I posted some of this before, but I am reading part of it at my UIC talk today so I thought I'd share if again.
If asceticism was simply a matter of self-mortification then
we could claim that we have never lived in more ascetic times. We diet to shed those dozens and dozens of
unsightly pounds; some voluntarily submit to a surgical ablating of the flesh
for the purposes of fabricating the perfect nose; our star athletes allegedly
undergo a period of sexual continence before the big game; some of you may even
gallop on scorching days for distances in excess of twenty-six miles, for no
better reason than to replicate the achievement of the first person to die from
that feat. And in general terms the
definition of the ascetic as a person who practices “rigorous self-discipline,
severe abstinence, austerity”, might tempt us to smuggle the more excessive of
these modern deprivations under the definitional bar. However, the OED qualifies the definition by
pointing out that asceticism aims are achieved “by seclusion or by abstinence
from creature comforts”. Furthermore,
the term derives etymologically from the Greek asketikos, meaning monk or
hermit and more generally the root term is ascesis – the practice of self
discipline, or exercise. If, in the
final analysis, the contemporary mortifications listed above seem to fall short
of being ascetic, why might we, in contrast, regard environmentalism as
fundamentally so?
To use the life of Simeon Stylites as a point of comparison
with environmental thought and practice may be a challenging place to start to
make a case that environmentalism is foundationally ascetic. Certainly there are more temperate ascetics,
ones who like St Antony of Egypt (231-356 AD) traveled to the wilds there to
meditatively dally, but after decades alone returned to society, at least in
the sense of taking many disciples under his care. In other words, there are ascetics whose
practice might be more appropriately compared to Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden
Pond. Perhaps one might compare
tree-stylites like John Muir perched in a storm-tossed Douglas Spruce or Julia
Butterfly Hill residing in her California Redwood to the ascetic sadhus of
India, who, practicing what is called urdhamukhi, dangle out of trees. In the case of Hill, she lasted two years; as
for the Muir and the sadhus, the latter who dangle upside-down, their tree
dwelling lasted a matter of hours. And
so on; one might look for a milder ascetic counterpart for Robinson Jeffers
dyspepsia concerning his fellows, preferring you’ll recall, to “sooner, except
the penalties, kill a man than a hawk”; one for Ed Abbey’s hilarious but
curmudgeonly defense of inaccessibility
for Arches National Monument in Desert Solitaire; one for Paul Ehrlich’s
discomfort in an ancient Indian taxi (“People visiting, arguing and screaming….
defecating and urinating”) prompting his writing of The Population Bomb;
counterparts even for the simple-living needed for ecological footprint
reduction, for the belt-tightening required by sustainability, and for the
meat-eschewing dicta of environmental vegetarianism. In all of these examples there is a whiff of
asceticism but none requires the foot ulcerating commitment of standing on a
pillar for decades.
