convergence

Wednesday evening Ben and I attended Sustainable Convergence, hosted by the Foresight Design Initiative.  Held inside Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, it was a chance to see the Massive Change exhibit, to check out exhibitors with the Chicago Sustainable Enterprise Fair, and to eat good organic food (served, by the way, on completely biodegradable plates made from corn, and eaten with forks made out of potatoes; the cups and napkins were similarly biodegradable/compostable).

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see too much of the exhibit.  What I did see has sparked my interest, and hopefully I’ll be able to visit it again before it’s over.  Some of its language really caught my attention, perhaps as a result of one of the classes I’m taking currently called “Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe.”  For instance, in one room it discussed how our relationship to nature has been up to this point one of applying artificial or man-made form to the natural material provided by nature, but how this distinction is breaking down with the development of nanotechnology as well as the creation of genetically modified life; we are taking over the very ‘nature’ of things by changing the material out of which they are made.  But the idea of the natural which the exhibit creators posit we are moving away from is in fact a relatively recent change in the understanding of what ‘the natural’ is.  For this class, we did some background reading in Aristotle, who very much sees man-made objects as natural.  In fact, it is not the material but the form of something which is its ‘nature’; as he says, “the nature of a thing is its end”; and a little later “Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal”  (Politics, Book I, 1252b32 and 1253a2).  The realm of the human and the natural overlap much more here, and I wonder if it’s possible to see our current relationship with nature as more of a return to this Aristotelian notion; if soon, something’s ‘nature’ will be defined by its end, or the use for which humans have created it.  (Which, in its extreme anthropocentrism, I would take as fairly problematic; we should have a sense of things existing outside of the realm of human purpose.)

‘Sustainable Convergence’ thus ended up being an apt description of the evening, as these ideas came together, but also in other rather exciting ways.  One of the folks we met while having dinner happened to know that Wendell Berry was speaking at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, only two blocks away from the MCA.  So partway through the evening we hopped over there, and heard the esteemed Kentuckian read some new work from his Sabbath poems, as well as a short piece about the death of one of his neighbors.  The amount of feeling he can express with the most simple of language should shame the many of us who choose to use more ‘complex’ styles in an attempt to sound like we know what we’re talking about.  Of course it’s not surprising, given his ideas about the need for particularities, for attachment to places.  This came out in some of his responses to questions after his reading.  On the role of the poet, he said, “Poets have the peculiar responsibility of making sure language keeps the possibility of telling the truth.”  And even politicians have a similar mandate: “The job of the politician is to make sense – an art our politics has pretty much lost.”  He elaborated more on this – on how our poetry and politics both have lost a sense of what they are about – how “language slips away from the pressure of responsibility,” as he also said.  The poverty of language comes when we begin to speak in abstractions, when we get away from the particulars – say the particular facts of a place, of a person, of things with which we are really in touch.  “The correct impulse is to make clear, precise sense about something in particular.  That way you have to pay some kind of cost.  And it’s good for you.”  All this was partially in response to someone who asked if the sense of ‘the land’ as Berry writes about it is really necessary (for a good human life, generally, I think, was the question – what about those who are immigrants, strangers, displaced?)  But Berry was quite emphatic; he paused, thought for a moment, and then said, “Yes.  Yes it is.”  He countered that part of what people frequently try to find when they come to a country (as many who came to America did) is their own bit of land; they are seeking a new sense of place as much as they are leaving a place.  (I might think that the logical extension of this is that the immigrant experience becomes as difficult as it is when people are not allowed to truly find this new sense of place – when they are kept as strangers by their neighbors, or caused to move repetitively, and simply not given any space with which to become or stay familiar.)  Still, his emphasis on this point is difficult to square with the increasing need for urban living (another point explored in Massive Change) and the fact that most people just aren’t able to do what Berry has done in living an agrarian lifestyle in a rural space, something I believe he has acknowledged.  Yet I still would tend to agree with him, as I see people’s alienation from a specific piece of land leading to a lack of value for green spaces in general, and I think even for one another; the sense of ‘neighbor’ must necessarily erode when our sense of place does.

I would also tend to agree with Berry’s statements about politics, which made another amusing tie-in with an earlier part of the evening, when we met a guy named PackerBacker Bob.  I would describe Bob, but there’s already a description in the middle of this Chicago Tribune sports article, so you should just read it there.  But basically, this guy is the Democrat’s Democrat; and like the majority of politicians, he has indeed lost the art of making sense.  He was boasting about how the Dems would likely take back Congress in the November elections, when I asked him if it made that much of a difference; why should I vote for someone just because they’re a Democrat, when 12 Democrats approved the Military Commissions Act last week?  He guffawed loudly, and said that these folks were probably just in tight races in their home state, so of course they voted for it.  Basically, that amounts to saying that it’s okay for our representatives not to govern well if it’s politically inconvenient for them.  We pointed this out; he said, you have to compromise, or you have no power, and then you can’t do anything.  As Ben noted, however, there is always another election; always another race for power; when do you stop campaigning and start governing?  When do you stop compromising?  Apparently not when habeas corpus is threatened, or when power is being consolidated in the executive branch, who now has legal authority to expand the use of torture and self-interpret the Geneva Conventions.  PackerBacker Bob was excusing himself from the table at this point; “Fine,” he said, “if you want to be Naderites, go ahead.”  Well, I guess a Naderite I’ll be, if it means thinking a political platform should consist of something other than “Republicans suck.”
So with poetry (even if unintended), politics, ideas on the nature of design and the design of nature, it seems that Sustainable Convergence lived up to its name by creating a good space for converging viewpoints and themes (as well as some excellent food and good organic wine).  Kudos to Foresight for putting it all together.