Beginnings

                Beckett once said that we find ourselves “between a death and a difficult birth.”  Both ends of the equation are troubling and threatening.  We live in the midst of constant talk of collapse and decline.  The political system we so proudly hailed has finally produced the clown king, Ubu Roi, in its final act of decay as it slides toward irrelevancy.  The economic stability that meant that a small but significant group of people didn’t have to win the genetic lottery to live free and productive lives is now producing unprecedented disparity and inequality.  The alliances that held the world together for the 75 years or so since the last great war are fraying at the edges, and a new class of global capitalists is emerging outside of and in opposition to the great nation states that have ruled the last couple centuries.  We are like family members gathered in a room in a hospice facility facing the inevitable demise of a patriarch we loved and cherished (at least some of the time).

                A lot of the conversation around this moment in our cultural evolution is centered on reform.  People, understandably, want to ‘go back’ to the old order that seemed to work so well (as long as you didn’t find yourself on the wrong side of some unspoken privilege).  These folks would have you believe that this is just a blip in the grand scheme of things, that the next election and a new policy will correct our course and put us back on track.  It’s an illusion.  The conditions that created this moment have been trending in this direction for a very long time.  The solutions to climate change, economic inequality, racism and misogyny aren’t patches that can be made to the existing system, they are fundamental challenges to the way that system worked and, even more threatening to those in power, a direct challenge to the wealth and power the system produced.  If you believe in a future that is more fair, equal, environmentally healthy and sustainable, then you have to be willing to leave this system behind to create that future.  This system was never meant, the eloquence of Jefferson notwithstanding, to produce those results.

                There is no time to despair.  A difficult birth is not a miscarriage or stillbirth.  Every large shift in cultural narratives and imagined order has been a struggle.  Every struggle carries within it unanticipated challenges and opportunities.  As it unfolds, it will produce a different kind of person, just as the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution did.  We will learn to think differently about the world and our place in it.  Technology will only be so much help.  There is no technological fix to creating a better human, better humans have to learn to manage technology better.  I think the only honest thing to do is to embrace this moment, in both its peril and possibility.  We need to honor and take a sober accounting of the death.  We need to be brutally honest with ourselves about what worked and what didn’t and for whom.

                At the end of Tree of Knowledge, Manturana and Verella tell a little story about how hard fundamental change is.  In the story, a girl lives on an island in an archipelago of islands.  Her people have no boats.  Their island is flat, the water is brackish and the only thing that grows are cabbages.  Everyone complains about the island, the water and most of all the cabbages.  One day our heroine makes a tricky swim across a strait to a new island.  The island has waterfalls of fresh, sweet water and a variety of fruits and beautiful forests.  She makes it back to her island and tells all of her people what she found.  They are all excited to move to the new island and agree to meet the next day at the beach to help each other navigate the strait.  In the morning, the girl rushes to the shore only to find her people there with their arms full of cabbages.  She explains that they will never make the swim to the new island with their cabbages.  Most of the people refuse to part with their cabbages, even though they have complained bitterly about them every day.  In the end, only a small group leave everything behind to swim to the new island, leaving most of the people on the shore with their cabbages.

                We face the same choice.  We can cling to what we have been doing and thinking or work toward a new way of thinking about the world.  I think we have to be willing to put down our cabbages and swim for it.