Save the circle!
“We are not here to control. We are here to become integral with the larger Earth community.”
Thomas Berry
The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future
If you’re like most people at this moment in history, you’re living on the edge of panic, coupled with waves of despair, anxiety and outright fear. The refrain is everywhere: “We’ve got to do something fast. We’ve got to fix this thing.” Not only is the virus killing people outright, it’s ravaging our economy and taking away people’s livelihoods. And in the meantime, a plethora of planet-scale problems have been shoved to the back burner of our attention where they continue to fester. We’re spooked, so we resolve to redouble and retriple our efforts–organize, do another webinar, raise more money and above all, do it fast.
At the same time, many of us are nagged by the highly inconvenient realization that our efforts may well be for naught, that this cluster of problems is way bigger and more deeply embedded than we first thought. We’re beginning to suspect that the common “save the world” proposals are nowhere near adequate. A vaccine would be nice and a widespread program of testing and contact tracing would be great, but it may be a long time coming. Green energy and a Green New Deal would slow the pace of habitat destruction, but none of these steps are going to solve our problems once and for all. In fact, most of the proposals in circulation are little more than Band-Aids, fingers in a leaky, bulging dike. And suddenly, wasf has become an actual word in common usage. “We Are So Fucked” is no longer a meme for cynics, but a growing presence in personal and social consciousness.
It would be one thing if all of this had happened overnight, but the hole we find ourselves in is 10,000 years deep. Agriculture fundamentally changed our relationship to habitat, and from there, a series of intellectual developments drove a wedge between humans and nature. The geometry of Euclid and Pythagoras promised perfect knowledge and certainty in the mental realm. Plato wrote of ideal forms and Aristotle gave us rules for rational thought. The scientific revolution demanded a new form of non-participatory consciousness while capitalism fueled the growing effort to harness and profit from every natural and human “resource.” And in the meantime, human population and impact soared. None of these things will be reversed overnight, and it would be folly to suggest otherwise.
We’re moved to act, but it’s essential that we get serious about identifying the root cause, the etiology of our affliction. So just to be clear: The virus is not the problem. Carbon is not the problem. Plastic is not the problem. Habitat destruction is not the problem. Trump is definitely a problem, an embarrassment and a stain on our history, but he is not the problem either.
Rather, our problem is a particular story–a story of dominion, imperialism, extraction and endless growth. A story that tells us that the natural world is nothing more than a resource for our profit and amusement. A story of human exceptionalism and supremacy. A story that utterly fails to recognize and accept the circular, biological reality of interdependence. Until and unless we re-write this story, we’ll continue to suffer from this culturally-driven ecological and social disaster. To put it bluntly, our cultural story may be the very thing that kills us in the end.
For all our talk about possible solutions, the thing that’s lost is the over-riding power of narrative in human affairs. We talk at length about endangered species and endangered habitats, but rarely do we mention the endangered narrative of participation, interdependence, continuity and respect. For the vast majority of our history, this native, indigenous view has been a human universal. But this story has been eroded, sometimes inadvertently, but often intentionally, by our so-called “advanced” cultures. And now, our primal, nourishing and life-sustaining narrative is in serious danger of going extinct.
The indigenous narrative was circular and humans were seen as participants in that circle. The dominant cosmology was animism and the belief that the entire world was alive. But with the advent of agriculture, science and corporatism, the story began to take the shape of a pyramid. Certain people, groups and species were described as being higher or lower in rank. And as the pyramid gained height and power, it began to obliterate the circle. Hierarchy took command.
And this is the crux of the matter: If we lose contact with the circular, indigenous narrative of interdependence, participation and respect, we are well and truly sunk. It won’t matter how much data or rationality we bring to our predicament, how much calculation, how much tracking and management. In fact, such measures might well serve to further distance us from the very processes and forces that we need to stay alive. Nature will remain an outsider, and in turn, we will go the way of the dodo. So, instead of posting yet another “save the Earth” meme, maybe we ought to say “save the circle.”
At first glance, we might suppose that modern biological science would support the circular, indigenous narrative, and in fact many biologists do speak of the importance of interdependence. But there’s a world difference between these two statements:
“We see interdependence in the living world because our data told us so.”
“We see interdependence in the living world because our experience told us so.”
The biologist’s perspective is necessary and welcome, but it’s not sufficient. What we really need at this moment is the feeling of participation, the experience of intimacy and continuity with the living world. This felt experience comes not from facts, data or information, but from experience and emotional engagement. In fact, scientific language is often non-persuasive and even counter-productive. This is a central theme in the book Don’t be Such a Scientist by Randy Olson. As a “recovering scientist,” Olson realized that communication in an age of information overload requires fluency in storytelling and emotional connection. Most people don’t respond to facts, charts and graphs; they respond to narrative.
So the real question that confronts us: What does it take to re-write a deeply embedded cultural story? How long does it take to revise the narrative of human supremacy and replace it with something more inclusive and participatory? How can we break down the pyramid of domination and bring ourselves back to a more circular experience?
In our fear and panic, we wish we could do it overnight, but in reality, our pyramid-shaped story is woven deeply into modern culture and won’t be displaced by any single person, book, webcast or meme. In all likelihood, this effort is going to take centuries. In other words, this is very a long game. It took thousands of years to get here and it’ll take thousands of years to wise up.
Perhaps you find this disheartening and disillusioning. Perhaps you’ve been swept up in the idea that if we just try a little bit harder and apply some clever technological solutions, we can go back to human supremacy as usual. But things aren’t going to be OK. The era of human domination and Western imperialism is coming to an end. It’s time to sober up and make peace with the idea that healing our culture is going to take a very long time, longer than our individual lifetimes and longer even than the lives of our children. And making this change will require sustained repetition by teachers, trainers, coaches, writers and speakers, spread out over the course of generations.
So don’t be seduced into thinking that things are going to change overnight. Instead, focus on the long game and the story that your children’s children will inhabit. Start with your experience. Feel the circle of interdependence, then speak of the circle, write of the circle, advocate for the circle. The circle is where all the good stuff lives: health, sapience and even sanity itself. Feel the power of life on this planet and remind your listeners that we are not “masters and possessors” as Descartes would have it, but only participants. You may well feel as if your words are falling on deaf ears, but no matter. Your target audience is 7 generations down the line.