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| An Eigenheim pasture, 2006 |
Some time ago, I
wrote a speculative opinion piece about what the world might look like after
the agonies of climate change mitigation and the COVID-19 Pandemic would be
behind us. In it, I suggested that gasoline might well be priced at $5.00 per
litre in the foreseeable future, that local business and services would improve
as travel and transportation becomes expensive enough to drive us all to look—even harder than we already are—for local
alternatives for our food and necessities, fun and games, leisure and shopping,
education and faith practice.
Most of
us don’t want to read or hear that kind of prognostication; particularly as we
get older, our psychological energies are bent toward fighting change, not
creating it. This is a dilemma for all people living in the 2020ish era of
human time; rapid transitions are needed; defiance of changes such transitions require
is fought tooth and nail. “I’ve always been able to fly to Barbados for a month-long
break in my winter, but now the government has let travel prices go so high, I
can hardly afford it!”
Poor you.
That governments feel they must add a carbon tax to fossil fuel
prices is witness to our stubbornness as citizens, an obstinacy causing us to
resist cooperating with absolutely necessary changes unless we’re forced. Perhaps
this obstinacy is endemic to human makeup along with the usual handy excuses
like, “So I could reduce my carbon footprint by driving less, but my neighbours
won’t make this sacrifice, so what’s the point?”
The Industrial Revolution drove people to abandon their
peasant, share-cropping agrarian lives for day labour in mills and factories.
The Enclosure movement put an end to common-land sheep grazing, and other related
changes shepherded people into massively-changed ways of living in the British
Empire. I can still remember when the predominant means to a living was for the
man of the house to “go to work” doing physical day-labour. Now professional,
technical and a myriad of service jobs predominate, and women’s numbers in the
“work force” are nearly equal with men’s.
All this to remind ourselves that we are in the throes of one
of those periods of significant change for humanity. At 80 years of age, I’m
likely to live only somewhere into the time of current turmoil. But I can faintly
see some of the ends these early steps are predicting, ends that will be the
shapers of the lives of future generations.
For the sake of the children, the participation of the
global community in cooperative effort is absolutely essential. Will that
spirit of cooperative, can-do finally prevail?
I doubt it. Too often, the spiritus mundi [i] has called to us … and been treated to a middle-finger response.
[i] From
W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming. Hard to define, but closest probably to
the Christian Holy Spirit. The truth-core of the universe? I understand Spiritus
Mundi to be like “the Word” in the opening salvo of John’s Gospel: “In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The
general theological assessment of John’s Gospel is that it seeks to show that
Jesus is God. I think Yeats would probably think of John’s Gospel as showing
that Jesus is the incarnation of the Word, i.e., that Jesus came
to "read" the word to us who were illiterate. In any case, I read that Yeats saw Spiritus
Mundi as the source of inspiration for great art and poetry, two
manifestations of spirit-inspiration we mostly “don’t get.”
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