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Title: Killing the Caterpillar Author: Alnoor Ladha Date: DECEMBER 15, 2015 Language: en Topics: spirituality Source: https://www.kosmosjournal.org/news/killing-the-caterpillar-competing-worldviews-at-the-chrysalis-stage-of-humanity/ Notes: Alnoor Ladha is the Executive Director of The Rules, a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, writers, and researchers dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality and climate change. He is also a board member of Greenpeace International USA.
In 1972, the Club of Rome published a groundbreaking study titled The
Limits to Growth. MIT scientists used computer simulations to create
scenarios playing out how exponential growth interacts with finite
resources. The findings were devastating. The growth trends in human
population, combined with rampant consumption, led to resource
depletion, destructive pollution, social unrest and ecosystem failure.
Without limits on growth we would inevitably end up with civilizational
collapse.
Clearly, perpetual economic growth, even when wrapped in the veneer of
‘sustainable development’, cannot save the planet.
Every dollar of wealth created heats up our planet, and of course,
creates inequality in its wake, as the vast majority of that dollar will
end up in the hands of a tiny elite. As the Nigerian author Bayo
Akomolafe reminds us, “perhaps the way we respond to the crisis is part
of the crisis.”
So what is to be done? Two recent books provide striking contrasts in
their modality of intervention. The first follows in the aegis of The
Limits to Growth. In The Collapse of Western Civilization, two acclaimed
historians of science, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, provide a “view
from the future”. Although it is grounded in current climate science,
the authors write from a sci-fi vantage point of the twenty-fourth
century. A Chinese historian reflects on the Great Collapse vis-à-vis
the milestones and triggers that brought down Western civilization.
The authors cast a wide net in their analysis, from indicting limited
aspects of the scientific model (e.g. the silos of scientific
disciplines, the standard of 95% statistical significance for truth
claims, etc.), to scientists’ inability to communicate, to the nefarious
“carbon-combustion complex” – the vast network of think-tanks,
politicians and corporations hell-bent on maintaining the profits and
power they receive from fossil fuel extraction.
Although this book provides a dire warning, steeped in verifiable facts,
it lacks a broader worldview. In some ways it is systemic in its
analysis, but it is not holistic. It examines traditional aspects of
structure of the economic system, but it doesn’t look at the
psychological, emotional or metaphysical drivers that led to the
collective insanity of capitalism in the first place. Nor does it offer
insight into what the post-capitalist world would or should look like.
There are cryptic allusions from our guide – the Chinese historian – but
they are limited to an unclear inference that we maintain a similar
system, just one that is somehow more in line with the planetary
boundaries.
‘Apocalypse’ by Albert Goodwin
One could argue that the role of this book is to paint a stark picture
of dystopia in order to strike fear in the heart of Western
rationalists. And for that, we must applaud the authors. However, there
is no mention of what the Great Collapse will do to us as a species.
Will we simply temper our most fierce instincts to consume and dominate?
Will we address the underlying drivers of these desires? Or will we
mature beyond extreme materialism all together, and heal the wounds that
have come from our perceived separation with nature?
The second book – Terra Nova: Global Revolution and the Healing of Love,
by Dr. Dieter Duhm – might seem like an unlikely place to look for these
answers.
Dr. Duhm is one of the founders of Tamera, a research center and
alternative community based in southern Portugal. The community was
founded in 1978 in Germany and then moved to its current location in
Portugal in 1995. For almost 40 years, Tamera has been a pioneer in a
wide range of solutions for solar energy, permaculture, water use and
retention, and many aspects of community and social relations, up to and
including ‘open love’.
These last two words might strike fear at the heart of the scientific
materialists among us. What does love have to do with our current
convergence of global crises?
There are three critical lessons that Duhm imparts by way of answering
this question.
1) There Is No Liberation of Society Without Liberation of the Self
Terra Nova lays out a vision for both the transition phase to the
post-capitalist world, and a beautiful description of what it could look
like. Terra Nova does this in a non-prescriptive sense. It’s more
Buckminster Fuller than Noam Chomsky, in that it is based on values
rather than policy prescriptions. More importantly it is deeply rooted
in the social, spiritual and psychological underpinnings of our current
crisis. Duhm’s background in psychoanalysis and sociology guides him as
he dives deep into the assemblage point of our collective fears and
repressions; the real foundation, he argues, of neoliberal capitalism.
It would be easy to dismiss Duhm’s philosophy as relevant to only
limited experiments or for those with a penchant for the Kibbutz
lifestyle. But Duhm’s structural analysis and application of ideas are
not so easily dismissed. He was one of the leaders of the German Left in
the Student Movement of 1968. He was on the coalface of the war against
imperialism and capitalism. He organized protests against the Vietnam
War and, during the German students’ revolution, he coined the phrase,
“Revolution without emancipation is counterrevolution.”
Duhm started to realize that the destruction wrought within human
relationships was stronger than external constraints. At that time he
wrote, “Why was it so far impossible to establish an ideal human
society? Because it is not only the outer conditions which are at fault,
but particularly inner structures and patterns of thinking. It is
impossible to form a free society from people who are structured by
authoritarianism. It is not possible to create a non-violent society
when the impulses of hate and violence within are suppressed but not
dissolved. A revolution that has not taken place inside cannot succeed
outside. This is what we learn from history” (emphasis added).
This is a very different place to start than thinking about failures of
communication, rigid scientific methodologies, or even the corporate
capture of democratic processes. Scientists like Oreskes and Conway do
not traditionally think about how the first surpluses from the Neolithic
Revolution affected the human psyche; how hoarding and protecting
material goods created a culture of violence; how excess food supply set
the stage for city-states that required constant war, hierarchy,
oppression and exploitation to feed their construction and maintenance;
how patriarchy has created a world where one in five women will be raped
in their lifetime; how the callous and abstract market logic requires
that we all engage in a form distributed fascism where we are all
incentivized to be short-termist, covetous, extractive, selfish and
often violent.
According to Duhm, if we dare to hope for achieving an anarchist utopia
with strong local and bio-regional economies, direct democracy and
symbiosis with the natural world, we need women and men to be sovereign,
to understand how power works, to consent to rules they themselves have
legitimized, and to consciously choose to live according to their shared
principles and values. In other words, his argument is that in order to
know what we want, we must first know who we are. What are our deepest
desires? Why do we think we are here? Where do we think we are going, as
individuals and as a civilization?
As Duhm argues, “It is the inner workings of humanity that steer the
external processes in politics and economics. Changes within the human
being will determine whether a social revolution will be successful or
not.”[1]
2) The Revolution Will be Spiritual, Not Just Materialist
Having dealt with the necessary preconditions for a successful drive
towards revolution, Duhm moves on to what the revolution may look like.
He is clear that we have to speak to the human soul; to create a vision
of the world that resonates at our deepest core, and not just a
description of what the rules of law will be.
His plan centers around “Healing Biotopes”, which is what he describes
as the archetypal communities that exemplify the values embodied within
the Tamera model. Borrowing from Cambridge biochemist Rupert Sheldrake’s
concept of morphic resonance – i.e. the idea that self-organising
systems inherit the collective memory from previous similar systems –
Duhm says, “the image of a Healing Biotope came from an intention to
create a morphogenetic field for a new humane world. Evolution moves
forward through creating morphogenetic fields.”[2] Essentially, this
means that the contribution of every new idea or model creates a
corresponding resonance or field that every human can then access.
The new morphogenetic field Duhm describes includes autonomous
individuals, fully realized in their spiritual truths; a well
functioning community based on open-love and non-ownership; and
symbiosis with the natural world (Duhm even discusses the possibility of
communing with plants, animals and the natural environment). In order
for the resonance of this new field to spread, these alternative
communities would ideally be connected with each other and embedded in a
greater political and social context.
3) We Need Both Resistance and Renewal
Duhm finishes with an appeal that will surely resonate in the heart of
anyone caught in the frustrations and aspirations of activism. There are
immediate struggles, he says, that must be won and reforms that must be
enacted. Both resistance and renewal are necessary preconditions for the
post-capitalist world. In other words, although it is true that we must
remove the noose of capitalism from the neck of humanity, we must also
create the infrastructure for transition simultaneously while engaging
in the struggle. Climate change is going to force us to into smaller,
more autonomous communities.
We either have the option to start building the infrastructure now, with
the necessary intention and ingenuity, or we will find ourselves in a
deep and dangerous dystopia, forced to build a new world as the remnants
of the old edifice crumble between our desperate hands.
Intentional Community, Tamera, in Portugal
The newly built “cultural crystals”, as Duhm describes this model for
new communities, have the ability to scale and replicate at a rate that
could actually address the deep destruction of late-stage capitalism. As
more and more people realize that the current system cannot be reformed,
there will, concurrently, be an increasing flux into existing
communities, and the creation of new ones. The pre-existing models for
Healing Biotopes may play a crucial role in the knowledge transfer and
modeling the new modes-of-being. They also have the ability to capture
the imagination of a new generation awaiting hope and transcendence on a
planet headed towards a Great Collapse of some kind.
Whether one agrees with the vision of Terra Nova or not, it is clear
that this is not just a story of utopia versus dystopia. The Western
academic tradition and the Progressive movement (especially the climate
change movement) have not been able to connect the deep truths about
psychological motivations, community, love and our relationship with
nature. As a result, they have been fighting a rationalistic,
descriptive, Cartesian battle for the most falsifiable facts. They have
not been able to articulate a holistic worldview, one that is both
materialist and spiritual, which speaks to the hearts and ambitions of
an increasingly apathetic majority.
How readers react to the contrasting approaches – the scientific
projections of destruction in The Collapse of Western Civilization, or
Duhm’s descriptions of “cultural crystals” that can spark the
imagination of the multitude – will in part be determined by how one
sees and understands the present reality.
Are we facing a dualist challenge of broken but fixable machinery, or a
deeply spiritual crisis? Are we in a potential endgame, or is this the
“chrysalis phase” of our civilization? Do we look back as the
caterpillar that could have become a butterfly but self-destructed
before its newest and truest stage of life began? Or do we tell the
story of the caterpillar that activated all of its potentiality to
become something it could not fully conceive of until it emerged, fully
formed?
What seems certain to me is that we must each hold for ourselves the
potential of the world we want to see. Another world is possible not
because we can describe or even theorize her, but because the seeds of
her potentiality already exist within our collective being. As Duhm
says, “The concrete utopia is a latent reality within the universe, just
as the butterfly is a reality latent within the caterpillar.”[3] The
only question is, will we kill our host environment’s ability to give us
life or will we act as the Imaginal cells, killing off the caterpillar
logic of neoliberalism in time for metamorphosis.
References:
[1] Duhm, Dieter. Terra Nova: Global Revolution and the Healing of Love.
Verlag Meiga: 2015, page 8.
[2] Duhm, Dieter. Terra Nova: Global Revolution and the Healing of Love.
Verlag Meiga: 2015, page 95.
[3] Duhm, Dieter. Terra Nova: Global Revolution and the Healing of Love.
Verlag Meiga: 2015, page 27.