Could we build a last cathedral?

I had the chance this week to attend to a lecture given by a lecturer in Industrial Ecology, that is currently member of an NGO, as well as a member of the City Council of Trondheim. Prior to this job, she took a degree in Industrial Ecology and spend time both in research within this field and applying this knowledge. The political aspects of this subject and the implementation of measures have therefore been addressed. In this post, I will comment on a more philosophical aspect our generation and behavior as a group of 6,7 billions (and still growing) individuals.

Education is a key point in succeeding to change this society and our system based on endless consumption of non-renewable resources, ecosystem destruction and purely monetary values. Our lecturer was trying to expose us the dilemma politicians have to face. In a first step, let us try to conceive politicians motivated by the common good, not by greed or power alone. Admit this is feasible for a while. As a matter of fact, politicians are only humans, and their vision of life is as restricted as ours to a limited amount of decades; therefore, their conception of success is based on personal achievements, impact on their communities, recognition by their peers. But most importantly, and due to their limited time in a position of leadership, they are inclined to secure their reelection at whatever cost. And to win elections, one has to suggest socially, morally and ethically accepted proposals (although these concepts and values can evolve with time. Take slavery for example, which was completely accepted a couple of hundred years back in time).

A direct consequence is that the one willing to act for the good of society as a whole, maybe the one thinking further than a couple of years, the one advocating changes that will secure next generations well-being at the cost of some (relative) sacrifices of ours; this one has little or no chance to see his wishes fulfilled. Implementing them, passing laws can be done, even if the majority of the population is against the measures, since the bills are not passed based on a democratic vote, but on the vote of representatives of the population, which are, once again, only humans and not robots, acting according to their beliefs and values. I have never seen any politician asking to his voters advice prior to a voting session. Incidentally, the only times I have seen politicians speaking to common persons were during the election periods.

But let’s go back to our core discussion: laws can be passed. If they are not accepted by the majority of voters, then the following elections will be bound to throw away the enlightened leader who had chosen to act for the good of the human species and not for the satisfaction of his community (notice the difference, which is fundamental in the following). This way, laws can be voted and later rejected. This is the principle of democracy, representing only a certain fraction of the population (spatial dimension) living in certain economical and sociological conditions (time dimension).

So the enlightened politician has to face this hard dilemma: “should I pass a law which I know will never be accepted, or should I give up and forsake the coming generations because of my fellows’ blindness?” The solution found was to call for help those who would share these ideas but are politically neutral: NGOs. Of course this solution cannot be always chosen; actually this option might only seldom be taken. But in the case of education, then it can be relevant. Because NGOs can simply teach a message that would never be accepted if coming from the political sphere. Let us consider the Global Warming issue, and the non-popular actions that must be undertaken in order to effectively affect our GHG emissions. These include radical changes in our consumption patterns; for a simplicity purpose I will consider here only two of them: car driving and vegetarianism.

Which politician would forbid the use of private cars in a city? Which one would put a ban on meat? Even though we all know that these are two steps to take, no one is ready to accept these bans. Simply because it would be considered as a violation of our “freedom” to choose, our freedom to act as we want, staying within the framework set up by law. Our lives would not be deeply affected though: it is just a question of re-learning what to eat, and a question of efficient public transportation networks. In spite of these extra efforts which would require maybe a couple of years to be integrated in our daily lives, nobody or so few are willing to act when it comes to effective measures for climate change mitigation, although recognizing that something has to change. And we are reluctant to upheaval, we resist changes that imply less “freedom”. Take the case of oil prices for example. A growing number of scientists now acknowledge that world production has peaked; therefore oil prices can only increase, the demand continuing to rise while the offer diminishes. We will have to accept higher oil prices, or change technologies; despite this reality we still keep on burning fuel for no reason. Recently, fishers in France went on strike because they could not afford any longer high fuel prices, and were hereby asking for subsidies. This is useless; subsidies will never suffice on a long time scale, deeper and more radical changes will be required. But we still keep on burning oil instead of wondering on how to save it.

These unpopular measures have then to be implemented through another way. This has to be education. Everything goes back to it. Education shapes us. It makes us the way we behave, enhances curiosity or passiveness, ethics or disrespect, altruism or individualism. And as Joel Bakan has depicted so well in his book, the Corporation, we have become more individualists because we have to be in order to consume more. The less we care about our fellows, about what happens in the world, the better it is because the less we see the effects of our actions. And the less we care about the consequences of our actions. So living in bubbles is exactly what corporations would like to see. Communities are a danger to those who decide to rob local resources. And as one must admit, they have remarkably succeeded in this goal. Today, few care about how our clothes are made, be it in sweatshops or in ethically acceptable conditions. Nobody knows how our food is produced, with which chemicals; what the impacts on the global environment our purchases have. And obviously, the one willing to break from this state of ignorance rapidly realizes the extent of the inflicted damages. Because our education has been supplemented by an omnipresence of corporations and other actors that have, little by little, turned us into passive, consuming individuals.

So here we are: we have never been so many on this planet; but paradoxically, we have never been so far from our neighbor, from our fellows. We do not care about the one dying down in our street, we do not know our neighbors, seldom speak to them, except when there is a problem requiring help or special cases. The time of the central plazza where people were meeting to speak and discuss; these times of public debates, of knowledge sharing; this agora that was the core of the ancient Greek daily life has disappeared from our lives.

Could we gather and act as one, forget our individualist lives, our selfishness, and achieve something that we could do before? Could we build another cathedral? Could we dedicate our life to the construction of a single project, explicitly knowing that we will never see its achievement? It took sometimes centuries to complete the construction of such edifices. Could we build something for generations to come? Could we spend our lifetime to one cause, the reconstruction of a salvaged world? Could we understand that we are, because of our limited sight and our numbers, each one of us destroying unconsciously the world we live in? Could we accept constraining measures that would require us to loose a bit of this “freedom”, for the sake of our children? I would like to believe it. But the truth is different. Everything goes back to education.

Picture: Nidaros Cathedral, Trondheim. Its first construction began in 1070 and finished in 1300. Photo: Jesús Rojo Martinez, 2007