Random Writings on Personal Sustainability

I have been working recently on a short article for the School of Architecture's Platform. I went through an unusual number of rewrites before I found one that worked for the editor but it seems like there were some good ideas in several of the earlier drafts, so I've decided to throw those fragments up on the ole' blog for your gratification (okay, probably mostly for my own gratification, but I would be really happy if you were, after reading, also grateful). So, fair warning, some of the writings below are relatively complete (if not polished), while some are very fragmentary (this is not a post for those easily irritated by incomplete or half-baked thoughts).

[FYI a revision of version 9 is going into the publication, so you'll have to wait until after Platform is published to see that version.]

For what they're worth:

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Version 8

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3 Observations

In my recent work, three key observations have emerged which have begun to form the nucleus around which my thinking on human sustainability revolves. I would like to share these with you in the hope that they may be of value to you.

Observation #1: Human beings seem to believe in one of two general cosmologies: that of the manifest god or that of the interventionist God.

We can think of the manifest god as the god of the atheists, agnostics, scientists, and liberals (in the religious, not political sense). In this cosmology the symbol god is synonymous with the symbol for law or universe. God represents the rules, the operating conditions, the universal landscape in which we exist. In this framework human agency or free-will is a very real, deep, and powerful force. Through free-will human beings are the creators of their own future and the formers of their own destinies, both individually and collectively. In this cosmology, mankind will determine by the interplay between its actions and the laws of the universe (or god, if you prefer) what kind of future, if any, it will have.

The cosmology of the interventionist God, on the other hand, is one of human impotence. God in this cosmology is most often perceived as a personality or partisan. Most importantly, nothing happens without the express application of the will of God. We most often find this cosmology in conservative religion, and it is strongly associated with Christian doctrines like predestination and grace. In this cosmology it is the will of God alone, and not any discernable rules of the universe, which determines the final outcome for humanity.

To quote Aldous Huxley, “…far from being irrelevant, our metaphysical beliefs are the finally determining factor in our actions.” For those of us who believe that we live in a universe where god is manifest and where the rule of law reigns supreme, we believe that the sustainability of human practices matters. However, for the significant numbers of us who live in a universe that we believe is the incarnation of the will of an omnipotent and omnipresent God, there simply isn’t any compelling reason to concern oneself with issues of human impact.

Observation #2: The language-based cognitive consciousness that we experience as the self is only a small part of the total system that is us, and it is not in control.

Much of ancient wisdom has propounded the dualism of mind and body. From Plato through Aristotle and Aquinas and Kant, we have built a wall between our minds and our bodies, our spirits and our flesh. We have placed one upon a pedestal and blamed every cursed thing upon the other. The problem is that this myth, like many, works as an analogy but not as a description. Contemporary research in cognitive science and psychology is continually revealing the mechanisms and processes underlying our own consciousness. It turns out, we do have a divided self, it just happens to be physical on both sides. For a more thorough treatment of this topic I recommend Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, but for our purposes the primary division of the self is between controlled and automatic processes. Haidt uses the metaphor of a rider on an elephant to conceptualize this division. The rider (controlled processes a.k.a. conscious verbal thinking) can direct the elephant, but only when the elephant (automatic processes a.k.a. everything else) doesn’t have its own desires.

Research consistently demonstrates that the preferences and choices that we believe we are making consciously are really emanating from unconscious processes, emerging into consciousness, and then triggering the ‘interpreter module’ in the left hemisphere to construct a narrative explaining the choice in a coherent way. What is more disturbing is that the interpreter module appears to have no privileged access to the unconscious processes that generated the choice. This process of confabulation is a normal part of everyday cognitive function whose purpose appears to be, first and foremost, the maintenance of a cohesive self. What is problematic is that we tend to accept this internal narrative as unquestionably true.
This reality explains our perpetual human struggle with weakness of will: why it is easy to have ‘ah-ha’ moments and to make sincere and heartfelt declarations about how we are going to change, but really hard to actually change how we live. The part of us that has the revelation and makes the declaration is not the part that is driving, at least most of the time. In order to change our behavior we must actually retrain the elephant. This can be difficult and time-consuming, but there are methods, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, that the rider can use to successfully retrain the elephant.

Observation #3: All living things are either in a process of growth or in a process of decay, living things do not do stasis very well and cannot do it for long.

The more important the topic of discussion, the more our words begin to fail us. For years I used the words ‘health’ and ‘disease’ when I was discussing this idea with people. In some ways the health/disease dichotomy is easier to talk about. For example, it provides a very good basis for the updating the outmoded dichotomy of good/evil. That is good which promotes health and happiness, and evil is that which is adverse to health and happiness. When we use the growth/decay metaphor, we must be clear that growth is qualified as healthy growth, with cancer being the obvious example of something that looks like growth but is, in reality, decay. Another word pair that helps us to clarify what we are talking about is strengthening/weakening, if we are getting stronger (physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually) that is good, if we are getting weaker, not so good.

What I think is useful about this dichotomy is that I think we can use it to evaluate our way of being in the world. Is this action or that, this choice or that, this lifestyle or that, promoting health, growth, and strengthening or is it promoting disease, decay, and weakening? What I like about the growth/decay metaphor is that growth is not easy, it takes work and energy and it often involves pain. Decay, on the other hand, is very easy, simply stop working. Decay is slow and persistent, and it requires nothing from you except a lack of attention. Decay is a word that connotes a kind of numbness on our way out of being. According to Hindu scripture the end of the world comes ‘not with a bang but a whimper’ when Krishna withdraws his hot-blooded force from the universe. To put it another way, in the words of Stephen King, “Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

Concluding remarks

One can think of these three observations as three hurdles or three preconditions to acting sustainably. First, one must sincerely believe, as a matter of faith, that one’s actions in the universe matter deeply and inescapably. Second, one must know oneself as a complex being in order to not only adapt one’s mind but to adapt one’s ways. Third, one must have a standard by which to judge one’s own actions, a standard by which to choose one way of being over another.
To each of these I submit that the Buddhist principle should hold, if it proves useful to you keep it and use it, if not, throw it out and find something that does.

Side column stuff:

Recommended readings:

The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt
Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert
The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
The Omnivore’s Dilemma – Michael Pollan
Tying Rocks to Clouds by William Elliot
The Art of Happiness by Tenzin Gyatso, The 14th Dalai Lama
Peace is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh
Tao: The Watercourse Way by Alan Watts
After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre
The Case for God by Karen Armstrong

Recommended TED Lectures (available at http://ted.com)

Jonathan Haidt – The Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives
Barry Schwartz – Our Loss of Wisdom
Barry Schwartz – The Paradox of Choice
Dan Gilbert – Why Are We Happy?
Dan Gilbert – Our Mistaken Expectations
Malcolm Gladwell – On Spaghetti Sauce
Simon Sinek – How Great Leaders Inspire Action
Clay Shirky – How Cognitive Surplus Will Change the World
Karen Armstrong – The Charter for Compassion

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Version 7

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While writing the many wildly varying versions of this article I became extremely frustrated. After some deep reflection and soul-searching, I realized why. There are some things that I want to tell you about you (and about me and the rest of us), but you aren’t going to believe me. As a matter of fact, some of the research that I am going to share with you tells me (pretty convincingly) that you aren’t going to believe me. Here’s how it’s going to happen: I’m going to tell you about some really interesting (and sometimes disturbing) aspects of human cognition, you will then use this information to more accurately predict the behavior of others, but you will spectacularly fail to change your estimations of your own behavior based on this new information.

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Version 10

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The Hundred R’s

If there were one hundred R’s, instead of only 3, and if the proportion of those R’s was to determine the success or failure of creating a sustainable future, then the first ninety-five would be reduce, the next four would be reuse, and the last one would be recycle.

Strategic Reduction

While simply wanting, needing and acquiring less is both powerful and necessary, equally important is making structural and strategic reduction. Moving from a disposable society back to a repair society puts people back to work, enables more sustainable product design, and stops the avalanche of poorly designed, poorly made, and often toxic refuse that is pouring into our landfills. We also ignore what we have learned about ourselves. Long commutes are generally bad for our cognitive function and our happiness, yet we continue to build exurbs. Living in smaller dwelling has no appreciable effect on our happiness, yet we continue to build (and define the American dream in terms of) inefficient single-family dwellings. We know that people who live in dense, mixed-use, walkable, urban environments

Paying for Externalities

Any economist worth their salt will tell you that in order for a market system to function properly all externalities must be properly accounted for. Externalities like the social costs of child labor or the environmental costs of pollution. Much of the sickness of our current markets is the routine avoidance of incorporating externalities into the market’s cost structures. Ensuring that these externalities are accounted for is a necessary role of government, one which few governments in the world are even attempting and even fewer are doing reasonably well.

Sustainability Sticker Shock

The most fallacious argument in the sustainability quiver is the idea that doing things sustainably is cheaper. Doing things sustainably is only cheaper if the following conditions hold: 1. You are operating in a market that accurately and correctly assesses the costs of all externalities, 2. You are evaluating the cost model over a long time scale (i.e. decades or centuries, not quarters), and 3. You are willing to put a reasonable dollar value on the cost of ecological disturbance and/or destruction (OK, this is really part of number 1, but it needs emphasis). If your accounting does these three things, then ‘sustainable approaches’ are always more cost effective (note: this does not mean that any particular technology that claims to be sustainable is). If, however, your accounting system still operates on 3 month cycles and systematically disregards the externalities of its own processes (which is de jour in contemporary global business practice), then your accounting system will continue to tell you that sustainability is a bad investment, period (except for when it is really good marketing).

The Sheep aren’t that Smart

Yes, we are the sheep in this metaphor. We are not rational actors, rational consumers, or rational voters… despite how we like to think about ourselves. We are still, when it comes to our behavior, ninety-five percent animal. Some significant portion of that ninety-five percent is caring, nurturing, compassionate, and ultra-social mammal, which gives some comfort. But the main point emerging out of contemporary psychological research, is that the language-based, cognitive, stream of consciousness, narrative-production aspects of the self with which most of us internally identify are only a small part of our total self. More importantly, none of these aspects are actually in charge, despite our internal perception that this is the case. Just as a small case in point00.: why is it so easy to have moments of cognitive or intellectual revelation (a-ha moments, if you prefer), and so difficult to turn these moments into lasting changes in behavior, thought, or lifestyle? The answer, according to the data, is because those changes have to be ‘trained’ into our other systems in order to become our new defaults. Will alone is not sufficient, because will alone is not in charge.

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Version 1

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“Sustainability is the capacity to endure.”

Definition of Sustainability from Wikipedia

“Unlike any other organism in history, humans have a mind-body conflict: we have a body built for performance, but a brain that's always looking for efficiency. We live or die by our endurance, but remember: endurance is all about conserving energy, and that's the brain's department… The brain is always scheming to reduce costs, get more for less, store energy and have it ready for an emergency... And there's the bitter irony: our fantastic endurance gave our brain the food it needed to grow, and now our brain is undermining our endurance.”

Dr. Dennis Bramble, Biologist, from Born to Run by Christopher McDougall

It is a stark premise, but it is this: our brains are undermining our sustainability. Our continuing efforts to ‘think our way out’ of this dilemma is but more evidence of the extent to which we are trapped in a prison of our own making. The prison, in this case, is our individual, collective, and cultural illusion that we are rational creatures. This thoroughly western idea grew out of the enlightenment and its pervasiveness in our culture is not difficult to ascertain and measure. Both our economic system of market-based capitalism and our political system of representative democracy rely fundamentally upon this assumption at their very core with their needs for informed consumers and an educated electorate. It is no wonder why these systems continually fail to perform as expected, because, as both ancient wisdom and modern psychology reveal, we are simply not rational creatures when it comes to our behavior (Haidt, 2006).

We are animals. It’s best not to water it down, but to recognize how cognitively uncomfortable it makes us to self-identify in this way. Have you ever noticed how easy it is to have an ah-ha moment and how difficult it is to incorporate the implications of that moment into your own daily life? This phenomenon would surely be less ubiquitous than it is if we were, in fact, creatures of rationality. But the truth is that this conscious-verbal cognition that we experience, that we generally identify as our ‘self’, is only one small part of us, and, contrary to contemporary mythology, it is not in control. In his book The Happiness Hypothesis Jonathan Haidt develops the metaphor of the rider and the elephant to explore the realities of what he calls ‘the divided self.’ As he puts it, “I can direct things, but only when the elephant doesn’t have desires of his own. When the elephant really wants to do something. I’m no match for him.”

This weakness of will for which modern Westerners are famous for castigating themselves (and others), is based on the same fallacious assumption that drives the rationality illusion, the idea that conscious-verbal thinking is in control. In order to use this portion of our brains to manage our own behavior, individually and collectively, we must understand what the elephant in the metaphor is and what it wants. Only then can we begin the process of retraining the elephant and restructuring our lives to produce sustainable behaviors.

As the opening quote indicates, one of the subconscious priorities for the brain is efficiency. As McDougall puts it, “To be fair, our brain knew what it was talking about for 99 percent of our history; sitting around was a luxury, so when you had the chance to rest and recover, you grabbed it. Only recently have we come up with the technology to turn lazing around into a way of life; we’ve taken our sinewy, durable, hunter-gatherer bodies and plunked them into an artificial world of leisure.” And the result has been, “Fatal disease in epidemic proportion.” In the context of the book, the reference is to literal disease (heart attack, diabetes, etc.) at the level of the individual, but the metaphor is just as compelling as a description of the culturally diseased practices that have propagated out of our production of this artificial world of leisure. Since human beings are among a small number of ultra-social species, it is impossible to speak about epidemics of disease without addressing them as both individual and collective phenomena.

The animal part of us wants to eat a steady stream of processed junk food because two million years of evolution have taught it to crave and to gorge on high calorie meals. For most of us, knowing that this food is bad for us isn’t nearly enough to keep us away from it (as the spread of the ‘American diet’ and the disease epidemics that go with it can attest). Understanding our real relationship to this food enables us to develop effective individual and collective responses. For example, we can individually generate visceral disgust in the elephant by exposing ourselves to rich information about factory farming (think video). We can also understand the types of social responses that would actually be effective at making these kinds of meals ‘rare’ again (e.g. prohibitively high taxation on all junk food).

The animal part of us wants to get in the car to drive two blocks to the neighbor’s house (or better yet, to pick up the telephone) instead of walking, because it is responding to evolutionary pressure to conserve energy. Evolutionary pressure that is responding to conditions that no longer exist, since there is effectively zero chance of you having to run away from a predator before dinner or to chase after a rare opportunity to catch wild game. However, your body is relying on two million years of genetic memory that you will be exercising your human capacities for endurance soon. Only, you won’t. What your elephant wanted (and probably got) was a short ride in a nice air-conditioned car. What your elephant needed was some good cardiovascular exercise. And how about that commute to work? Here are two interesting facts from contemporary psychology. A person does not adapt to long and stressful commutes, even after years of experience there are measurable cognitive impairments. A person does adapt to smaller living environments. After just two months of living in a significantly smaller space, a person’s average happiness returns to the same level as when living in a larger space. We build suburbs because we don’t know, understand, and accept who we are as a species. We believe the illusions and then we act on them.

We could construct paragraphs like the two above linking almost every modern convenience and contrivance implicated in the contemporary debate on sustainability to the drives and motives that are emerging out of our cutting edge understandings of psychology and evolution. But until we are ready to lay down the myth of our own rationality, until we are ready to admit, collectively and individually, that we need to live in intelligently managed environments in order to consistently and reliably behave in ways that are healthy and not self-destructive, then we will continue to make the kinds of half-hearted and ineffective stabs at sustainability that have characterized the last several decades.

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Version 2

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"Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye."

Bible, Matthew 7:3-5

"It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one’s own faults. One shows the faults of others like chaff winnowed in the wind, but one conceals one’s own faults as a cunning gambler conceals his dice."

- Buddha, Dhammapada 252

"Though you see the seven defects of others, we do not see our own ten defects."

- Japanese proverb

"A he-goat doesn’t realize that he smells."

- Nigerian proverb

"The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity."

- André Gide

"[O]ur righteous minds were designed by evolution to unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams and then to blind us to the truth."

- Jonathan Haidt

You can find this sentiment expressed in some form or fashion in every major religious or spiritual system in human history, an acknowledgment of the self-serving biases and blindness that are part of the human condition. The path of wisdom is largely the struggle to overcome these problems, to diminish ego, to learn to be critical of ourselves first and more accepting of the flaws of our brothers and sisters. Today, we can back up these ancient truisms with verifiable research data that shows us the mechanisms by which we fall into the trap of self-righteousness.[i]

"If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against, the struggle between for and against is the mind's worst disease."

- Seng-ts'an, Zen master

It turns out that we are pretty good at predicting the behavior of others, but not so good at predicting our own behavior. As a matter of fact, when we are shown research data that gives us insight into how people behave under certain conditions, we modify our expectations about others’ behavior, but stubbornly refuse to modify our beliefs about our own behavior. We believe, wrongly as it turns out, that we have special, privileged internal knowledge of ourselves which makes us different, which makes us exempt. What we don’t have is any inherent skill for apprehending causal relationships (this is why we needed to develop the rigor of scientific method in the first place). What we do have is a knack for observation and correlation combined with a brain that loves to make up good stories. What modern cognitive psychology reveals is that this portion of the brain that tells stories has no privileged access to the subconscious or unconscious processes that actually produce our decisions, it simply spins tales that connect the data that we are consciously aware of, and it does so in a way that constantly attempts to confirm our previously held beliefs. This is the trap, our default mode of operation is to subscribe first and foremost to our own self-righteousness. As alluded to in the Seng-ts’an quote, we remain alienated from truth as long as we remain in a default mode where we are convinced of our own essential correctness.

"Think globally, act locally."

- disputed origin

At the individual level, this is our biggest obstacle to making the changes that are necessary to achieve a sustainable mode of existence. In our default mode we spend the bulk of our time in critical appraisal of the failings of others and in a Machiavellian defensive posture toward our own actions and beliefs. If we adopt a stance of moral humility as Jonathan Haidt proposes[ii] then we step outside of our role of personal, egoic advocacy, we step into a space where we can see each moment as a struggle playing out where everyone is convinced of their own rightness.

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[i] One of the seminal works in this area is The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist from the University of Virginia. The research findings peppered throughout this paper are cited properly in his book.
[ii] The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives, Jonathan Haidt, ted.com