The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation - PART ONE. Chapter 1: Metanoia, Part One
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When I was growing up in the 1970s, I was offered a choice between two mutually contradictory ways of understanding the world, and two corresponding and equally contradictory accounts of how the world and humanity came into being. The first of these was taught to me in church and Sunday school, where I was taken every week by my mother. God created the world in six days, and the last thing He created was Adam and Eve. They had everything they needed, happily running around naked in the Garden of Eden, but there was also a tree there called The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the fruit of which God instructed them that they must not eat, or they would die. Then a serpent told Eve that God had lied to her – that she wouldn’t die, but rather she would gain knowledge of good and evil, and thereby become like God. Eve ate the forbidden fruit and gave some to Adam as well. Adam and Eve’s eyes were then indeed opened up, and they realised they were naked and were suddenly ashamed. God was furious, kicked them out of the Garden, and has punished the rest of humanity for their disobedience ever since.
I have never understood what this creation story is really about, which is why I never believed it – taken literally it is about as believable as Father Christmas, although considerably weirder, which made it all the more astonishing to me why some grown-ups think it is literally true. If God’s plan was for Adam and Eve, and their descendents, to stay in the Garden for ever, then why did He create the Tree? And why would He punish all their descendents for a crime they didn’t commit? Are these the actions of a loving and merciful God? This is just one example – I had countless other questions that are just as unanswerable on a literalist interpretation. But if the myth is supposed to be understood metaphorically instead, then what does it mean? Nobody ever volunteered this information, and at the time I didn’t know how, or who, to ask. My Sunday School teachers either didn’t know or wouldn’t say. Even now, with the internet as a research tool, the meaning of this mythology is opaque, because there are competing interpretations, none of which resembles the one I’d suggest if I were asked now what I think it might mean. And yet this is not some minor theological detail – it is the foundation of the Judaeo-Christian explanation for what has gone wrong in the world.
I found the New Testament no more believable than the Old – virgin birth, resurrection and the feeding of 5,000 people with two fish and five loaves of bread? If you remove the magical elements then the story doesn’t make any sense, but these stories were presented to me ashistory – albeit a special sort of history about a time when magic was real. The Christians in my life believed, with no apparent trace of doubt, that the canonical gospels are eye-witness accounts of the miraculous life of a historical person called Jesus.There was no suggestion of this having a metaphorical meaning. That it is unbelievable is not a reason to think that it isn’t true, but further proof that Jesus really was (and still is) the son of God. How else can you explain the miracles? I grew to resent the waste of my Sunday mornings, but my mother compelled me to keep attending. “You may not care about your soul,” she said, “but I do.”
By the time I was ten I had grown confident enough to resist. I chose Christmas Day to point blank refuse to go to church and that was the end of that. However, the effects of these experiences reached far beyond my relationship with Christianity. I was vaguely aware of Islam, which seemed to me like an angrier, scarier version Christianity. Judaism I thought of as Christianity without Jesus. Of the religions of the east I knew nothing more than names and saw no reason for that to change. For me, Christianity had poisoned the well from which all religions are drawn, and I decided that religion was something I was better off without.
The other creation story on offer was so much more fascinating and believable than any kind of religion I could imagine, because it actually goes to the bother of explaining and justifying its claims to knowledge. The scientific account of the development of the cosmos and the evolution of life on Earth intuitively made sense to me, is supported and driven by observation of the material world, aims to be clear and coherent, and admits to being a work in progress that changes when change is needed. And there are no fairy stories. Philosophy didn’t register on my radar at all. How is it different to religion? What answers does it provide? How does it justify them? I didn’t know and didn’t care. I just immersed myself in science wherever I could find it, which was mostly television, books and magazines. The three subjects I eventually chose to study at A-level were physics, chemistry and biology.
I spent my childhood roaming the woodland that spread out in three directions from our house, and began to develop a deep personal connection with the wild natural world. I increasingly felt more at home there than I did anywhere else. I felt a growing bond with all animals...except for humans. These were signs of difficult times to come. My teens were troubled years – nothing unusual about that, except that in my case I was a very early adopter of climate-change-related mental illness. I had already been heading towards the extreme end of the environmental movement before climate change began to emerge as the ecological story of our age. It was not like there was any shortage of other problems – the barbaric cruelty of whaling, the rapidly disappearing rainforests, the chemical assault on the wild world everywhere, etc... I wanted to fight back on behalf of nature, so I decided to get into politics. First I joined the Labour Party, but nobody there was interested in my point of view. They were far too committed to their existing agenda, ecological issues were only ever going to play second fiddle at best, and that just isn’t enough if the world needs saving. So I left Labour and joined the Greens, only to find that even more depressing and hopeless. The Greens were supposed to be the party that put ecology first, but my local party spent most of its time navel-gazing about internal politics (one leader, or two?) and trying to out-left Labour on social issues. And since they had no hope of gaining or even influencing power at a national level because of the UK’s antiquated first-past-the-post electoral system, the whole thing seemed like a pointless waste of time. What were these people actually trying to achieve?
At this time I was also paying attention to what was going on in the United States, and it was clear to me that the political resistance to climate science there was going to be enormous, and based on the most cynical sort of lies. So I gave up on politics. I didn’t lose interest in following it, but I gave up believing that it was worth any time or effort engaging with the political system myself. I gave up believing that politics offers any real solutions to our most serious problems. I felt that most people either didn’t understand the severity and implications of our ecological predicament, or they were trying to mislead others about it. To make matters worse, even the people who did understand were so committed to the traditional battle between left and right that an agreement about how to share the costs of stopping climate change was clearly going to be impossible. Such an agreement remains as far from reality today as it was then, although many more people are becoming aware of the true nature and scale of the problems.
There was also something else going on in my life at that time: a growing awareness that casual dishonesty was getting me into trouble. I did not prioritise truth and sometimes I would lie in order to make my life seem more interesting, or to get something that I wanted. Liars need to remember which lie they have told to whom and hope people don’t unexpectedly talk to each other, and so perpetually run the risk of ending up trapped in a web of their own falsehoods. For me it all came to a head late one night when I was on holiday with some friends. I found myself alone on a beach, feeling lost, with no foundation to my life. I wanted to be free from lies and their consequences, and made a connection between the search for scientific truth and the need for personal honesty. So I decided to invent my own personal “religion”, with three commandments:
- Seek and defend the truth. Try to understand what is really going on in the world, and defend what you believe to be the truth from attempts to hide, distort or deny it.
- Speak truthfully. Don’t intentionally mislead people.
- Never lie to yourself. Those are the worst sort of lies.
Then I walked naked into the sea and went under the water in a ritual of self-baptism.
By this point in my life I understood the threat that climate change posed, I had been forced to accept that there wasn’t going to be an adequate political response, and lying to myself about the likely consequences wasn’t an option. I therefore arrived at the conclusion that the world as we know it is doomed in the foreseeable future – that we are heading for an almighty collapse, probably in my lifetime. I had nobody to talk to about this. Trying to do so just made things worse, because nobody understood what I was trying to tell them, so everything was misinterpreted as a deepening problem in my mind rather than anything to do with the real world. There was no internet to help me find like-minded people in faraway places, and no books to help me understand or cope – or at least none that I was aware of. I felt isolated and alienated, and fell into deep depression. I fantasised about becoming a genetic engineer and creating a superbug capable of wiping out enough of the human race to stop the ecological destruction and save what was left of the non-human natural world. The only good thing in my life was music, but even that was the agonised output of bands like The Smiths and Nirvana. I did not want any part in the society I had grown up in. I didn’t want what it was offering me, and I didn’t want to share its guilt.
Then one day in the summer of 1989, when I was 20, my brain seized up. I sat staring into a computer screen at work, no longer able to think anything at all. When I started talking again, my words booked me a place in a psychiatric hospital, deemed to be a suicide risk. During my four week stay at The Netherne I made no progress at all on my own problems, although I learned quite a lot about other people’s. The doctors told me I was psychotic – detached from reality. They told me I was suffering from “endogenous depression” – the sort that comes from inside, rather than being caused by external problems. I repeatedly explained to them exactly what the external causes were, and they told me I had an over-active imagination and had got things out of proportion. They gave me drugs which replaced the psychological pain with meaningless nothingness, and that allowed the rational part of my brain to start working properly again. I eventually arrived at the conclusion that neither the doctors nor the drugs could help me, leaving me with a stark choice: I could either take my own life, or live one day at a time with no care for either my own future or that of the rest of humanity. Nihilism (at least with respect to humans, myself included) or suicide. Since both options required me to get out of the hospital, and the only way to get out of the hospital was to lie to the doctors, I was forced to break my second commandment. Footnote:This I did not do lightly, and it forced me to acknowledge that there are certain circumstances where lying is indeed justified. However, I have found over the years that these circumstances occur very rarely indeed. The overwhelming majority of lies are badly motivated. I told them that I had had time to reflect, and now things didn’t seem so bad, and they let me go home. As you will conclude from the fact that I am still here, I chose nihilism.
I came out of that hospital a changed person. I was fascinated by the coming collapse, and even though I’d abandoned hope that the most serious of our problems could be solved, I continued to search for a deeper and broader understanding of what is really going on in the world – a process made considerably easier by emotional detachment from the inevitable human suffering. If you find yourself perfectly placed to observe the most spectacular train crash in history, you might as well get the popcorn in. Obviously I knew I am a passenger on the train myself, but nihilism is a pretty good antidote to that. I became a drug-fuelled hedonist, found a sweet and caring girlfriend, wrote some agonised songs and put a band together.
My acceptance of the inevitability of collapse, and the resulting nihilism, were early steps on a longer journey, though I had no idea of that at the time. Sometimes a comprehensive breakdown is necessary before you can start again. This principle doesn’t just apply to individuals. It can operate at much larger levels.