Orion Magazine - March/April 2009

artificial present that takes no account of its e=ects on the seventh generation. The artificial humanism that insists that human activities are supremely valuable while other creatures and habitats have no intrinsic value. The world’s richest nations and individuals have adopted a high-risk credit strategy, overborrowing from the Earth, taking the wealth of fossil fuels, heedlessly racking up the toxic debts of CO2 in the sky, and addressing the bill to future generations, to the nation of Tuvalu, or to the Inuit. Chief Seattle’s axiom that we do not own the world but borrow it from our children has always been true but

Staring at the screen of the flight simulator, you are in actuality screened o= from where you are. Being anywhere in the virtual world, you are nowhere in the real one. Facebook is here, of course, being everywhere.

The small boy playing Spyro was stupefied and spaced-out, his senses dulled by the anaesthetic of artifice. The human spirit needs authenticity for its vitality and intelligence to flourish; we know the world bodily and we are intelligent not only with our minds but through our senses, and another word for stupidity is non-sense.

IT IS A PERVERSION OF LANGUAGE TO CALL THE ARTIFICE OF FINANCE REAL AND

THE WHOLE WORLD OF POLAR BEARS, SONGLINES, ICE, AND RIVER UNREAL.

has an intense and sudden relevance now in these toxic debts; we have borrowed from our children more than carbon: we have borrowed sky, serenity, and life, and we are barely bothering to apologize for defaulting so grossly on the loan.

The collapse of the financial markets, meanwhile, is index-linked to its own artifice, and having created synthetic “wealth” for a few, it has demanded that ordinary people should pay in real terms. While hundreds of billions of dollars were poured in to rescue the financial market (that peculiar and greedy artifice of credit, futures trading, short-selling, hedge funds, and gambling), the question remains why there is not a similar, immediate amount of money put toward the rescue of the climate, that radiant, generous, and delicate reality.

I was in the Arctic in the autumn of 2002. The TV was on loud every morning, the urgent clamor of CNN with its frightening straplines about the so-called war on terror, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the tawdry a=air between Britain’s ex–prime minister John Major and Edwina Currie. This was TV at its most artificial, creating artificial distances so the viewer cannot see the deaths and injuries of the bombing raids, but creating artificial proximity so the viewer is intimate with the bed of strangers. Adverts and celebrity culture were creating their artificial dreams and artificial fears.

The Arctic has its chiaroscuro e=ects; the black feather on snow, the red whale blood on a white frozen shore. Perhaps because the Arctic is a place of such stark realities (death and the raven, or the midnight sun), somehow artifice seems yet more artificial by contrast: television’s simulacrum and the virtual world, that über-artifice, seem to jar against the human senses more here than anywhere.

Out on the land, in the Arctic, intelligent hunting uses all the senses, not just the usual five, but a sense of duration in time, a sense of direction in space, a sense of weather, a sense of being watched. In the world of artifice, though, I am exiled from all my own senses, alienated even from myself, existing as a screened-o= simulacrum of myself.

I can’t kiss you with an emoticon. I am alone, I am pale, I am chilly, I am tired, listless under the lifeless glow of my computer, keeping “in-touch” with you on Facebook. I cannot. For in what e-twilight can my hand find yours?

As humans, we are endlessly, delightfully enchantable. Our enchantability has led us to love the moon and ice, the spirits of the land, prairies, dogs, and dragonflies. Our enchantability has given us song, dream, fiction, fascination, enthrallment, and the iridescent quality of art’s illusions.

But this enchantability is also our vulnerability—making us prey to simulacrum, artifice, and con tricks. Gullible, we can be snared by falsity. There are two kinds of fiction; fiction that is a dream and fiction that is a lie. There are two kinds of enthralling too; one, the enthralled rapture of a theater audience, the other, being in thrall, being literally in slavery, to the giddy mesmerizing world of marketing and advertising, spin, PR, and political deceit. The age of oil, with its slick pretense of permanence, has tricked us badly. Modernity, seeking artifice with such avidity, demanding deception for entertainment, has fostered its own credulity, so the lies of Bush and Blair about Iraq, and the helpful deceits of the media, were eagerly swallowed not because they were such good liars but because our society is fascinated by the fake.