"the hardest thing in this world is to live in it"
Mostly everything else in a brain-academic way.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Arizona Shootings Reaction | ||||
|
||||
Perhaps the most poignant and appropriate commentary yet on the Saturday shootings in Arizona. I’m not sure what it says about us, as a culture (or Jon Stewart’s claim to be “just a comedian”) that the voice of sanity in the face of the massacre is coming from Comedy Central. Then again, perhaps that’s most apropos.
My friend Naomi writes a blog about simpler living (named, appropriately enough, Simpler Living.). In fact, it’s how we met, because I find myself drawn to the same sorts of things she discusses in her blog.
Naomi started it as her version of Dave Bruno’s 100 Thing Challenge. It was an appealing idea – at that point, I had moved twice in a little over two years, and I was well aware of the benefits of having less. Tracking intentional pairing down without having a move at the end of it seemed like a good idea, and I was still rather overwhelmed with the general accumulation of detritus that happened when I wasn’t looking. (Or rather, that happened when I started using my parents basement as a storage cellar, and then suddenly had a lot of it to take with me when I moved 3000 miles away.)
It was, in other words, a movement motivated by shared goals applied to individual lives in specific and tailored ways. Which, if you think about it, is really the pinnacle of rejecting a conspicuous consumption culture, where everyone should have the biggest, best, most recent, most expensive – and everyone has and tries for the same cookie cutter things.
Quirky, unique, and custom – what could possibly go wrong?
Well, cut to two years later, and there’s a lot of division in the minimalism communities. Today, Karol Gadja of Ridiculously Extraordinary really solidified the problem: minimalism has become it’s own version of Keeping Up with the Jones’s; the very thing that many of us tried to consciously get away from when we gravitated towards a simpler lifestyle.
Now, instead of whether or not you have the latest and best flatscreen TV or the nicest luxury car on the block, people talk about how minimal you are. And if you don’t meet their particular standards, then be prepared to be judged, called names, told you’re boring and ordinary and part of the problem. (Just for one particularly grating example.) And if you think about it, this kind of one-upmanship is the exact same thing you see when people are comparing their cars, their houses, their purchases. It’s just that instead of measuring against consumption, the marker has become a sort of limbo “how low can you go”.
Is this any more helpful? I don’t think so, because it’s playing on the same sort of competitive drive – it’s just the flip side of the same coin, where you’re still having to struggle to keep up. It’s just a different sort of keeping up. You know how food advocates are always saying “read the labels, read the labels”, so that you don’t get caught up in the hype? This is the same thing – the hype makes it look different, but under the hype, it’s the same exact thing.
There’s nothing wrong with setting goals, or using numbers to make things tangible for yourself. But there’s a lot wrong with having your motivation be external forces and a drive to prove to those external forces that you’re just as good, just as minimal – and that you’re capable of bagging on people who don’t meet your arbitrary goals and ideals. (Which, by the way and for clarity, is not at all what either Naomi or Karol are doing. But if you’re at all involved in minimalism, you certainly know people who do this. Why, just look at the link above that doesn’t belong to Naomi or Karol’s blog. Ahem.)
Naomi recently went through her last two boxes of things, which is actually what inspired Karol to write, and me to join the discussion. And she notes that she’s living lighter, and is happier and more appreciative about the things she does have in her life.
And that’s what this is all about – reevaluating your life and removing yourself from the rat race that makes you unhappy. So if your version of minimalism is all about sewing your own clothing from organic, fair labour clothing, go for it! If your version of minimalism is about fitting two people and five cats in a 400 square foot home, more power to you and your litterbox. If you want a full pantry for the winter, made with the bounty of the summer, join the club.
Just don’t opt out of one rat race to join another. That’s missing the entire point – of doing what makes you happy, rather than using the yardstick of others.
Om mani padme hum
Om ami dewa hrih
Om vajra sattva hum
A a sha sa ma
I bow to the jewel in the lotus
Diety of endless light
May you open the gates of samsara
And purify my companion’s life
I drove out of one state, through another, and into the new state I’ll be calling home today. The entire way down, I was aware of all of my possessions, my entire home, ‘on my back’ behind me (well, in the UHaul I was sitting in). It was a somewhat eerie and odd feeling; the last four times I’ve moved, I either wasn’t driving the UHaul (on my cross-country move), or they were in-town moves where I just used my car. And the last time I did use a UHaul – a decade ago – it was before I returned to academia, and I had few books.
The process of loading the UHaul was interesting. It’s very neat and organized and orderly in the very front (Grandma’s Attic/ part closest to the cab) of the truck, but by the back of the truck, you can see that a combination of tired and fuck it has set in, and it’s all sorts of chaos and “shove it in there” mentality.
I was thinking of this, between finishing emptying out the apartment, joking about it being a bag of holding, and cleaning on the way out. (Cleaning is another topic entirely – how often do we think our place is clean without realizing how dirty it would be if we took it apart completely?) There is always a point in moving I reach, where the best idea is just burning it all to ashes and moving without whatever things it is that are inspiring this feeling. But rational thought always takes over – not greed; I threw out quite a bit this move, and I’m sure I will continue to as I reevaluate on this end – but practicality. Lamps are necessary. Clothes are necessary. If I want to continue as an academic, some concession to books are necessary. These are all items and pieces of the kind of life I want, and in two weeks when the bruises and cuts and scrapes have healed, I’ll be happy to have the tools I need to continue to pursue my academic, professional, and personal goals. (More importantly, perhaps, my body in general will be happy I still have all the concessions that I’ve made to the RSD/CRPS.)
Still, it’s hard not to remember a more flighty and carefree life, the one before I decided I wanted to pursue study as a way of life. Then again, this was also a life I had before chronic pain; perhaps the two are related.
In the six years since I started taking coursework, TAing, teaching, and eventually working in the field of bioethics, there has been one constant: the slippery slope fallacy will set me off ranting every time. In fact, as a TA and a teacher, it is one of the first things that I discuss in a classroom: why I will not abide slippery slope arguments, and just how sloppy that thinking can be.
So imagine my surprise to see a presentation of the slippery slope argument that not only was not sloppily presented, but was in fact one of the better arguments for it – and in a horror movie no less.
Yes, I saw Splice last weekend, and I was quite taken with the movie as a whole. As most reviews of the actual plot will tell you, the movie went strangely sideways in it’s last 20 minutes, and came to a somewhat more typical horror moving conclusion than the majority of the movie indicated (although in it’s defense, the final scene was quite deliciously back to the sort of psychological/thoughtful horror that most of the movie was).
What is the plot of Splice? Quite simply, that two rockstar molecular geneticists (I know, I know) decided to take their research on splicing critters together to the next level, and they created a human hybrid, a chimera of assorted animals. The result is Dren, a creature that starts off working on pushing every button in neotany-is-cute land before maturing into a startlingly beautiful, exotic adult. Roger Ebert was as taken with the movie as I was, and I recommend his review for a more thorough movie analysis. What I want to discuss here is why, ultimately, this movie presented an almost believable defense of the slippery slope argument.
The main male character, Clive (named in homage of Colin Clive and played with an intensely dark brilliance by Adrien Brody), disagrees with partner (Sarah Polley) Elsa’s desire to forge ahead with their gene splicing experiments to create a human hybrid. He argues that it’s wrong, it’s unethical, and it’s against the law so they could get into a lot of trouble. This is about all the actual dialog of the movie adds to the direct debate of human hybrids – there’s no actual discussion of why it is unethical, only Elsa’s clear ambition to do first what both characters agree will eventually happen somewhere by someone. Elsa supports her decision to create the hybrid by arguing that it could help create a multitude of cures for diseases (via some sort of protein marker, another hand-waved area of the movie), and that she and Clive should do this to do good. Enter Dren.
So far, so good – and pretty standard. It’s later in the movie where the slippery slope comes into play. Clive does something that won’t be specified here due to it’s somewhat spoilery nature, and he and Elsa get into a fight. Utlimately, he tells her that his unethical and immoral behaviour is a direct result of their creating Dren: by creating Dren, they rewrote and removed the rules that they used to govern themselves and their lives, and a world without rules was a crazy and immoral place. (I am, of course, paraphrasing in an effort to at least slightly obscure the plot.)
Now, this is interesting – not the idea that doing one small thing, like creating animal hybrids, will create some big travesty through a slippery slope that you keep sliding down, thinking that “just one more thing” won’t be so bad (after all, the basic premise of the slippery slope argument is that making change A will cause disaster X because it will be easier to take incremental steps to get to disaster X, as we become inured to each change or step). Instead, Clive argues that removing the boundaries that are created by the rules we as civil creatures agree to follow, there is nothing with which to judge right and wrong. In a way, the very idea of the slippery slope is reframed into something that I suspect would be more at home in the world of a virtue ethicist than mine. Can we judge what is right and what is wrong when we blur or erase the boundaries that we set up? How do you tell one or the other when there is no sign post to measure with?
Clive and Elsa step beyond the measuring post that their particular scientific community sets up as a moral guideline and as a way to evaluate and judge behaviour. Once they step beyond this line, they have nothing with which to establish their morals against – they’ve already gone beyond.
Is this the most convincing argument in the world? As briefly and tantalizingly presented as it was in Splice, no. While we might not have visible signposts once we step beyond the last line that should not be crossed (how many more ways can I mix this metaphor?), we still do have memory of what the previous signposts were and what they allowed and banned and why. However, I can just as easily see a movie more dedicated to exploring these issues and how we both establish and maintain our moral identity, offering a convincing argument towards this idea of destroying all the rules and having nothing left to live by. I’d like to see that movie, if only because I think it would create a lot of deep food for thought.
