Freedom, Justice, Kinship

In the early days of dealing with the coronavirus and the exponential rise of Covid-19 cases, there was a palpable sense of unity and solidarity – “we are all in this together.” We saw the rise of mutual aid grassroots groups and many expressions of care and concern for what came to be known as the front line.

Tensions and trauma mounted as the weeks of inaccurately titled “lockdown” turned into months. Conflicts have erupted with concerns raised about liberty and authoritarianism. Old divides from unresolved issues in our society have returned with a vengeance. Another black man is killed by a police officer as other police watched. The lack of equality is exposed once again. Riots erupt, and fingers point in multiple ways to the actual source of violence (see for example this report).

Conspiracy theories abound and distract. Meanwhile, and in plain sight, the haves continue to take advantage of the have-nots in an unparalleled extraction of wealth from every aspect of the economy as possible. The Equality Gap is widening dramatically. The extreme inequality in wealth and power that already exists is in the process of becoming vastly more extreme. As Kenny Ausebel put it,

“Corona capitalism just engineered the biggest heist in history: a hostile takeover amounting to between $4 to $10 trillion, with corporate concierge service from the Fed. For everyone else, it’s busy signals and crashed web sites, endless dysfunctional bureaucratic hoops and life-threatening delays. When it’s finally safe to go out again, we will find a very different world: Giants and dwarves, Lords and serfs.”

Naomi Klein has outlined How Big Tech Plans to Profit from the Pandemic via what she calls “The Screen New Deal.”

And Nafeez Ahmed’s investigative journalism has revealed: “The COVID-19 public health crisis is enriching a murky nexus of technology surveillance firms linked to senior Government officials – at the expense of people’s lives. The financial adventures of a former MI5 spymaster and the medical fantasies of Boris Johnson’s top advisor point toward an unnerving endgame: an artificially intelligent (AI) corporate super-state, with a special focus on NHS genetic research inspired by eugenics.”
The wealthiest and most influential asset holders have been insured by the world’s most powerful central bank without conditions.

Forbes reports that “Twenty five of the wealthiest people on Forbes’ list of the world’s billionaires are worth a whopping $255 billion more than when the U.S. stock market hit a mid-pandemic low on March 23.”

With all that is going on as outlined above, I find wisdom from Edgar Morin. His book Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millenium , written with Anne Brigitte Kern, applies very well to the situation we find ourselves in today, with the tensions and trauma of dealing with the coronavirus, combined with the deeply embedded inequalities in our culture, the concerns about liberty and authoritarianism, and the extractive nature of neoliberalism and disaster capitalism currently exploiting the crisis we are experiencing. Not to mention the ecological crisis, which is a central theme of the book.

“In 1789, the French Revolution established the democratic norm, supplemented in 1848 by the triune slogan: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. This trinity is complex, as its terms are mutually complementary and antagonistic: left to itself, liberty kills equality and fraternity; compulsory equality kills liberty without achieving fraternity; and fraternity, without which no lived fellowship can possibly exist between citizens, must check liberty and bring down inequalities, even though it cannot be promulgated or established by law and decree.”

– Edgar Morin, Homeland Earth (1999), p. 90

The French Revolution ushered us into The Age of Enlightenment and Modernity with this triadic concept of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” But how well has any society embodied these three principles?

Liberty (at least for white men) was a theme for the American Revolution as well as well as the French Revolution, and continued as a primary theme during the Civil War.  Even so, it remains fragile, and outside of the grasp of many in the world.

After the two world wars and the great depression, Equality became a dominant theme for the civil rights and feminist movements, and a hallmark of Post-Modern pluralism.  And yet, current events demonstrate how we have fallen painfully short of the mark.  As I write, protests and riots are rocking the United States, in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.

Fraternity, limited from the beginning, since its Latin root means only ‘brotherhood,’ has still not been successfully demonstrated as a major cultural theme in the modern or post-modern world. Communist regimes have failed to manifest anything beyond a forced unity as they were overcome by totalitarian tendencies.  Post-WWII initiatives such as the U.N. and Bretton Woods institutions have played important moderating roles but have lacked the strength to accomplish much in the way of real change.

Reframing the terminology as Freedom, Justice, and Kinship, our first task is to fully embrace the healthiest expression of the post-modern pluralism. As Gary Hampson has astutely noted, the way out (of postmodernism) is through (postmodernism). We’ve got to fully inhabit and grok this stage if we want to move forward and beyond. Black lives do matter. White male privilege is real. Gender identity and LGBQT issues have something to teach us. This is not to discount dysfunctions and unhealthy expressions we often see at play.

As Edgar Morin suggests, kinship is needed to regulate freedom and to support justice. If we can move past the Post-Modern cultural phase into an Integral or Meta-Modern phase, kinship should become a major cultural theme, which can assist us in a better balance and integration of freedom and justice, and should embody “citizenship in its deepest sense” (Morin).

As the integral framework is intended to “transcend and include,” it can potentially bring forth the best of capitalism (freedom), socialism (justice), and, yes, communism (kinship). And perhaps “transcend and include” could be transformed into “embrace and befriend” as Will Varey suggests – “An approach of ‘transcend and include’ validates the higher by the potential overshadowing of the included lower. In a reflexive reconsideration, perhaps there is virtue in the alternative paradigmatic approach to ‘embrace and befriend’.”  (from Integral Explanatory Coherence: Consilience. Resonance. Coherence).

Can an integral consciousness manifest a type of “communism” that is not a totalizing ideology in nature and able to balance with the best aspects of capitalism and socialism? Riane Eisler suggests that we move beyond terms such as capitalism, socialism, and communism, and embrace a new economic organizational form she calls “Partnerism“.

Jeremy Johnson’s recent essay (Meta, Modern: Understanding the Phenomenology of Consciousness) outlines the vibe and vision for an integral or meta-modern consciousness structure, rooted in the work of Jean Gebser. Johnson explains:

…we no longer inhabit a mere (post) modern sensibility…Our position in the present is oscillatory, characterized by liminality…This structure of feeling, like a pendulum, swings back and forth in anticipation of a new cultural sensibility. But we need not merely bounce between modern and (post) modern; tomorrow is already latent in our cultural phenomenology.

Is kinship so far out of reach as it appears?  Bonnitta Roy has recently provided a startling insight in her recent 2 part essay, Corona: A Tale of Two Systems. Part 1 here and Part 2 here).

Bonnitta points out that civilizations have always had ideologies of connection, and that even prior to civilization there was a felt sense of kinship with others, and even a deep connection with the natural world.  She states:

“Ever since the beginning of civilisation we have built the illusion of unity as somewhere up there, somewhere in our future if we can just get it right. This is because we have turned our backs on the ever-present reality of our prior unity in the depths of our evolutionary becoming. The deeper evolutionary layers of our being are the larger universals. We are precariously tethered by an ideology of the market, but we are innately connected through our participation in and interdependence with the life force of the planet.

… The deeper, ontological reality is that we come from unity and grow toward diversity. There is no need to fashion a story or a system to “seal the deal.” The deed has been already secured through our natural human heritage.”

It is important to understand that it is a unity/diversity polarity – two sides of one coin, rather than conflicting opposites. When we can truly connect with the many elements that provide us with an underlying unity, we can then become more secure in embracing our diversity without conflict.

Diane Hamilton,  Gabriel Wilson, and Kimbely Loh have recently co-authored a book entitled “Compassionate Conversations: How to Speak and Listen from the Heart.”  In a recent conversation about the book between Ken Wilber and Diane Hamilton, they discuss this very topic of Integrating Unity and Diversity  as they address the question, “How can we begin to cross those divides and heal as a community, as a nation, and as a single human family?”

Kinship includes a sense of unity with the natural world as well as our fellow humans.  Here we come to the work of philosopher Donna Haraway: “For Haraway, “kin” means something other than entities bound by ancestry – it signifies new kinds of relations between humans and non-humans alike. She states that “making and recognising kin is perhaps the hardest and most urgent” challenge humans in and of the earth face today, although in the deepest sense, “all earthlings are kin” (Haraway, 2016b).”

Recognizing kin can be a kind of spiritual practice, as demonstrated in this short video on Encounter, featuring Dr. Stephen Harding, followed by some words of wisdom from David Fleming (this is an excerpt from the film on David Fleming, The Sequel: What Will Follow Our Troubled Civilization .

Encountering Another Being II from Empathy Media on Vimeo.

In his recent, masterful, connecting the dots article (White Supremacism and the Earth System, Nafeez Ahmed provides a big picture perspective, pointing out that the “otherization” that is currently happening on such a broad scale is the result of a global systemic crisis. We need to look beyond the obvious symptoms to wider issues behind them, and to be ready to adopt a system change.

Ahmed writes,

“As the prevailing system declines, breaks down, weakens, elicits the unleashing of rage and angst, this very process of weakening creates a clearing of systemic uncertainty….

This is what I call the global phase shift. This is the transition point where small, local actions can have wider, accumulative, system-wide effects. This is the moment where each of our choices has a momentous, history-forging potential.”

Cultural philosopher Jean Gebser envisioned a consciousness mutation after a period of chaotic breakdown.  He referred to this as an integral-arational structure of consciousness (The Ever-Present Origin).

Peter Pogany summarized Gebser’s vision as follows:

“The collision between our civilization and its ecological constraints, along with a likely historic crisis of epic proportions, may be regarded as the struggle of integral-arational consciousness (Gebser’s “fifth structure”) to deprive overblown rationality (the deficient phase of mental consciousness) from its current preeminence.”

Key characteristics of this integral structure of consciousness must include…

Freedom, Justice, and Kinship.

A Lesson in History

by Peter Pogany

This story was written in December of 2010 by Peter Pogany. In his last published work (Havoc, 2015), Pogany shares a shorter version of the story, and introduces it this way:

“Chaotic transition is near when the established order becomes prone to disruption through stochastic developments. This characterization corresponds to the ‘butterfly effect’ as initial condition sensitivity has been nicknamed in the study of nonlinear dynamics. How an innocuous and totally unpredictable small event on the molecular/atomic level escalates in significance may be illustrated by the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Hapsburg throne, in Sarajevo, on June 28, 1914.”
Peter Pogany passed away in 2014, but were he alive today he surely would have noted the similar circumstance playing out before our eyes now. How did a coronavirus transfer from bats and pangolins to humans? What started off as a seemingly small event occurring in a seafood and meat market in Wuhan, or a small mistake made in a Chinese bio-research lab, has resulted in bringing the world to its knees. A world already poised on the edge, vulnerable to innumerable innocuous occurrences that could set in motion a chain of events that would instantiate a chaotic transition. A bifurcation that just might bring the existing world system to a transition point. A transition to what remains to be seen. Pogany again: “To put it crudely, something will set the ball rolling, perforce.”  I hope you enjoy the true story that follows, and how Pogany tells the tale. Following the story is an analysis, and then a warning! For more, see my Peter Pogany page. 

June 28, 1914. Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Hapsburg throne and his expectant wife Sophie, visit Sarajevo, capital city of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a province of the late Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Seven potential assassins await them, lined up along the expected route of the official motorcade according to the contingency principle — if A fails B will act, and so on.

Tragicomic coincidences almost turn the plot into a ridiculous failure. One of the conspirators throws his bomb. He hears the explosion, dutifully bites into his cyanide capsule and jumps into the nearby Miljacka River. What he did not know was that the bomb bounced off the Archduke’s car and exploded under the next one; that the cyanide was years past its “due date,” and the river that was expected to swallow him — as would befit a martyr and legendary hero for his people — was about three inches deep at that time of the year. The rest of the conspirators did not act. They either thought the deed was done or became paralyzed in the critical moment. But just when the whole thing looked like a youthful blunder, randomness came to the aid of Big History.

One of the conspirators, Gavrilo Princip, who skipped dinner the night before, got hungry and decided to sample the delicious offerings of Moritz Schiller’s delicatessen downtown. In the meantime, the Archduke — defying counsel to get the hell of out town — insisted on going through with the originally scheduled program, even extending it with the PR gesture of visiting the military hospital where the victims of the earlier bomb explosion were treated. General Potiorek, the governor of the province, decided to speed up the convoy by taking the unencumbered, freeway-like “Apel Quay” along the river. He told everybody about the route change except the chauffeur who drove the car in which he sat along with the royal visitors. It ended up alone in the narrow downtown street where Schiller’s establishment was located.

What is this? We have taken the wrong way!” yelled the General. The chauffeur immediately stopped and began to back up as a crowd of onlookers gathered. Gavrilo, now in the front of the restaurant, found himself face to face with his targets. He pulled out his pistol and killed them point blank. As is well known, the ensuing chain of diplomatic events led to the thundering “Guns of August.” The First World War was on, and from our contemporary perspective of universal history, one might say that the global society entered a period of chaos that did not subside until the end of the Second World War.

 Assassination illustrated in the Italian newspaper Domenica del Corriere, 12 July 1914 by Achille Beltrame

But once we appeal to chaos theory to explain what happened during the first part of the 20^th century and why, we must account for the butterfly effect, the nickname of “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.”

Since it is defined metaphorically as “insignificant/significant” (i.e., an innocuous happening unleashes a process that results in a major event), the assassination described obviously cannot be compared to the fluttering of the butterfly’s wings. While no direct and inexorable causality can be shown between the assassination and the ensuing conflagration, the occurrence defies the degree of insignificance stipulated by a general understanding of the butterfly effect in the context of “initial condition sensitivity.”

The problem with the application of this concept to historical narrations is that visible events range too freely between what is truly negligible and quite significant. Therefore, to find the real innocuous, totally unforeseeable occurrence (inviting even the notion of being external to human affairs as these can be recognized by simple observation), we must go deeper into matter than what individuals and their actions represent. We must enter the brain, the neurophysics of forming thoughts, making determinations, and instructing the body to carry them out.

In these terms, one might say that the nearly infinitesimal material conditions that allowed a predetermined plan (already established in the assassin’s neural network) to find an opportunity of implementation, resided in a random coincidence between two electrochemical events: One that signaled hunger for the assassin (especially for the offerings of Herr Schiller) and the forgetfulness of the General to instruct his driver about the change of route.

But a short reflection suffices to recognize that this explanation is also unsatisfactory. An uncountable number (e.g., unknowable from the human standpoint) of conditions had to come together for those two cerebral manifestations in order for the event to occur: the weather, the traffic pattern, the speed of service and portions served in the restaurant, the configuration of the crowd gathering around the royal vehicle, and so on ad infinitum. Thoughts in the General’s head that diverted his attention also corresponded to physical circumstances with an infinite number of attributes and antecedents.

To exit from the labyrinth, the initial conditions must be described in more general terms. The inquiry leads deeper into matter; into the world of molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles that make up the human population and bind it with its surroundings. And we can go even deeper (almost incomprehensibly more so) if we accept the stipulations of “string theory,” the most supported version of the “theory of everything” among physicists. Whether we stop at the subatomic level or opt for strings in imaging initial conditions that prevailed on June 28, 1914, the analysis finds itself face to face with the old dilemma of chance versus necessity.

To show that the outbreak of violence ought to be ascribed to destiny rather than to a random incident, we need to make a detour through the realm of historical systems analysis.

Let us begin with a widely acknowledged observation: The Great War effectively ended the age of classical capitalism.

After a very painful — almost revolutionary — start in the British Isles during the 1830s, the institutions, organizational schemes, and the repertoire of matching individual behavior that characterized “Capitalism 1.0” spread to the rest of the world like wildfire.

Smoke-belching factories, squalid living conditions, disease and deprivation, crude exploitation, child labor, injustices of all conceivable forms on a mega scale, Marx’s Communist Manifesto mid-century notwithstanding, by the 1880s, the system turned into a roaring success. At least in broad statistical terms. Per capita income increased for the world’s growing population. International trade and other forms of cross-border economic relations accelerated with a vigor that reminds us of the late-20^th-century burst of globalization.

Scientific-technological development brought new marvels every year. Just a few examples (cited from the work of British historian Neville Williams): 1880 saw Andrew Carnegie’s first large steel furnace; in 1881, Louis Pasteur used vaccine to fight anthrax (a method that is standard practice even today in preventing the from-animal-to-human spread of this vicious disease); and so on, year after year.

No sooner did the Victorian era, which cradled the golden age of laissez faire capitalism, die in 1901, the Edwardian period was born and the triumphant march continued. Cumulative breakthroughs in industry and transportation created fabulous new opportunities for entrepreneurship and employment.

The middle class grew by leaps and bounds; especially in the industrialized countries; but even in far corners of the planet, an increasing number of people began to have access to luxuries by the epoch’s standards. Arts, music, literature, and theater flourished. There was no let-up in epochal achievements, not even on the eve of the disaster. In 1913, Niels Bohr discovered the atomic structure; in the spring of 1914, Canada completed its Grand Pacific Railway. It seemed that humanity was on its way to New Jerusalem. And yet, the machinery that wove the fabric of growing welfare became hopelessly outdated by virtue of being less and less able to accommodate further progress. There were four main reasons:

(1) Dependence on gold limited the supply of money that must expand in order to sustain growing levels of output, hence employment and income; (2) while industrialization reached the level at which national economies were prone to accelerate and decelerate if left on their own, the global order’s policy space did not include instruments (i.e., modern fiscal and monetary policies) to counter this phenomenon; (3) the system skewed distribution too much in favor of capital at the expense of labor, thereby constraining the development of mass consumption/mass production; and (4) it was unfit to accommodate institutions or schemes for international cooperation, required by growing economic and financial interdependence among national economies.

“Initial-condition sensitivity” (i.e., proclivity to the butterfly effect) hid in the incongruity between system parameters and the state of the world. Starting with the circumstances that coalesced in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, any innocuous development (such as coincidental neuro-states in the brains of Potiorek and Princip) was sufficient to tear apart global organization. Why was chaos needed?  Because the system was too entrenched and much too successful to abandon it voluntarily via thoroughgoing, peaceful reforms, and because there was no consensus as to what the next global system ought to be.

To allow history to move to “Capitalism 2.0”, which we have been enjoying since the end of World War II, global self-organization needed help from the “outside.” It got it from there since conditions deep in matter, where the state of the world actually resides, can be considered “other than us,” by virtue of being external to the strictly human-scale realm of political movements, personalities, logically explained and plausibly demonstrated individual and national aspirations, ideas and propositions.

World population was fewer than 2 billion in 1914 — roughly the same as the increase between the late 1980s and now, when planetary occupancy numbers around 7 billion souls. It is clear that the standard of living currently enjoyed by billions would be inconceivable if Capitalism 1.0 had remained in force. It had to go. Therein lurks the necessity of its being blown away by something, anything that could unleash the dark forces of the night, the chaotic dynamics from which a fresh dawn, a new world order would emerge after spectacularly failed false starts and a collective moral-catharsis-engendering deluge of blood and pain.

By 1914, the system was so anachronistic that the slightest stir in the organization of matter (intimated in political economic terms as “Capitalism 1.0”) could snowball into an event significant enough to disrupt it, along the same line of reasoning that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Mexico could lead to a thunderstorm in France.

Going deeper into matter in analyzing history and considering the human biomass with the world economy a single entity, which since the 1830s has had a demonstrated need for a comprehensive system in order to function and grow, has two advantages.

The obvious one is that such a materialist theory allows us to go beyond personalities and national policies, arguments that tend to provoke dismissals and counter arguments with no end in sight. Since it is abstract, it can exist along with other, more concrete narrative plots and explanations. Indeed, we are learning that reality is much too fuzzy to be describable only through the exclusive application of either/or, hard-nosed binary logic. The good news is that our minds have revealed their capacity to supersede straight-jacket narrow, rationalistic duality. For example, by now, physicists accept that light is both a stream of particles and a wave. Both are correct and they are allowed to live side by side without a formal synthesis.

The less obvious reason may surprise you: Global system parameters are once again out of joint with the times. Namely, the prevalent world order is predicated on vigorous economic growth and it tends to stall, and perhaps even collapse, without it. Marx was wrong in this respect too. He thought that the greatest weakness of capitalism was its inability to accommodate economic growth beyond a certain point. That may have been correct for its first version but it is eminently wrong for the current one.

Judging by the intensification of environmental problems associated with expanding levels of output; along with the expected rise in the prices of oil and other key resources (e.g., several metals) — once the world economy gets back to its full-swing — it appears that nature is trying to tell us something. It may be this:

“Hello earthlings! Considering your huge and growing numbers, coupled with your insatiable material ambitions, I am switching to a constraining mode. It’s time for you to move on and become consciously resonant with my laws. Have you considered Ecological Capitalism (Capitalism 3.0)? Perhaps. But the need to find a substitute for your current ‘expand or perish economy’ faces quite a struggle for acceptance. And admit it: Most of you don’t know much more about it except that it must be something very different. Since the corrective challenge penetrates the wellsprings of your ordinary aspirations, piecemeal reforms are not an option. Your species faces a new spasmodically zigzagging search via macrohistoric chaos. As of now, and increasingly so in the future, you are destined to live with ever-sharpening ‘sensitivity to initial conditions.’ The enhanced sense of unpredictability along with the growing threat of discontinuity you experience means that global society’s rendezvous with another axial date is not far off.”

Remember June 28, 1914! Be in shape!

We Must Act Now!

Friends,

The Coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic is serious business. For the sake of community resilience, please take it seriously. If this is to be ovecome, we all need to do our part.

At a MINIMUM, we must ALL follow the guidelines set out by the Whatcom County Health Department, which are regularly updated here.  They currently recommend that “people at higher risk of severe illness should stay home and away from large groups of people as much as possible.” If you are over age 60 or have underlying health conditions, or weakened immune systems, you are considered high risk. 

There are a growing number of people who believe we need to be taking more aggressive steps – that we should ALL be engaging in physical isolation NOW.  I personally have been persuaded this is the wisest approach.  Here I am going to quote in full a recent post by thought leader Daniel Schmachtenberger:

“Public influencers: please strongly encourage physical isolation to your audience now. You will be saving lives and helping mitigate catastrophe.

All of Hollywood, youtube and instagram celebrities, podcast hosts, bloggers, companies with mailing lists, social media platform companies…please take this simple action immediately. Help people who don’t fully understand the situation yet to take this seriously.

The total number of people infected is much much higher than the reported numbers (we aren’t doing the testing to know how many people are infected, but many hospitals are already getting overwhelmed throughout US cities).

The number of people infected doubles in about 4 days with normal social behavior. Do the math on 2-3% death rate ~70% of the population.

With physical isolation, the transmission stops completely. This virus is transmitted via physical human contact (direct and indirect).

Two months of complete physical isolation and the pandemic is over. Otherwise, this could continue with no clear end in sight, and kill more Americans than the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined.

I wish we had ubiquitous, early, accurate testing already in place like South Korea so we could do a smart quarantine. But we don’t. So we need a total quarantine.

We don’t have to wait for the government to enforce it with the police and national guard. We can recognize the need and self organize to do what needs done. That is self-governance: of, for, and by the people.

We are too focused on the role of our elected leaders; this country was founded on the idea of self-governance with intentionally very limited representative power.

China has strong top down government and was able to enforce quarantine, build hospitals quickly, disinfect entire cities, put hazmat gear on all the workers. Our government is not prepared to do that. And, while effective, nobody wants to be in a Wuhan style enforced quarantine. If there was ever a good time for Americans to take back their sovereignty and lead themselves, this is it.

“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” – John F. Kennedy”

For more information, please at least skim the following article, which numerous people are calling the single best article they have read on this topic (including Michael Dowd and Alan Seid): Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now.  Michael Dowd commented, “I especially appreciated the reminder that because contagion is delayed in expression and that only “lock-down” examples are showing any ability to quash exponential infection rates and hospital overloads, that a wait-and-see attitude is the least responsible approach.”

Some of you might also be interested in exploring more deeply how we might relate differently to the fear in ourselves and in others — as well as the larger systemic turbulence we’re experiencing. I encourage you to check out the podcast conversation between Terry Patten and spiritual teacher Thomas Hubl: Coronavirus Crisis – Touching, Not Touching, Not Separate.

Finally, a consideration about how the coronavirus is affecting all of us on the financial/economic level.  Economist Steve Keen has an excellent analysis, and some key recommendations for how authorities should be responding: A Modern Jubilee, a Cure to the Financial Ills of the Coronavirus.

Thank you for reading and considering the above.  Stay safe and resilient! Remember to wash your hands for 20 seconds, with vigorous rubbing. Here’s the best video I’ve found on how to do it right; it also demonstrates why a quick hand wash is not sufficient: A Complete Guide to Hand Washing.  Remember that it is the friction that is important. According to a recent discussion between functional medicine practitioner Chris Kresser and infections disease specialist Dr. Ramzi Asfour:

Ramzi Asfour:  There are quite a few studies showing that it’s the friction that’s most important. Whether you’re using alcohol jelly or washing your hands, it’s friction that’s very important. And the reason that, spores are not very well, like, for example, Clostridium difficile, spores are not well-removed by alcohol jelly because people, probably because people don’t use enough friction. They don’t do the rubbing or scrubbing for 20 seconds with alcohol jelly.

Chris Kresser:  Right. And I’ve heard that, I also read a study suggesting that alcohol hand sanitizer wipes were preferable to the jelly for that reason, because it adds more of that friction element.

Michael Dowd: Standing for the Future, Part 2

As a follow-up from last week’s post, I share with you Part 2 of Michael Dowd’s video series, “Standing for the Future.” You can view Part 1 here.  The text right above the video is just copied and pasted from Dowd’s website.

There are two quotes from this video that I found especially important and meaningful. First on The Importance of Personification.

The words ‘God’ and ‘evolution’ are both pointing to the same divine creative process. Both answer the question ‘How did we get here?’ One uses the mythic language of religion, the other uses the literal language of science.  Arguing whether it was God or evolution that created everything is like debating whether it’s Uncle Sam or the U.S. government that insists we pay taxes every year, or like quarreling over whether it was Gaia or plate tectonics that created the oceans and mountains. Such silly and largely unnecessary confusion will remain the norm until we get and celebrate what I think is the single most important scientific discovery about religion in the last 500 years: personification. – Michael Dowd

The second quote is in support of Michael Dowd’s conviction that Ecology is the new Theology

Every characteristic that we attribute to the divine derives from our experience of Nature. If we imagine God as beautiful, gracious, loving, awesome, powerful, majestic, or faithful, it is because we have known or experienced beauty, grace, love, awe, power, majesty, or trustworthiness in the world. – Michael Dowd

“If we lived on the moon and that’s all we and our ancestors had ever known, all of our concepts and experience of the divine would reflect the barrenness of the lunar landscape.” – Thomas Berry

Standing for the Future (2/3) — “Reality Is Lord: A Scientific View of God on a Rapidly Overheating Planet”

“We each have experienced times of trouble that threaten to overwhelm our individual lives. In such times, a vision of possibility is essential. The same holds for the punctuations in history when whole societies face troubles of an immense and uncharted variety. Truly, we have arrived at such a time. Humans, unwittingly, have become a planetary force. We are irreversibly changing the very climate of our world. Henceforth, any actions we take as individuals and societies will be done in the new light of climate change.

What vision will carry us forward through such times and inspire us to work together? How shall we frame the need to shed our business-as-usual outlook on life and take on a new vision of possibility that can unite us as a species in joyful self-sacrifice and service? What vision will charge us with a sense of heroic purpose that the future is, indeed, calling us to greatness?”

In the video above, Dowd includes some of the amazing examples of nature personified that have been created by Conservation International in collaboration with some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, all available at the Nature is Speaking website, which emphases the point that nature doesn’t need people, but people need nature. Here is Kevin Spacey as the Rainforest:

 

 

You Say You Want a Revolution

Naomi Klein’s recent article posted at New Statesman has been generating a bit of a buzz. The title is “Why Science is Telling All of Us to Revolt and Change Our Lives.” She begins with a story discussing a presentation by complex systems researcher Brad Werner, who  “is saying that his research shows that our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability.”

Klein writes further:

There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.

I’m no expert, but as someone interested in systems theory, I find it a bit odd that there is only one dynamic mentioned that appears to offer hope.  Renowned systems thinker Donella Meadows identified at least 12 leverage points, or places to intervene in systems, and PatternDynamics™ founder Tim Winton has identified 56 patterns in systems that all need to be balanced and integrated if we want to achieve a sustainable system.

Transition U.S. blogger Joanne Poyourow, in her response to the Klein article (Revolt and Change Our Lives), points out that systems thinker Joanna Macy has outlined 3 Dimensions of The Great Turning.

Macy’s first is Stopping action, stopping further destruction, which is all that Klein talks about or labels as “appropriate.” Stopping action is noisy campaigning, it is Julia Butterfly Hill sitting in old-growth trees, it is Tim DeChristopher bidding on land parcels, it is the activists who lie down in front of the pipeline trucks.

…Macy’s second type of action is Creating New Structures, creating that which will be in place to replace the old. Sound familiar? To those of us working with different facets of the international Transition movement it sure does. This is the “change our lives” part of the equation. It’s a much quieter type of action, in that it doesn’t necessarily mean noisy crowds with plackards out on the streets, and it doesn’t necessarily grab the notice of the news cameras. But it’s no less of a revolution. And it’s happening all around you right now.

Which brings me to Macy’s third type of action to help further The Great Turning: Change in Consciousness. Joanna Macy describes this as changing the stories we tell each other, our cultural stories, our inner stories. Redefining who we are, and how humanity fits into the cycles of this small planet. Within the international Transition movement, this is addressed as “inner transition.” Changing our inner selves, our inner paradigm, our ways of relating to each other is another huge part of creating the world we want to live in.

Rob Hopkins also mentions the Klein article, in his own excellent post on Austerity (Imagination: Antidote to the Plague of Austerity).

I don’t agree with Klein and Werner’s analysis that “resistance” should be only taken to refer to the same tools that oppositional politics has always used. For me, Werner’s “certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture” needs to be viewed more broadly…And that’s where Transition comes in, with its core focus on imagination and the telling of different stories.

……In order to be able to create something, first we have to imagine it.  That applies as much to the supper you’ll cook when you get home tonight as to social change.  While there is much that Transition initiatives can, and are, doing to respond to austerity, it is the holding of spaces where people, their political representatives and others, can come together to imagine the kind of future they want to see, and modelling this in practical ways, which may be one of the most powerful things we can do in these difficult times.  It could prove to be, as the world seemingly steps from arguing that climate change isn’t a problem to arguing that it’s too late to do anything about it, missing out that vital piece in the middle, you know, the doing something about it bit, that the “poverty of life without dreams” may turn out in the long run to be the wickedest form of poverty.

Hopkins’ thinking is reminiscent of thoughts expressed by David Holmgren (also a systems thinker) in late 2011 (David Holmgren Talks Strategy):

I think that, while the big political movement stuff is always going to be in some ways more exciting – and there’s certainly some exciting aspects of that emerging in the world now around the notion of demanding that someone do something, I don’t think those things really help change the structure much, unless people are also making the changes themselves.  Because the changes people make themselves are double insurance – they are insurance against dysfunctional or anti-social behavior by elites (and there’s certainly plenty of evidence for that), but they’re also the way we model the world that we’re actually wanting to be, because in a lot of ways it’s a matter of being able to crawl before you walk. The sort of world we’re trying to construct, I think it’s actually impossible to construct that top-down. It has to actually be rebuilt bottom up, in parallel with the crumbling system. And then as those models become more real, it’s possible to get some degree of top-down reform/support for those things. But if they don’t actually exist, if we don’t have the working, living solutions, then it’s very hard for policymakers to say “Yes, we’ll have more of that, and less of that.” They can’t actually create the things we need. The things we need are all very small, localized, particular, and large scale systems just can’t do that.

I’m saving the best for last. If we say we want a revolution, who better to check in with than someone who’s been at the forefront, and working on revolution for over 7 decades? Her name is Grace Lee Boggs, and she published a book last year called The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the 21st Century (read the review by WWU’s Molly Lawrence).

As an activist for over seventy years, and involved in movements including the civil rights movement, labor movement, women’s movement, Black Power movement, Asian American movement, anti-war movement, and environmental justice movement, Boggs has some wisdom to share.

Over these many years, her keen mind has continued to think about “how to bring about radical social change,” which has become all the more urgent, because, as she says, “I cannot recall any previous period when the issues were so basic, so interconnected, and so demanding of everyone.”  “What is going to motivate us,” she asks, “to start caring for our biosphere instead of using our mastery of technology to increase the volume and speed at which we are making our planet uninhabitable…?”

Interestingly, she believes that, though they were effective in the late 1960s, “it becomes clearer every day that organizing or joining massive protests and demanding new policies fail to sufficiently  address the crisis we face.”  She tells us that we need to “come out of our culturally defined identities,” and she claims that mass protests “do not change the cultural images or the symbols that play such a pivotal role in molding us into who we are.”

Boggs also makes a crucial distinction between rebellion and revolution.  Rebels see themselves as victims and do not go beyond protesting injustices.  Revolutionaries go beyond anger, protest, and opposition, and instead concentrate on involving people on a grassroots level with assuming responsibility for creating the values and infrastructures needed for a new society.

What does Boggs recommend on a practical level?  Working from the ground up to transform individuals and to rebuild community. This revolutionary sounds very much like Hopkins, Holmgren, and Poyourow:  Living radically differently by rejecting consumerism and the ideas around unending economic growth.  It can begin with simple actions such as “planting community gardens, recycling waste, rehabbing houses ,… and organizing neighborhood festivals.”  It can then develop into “a solidarity economy whose foundation is the production and exchange of goods and services that our communities  really need.  It’s about “remaking this nation block by block, brick by brick,” pledging to look after not only ourselves but also each other.

Fortunately, there are many working on various pieces of this puzzle we call “sustainability.” Are we doing enough, fast enough to avert crisis? No. That’s why we need all hands on deck. Stopping Actions, Creating New Structures, and Changing Consciousness are all significant.

In terms of changing consciousness, the theme Boggs returns to over and over in her book is that “these are the times to grow our souls.” It’s easy to neglect this important element.

My hope is that as more and different layers of the American people are subjected to economic and political strains and as recurrent disasters force us to recognize our role in begetting these disasters, a growing number of Americans will begin to recognize that we are at one of those great turning points in history. Both for our livelihood and for our humanity, we need to see progress not in terms of “having more” but in terms of growing our souls by creating community, mutual self-sufficiency, and cooperative relations with one another.
…Should we strain to squeeze the last drops of life out of a failing, deteriorating, and unjust system? Or should we instead devote our creative and collective energies toward envisioning and building a radically different form of living?

That is what revolutions are about. They are about creating a new society in the places and spaces left vacant by the disintegration of the old; about evolving to a higher Humanity, not higher buildings; about Love of one another and of the Earth, not Hate; about Hope, not Despair; about saying YES to life and NO to War; about becoming the change we want to see in the world.

— Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century

Related Article:
JoAnna Macy On the Three Pillars of the Great Turning

Could Our Obscure Whatcom County Council Election Change the Planet?

A couple of months ago there was a piece in the National Journal that put a spotlight on our humble county, and caught some local attention: The Obscure County Election That Could Change the Planet by Carol Davenport.  The tagline says “A little watched race in Washington State will determine how America uses its coal – and the future of the global climate.” (in addition to the article, you can watch an interview NBC did with the author).

The issue of concern is the proposed Gateway Pacific Terminal, a $600 million project that, if approved, is projected to ship 48 million tons of coal annually to Asia, which would make it the largest coal export terminal in North America.  This is said to be enough fuel to power 15 to 20 new coal fired plants a year – taking us in exactly the opposite direction in which we need to go. With carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere now reaching past 400 parts per million – the highest levels ever recorded in history – many of us believe it is a very high priority to do all we can to discourage the burning of coal anywhere and everywhere.

The Richards Bay Coal Terminal, the largest coal export terminal in Africa exports 66 million tons annually.

The site for the proposed coal port is Cherry Point, just north of Bellingham, in Whatcom County, WA, with coal from Wyoming and Montana arriving here via rail – up to 18 coal trains per day. And this is where our County Council comes in. According to Davenport’s article:

Over the next two years, the seven-member board will play an outsized role in Gateway’s fate, voting on two crucial siting permits which, if approved, will pave the way for the terminal’s construction. If the council rejects the permits, it could freeze the project for years, if not permanently. This November, voters will determine the makeup of the council that will make those crucial permit decisions, electing four of the seven members.

Hence, this year’s election is extremely important. And there’s big potential for special interests to have a large influence. Apparently the world’s largest public relations lobbying firm has already been hired to help promote the project.

The problem is that the candidates are not allowed to directly address the issue with their opinion, lest they jeapardize their role in being able to participate in the decision.  It is set up as a “quasi-judicial” system, requiring the council to remain neutral and base their decision only on the “facts” that are presented to the council at a future date.

So what is a voter to do? For one, you want to consider the candidates who believe in climate change, and who acknowledge that human activity is the cause for much of the warming we’re seeing today.  Two, examine how the candidates relate to other sustainability related or resilience related issues.  What are their positions on protecting the Lake Whatcom watershed, or handling the GMA related issues, or the slaughterhouse regulations?

The GMA? Growth Management Act.  This is huge, and has been a thorn in Whatcom County’s side for more than a decade.  More about that next time.

How can you learn more about where the candidates stand on these issues? Attend the Candidate Forum on Growth and the Environment, Thursday Aug. 1, 2013, at Bellingham High School, from 5 to 7:30pm.

Attend the Growth and Environment forum to hear comments and opinions from Whatcom County Council candidates regarding  important growth, land use and environmental issues facing Whatcom County.  By answering a series of questions from forum moderators with audience input on topic selection, candidates will  discuss pivotal issues in the upcoming elections, such as new industrial development, growth management, the proposed jail, Lake Whatcom, Critical Areas protection and shoreline protection.

We have invited every candidate to attend and represent his or her views, and are hopeful for full participation from all eight candidates.

Out of respect for the quasi-judicial role that council members inhabit during major project land use permit evaluation, moderators will not ask direct questions related to support of or opposition to Gateway Pacific Terminal or other similar projects.

Also, please join us from 5:00 to 5:30pm for a pre-forum information fair. Representatives from local organizations working on county-wide (including Bellingham) issues will be available to answer your questions (stop by the Transition Whatcom table).

For more information, visitwww.re-sources.org or contact Matt Krogh at

(360) 733.8307, or

mattk@re-sources.org.

 

Related: See the excellent article in Whatcom Watch by Terry Wechsler: GPT and County Council Elections

Foundations of PatternDynamics – Tim Winton

Tim Winton recently posted an audio recording on his thepatternguy blog.

Click to listen to audio file:  Foundations of PatternDynamics

He writes, “This talk was recorded as part of the Certificate 4 and Diploma programs in Accredited Permaculture Training I taught at Permaforest Trust. This was recorded at the beginning of the second semester in 2006, probably in late July or August. It is interesting to go back and listen to how I was thinking about PD at the time now that it has developed into something more tangible 6 years later.”

As I was listening, I decided I wanted to transcribe a short section.  That short section got longer and longer.  I hope you find this as interesting as I do.

“…I am wholly uninterested now, after having witnessed lots of failures, in ‘sustainability’; because there was no attempt at working with self or culture. It was just a focus on nature – those failed. I don’t really have an interest in perpetuating that failure. I will not introduce you to that failure.

I would like to integrate acting on nature through Permaculture and other practices with acting in culture – that’s about storytelling, it’s about framing worldviews, it’s about collective understanding – that’s story and myth. And also introducing practices on self – that’s about developing awareness. Opening up this space where everything you thought was not you becomes you. The only way to do that is to sit in awareness and witness all this stuff. Then, all of a sudden, the boundary fades. That’s human development.

Integrating all those things is a very cool thing to do, and is very powerful. I think that’s what we can offer, and in developing PatternDynamics as a discipline or a modality, what I’m hoping to do is to give you a tool to develop your own integral capacity for sustainability. If you can understand the dynamics in integrated whole systems, you can understand where to intervene to create health where it will have the most effect – how to relieve disease, how to open up the flow. There’s no rational way to understand it- it’s too complex. You can’t understand this by learning ‘A’, learning ‘B’, learning ‘C’, learning ‘D’ and then coming out the other end. You don’t just have A,B,C, and D, you have the whole alphabet, and they’re all swirling around in this great interconnected dynamic play. There’s no way to comprehend that holistic dynamic one bit at a time. You have to develop the capacity to understand the dynamics.

The only way to do that is to stand back in awareness and see the patterns. Patterns are the only way to really understand fluid dynamic integral wholes. And that’s what the universe is, and that’s what we have to get a grasp on.

Both David Holmgren and Bill Mollison [co-founders of Permaculture] have keyed in on this. They know that patterns are how you understand wholes. Ken Wilber also keyed in on this. He calls Integral “The pattern that connects” [a phrase borrowed from Gregory Bateson – another pioneer of pattern literacy]. He’s just taken that natural step beyond ‘if everything’s connected,’ that means my awareness is connected to the awareness of the universe. There’s not such a separation between my experience and the experience full stop – you know, ‘out there’. It’s a natural extension.

So we’ve got a natural resonance between Integral and Permaculture through their understanding that patterns are important to understand integrated wholes.

…PatternDynamics is a base pattern set for understanding – it’s a tool, it’s not reality, it’s just a tool. It’s an educational discipline to help you gain an integral capacity for understanding integral dynamic systems.”

 

Tim Winton just finished a PatternDynamics™ One Day Workshop in San Francisco earlier today.  He’ll give an evening workshop in Bellingham, WA on Tuesday Jan. 29th, and another One Day Workshop in Vancouver, B.C. on Saturday, Feb. 2nd.

Lessons From the Ages for 2013, Part 2

Read Part 1 here.

The Maya Civilization has earned a great deal of respect. Beginning sometime around 2000 B.C., they had a fully developed written language, as well as well developed art, architecture, mathematical, and astronomical systems. They seemed to be pretty danged smart and sophisticated.

And yet, they did themselves in by over-consuming their available resources. They had an amazing rainforest, and they cut it down. Why would they do such a thing?

If we look at human history in terms of the major stages of technological-economic development, we see periods moving from foraging to horticultural to agrarian to industrial, to informational.  American philosopher Ken Wilber sees each of these stages as signs of the advancing evolution of human consciousness, and he associates them with changes in worldview of the various epochs of human development, using terminology from Jean Gebser: archaic, magic, mythic, rational, and pluralistic.

The Mayans were firmly in the agrarian period, with the mythic worldview, and their accomplishments were quite amazing for their time. Having moved beyond foraging, and beyond horticulture (based on usage of a hoe), the agrarian period made use of heavy animal drawn plows. This advance provided other opportunities for some of the privileged men in these societies, due to a huge surplus of food that was made possible from the new technology. And so highly specialized classes arose, which made possible the development of things like mathematics and written language, and astronomy, and many cultural endeavors. Warring small tribes came together into larger wholes of social organization, beginning to pave the way for nation-states to eventually develop. Ken Wilber points out that it was during this agrarian period that a class of individuals arose that had enough time freed up to be able to contemplate in depth their own existence.  It was during this period that the great sages existed, including Gautama Buddha, Lao Tzu, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, Patanjali, and Confucius.

The first point being, that the agrarian period brought some pretty major advances that I am quite thankful for. And the second point is that these advances were made possible by the conditions that had changed, and would be extremely unlikely if we had not moved beyond the foraging and horticultural stages.

However…Ken Wilber also points out that every new stage always brings with it a new set of problems.

Q: You refer often to “the dialectic of progress.”
KW: Yes, the idea is that every stage of evolution eventually runs into its own inherent limitations, and these may act as triggers for the self-transcending drive. The inherent limitations create a type of turmoil, even chaos, and the system either breaks down (self-dissolution) or escapes this chaos by evolving to a higher degree of order (self-transcendence) – so called order out of chaos. This new and higher order escapes the limitations of its predecessor, but then introduces its own limitations and problems that cannot be solved on its own level.

In other words, there is a price to be paid for every evolutionary step forward. Old problems are solved or defused, only to introduce new and sometimes more complex difficulties.

…Wherever there is the possibility of transcendence, there is, by the very same token, the possibility of repression. The higher might not just transcend and include, it might transcend and repress, exclude, alienate, dissociate.

– Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

Some of the inherent and complex difficulties that were quite common during the agrarian period include: dominator hierarchies, with Empires at the top of that hierarchy, and overshoot (exceeding the carrying capacity of the environment and resource base).

What about those Mayans? Where did they go wrong?  Again, Ken Wilber:

The Mayans had already moved from foraging to horticulture, and that meant not only that they could begin to bind various contentious tribes into a larger and solidified social structure -–and not only that they could, via farming, free a class of priests to begin developing mathematics and astronomy and a sophisticated calendar – but also that they, in a way foragers never could, begin to deplete the rain forests. They transcended mere foraging, only to go too far and dissociate themselves in certain crucial ways from the biosphere, which was altogether suicidal.

They didn’t differentiate and integrate, they dissociated and alienated. They didn’t transcend and include, they repressed and denied. Since the biosphere is an internal component of the human holon, they secured their own destruction.

So this theme – transcendence versus repression – is an altogether crucial theme of historical development, and we want to watch carefully for signs of repression at each stage of human evolution, individual and collective.

“Transcend and Include” is one of the mantras of Ken Wilber’s Integral model, and in this context it refers to the idea that as each period Transcends the previous period and moves to a higher level, if it does not Include the best aspects of the levels that came before it, there will be big problems. Foraging and horticulture had a closer symbiosis with the rhythms of the natural world, and as human society moved beyond those structures, we become more and more distant from those processes. And the replacement processes as technologies advance allow increasing amounts of destruction to our biosphere.

It is important to understand what Wilber is not saying here about the Mayans. When he says that they went too far and dissociated from the biosphere, that they “repressed and denied,”  he is NOT saying that this was a conscious decision, or that they somehow should have known better. He explains:

The primary cause of any ecological devastation is, as we were saying, simple ignorance. It is only with scientific knowledge of the biosphere, of the precise ways in which all holons in the biosphere are interrelated, including the biological holons of the human being – it is only with that knowledge that men and women can actually attune their actions with the biosphere. A simple or sacred respect for nature will not do. A sacred outlook on nature did not prevent numerous tribes from despoiling the environment out of simple and innocent ignorance, and did not prevent the Mayans from devastating the rain forests, and it will not prevent us from doing the same thing, again out of ignorance.

Roszak points out that it is modern science, and modern science alone – the ecological sciences and systems sciences, for example – that can directly show us how and why our actions are corroding the biosphere. If the primal tribes knew that by cut and burn they would ruin their habitat and endanger their own lives – if they actually knew that with a scientific certainty – then they would at least have thought about it a little more carefully before they began their bio-destruction. If the Mayans knew that in killing the rain forests they were killing themselves, they would have stopped immediately, or at least paused considerably. But ignorance is ignorance; whether innocent or greedy, sacred or profane, ignorance destroys the biosphere.

They know not what they do. As advanced as they were, they didn’t have systems ecology to give them the understanding that what they were doing was going to bring destruction in the long run….and neither did the preceding stages.

In fact, some argue that the earlier stages also had the tendency to over-consume resources. Ken Wilber makes a very important point: To dissociate with the biosphere is suicidal, because “the biosphere is an internal component of the human holon.”  However, in general Wilber  tends to put more emphasis on the “technological-economic” structural base behind the periods of human history than he does on the biosphere that supports and makes that technological-economic structure possible.

David Holmgren

On the other hand, Permaculture co-founder David Holmgren brings more attention to the ecological framework that makes possible different technological-economic structures.

The broad processes of human history can be understood using an ecological framework that recognises primary energy sources as the strongest factors determining the general structure of human economy, politics and culture. The transition from a hunter-gatherer way of life to that of settled agriculture made possible the expansion of human numbers, denser settlement patterns and surplus resources. Those surplus resources were the foundations for what we call civilisation including the development of more advanced technologies, cities, social class structures, standing armies and written language. Archaeology records a series of civilisations that rose and fell as they depleted their bioregional resource base. Lower density simple agrarian and hunter-gatherer cultures took over the territory of collapsed civilisations and allowed the resources of forests, soils and water to regenerate. That in turn, gave rise to new cycles of growth in cultural complexity.

– David Holmgren, Future Scenarios

As populations grew, hunter-gatherers perhaps over-hunted some areas and over-gathered others, and thus found the need for domestication of plants and animals because of a now less abundant landscape. They had to develop the new technology of horticulture in order to maintain surplus resources, and so the “cycles of growth in cultural complexity” began. As mentioned above, each period had its problems. “Old problems are solved or defused, only to introduce new and sometimes more complex difficulties.” (Wilber)

In Part 3, we’ll be looking at the Industrial period with the rational worldview.

For more along the lines outlined in this post, see Permaculture teacher Graham Strouts  helpful series on “Back To Nature”. He discusses humans’ relationship to the natural world and explores the major periods in the evolution of human consciousness, as outlined by Wilber and Don Beck (Spiral Dynamics), but within the context of ecology:
http://zone5.org/2007/12/01/back-to-nature-1/
http://zone5.org/2007/12/10/deep-ecology-nostalgia-for-eden
http://zone5.org/2008/01/06/back-to-nature-3-the-evolution-of-consciousness
http://zone5.org/2008/01/13/back-to-nature-4-the-trouble-with-green
http://zone5.org/2008/01/27/back-to-nature-5-consciousness-for-sustainabiltiy

 

Lessons From the Ages for 2013, Part 1

Brand Spankin’ New (Zony Mash)

Well, here we are in the brand-spankin’ new year of 2013, with all of its rich possibilities before us, as well as all of the potential problems and risks.

The Mayan calendar was, of course, the subject of much discussion in 2012, especially so as the year wound down. Some used it to predict ‘the end of the world as we know it’, and others claimed it was about a huge leap in human consciousness and an entry into a glorious new age. I would argue that both of these statements are true…in some sense, but not as either a cataclysmic ending, nor a brilliant new beginning with a dramatic and immediate end to the evils that occur in the material world.

What we do know is that the Mayan calendar has completed its cycle. Dec. 21, 2012 marked the end of the “Long Count” calendar, a calendar system used by the Mayan civilization of Central America.

Things do end. And new beginnings are possible each and every day.

We have a tendency sometimes to fall under the illusion that our world is stable, and that the living arrangements we live under have a solid footing and are pretty much here to stay. And the more material possessions we accrue, we feel both more secure and more attached.

…it is not thinkable among us that our public institutions should collapse and we must engage in deception and self-deception about our alienation…Ultimately, we are incapable of facing our own death. All these denials about endings are necessary…because it is too costly to face and embrace them. It would suggest that we are not in charge, that things will not forever stay the manageable way they are, and that things will not finally work out.
– Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination

In our heart of hearts, however, we all know that nothing lasts forever. “No epoch is finally privileged,” Ken Wilber has written. “We are all tomorrow’s food. The process continues. And Spirit is found in the process itself, not in any particular epoch or time or place.”

One of the “funnies” circulating on the internet recently was this image:

Some have pointed out that the image on the left is not actually the Mayan calendar, but is instead the Aztec calendar – the Aztec civilization came after that of the Mayan.

Now, after having the laugh about the similarity of the Oreo cookie to the circular calendar, and after correctly identifying the calendar images, another thought came to me.

The Oreo Cookie actually is a tolerably good representation of our current consumer culture.  The Oreo has come to be known as the world’s favorite cookie, and is made by Nabisco, a division of Kraft Foods, Inc.  (which recently changed its name to Mondelēz International, Inc.)

Kraft is an international foods conglomerate, known for its highly processed and chemically laden foodstuffs, such as Oscar Mayar hotdogs, Velveeta Cheesefoods, as well as Oreo cookies.

And our consumer culture has an unhealthy addiction, which tends to devour as quickly as possible.  And so we have the Kooky Cookie Calendar as a reminder of where we are.  Consuming our resources at an ever expanding rate.

And the Mayans? Well, they do have a few lessons for us. More about that in Part 2.  Until then, this quote from James Howard Kunstler, written in 2007 (before the burst of the housing bubble):

The key to understanding the challenge we face is admitting that we have to comprehensively make other arrangements for all the normal activities of everyday life…

If you really want to understand the U.S. public’s penchant for wishful thinking, consider this: We invested most of our late twentieth-century wealth in a living arrangement with no future. American suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. The far-flung housing subdivisions, commercial highway strips, big-box stores, and all the other furnishings and accessories of extreme car dependence will function poorly, if at all, in an oil-scarce future. Period. This dilemma now entails a powerful psychology of previous investment, which is prompting us to defend our misinvestments desperately, or, at least, preventing us from letting go of our assumptions about their future value. Compounding the disaster is the unfortunate fact that the manic construction of ever more futureless suburbs (a.k.a. the “housing bubble”) has insidiously replaced manufacturing as the basis of our economy.

Meanwhile, the outsourcing of manufacturing to other nations has spurred the development of a “global economy,” which media opinion-leaders such as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman (author of The World Is Flat) say is a permanent state of affairs that we had better get used to. It is probably more accurate to say that the global economy is a set of transient economic relations that have come about because of two fundamental (and transient) conditions: a half century of relative peace between great powers and a half century of cheap and abundant fossil-fuel energy. These two mutually dependent conditions are now liable to come to an end as the great powers enter a bitter contest over the world’s remaining energy resources, and the world is actually apt to become a lot larger and less flat as these economic relations unravel.

– James Howard Kunstler, Making Other Arrangements

The Importance of Good Communication Skills

I’ve said this before:

I think one of the biggest challenges for Transition groups is to learn the skills of how to work effectively as a group in terms of having efficient meetings that are inclusive, enjoyable, and get a lot accomplished. Learning to work together effectively may be one of the most important things we do to prepare for peak oil, climate change, and economic instability.

I’ve also said:

…when we think of “Reskilling” in Transition, we tend to focus on the “practical” hands on skills, like how to grow a garden, or retrofit your home, or graft fruit trees.  How often do we think about the importance of learning skills like how to become more skillful in our communication, or how to keep a working group together, or learning tools for building consensus? I’ve often wished that we at Transition Whatcom would find more time to make this kind of skill building more of a priority.

and so…I’m now excited to announce that my friend and colleague Alan Seid, founder of Cascadia Workshops and the Blackbelt Communication Skills Coaching Program – has put out some excellent free training videos, and I am now an affiliate.

Alan Seid

I have attended Alan’s Empowered Communication workshops and found them to be powerful and extremely helpful and applicable in my everyday life, as well as in my volunteer work in groups, such as Sustainable Bellingham and Transition Whatcom. For a period of time my wife Angela and I helped Alan produce these local workshops because we were convinced this material needs to be more widely shared. Now I’m excited that this material has been refined and more widely and conveniently available online as the Blackbelt Communication Skills Coaching Program.

These videos were created for people who want to make a difference in the world, and who are committed working on themselves AND to improving their relationships through clear and powerful communication skills. (Alan also happens to be a Certified Trainer in Nonviolent CommunicationTM having studied directly with Dr. Marshall Rosenberg starting in 1995.)

These videos are for you if:

– you want the people in your life to appreciate you as a present & compassionate listener

– you want to learn a formula for speaking with clarity and power consistently

– you’re looking for a proven method for transforming and more fully enjoy ing all your personal and professional relationships

– you want to know exactly what to do about conflicts and lack of harmony since they get in the way of a team’s or an individual’s ability to have the positive impact they could be having

– interpersonal conflict is something you’ve shied away from but you yearn to be skilled and confident at handling it masterfully

– you want to show up in the world in a bigger way, all the while creating interpersonal connection and effectiveness

– you’ve seen how powerful and positive interpersonal relationships are the foundation for teams working well together and for individuals making a bigger difference, and you’re ready to take your knowledge and skills to the next level.

Again, this is a FREE video training series, and I think you will really enjoy Alan’s teaching style.

Check it out here: Free Videos from the Blackbelt Communication Skills Coaching Program