 When
I was a kid in Winnipeg, it was something special to be allowed, during
the oppressive summer nights (no air conditioning back then) to sleep
in the basement. It was pretty spartan, because every couple of years
after a heavy summer rain the sewers couldn't handle the volume of
water and basements would flood, so you didn't put anything in the
basement that you couldn't afford to lose. Our basement had that cheap
patterned "wood" paneling on the walls, and the floors had
'indoor-outdoor' carpeting (which we called 'astroturf') laid right on
the concrete, which was cracked and uneven due to winter frost heave.
The furniture included two somewhat ratty sofas that folded out into
beds ('chesterfields'), and the Zenith TV, black and white, which in
the late fifties was a novelty, but not respectable enough to put
upstairs.
You got the English and French CBC channels, and later the CTV private
network, and a few years later again if you adjusted the rabbit ears
just right you got a very grainy station from Pembina, North Dakota. I
used to race home at lunchtime to watch Concentration,
moderated by Hugh Downs, on that channel, where you had to match up
squares from memory and if you did, they were taken off the board to
reveal part of a rebus puzzle that you had to solve to win the prizes
you'd matched up. It was followed by the original (black and white)
Camouflage game, hosted by Don Morrow (this was 1961, and I was nine)
where if you answered questions correctly part part of a jumble of
lines disguising an outline picture of some everyday object was
removed, and you had the chance to trace the object correctly in 10
seconds to win. I saved up for the 'home game' versions of both shows.
The wood paneling separated the room from the laundry room and the
workshop where all my Dad's tools were kept, and which later housed our
first shower. The 'basement room' was curtained off from the stucco
wall, and behind the curtain was storage. But just in front of the
curtain lay my favourite toy -- a linoleum mat printed with streets and
houses that became the village where my imagination ran wild, and which
was home to my prized collection of Matchbox Toys (miniature cars made
in England of, I believe, solid lead, which probably accounts for at
least part of my madness). I used to make up games by sectioning off
the 'roads' on the lino with crayon, and have different cars race
(controlled by a dice roll) to be first complete a designated route
(with required stops e.g. 'to deliver milk'). This was how my creative
spark first found vent, and I am still enthralled with the much more
sophisticated Playmobil and other 'village' sets to this day -- as long
as there is a playing surface with roads and houses of course.
I was a pretty sociable kid until adolescence hit, and we used to play
a lot of games and sports outdoors (even at -40º), but my basement time
was solo -- just me and my ideas. My brother used to take the other
fold-out sofa on the hot summer nights, but he was four years younger
than I was, and moved in different circles. But at night we used to
talk, or rather, I'd think out loud and he'd play along until he got
bored or fell asleep. With cardboard and coloured pencils I had created
a 'dashboard' for a space ship and tacked it up beside my pillow, so
these night-time conversations were mostly role-plays in space, with
each of us taking multiple roles ("now I'm the pilot and you're the
engineer"). At first, my dashboards got more sophisticated so I could
control the 'ship' without moving, but later I simplified it, reasoning
"Why have a whole bunch of buttons when you just need one very smart
one". This was in the days before computers. I was of course delighted
years later when Star Trek (to which I quickly became addicted)
introduced the 'replicator' that did just what my one-button bedside
dashboard did.
By the standards of the day we weren't poor, and my ambitions for life
were modest. I wanted to travel, all over the world and into space, but
I never had material aspirations and if there was any jealousy or envy
over possessions among our circle, I wasn't aware of it. I had no
intention of marrying, since that would "tie me down", and I remember
when the series Run for your Life came out five years later (when I was
fourteen), featuring Ben Gazzara as a man who discovers he only has a
few months to live and spends it traveling all over the planet and
enchanting every woman he meets with his bravado and charm, this became
my role model. By then I was suffering the anguish of early teenage
years, my naive self-esteem shattered by the strange new rituals of my
peers, my face ravaged by acne, and my ego and social stature further
ruined by my horrendous lack of coordination (an inability to learn how
to swim, dance, or properly play a musical instrument). Although I
longed for popularity, I never longed for fame or fortune (the game
Careers was a hit in those days, and in it you were required to gather
a minimum of fame, fortune and happiness by pursuing various careers,
but the game seemed kind of silly to me -- if you only wanted
happiness, why bother pursuing a career at all?)
Well, if you;re still reading, you're probably wondering where I'm
going with all this. Here's my point: In my own case, my ambitions in
life were set pretty early, and they were (space exploration plans
notwithstanding) pretty modest. At various times in my life I have
achieved some measure of fame and financial success, but I was always a
bit apologetic about them, because I didn't aspire to them and they
never seemed to come to those who wanted them most. I only wanted to be
happy, and to learn everything that could be learned. Those personal
values have never really changed.
Richard Douthwaite, in his wonderful layman's book on progressive economics The Growth Illusion,
cites a 1970s British survey ranking what participants said were the
things that represent and increase quality of life and happiness.
Here's the list in order of ranking:
- Good family and home life
- General contentment
- Financial security and affordability
- High standard of living and consumption
- Meaningful social values
- Personal beliefs
- Strong and multiple social relationships
- Quality of housing
- Quality of health
- Quality of work
- Personal freedoms
- Leisure time and travel
- Proximity to natural environment
- Quality education
- Progress relative to other times and places
- Possessions and personal wealth
- Freedom from stress
- Equality and justice
Respondents were able to check as many answers as they wanted, so there
is no 'vote splitting' to bias these results. My guess is that thirty
years later the answers wouldn't have changed much, and that for most
of us our personal ranking hasn't changed much since childhood either.
We can only guess at why respondents gave such different scores to #2
and #17, and to #4 and #16, but it seems clear that for most people the
key to happiness is social rather than economic. Why then do so many of
us devote so much of our lives to achieving economic goals? Is it
because most of us think we've already achieved the social goals? Or is
because we've deluded ourselves into believing we have more control
over the economic goals, and that our social goals will (or won't) be
achieved regardless of our investment in reaching them? Or is it
because we have a nagging fear that if we don't devote most of our
waking hours to achieving economic goals (even though we don't think
they're that important in and of themselves), we will become economic
failures, and that economic failure will jeopardize our achievement of
our social goals as well?
I suspect, and perhaps I'm guilty of judging other people by myself
here, that most of us look at what our peers and our role models have
done and what our parents have done and then do what we do because we really don't know what else to do, how to live any differently.
The harried, hierarchical, partly-fulfilling and partly-anxious way we
go about our lives is the only way we know to live. We don't see any
credible alternative models presented in schools, or on television. So
although there is some fear involved (just look at the face of anyone
who has just passed a homeless person if you don't believe me), I think
most of us do what we do, haplessly contributing to our ruinous and
unsustainable economy, largely because no one has shown us any
alternatives. We have unwittingly come to believe that there is no
choice, and as a result our culture has become monolithic. Our
instinctive rankling at being told this is what we must do, this is how
we must live, is discharged by the vendors of consumer products who
give us astonishing choice when it comes to things that (if you believe the above list) don't really matter.
We are seduced by this comforting deception, and before we know it we
are part of the machine, we are addicted to consumption and to the debt
that allows us to finance yet more consumption.
The list itself is rigged, 'framed', semantically aligned with the
objectives of passivity and enslavement of economic man in pursuit of
perpetual growth. Family and home are a respite, a refuge from the
daily grind, the prison of our jobs. The word 'community' is not even
mentioned in the survey. Housing and health are the carrots we are
perpetually chasing and never quite catching -- we work long, hard
hours because without toil we can not be sure, even in this world of
staggering abundance, that we won't suddenly be without housing,
health, and other necessities of life. No one has ever taught us, or
showed us, that there is, or was once and could and should be again
a way to achieve all of the above 'quality of life' ends (except #4 and
#16), and many other important ends not listed in the survey, without
participating in our growth-and-consumption-and-debt economy. This is
why we need to create Model Intentional Communities.
Give yourself this self-test of your definition of quality of life, and of your personal values:
- Rate on a scale of 1-10 how important each of the eighteen factors listed above is to human quality of life.
- Now go back and ask yourself which are 'ends' in
themselves, and which are primarily 'means to ends', in other words,
which do you think are important only because you perceive them to be necessary to achieve other factors that are important in and of themselves. Be a reckless idealist for a minute, pretend these 'means to ends' factors are not necessary to achieve those other factors, and strike them off the list. For this exercise, we're only interested in the ends.
- Next, ask yourself what's missing from the list. Imagine a
perfect world, like the one with Star Trek's replicator ("Tea, Earl
Grey. Hot. Black. Thank you computer"). Pretend you're a child. Dream
big. Add and rate the additional factors you come up with.
- Now list the five factors you have rated highest. For each
of those five factors, grade yourself on your achievement at this point
in your life of these factors.
- I would suggest the average grade you give yourself in step 4 represents the true
quality of your own life. I'll also guess, just to be mischievous, that
this average grade isn't as high as you might have rated your quality
of life in the 'real' world, or as high as others would rate your
quality of life.
Of course the final step is to ask yourself what changes you need to
make to improve your self-scores. And, more importantly, what changes we need to make, all of us, together, to improve everyone's
scores. I'm guessing that a lot of those changes will be impossible in
the current economy, but that if we built a new economy, focused on
sustainability and egalitarianism and well-being, not only would they
be possible, they'd be easy, even inevitable.
I'll share my answers to the above self-test in a couple of days. I'd
be delighted to hear your answers, and especially to see the factors
you added in step 3. Who knows, we might be on a road to building a
new, collective value system for the next human culture.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
