This Evolutionary Choice
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.
