Watching Apocalypse

The Structure of a Humanific Revolution

 

 

 

I get daily emails from a non corporate news service that publishes stories on climate and energy issues. It calls itself Climate News Network.  It's good if one has a broader, ecological-language based view, because stories can then be put in a perspective.  After all, the journalists report on a single issue, but making sense of the meaning of a single issue involves putting that issue into a larger context.  Some journalists will try to do that, some will not.  Renewable energy is one of those single issues that can be reported on with a certain tone of exuberance while ignoring the larger social context that gives it that categorical meaning.  Take today's email story:

Fossil fuels investment takes a nosedive

The story's author is Kieran Cooke, a founding editor of the news service, a former correspondent for the BBC and Financial Times who now focuses on environmental issues.  In my mind, a good resumé.  Cooke sounds to me like someone who's been there, and seen a lot, and probably has developed an ecological consciousness that's brought him to a point where he sees the predicament humans have created for themselves.  I look at these things when I read the news because I see the who of the writer as an important context of the what that's being said.  That's part of what I mean by developing an ecological language.  So I stress, ecology is not just about the understanding of biological systems of the environment, its about understanding human thinking and its relationship to what we think about.  This was expressed years ago by Gregory Bateson in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind.

This, I discovered years ago, is also a raised consciousness issue in all of science that helps us to mentally remove it from the iconic pedestal upon which it was once mounted by proponents of the Age of Reason. These are the same proponents who invented the notion that humans are now successfully dominating nature with their science-based technology.  That illusion has become an archonic driver of institutions that allows the humans who are part of institutional machinery to ignore the effects of what their institutions are doing, since all that is done by science driven technology is by this definition good for Progress with a capital P.

A familiar example may be found in the question quantum physics raised that first disturbed Einstein: is light a wave or a particle?  The answer depends on how it's looked at.  Which brings up the whole problem of subjectivity of perception.  How light is looked at is related to how it's measured.  This goes for just about everything we think about.  Take for example the seemingly science unrelated question of leadership in a society.  What should a leader be? What behaviors should a leader exhibit?  How do we know someone is, in fact, a leader?  Someone with a strict parent conditioning will answer that question one way, while another with a nurturant parent conditioning will have a different perspective on leaders.  The very issue of the legitimacy of the authority of any leader rides on those very different contexts.  The very nature of the institutions involved will be a result. And, subsequently, the nature of the institutions will effect the conditioning of those who are involved. So whether leadership is a wave, that is a continuum of relationships that's always connected with those involved, or a particle, something seen as a discrete, a definite something that exists as an object apart, thus something objectifiable, from the group, will depend on how it's looked at.

The importance of becoming aware of this involves our consciousness.  If we are not aware of our conditioning, we may have difficulty realizing that we are creating a kind of predetermined answer by the way we think out our questions.  If we are unaware that the punishment our strict and authoritative parent gave us as a child when we exhibited creativity in our thoughts is now part of our ongoing self suppression of our imagination, we may miss the part where we are succumbing to institutional thought patterns without giving it proper doubt and questioning, and thus succumbing to the words of a leader who we fail to doubt and question.

Now, back to the topic, the categorical.  In this case, fossil fuel investment takes a nosedive, while renewable investments are on the rise.  What does that mean in the big ecological systemic relationship picture?  

In the big picture, not only do we have this problem of rising CO2 in the atmosphere, caused by human activity that is always directly related to employing energy for those activities (that's a simple law of physics that cannot be repealed nor avoided), we also have a range of ecological disasters related to a de-speciation of many regional and local ecologies that humans have invaded and transformed for specifics related to their species without consideration for their systemic ramifications.  The climate is not the driver of this rapidly accelerating process but merely one of the consequences.  This is being noted now as a mass extinction, which our science tells us from extensive investigation, is only the sixth one ever to occur since life emerged on this planet.  This may be the first one ever to be caused by a single species, rather than some catastrophic geological event.  

The key factor in this mass extinction cause is a choice-driven way of life by one species, humans.  And that's, again, where our consciousness comes in.  If civilization is a human choice, not a DNA-driven way of organizing ourselves, as we see in, say, bee hives, then it follows that we may have some choice about whether we want to participate in causing a global mass extinction of species, with truly unknown -- in its full systemic detail, though clearly catastrophically probable -- consequences.

So here's the thought.  In specifics it's held that replacing fossil fuels with renewables is a good thing for diminishing climate changes being caused by mounting levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.  But if there's so much more involved than climate change, is there not more that needs to change than just replacing fossil fuels with renewables? ...Provided that's even possible, which merely raises another searing and daunting set of questions.  Don't we need to be thinking about how we live as well?  Don't we need to be thinking about maybe how we look at our biosphere, our local environments, and how our way of living brings us into relationship with that?  That is what I mean by a revolution of thinking by changing our thought paradigm itself.  Changing from one that looks at specifics without much consideration for the whole and the consequences of those specifics.

 

But... Changing to what? I'm calling that what a kind of revolution: a revolution in 'ecological thinking.'  And if we need to be doing that, then we need to become conscious of it, and in being conscious we can begin to open our imaginative capacities and wonder how we go about transforming the way we think from this predetermining particulating, objectifying process that continues to produce the same conclusions, over and over, which include the same hubristic preconceptions that we are somehow advancing, progressing as a species, to a perspective that's entirely new.  

 

I guess coming to that understanding would be the structure of a humanific revolution.