Habit Forming

This post may ramble a bit--more so even than usual--because I'm trying to knit together a number of thoughts that have occurred to me over the last few days. Earlier this year I posted about ways to get by under the current regime in Washington and its (as promised) ensuing idiocy. The idea was to cultivate habits that might help one survive the almost overwhelming deluge of anti-intellectual diatribe issuing from the White House and Congress. I focused on several centers of effort (eat real food, get real exercise, make stuff, write more, read even more; see Sunrise, Sunset from 19 January), all of which I fully intended (and still do) to establish as habits. This intent has since led to ruminations on the word habit itself, and all it entails--including words like inhabit, habitat, habitable, and the like. There's probably no better word to describe my basic materialistic view of life, because it comes from the Latin habeo: to have, hold. Bundled in this one little word is a universe of ideas encompassing carrying, wearing, possessing, holding, wealth, inhabiting, ruling, conversing, using, managing, keeping oneself, and disposition. Thus, it also contains within it many of the basic themes considered on The Farm. And so, as often happens, my simple curiosity about the nature of habits has led my back to my usual philosophical playground: economics in the form of home-keeping.

Due to my diminishing ability to remember stuff consistently, I have been thinking lately of seeking a technological solution: something to help me perform the tasks I mean to do but don't necessarily remember to get done. As many of you already know, my relationship with technology is ambivalent at best, and although I've succumbed to many aspects of digital culture (computers, smart phones, and the internet), I have avoided many social media outlets even as I embrace others. I eschew the more egregious offenders, but find others useful--such as Blogger, which has enabled me these past ten years to get thoughts into the universe, whether anybody's interested or not. It took me many years to adopt my iPhone, and now it's become part of my life. Too much, in fact, because when I decided to use a movement tracker to help keep me from becoming a total blob, I found myself practically welded to the device. I quite literally could go nowhere without my phone if I wanted to keep track of my activity level. This entails always wearing pants or jackets with pockets. Given my rather limited wardrobe, I found myself needing to stuff the phone into my knickers or brassiere if my trousers were missing something to carry it in; retrieving it in the checkout line at Whole Foods caused double-takes all around.  The solution became obvious, but involved another technological concession: either a fitness tracker or a smart watch.

In the end I opted for the Apple Watch because it so easily wedded itself to my phone, iPad, and computer. The Beloved Spouse and I headed for the Buy More last weekend and got a deal on an out-of-box Series One in basic black. I haven't worn a watch in years, and used to prefer the face on the back of my wrist so I wasn't constantly looking at the time. This one has to be worn on top, but it only activates when I tell it to. It does nudge me to get off my keester and move around every now and then, and I have told it to prompt me to breathe several times a day (other than reflexively). Now, as if by magic, my intention to get real exercise is well on its way to becoming a well-established habit. In addition, my phone doesn't have to follow me around and I don't always have to have pockets, even though I prefer them to purses and such.

When I was looking up habeo in my Cassells Latin Dictionary, I anticipated only a handful of the definitions attached. The notions of wearing, carrying, managing hadn't really occurred to me, and yet here they are, all bound up with this new habit of walking around purposefully, noting my range of activity, and nudging myself toward better health. Coincidentally enough, the Beloved Spouse informs me that some of our Continental philosophy colleagues are thinking and writing about the relationships among habit, habitation, and Heideggerian "dwelling." Of this I was unaware, but will certainly pay more attention to in future.

Some habits have evolved more naturally over the length of my retirement, and require little technological assistance. I find myself getting into the garden on most clear mornings, to drink my coffee, read, write a little, hang out with my animal companions, and enjoy the natural wonders that reveal themselves when one isn't consumed with time tables and administrative obligations. I have, for example, spent an afternoon watching a Black Swallowtail butterfly flirting with my dill and fennel plants, and later discovered that she'd laid an egg (and then several others), which then hatched into a quickly-evolving larval form (all of the photos below are of the same wee beastie).

Alas, this little critter and its later siblings have all disappeared, perhaps victims of a wasp-like creature I noticed hanging about the fronds after they were all gone. Nevertheless, it's quite wonderful to be able to observe all this, even if it's a bit "nature red in tooth and claw."

The ability to grow at least some of my own food has finally become a reality, as the habit of daily tending to the garden has made timely planting and appropriate husbandry possible. The tomatoes and butternut squashes are on their way to edibility, peppers are almost ripe, lettuces and even a couple of radishes (which need re-seeding) have made their way into salads. The pods of Anasazi beans are bulging, but I need to let them be a bit longer. The bush beans I planted on the previous compost bin site (which I moved over and re-started after I harvested the compost) have already borne fruit, even though the spot doesn't get much sun. New projects include beginning a hügelkultur on the north side of the house to take advantage of the sun next spring, and trying to tame the herb garden enough so that everything has room to grow--not just mints and garlic chives. [Edit 05.18: just this morning the Daily Poop included an article on Bokashi composting--prompting me to restart mine. I have two bins and used to alternate them, and will reinstate the practice anon.]

The rest of the sanity-saving habits list doesn't really need electronic enhancement, and I'm actually using pencil and paper for some of the writing. I've collected a massive number of notebooks over the years (many are abandoned sketchbooks from former students, who turned in a couple of completed pages and then gave up), so I'm assigning separate tasks to some of them, and they accompany me into the garden, or are housed on the table next to my reading chair in the living room. I need one upstairs, too, next to the bed, for remembering stuff that occurs to me during occasional bouts of sleeplessness. As I sort through accumulated "collections" of materials from my past, I often find old notebooks used for similar purposes, indicating that this is a long-established habit that's simply being resumed after a hiatus.

Thus, this ramble comes to an end. My little digital watch has just told me that it's time to get up and move around, so I think I'll go out and look for caterpillars. After having exceeded all of my goals yesterday, I'll need to mow the front lawn in order to keep up the good work. But that's also a habit worth cultivating.

Ned Ludd's Bad Rap

Back when I was seriously formulating a dissertation, before I got tired (finally, at about 45 years of age) of being a graduate student, I was trying very hard to be a philosopher of technology. This, to me, provided a focus that made sense of the enormous variety of courses I'd taken (in both the social and natural sciences, as well as in the humanities) over some (then) 25 years of higher education.

It made sense to me that if one of the things that helped us define ourselves was our use of tools (for everything from hunting and preparing our food to expressing ourselves in art and music), then we ought to be able to examine critically the uses we make of these tools, and to assess their impact not only on ourselves, but on our fellow beings--animal, vegetable, and even mineral. When I first started looking around at the developing fields of technology assessment, environmental ethics (now more broadly characterized as environmental philosophy), and other branches of philosophy (mostly pragmatism and the Continental tradition), I wondered why there wasn't a more coordinated effort to study questions that seemed to be on everyone's minds: what are we doing to ourselves?

Some folks were, in fact, writing about this very question, and I discovered them when I started thinking seriously about what human beings were up to. Continental philosophy had, in fact, produced one of the most enduring critiques in 1954, when Martin Heidegger published his essay "The Question Concerning Technology." Even earlier, Karl Marx, John Dewey, Lewis Mumford, and William Morris (among many others) had written about technology in philosophical terms. The idea of questioning technology, I discovered, had been around since the Greeks. I wasn't exactly on to something new.

Nonetheless, pursuing the subject led me deeply into Morris and his work on the technologies of art and design, and on the social and political aspects of active critique. Some folks, it seemed, hadn't just written about this stuff--they went out and tried to whack people on the side of the head to try to get them to think about where all these new machines (steam engines, power looms) were leading us. Hence the notion of sabotage (and the rather odd choice of image to illustrate this post), perhaps related to the development of the Luddite movement during the Industrial Revolution.

Of course, terms like "sabotage" and "Luddite" carry primarily negative connotations these days, but their origins lay in the act of criticizing technologies--not in terrorism or the refusal to immediately adopt every damned toy that comes on the market. My question is this: How much different might the world be today if we actually stopped to think about new tools, and took a bit of time to imagine where they might lead?

I'm absolutely convinced that the manifold problems associated with the internet, for example, would not have arisen if we hadn't all jumped higgeldy piggeldy onto the bandwagon, brandishing our cherished American gospel of individualism and waving our technical superiority, trying to convince the rest of the world that if it wants to join the future, it had better become like us. Only it's not just us--it's the entire West (trying to be like us--or perhaps trying to convince themselves that they were like us before we were). The impact of computer technology alone, from manufacture to use, on the rest of the world has created such rapid and rampant change that nobody has a choice about it any more. Traditional tribal peoples all over the globe are (thanks to Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child initiative) being introduced to the internet, and their children are being seduced by technology in the name of "progress" and "modernity" and the inevitability of globalization. The real crime here is that nobody asked them if they wanted it. We in the West are all for freedom of choice (walk down the supermarket cereal aisle to see where that's led us), but only when it comes to "choosing" which brand of computer to buy--not choosing whether or not to buy them in the first place.

The irony of the market, of course, is that choice exists only in the beginning. The "winning" technology eventually takes over (VHS beats out Betamax; DVDs beat out VHS; Blue Ray beats out HD DVD), and then those of us who bought into the "wrong" technology are left with stacks of obsolete, expensive crap that the conscientious person has to agonize over what to do with, and those who don't give a damn simply dump into the landfill.

I held out on using a cellular telephone for much longer than most (although I did own one briefly, about ten years ago, while my mother was still alive and under my care). It was only my daughter's emergency surgery a couple of months ago, and the ensuing difficulty of trying to contact me, that I finally acquiesced. And I didn't just buy a little pay-as-you-go model as I had originally planned. I bought an iPhone, because this way I could convince myself that I wasn't buying a phone--I was buying a little tiny laptop. In fact, most of what I use it for is checking e-mail, so it doesn't seem quite so much like selling out.

But of course I have sold out. I became a techno-whore when I bought that Commodore 64 back in the eighties and stopped writing my essays out by hand and then typing them on an electric typewriter. I was convinced, like Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, and the rest of the Whole Earth crowd on The Well (which I never did join, however) that the internet was going to bind people together and make the world a better place. Our optimism was a bit over-frought, as Lee Siegel has rather succinctly pointed out in his new book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. If only we had thought it through a bit more carefully.

Now, I have to admit that there are things about the internet that I love. I truly enjoy writing this blog, and doing so actually forces me to think more carefully about the world and what's going on in it. It allowed me to publish my book without having to sell myself or pander to the whims of the book trade. I've also made some good friends that I'd never have even come in contact with without the rapid development of internet communication devices and programs. Best of all, I enjoyed a long and lively correspondence with my father in the years before he died, which would certainly never have happened otherwise because I'm so lousy with the phone and so bad at getting around to writing letters.

But this is only one technology, really, as all-encompassing and pervasive as it is. We don't tend to think seriously about the consequences of anything we do: cloning, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, nuclear power (well, that does cause some contemplation, thanks to Chernobyl). Unless we endure some whacking great disaster related to one or all of the above, we're not even likely to discuss potential problems before they're already out of our hands entirely. Anyone who does ask questions is an alarmist, or worse: a Luddite.

In her sort-of utopian novel, Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Leguin describes technology as "morally dangerous." The computers are all located somewhere in a city, most people live in low-impact rural enclaves, and even solar-powered electricity is looked upon with suspicion. As she explains in an appendix on practices, the "arts of the uses of the energies of sun, wind, water, electricity, and the combinations of things to make other things are all practices of exchange. They want vigilance and clarity of mind, a bright imagination, modesty, attention to detail and to implication, strength, and courage" (479). Imagine how different the world would be if we became equally mindful about the technologies we now so thoughtlessly pursue, oblivious as we are to the varieties of potential--not just the prophesied advantages.

Thanks to the wonders of technology, I'm still alive and able to wallow in my low-fi Luddism. I'm fully aware that were I to move to the valley in my own utopia, I'd last a couple of years at best, because I'm so dependent on the drugs that mitigate my unfortunate combination of genes (and my sedentary way of life, pounding away at a computer keyboard rather than charging around the garden as I should be doing). But that doesn't mean that it's a useless exercise, and it doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing much more thinking about technological consequences, much more frequently.

To some extent, we are. The back-to-the-land movement that came out of the sixties has become more sophisticated and has begun to focus on permaculture and sustainability. "Green" blogs and websites abound (some are noted in my sidebar entries). People are more interested in the quality of their food, and the market is responding, at least on a small scale. But I did discover, while conducting a bit of background research for this blog, one ominous sign. The U. S. Government office of technology assessment has closed. I'm not sure whether it ever accomplished anything anyway, but if we're officially closing up shop in this regard, it makes one wonder whether Our Guys in Washington have permanently given up thinking about consequences, or whether it's just a temporary blip. It'll be interesting to see what happens after November.

We should not, however, need a government agency to do our thinking for us. We really need to be asking questions ourselves, every time we make a purchase, especially of the latest high-tech gadget. What went into its making? Did any being or environment suffer or die as a result of its manufacture? Will this object (or complex of objects) truly enhance my life? How will it affect my relationships with my family and friends? My ecological footprint? How long will it last? Does it have the potential to cause social or environmental harm? Do I really need it? It wouldn't hurt to treat any technology we adopt as if it were potentially dangerous not only to our physical selves, but to our moral being.

Heidegger himself put it best, at the end of "The Question Concerning Technology": "The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought."

Photo: Panthouse's own clogs (modified), from Wikimedia Commons.
Citation: Ursula K. Leguin, Always Coming Home. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.

Happiness is Bliss?

I once helped run a campaign for student government president at UC Riverside on behalf of a guy named Larry Bliss. Clever person and half-assed artist that I am, I ripped off Charles Shulz’s dancing Snoopy and under it drew (in cute ‘60s-style balloon letters) the slogan that I’m using to (sort-of) title this post. I don’t even remember if Bliss won the election, but I’m assured by the alumni magazine that he’s alive and well.

As usual, the urge-to-post is prompted by a confluence of newspaper articles and NPR broadcasts, together with latent notions brought to mind by snow and the realization that we’re not going to be able to escape north Texas after all, at least until summer.

I spent the entire day yesterday calculating a route, distances, and time for our proposed trip to California in a couple of weeks. I had made it only to Cathedral Gorge in eastern Nevada by suppertime, when my husband discovered that because of a mix-up in dates, we wouldn’t be able to go after all. It turns out that his spring break and mine do not overlap as we had originally thought, and he would miss two important tennis tournaments. So, instead of letting the players and the other coach down, we decided to postpone the trip, and I was plunged into a fit of melancholy that lasted only until snow started falling a couple of hours later.

This morning there is a six-inch deep layer in some parts of the yard (actual snowdrifts!), and the puppies—who haven’t seen snow since they were infants—are ecstatic. That last time, on Valentine’s Day four years ago, coincided with my last trip to see my father before he died, so that memory is rather bittersweet. I thought of him when I looked out and saw the ancient metate that has been in our family for nearly a hundred years, now ensconced in my back yard, and looking a bit like a caldera, with its rim covered with snow; he would have loved the picture I took with my new iPhone (yes, I know; another Luddite bites the dust).

As I settled into the Comfy Chair and began to read the paper, I came across mention of Eric Wilson’s new book, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy. I’d heard a brief bit of it on All Things Considered last month, but (because I have yet to start carrying a note pad in the car) had forgotten about it. I also remembered hearing about Eric Weiner's travelogue, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World, on Weekend Edition, and although I've yet to read either book, I was pleased to note that the world may not be as full of happiness-addicts as I had feared. Wilson's book, especially, seems to have garnered some interesting responses, from a blog for Moms to Book Forum, so it's got my interest piqued. Now I'm going to have to read both of them.

I have long been intrigued by the attractions of melancholy and the improbability of a sovereign nation’s having been founded on some foggy idea of insuring “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—none of which it could actually guarantee. Utopian literature often focuses on an equally fuzzy notion that everyone should be “happy,” and this is one of the stumbling blocks to writing about any kind of “ideal” society. I have also long been disturbed by the often vapid expressions of people who claim to have completed their lives by having found Jesus (or Buddha, or the Way), as if all the struggle involved in actually living (including its pains as well as its joys) were something to be done away with. Perhaps our collective reluctance to embrace the “down” along with the “up” is what has prompted pharmaceutical companies to keep inventing drugs to “cure” every minor ache and pain, as if to numb us from reality like Soma did in Brave New World. (As an aside, there actually is a drug called Soma, and it looks familiar to those of us who have read Huxley’s quintessentially dystopian novel.)

If, as I also read this morning (in a review of the new Fox series, New Amsterdam), death is what makes life meaningful (the protagonist calls it “God’s joke”), surely the absence of happiness is what makes happiness mean anything at all. Philosophical happiness, in fact, seldom has anything to do with the feel-good sensibilities of self-help books. It’s about being intellectually fulfilled—recognizing the good, even if one can’t actually attain it (Plato). Rather than seeking to forget about death (The Ultimate Sad Thing), philosophers tend to find in it a reason for living. Martin Heidegger’s term Sein zum Tode (being-toward-death), for example, actually describes what it means to be human: the human being is the only one aware of its own mortality.

In my utopia, happiness does not describe a blissful state of existence. I’m not sure I’ve even used the word in the story. What my characters try to build is a world in which people can exist without all of the artificial angst-makers the modern world presents: pollution, inequality, terror, greed, environmental degradation, violence, racism, and the like. Their freedom lies in the ability to do what people need to do, and to live meaningful, creative, fulfilling lives that center on be-ing, and not on the denial of death.

Happiness is a slippery notion, and I welcome books that buck the trend of trying to guide people out of “negativity” by urging them not to be “cynical” or “pessimistic,” or by developing step-by-step programs that earn their authors untold wealth by fleecing people who’d rather not think. Thinking is difficult and frequently uncomfortable, but it keeps the mind alive. Certainty is unattainable (and probably not any more desirable than blissful happiness), but the search for understanding is boundlessly rewarding. All the “definitions” of happiness promoted by popular culture seem to suggest that one should choose to be a contented fool, rather than a discontented Socrates.

And so I go forth to wallow in my uncertainty (Clinton or Obama?), and to mull over my delayed escape from Texas. I can, however, assuage my melancholy by planning to spend the time re-glazing needy windows and planting my new garden. And I can go out and watch the puppies, contented fools that they are, and ignorant of death and destruction, while they romp in the snow—which is, sad to say, melting as I type.

Photos: Chinaberries laden with snow; my grandmother's metate.