EPISODE 245: KINDNESS IN MESOPOTAMIA

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

A couple summers ago I had the great fortune to spend about a week in London. I was just coming from a month of volunteering with the Jesuit Refugee Service in Malta.

I guess Malta is one of those places visit on cruises. It apparently has some really nice beaches, in addition to some super old cities, including one called the Silent City that is a bit like a Medieval Tales Twilight Zone episode – it’s ancient, and more or less empty, and aliens definitely at some point took all the people away.

But living there was not at all like being on a cruise. In fact, it reminded me a lot of non-beachy L.A. – a bleached, urban environment with some pretty challenging traffic. (So many roundabouts in places you really want stop lights. So many.)

I really enjoyed working with JRS and the refugees I met; incredible people one and all. But then I got to London and stumbled upon one of the city’s many parks and just could not get enough of the green and flowers and the cool breeze. It was like I’d been in a kind of desert and starved somehow. I ended up wandering through parks for days, just trying to soak it all in.

Towards the end of my stay I came upon this little park near a port and wine bar where I was going to meet a friend. And as I’m waiting for her I’m sitting on a bench there in the middle of kind of rainy late afternoon. And I have this overwhelming sense of the kindness of God.

“Kindness”: is that a word in your vocabulary? I mean, do you find yourself calling people “kind”? I can’t say that I have very much, really. In fact, before that evening I don’t think I ever said that word really understanding what it meant. But it was like the week and the month in Malta all caught up to me at once and I was just so aware of what the week in London and all those parks had given me. The sense of being cared for was so clear.

But for some reason I’ve been thinking about the term some more in recent days, and it’s made me wonder if kindness is not an experience of someone doing something for you, giving you something as much as it is an experience of someone actually letting you and your needs into their life. Kindness is when someone else allows you to exist. “Allows you to exist” – that is, allows for you to be real enough to them that your needs and life cannot be ignored by them. It’s a relinquishing of the distance, the safety we put between others and ourselves. A willingness to be out of control out of a sense that the world is a lot bigger than me.

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I’m not exactly sure what got me riffing on this last week. Maybe it was this movie I saw, Darkest Hour, which stars Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in the early days of World War II. If you’ve seen Dunkirk, this is basically the “Meanwhile, in Parliament” other side of that story.

There are some fantastic moments in the movie, one in particular I really want to talk about but I won’t because spoilers. Let me just say, please, everyone, see Darkest Hour when it comes to your city, town, village or cave system hey B, liked you in Justice League, brah so that we can talk about it.

Near the end of Darkest Hour, we see the English civilian boats all headed off to try and save the British army from the coming German uberpanzer nightmare tanks. And, maybe because I had already downloaded the emotion of that whole story in Dunkirk (thank you Chris Nolan), as soon as I saw the boats here I found myself getting choked up. It’s that sense of ordinary people just dropping everything to help one another.

It’s the same situation we hear about after every natural disaster; no matter what the dramas and difficulties in our country/world/underground bunker today (if you’re in an underground bunker, and you’re not Batman, I would like to invite you to the surface, if only to try Chipotle, it’s really filling), when things matter it turns out there’s still this great capacity for kindness within us.

(There’s a great story like this in the LA Times today, about a photographer who came upon five high school kids who took it upon themselves to save a stranger’s house in the midst of the scary fires currently racing through parts of Southern California. The owner of the house wasn’t even there; they just decided to do it.

Take that, every pessimistic view of the world.)

As my heart was swelling with all these positive yeah us it ain’t so bad thoughts, someone’s cell phone went off in the row ahead of me. It was one of the standard iPhone jingles, the merimba-y one that goes um, kind of a while.... And the owner either couldn’t hear her phone or thought she’d wait it out, because it just went on and on.

I didn’t realize Churchill had a mobile device, I found myself tempted to say.

Suddenly someone two seats down said, quite strongly, “Turn that phone off right now.” When that did no good, she went after the owner HARD: “What is wrong with you?”

The owner finally pulled out her phone and silenced it, only to then have her husband/partner/guy pal take the phone from her and check it out, bright screen glaring about for all to see. Once again my seat friend took him on: “What are you doing? Put that phone away now.” And, after a long pause to show her who’s boss (because we never really outgrow adolescence), he finally put it away.

Normally I’m a similarly salty handful of outrage when people’s phones go off, but in this particular moment, what hit me instead was the life choice between the stories onscreen and in the theater: the instinctive sense of an “us”, a community of humanity and kindness; or, selfishness and outrage over stupid things.

(Although you also have to think people in bomb shelters in London would have said shut your bloody cellphone if they went off during the weekly newsreels.)

You really should see Darkest Hour. It has so much resonance with today.

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Have you heard the term “Anthropocene”? It’s getting bandied about a lot lately. (Also: Can we just take a moment to enjoy the fact that human existence includes the opportunity to say the word “bandy”?

So high on my “words that are satisfying to say” chart.)

It’s a way of connecting the era that we’re living in with prior eras of the earth’s geological and biological history. Instead of Jurassic (dinosaurs) or Paleolithic (cave men) or the Magna Carta (dunno, but it sounds way old), some have begun to say we’re living in the Anthropocene.

The idea behind the new term is that we’re at a time when human beings are affecting the very geology and overall life of the planet, and in such a significant way that it has to be understood as an era all its own. (Hence the “anthro”.)

Not long ago the Guardian ran a great long-think article on one of the great thinkers of the Anthropocene, a man named Timothy Morton. He argues that the “human era” began not with us significantly impacting the planet but knowing it.

The Anthropocene is not only a period of manmade disruption. It is also a moment of blinking self-awareness, in which the human species is becoming conscious of itself as a planetary force. We’re not only driving global warming and ecological destruction; we know that we are.”

And more than that, “we are condemned to live with this awareness at all times. It’s there not only when politicians gather to discuss international environmental agreements, but when we do something as mundane as chat about the weather, pick up a plastic bag at the supermarket or water the lawn. We live in a world with a moral calculus that didn’t exist before. Now, doing just about anything is an environmental question. That wasn’t true 60 years ago – or at least people weren’t aware that it was true. Tragically, it is only by despoiling the planet that we have realised just how much a part of it we are....”

So for example, says the Guardian, “Coral bleaching isn’t just occurring over yonder, on the Great Barrier Reef; it’s happening wherever you switch on the air conditioning.”

There’s a hardship to this. How many hours do I end up wandering the supermarket aisles, trying to figure out which brand of cereal is most ethical? How do I even go about determining that?

(It’s Quaker Apples and Cinnamon Instant Oatmeal, btw. It fights bad cholesterol and tastes delicious.

You are the worst, Maple and Brown Sugar. The absolute worst.

But what’s unusual about Morton is that he doesn’t seem interested in guilt or shaming. For him, the real work is two steps: first, relocating ourselves within nature and the world from our current longstanding position that we’re somehow above or outside of it.

Again from the Guardian: “’We Mesopotamians’ – as he calls the past 400 or so generations of humans living in agricultural and industrial societies – thought that we were simply manipulating other entities (by farming and engineering, and so on) in a vacuum, as if we were lab technicians and they were in some kind of giant petri dish called “nature” or “the environment”. In the Anthropocene, Morton says, we must wake up to the fact that we never stood apart from or controlled the non-human things on the planet, but have always been thoroughly bound up with them. We can’t even burn, throw or flush things away without them coming back to us in some form, such as harmful pollution. Our most cherished ideas about nature and the environment – that they are separate from us, and relatively stable – have been destroyed.”

I love that idea that we’ve been thinking of nature as some kind of petri dish separate from us, missing the fact that actually we’re just other bacteria in the dish. In a way it’s a path to kindness; to recognize oneself as a part of the world or an institution or a group is to accept a different role within it.

His second point is that that different role is not necessarily sackcloth and ashes. Avoiding the fact that we are a part of nature is actually a lot of mental and emotional work, he argues. (Erasing a part of the truth of your existence can be exhausting, y’all!) If we can let that go some, his belief is that it leads not just to a better planet but overall greater happiness.

From the Guardian: “If we give up the delusion of controlling everything around us, we might refocus ourselves on the pleasure we take in other beings and life itself. Enjoyment, Morton believes, might be the thing that turns us on to a new kind of politics.

“’You think ecologically tuned life means being all efficient and pure,” the tweet pinned to the top of his Twitter timeline reads. ‘Wrong. It means you can have a disco in every room of your house.’”

I don’t totally know what he means there, but it sounds fantastic. An article and thinker filed with great big ideas and a take on the future of our planet that is a bit less scream-y.

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A bit late today, and not much in the way of visuals, either. What kind of newsletter am I running?! Back to normal operations next week, I promise. Also – it’s entirely about Star Wars. (You may not have heard, but there’s a new Star Wars film that opens next Thursday which is the longest Star Wars film ever and may or may not feature someone losing a limb and/or trying to rescue loved ones.)

Meanwhile season two of The Crown has just dropped. And so here is a picture of Queen Elizabeth and Princess Philip posing as your grandparents in honor of their 70th anniversary.

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The only time you will hear me use the term “fake news” (ever). Ryan Gosling won’t eat his cereal, (but then does for a very good reason). The Brits can’t stop eating sandwiches (a history). Alan Moore and others sing the praises of owning your own dictionary (and posting photos of them on the internets).

Meanwhile, Two dogs take flight for some Peking Duk. Famous Person Melissa McCarthy and Slightly Less Famous Person Junifer Ooniston debate the existence of gravity. Vanity Fair hypes the next round of Marvel movies.

And, in the greatest example of making lemonade out of lemons, a photographer transforms sick and disabled kids into members of the Justice League.
Have a good week. Don’t let the nonsense get you down. You’ve got this.