Today I have another translation from Ven. Pomnyun Sunim’s “Inner Peace, Socialization of Compassion”. I’m actually working with my Buddhist order to translate this book in its entirety, but for today please enjoy this sample of the book.
Threat to Civilizations Brought On by Consumerism
From a global perspective the biggest problem is that of the environment. To properly discuss environmental problems, we first have to think about something specific. People commonly use the expression “well off” when describing life, what is the standard of how we measure the wellness of a life? “That country is better off than the other country”, “That person is better off than another person”, “We’re better off now than before”, when we say these things what is the standard of measurement? Of course there are many, but the most representative measure is the level of consumption.
To say that you’re “well off”, you have to be able to consume as much as you want to. This means production has to match your level of desired consumption. Humans have throughout history improved production through science and technology developments. That is the industrial society. The industrial society is a solution to the problem of human desire to consume. In olden days our production was limited and thus was our consumption. Conversely modern civilizations are characterized by mass production and mass consumption. Therein lies our problem: mass production requires mass energy. Past humankind considered energy to be an unlimited resource. It was just that the human power to harvest it was limited. If we had the manpower, we could cut down trees from the forest and mine ores from the earth. So the worth of a product was determined by how much human power went into creating the product. That is the labor theory of value. However the industrial society’s mass production has run into the problem of energy scarcity.
First came the threat of complete exhaustion of underground resources. Projections such as “Coal will run out in 30 years”, “fuel will run out in 50 years” have run rampant. Not only is underground resource under threat, so is food. Speculations said that when food runs out, war will inevitably follow. We also generally are running low on energy. We thought trees and coal were unlimited but it turned out they weren’t. What we considered infinite, was demonstrated to be finite inside a closed system called the earth. Now we are in the era of running out water as well. In the current era (my note: this book was published in 2002) the biggest variable in the exhaustion of resources is water. Food is always under research for more efficient development so it is not as much of a threat as it was considered in the past. Fertilizers, pesticides, selective breeding, and genetic modifications gave rising to super potatoes or other high-yield crops. Traditional energy is being replaced by alternative energy. Trees are being replaced by coal, coal to petroleum and natural gas, nuclear power, solar, wind powers and so on. Other scarce resources are being replaced by material engineering that produces synthesized materials. Synthetic fiber, plastic, nylon; these are things that don’t exist in nature but can be made by artificial combination of materials. Just like this, humankind was overcoming the limitations of its contemporary civilization.
But around the 1960’s we started having unforeseen issues and humankind started experiencing a new difficulty. Mass production and mass consumption had led to the side effect of mass waste. In the past, waste was not a problem; all you had to do was dispose of them. But with the new mass model, we started seeing side effects and the biggest one of them: pollution. This problem of pollution was unheard of in the thousands years of human history. Pollution is never discussed in the sutras, the bible, nor the Marxist manifestos. Simply because the people of those times had never experienced it before. The first problem that came from pollution was new illnesses, like Itai-itai disease. Then came the air, water, food pollution. This led to the mass scale problem of ecosystem destruction. When ecosystems get destroyed, species go extinct and the earth’s life system experiences a critical error. Then after that we see climate change, which is practically the destruction of the environment of earth.
As we face these perils we have to ask ourselves, “what is living well?” as we consider the “quality of life”. It is no longer optional to consider these questions, because it became a matter of life and death to us. Until now we have strived for a “better” life by engaging in mass production and mass consumption. As a result of that our air is unbreathable, water undrinkable, and food plastered with chemicals. When our entire body is sick to the core, what is the point of a pretty colored lipstick and the most luxurious car? In harsher terms, this is like a rat eating rat poison. It ate it to feed itself but it ended up killing itself. Human civilization will meet its end due to resource exhaustion or side effects of pollution, and very possibly both.
Our life is contained in a repeating closed circuit. It is not an infinitely linear trajectory. When we throw something away, it ultimately comes back to us. When we eat something with our mouth it comes out as poop, and it eventually comes back into our mouths again. I attended a lecture once that said this: car emissions can be very easily solved, all you have to do is just have the exhaust pipe connect back to the inside of the car. As I heard that, I had the brilliant idea: our showers, toilets, and vanities should all drain down back again and all our problems will be solved! This sounds ridiculous at the small scale, but it is the reality at a larger scale of the earth. It just takes a lot of time to come back to us again, but it inevitably comes back to us again.
But another problem is that the originator of these environmental problems are only about 20% of the 6 billion people on the earth. 1.2 billion people are using up around 84% of the earth’s resources. The lower 20% consumers of the earth are using a mere 1%. In other words, 1.2 billion people’s worth of environmental problems are what we’re experiencing now; what will happen when all of 1.3 billion Chinese and 1 billion Indians all match the level of consumption of the high consumers? It’s obvious. We will either all die together or perhaps some policy will make only 1 billion people be able to consume and the rest will be forbidden from using resources. But this is extremely unlikely.
Let’s recap all the problems we’ve stated until now. Modern civilization is facing some clear threats and the first is exhaustion of resources. Because we used to only see things from our perspective, we thought resources were infinite. This was a kind of ignorance. We mistook a part to be the whole and arrived at this thought error.
Second is pollution. The world we live in is not a linear world, it is a closed webbed circuit. In other words what we put it will come back to us. We have not considered this in the past. Perhaps it’s because we used to think the world was flat, we extended this idea to consider trash as something we just put away somewhere and it just disappears forever. What happens when you put your trash into the chute? Might as well be a black hole, considering our worldview. But in reality, it was landing directly on to our apartment again.
The most primary problem is that the human desire knows no end. The threats to human civilization is an output of the endless human desire, finite resources, the closed circuit of waste coming back to us, the great development of human capacity combining in contradictory ways.