5th anniversary of the Paris Accords—and my birthday (68)
I wrote this in response to Gore’s recent piece (RECOMMENDED) in the NYT.
Science depends on facts in its search for truth and human culture must have science to have more than a prayer to survive. But human culture must also give up on some of its old and fixed ways of seeing. In modern times such thinking begins with cogito ergo sum (I THINK THEREFORE I AM) but anthropocentrism, racism, sexism, and other inequalities go back 10,000 years to the first significant division of labor that built agriculture, husbandry, cities, religion, and the business of war. Consider a few predicates. The world (the universe!) was created by a supreme being—who looked just like us--& for US alone, “HE” made everything on the earth. In short the planet is our private warehouse full of useful junk that we can use up as we please because “HE” wants us to. Implicit in all this is that we are a special thinking animal (unlike the others who are instinctual beasts or [worse] the nearly dead plants—that don’t think at all--, etc) or other creatures (fungi, bacteria, archaea, viruses, etc) that don’t really count at all), and the bit that WHITE MEN are a special race of man, likewise a special gender, ad nauseam. Of course at this late date, some of us are beginning to know that we do not live on top of the earth and on top of all the others, but with and in continuous relation with other organic and inorganic forms and fields of forces of the whole co-exstensive EARTH—that thinking itself is co-extensive and distributive. Put it this way:
the way we look
is the way we look at it.
And that’s something we better change soon, because we are witnessing geological changes in the span of a single life. Vectors that could spark untoward events are going off in every direction on every plateau. You know this. So being willing to look at the facts of the planet alone is not going to be near enough. We must build a new paradigm for how we look at ourselves and this world and our place in it. But who can really do this?
Just when you thought that the arts and humanities were useless...
Relying on science, serious artists and those working in the humanities are indeed well-equipped to help humanity develop a new way of seeing itself as something inside of the immanent world--not above it in body or mind—but something emergent from interacting co-evolutionary processes. That is the gist of my proposal. They can help us build egalitarian myths to live by. But can those people you might call our religious guides (not talking shamans here—who are most welcome!) join in? They also must give up a lot of self-serving notions from the past.They must also learn about the facts of life and science to begin to embrace a practice of living with all the earth in the present and not in advocacy of being with HIM after DEATH in HEAVEN ABOVE. Earth’s the right place for love and to get that right all way around--a new kind of spirit is called for.
I don’t think humanity will survive without developing a more modest and truthful mythos and philosophy to live by. But really to succeed, ALL OF US must contribute to the work of discovering a new language for really talking accurately about the planet and our place with it. To illustrate one point. We not only live in an environment, we are an environment for many others. Every biome of our body is full of bacteria and archaea and viruses. Are we their symbionts or they ours? Every cell is full of others. Every form a composite of others. We are not discrete individuals, but consortial entities. There is more that is other in our bodies than is us. In this world move as we will, we are never alone and we never act without affecting others. We cannot live at all without others.
We emerged from the thermo-, morpho- and teleo-dynamic interplay of other coherences. Every encounter we have with others (human or otherwise) is an ecotropic opportunity to create a new way of understanding, a truth procedure of consensuality on the path to creating a new way of seeing, a new way of being--making the form of society the shape of nature's content. I underscore consensual as if it were a democratic call to justice. Yes, all this could be dangerous and probably will call for everyone to be on guard--everywhere—against fascism. Just see how easily a great many Americans were recently intoxicated with it. I think a movement away from the great “I” (the cognito) just might be the ticket. 1st person plural maybe? 3rd person anyone? The need for a new democratic relationship with the whole of nature does cry out for a new democratic and egalitarian nation. a new and more egalitarian constitution that protects the whole of nature.
We live in interesting times do we not?
