The Daily: 17 November 2023

I made the mistake of writing about the fragility of cities again. If there is way to rile everybody up, it’s saying that our settlement patterns don’t work very well now and won’t work at all in a lower energy system, one that can’t transport bulky materials long distances, and maybe can’t do refrigerated transport at all. But… I said it…

Later, I was listening to a discussion on food with people who are actually involved in producing food now and who think a good deal on how food is going to be produced in the future and, just as importantly, how it is going to be processed and distributed in a lower energy world — preferably in a more equitable fashion than is true now. Most of the people in the discussion felt that, among other changes, settlement patterns needed to change so that food system transport distances are substantially shortened, resource use is reduced, and body-based labor can be increased.

The discussion panel consensus was that future settlement patterns needed to be rural-ish because it is very difficult to access flows of sunlight, water, and healthy soil in an urban environment. It’s much easier where the land is not covered in urban infrastructure and poisoned by urban activities. But most cities are separated from farmable land by great distances now. So the thought was that it is easier to conceive of moving people closer to farmable land than it is to come up with viable plans to move farming into cities.

Most of the panelists had reached this conclusion, but one had not and seemed to be somewhat irritated by the idea. Or maybe dismissive of the idea (which, in my experience, is usually the outward expression of internal irritation). This dissenting voice argued that cities simply had to remain in existence because… I’m not sure why.

There were arguments about the onerous labor and upheaval that will be needed to relocate large numbers of urbanites, which is a genuine concern — one that keeps me awake at night — but maybe not an argument against doing that work if it is necessary to the well-being of those urbanites, among many others. There were questions of where these people should go, which is also a dreadful concern, one that nobody is addressing adequately right now, but again not one that can be marshaled against doing what needs to be done for the benefit of most of the planet, particularly those that need to move. However, the main argument, one that was repeated several times in the course of the conversation, was that “there isn’t the political will” to move people.

I just don’t know about that. For one thing, those that are not benefitting from urban living and have any kind of chance to leave are doing just that. Urban flight has been ongoing for almost as long as there have been cities, but it’s been intensified since COVID made it clear that cities are not the healthiest ways to organize our lives.

It seems to me that the reverse is true; people do not have the political will to stay in cities. There doesn’t seem to be a problem with getting them to leave when they’re given a choice. There isn’t even a resistance to everybody leaving and allowing cities to collapse. When there is no coercion, people leave cities in droves. This has happened in history many, many times. Cities are not nice places for most people. For most people, cities are deemed a necessary evil… until they are not… deemed necessary, that is. All we need to do is give urbanites a smidgeon of an option and there will be instant “political will” — but probably only among those whose political will is rarely of any consequence.

There may, in fact, be deep resistance from those fewer urbanites who do benefit from cities. These are also the people who have political will that actually affects politics and other public decisions. So the claim that there is no political will to move people into more congenial settlement patterns may be true with qualification — there is no political will that counts.

Resistance to settlement changes, or really any changes to modernity, come largely from those who benefit, who are — not coincidentally — also those who have the loudest voices and most influence in this system. Take the example of air travel. It is fairly clear that there is little reason to preserve the airline industry. It is wasteful on a grand scale and confers benefits only on a very small group of humans. But there is great resistance to change from that small and influential group.

To justify their wants, they use strange arguments about collectivity and the futility of hoping that individual actions will have any effect on the system. It seems that in their minds, there has to be a universal halt to flying before it is necessary for anybody to give up this behavior. Whatever that means. They say that whatever choices they individually make about flying make no difference. But in the real world, the only choices made are made by individuals. The only way a universal choice will come about is if everybody makes individual choices, one at a time.

It seems to me that this argument is raised primarily to excuse those who don’t want to give up flying or can’t imagine living at human scale. It is also raised primarily by those people. Those who don’t fly have no qualms about the ineffectuality of their personal choices — where flying is a choice, which is far from a universal thing in the world.

Just as most humans would prefer living outside of cities if given any option, most humans also do not travel much. Most humans live small lives. Most communities of humans can meet most human needs. It is only a small segment of humanity that imports all their needs into their communities and spends most of their surplus resources running away from those communities (we call this “entertainment”). These are the people who are driving planetary degradation and benefitting from that degradation. These are also the people whose political will resists any attempt to reduce that degradation — and their will is strong and unified. They all seem to believe that until everybody agrees to stop doing destructive things and start doing constructive things, then nobody is obligated to do so. I’m sure this makes sense to them.

But sense has different meanings… David Abram would argue that making sense of the world only comes through sensing it with our bodies. I think many thinkers outside the EuroWestern tradition would agree with this definition. Wisdom, understanding the world, knowing — these come from an organism relating to its place. We are wise when we know our world through our bodies. But EuroWesterners, with their sky-gods and hierarchies and disconnected souls, created a very different philosophical view of the world. In truth it is nearly all a view, with no other sense information. Moreover, it is a view from far above, with no possibility of sensible relationship. And it is a view of objects that, being inferior to the human being with such a exalted viewpoint, may be exploited. It is a senseless and cold way of collecting information on resources, rather than knowing the world as interrelated beings. 

EuroWestern philosophy has been less friendly with wisdom than its name implies. It has largely been a project of justifying this disembodied view of the world and the degradation of the world that it enacts. It is an apologia for the violence done by a small group of separated, special and superior humans over an entire planet of Otherness. It began with separating laboring humans from those who benefit from that labor and continued right on to dividing the numinous from the world and largely placing it outside and above the world. In the end, all good is reserved to those beings that are above the working of the world, and those good beings may make use of the world’s work as they, being loftier, deem correct. Of course, those good beings are exclusively the same small group of humans who created this “wisdom”. Millennia later, very few of them still have questioned the extreme self-referential arrogance inherent in their disembodied world views. Rather, they rely on this perspective to explain why it is impossible to stop flying or dismantle cities or give up any of their privilege. Some disembodied entity named “Political Will” excuses their actions and inactions.

Notice that Political Will is never vested in the groups of people who don’t live in cities or make other extravagant uses of resources to support their lifestyle choices. Political Will is a very specific human. Political Will does not live in the Navajo Reservation or the Appalachian backwoods or the Alaskan interior. He does not know any small places intimately. He is not kith or kin with Others. He does not seem to do work and impedes a good deal of what Others might otherwise be doing. Political Will is the desire of those in privilege to remain there. Political Will is not native to any other place.

In most other views of the world, Political Will is not real. 

Political Will will not feed us. Nor will he make it possible to sustain the systems that rely on extravagant use — and waste — of resources. To most of the world, this is obvious. But blinkered as we are by our fanciful notions of the singular and superior minds residing in the bodies of a certain small group of humans, we can’t seem to grasp that Political Will isn’t us, that political will is nothing more than the wishes of that certain small group of humans.

Political Will is the polite name for the grossly infantile I Want…

In the end, none of this matters. People will go where they can meet their needs, abandoning even the shiniest, richest cities in the world when those riches can’t pay for the transport of food. The decision to fly or not will be made incrementally and individually as more and more people fall into the majority group that can’t afford to make that choice — until eventually some critical lack of mass is breached and the industry implodes. All the trappings of EuroWestern separateness from bodies and needs and nature-as-Other will melt into the ether along with all the other Platonic ideals. Reality will be where we all live.

Lived reality is embodied. It is comfortably human scaled. It is enacted and sensible.

In reality, there is no Political Will…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023