THE MIDDLE AISLE OF ALDI

On systems, consumption, and the human animal beneath them

People did not know they were interested in skiing until the ski helmets appeared in the middle aisle of Aldi.

This is obviously not entirely true, which is why it is useful. Desire does not begin in Aldi. But much of what we experience as desire requires an object before it can organise itself into wanting. A wetsuit appears. A pizza oven. A set of dumbbells. A pressure washer. A telescope. Some improbable piece of camping equipment for a life you have never lived. You stop. You look. Suddenly there is a possible version of you who kayaks.

Consumer culture understands this very well. It does not merely satisfy wants. It places possibilities in front of us and waits for desire to form around them. We like to imagine ourselves moving through the marketplace with established preferences, making sovereign choices. Often the marketplace has been considerably more involved in establishing the preferences than we care to admit.

This matters because somewhere inside the problem of consumption is also part of its solution.

I was thinking about this after listening to Harrison Gardner speak about the need to move from silos to systems. He will soon be speaking at a dinner in Ballintubbert with Mary Robinson and others about climate, agriculture, economics and the necessity for different disciplines to begin talking to one another.

I found myself irritated by it.

Partly because I have become suspicious of gatherings of intelligent, well-funded people announcing that what is required is a new way of thinking. We have been having new ways of thinking for quite some time. They arrive with alarming regularity, usually accompanied by a framework.

The problem is that the system itself remains inside a larger silo. Farmers can talk to economists. Economists can talk to ecologists. Architects can talk to politicians. Everybody can move their chairs closer together and congratulate themselves on having escaped their disciplinary enclosures.

But the human being comes with them. The same frightened, acquisitive, status-conscious, imitative, territorial animal walks into the new system and takes a seat.

This is the part we are reluctant to discuss.

We will talk about climate, politics, economics, technology, agriculture, inequality, biodiversity and housing before we talk seriously about the creature attempting to manage all of them. Ontology is less convenient. It does not fit easily into a five-year strategy document.

There is something peculiar too about the scale of the language we now use. We speak about fixing the climate and saving the environment as though either were a discrete object.

What is the environment?

Everything.

Air, soil, oceans, bacteria, forests, concrete, weather, insects, energy systems, farms, houses, factories, rivers, human beings, consumption, geology, death, birth and decay. To say that we will intervene in the environment is not far removed from saying that we will intervene in existence. It is almost theological in scale. Imagine announcing that there was a God problem and assembling a committee to identify the appropriate interventions.

The difficulty is not an argument for doing nothing. Quite the opposite. There are specific things we can do extremely well. If a chemical is destroying atmospheric ozone, stop producing the chemical. If plastic bags cover the hedgerows, make disposable bags expensive enough that people stop taking them. If a river is being poisoned, find the source and stop poisoning it. If soil is exhausted, change what is being done to the soil.

The closer the problem comes to earth, the more intelligible our responsibility becomes.

Somewhere along the way, though, the object expanded. The polluted river became the environment. The emissions source became the climate. The displaced person became the refugee crisis. The shortage of homes became the housing crisis.

Everything became a crisis.

Before that everything was a war. The war on drugs. The war on terror. The war on cancer. The war on poverty. Now we live permanently inside emergency terminology.

A crisis may be real. A war may occasionally be unavoidable. But language acts upon the nervous system before it acts upon the intellect. Crisis announces urgency. It narrows attention, demands allegiance, creates enemies and suspends ambiguity. The collective discourse begins to resemble an externally amplified limbic system. Something terrible is happening. Something must be done. Immediately. And because something must be done, somebody must know what should be done.

That last movement is where I become nervous.

The scale of our certainty seems to increase alongside the scale of the thing we claim to understand. Perhaps the opposite should happen. The larger the object, the greater the humility.

Media makes this worse because speech now costs almost nothing. We are invited to maintain opinions on events occurring everywhere on earth, continuously. Catastrophe arrives through the same screen we use to order socks. Ukraine, Gaza, climate, Trump, migration, artificial intelligence, housing, gender, pandemics, markets, elections, extinction. Before breakfast.

The nervous system receives information at a scale for which it has no corresponding capacity to act. We know far more than we can touch. We are emotionally recruited into circumstances over which we possess almost no agency.

Perhaps the €125 dinner is not the worst idea after all.

At least you have to go somewhere. You have to put on trousers. You have to drive there, probably in an SUV if the jokes are writing themselves properly. You have to sit beside another person and remain in their company after saying whatever you have said. There is food. There is time. There is friction. There is at least some skin in the game.

Perhaps speech should cost something. Not necessarily €125, but attention, reputation, labour, presence, the possibility of being contradicted by somebody who remains physically in front of you. Online we can discharge agitation into language almost instantaneously. Thought barely has time to become thought before it becomes position.

This essay may be guilty of precisely the same thing.

That possibility has to remain open. Any intervention worth making should begin with the admission that it might be useless. Worse, it might do harm. Otherwise we are back inside the same arrogance. We know what is wrong. We know what is good. We know what everyone else should do.

I don't.

But Gardner's practical work interests me considerably more than systems language does.

Common Knowledge teaches people to make things, repair things and understand the physical world around them. That strikes me as genuine intervention because it puts something into the middle aisle. Another possibility appears. You could build this. You could repair that. You could understand how your house works. You could acquire competence rather than purchase another convenience.

A person encounters the possibility of becoming something they did not previously know they wanted to become.

Consumerism does this every day.

Why wouldn't we?

Perhaps culture is changed less by announcing better ideas than by making different forms of life visible. A beautiful house teaches. A garden teaches. A monastery teaches. A carpenter teaches. A functioning family teaches. A badly made building teaches too. So does advertising. So does pornography. So does Instagram. So does the middle aisle of Aldi.

Everything placed before us makes some claim about what a human life might contain.

The real contest is not simply between competing policies. It is between competing objects of desire.

This is where consumption becomes more interesting than recycling. The great environmental rebellion may not be learning to consume responsibly. It may be discovering that we do not need so much.

Not through austerity. Not because somebody in government has calculated our morally permissible allocation of pleasure. Not because deprivation has acquired ecological branding.

Because something has happened inwardly.

Anyone who has undergone a serious spiritual experience will recognise some version of this. It can happen through prayer, grief, illness, parenthood, psychedelics, love, failure, age or simply becoming sufficiently exhausted by one's own bullshit.

Something falls away.

You look at half the things you believed you needed and wonder what strange hunger they were feeding. Consumption drops without becoming a virtue. You just don't want the thing anymore.

That is far more dangerous to the existing order than separating your plastic bottles correctly.

A person who needs less is difficult to sell to. A person who no longer requires constant novelty becomes difficult to stimulate. A person whose identity is not assembled entirely from acquisition, affiliation and display becomes harder to recruit.

This does not produce sainthood. Appetite can migrate.

Consumption has a shadow and its name may be creation.

I stop buying things and start making things. Excellent. Then I discover that I need to be seen making them. I need productivity, output, audience, recognition, legacy. The same hunger changes uniforms.

So making cannot be the final answer either. Creation needs to be subjected to something beyond the creator.

Truth, beauty and goodness are old words, dangerously easy to sentimentalise, but useful precisely because none belongs completely to us. Does this thing need to exist? Is it true to what it claims to be? Does it increase beauty or merely occupy more space? Is it good for the people who make it, encounter it and inherit its consequences?

And perhaps the least fashionable question of all: would anything be lost if we simply did not make it?

The modern economy has very little defence against that question. Neither, for that matter, does much contemporary commentary.

There is another population coming towards this encounter with reality carrying an extraordinary amount of pressure.

Gen Z in particular has inherited a strange confluence of instructions. Consume, but save the planet. Express yourself, but remain permanently aware of how you are perceived. Become financially independent in economies where housing has become increasingly inaccessible. Be sexually liberated, but vigilant. Construct an identity, but do not allow anybody else to define you. Care about events occurring everywhere on earth while possessing almost no power over most of them. Stay informed. Stay safe. Stay open. Stay productive. Stay authentic.

Stay anxious enough to know that everything matters.

It is hardly surprising that anxiety appears.

But eventually abstraction encounters incarnation.

Life arrives. The body gets tired. Money runs out. Somebody dies. A relationship refuses to conform to the vocabulary brought to it. A child requires care regardless of your internal state. Timber has a grain. Soil has a pH. The roof either leaks or it doesn't.

Reality does not argue. It answers.

That encounter will not automatically ennoble anybody. Pressure does not always create diamonds. Sometimes it pulverises. A great many people will be pulverised.

But some will not.

Some will discover under the pressure of reality that large parts of what they inherited were incoherent. The contradiction will become unbearable enough that something else has to form. Not another ideology. Something harder. Something capable of carrying weight.

This is why incarnation matters.

The organism eventually has to encounter a world it did not invent.

Perhaps genuinely new culture emerges there, more often than it does from gatherings of experts. Scientific discovery rarely arrives because everybody agreed on the framework beforehand. Art certainly does not. There is conversation, apprenticeship, tradition, argument and accumulated knowledge. Then somewhere inside a person something catches. An observation. An anomaly. An image. An intuition. The thing arrives.

The task of culture may therefore be less grand than saving the world and considerably more demanding.

Put better things in front of people. Make competence attractive. Make restraint imaginable. Make beautiful buildings. Teach children how things work. Restore contact with land and material. Make places where people can encounter one another without mediation. Allow silence, boredom and difficulty. Make fewer things and make them better. Repair what can be repaired. Plant. Cook. Build. Read. Attend.

And when something is genuinely wrong, get close enough to it that it acquires a name more precise than crisis.

Perhaps systems have their place. Perhaps €125 dinners do too. People have always gathered around tables and occasionally something useful has come from it. I have no knowledge of what will come from Ballintubbert and should not pretend otherwise.

But no gathering escapes the human beings who attend it. No system transcends the ontology of its inhabitants. No policy eliminates appetite. No technology removes mortality. No framework abolishes the possibility that we are wrong.

That recognition need not produce paralysis. It might produce humility.

We cannot stand outside the whole and repair it. We are in it.

So perhaps we begin considerably closer to home, with what we desire, what we consume, what we make, what we refuse to make, and the possibilities we place in front of one another.

The middle aisle has always understood this.

The question is what we put in it next.