Litter and Nihilism

Commonplace Newsletter #28

The Freshkills Landfill site, Staten Island, NY.

We can learn a lot about a civilisation from their everyday objects and from what they discard. This, in many ways, is what the field of archaeology consists of. Tools, containers, garments, ornaments all buried in time and then excavated and speculated upon.

So I wonder what the fossil-hunters of future centuries will make of our own epoch- what hypotheses will they draw from the dug up detritus of crushed Monster cans, crumpled sandwich packets and fly-tipped but serviceable television sets?

And what can these items, if anything, tell us people now living about our present moment?

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‘Nature Is Healing, We Are The Virus’

During the first lockdown back in March 2020, we in England were officially allowed to go out only once per day to get some exercise. And so my walks became even longer than usual.

(Tell me I can’t do something, or that my ability to do something is limited, and suddenly I will begin to do it to excess. In this way I am eminently controllable, by simple use of bad-sitcom reverse-psychology tactics.)

As I walked the same streets and alleys and parks and cut-throughs and estates, I noticed an interesting thing develop day to day and week to week. Things were becoming cleaner, fresher, wilder.

At first I attributed this good feeling in the air to the unseasonably beautiful weather and the lack of crowds and pedestrians on the streets (an introverts dream), and cars on the roads. Less noise, more chance to hear the birdsong. This was a part of it.

But on my daily investigations I noticed something else too. Things were becoming greener. Manicured public grass was neglected and so grew longer and more beautiful. Grasses and weeds and even flowers started to push up between the gaps in the paving slabs. And the litter seemingly subsided by itself and did not return.

As the meme of the time had it: nature was healing. And indeed, it seemed that we were the virus.

It’s strange what you get used to. A moderate- though to some totally unacceptable- level of litter on the streets soon becomes an unnoticed facet of modern life, like the low-level hum of a fridge-freezer. You only notice it when you consciously tune in to it. And then it becomes aggravating.

I suspect this selective-attention is our brains looking out for us. Imagine how annoying it would be to take some for of Limitless pill that allowed you to unlock all of the unused parts of your brain. You’d notice everything; every noise, every gratingly unaesthetic aspect of your surroundings, every last hypocrisy and lapse of logic in every single conversation. Nightmarish.

(There may be a short story idea in here. I should make a note of it.)

But back to the litter. It becomes something you almost imperceptibly adapt to, like the proverbial boiling of the frog or the incremental annual shifts of the Overton Window (although in truth, in a world of social media the Overton Window often seems to be more akin to Overton’s Sliding Patio Door.)

It is only when circumstances change and the hob of boiling water is temporarily turned off that you begin to notice just how hot the water has become. Or in this case, just how rubbish-strewn the streets have grown.

You think back to all of those disregarded McDonalds milkshake cups and balled-up crisp packets (for my American readers crisps= chips) and the archipelagos of cigarette butt that would form outside of train stations and court houses and you shake your head. You think back to- in bad neighbourhoods- those strangely alluring glittering carpets of broken glass that signal that another car has recently been stolen.

But why all the litter, beyond mere reflexive thoughtlessness? Surely, there is a little more to it than that.

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Throwaway Culture

As is sometimes the case with these weekly essays, we stand now on the verge of descending into a curmudgeonly round of griping about how things were better in the good old days and how standards have now slipped all around.

This line of thinking has some merit- it certainly has plenty of plausibility- but it ultimately drags you down and thus makes you incapable of bringing about, on however small a scale, the change you wish to see in the world. Gandhi was right on that score.

But still you have to acknowledge a problem before you can tackle it, you have to track the beast before you can vanquish it.

And the problem here is the disposability of culture, in every meaning of that phrase. Planned obsolescence is outrageous and also ubiquitous, as unremarked upon as the aforementioned trash that blights the streets we walk.

Environmental depredation aside, rare mineral depletion and Developing World slave labour aside, what does it say when our goods are all built with a bare-minimum, that’ll-do mindset? Cathedrals have withstood a millennia, there are shoes and lace goods in museums that have survived centuries, but today I count myself lucky if my laptop lasts eighteen months before giving up the ghost.

Another day, another binliner full of too-cheap and now boring clothes donated to charity. Another year, another new phone with a slightly better camera and a slightly higher resolution screen to stare away your life in.

This is a point both tediously familiar and yet overlooked all at once. Because objects have a way of taking on metaphorical resonance and these signals have a way of shaping our conduct. If your gadgets, your clothes, your environment and the architecture that surrounds (or indeed oppresses) you as you go about your day all subtlety subcommunicate ‘who cares’ and ‘why bother?’ then how can you expect to cultivate the kind of worldview that is the foundation of building things that last?

To raise your station in life, you must first raise your standards. And that is a two way street.

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Small, Antisocial Acts

A further point about the litterbug habit- it is a small yet deeply antisocial act. Every casually tossed food wrapper is a small signal of nihilism. It is the ‘who cares’ attitude implied in our tech and our concrete eyesores made manifest and perpetuated.

You only get graffiti on the side of ugly buildings, you only get litter in cities and in places where cars can roam. Such things are slight gestures of despair, ineffectual yet telling tiny protests.

You don’t desecrate and spoil something you respect and revere and feel protective towards. And how many things remain that fit that bill?

But without myself giving in to nihilism by highlighting the futility and seeming inevitably of the nihilistic little gestures of others, I’ll try to conclude this in a level-headed, if not fully upbeat fashion.

Littering, like so many other careless and antisocial little acts is symptomatic of a wider malaise. And when you get to the root of a problem, the symptoms have a way of resolving by themselves. And the root of this, as with so much else, is existential. To litter is to express a belief system and belief systems can be changed, or at least modified, by acts of will and pursuance of a wider perspective.

As I said, a persons standards need to raise and the slipping of these need to be taken as a signal. I worked with an ex Royal Marine once who would mop floors, peel potatoes, and scrub toilets to the absolute highest standards. Not out of a neurotic, persnickety perfectionism but because if you’re gonna do something you do it properly. The way you do anything is the way you do everything, as they say.

And that- besides the fact it would’ve been drilled into him by threat, force, and sheer repetition since the time of the Falklands- comes from a place of respect for the self, the world, and the Other.

And this way of being has a way of being contagious when encountered.

This is the lesson to be learned. This is the way out.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I’ve just noticed that my flat could do with a bit of a vacuum.

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