losing versatile solutions for modern living

Recently, through a series of communication snafu’s, a friend on mine nearly lost her domain name. Her struggles to navigate the quagmire that is the telecommunications industry reminded me in many ways of my own difficulties with the strife of modern living. Not long ago I recounted the disaster that was the failure of our refrigerator. Though we eventually got it repaired, it was out of commission for several days, and forced us to rely on a variety of strategies for keeping frozen foods. Perhaps the most difficult decision was what to do with the frozen placenta in our freezer that we were planning on planting beneath a tree in our backyard. Ultimately we stored many items in various coolers, friend’s refrigerators, and even made use of the freezer at our daughter’s co-op for a time to get us through till life was restored to our own unit.

Last week we experienced another unsettling dilemma when the power went out over half of our house. I checked the breakers, swept the plugs, called the city and eventually an electrician was called. It turns out the problem was in the breaker box. I didn’t catch it because our 30 year old box is in such a sad state that when a breaker trips, it doesn’t move, so I am left guessing where the problem might lie. To make matters worse, nothing is labeled. The best we can hope for is to plug a few lights in at various points throughout the house, start throwing switches and see what flickers. Ultimately we ended up pulling an orange extension cord from one side of the house to the other to restore phone and modem, and were lucky enough to be spared another refrigerator ordeal.

Needless to say, the electrician was less than impressed with our methods. After some debate and a horrendous quote that would cost me more than the birth of my second child, the electrician left, shaking his head and saying, “you have to get that thing fixed somehow!”

I found myself thinking about these myriad situations in philosophical terms, and posted as much on the unreliable narrators site. What follows are the general comments I made there, but which I felt deserved further fleshing out here: I think it was Lucretius that suggested that the isolated or “natural” man would be savage and brutal but would have greater freedom and happiness and fewer vices than the civilized man. Today, however there is a tendency to think of the savage life as unstable, dangerous and insecure where, far from being happy, we would live in constant fear of death and that we are really social creatures, which loosely translates into being utterly dependant on one another for the most basic tools of survival: a woobie, a modem, a few gallons of petrol, and a large supply of Haagan Dazs. Without them are we Robinson Crusoe, a social man in isolation making solitude an object of reflection?

I was recently reading E.M. Forster’s short story, The Machine Stops, and reflecting on just these questions. At what point do we say I am still independent? If the power went off in my home, we might be able to survive for a few days, devouring the contents of the fridge first then moving on to canned goods. Without water, that time would be cut in half. I like to think of myself as self sufficient, but it only seems to exist within the system of carefully balanced rules that have been erected around me. Without them I spend a lot of time on the phone pleading to get them back. Maybe it is this recognition of our dependence of the system and the importance of considering life without it that Lucretius saw as having greater freedom and happiness? What do I know? I enjoy the irony of typing this question into my word processor.

I have a cousin living just outside of Austin whose declared intention is to “live off of the grid.” I can’t even imagine what that would be like. Though I suppose, many of the green living solutions are really just this. Install solar panels to be less reliant on power companies, a rainwater cistern to be less reliant on the water company, build a compost pile and grow your own seasonal vegetables, bike, or better yet walk wherever you can. The entire green movement is about being less dependent on systems, or, I suppose, about substituting one system for another. I am very guilty of this.

When Crusoe finds himself shipwrecked on an island, he is completely isolated from society. In this isolation, Crusoe creates his own civilization, population one, though he bemoans his isolation. As he begins to re-encounter people he discovers that his idyllic world is merely another social construct, one in which he is neither king nor governor, but the same middle-class man he left behind in England. Arguably the island is not Crusoe’s final destination, however Crusoe’s needs have never really changed, even while his surroundings did, and so ultimately Crusoe abandons the island and returns home.