Conscious Choice: Life's Little Losses

September 1996 | News of the Earth

Life's Little Losses

by Mark Long

It strikes me as rather odd that the American public generally thinks of itself collectively, when it does so at all, as the generational embodiment of the class of ’76. We invoke images of Washington, Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson time and again to prove to ourselves and others that we have bravely carried forth the tradition of the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” Never mind that the tradition was a stillborn myth, we proudly pat ourselves on the back every Fourth of July and every election cycle for playing the role of history’s agent, leading by our example as we march bravely into the next millennium with the confidence that our freedom is secure from threats both domestic and foreign.

In truth this country has played an important role in the past in certain respects in the creation of democratic forms of governance as well as of a democratic culture. In spite of my seemingly congenital position as hostile critic there are many aspects of American political and cultural traditions which I feel fortunate to have inherited.

Yet the more I watch daily life unfold in these United States, the more I am convinced that we have surrendered unto the state and market forces the autonomy that we love to claim is our birthright—despite those red, white, and blue orgies of nationalism that seem to constitute public life in this country.

Much of our loss of autonomy has taken place at the level of the mundane. Notwithstanding the expansion of formal political power over time (female suffrage and the civil rights movement are notable, laudable examples) the genie of modern politics seems to take away with one hand that which was given by the other.

A series of seemingly trivial events in rapid succession triggered these thoughts about the degradation of everyday life and the importance of reclaiming it. To wit: the inability to launch my kayak in Lake Michigan (public waters with public beach access) without paying an exorbitant sum; being told that I was not allowed to swim in water over my head or I would be kicked off of the beach by a City of Chicago lifeguard (having grown up on a Florida beach where I learned to swim at the same time that I learned to walk, this incident particularly annoyed me); being chased off of a public pier by a different Chicago lifeguard while watching a rainstorm pass many miles to the north, completely out of harms way; and lastly, stopping at a State Park in Wisconsin to spend an afternoon at the lake only to find the surface covered with nearly a foot of neon-green algae resulting from fertilizer runoff.

The lakefront was crowded with people that hot August afternoon but no one was in the water, and everyone I talked to seemed sadly resigned to their fate, as if the eutrophication killing the lake were naturally occurring or beyond our control.

Taken singly, these are trivial events with reasonable arguments for their defense. Yet, when coupled with the loss of control over our lives that most people experience as a fact of market economics (e.g., working longer and longer hours, living as virtual slaves to our appointment calendars or someone else’s time clock, living off fast food and canned entertainment and finding pleasure through commodified consumption) these “smaller” losses begin to add up to a significant surrendering of our personal autonomy to seemingly objective forces.

What is depressing is the apparent ease with which we habituate ourselves to this loss of autonomy and the degradation of our daily lives; once we have accepted the “little” losses of freedom and the “small” degradation’s of daily life such as the loss of the pleasures of swimming in our lakes, we find it that much easier to habituate ourselves to larger losses, such as the notion that “all politicians lie, cheat, and steal” or that “international competitiveness requires layoffs and wage reductions at home” and even that “the commercial logging of a forest is part of a program to enhance its health.”

The truth is that all of these losses are about compulsion in one form or another. The recent welfare “reform” bill is directed entirely at removing the last vestiges of countervailing power against an otherwise all powerful labor market. We have made a Faustian bargain by sacrificing the pleasures of spontaneity, friendship, sexuality, and time autonomy for the over-ordered and pressingly busy schedules of post-modern life. We have let our lives become so minutely regulated, so micro-managed, by market forces, by paternalistic government and by employers that what daily freedoms we have must be begged or borrowed from the powers that be.

French critical theorist Henri Lefebvre (who argued forcefully for the vital importance of the politics of daily life in his book Everyday Life in the Modern World (Harper and Row, 1971), asserts that the advent of modern industrial capitalism seized on “the possibility of exploiting consumption to organize everyday life. Everyday life was cut up and laid out on the site to be put together again like pieces of a puzzle, each piece depending on a number of organizations and institutions, each one—working life, private life, leisure—rationally exploited (including the latest commercial and semi-programmed organization of leisure).” Everyday life has thus been “...organized, neatly subdivided and programmed to fit a controlled, exact time-table.... In the modern world everyday life has ceased to be a subject rich in potential subjectivity; it has become an object of social organization.”

Lefebvre saw the conflict between the salvation of daily life and the fight for larger institutional reforms as an either/or proposition—"...either we exert all our energy...in consolidating existing institutions and ideologies—State, Church, philosophical systems or political organizations—whilst attempting to consolidate the quotidian on which these‘superstructures’ are established and maintained; or we reduce these entities (state, church, culture, etc.) to their true proportions, we refuse to see them as substance and hidden being of human reality, we devalue them and we revalue the mere residuum upon which they are built—everyday life; either we elect to serve‘causes’ or we support the humble cause of everyday life.”

Perhaps the struggle to reclaim our autonomy and reinvest our daily lives with dignity does not have to come at the expense of abandoning attempts to reshape existing institutions. It seems to me that the process by which we recolonize our daily lives in our own interests leads inexorably to a process in which ruling institutions are demystified.

It has long been said that the importance of organizing is to force the hand of power, revealing it for what it is. Perhaps it’s time we do a little internal organizing and confront the issue of control of our daily lives, revealing to ourselves the extent of the grip that state/market power has on our most intimate existence. Like Emma Goldman, I believe it’s important to be able to dance at the revolution.

National
• Citizens for a Better Environment (CBE) won an important victory this summer when the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled to preserve citizens’ rights to effectively enforce the Emergency Planning and Community-Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA).

“The government simply does not have the resources to take action against all violators of this important law,” said CBE staff attorney Stefan Noe. “It’s vital that we preserve the right for citizens to fill the enforcement gap and ensure compliance.” EPCRA was passed in 1986 in response to the Bhopal tragedy, in which more than 2,000 people were killed and approximately 200,000 were injured from the unexpected release of toxic gas from a Union Carbide plant in India.

The purpose of the law is to provide the public with important information on the hazardous chemicals in their communities, and to establish emergency planning and notification requirements which would protect the public in the event of a spill, fire, explosion or other accident involving hazardous chemicals. The law has spurred enormous reductions in toxic chemical pollution because it stimulates public pressure and forces companies to account for their chemical use. Information reported by facilities under EPCRA has become the primary resource for environmental organizations and government to evaluate and respond to health and safety issues surrounding the use of toxic chemicals.

Unfortunately many companies ignore this law. CBE’s victory, under the guidance of Noe, will help ensure that they do so no longer.

• There is a dramatic new threat to the ozone layer resulting from the increased emissions of hot air inevitably generated by a Presidential campaign. Keep a close eye on the two leading Republican candidates, Clinton and Dole, and watch them fight for post-up position underneath the corporate backboard. It’s politics as usual: stupid.

Congress returns to session in early September with the promise from Republicans that the Senate Interior Appropriations bill will be taken up for debate first thing. It is vital that we press for a complete repeal of the “Logging without Laws” rider, a.k.a. the salvage logging rider and that a moratorium be placed on all salvage sales for the last four months of this year. The administration has doggedly pursued the target cut levels of 4.5 billion board feet for this year, hampered only by falling wood prices resulting from the glut of timber now available (another indication that the salvage rider was wholly unnecessary). We need to be as aggressive as the timber executives in pursuing our aim to end this travesty once and for all.

International
• The World Trade Organization’s Trade and Environment Committee (CTE) was created because of pressure from the Clinton administration in an effort to win support from the major environmental groups in the U.S. for passage of GATT. Ironically (tragically) the CTE announced in late July that it is incapable of fulfilling its role because of a lack of constructive involvement from the U.S. The U.S. has failed to take positions on pressing issues in advance of the November elections, choosing instead to play the role of spoiler by defeating constructive proposals from other nations. It is evident that the administration acted in bad faith when it promised the major environmental organizations to maintain environmental sensitivity under the neo-liberal trade regime ushered in during the Uruguay round. That Clinton was duplicitous is expected. That the “environmental” organizations went along is tragically embarrassing.

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