Editor’s note: This commentary is by Nate Denny, a former woodworker and teacher from Northfield.
Like everyone else in Vermont, I have at times felt a bit stir crazy during the past few months, and thoughts of pristine tropical beaches and turquoise water have itched in my brain as spring seemed to take forever getting here. Yet that slow progress of time spent carefully weighing one’s actions and motivations is, in fact, normal. It is the pace of modern life since the invention of steam-driven locomotion that is madness.
In the past two centuries humanity has learned to go fast and in the process we have gone quite mad, infected from head to toe with the need to be somewhere else, seeking a location cure. The coronavirus epidemic, a relatively mild ailment in a long series of horrific diseases spread by human migration, has provided an opportunity to reassess what a human needs, indeed, what humanity needs.
What we need is less.
With the planet overheating as a result of all of our frenetic activity and the sixth global extinction well underway, it is time to realize that it should be more difficult to get from here to there. It should be so expensive to ship products across oceans that the difference in wages between a free populace and that of a cowed proletariat is balanced out. The price of fossil fuels should be so high that a ride in an airplane should be a rare event. Who enjoys dealing with the TSA, anyway? People should, in general, stay home with their families, learn to live smaller lives, and suppress the need to express the pricklier aspects of their personalities. In other words, we should grow up.
What would that do to the global economy? Well, I guess that economic activity would slow to a walking pace. Which is about as fast as a human can safely travel when not surrounded by a ton of steel and plastic and air bags. I’m not saying people shouldn’t have cars. It’s a metaphor, you see, to suggest that the pace of modern life has made us prone to road rage, inconsiderate of others, and unable to make good decisions in times of crisis, such as a global pandemic.
It isn’t as if I believe that the human race won’t return to moving around at breakneck speed, not until Mother Earth has figured out how to once and for all reduce our numbers. I don’t really believe that the madness of modern life will fade away and we will reject the twin poisons of social media and envy. And I probably won’t be able to say no if my wife suggests that we vacation on a Caribbean island, although I should. You see, I am weak, thanks to the corruption of modern life, and so are you.
