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Animals in human society

While I’m not writing anything really seasonal this year, it seems a reasonable opportunity to think about the position of animals within our society – not in a dietary way, but looking at the roles we give them, what they offer us, and the relationships we create.

It’s fascinating in a way how different cultures and societies form different connections with animals – traditional or sacred relationships, closer or more remote bonds. We could say in the West it boils down to “are you a dog person or a cat person”; the persistent cultural stereotypes over mice, foxes, sheep, donkeys; or the instinctive reverence and mystery of the whale, the elephant, the lion.

Clearly many animals represent or embody various qualities and traits – the majesty and power of the horse; the innocence and hope of the lamb; the playful wisdom of the dolphin. I guess that’s also true of nature more broadly, but it seems many people are drawn to certain animals and the qualities they express.

More practically, it seems there’s always been a history of assigning certain roles and tasks to different animals; for example transportation, scientific discovery, medical assistance, land management and agriculture, or as sheer power in manual labour. I wonder at times at the extent to which modern society is in fact built upon the assistance afforded us by the animal kingdom, as it seems they played a part in many historical breakthroughs and phenomena.

Then there’s the more recent “employment” of animals as domestic companions, in a way more as a lifestyle choice and for social or emotional support. Dogs that encourage us to walk in nature more and initiate countless social encounters with strangers. Cats offering us their independent presence, their grace and playfulness. Birds, rabbits, iguanas or other creatures that fascinate, amuse and soothe us. Plus the roles these domestic creatures cast us in to take proper care of their needs, to train them to fit our lifestyle and within society at large, to understand them better. It seems in all this that animals are still woven closely into human living.

This post seems to have less of a point than most so far, but it’s hard to grasp what this human/animal bond is – there’s clearly an ongoing connection as our existences are so intertwined, but we often seem largely dismissive or sentimental over their significance. To me, there’s a mystery to it all and maybe that’s part of the reason we struggle to understand our responsibilities and entitlements when it comes to how we treat them.

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“Essays” by Emerson

I wasn’t sure where to begin with Emerson because he explored so many rich and powerful thoughts. In the end I’ve chosen a topic I’ve had many conversations about lately and one that also crops up in relation to modern life: Friendship.

A recent study into perceptions of friendships highlighted some of the challenges of social media and recognising reciprocity. To this I would add the greater mobility of our lives now – moving to new places, changing jobs more frequently, the overwhelm of things calling for our attention, and the practical inability to manage and maintain so many demands and friendships.

It’s an area of life that seems to have evolved of its own devices – life’s changed at a dramatic pace and existing notions of social etiquette seem to have been contorted to fit new realities. Work friendships are often circumstantial and indeed in any situation we find ourselves it is often expedient to create the illusion of friendship to smooth our experiences. There’s almost an unspoken code that we all know it’s an act.

Maybe that’s “modern life”, but to me such an instrumental approach seem a wasted opportunity to get to know another human being and quite a strange social reality. As with everything, there’s a balance, and the pace of life now may “demand” an economising of social connection in order to get things done, but the way Emerson spoke of Friendship resonates with me more strongly:

“Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God, which many summers and many winters must ripen.”

“Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man. Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards, but the austerest worth; let us approach our friend with an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the breadth, impossible to be overturned, of his foundations.”

“Let him be to thee for ever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside.”

There’s a lot more to the Essay but, to me, it’s essentially describing a more fundamental perspective of knowing who you are and relating that to the mystery of others. Emerson seems to have been looking to what it means to be truly human, which seems an interesting challenge we are now facing.

I know that modern life and professional connections in particular don’t really lend themselves to that level of connection, but it would be nice overall if the social fabric of our times was a little more honest and authentic.

Reference: ‘Friendship’ in “Essays” by Ralph Waldo Emerson (Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, Bungay, Suffolk) originally published in 1841. A copy of this essay is available online at www.emersoncentral.com/friendship.htm.

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Value of each human being

Following Age, Image & Self Worth, it seems timely to offer my general philosophy around humanity.

Fundamentally, in my eyes every single human being has equal worth for who they are, the path they are walking, and their views of all that. That may sound obvious or trite, but I find it hard to accept another view of existence. How can we judge our experience to be more important than another’s? Obviously we can, our society and culture set us against one another in this way fairly constantly in some kind of Darwinian contest. But essentially I’m not sure how we rationalise making our own concerns more pressing than those of everyone else.

Clearly I am idealistic – I’m arguing for absolute equality based on the philosophical premise that we are all ‘one human’ and therefore worth the same. I know realistically some people are “worth” more – practically-speaking, that their lifestyle costs more to maintain and they’re in the socio-economic position to do so. Some are born with advantages while others are not, but I would tend to assert that having good fortune bears with it a responsibility to address the causes at the root of the inequalities.

What I’m struggling with is that our society seems based on some people always being worth more than others. Democratically we have more parity, but it could be argued education and lived reality don’t leave us on an equal footing there either. The premise of inequality seems woven through society – how we’re different, subtle judgements, which inconsistencies to conveniently ignore.

At root, it seems to come down to economics – opportunity, earning power, socioeconomic structures – which seems inherently based on inequality. So maybe all the laudable efforts to remove these barriers are ultimately unlikely to succeed while the system remains as it is.

Our society seems to be this race for self – get what you can, make yourself secure materially and socially, succeed in the eyes of others. But it really seems to me that we are all the same, and that this race is an illusion of sorts. Who are we beating? How can we judge others and make ourselves better? What if we had to look in the eyes all the people actually oppressed by the lifestyles we lead?

I’ve tried to rewrite this many times, as I’d intended to write a human-centred post but it kept drifting into something more system-based. I see a truth in it though. I see the faces of people I’ve met who stand firmly on the less-advantaged side, and I see that they are no different and deserve much better.

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Age, Image & Self Worth

It seems in Western culture that people are valued less and criticised more as they age, and purely on superficial factors – often on standards of beauty associated with attributes of youth. We do not seem to value so much the wisdom, experience and understanding that living offers us or the natural human face of that process.

I understand in a way that our culture praises what can be described as youth/beauty. I write it that way because it seems that youth ‘has’ beauty, which is then emulated and passed off as beauty itself. But what is beauty? Youth isn’t beauty, but youth often has what we judge as beauty. Maybe it’s the life force, the innocence, the relationship of inner qualities meeting outer forms, an honesty in that. I don’t know. I’m pondering. But youth is not beauty, and believing it is creates a mask out of youth that makes the truth hard to grasp.

Essentially, what I am saying is that I feel our society is mistaken in confusing youth with beauty and peddling that to us all. I don’t feel that fighting the process of aging in order to maintain a youthful figure or hair colour should be the main path to beauty and it seems quite a damaging attitude for a society to adhere to. By all means, pursue those things out of regard for health or general aesthetics but in and of themselves they do not make a person beautiful or more worthwhile.

Obviously an aside could be taken here regarding the economic drivers behind these attitudes or how beauty in a way becomes a preserve of those with funds to wage this battle and therefore another source of social division. But I’ll leave it there.

For me, beauty is the continuance of the truthful relationship of the inner and the outer that I stumbled on above: as we age we understand how we are and why, we make choices based on our values and priorities, we hopefully come to a happy self-expression in the image we present to the world and how we feel about it and our selves. There’s a truth there, a personal engagement with the process of living, an authenticity and originality. No one expression can be judged better than another if they are all expressions of inner truth.

Clearly this is quite a philosophical take on image, but aging is a natural part of human existence – we are young, we age, we decline physically. Why do we praise certain parts of that cycle and disregard the attributes of others? Given that we’re all going to go through this, surely it’s sensible to have a society that values its members throughout their entire lives.

To judge people and put pressure on them to conceal signs of the natural process of living seems an assault on the individual – as if you have to fight your self, conceal your true nature in order to have worth in the eyes of others.

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Spirituality since the 80s

Moving away from more topical concerns, the focus of this post is modern spirituality. In essence, it seems that spirituality and religious or philosophical concerns loomed large throughout much of recent history even up until the Eighties. I use that date as a slight watershed because there are many texts running into that decade that seek to address the challenges of spiritual experience but then the tone seems to shift (possible reasons for this and whether or not it’s connected with shifts to a more technological or materialistic society is a different matter).

Broadly speaking, from the Enlightenment it seems there was weighty public discourse around belief, religion, responsibility, ethics, meaning and so on. Even through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century debate continued around the moral basis for human activity. Then I suppose from that point Western society became caught up in progress and conflict and rapid social change, including a loosening of these sorts of discussions.

Not to be critical of that, because the process of exploring diverse belief systems and questioning your own seems a beautiful process that can lead to greater tolerance and understanding. There are some wonderful books from the 80s and beyond that seek to chart these waters and find a voice for hope and meaning in modern life, some of which I will pick up here at a later date (Spiritual Emergency, The Aquarian Conspiracy, Towards a New World View, New Renaissance, among others). In a way I see this as a dialogue of progress through the twentieth century as thinkers sought to grasp how humanity meets modernity.

Then it seems, interestingly, that society has taken a path of meaninglessness (that’s not a judgement, but the philosophy of materialism is essentially that there is no deeper meaning to life) while religion seems to have undergone a hardening of sorts in response to modern times and spirituality has often become an emotive or sentimental retreat, an escapism in a way, or a handy tool for calming the modern mind.

I will return later to this, but it just seems intriguing how our way of living has essentially stripped meaning from life yet we still live within it all as humans who seem to intrinsically seek meaning and understanding. Clearly belief still carries weight in current affairs and it seems it cannot be dismissed out of hand, but the place it holds in human society is fascinating.

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Media immediacy

Related slightly to the Trying to understand our times post, my concern here is about how we are living blow-by-blow as diplomacy and democracy are tested as they haven’t been in a fair while. The last time things in the West were so heated, information was delivered by a much slower form of media and one that operated by pretty different codes of responsibility in terms of truth and also its likely impact.

It seems we are being constantly tossed and turned between conflicting and often contradictory opinions while waiting for actual facts to emerge, and I wonder at the psychological and social impact of masses of people being deeply emotionally affected by what often seems to be merely opinion or conjecture (possibly for the sake of revenue or political advantage).

I’m a fan of facts and of trusting in and using the proper channels within democratic society to express concerns and ensure proper paths are taken. These systems are here and built on the ideological foundations of previous generations; now they are being tested and can hopefully be refined and strengthened to support our societies in taking informed and responsible directions.

It seems we are being encouraged to indulge in immediate reactions and emotive responses, and while these are valid in a way and tell us many useful things about what matters most to us all, it may be time to take a step back from that cycle rather than keep perpetuating it with our fears and uncertainties.

As discussed earlier in a post on Communication and the process of change, this seems a time to be calmly listening to others, understanding more fully, and articulating clear intentions for the values and priorities of our societies.

No one seems to really know where things are headed right now, but if we believe in the values of our way of life and are committed to finding constructive ways forward I see hope in that.

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“Towards a New World View”

This post refers to the text “Towards a New World View: Conversations on the Leading Edge” edited by Russell E. DiCarlo, published in 1996.

Clearly this isn’t an overly recent book and it isn’t one that seems to have much of a following from what I can gather online, but it’s a nice starting point for considering how we live and the kinds of reasoning behind that.

The book takes a conversational format and explores what was ‘new thinking’ back in the late nineties and still remains pretty far from generally accepted ideas today. Russell E. DiCarlo interviews people from across the fields of human activity – history, philosophy, medicine, psychology, science, business and education, among others. He takes an intelligent, open minded, curious, informed approach to exploring these areas of interest and enquiry, and in doing so he raises so many fascinating and beautiful questions and possibilities.

For me, as I say, it’s a great starting point for looking at what ideas, assumptions and beliefs underpin an individual world view and how we might go about taking a more conscious role in crafting how we look at the world and our existence within it.

With books like this published before the widespread advent of technology, what I find particularly valuable is that the impending transformation of society is anticipated but discussed within a time where people still engaged mainly with more tangible ideas and approaches to life. Often with writing after the spread of technology this sense of groundedness disappears, as people respond to specific realities or try to understand the rapidly-changing phenomena of modern life.

As with podcasts, the interview format adds a beautiful human dimension to this quest for knowledge – between the lines of the questioning, the exploration of ideas and the paths these conversations take, real human beings with genuine concerns and insight and an often passionate faith in the potential of the future emerge. It comes across as a real celebration of humanity and also models a wonderful form of communication – a process of mutual discovery rather than an attempt to convince.

There are also firm calls to more awakened engagement with our way of living and the risks and pitfalls that could be approaching. There are conversations around crisis and chaos and the breakdown of civilisation, but also of potential paths to take through that – I see much of this as building bridges from where we were to where we are and where we are hopefully heading.

Overall it’s deeply empowering: that we all have a role to play, that our participation in life matters and that if we open our minds and loosen our rigid judgements there can be room for a very inclusive and progressive future.

I haven’t done it justice, but I love this book simply in terms of raising reasonable questions many of us may not have thought to ask.

Reference: “Towards a New World View: Conversations on the Leading Edge”, Russell E. DiCarlo, Publisher (UK) Floris Books. A selection of interviews also seems to have been made available through the healthy.net website.

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Happiness and modern life

I wonder at times about the pursuit of happiness as an aim in life.

Happiness seems to be used in the sense of feeling at ease, joyful, satisfied. Surely to be happy in a world such as ours means to either ignore reality or to justify it in some way – some kind of mental adjustment to “make it all ok”.

It seems there’s a lot of “off-setting” that goes on – making up for the compromises of the week by buying things or indulging various “vices” in our free time. But it seems as if we are turning off our intelligence in order to feel better: consumer goods often equate to human or environmental suffering; and a way of living that drives us to activity that diminishes our consciousness and harms our health seems concerning.

Maybe overall these things even out and leave us feeling happy, or better, or simply relieved at which pocket of society we happen to exist within. But the truth seems to be that we are participating in a system that doesn’t quite work as we may hope and lead ourselves to believe.

It also seems that, in many ways, society itself undermines our sense of self-worth. In implying we are not complete or good enough without certain belongings, looks, relationships, lifestyle markers our very sense of our value is often shaken. This is a topic for another time, but it raises itself here to the extent that psychological happiness must be tied to how we view our self, and society takes a hand in that.

This isn’t to argue that we shouldn’t be happy, but more to look at reasons absolute happiness is difficult to justify. With this, as with issues around Values and the economic, it seems to be a question of balancing an honest understanding of realities with our personal concerns and capacity to enable change. There is a lot in life that is demanding our active engagement both in terms of purposeful action and in looking at the world we are making. I just feel that for happiness to be secure it needs to be founded on knowledge and acceptance, rather than on avoidance or denial: to know what we are doing.

Maybe it’s more a search for peace and a sense of self-worth and also of agency – that we matter, that our actions matter, and that things are heading in the right direction.

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Trying to understand our times

Something I find interesting is how we all seem to feel the pressure to declare our opinions and understanding of what is going on in the world and what should be done about it. Yet we’ve created this highly complex, interconnected, fast-moving and responsive global society over the last hundred years or so and it’s a little presumptuous to say we know what’s happening and what it means. It seems everyone is struggling to catch up while also availing themselves of the opportunities – as if, knowing ourselves to be intelligent beings, we rush to exercise that power and move ourselves forward.

What I love about the world right now is how all the diversity of experience and culture is blending into a pretty democratic, free and informed world. Not to say there aren’t problems and inequalities, but we are able to communicate with and begin to understand people from all different parts and hear what they have to say about the systems we are creating and participating in.

Much of this may be uncomfortable, difficult, challenging. Western society is almost unquestionably built upon exploitation and the imposition of our ideas and systems on other quarters of the globe, and it’s hard to claim superiority without also acknowledging these foundations. Inequality and questionable intentions can also no longer be so easily swept under the carpet, and in attempting to do so issues around trust and truth become even murkier as dubious interests attempt to present a human face to us.

It’s challenging to face up to the past and also to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. Recent events have shown that even understanding those nearby – who broadly share the same history, culture and reality as you – can seem impossible at times, so fully understanding and appreciating the lives of those much further afield cannot be a simple task.

For some reason there is an intense “rush” about modern life – not wanting to miss out, wanting to be the first to create and benefit from new trends, essentially seeking to ride the wave of change and emerge a winner. But can we rush when it comes to understanding all this? Information is generally available now but it is a real challenge to grasp it, understand it, integrate it, and to make wise decisions that take all factors into account while fully anticipating the implications.

In thinking we know what is happening and what is right, maybe we stop asking questions and start applying rigid labels to a very complex and evolving picture.

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Values and the economic

It seems in life that there are two sets of values: the economic and all the others (such as beauty, ethics, environmental concern, legacy); and it seems that economic factors tend to override most other concerns at the end of the day. Rather than looking at what’s being created on a wider scale, money and profit are often the ‘bottom line’ of good decisions in modern life.

So someone could be planning something that ethically, environmentally, aesthetically doesn’t add up to much but if on paper it stands to make a profit or represents a wise use of resources, then it’s understood and praised as such. Whereas if someone was acting out of concerns for beauty, longevity, environmental integration but the project may make less profit as a result of factoring in those concerns, then it’s likely seen as unwise or an indulgence.

And I just wonder at the extent to which economic concerns ever really add to the overall value of human activity. It might be wise, it might be scalable, it might be efficient and cost effective but where will these materials be in fifty years and can the impact to the environment be genuinely mitigated (rather than simply ‘balancing the books’ in terms of hypothetical cost)?

Not to say there aren’t projects where other values are considered, although it does seem these are often a luxury or a lifestyle choice rather than a widespread shift in values. We don’t seem to be in a place yet where values are being consistently defended and acted upon, yet the environment around us displays our values loud and clear.

I lose count of the times something beautiful that speaks volumes about the intentions of the people who created and tended it has been destroyed in this way. Old trees that add to the neighbourhood and local ecosystem are cut down presumably because maintaining them is considered too great a cost – trees that simply cannot be replaced in a person’s lifetime. Old houses built with a beautiful balance of space, form and grace that are torn down because the plot can be maximised for ‘modern’ dwellings where people are made to live with much less space, privacy and workmanship.

And, on a more everyday level, the “economic” choice is often one that comes at a great cost – the cheapest shoes, clothing and items are often so because they are mass produced without concern for environmental waste, the long-term viability and impact of manmade materials, or the human experiences linked with them. I struggle to imagine the vast mountains of discarded products that can never be reintegrated into natural lifecycles, and this process doesn’t seem to be slowing.

It seems money stands against these other, human concerns and our way of thinking seems to say that you cannot make a decision based on this other reasoning where the economic outcome is less favourable. But I wonder what degree of wisdom can ever be incorporated in a system that approaches things that way.

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