interspecies play as the antidote

That recent post, ‘The Myth of Sustainability‘, is a short realist critique of sustainability. Here I want to dig under the realism and pull out the more profound challenges. Then I will pose a possible antidote.

Let me begin by contrasting two different pieces of writing that I encountered today, one by the head of CITES, John Scanlon, and one by two engaged Buddhist theorists, Bee Scherer and Jeff Waistell.

Scanlon is deeply concerned with the practical incompatibility between conserving wildlife and development through tourism. His solution, finally, is to urge individual responsibility on the part of tourists travelling to wildlife destinations. Having focussed on the ethics of touirsm operators, he writes, “But operators can’t do it alone. How we behave as individual tourists is ultimately what counts, and that is our choice. We have a personal responsibility to hold operators’ feet to the fire. We cannot support the bad ones, no matter how good the price. And let us never forget: wildlife and the local people living among it are to be not just enjoyed but respected by all of us.”

Scherer and Waistell are critiquing the appropriation of Buddhist mindfulness by corporate capitalism. In an incisive and bold article, they connect socialism and communism to engaged Buddhism and explore the Santi Asoke community as a flawed model. However, they are oddly silent about non-human wellbeing. Where they do discuss ecology, it is in terms of ‘eco-Buddhism’ as an input into political economics or as a discipline of living sustainably. Marx is deeply indebted to European Enlightenment human exceptionalism, an assumption unacceptable to Buddhist ethics, but that contradiction is not explore.

Both of these pieces of writing address serious problems, and they do so for the right reasons and in good ways. Yet neither is sufficiently radical: they do not acknowledge the accelerating environmental crisis within which these arguments are taking place, and they do not address the underlying contradictions of cosmopolitan thought about the environment that lock all living things into that crisis. Wilder and Kammen’s piece on Yale 360 does a good job of showing the long-term acceleration of the environmental crisis. Here I want to look at the conceptual knot.

Sustainability says that we should adopt a slightly constrained life now, so that our children can have an equally sensible lifestyle, and we all of us deserve not to suffer overmuch to have all these goods. Now, I have argued that there are serious material constraints that reveal the language of sustainability to be a false promise in bad faith; any bargaining with future generations in a rapidly and unpredictably changing ecosystem is a self-serving scam. But what could be wrong with the desires themselves? Viewed in Buddhist terms, the doctrine of sustainability is all about attachment: attachment to self, attachment to unchanging things, attachment to pleasure.

We are so deeply entangled in an aesthetic of commodity capitalism (we ourselves have been trained to commodify ourselves so that pieces can be fixed and sold back to us for a fee, our remorse or failed sex drive or guilt or colour or fitness made better by the market) that it is often hard to present a constructive critique of seductive ideas. But each of these three characteristics, the attachment to permanence, the attachment to self, and the attachment to pleasure are well known in Buddhist thought. There are well-kennt and thorough pedagogical tools, such as the meditation on the body as it passes from an object of sexual desire to a decomposing corpse, that are intended to dislodge these specific attachments. In the glitter of the marketplace, though, this approach can be satirised as distinctly ascetic and mean-spirited. Although I heartily recommend such traditional tools, I would suggest that there is also room in the toolbox for new approaches. Indeed, where the challenge is not just one of confronting attachment and overcoming it, but also of summoning the strength to pursue engaged ethical projects under the shadow of an overwhelming environmental crisis, I think new tools are required.

Let me begin by drawing a distinction between pleasure and joy. Pleasure is for the self; joy arises among and between us. Pleasure may be competitive, but joy is generous and open. Pleasure is what one hopes for, but never really gets. Joy arises without being sought whilst playing with the body, the mind, the voice: just as pleasure can never escape self-centredness, joy is irreducibly plural and social. (In Buddhist terms, pleasure is sukkha, paired with duḥkha, whilst joy is modana, the process of the third of the Brahmavihāras.)

This directs us towards the originality of the first person plural voice. Writers from Vyogotsky and Bakhtin through Alfred Schutz and Geertz to Evan Thompson and Nikolas Rose have showed that the self with which we experience is historically contingent and acquired through cultural mediated social experience. We acquire a sense of ourselves, what Rose calls the disciplined self, through watching others watch us, and this extends all the way down to the experience of pain and laughter. When a young child is surprised by a minor injury and turns to look for support, a trusted and supportive parent can lead the interaction towards a shared, if wry, laugh of experience bravely shared and a cuddle…rather than a howl of needy attention. As Rose points out, it is no less true for being invented; but there is no transcendent self hiding underneath that can be revealed through critique. The self is a social process requiring incessant reproduction through interactions, an epiphenomenon of sociability.

But intersubjectivity is not just human. Recent studies of early childhood development suggest that, by the age of 5, urban children with little exposure to living things other than humans acquire anthropocentrism but this is preceded a biocentric perspective which persists in rural children. (Herman, Waxman and Medin 2010). Bateson calls our attention to the ‘this is play’ signal that domestic dogs use in interactions with us. Again, observant parenting can teach us obvious truths: when the family dog encounters a baby, they teach each other a whole range of cues around invitations to play, acceptable play, and the limits of play. Children who grow up with dogs, horses, and so forth have lower incidences of allergy and richer microbiomes those who don’t, and they develop social skills that extend beyond the merely human.

When Buddhism was yanked into the intellectual tapestry of the colonial powers, many of its sharpest critiques were lost because they were literally inconceivable to its appropriators. For example, the idea that Buddhism was designed by its founders, not as a whole-package religion (like Protestantism or Catholicism) but as a set of strategies, practices, and social institutions that could easily be transposed into other cultural contexts, is only just now making sense. So, too, the radically different understanding of agency in the early Indic religions, that awarded full enlighten-ability to all living things, was completely overlooked, even though it is insisted upon ins endless ritual, legal and philosophical texts across several languages. The discussion of intersubjectivity is only just now beginning to properly unfold, prompted by the work of Haraway, Dooren and others. (Haraway’s messy dog-kissing in Companion Species Manifesto is just an adult admitting something many dogs teach their children to do!) My paper on Buddhist anthropology (which will actually come into print this year I am promised) is an attempt to begin this process.

The challenge here, though, is how to use strong intersubjectivity as the basis for social action that absolutely refuses attachment to self, to permanence, to satisfaction.

And here is my antidote for sustainable development. The term ‘sustainable’ is just a lie. What we are seeking is flourishing, wellbeing, through what is bound to be a turbulent future. Economic development is the wrong long-term goal; it’s part of the problem. But for those of us who actually do work on policy, planning and activism we need a toolkit that allows us to imagine how long-term projects might succeed: what values they should embody and instil, a ‘how’ that helps us see paths from this desperate present, through an uncertain future. Interspecies playfulness, intentional collusion, dissolving the boundaries of the self in favour of life itself: maybe this is a rather wooly recipe when a well-defined meditation framework might be more appropriate. Fittingly, I wrote the first version of this essay and then erased it with an exhausted hypnagogic twitch of the finger on the iPhone WordPress client—a good lesson in non-attachment and impermanence! But conversations over lunch today reminded me that I had sought particular interspecies engagements and their irruptive en-joy-ment. There are awareness practices to be learnt! Digestion, for example: enough of fart jokes. The fart itself is interspecies humour, a ribald message from the digestors about the limits of even their capacity. Immunity is another: the extraordinary sensation of recovering from disease, the even more extraordinary sensation (watch for it!) of the whole agora that includes and pervades and constitutes one human body (a leaky sack with several holes) detecting, mobilising, greeting, and sending away a now-familiar infectious disease. We are only just beginning to understand the relationship between symbiosis and mental health, but don’t for a moment imagine that this is just awareness of some Cartesian body over there: your intentions, your words are also motivated and constituted in this rich symbiotic soup.

We need a thrilling, insipiring basis for collective action, but we ourselves are collectivities. When we work together to manage a forest in the Himalayas, the goats wandering past and the watching ravens and the microbes that pass among us and the yeasts that ferment the bread and the forest trees in the first rank and those hidden from view…all of us are working and playing together. That insight is the foothold that allows us to continue. Not the soul-sucking lie of economic growth; not the bland poison of sustainability. It is collusion and collaboration across an unimaginably numerous, constantly shifting ecology at many scales that is the only viable ground for hope.

There is a mealtime ritual of thanking all the sentient beings that contributed to our food, and vowing that our eating of the food will transform the food for the sake of all sentient beings, followed by an offering of the first morsel to the ancestors and hungry ghosts. (There is also the exchange of self and others—but where the others comprise the self, that gets a little tricky!) Taking that as a model: begin with ourselves as a collectivity. Remember the digestion, the respiration, the mitochondria and the gut bacteria, the skin and mouth bacteria, and be grateful. You are not one being, you are countless and poorly bounded, but you are grateful amongst yourself. Follow the leaks and threads of connection: your gut bacteria come from your mother, your dog, your lover…they each are wetly interwoven into you, and you into them. There is life everywhere, and it circulates with your intentions, your words, your body. Be grateful. In every instant you are dying, changing, evolving. Vow to work together for the sake of all life. It is extraordinary that you (are you alone, or did you all stand up together?) can stand up and bow, different/not different from every other daft agglomeration of life around you yet it is somehow this bow now. Breathe. Act.