Here am I, reft of modest pretense! ;-) I'll just have to fall back on my reputation as the humblest man in any crowd and try not to descend into conceits of vanity.
But I digress...
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So, what is Eco Dandy-ism [ED]? How common is it? Could it be treated? Could it be you?
Eco Dandies are simply the next evolutionary step for this organism:
You know, the types of people who are so amazingly fashionable that grooming goes right past the wardrobe and into the soul as well. The ones who will casually admit that their nonverbal presence has, on some particularly good days, caused blindfolded observers to mistake them for the Dalai Lama.
Check yourself: Are you wearing enough hemp? Do you drink free-range coffee (so the beans can frolic in the breeze)? Do you breath *only* Fair Trade air? (don’t laugh, there’s bottled oxygen on sale at convenience stores everywhere)…
Why are we so green all of a sudden? The environment isn't new but in recent years it's suddenly become a whole lot more fashionable.
How can we as a culture switch so effortlessly from chanting "Green is God" to "God is Green"?
It is awesome to want to improve the world around you. On the other hand, it is somewhat less awesome to invoke the image but not the reality.
Personally, I'm not here to judge whether you emit more carbon with your car or your bong.
You may arrive at WalMart in a mammoth SUV
Or pedal your Dandy Horse all the way to Trader Joe's
For all I know you could be running your vehicle on solar derived hydrogen, or getting your pedal power from unsustainable aquifer depleting organic agriculture. Appearances really don’t matter; the underlying chain of cause and effect does. And that’s the problem with a society increasingly driven by focus groups, polls and crowd-sourced inspiration: we have become ever more reliant on superficial intellectual fashion as a bellwether for truth.
So many people are singing that old, old song from Gilbert & Sullivan’s Patience:
If You Want to Shine in that High Aesthetic Line (Gilbert & Sullivan, 1881)
If you’re anxious for to shine in the high æsthetic line
as a man of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms,
and plant them
ev’rywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases
of your
complicated state of mind,
The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter
of a transcendental kind.
And ev’ry one will say,
As you walk your mystic way,
“If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me,
Why, what a very singularly deep young man
this deep young man must be!”
Be eloquent in praise of the very dull old days
which have long since passed
away,
And convince ’em, if you can, that the reign of good Queen Anne
was Culture’s
palmiest day.
Of course you will pooh-pooh whatever’s fresh and new,
and declare it’s crude and mean,
For Art stopped short in the cultivated court
of the Empress Josephine.
And ev’ryone will say,
As you walk your mystic way,
“If that’s not good enough for him which is good enough for me,
Why, what a very cultivated kind of youth
this kind of youth must be!”
Then a sentimental passion
of a vegetable fashion
must excite your languid
spleen,
An attachment a la Plato for a bashful young potato,
or a not-too-French French
bean!
Though the Philistines may jostle,
you will rank as an apostle
in the high
æsthetic band,
If you walk down Piccadilly
with a poppy or a lily
in your mediæval hand.
And ev’ryone will say,
As you walk your flow’ry way,
“If he’s content with a vegetable love
which would certainly not suit me,
Why, what a most particularly pure young man
this pure young man must be!”
Really puts vegans in a new light, huh?
If we live in a world where majority rules, does anything else matter? People buy hybrids that aren't economically self sufficient. They buy organic foods that require more acres of land to support a given number of people. Some folks even manage to work up a bit of scorn for impoverished 3rd worlders who would cut down virgin forests (though many years ago we laid ours upon the altar of our globally hegemonic materialism).
But what does disingenuity matter? Isn't it a harmless elegance of fakery?
Is there even another side to this debate?
Galileo had this to say: "In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual"
Now before you get (rightfully) irritated because you think I'm claiming to have all the answers, please know that I’m not championing my own views; I’m embracing a healthy blend of optimism and skeptical independent reasoning. You know, “Made with Whole Brains & High in Moral Fiber”
Let us probe beyond the outward appearances of these trends and into the underlying interactions of cause and effect.
The impetus for this observation arises in small part from the need to prevent the counterfeiting (and consequent devaluation) of crucial social attributes. Far more prescient is the inherent danger of obfuscating the truth.
Consider Michael Crichton's remarks in 2003:
I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.
As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why.
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
http://www.perc.org/publications/articles/Crichtonspeech.php
Environmentalism = far-out religionists? Hmmmmmm.....
Um, yeah, no resemblance whatsoever... Um... Anyway, man does not believe by beard alone...
Besides, I think freedom of belief is the sine qua non of advancement for modern civilization.
Nonetheless we see that environmentalism is both fashionable and quasi-religious, and that therefore we should regard it as subject to the fickle winds of popular favor and require that it exercise a degree of parsimony of belief.
That shouldn't be a problem in and of itself, right?
Well, what if there are other influences, such as good old fashioned greed?
"But wait!" you argue, "environmentalists are pious, abstemious folk, the salt of the earth, the very heart of altruism! They would never act on selfish motives!"
"Aspects of environmentalism have long been criticized as using ostensible concerns about nature to serve private purposes such as property values."
– Gregg Easterbrook, “The case for sprawl”, The New Republic, March 15, 1999
Any, any, *ANY* time you give people the opportunity to slight their neighbors and chalk it up to some kind of higher power or greater good, you're setting the stage for conflict of some sort. Take the case of the purportedly religious witch trials in colonial Salem:
In 1692, Salem was divided into two distinct parts: Salem Town and Salem Village. Salem Village (also referred to as Salem Farms) was actually part of Salem Town but was set apart by its economy, class, and character. Residents of Salem Village were mostly poor farmers who made their living cultivating crops in the rocky terrain. Salem Town, on the other hand, was a prosperous port town at the center of trade with London. Most of those living in Salem Town were wealthy merchants.
For many years, Salem Village tried to gain independence from Salem Town. The town, which depended on the farmers for food, determined crop prices and collected taxes from the village. Despite the three-hour walk between the two communities, Salem Village did not have its own church and minister until 1674.
But there was also a division within Salem Village. Those who lived near Ipswich Road, close to the commerce of Salem Town, became merchants, such as blacksmiths, carpenters, and innkeepers. They prospered and supported the economic changes taking place. But many of the farmers who lived far from this prosperity believed the worldliness and affluence of Salem Town threatened their Puritan values. One of the main families to denounce the economic changes was the Putnams—a strong and influential force behind the witchcraft accusations.
Tensions became worse when Salem Village selected Reverend Samuel Parris as their new minister. Parris was a stern Puritan who denounced the worldly ways and economic prosperity of Salem Town as the influence of the Devil. His rhetoric further separated the two factions within Salem Village.
It is likely that the jealousies and hostilities between these two factions played a major role in the witch trials. Most of the villagers accused of witchcraft lived near Ipswich Road, whereas the accusers lived in the distant farms of Salem Village. It is not surprising that Reverend Parris was a vigorous supporter of the witch trials, and his impassioned sermons helped fan the flames of the hysteria.
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So where are the witches? Who gets to sit in the dunking stool?
Consider this:
-Data source: BP's Statistical Review of World Energy 2007 http://www.bp.com/multipleimagesection.do?categoryId=6840&contentId=7021557
"But hey," you say, "that implies that increasing consumption is to blame, and it's probably bad for global warming too, so the Chinese must be witches!"
That might be true, but you're going to have to pedal the Dandy-Horse around a heck of a lot before you can come up with a billion dunking stools. Let's try for a more reasonable number, say 5:
With gasoline selling at well over $3 a gallon, it's easy to point fingers at the oil companies. And so, with the cameras rolling, top executives of five major oil companies were hauled before a committee of Congress on Tuesday for a public grilling.
http:////www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_8816055
"Great!" you say, "We're giving those excessively prosperous clowns exactly what they deserve for trying to bring oil when we ask for it. Still, we're running out of oil anyway..."
Are we really? At the risk of being called a witch (or more technically a warlock), I'll point out the fact that last year we discovered 80 barrels of oil *every second* in the USA alone.
-Data source: BP's Statistical Review of World Energy 2007 http://www.bp.com/multipleimagesection.do?categoryId=6840&contentId=7021557
You may even have noticed the trend line showing that we are starting to discover new oil even faster? How is that possible? Find out next time in: "School Buses and Stripper Oil"
