What to do? You’re in an organization or process you see isn’t working, but you suspect or know that people involved are assuming that change is impossible. Not an abstract question by any measure. Like me, you may frequently find yourself there.
The online forum at Grist.org, for example – a forum whose members I have great respect for – frequently speaks to the need for something beyond the two major (American) political parties, but the visioning stops there. Beyond declaring that something new is needed, few options or little chance of their success are envisioned. Peak oil author and uber-blogger James Howard Kunstler talks about things being worse than just before the French Revolution; he sees a grisly scenario of revenge against the elites soon upon us, but no real change in the status quo. The forum at the news aggregator CommonDreams.org is likewise more nightmare than dream, peopled as it frequently is by the righteously angry.
It’s common, even usual online, for the left and the right to be angry at each other, flying in the face of the observation made by the cartoon character Pogo and by others, that the enemy is us. Our tendency to perceive the enemy as the other guy is deep and not prone to change easily. In so many printed, online and broadcast media, whatever discussion there is of alternative exploration soon finds itself awash with conformity to the left-right tug, pulled into a two-camp arena, regardless of the topic. Attempts to change the story itself are resisted as if the journalist’s job depended on it, which of course it usually does. In our ways large and small we are all part of that system.
The upshot is that our private and public conversations are often mired in a context in which there’s no relief on the horizon, no vision to beckon us out of the muck. Even folks who’ve never said it can feel that we’re on a slide toward collapse and chaos, the only remaining question being, “When?”
We’re stuck. And what we’re most stuck in are not the topics, but the dynamics of the discussion and the shaping of the way forward.
The evolutionary moment of choice
Could it be natural and normal to be here, with no vision and all? No nothin’ in fact, like a deadpan poker player with a bad hand facing very high stakes? Could this moment be the cliffhanging moment in an evolutionary story that’s unfolding right on schedule?
I think so and here’s the case for that. In any finite world such as our own, in which a species such as ours became as wildly successful as we have, sooner or later that species will hit real limits, solid walls. Every planet reaches the end of its adolescent grabbing all it can, and must eventually face the biggest lesson of all: now it’s up to us.
Aren’t we there now in reality? Now the challenge is to do something different from what got us this far. This appears to be a hard turn, habit being what it is. Or, more to the point, what we have made habit become, by habit. We face a deeper habit, the one that believes that habits are hard to break. That too is a habit, our habits around change itself, something we often view as near impossible. Just like the strong reactions which can quickly rise when we are faced with the mere notion of getting past a longstanding two-party political system.
I didn’t invent the evolutionary idea that we are exactly where we need to be. The notion that we’re smack dab in the middle of a necessary evolutionary process is right in line with what a lot of folks are saying. Evolutionary scientists such as Elizabeth Sahtouris and Brian Swimme are telling us, as is integral philosopher including Ken Wilber and a hot of cronies. So’s evolutionary spiritualist Michael Dowd, whose extraordinary blending of religion and science in Thank God for Evolution has been positively blurbed by a half-dozen Nobel laureates. They are trumpeting the news that we are in an evolutionary moment.
Following the bouncing ball of e-v-o-l-u-t-i-o-n
The story of evolution is the story of progressively greater capability: the astonishing emergence of life itself – single-celled creatures turning into multi-celled and increasingly complex organisms that have greater and greater capacity. Then the reptilian brain, transcended in its turn by the early mammalian brain with new bonding-related social capacity as parents care for offspring. The higher mammalian brain as socialization develops. Now the self-reflective homo sapiens, the recent inheritors of reason and choice with a neo-cortex that’s partially freed us from our instinctual obligations. Ta-dah!
Human history has been deeply marked by survival and competition for apparently scarce resources, each community fighting others for territory and share. As a species, we’re extremely successful. Now we face a real scarcity of the resources we have become familiar with and the energy-exchange processes that have become our habits. For the first time we find ourselves with nowhere to run, with no new finds to plunder with abandon.
Now, so pushed up against each other, there’s no way we can fight among ourselves without fighting against ourselves. What got us here is not what will get us out, and beyond, this point. Now if there is to be enough to permit most to eat and live, we’ll have to intentionally cooperate with “the other” like never before. We’ll have to move the term “my brother’s keeper” from a religious tenet and a philosophical nicety to an economic imperative and a practical wisdom. Maximum consumption is no longer a practical option. But most of us haven’t heard that, or we are not ready to really hear it.
Resist this reality how we may, we really do have a choice about how we act now in this moment. Likewise, this “moment”-um continues, as always, to include our freedom to resist our freedom. We can use our wider mind – or not. To use it is to override the old “me-first” drive and choose what has to be if we are to continue to evolve. Cooperation, mutual aid, and opening to diversity are now survival imperatives.
For those of us, as it were, on the top of the economic heap, it’s all the more difficult to “get” and implement the new rules of the game. The old rule which so recently propped us up is now a fast track to the bottom. The new rule says cooperate to build a liveable future.
It is as though Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were once again at the edge of the cliff if you can remember the scene – nowhere to run, no way back, no choice but to jump into something new.
Which brings us back to the question posed at the opening of this article – what to do when we feel the need for change but perceive that few others do, or perhaps that that they secretly share the feeling but not the readiness to act? The simple, but not easy, answer is that we make the evolutionary choice ourselves because it’s the only one that will work and we do see it. We choose to move in cooperative, farsighted ways that, though seen and wanted, are unfamiliar and new to us in practice.
The next evolutionary step is a mental or spiritual adaptation and a matter of choice. In the process of that choosing, we are evolving. In that, we miraculously get unstuck. Right on schedule.
