This commentary is by Tim Stevenson, a community organizer with Post Oil Solutions of Athens, Vermont, and author of “Resilience and Resistance: Building Sustainable Communities for a Post Oil Age” and the forthcoming “Transformative Activism: A Values Revolution in Everyday Life in a Time of Social Collapse” (Apocryphile Press).
As a civilization, we have responded to the climate crisis as if we could solve it through a variation of the same political approach that is the cause of the problem in the first place: exerting power over our circumstances in an attempt to control life as it is.
Routinely employed since at least the birth of agriculture 10,000 years ago, the attempt to subjugate the natural world — to govern life! — in order to advance civilization’s signature mission of material progress was always an illusion. While seemingly successful, the effort to subject Mother to mankind’s (sic) dominion was in reality only an exacerbation of the hubris that has dominated our approach to life, and lies at the heart of the current climate dilemma.
As the climate crisis illustrates, political problems cannot be solved with political solutions; like the arcade game of Whac-a-Mole, they only pop out again from another hole when dealt with with the same old power-over praxis.
By continuing an approach that avoids creative, enlightened, truly transformative ways, we only postpone our inevitable reckoning. Such is the fix we’re in today with the climate crisis.
We can realize a revolutionary change only when we come to accept that the basis of the climate crisis rests in its spiritual origin, our failure to live a values-inspired way of life by embracing our basic interconnection with life, and the state of impermanence that we share with all living beings.
Deprived of the compassionate sensibility that such consciousness would engender, as well as inform our behaviors toward other sentient beings with humility and love, we have lived a political existence by trying to control, rather than learning to live with life as it is.
It is this fundamental flaw that is baked into what it means to be civilized that has now come full circle in the climate crisis, and the pending collapse of the civilization it has created.
This mania to control life is not inherent to all human beings, however, but most notably distinguishes its civilized variety. Specifically, it is atypical of many “uncivilized” people who, in contrast to their civilized brethren, have the good fortune to be born to and raised by societies that both recognize from birth and honor in deed their inherent connection to nature and the rest of life.
Civilized folks, on the other hand, are deprived of this basic feature that we require to live a sane existence. We arrive at a political society that is blind to this necessity, wedded to a radical individualism that urges us toward exercising power over the rest of life. This results in the power relationships — like patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism, not to mention humans over nature — that both characterize and are the curse of civilization.
At the heart of this development is ego, a latent property of all human beings that ascends for those of us when the organism is faced, as it is in civilized society, with the existential threat that manifests when we fail to connect with the rest of life. In this situation, we lack the inherent power we would otherwise derive from being so related, and that we require to function effectively in the world.
Unless attended to, this condition would result in intolerable psychological disintegration, especially in the face of our always imminent death. This is when ego emerges, providing us with the power surrogate we require to exist in the world.
While necessary to our early survival, ego is also something that, from a developmental standpoint, we can grow beyond, to where we are able to live life without being dependent upon its chimerical power of power-over. Unfortunately, most of us do not spiritually mature to this extent. We don’t grow up. Rather, we become habituated to, ultimately stuck in, ego and its fatal illusions of control.
Eschewing an authentic existence that is centered on our universal interconnection, and the basic goodness and intrinsic values of our hearts that such an acceptance awakens, we settle for being unreal, and the oppressive relationships that flow naturally from such a state, including the original one, “I” over the real us.
It is only by resolving this basic power contradiction that we are able to plumb the heart of the climate crisis. Responding to the latter as the spiritual crisis it is provides the true power we require to live successfully with our natural and inescapable powerlessness.
To do this, we engage in a practice, not to transcend this messy world, but to show up in it, to be a spiritual presence who encounters life with an approach grounded in the acceptance of the people we essentially are. We’re not reinventing ourselves; rather, we’re just finally and fully being who we’ve been all along.
Cultivating being real is the best contribution we can make to the transformed world we need. By engaging in a values practice in whatever situation we find ourselves, we shine the light of our essential goodness on what is.
