EPILOGUE -- PART ONE: "The 'is' is us!"

EPILOGUE
PART ONE

“The is ‘is’ us!”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 2006

NOTE: This is the epilogue to my new book that is now in the hands of my agent. It is titled “NOWHERE MAN” IN “NOWHERE LAND!” It addresses the nature of our sick Western society from the vantage point of a trained diagnostician. As an industrial-organizational psychologist, my client is the collective group as opposed to a clinical psychologist whose client is the individual. The book was written because I have a sense we Westerners are not aware, or choose to be unaware of how much damage we are doing to our environment and ourselves, and by extension to our neighbors on our little planet. Environmental pollution is correlative to emotional pollution, both of which are discreetly in evidence. I see hope however in the fact that we are moving together as a common world society, not necessarily because we desire such a development but out of the reality and circumstances of our changing world. It is my hope that the book will move the reader out of the delusional comfort of Western ambience. The West, which is mainly white, consumes 80 percent of the world’s natural resources while being only 20 percent of the world’s population. This cannot continue without doing major damage to Western health, wealth, security and happiness. We are at a crossroads and must leave “NOWHERE LAND” and rejoin the rest of the world community, not only as givers but also as neighbors sharing the same communal table.



Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall.
He will end by destroying the earth.

Albert Schweitzer (1875 – 1965)
Medical missionary, theologian, musician, and philosopher.

When you write a book, you are opening yourself to reveal something inside that you might feel you have no business communicating that burns in your heart to say. That is because you don’t know if anyone else experiences what you have experienced, or worries about the same things that cross your mind when you’re trying to fall asleep. There is a bit of arrogance to a book like this. How could anyone write with so little assurance that others think as he does? Good question. We know for a fact that words are restrictive when they attempt to describe the actions behind ideas. Then, too, they can be as self-serving as statistics can: “Statistics don’t lie but liars keep statistics.” Nor is there any assurance the reader has the same sense that we have drifted into “Nowhere Land,” and exist as “Nowhere Man.” Admittedly, it is not too flattering.

My colleagues when I was a chemist put Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring concern about DDT down as the hysterics of a careless chemist. That was a half century ago. Time has proven Ms. Carson right her chemistry notwithstanding. She didn’t live long enough to be vindicated. But I believe if she had she would be astonished by our ecological irresponsibility.

I was thinking about death and dying and how much that is the theme of this book. It is natural to take inventory of one’s life when “Mr. Death” is at his door. Actually, he is at everyone’s door. “Mr. Death” is Nature’s great antidote to narcissistic existence.

The trouble we have with death is that we don’t want to be bothered by it. So, we ignore it; put it off until it is staring us in the face, when actually death is staring us in the face all the time. It is not death we put off because we can’t. It is life we put off because we never find the time for it. I am thinking of this when what comes across my desk, but Time Magazine. The cover story is: “How to live to be 100” and then in parentheses below (and not regret it).

Medical science seeks to retard the aging process because it can when there are more significant things it could do, such as find a way for four-fifths of the non-European, non-white population of the world to be able to live at least to forty. Now that would be something, especially since tens of millions never live much past thirty. Also, Time’s cover has a picture of three women, not three men, and all three of the women are white, seen at various stages of aging. Future Perfect suggests this epitomizes “Nowhere Man” in “Nowhere Land,” an obsession with staying eternally young with little desire ever to grow old and therefore little will ever to grow up, to live in the utopian bubble of constant motion and noise while always looking in the mirror, and always having the face looking back a white one, when 80 percent of all faces around the globe are not.

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Nineteenth-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill states that it is “better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” I wonder if anyone is listening.

Does an honorable life result from piling up wealth, property, leisure, and invaluable artifacts in a frantic quest for self-indulgent satiety? Most of us would say it does not, but that is what Western civilization has been about. “Pursuit of happiness” is such a quest with blinders on while “Mr. Death” is always lurking in the shadows. Could happiness actually come from an earnest effort to confront the big issues of existence? Alas, this does not suggest the carrying of other people’s burdens, but precisely the opposite. The problem is not enough people are involved in owning much less solving their own problems. But to solve their own problems, given the opportunity to do so, these same people need the freedom, enough food and water to have the strength to act on them, enough information and training to solve them, and the stable political environment that makes this all possible. Otherwise, it is just an exercise in words. This is not the lofty common cry of the haves, who are too busy having, but the aching sigh of the have nots who are dying.

Global economic stability and a secure energy supply top the agenda of most Western democracies. Name a Western nation, any nation, and you will see that nation’s government and economic leadership has been embroiled in some kind of scandal that generates not only righteous outrage but debilitating cynicism. Entropy has had a field day with people in power.

The United States, alone, has passed from Vietnam to Watergate to Enron and WorldCom and on to Afghanistan and Iraq with concomitant scandals without breaking its stride. Scandals have not escaped Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy or Russia.

Meanwhile, mass-market capitalism with its “cut and control” precision seduces consumers across the globe by equating material goods with happiness. Officialdom jealously guards its power while leader-speak is reduced to rhetoric and undeliverable promises. This isolates citizens from emotional involvement in the larger social issues that impact them.

It also finds many of the haves in the West retreating into tranquilizing psychotropic drugs, constant partying, escapist television, relentless cell phone chatter, mania for spectator sports, living on the edge, or living on the Internet, sending and receiving empty e-mail messages and escapist pictures, often erotic, while the have nots in the Third World, in some cases, but obviously not all, plot diabolical and destabilizing insurgencies hiding behind a righteous God. Both extremes demonstrate utopian bluster and blackmail and illustrate how “Nowhere Man” in “Nowhere Land” has become the center of our passionate or passionless agenda, as the case may be, while millions of innocent people who have done nothing wrong get caught in the demonic net. I am talking about people whose own governments destroy their homes, kill their animals, rape their women, turn their boys into soldiers, while the world argues who is going to get credit for the latest cargo shipment of rice to the needy.

The thesis of utopia or Nowhere may appear to lack a coherent philosophical framework, which is a legitimate comment, but how could it be otherwise in these schizophrenic times? Nowhere is ruled by "Big Brother" in doublethink. Indeed, the message in these disintegrative, discursive times is that society can’t be trusted, yet people insist on blaming it for not rescuing them. We are all one, East and West, North and South. On this tiny planet, there is no room for pointing fingers. We are shoulder-to-shoulder in a maze. As the comic strip character Pogo once put it, “I have met the enemy and the enemy is us!”

The Buddha says “go forth in joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.” It is good instruction as joy and suffering are connected, as are the yin-yang inextricably entwined in a circle of ecstasy and misery, which is not a commercial for Viagra and “great sex.” I am talking about moral growth and spiritual commitment. We are in a time when it is not comfortable to talk too openly about being “spiritual.” It is far easier to be religious, to attend church or synagogue or temple regularly, and then go about our business doing, whatever, without any reflection on the spiritual costs.

People are suffering. Most people reading this think they are suffering, but I doubt seriously if such suffering approaches the suffering of displaced Africans throughout the African continent. Suffering is misery, and misery is having your baby covered with flies because you have no shelter from them; suffering is not enough food in your child’s belly to keep its little brain alive much less its body. Suffering is having no home to go to as the warring tribes have taken to destroying what little you have. Suffering is senseless carnage, killing and raping and maiming by outlaw rebels because they can. Suffering is never to be able to get out of the heat of the day, or the cold of the night. And, yes, suffering is not knowing if the person next to you in the mall, in the supermarket, on the bus, in the restaurant is about to detonate the nail-packed explosives strapped to his or her person.

In suffering, people cry out for divine intervention. It is the cry of the soul when nothing is left but despair. In joy, people expand their sense of well being beyond their own narrow universe; in joy they give proof of a soul, because the “good soul” surfaces when the “good life” is put on hold. That is the beauty of our times, the people who disrupt their lives to help people despairing by being part of Doctors Without Borders, or volunteers with the International Red Cross, or other such agencies.

Obviously, I don’t know the motivation of these humanitarians, but I’m sure it is not because their lives before were pleasure-soaked. Perhaps it is simply because they care in that special way that isn’t the road for most of us. Noble as their efforts are, however, they will not save the planet. You and I must save it.

What they do on a large scale we can do on a much smaller scale by joining some community activity that helps those less fortunate, by not buying and consuming because we can, by using natural resources with care, by not polluting, and by developing a deepening awareness that our planet is dying, and that we are its killers.

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