February 12, 2012 New The Skeptic
Okay, Chris, so you have a new blog for people to explore their experiences in navigating these Transition times you say are upon us. Congratulations. But I don’t believe that these crises you are describing exist, and even if they do fully manifest, that doesn’t mean society will collapse. And further, the crises you are describing are not “causal”, e.g. people don’t fry due to global warming when they walk outside, so they’re going to put what you’re writing out of their minds all too easily.
So wrote my old-time friend Craig, in so many words, in a thoughtful response to my beta release of the first entry in this blog. I will address all of the questions you raise in turn, Craig, but for this entry, let me just say thank you, you have given me an important topic to treat right up front in this work: The Skeptic.
When it comes to Transition issues, The Skeptic abounds. The Skeptic is anchoring your favorite news show, making sure that every time the phrase “climate change” or global warming is uttered, she follows it with a disclaimer that the science behind it is dubious. The Skeptic is across from you at the dinner table, telling you that you can’t believe anything anyone says or writes about anymore, that “it’s all politics” and that all we can do is shut out the noise and take care of ourselves. The skeptic is a government representative up there at the podium during your Statewide sustainability conference, waxing positive about the need for American competitiveness in alternative energy without so much as a single word of warning to the public about our utter dependence on a form of energy whose global supply has passed its production peak.
And then, there’s the internal Skeptic. In some, like Craig, this internal Skeptic presents itself as the voice of rationality, of the academy. It says, ‘show me the logical, causal link between these phenomena you describe, then maybe I’ll believe you. Maybe.’ In others, the internal Skeptic’s voice is boisterous and confrontational. Reacting to an invasion of unwanted data, it inherently distrusts all others’ motives and intentions, and the more information it receives, the more it resists both the message and its sender. In others still, the Skeptic emerges as intuition–a persistent whisper that manifests as uncomfortable body language or a devil’s advocate-approach during conversation. Perhaps you recognize one or more of these aspects of the inner skeptic in yourself. I certainly recognize them in me.
That said, it is important to honor the Skeptic, both the one “out there” and the one inside. The ability to evaluate information, to sift through data and make our own determinations is something that distinguishes us humans from other sentient beings. Healthily employed skepticism can protect us from all kinds of dangers, philosophical and practical. In deference to the healthy skepticism, this blog will contain links to ample information detailing our environmental, social and economic Predicament at this moment in history. I strongly encourage those who have not steeped themselves yet in the ample literature, published by credible sources from across the world, to break with your usual schedule or somehow work into it regular opportunities to sponge up such information on this and other sites. Take the deep dive. Explore all the angles, including those of contrarians. Apply as objective a frame as possible when encountering any information related to our alleged Predicament, and make your own determinations.
But as you do this, I also encourage you to be skeptical about your own skeptic. In a society where there is too much information static, and the dominant mode of understanding is left-brained, linear, competitive and allegedly rational, cognitive dissonance reigns supreme. In such an environment, it is all too easy to filter out any information that doesn’t immediately comply with that “rational” frame, that doesn’t come from an “official” source or, that simply takes a tack with which we are uncomfortable or disagree. By the same token, it is equally misguided to treat all information as equally valuable, or equally worthless.
So ask yourself when you are ready to look at the big contextual picture of our times–”what are my own assumptions about that picture?” Are they actually mine, or have they been “implanted” in me by family, friends, relatives, colleagues, media, my own culture? To what degree am I finding and interpreting information about this context to fit my existing assumptions, and to what degree am I really using this information to question my own assumptions themselves? How much do I value or discount information I receive based on the messenger? How much do I rely on my own habitual methods for perceiving and interpreting this information? To what degree do I invest in generating my own information and beliefs, vs. picking apart those of others?
And above all, remember that the ubiquitous Skeptic “out there”, the one that profits in some way (e.g., psychologically, financially), from perpetuating the status quo, derives her power from connecting with the Skeptic that resides within each of us, the one that doesn’t want to believe that life may be changing in an any significant way, the one that can’t see clearly because it doesn’t really want to. For is it not a self-deceived form of inner skepticism, fed by a certain addiction to comfort, that allows individuals, society, in fact a whole civilization, to turn a blind eye to the Predicament we now face on this planet? Is it not this same type of skepticism that enables the oppression of countless people in other countries for the sake of producing more Barbies and iPhones? Is it not this same, lazy inner skeptic who consciously and unconsciously condones ”value chains” that pillage the Earth’s resources and toxify its land, rivers, seas and atmosphere? If an unhealthy skepticism about our Predicament is not somehow at play, how can we explain why we destroy the Earth’s very capacity to support us by blindly participating in such a fatally flawed societal operating system?
I close with this reminder and parting observation: we are all on a journey of great change. The Transition journey we are on will require us to employ new ways (or to rediscover old, mostly lost ways) of listening, perceiving, discerning, judging and deciding where we stand and what to do about it. At this crossroads, each of us would do well to explore mysticism with the same vigor that we have historically championed positivism. In any event, the journey will require that look our own propensity for self-deception straight in the eye and develop some skills to reckon with it. This observation should not be confused with a call to abandon critical thinking, reason or science. It is, however, a call for all of us to honor, understand, integrate and employ many ways of knowing as we seek to discern the pathway through systems collapse to humanity’s continued survival and evolution.
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January 23, 2012 Introduction and Invitation
It’s not that it’s not you. It’s that it’s not just you.
Times are indeed changing, and not simply in a business cycle kind of way or even in a “new economy” kind of way. We’re actually reaching the end of an epoch. Whether we allow ourselves to grasp it fully and begin to articulate it as such, most of us feel it deep in our bones.
Take my father for example. He’s a salt-of-the-Earth small business guy born and raised in New York. He votes Republican every election and has made a life, supported a large family and amassed a small fortune by working 10-12 hour days for 40 years. Dad is proud of the work he has done and the opportunities he has given to others. He’s a believer in the American dream and an eternal optimist. But the other day when we were talking about my older brother’s divorce from his wife of 17 years, family health challenges, and a number of Obama’s recent political decisions he closed the conversation on an uncharacteristically enigmatic note. “I just don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “Nothing makes sense anymore.”
My former neighbor whom I’ll call Maria, another ex-New Yorker turned Coloradan, stopped her car recently while I was walking up the street from my soon-to-be foreclosed upon home. Maria, who is well-known in town for her sharp mind and arch conservative views, did a stint as my ex-hometown’s mayor some years ago and last year retired from the University of Colorado. Talking across the car window, Maria wanted to reassure me that she understood how tough these times are (a reference to the imminent foreclosure) and that “we”–ostensibly voters who share Maria’s anger about Obama’s failed leadership–“are going to turn this thing around.”
It matters little to me which way my father and Maria lean politically. Nor do I mention my encounters with them to make commentary on their or their generation’s worldview. I mention these encounters because, while at one level, both Dad and Maria are dealing with what might be seen as “normal” life concerns, at another level their comments (and their exasperation in uttering them) reflect a larger underlying struggle with something unfathomably complex, with a process of societal change that has outgrown anyone’s ability to fully understand or skillfully influence it, much less actually control it.
For Dad, it’s as if his world or stable relationships, good health and small business-friendly government has turned upside down, and he can’t relate to it anymore. His response: back off, disassociate, flee. For Maria, a true partisan who thinks Peak Oil and Climate Change are hoaxes, it‘s about usurping power from a democratic leadership that has “botched the job” through it’s wrong-headed economic policies. Her response: take a side and fight. Be it flight or fight–the responses are similar in that they were both imbued with a visceral sense of the problems underneath the stated problems.
Rather than going deeper into the inquiry called “what’s really going on here” and then connecting the dots we find, Dad and Maria did what most of us tend to do most of the time. We grapple only with what appears to be the problem du jour. We ignore, perhaps even actively suppress, our own curiosity about the larger context, the systems view that could shed new light on our problems, and help us address those problems together.
Courtesy of crises in my life, I have come to develop my own systems view that informs this blog. So here’s the view I hold, born of hundreds of hours of reading everything I could get my hands on, attending countless experts’ presentations, engaging people in local communities throughout the country and abroad, and allowing these ideas to steep in my consciousness over the last two plus years:
As a global society, we have smacked up against the limits of Mother Earth’s carrying capacity, and are now experiencing, individually and collectively, the disjointed denouement of our Western Industrial way of life. This way of life is dependent on a system we have both intentionally and unintentionally created through a multitude of human actions at every level. Like fish to water, we now take the system for granted, having come to see it as the natural way of things. But the reality is that this system has become an increasingly complex and unworkable intermediary between us and Nature. And as evidenced by the collapse of national and international financial sub-systems, increasing resource constraints amidst skyrocketing population growth, and human-induced climate change resulting in environmental calamities worldwide, the system is now coming apart.
The dissolution of this system is causing increasing numbers of us great stress and pain of the kind that cannot help but show up in the workings and issues of our daily lives. However, having collectively created and perpetuated this operating system, our lives are now thoroughly implicated in it, and we can scarcely envision how we might extricate ourselves from it and abide its subsequent demise. Our survival as individuals and as a species nonetheless depends not only on the system’s dissolution, but on our ability to navigate a Transition to some other way of living, one that we cannot yet understand.
Scary stuff, this talk of systems collapse and Transition, this notion that we have arrived at the ultimate tipping point in human history. But that is where we really are. We live in interesting, paradoxical times, times that call us to straddle two different worlds–the dying one and the emerging one. And consequently, whether we admit it or not, whether we like it or not, we are all leading Lives in Transition.
There are plenty of blogs, ample literature, a multitude of speakers and presentations that detail the environmental, social, spiritual, economic and other crises our civilization is facing. There are others that lean into the reactions, the responses, the social movements, the organizations and all manner of solutions emerging from quarters across the globe. This blog occupies that same milieu and will not shy away from these issues. That said, the focus of this blog is not to host academic debates on the issues of our era, nor to convince anyone either that serious changes in our way of being are needed or being implemented. Rather, Lives In Transition serves to tell the personal stories of people experiencing this time of great change.
And there is a great story to be told as we–individuals, communities and humanity as a whole–begin to awake to the truth of collapse and embrace the unfolding Transition to a different way of living. There is a redemptive process to be experienced as we start to explore the opportunity to co-create a new regeneratively-based “system” with the diva we call Nature. And, if we dare to see it, a living universe of opportunity awaits us as we struggle nobly, like newborn fawns, to gain footing on the path to a new way of being on the planet.
I look forward to your company during this unfolding. In fact, the story of humanity’s hero’s journey cannot unfold and be told without you.
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