World Ethos 3
Earth’s Twilight — Chapter 08.3
The hourglass
As we already said,
this new common responsibility is oriented towards the future,
the near as the remote. Just like any other living being, or maybe more so, the human organism is a ‘dissipating structure’, that is, an open thermodynamic system that exchanges energy with its environment: it absorbs free energy (nutrients and sunlight) and returns it degraded as waste (heat and entropy).
This exchange produces a ‘fluctuation’: when the system is not able to to cope with the terms of exchange, it tends to reorganize in more complex forms, more flexible and yet more vulnerable to the side effects of entropic decline, the growing dead weight of non-renewable energy. Therefore, life’s possibilities after us are linked, at least to a certain degree, to the use that we make today of the planet’s energy resources.
The world’s energetic heritage belongs indiscriminately to the entire biosphere, present and future:
this is the fundamental axiom of an authentic world ethics.
Our priority is to understand how this responsibility can be translated into praxis:
how can we, human beings, effectively respect ourselves and the other creatures as an end and not as a means.
When we love somebody, we also love the vital environment within which our relationship is set. Of course even love itself cannot escape the entropic process, which is fundamentally tied to the nature of life: the entropic curve is the inescapable frame of our finiteness.
And yet, love operates in anti-entropic fashion, harmoniously integrating in the universal rhythm of life, placing the common interest in front of the personal profit, in conscious solidarity with the other living beings.
The metaphysical sense of self-limitation that inspired all the ascetic traditions, today can be translated in a peaceful subordination of the self to the universal cycle of life, a cycle for which death is only a temporary season.
Every human can indeed transcend death, to the condition of loving the entire life as itself,
and within the entire life every living being, even the most insignificant: to the condition, hence, of being a
loving caretaker and not a master of the earthly garden.
The struggle for survival, that shaped the transformations of the species, and the struggle for power, that guided the clash of human civilizations, left in each one of us a residual aggressive impulse whose primary expression is self-affirmation and repulsion of death. Deep down, in every destructive action and thought, each human is really targeting its own death.
The acceptance of one’s own death as a congenital measure of the life process, has the effect of dissolving the separation between the individual self and the concert of creatures, allowing the internal void to be filled with the rhythm of life.
It’s the ‘perfect joy’, disclosing the secret of things and weaving together our rational language and the original language of life, the ‘universal grammar’ rhizome that links every sprout beneath the surface of the planet. The Canticle of the Creatures is not only the result of the mystical experience of St. Francis; It is an experience attainable by the ethical conscience of every human, once it is healed from the contagion of individualism. The credo of the world ethics could be summarized in
“Love your species as yourself”
or, more radically,
“Love all life as yourself”.
To recap: the future reveals to be the most profound dimension of moral responsibility. In the old ethics, the moral choices were conceived as regarding the present or the immediate future, the only foreseeable time-span on which to judge the effects of our actions. Today we know that our actions, by affecting the entropic process, will determine the living conditions of the future generations, and even the same duration of life’s journey on Earth. It turns out reversed, therefore, the relationship between individual and History as described by the Hegelian philosophy: It isn’t by committing to the Absolute of History that the individual redeems itself from its finiteness, it’s rather History that gives itself up to each individual, from whose choices depends its duration.
The cloud and the book
The immanence of the species in the systemic unity of the biosphere doesn’t allow, when formulating a moral judgment, for any kind of analysis that proceeds by isolating a specific fact from its totality.. “A poet – writes the Vietnamese buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh in his last book – when looking at this page, will clearly see a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud there would be no water; without water, the trees could not grow; and without trees, you couldn’t make paper. So the cloud is in here. The existence of this page is dependent on the existence of a cloud. Paper is such stuff as clouds are made on”. This suggestive metaphor reminded me of Remy Chauvin, the scientist author of God of the ants, God of the stars. He recounts how one day, visiting the Paris museum, he saw some kind of butterflies that were the exact image of a starlit sky:
Night blue, with shining white spots.
On the rear edge of the wings, a faint rosy line gave the impression of a rising aurora. Proceeding from a butterfly to the next, the rosy stripe would get bigger and bigger until the aurora rose in its full magnificence, leaving only a tiny border of starry sky in the fore wings.
From those butterflies, concludes Chauvin, came a message I couldn’t completely unfold. Both examples are poetic transfigurations of what today even the most rigorous science tells us: things reciprocally give each other existence and meaning, and nothing can be understood outside its whole set of relations.
The new ethics rests upon the compassionate interdependence between every element of the world-system.
The fundamental interdependence is that between humanity and nature.
“The ultimate balancing of budgets – explains Rifkin — is not within society, but between society and nature… Economic activity is merely human intervention in the ecological cycle, borrowing low-entropy inputs, converting them into temporary utilities, and eventually discarding them back into the ecological cycle in the form of high-entropy wastes”.
Multinational Corporations and National states have only recently started to give in to the requests of the global environmental movement.
Voices such as sustainable development, environmentally-friendly chemical engineering, environmental resources management are now on the agenda of every business manager and every head of state.
My impression is that, in spite of the formal statements, the present political and economical institutions are structurally unsuitable to lead humanity in the path towards effective environmental awareness:
their hierarchical architecture is obsolete and must be replaced by a global network of grassroots intentional communities.
The internet technology is coming to our aid: we will soon have the means to develop a decentralized, collaborative world network organization, inspired by the new planetary ethos, to unite the efforts of the human species at the dawn of the new era.
In order to ‘walk the talk’, it’s time for humanity to prove its maturity once and for all. Only by cutting off the umbilical cord tying us to our hierarchical past, we will be finally able to
commit ourselves as adults to the common goal of creating a human community able to care for its new home, the world, and provide for its children, the future generations.
For more in-depth operative guidelines and suggestions, I’m going to dedicate the last chapters of this book to the articulation of a worldwide transitional strategy.
