Change what you believe by changing what you do
When I open my compost bin, I see all the things breaking down to soil and think “that’ll be me one day”. And a feeling of satisfaction flows through me.
I’ve written about my struggle to accept that I’ll die one day before and it’s a lot:
This was an acknowledgement that, yes, I will die – and not by my own hand. And I was asking myself if I’d recognise death when it arrives, like an old friend returned.
Looking at decaying fruit and veg, though, brings about a sense of peace. It’s not just rot: it’s matter changing state, changing purpose. It’s food becoming soil that will help my garden grow. One day, I’ll do the same.
And, sure, I won’t be buried in my backyard (and this isn’t a Nightmare of You type situation). But throw me in a hole near some trees and I’ll get to work.
Here’s the thing: thinking and writing and philosophising didn’t help me find a way to being down with death. It came from interacting with nature.
The more I do in the world, the more I understand how action can come before thought. It’s easy to think that all your pondering and pontificating comes first: you think for a bit, arrive at a decision, define your beliefs and then get on with things.
But the opposite is true as well: what you do, and the things you interact with, help define your most deeply held beliefs.
So let’s break it down:
- Our ideas come from interacting with our world.
- The systems we interact with become what we believe in (using capitalism as a totally uncontroversial example).
- We can change our views by doing different things
Our ideas come from interacting with our world
Our ideas like knowledge, truth and justice came from our interactions with nature, according to research fellow Matthieu Queloz. They emerged from well grounded human worries – not abstract ideals or “higher plains” like God or Plato’s eternal forms (wherein earthly versions of things are just shadows puppets on a cave wall compared to their perfect shape high above).
Sure, “knowledge” may have become a higher value but, Queloz argues, its importance started as a pressing need. We needed to figure shit out to survive. “Justice” was necessary to keep us together and it didn’t just float down from the heavens (or some asshole in a powdered wig), it was forged out of interactions with other people.
They weren’t just ideals: they were the result of human concerns being actively solved by people. And Queloz argues that knowing this helps understand how these ideals work and what they were made to solve.
There’s a flip side, though: if we’re removed from the daily practice of these ideals, they can seem useless or – worse – used against us. And if we’re disconnected from nature and the world as a whole, we can lose our sense of agency all together.
We believe in what we interact with
Take the rise of capitalism, for example. Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel argued that capitalism separating people from nature is a feature, not a bug, in his book Less is more: how degrowth will save the world. In his telling, the catalyst for the capitalism was the mass acquisition of public land by the English government, which disconnected people from the natural world and limited their ability to be self sufficient.
At the same time, ideologies that separated people from nature flourished. Francis Bacon turned "mother nature" into a "harlot" that needed to be restrained. René Descartes's dualism presented a view that humans alone have agency and motivation. Immanuel Kant argued that humans have no obligation to non-human beings.
To be clear, I’m not saying Bacon, Descartes, and Kant were huddled in dark rooms absolutely frothing about capitalism. I’m just saying that their ideas emerged at a time when people were being systematically separated from the natural world and that their ideas added intellectual weight to that idea.
They were interacting with a particular world as well. And their ideas addressed the concerns of that world – just in a way that supported the trend towards exploiting nature.[1]
Change what you do, change your views
If it’s true that our abstract ideas – our values, our guiding principles – emerge from our interactions with the world, then being removed from nature will dramatically shape our ideals. If we’re presented with an assortment of problems that are defined by capitalism’s needs then, well, we’ll start with solutions that support those needs.
By redefining the boundaries of our world to be cities, work and consumption, policy makers and capitalists shaped society’s grand ideas to make it easier to exploit nature and people.
That’s not a value judgement (as much as I’m opposed to that world view). It’s just what happened. The world we inhabit defines our beliefs. And our world has been shaped by a select few for very particular ends.
But we can change those interactions – and how they shape our thinking – by getting out there and doing stuff.
I recommend starting with a compost bin. It gives you something to look forward to.
The 30-second action plan
- Grab a notebook (or your notes app of choice) and jot down some of your core assumptions.
- Reflect on how your actions reinforce your assumptions. Decide if they’re working for you.
- Design some new behaviours that could help shift your assumptions. Keep them simple. Nothing too ambitious.
- Book some time to wander around trees. Or ponds. Or flowers. Any natural stuff. Spend some time appreciating these delightful things for their own sake. If that seems pointless to you – do it as a challenge. But really try. That’s what we’re about here.
- Baruch Spinoza went the other direction, arguing that God could be found in all things and that, because of that, all things were sacred. And, look, he ain’t held up as a philosophical great in the way Bacon, Descartes and Kant are, is he? I’ve always preferred Spinoza’s philosophy, personally, but that’s just because I’ve always been cool and rebellious. ↩︎