Self-Absorbed in Dundas (aka “Fundas”)

The word vainglorious is appearing evermore frequently in the press these days. Ego-tripping has always been prominent in the rich world but seems to have surpassed the tipping point in 2007. Perhaps this trend is rooted in the kind of self-glorification Facebook propagates. I bit the bullet and joined this evil self-promoting empire the other week. For me, the choice was actually a no-brainer as I have been guilty to the extreme of vainglory these past few years. The market for post-graduate academic and policy research consulting work demands that I project an image of success. As a grad student with contingent, flexible and part-time jobs on the horizon, this drive to brand myself a winner has sometimes been overwhelming. I am quite certain that my occasional obsession with this aspect of the biz pisses my colleagues off to some extent, if not my academic overlords, non-professional acquaintances and even my friends. With Facebook, the latest incarnation of my fixation, I made the choice to dive in not simply for the personal connectivity that it can enable. Making use of the site seemed also to be a good opportunity to create a few “backwards linkages” in my network. My thinking at the time was that some of the people that I had fallen apart from over many years of increasingly instrumental or career-oriented networking might be tempted to check out what I was up to. In hindsight, this rationale reeks of an individualism gone horribly wrong. That being said, I won’t be closing down my account anytime soon. I’ll leave it to others to decide whether this is an instance of cognitive dissonance or of Facebook’s increasingly insurmountable cultural “hegemony.” It’s likely a little bit of both….

The “culture” of self-centricity in this place is at the forefront of my mind these days due to the fact that it was quite absent during my time in Sénégal. Social living with Keba Faty’s wonderful family and his French expat researcher guests enabled me to approach life in an entirely new way. There is no place in his extended household for “gaining wealth and forgetting all but self.” Back when I was a treeplanter in Northern Ontario’s massive clear cuts I had previously lived a communal life. However, the nature of that dirty job – i.e. bending over for 8 cents per tree again and again to get my piece of the limited “pie” before someone else did – reinforced my selfishness. In Dakar I felt connected to those around me at a higher level. Gone were the barriers to community thrown up by suburbia and its fleet of so-called “private” gas guzzling transport containers. In their place was a teeming market where the sights and the scents drew my attention to the fact time and again that we are all in the same boat. French colonial heritage might also have had something to do with my experience. It was my first time living for an extended period with people who have grown together outside of what can be called the “Anglo-American” sphere of influence and individuality.

I worry these days about the extent to which North Americans are individualized and privatized. I am not sure if it is healthy that the solution to nearly every social or ecological ill on offer in the popular press seems to be market-based or rooted in the idea that people have to get busy helping themselves. I am getting fed up with hearing about the micro-level, peripheral successes of self-aggrandizing philanthropic entrepreneurs or “philanthropreneurs”, as The New York Times has dubbed them. The fact that the onus is being put on North American citizens to alter their consumption habits in order to save the planet, rather than on rent-seeking, non-innovative corporations that are supplying the public with outdated technologies such as the internal combustion engine, is also continual source of frustration. The need for substantive global level collective efforts to implement regulatory ideas about the global economy and the biosphere that have been floated for decades and that could very well advance the principles of global equality and intergenerational equity has never been starker. Yet the media continues to foster the notion that the star power of Oprah, Bono and Bill Gates is making more than a marginal difference. They have sung the praises of the latest Nobel Peace Prize winning “solution” for poor people across the South – that they should jump into debt through obtaining micro-finance in order to eventually climb the “ladder” out of poverty – at a time when there appears to be no end in sight to the astronomical levels of personal indebtedness amongst ostensibly “rich” consumers in the United States. The market for information is saturated with stories about the world that have been framed in a similar manner. Maybe someday more people will become aware of the limits of the current orgy of individualism. For example, the absurdity of excess individualism might become apparent when media “consumers” are implored to sponsor individual penguins atop of melting icebergs in order to facilitate their relocation via corporate-sponsored carbon neutral yachts to CFC-free cold storage pens at private “climate refugee” reserves. Or not. Financial types often point out the necessity and desirability of this pervasive force. As an individual, I agree with them. But I also believe that it must be balanced, as Karl Polanyi pointed decades ago in The Great Transformation, with an equally dominant community orientation. So, where’s the balance? I’m still trying to find it….