Where are we going?
This is third of my posts exploring Climate crisis, psyche and spirit. As before there are no certainties — only, perhaps, the lesser of evils.
Steve Thorp, February 2017.
“…the space diaspora occurred as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision whether to destroy the Earth’s biosphere or change its rules. Many argued for the destruction of the biosphere, as being the lesser of two evils…”.
(2312, Kim Stanley-Robinson, Orbit Books, 2012).
Civilisations end…
No-one who has read a lifetime’s worth of science/speculative fiction will be surprised by the notion of human civilisations ending. In Kim Stanley-Robinson’s epic, 2312, the more imaginative and adventurous elements of the human race have left the earth to work and play elsewhere in the solar system, whilst those earthbound continue to live within an insular, suspicious, declining civilisation — and on a post-climate-change planet where biodiversity has all but disappeared.
The point being that civilisations change, evolve, decline and fall.
Actually, Kim Stanley Robinson’s vision is quite an optimistic one. A tranche of the human race gets away from the earth that it has all but destroyed and builds homes elsewhere. And these more enlightened people develop a plan to save the Earth, despite the best efforts of the Earth-bound to continue the decline.
Most of the best speculative and science fiction imagines other ways for humans to live. We are, after all, creative animals who have found ways of adapting to many of the challenges we have faced. Maybe we can get through this with ingenuity and science? — some of these stories tell us. In reality, however, this won’t happen unless the right choices are made.
In Robinson’s vision of 2312, the dilemma we face right now is looked back upon from the future as history: “…the space diaspora occurred as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision whether to destroy the Earth’s biosphere or change its rules. Many argued for the destruction of the biosphere, as being the lesser of two evils…”.
The situation we are in is hard to comprehend when looked at through this lens, but we know there are people out there — powerful people, the ‘hollow men’ of my previous essay — who see the prevention of the destruction of the biosphere as less important than the preservation of the capitalist systems that make a small proportion of us very rich, and leave the majority of humans immeasurably poorer — and which also continue the rapid decline in biodiversity and lead to what present day campaigners like Polly Higgins have termed Ecocide.
The science fiction reader in me always hopes that the future will turn out more like the wonderful vision of an civilisation that combines indigenous, spiritual wisdom with deep technology as in Ursula LeGuin’s masterpiece, Always Coming Home, than the bleak dystopias of The Road or Oryx and Crake. Or maybe we will end up with something like Kim Stanley-Robinson’s 2312, which, I guess might be somewhere in between…?
Of course, we might not be so lucky…and whatever the path taken, the short-term pain of getting to some future civilisation will be difficult indeed.
What has this to do with spirit?
When we look to the skies, humans have always been inspired. The universe carries with it our spiritual — and scientific — imagination. It is the combination of these that, for the first time in our history, is available to us in mapping out our future. The best holistic models of development recognise that the combination of spiritual and indigenous wisdom with scientific and technological knowledge offers us an opportunity to make a quantum leap in our development.
However, at the same time as we’ve reached this point of potential, we are on the verge of a precipice. It is deeply ironic that even now that we have the tools, knowledge and technology with which we could develop a culture and civilisation that is sustainable and soulful, the hollow men seem determined to continue our relentless acceleration towards the cliff’s edge. And we allow them to do it.
In some ways, speculative (science and fantasy) fiction writers have in them more of spirit of awe, wonder, searching and imagination than any number of priests, rabbis and imams. The best of this writing warns us of the worst consequences of our cultural behaviour, and signposts us to the deepest, most wonderful possibilities for our future — and carry metaphors and symbols that point us to the ways we should be living in the here and new.
When I am reading the work of a great author like Robinson, LeGuin, Atwood or Gaiman, I feel something of the wonder that is inherent in the Universe, and in our humanity. I know that the imaginative metaphors, myths and archetypes that frame so much of our human being are being kept safe and are being reframed and reimagined for new generations. True, speculative fiction can be escapist — but the best of the genre is always uncompromising in its challenge to norms and assumptions in a way that is difficult to do in almost any other art form.
Where else would you find explorations of gender fluidity as norm (as in LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness), years before they were being openly debated and played out in our culture? And where else would you find an imagined North America in which religiosity so dominates gender relationships (as in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale) three decades before the advent of the far right Evangelical Christian Movement that is now flexing its muscles under the shadow of President Trump?
Of course, speculative fiction is not the only place in which this imaginative capacity is seen — it is found in other art forms and creative practices — and in science too. Wherever it emerges, however, in its purest psychological sense, imagination is spirit. It is what bubbles up from within us when the channels are clear, and its what comes to us when we empty ourselves and are open to what is out there in the vast, mysterious unknown.
Part of the problem with the narrower aspects of our culture is that some of us find it impossible to imagine the sheer scale of things — the almost infinite smallness and bigness of what is within and beyond us. Religion is often set up explicitly to help us manage the existential crisis that the infinite faces us with. It intends to makes the vast and mysterious, finite, tangible and explainable. It gives it a name — ‘God’ — and means we do not actually have to face up to the fact that we (as individuals and as a species) might have no meaning in our existence, particularly in relation to the vastness of the Universe.
Perhaps, true spirit comes from humility above all. It imagines — yes — but does not purport to know; does not reach for certainty or even meaning.
Spirit simply experiences, imagines, connects and serves.
The problem of the human soul
One consequence of our civilisation’s actions is that the Earth has been degraded and damaged, and the very ecosystems we have evolved to live within are disappearing. Humans, ever ingenious and self-regarding, simply think that all we need to do is create new environments to replace the ones that we have destroyed.
This may be possible. After all, that’s what science fiction has often been about — creating new environments, in alien places, in which humans can live and possibly thrive. However the consequence of this cultural myopia has been that we have lost touch with the animal in our psyche, and have lost our fundamental connection with other non-human lifeforms. We have, as Will Falk puts it, become ‘human supremacists’ — seeing animals and lifeforms as resources and entertainments, even therapeutic tools and items of commerce to be sold and profiteered from.
Small children have a reverence for animals — even the smallest of creatures. My 4-year-old granddaughter, Freya, has always found small creatures and their ecologies endlessly fascinating; birdsong and wind seem to calm her 11-month-old sister, Ellie, in a way that no other sounds and sensations do. In fact, outside, she seems to hear and sense more than I do — a look of rapt concentration (or reverence if a baby is capable of such an emotion) on her little face!
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at this. Children are (like all of us) animals after all, and are acutely aware of this at one level or another. They are also deeply imaginative in their landscapes and ecosystems — however small these might be. As Jay Griffiths puts it: “children know they are made of the same stuff as grass”.
“Nature”, she writes, “gives children a soul acceptance smooth and valuable as silk. In nature, children learn they are watched over by something of stature and gravity, to which they can take their levity and mischief, something which will comprehend their sadnesses and stand witness to their secrets”.
Nature is meant for humans to be within, to be embraced by. Our souls depend upon it.
In our adult human culture, however, something changes and seems to get lost. Animals and their ecosystems cease to be things we imagine and are connected to, becoming somehow ‘other’: the subjects of possession and functionality. Land is enclosed, packaged and sold as ‘property’. Animals are owned: benignly as pets, or exploitatively as part of industrial food production systems. The Commons is lost. Connection and embeddedness are lost. And so is the soul at the heart of all this.
Sometimes I have a fleeting sense of something other than — beyond. When meditating in the garden or walking on the headlands near my home, I get a hint of the different layers of existence in which the animals and other lifeforms are living. It’s far from shamanic, but in these moments I somehow experience a different place for me in the world — one that isn’t boundaried or fixed; one in which the sparks of life all around me seem to reveal themselves. This feeling is spiritual (if I am to give a human word to it), but probably carries within it something deeply normal about being a human animal.
The experiential problem of the modern human soul is that the moment we experience something deep or transcendent we seem to want to pin it down and give it a label or meaning. We seem to want to make the world about us, for some reason — even the Universe can’t exist (in some people’s view) without our human perception, and in the most simplistic interpretation of this human-centred doctrine ‘God’ creates ‘Man’ in his own image.
Tell that to the kites and buzzards that circle the hills around my home. Tell that to the whales, seals and dolphins who swim the coastal waters. Tell that to the tigers. Tell that to the mini-beasts who till the soil. Tell that to the rising waters and the roaring winds. Tell that to the endless stars and the countless galaxies. Tell that to the ghosts of lost civilisations and extinct species.
Tell that to the gods of our imagination.
Always coming home
Maybe one day we will find ourselves in the stars — terraforming the planets and asteroids, bringing life to places where life has not existed. Perhaps this will be the balance we might bring — in the medium term — to the Universe. Or we may stay grounded and live with what we have — reaping what we have sown, and what we will sow in the next few years and decades.
I always seem to have hope in my spirit. This helps me in the day-to-day — it keeps me connected and loving, even though my knowledge and intuition tell me about harder times to come. So perhaps there is denial in the hope, but there is also imagination.
I have hope for a species that can imagine so well, and can hold myth and vision and wonder so closely, and can tell stories and sing songs and examine and learn about the smallest things and the largest things and still stay curious. All this gives me hope, which is also why I still read speculative fiction, because it keeps the possibilities alive for me.
Cover art for the book by Ursula Le Guin
Possibly my favourite passage of any book, is from the beginning of Ursula LeGuin’s Always Coming Home. She’s setting the scene for an imaginative journey like no other: an archaeology of the future of a people who “might be going to have lived a long, long time from now…”. However, as she points out, “There’s no way to reach that lot by digging”.
She goes on: “The only way I can think to find them, the only archaeology that might be practical, is as follows: You take your child or grandchild in your arms, or borrow a baby, not year old yet, and go down into the wild oats in the field below the barn. Stand under the oak on the last slope of the hill, facing the creek. Stand quietly. perhaps the baby will see something, or hear a voice, or speak to somebody there, somebody from home”.
When we have our children or grandchildren in our arms, it gives us the opportunity to imagine — to open up possibility and to love deeply and with connection and compassion. We can look to the future and know that every baby in the arms of every parent or grandparent is just as precious, just as all-seeing and just as deserving of a gentle, connected existence. Every child and every adult has the instinct within us to experience our animal selves — and not just some kind of primal, wild, instinctive self (though these are in there somewhere too), but more the elegant, connected way in which we all — we animals — fit with the Earth we live on.
That, for me is as much to do with spirit as any human ritual or belief. It is about, in David Abram’s words, “Owning up to being an animal, a creature of earth…becoming a two legged animal, entirely a part of the animate world whose life swells within and unfolds all around us”.
This does not necessarily need us to move ‘back to the wild’ (whatever that might mean; and I, for one, hope that this state doesn’t become a forced existence for most of humanity) but it does require a re-minding and a re-calibrating of the way we relate to nature and to each other.
If our civilisation dies, then we must hope that something will emerge in its place (though nothing — even humanity — will be forever, whatever the science fiction writers might hint at and hope for!), and when it does we might hope for a way of relating that carries this sense of connection and recognition of the animate and imaginal world. A wise, spiritual and material culture that values knowledge and development, but holds onto the truths that everything has a consequence, and that we hold the earth as stewards for future generations of human and non-human descendants.
If we are wise, we will choose a future in which the biosphere is not destroyed; and in which we recognise that the Earth is worth much more to us than a failing system of political economics that has existed only for a short time in the history of humans. There are other ways we can manage and organise ourselves, if we are creative and imaginative enough.
Our souls — our spiritual selves — depend on the love and courage we can muster to make the choices we need to make, even now when we are standing on the edge.
Who decides when its time to act?
No one decides. The moment happens.
No, we decide. How we decide is an interesting question. But even if we don’t know the answer to it, we decide.
(2312, Kim Stanley-Robinson, Orbit Books, 2012).
