Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (18 page)

‘What you think of black magic?’ he suddenly asked.

‘It depends on how it is used,’ I replied.

‘Sorry,’ he said back, sounding as if he assumed that I hadn’t heard his first question. ‘What you think of black magic?’ he asked again.

‘Good,’ I replied this time.

‘You like?’ he said, smiling with large white teeth.

‘I really like,’ I said. ‘I would love to meet your mother. Could we perhaps go back to the shore now?’

‘No, not yet,’ he said, his smile temporarily leaving him, ‘your lesson is not up yet. I want to learn more about your psychology. Turn the other way.’

‘Towards the cyclone?’ I asked hesitantly.

‘Yes, that way,’ he said, gesturing towards the cyclone but without actually mentioning it.

I sat in silence for a moment just listening to the rain bouncing off the boat.

‘Have you met Ronaldo?’ he asked, and looked disappointed when I failed to answer. ‘Would he like a sacrifice? What about Alex Ferguson? My mother would sacrifice a large goat for him for Manchester United to beat Chelsea. You tell me what score you want, two nil, three nil, my
mother arrange it.’ His mind was racing away with him, thinking about all of the commercial possibilities when east meets west. I just wanted him to keep focused and get us back safely. I was trying to put all that I had learned in this lesson, which was not very much, into practice and the small white sail-boat responded well, sprinting back towards the land like a dog trying to get out of a storm. I shook hands with him when I half fell out of the boat onto the shore. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

The rain was torrential now: torrents fell through the trees, torrents raged though the rivulets and drains. There was a large cyclone off Rodrigues Island maybe heading south east, maybe turning towards Mauritius, but it had still sent all this rain here. I stood sheltering with the beach boys who hired out the pedalos and the sail-boats to the tourists. They told me that the cyclones were far more frequent and more intense than they had been in previous years, and that the beautiful manicured grounds of this hotel that sweep down to the lapping waves of the Indian Ocean were now often the victims of flash floods. They also told me that the temperature was rising – they had seen this with their own eyes. Even though they were all in their late teens and early twenties they said that they personally had seen the change – each summer now the temperature climbed to 37 degrees rather than peaking at 32 degrees as it did when they were younger. ‘It’s getting too hot for some tourists,’ said one dark African boy with a fashionable goatee. ‘And much, much too wet,’ said another. ‘One day the tourists may not want to come.’ I knew that they were right from some recent studies I had read. But it is one thing reading it in a paper, and quite a different thing to stand there feeling the new intensity of the cyclone on the horizon.

I climbed back off the beach and saw that the palm tree outside my room now appeared to be emerging out of a deep pool about two metres across. It was an odd sight, like an island that had been drowned – maybe like a vision of the future. A little bird, flame red in colour, called a red cardinal, hopped towards the pool of water around the base of the tree to pick insects from the wet soft ground around the new pond. The heavy patter of rain through the leaves
was everywhere. It was such an evocative image, an image that I knew would prove to be indelible, and it pushed one clear thought my way. It was such a cruel thought. The thought was that we helped make this Eden, we tamed it, we structured it and we imbued it with our unconscious desires and our symbolism of tropical island beauty and romance and sanctuary and aspiration, but then our choices – one at a time, linear, sequential and unconstrained – might already have helped to bury it.

Sometimes you sense when it’s time to change. But the instigation of new actions can be a difficult and, on occasion, uncomfortable process for any individual. It may require deliberation when previously there was none, and the interruption of automatic unconscious routines to be replaced by something more conscious and controlled. Psychologists and other social scientists often talk about ‘habits’ and argue that we will save the planet only if we do something about the destructive and selfish habits of all of us. But I always find the concept of the ‘habit’ mildly disconcerting. Of course it reminds us that habits are forms of learned behaviour, not instinctual and not
necessarily
biologically programmed (although some may well be). The discourse about habits talks about ‘bad habits’, ‘breaking a habit’ and acquiring ‘new habits’, which is both positive and empowering. But my issue with habits is that I just do not see them as more or less behavioural accidents, reinforced in childhood by a contiguous maternal smile or by the sheer contingency of a sibling’s quiet look. They are more deeply ingrained than that, critically attached to aspects of the individual’s personality for sometimes inexplicable reasons. They are often bound up with something much deeper than chance behavioural contingencies, the way that some behavioural psychologists might have us believe.

The image of the palm tree outside my room in Mauritius, its roots fighting for survival in its new private lagoon, made me want to think about some of my core habits – the habits that define me but may be destructive forces from the point
of view of the planet. One of these core habits, now that I am in confessional mode, is my sheer level of consumption and indeed my whole relationship with possessions. I buy far too many clothes, which I accumulate and hoard. These clothes and sports equipment and running shoes are part of me, and I hang on to them for years until every chest of drawers and wardrobe is full to bursting with the internal rails bowed and on the verge of breaking from the sheer weight of the clothes being hung on them. There is no room for anything else and yet I constantly buy. ‘I will find a space,’ I say to another set of disapproving eyes. Suits jut outwards from the wardrobe suspended from the handle in unsteady configurations; some shirts or suits disappear in the wardrobe and I will find them a year or two later, brand new but crumpled and creased and almost unwearable.

A few years ago I treated a shopaholic for a television series for the BBC: her name was Carmel and she lived in a bungalow just outside Derry in Northern Ireland. She was like me in many respects, at least in terms of her shopping habits. She had hundreds of items of clothing and maybe a hundred pairs of shoes. The clothes were stuffed in drawers, under all the beds in her house, including her parents’, in the wardrobe in her boyfriend’s house and even in the back of her car. It was her parents who rang the programme and as part of the ‘therapy’ I made her retrieve the clothes, often still in their wrappers, from the wardrobe and the drawers and under the beds and place them in the front room of her bungalow, eventually forming this giant haystack of clothes, then I sat on top of this clothes mountain with her and I interviewed her on camera. She was a lovely girl and very relaxed but it still felt uncomfortable, because I could have been interviewing myself. I told her off camera that I was no different from her and that I had the same fragile ego that needs that approving look which can most easily be elicited by a new set of clothes. (If you try to get that same approving look in old clothes, or even just clothes that you have worn before, you are more likely to get rejected for being too insecure and needy. With new clothes, however, you can turn on the tap of narcissistic supply and let it pump its soft, velvety liquid all over you.)

As part of the programme we fitted a heart-rate monitor to Carmel to see where the excitement of being a self-confessed shopaholic came from. Carmel could have got the buzz from the power of the credit card, or with the interaction with the sales staff or even by walking down the streets of her native Derry laden with designer bags, all attracting envious glances. But no, the buzz came, and her heart rate peaked, when she got home and tried on her new clothes in front of her family and particularly in front of her beautiful sister, because for a moment all eyes were on Carmel. It was easy for me to predict what the critical moment would be and to understand exactly what her consumption did for her, her ego and her life. It sometimes pays to be a flawed psychologist.

But from the point of view of the planet I cannot go on consuming in this way because the labels on all of these shirts and suits that I buy tell me that many of them are manufactured in China, competing to be the world’s largest emitter of CO
₂
and the new bogeyman of climate change. As Walker and King (2008) put it:

The pace of development in China is extraordinary. A year or so ago, China was building a new coal-fired station a week. Now it is more like two a week and counting … their new power stations are especially bad news from a climate perspective because coal is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, producing not just smoke and smog in the cities, but also much more carbon dioxide for every unit of energy than either oil or gas. (2008:199)

But of course, life is never that straightforward: you do have sympathy with a government trying to do something about the economic gulf that exists in that country, with vast and conspicuous wealth centred in Beijing and Shanghai and yet 700 million or so people living on less than two dollars per day (see Walker and King 2008:200). As Walker and King (2008:200) point out, ‘China can say, with justice, that unlike the industrialised West, it has done almost nothing to create the climate problem, and that its citizens play on average a very meagre part in perpetuating it.’ China
might have a total annual emission rate of 6,467 megatonnes of CO
₂
, but its per capita emission rate is 5.0 tonnes per person, compared with 7,065 megatonnes for the USA but 24.0 tonnes per person (with the UK at 656 megatonnes and 11.0 tonnes per person).

I need to pass on some of the things I have bought to cut down overall consumption to slow down the pollution from China and other developing countries, but I also need to break the emotional bond between me and my possessions and to separate who I am from what I own, but I knew that this was going to be easier said than done, even when life was conspiring to help me.

In Mauritius the Hotel Maritim had a gym, and every day without fail at roughly the same time I would be there. This is also a big part of being a narcissist. The gym was quite quiet and most days it was just the instructor and me – he was a broad-shouldered Mauritian of Indian descent with a shaved head and a left eye that seemed to be permanently bloodshot, perhaps as a result of the effort he was putting into his bench presses. We would train in parallel and thereby developed a sort of bond, an intimacy that comes from routine and dedicated activity. Each day he would ask me about my runs and often he would remark on the quality of my running shoes. One day I happened to comment that in England I had maybe sixty pairs of running shoes. And from then on he kept asking me when I was leaving and whether I would be leaving in the morning or the afternoon. It was as if he didn’t want to miss my departure, although I couldn’t really understand why. But then he came right out with it and he asked me whether I would give him my running shoes when I left. ‘They are of much better quality than the ones we get here in Mauritius,’ he said. I glanced down at the shoes he was wearing: they were also Nike and I could see that they were much bigger than mine. I pointed this out to him and he explained that the shoes he was wearing were several sizes too big for him but that they had been given to him by a previous guest.

So this was my essential dilemma. I know I need to break my habits of consumption and to do something about my emotional attachment to possessions. I know I need to
recycle not just tins and cans but my shirts and suits so that hundreds of other shirts and suits don’t have to be produced in the first place. Giving a pair of trainers away would be a start, a small moral act that would make me feel better about myself and might be the first step in my attempt to break one of my destructive habits, but it was never going to be easy. I sat that night full of self-reproach, raging at my lack of will. My problem is that I know that this is one of my stable and enduring traits – rooted in the insecurity of my working-class childhood and most certainly not reinforced and conditioned by those around me. This attitude to my possessions has all the wrong cogitations for a mere ‘habit’: the wrong aetiology, the wrong sustaining features and the wrong connection to my essential self.

My attitude to my possessions has always been there as far back as I can remember; indeed, one of my earliest ‘flash-bulb’ memories of my childhood centres around the destructive aspects of this attitude. Like all flashbulb memories this is something that I cannot forget, and I do try to forget it because it is an image and a narrative associated with shame, but my conscious will to forget cannot undo what has been stored unconsciously and involuntarily and, it would seem, for a lifetime. The memory concerns a visit to my uncle and aunt’s house. They lived in Lesley Street in Ligoniel, at the edge of Belfast, and some Saturdays I would take my box of cornflakes folded over at the top, and my pyjamas, and go up there to sleep between my aunt and my uncle in a house that smelt different from ours. In the morning they would sometimes let me go and play on the steep hill at the end of the street, the steep hill where my fort ended up.

My father made a fort for me at work. He was a motor mechanic for Belfast City Corporation and worked on its buses in the Falls Road depot. He told me that he was bringing something for me and I waited for him for an hour at the bus stop at the top of Legmore Street. It wasn’t my birthday or anything like that; it was just a present. I saw him in his oil-stained overalls with his glasses on, getting off the bus with something large wrapped in newspaper. He was a slight man and he could hardly carry it, but he was smiling, because he knew that I would be very pleased when I saw it.
He tottered as he held it in front of him. He wouldn’t open the present until we got into the front room. Our dog Spot was jumping all over the furniture, sniffing the paper and barking, shredding the paper with his sharp teeth, too excited. The package was soon opened by the dog and me. I stood staring at the present. I had never seen anything like the fort before. It had brown metal ramparts with zigzag steps shaped out of a single piece of aluminium and a hardboard base. The whole thing was solid and well put together. It must have taken months to make in his spare time at work, and every bit of metal had been shaped by hand. I had received an expensive Christmas present that year – a rocket and missile base, in which the rocket and the missiles both fired. But the fort was different. In these rows of identical mill houses all crouching in that hollow below the hills that ring Belfast, street after street of them as far as the eye could see, all with their cheap identical flowery settees bought on credit from the same shops at the bottom of the Shankill, and the same pictures on the wall of foxes, fawns, infants – in fact anything with big eyes professing innocence and adoration – there was something individual and unique about the fort, made in and for love. And made for me.