In the following essay, submitted to a Sierra Club publication, I articulate a new approach toward progress and sustainability.
In the November/December 2010 issue of Sierra, Sierra Club executive Director Michael Brune, bemoaning the inaction on legislation to address climate change, called on the club’s members to look for progress through other means (see “Opportunity Knocks: It’s time to stop looking to Congress for leadership. We all need to step up”). Here he provided a particularly apt quote from Alexander Graham Bell: “When one door closes, another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.” I imagine climate change to be a challenge to be addressed on all fronts.
By thinking outside of the modern mindset, the modern environmental movement can open a new front towards attaining a sustainable society. In Plato's Republic, Socrates cites an ancient argument, or difference, between poetry and philosophy (i.e., mythos and logos) that I submit continues to this day. By weighing in on this “ancient argument” and providing a resolution, we can induce bottom up culturally transformative change at a time when top down incremental change may not be enough to save the day.
While the modern era has exalted education, science and reason, the approach through logos, the term myth has becomes generally synonymous as something that's dismissively untrue. A more accurate and working definition can be as follows: the stories a society tells about itself. The term narrative seems to be currently en vogue and is similarly used to describe how an individual or group sees itself in relation to the rest of the world body. Furthermore, the modern mindset often fails to differentiate between religion, an institution, and the mythos.
This is not to say we should abandon abandon education,science or reason, only to recognize their limitations. Speaking truth to power is important, that is, as best we understand that truth to be given our limited vision. But that truth doesn't necessarily lend itself to inspiration; conversely, it can lend itself to its opposite effect, that of demoralization. Consequently, people become susceptible to latching on to a narrative that enables one to disengage from an inconvenient truth, so to speak, in order to sustain a level of validity and inspiration to their lives.
More than art, poetry can be about the truth. By drawing on the mythos and framing it poetically yet truthfully and interjecting the arts, we can tell the human story, in its diversity of forms, to induce the human spirit. By telling the human story, from beginning to end, you enable the individual to awaken to the truth of his or her role in its outcome by providing a new means to discover or affirm validation for one's life. Furthermore, it can cast roles, making it difficult to disengage from.
If you promote a collective vision, rooted in truth and integrity, people will eventually adjust their lives because inherently they will desire their lives to be part of the solution rather than the problem. But the key words here are eventually and inherently. There are legitimate obstacles: it must be the truth, as best we understand the truth to be; it must capture the collective imagination; it must sustain a level of inspiration. Granted, my limited credibility here is the first obstacle. But I see no impasse.
To summarize, addressing the environmental crisis should addressed as a spiritual crisis, which I define, simply, as follows: the inability to overcome entrenched, narrow interests that threaten the integrity of the greater collective. Put another way, the environmental movement should be part of a broader spiritual movement. Self-interest in human nature is a force to be reckoned with; who among us has not strived to attain a certain degree of wealth and power, or wealth and status? But it's no match for the human longing that our lives be imbued with meaning beyond our individual selves. Moving in this direction I believe we may find our salvation.
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