Some further thoughts on excess

I know, I know, these posts on excess are becoming excessive (and what does excess reveal about what one really lacks?).

How targets will not be met:

1. Copenhagen ain't gonna be met. That means the global average temperatures will have increased by 2 degrees (Celsius) by 2100 (compared to 1900). That's on average, mind you, and I don't think that's the same figure as the steady state increase. 

2. Currently 13% of the world's population is obese (670 million people). By 2025 it is estimated that some 2.7 billion people will be overweight. 

For the figures see here 

The road to excess does not, in this case, lead to the palace of wisdom.

There is something strangely and perversely addictive to those television programmes on the lives of the severely obese. Channel 5-and here's an argument against the excessive availability of channels if ever there was one- seems to specialize in such programmes: 'Britain's fattest man' etc., etc.

But why is that? Do we get some kind of grim satisfaction by gloating over someone else's lack of control, some kind of pleasure in seeing people wallow in their own sad little lives? I suppose-for some-there is the minor happiness that accompanies the feeling that someone else is "pathetic" or "disgusting". The most extreme reaction usually leads to a rant on how the health service is being abused, how we (the relatively healthy) can't afford to subsidize the disastrous but free choices of other people (read: "losers", read: immigrants)). How much is all this costing us? Go and die at someone else's-your own, that is-expense, if you please. 

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But no discussion on what is leading to these excesses and addictions. No attempt to see the whole picture. Moral scorn is directed not at the system that is generating these problems but at the individuals who can't escape it. In that sense the moralizing is really just a lot of self-righteousness, a display of sentiments devoid of any genuine sympathy or understanding.

But if we try and tie the two things together we might see that the root problem of climate change and our addictions (to food, cheap credit, etc.) is commodity fetishism. Having more is a compensation for what, though? A fear that we will lose what we have, a deeper anxiety over our own mortality, or does abundance act as a cover for our desire to renege on our responsibilities (if you have more than enough you do not have to make any choices, any sacrifices...the dream that we can have it all)? Or is abundance a search for recognition? Maybe it is the complete opposite: that maybe I will, mercifully, stay hidden under all these goods. 

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The first question (Auden: first things first): what we die off is the lack of friendship, love, meaning in our lives, imagination (Isak D). 

The original sense of being at ease with oneself (and with others), is this not but a dim reflection of the Garden carried over from all those thousands of centuries ago? We, of infinite desires, because we are at root finite, limited. 

"Beware of false infinities" Simone once wrote. 

What is the proper object of our love/desire (Augustine's old question)? It is out attachment to the world that makes it the world. No, perhaps not that. It was our belief, which was a form of idolatry, that led us to mistake the finite for the infinite (all worldly goods, no matter how high we pile them up on one another, still do not reach the moon).

You re-opened Ignatieff's small gem of a book after many years and read these lines. They have a wonderful feel to them..a poetic truth amongst all the shabbiness and scruffiness that is our life. 

"All these old people seem like that, cut adrift from family, slipping away into the dwindling realm of their inner voices, clinging to the old barrow as if it were a raft carrying them out to sea."