Walden or bust
“… a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
H. David Thoreau, Walden
My father was an admirer of the USA, the country which he visited only once or twice in 1990s, in his early seventies, to spend short time with my brother Hasan. He was very impressed by what he saw: wealth, orderliness and cleanliness of the streets, the basic standards of life, in short, to him, what every other country on earth should aim for. In fact this was the only place he saw outside Turkey, parts of the Bay Area, San Francisco and around San Jose, and I think Salt Lake City as well. An educated and literate Turkish lawyer, he was a twentieth century man dedicated to being ‘modern’ and despised everything that he deemed backwards regarding his home country. To be (or to think) modern was only possible in the previous century, it seems, with reflections of the term denoting freedom and emancipation somewhat less relevant outside industrialized world. For many educated people in the developing countries, the aspiration to work harder and lead one’s country towards the civilized camp (read West, and for former European colonies and semi-colonized, read America) was prime. In Turkey, this was more pronounced by the educated elite after the ‘modern republic’ was established with hard won struggles in the aftermath of the Great War, in 1923. In a traditional society, this facet of modernity was most pronounced in speech and political rhetoric of a minority insisting on the importance of education, and in their attire and manners in public, men and women. Meanwhile in the absence of moneyed class, the engine of economic growth was the state enterprises for production of basic goods, until 1960s, and unlike the post-colonial Middle East, how this was spliced together with fervent anti-communism in Turkey comprises a unique story.
For my father and his contemporaries educated in western literature and Hollywood until the 1970s it was possibly hard to understand the true ‘nature’ of American consumerism and the resources offered to it by a vast continent and by the dominated world. A century separates Henry David Thoreau from all this, but the moral equivalence of the two worlds is striking. My father was a modest person who took a frugal life as a virtue of highest kind. For him, to be content and thankful, not to a higher being but to the generous offerings of nature was essential. As such, modernity meant not so much the consumption, but a decent life without (relative) poverty for all. Meanwhile, very few people, like Thoreau, could eloquently write on the generosity of a romanticized nature. In a state of contemplation, he was able bring out the most poetic view of the pond, its winter and spring, animals and the humble folk that lived around Concorde, MA. as a microcosm of sorts, or more likely, as the model for the globe. ” … The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth ; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.” (1) he would muse in an enlightened moment of romancing the countryside.
Looking back, it gets harder to assess the effects of such praise that keeps humankind somewhat apart from the domain of the ‘planet.’ Just as it did to J.M.W. Turner, the great British painter of landscapes, the introduction of the railroad to the countryside tickled the nerves of Thoreau on one side of the Walden Pond. The full effect of industrialization had yet to appear in the pastoral and domesticated countryside of Britain and less so in the rather vast frontier of the United states in the first half of nineteenth century. Meanwhile, only a fraction of the species of the living were named and catalogued by then, around 150.000 to be approximately precise.(2) As the inaugural writer of nature, Thoreau is rightfully praised, in a given historical context. The ‘earth’ that opened up to him, just as to my father, did not entertain the question of sustainability. No one in mid 19th century West (or almost none in mid 20th century Turkey) would link colonialism, exploitation, labor movement, Das Kapital, inequality and slavery to the ‘end of nature’ as they knew it.
As a child, I remember DDT being generously used in and around our house and many others in Turkey. In the Turkish lexicon, all similar poisons (pesticides/insecticides) were labeled as ‘drugs’, and they still are in the agricultural fields. It was somewhat around the time Rachel Carson wrote “The Silent Spring” (3) that this wonder drug was hailed as a cure for many a problem in the developing world. For a long time the petrochemical industries were celebrated as the enabler of feeding and maintaining a booming population all over the world. It appears that they are still immune from criticism, together with fossil fuel companies, the producers of much needed energy for manufacturing and consumption, covertly and sometimes openly supported and subsidized by the state authorities. At the same time (just like tobacco once and super-processed foods now) they are accused as the pushers of addictive matter that induce short lived ecstasies, by a relatively small (but exponentially growing) number of activists (ie. Extinction Rebellion.) These companies greenwash their outlook, block alternative energy solutions, and immensely profit from the overall situation. The lethal feedback loop involving economic growth, consumption, demand and production of energy and goods would gobble up several earth-sized planets while this earth’s climate spirals out of control and species go extinct. Meanwhile, no one in a sane mind would ask the addict to give up her pleasures all at once, from cold turkey to a new society a cure and a reasonable transition is needed. But how? And how will the populations in Asia, Africa and South America will be persuaded to turn around from their aspired (ie. Western) ways of life ?
History repeats itself. Increasingly more literature appears on the devastation of the countries on (especially) the African continent, exploited to extract much needed materials (copper, cobalt, lithium and others) for (full) transition into green energy to save what remains of the planet, and for the increasing demands of digital networks, server farms and the AI. It appears that this time around, the neocolonialism is set to work with noble aims with a view of a bright future, with the consent of governing bodies of sovereign states, promising jobs and extra wealth, but enriching few crooks and corrupt officials and leaving ecological ruin and ruined populations behind. From silk roads to China to the highways of information under the ocean, for capitalism the ‘externalities’ in the global south and elsewhere are still negligible.
Above all else, ‘end of nature’ is a moral issue, but not in the hypocritical sense that we owe a livable planet to the future generations of humans. In a true Darwinian sense, the humankind is at best (biologically) capable of selflessness as much as a common lizard, to think of its offspring in some future time. Mentally, we still do not know how the common lizard feels for the future of her genes, as a sentient being, and how her sense of history developed. The struggle for well-being and continuity of species may be hardwired, but they are totally outside the historical consciousness of the humankind. The corrupted (and defunct) concept of ‘sustainability,’ for a while the mantra of corporate capitalism and its ad campaigns now, with extensions in academic curricula from design schools to business management, was never about the “welfare of the unborn.” It is only together with the rest of the species that humans can inhabit the planet. Meanwhile, “We humans never experience ourselves as species” writes Dipesh Chakrabarty: “… there could be no phenomenology of us as a species.”(4)
As a resident of Turkey I have studied archaeological sites and parts of related literature for a while now. As an enthusiast, my contribution to the knowledge in human past proper would possibly be minimal. Mine was a selective research for understanding the specific geography, its nature (as of now) and how it was intertwined with human lives, and to come up with images (vistas) as metaphors that would narrate (quasi) moral stories for our time. In human timescales, what intrigues one most is the prehistory of Anatolia as shared with the greater Middle East that possibly go back 10-12 millennia the most. What I vaguely understood was that the trajectory (of ‘civilized’ life) perceived from upper Paleolithic to late antiquity on a land of continuous habitation is full of illusions. There are gaps, jumps, diversions and breaks in this timeline that both reveal and simultaneously conceal human desires and feats. Ironically, all this is appropriated and stitched within the textbooks on ‘History of Civilizations’ and ‘World Histories of Art’ which may also stretch back to the caves in southern France and Spain. Must not one claim that at no point in this timescale of human presence that humans experienced themselves as a species among others, even before the settled farming and animal husbandry? And this, even when every act related to animals and plants were ritualized as among the equals and when human lives were ‘one with nature’?
One suspects that inequity among the members of a (human) society is duly projected onto beings to alter the fate of everything on the planet. Deep history and archaeology should be scoured for not-so-rare instances when traces of egalitarian and just organization of human societies are unearthed from very different eras, as David Graeber and David Wengrow wrote in “The Dawn of Everything.” (5) It seems only there can we find clues that would possibly divert the trajectory of industrial civilization, and its post-industrial appendix, still hungry for colonization and profits, for energy and rare resources. In the impending doom, when ultra rich devise escape plans to lead an exo-planetary life somewhere in space, one should look back in deep history to organize, to shake off habits, disconnect from varied networks of consumption and resist the networks of a fake reality, and to contemplate that a new world on the old planet is a possibility.
November 2024
(1) Henry David Thoreau, Walden. Thomasy Crowell and Co. Publishers, NY. 1899 p.324
(2) Michael Ohl, The Art of Naming. MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London. 2018 p.228
(3) Rachel Carson, Silent Spring. Penguin Books, London. 1962
(4) Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 2021 p.43
(5) David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Penguin Books, London. 2021