All things go to eleven

It’s impossible to talk about anything proportionately. Everything has to be a battle of all or nothing, good and evil, stasis or complete destruction.

There are a number of things I’d like to talk about, and think about, with other people. But I’d like to talk about them shorn of the contemporary political overdetermination that engulfs every issue. This is harder by the day.

Let’s take environmental issues. Ach—is that even the right term? Am I setting this conversation up to take the exact turn I don’t want it to take? Probably. Damn.

It’s baked in: “environmental issues.” That phrase itself evokes strong, passionate moral reactions in most readers, whether they tend left or right. For the left, you can almost hear the capital letters; Environmental Issues. We’re talking about the mega-horrible-gaiapocalypse. For the right, they may not want to talk about them at all because all they hear is what the left is going to do with the topic, so they’re already primed to fight against Thunbergism.

This prevents common-sense discussion of basic, real-world issues before it starts. Disclosure: I’m closer to how “the right” would react to that question, but I’m not satisfied with that outcome. The left has gone way too far with environmental issues, and I do sigh and roll my eyes when they come up.


But I have questions and concerns about waste and pollution that will strike the right as “leftie environmental sensitivity”. Avoiding the discussion is not a solution, and it shouldn’t have to be this way.

Here’s an example. Yesterday I was at a lumber mill and contractor’s warehouse ordering materials for the renovation of my flood-damaged apartment. This is Men’s World. Men run the business, order the tool inventory, wax poetic about the virtues of this wood or that drill bit. Men do the carrying and lifting and all the same sorts of things men have always done.

Why am I highlighting the sex who predominates here? Because being left today is feminine. It simply is. It’s a female-dominated political grouping that never shuts up about female-typical levels of emotional investment in causes. One of the benefits—or former benefits—of being in a men’s grouping is escaping from mommyism.

This is not a leftist “space”. Or, is it?

Well, yes, it is, when it comes to “the environment.” Once again, just engaging in the normal small talk with the employees about the job I was ordering for provoked lamentations about the environment. Mentioning the flood and how much money and work it was costing me got:

”Well, it’s going to keep happening with what we’re doing to the environment.”

”I’ve seen three floods in the past 15 years and it’s just going to get worse becaue we keep heating up the planet.”

Lord. All I wanted to do was engage in friendly complaining banter about a discrete (and awful) event. Not possible. Everyone had to make sure to signal that they knew “the environment was collapsing,” that we—including those of us standing there in the store—were responsible for it, etc.

These were all down to earth men. Working class men who build and work with their hands. Their opponents are water, earth, and temperature, which their trades work to control every day.

These are not bureaucratic Millennial women on a perpetual mommy crusade, but they may as well have been. You can see why anyone with a disposition to the right of center would want to avoid talking about anything that evokes “the environment.”

Well, I’m to the right of the center politically, but I still have concerns and questions about how we deal with the material world we build and what effect it has on the health of our environment. I’d like to talk about those without the frankly religious overlay. I’d like to talk about them without the left thinking I’ve signed on to their anti-human martyr cult, and without the right thinking that my concerns about pollution make me a clucking Karen.

Here are some of those issues.

1. Plastic has taken over everything. We have plastic seals over other plastic seals on almost everything, down to spice bottles. It’s absurd, annoying and wasteful. Safetyism is clearly at work in food packaging (hysterical, excessive safetyism).
   
   Doesn’t this surfeit of plastic bother others? What do we do with it, actually? How long does it actually take to break down and go through the cycle anyway?

2. Even in rural, lush Vermont, we have a problem with badly designed paved surfaces. Our islands of asphalt in our smallish cities contributed to the devastation of the recent flooding. Our drainage is insufficient; our built surfaces take no account of height above sea level and necessary inclines for drainage.

3. Almost nothing is effectively reused in any way that seems reasonable or efficient. We’ve gone from a country that used to take back glass soda bottles for refilling to a country where almost everything is plastic and single use. Where is it all going? Can it actually be recycled in a way that is more efficient and less polluting than throwing it away and casting new plastic? Is the solution to return to durable materials like glass? And what are the economic incentives for and against that? How do they compete with values of thrift and waste-not, want-not?

These all seem to me to be reasonable questions that any person of common sense and an ordinary commitment to living in a shared world would want to discuss. They don’t seem to me to be “left” or “right” issues.

But how often do you see conversations about these things that don’t immediately divide along political lines? It’s pretty much impossible. One party in the conversation will be the first one to signal his commitment or anti-commitment to “environmentalism,” and the whole effort is derailed because opposing parties must counter-signal.

All conversations go to eleven, everywhere, all the time.