their former lives of quiet desperation.


*


I’m interested in the limit of forgiveness. Where it is, and why, and how some people are able to forgive those who’ve done them the greatest harm, often when they haven’t earned it.

Just reading reports from Standing Rock, I found my mind drifting into violent fantasy. A part of me wanted the police and the corporate VPs and private security people to feel the pain they’d inflicted, to be hit with hoses in freezing temperatures, to have their snarling dogs turn against them – and it wasn’t my home that had been invaded. This was a problem. Not because violence isn’t warranted in defense of the planet but because the violent fantasies of a distant observer like me might serve a shadow purpose.

If there is such a thing as evil, I presume Big Petroleum is high on the list. But it’s a divided self who daydreams about eviscerating the hocks of an economy in which she participates. And if those violent daydreams provide catharsis, if they serve to further distance her from her own culpability, to mutilate that which implicates her, and thereby help her dodge the imperative to effect material change – then aren’t those fantasies an extension of the evil at hand? And so long as we’re at it, why not acknowledge that by she and her I mean me.



.