TOWARD AN OLD CONSCIOUSNESS
I was recently given a report called Toward a New Consciousness: Values to Sustain Human and Natural Communities. The work was produced by Anthony Leiserowitz and Lisa Fernandez of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. It was presented to me by a professor of environmental communication as an invaluable holistic roadmap to addressing the many problems associated with climate change and its abatement. Needless to say, I couldn’t have been more excited to read it.
After studying the report I was left feeling annoyed. This “roadmap” seems to me more like a broken GPS system – one that, aside from trying to send you the wrong way up a one-way street, has switched itself over to a foreign language setting and refuses to be reset. From my perspective (naïve and arrogant as ever) the report more closely represents a recipe for disaster than a way to steer humanity from disaster. Mostly it seems to lack depth. It appears to me as a collection of supposition and cliché, entirely lacking dimension and perspective. I find the bulk of what’s presented and proposed in Toward a New Consciousness to be a near-perfect model of the problem, as I see it. In fact, the observations, conclusions, and solutions on offer are precisely what I imagined the authors to be setting out to counter in the introduction. Curious, right?
Let me explain. At the beginning of their piece, Leiserowitz and Fernandez diagnose our current climate change problems as originating in “the prevailing worldviews, structures and institutions, and norms and beliefs within modern society.” (Great, I couldn’t agree more.) But they follow this by laying out an over-simplified and supremely uncontroversial set of remedial prescriptions. Along the way they bash virtually all of Western civilization (as any contemporary social scientists surely must.) They do so while mindlessly elevating anything that can be frame as other in some way. This stance is so lauded that many of their outright false and misleading arguments are, it would appear, either unnoticed or happily disregarded. As I see it, such a situation only furthers the problem, making it harder to transform social values for the better (their stated aim.)
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To get into it and get specific, Leiserowitz and Fernandez start out by addressing Worldviews: Anthropocentrism, Materialism, and Alienation from Nature. In their opening statement they tell us that anthropocentrism (a human-centered perspective that sees humans as the most important species) “has deep cultural and historical roots” in Western civilization. To justify the claim they contend that this perspective has its origins in the Biblical formulation of Genesis.
As framed, such an assessment comes across as a form of criticism, of Christianity and of Western culture more widely; and, as a result, it’s easy then for most people to ignore that this idea actually perpetuates a silly myth about Western uniqueness. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for blaming the Catholic Church at every convenience and for all our social ills; nevertheless, it just doesn’t pan out in this instance.) You don’t have to be an anthropologist to notice that their assertion keenly ignores much of what we know about countless cultures around the world, both living and extinct.
I think it’s fair to say that their assessment denies the history and beliefs of nearly every group who has ever had a creation myth. No? Almost every culture I can name has a story about there once being nothing; which is then populated by a God, or more typically an entire bustling pantheon of gods – who often look, sound, and act remarkably human-like. This extra-humanness (the great godly metaphysics beyond) then creates the land the myth-tellers inhabit: usually an area not much bigger than their immediate surroundings, or otherwise a vague “everything” that still encompasses nothing more than the myth-teller’s extraordinarily limited experience. The creation of this land-of-all is typically followed soon thereafter by the special creation of the myth-tellers themselves (often in their God’s likeness) and all the stuff filling their immediate surroundings – or at least that which the myth-tellers find important: either an excruciatingly small list of items that occupy the very medium-sized domain of the archaic human experience (the sea and sky, rocks and cliffs, bugs and beasts) or another extraordinarily vague “all things”. This, all of it, is the definition of a very human-centered worldview and is often a total lack of information and understanding, or even imagination, masquerading as, or transmuted in the present, to omniscience.
Similarly, nearly every culture that I’ve heard of has felt that they directly controlled or could influence virtually every aspect of the universe. Humans appear to have always felt responsible for everything from the weather and natural disasters to the ebb and flow of other people’s health and well-being – and especially culpable for that which they have absolutely no ability to control. (What is more anthropocentric or egocentric than that?) And you don’t have to get obscure or search the hidden vaults of our oldest libraries and museums to uncover specific examples. No, we can just talk about the most popular, well-known cases. There are the Aztec and their bi-weekly sacrifice of captives, even their own children, to a variety of gods for the purpose of modulating the weather, crop yields, fires and floods, and disease. Or there are the ancient Greeks who had a similar understanding of the universe and their capacity to influence it. They also bribed their many gods in a variety of ways and for a range of purposes. For example, folks would make horse and goat offerings to Poseidon (“Earth-Shaker”, God of the Sea) for the expressed purpose of preventing shipwrecks, drownings, and earthquakes. As well, there are the God-Kings of Egypt, the intermediaries between mortals and gods, who personally maintained order in the universe by turning the gods and their powers to human advantage through prayer, ritual, and regular offerings. This all seems pretty Homo sapiens sapiens-oriented to me. Don’t you think? Believing that you’re in tight with the divine Creatrix and her posse (maker-of-fire, bringer-of-light-and-water, mother-of-all) and that what you do, or fail to do, is of utmost concern to the mystical divine – that you have God(s) on speed-dial, or can influence them by merely sending a basket of fruit (or your nine-year-old’s still-beating heart) – suggests to me that you think pretty highly of your species, your tribe, and yourself. What could be more human-centered?
If that’s too abstract, you can find in all corners of the globe, and at any time in history, more literal examples of a belief in the human-centered world and a human perception-oriented view. An again, you don’t have to mount an expedition or do your own research and uncover and decrypt previously untranslated texts. All over the planet are cultures who’ve told us that they happen to be sitting on the most sacred ground at the very center of creation. This notion of “axis mundi”, the axis or pillar or center of the world or even the universe, is nearly ubiquitous (and remarkably common among cultures who only ever saw a one infinitesimal corner of the globe.)
In ancient Greece, for instance, people would travel to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi to receive a prophecy from the Pythia, the priestess of the temple serving as the oracle. Delphi, and the Temple of Apollo, was such an important location because (as determined by no less than Zeus himself, King of the Gods, and understood by all Greeks) this was the planet’s navel, the non-figurative center of everything. The gods also happen to have their home on Mount Olympus in the heart of Greece; not in Africa, not at the bottom of the Pacific, not somewhere among the stars. (This isn’t human-oriented, Greek-centered thinking? Greeks placing themselves at the center of everything, a place designated by their bearded, bipedal, man-God?)
What about the Norse, that pre-Christian Scandinavian culture? Their mythology explains that there are nine worlds. Humans, it was believed, inhabit Midgard (or Miðgarðr, in Old Norse), the middle world at the center of the entire cosmos. (That places no emphasis on humans and does not frame things from a human perspective?)
The Buddhists, Hindus, and Jains, to compare, contend that Mount Meru is sacred and at the center of both the physical and metaphysical universe. There are many conflicting opinions about where the mountain actually sits, however: some say it’s in Central Asia, perhaps north of Kashmir, while others have argued that it’s at the North Pole (where no mountains of any kind exist.) What is generally agreed upon is that it’s around this mountain that the Sun and all the planets and stars revolve. (That doesn’t orient the whole cosmos around humans or human perception?)
Another “axis mundi” is the city of Teotihuacán in Mexico. This was not just a massive city and temple complex at the center of the empire but its name literally means “birthplace of the gods.” The Aztecs understood this location to be the very place where the gods brought all of existence into being. Their creation myth explains that from this spot their gods set into motion the Sun and Moon and spawned a new age. Now, you don’t know the names of the gods, their traits and histories, how the entire cosmos looks and acts, or get to live, work, play, or worship upon the most sacred ground in the universe unless you think you’re pretty important and have some deep knowledge of and power in the unfolding. Surely their whole worldview can be seen to place “us”, “here”, and “now” as critical phenomena.
Other stories would have us believe that we humans are in some way uniquely imbued with special skills. Thinking that we’re special among all life forms has to be the most archaic idea that we inherited from our ancestors. (Belief that humans were created in the image of God, or “the gods”, is a common idea that attempts to make sense of our apparent uniqueness – and was plagiarized from other belief systems, not something born of the Bible.) It’s a ridiculously stubborn fiction that people still believe today despite an ever-growing and now mountainous list of organisms found to do all the things we once thought were uniquely human tricks. For instance: creating and using tools, language and math abilities, maintaining complex social systems and even cultures, as well as having highly evolved emotional lives. We’ve even found “simple” birds and insects who’ve developed sophisticated art and architecture, complex farming practices, and even their own coordinated pharmaceutical manufacturing. Moreover, can you fly under your own power, run atop the water, climb vertical glass or across the ceiling, see in ultraviolet or through flesh using sonar, regenerate lost limbs, lift 1,000x your weight, change genders for mating purposes, produce 600 volts of electricity and discharge it through your flesh on command (while causing no damage to your own tissue), make yourself young again, withstand unearthly levels of radiation, freeze solid and thaw out again not less than thirty years later, or instantly manipulate the colour, pattern, and texture of your skin? No, these are things “lesser” and "simple" creatures do. And you’ll note that these are traits primitive peoples (Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, say) attributed to their gods – apparently unconcerned or ignorant that the most common insects, fish, and lizards also exhibit these wholly terrestrial, and not whatsoever godly, abilities.
None of the above beliefs and perspectives were informed by the first book of the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible. So, from where I sit it seems a narrow and almost meaningless view of history and culture that traces anthropocentrism to the Bible, or places it as a uniquely Western construction. It’s laughable really. (Ha!)
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And yet, Leiserowitz and Fernandez have just begun their campaign. From there they immediately go on to insist that the “reigning scientific worldview” is immoral and renders modern humans ignorant of, and disconnected from, the natural world. (Now, I thought Richard Feinman and Carl Sagan quashed this idea once and for all, decades ago, but apparently not.) As I see it, such a statement is not only wrong but also deeply problematic and itself fosters ignorance and disconnection from nature. (But what do I know?) The authors claim the Enlightenment to be where humans really began to get things wrong and go astray. The Enlightenment, they assert, is where we, the confused, inherited the notion that we could alter the material world with impunity. (Uh, what?)
As I understand, the Enlightenment was about the free exchange of ideas, along with fierce opposition to superstition and the pervasive abuses of church and state. (Hardly something we should be maligning given our present situation.) Here again we find the authors presenting an entirely accepted and uncontroversial set of statements – apparently the pablum of Western social science. Apparently all of this is so thoroughly accepted, and therefore uninteresting, that it can be safely ignored. And yet, from where I sit, a more problematic statement could hardly be uttered. At the very least such a comment helps perpetuate the many staggeringly common and oppressive myths that imply humans are, or even could be, separated from nature, and that this debasement is becoming more pronounced. An ontology of disconnection is what these authors offer us. This is not something they aim to extinguish. And it’s a totally unscientific view of the nature of things, not a byproduct of science (as emphatically suggested by our tenacious authors.) In a very scientifically demonstrable way – and incorporating all fields of scientific inquiry – humans ARE nature. (Which is just another way to say “THERE IS NO NATURE!”) How could you think otherwise? There is no height or depth to “man-madeness” (whatever that is) that we could ever hope to transfer ourselves that would somehow result in our extraction from nature. There is no centrifuge we could build, no detergent, no surfactant we could create that would stabilize and suspend our infusion with and composition of nature. Is there any doubt that ourselves and all our tools and toys are entirely “of the Earth”, “of the Universe”, “of Nature”? What is this meaningless definition of nature (that apparently everyone holds) that fails to include all (or many, or even some) of the known parts and properties of nature?
And once again, as a well-worn criticism of the Western world, it’s easy to applaud the sentiment (as we all seem wont to do) and ignore the fact that any story that places the origin of human meddlings with the material world in eighteenth century Europe is a bold attempt to rewrite history. What, I ask you, IS making fire or cooking food, crafting tools and weaving cloth, diverting streams and building dams, domesticating rice or maize, camels or dogs – or nearly any other human activity I can think of – BUT the very bold and wilful manipulation of the world for our own narrow human ends? (Yes, domesticating cats or wheat benefits those organisms, but their well-being, flourishing, and global dispersal was not the reason for their domestication and hybridization: we did all that for us.) Furthermore, to suggest that these activities (starting fires, building walls and aqueducts, hybridizing apples…) are somehow more benevolent, moral, or grounded in a sense of obligation, and therefore fundamentally different, than what goes on in a physics or chemistry lab is a very bizarre and misleading representation of science (and culture and history as well.) The contention that the prevailing worldview of science is that of disconnection and indifference disregards nearly everything I’ve ever watched, read, heard, or been taught about science (which is quite a lot) – to say nothing at all of the experiences I have personally had with the many scientists in my life.
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Moving on, but still in the same depressing paragraph, we are told that because of the waywardness of the Enlightenment “members of modern societies are increasingly physically, psychologically, and culturally separated from the natural world.” In defence of their statement, Leiserowitz and Fernandez call on an old stand-by: that of our “loss of connection to nature.” They insist that modern Western humans are growing ignorant and disconnected and that “there seems to be a growing societal blindness to the beauty, succor, and necessity of the more-than-human world.” Ouch!
Really? Where do these people live? And what interpretation of historical events paints such a bleak view of today’s world? To further reinforce the cliché they invoke the oft-used examples of grocery store chicken and of cell phone manufacture; specifically that children don’t know where their food comes from, and that our electronics are made under horrible labour conditions and from toxic materials.
Firstly, let’s not confuse a total lack of understanding with virtuous wisdom. I am certain that myself, my family, and everyone I know has a deeper understanding of what our food is, where our food actually comes from, and how it is made than anyone, ANYONE, at any time and from any culture pre-dating the Enlightenment (that prime mover of all things confused and evil.) Surely an adult thinking that yams are gifts from the rock spirits, or that a bounty of maize had grown, or failed to grow, entirely at the whims of a temperamental serpent daemon (who trades favours for human flesh), is not somehow less problematic than a child thinking that food originates at the grocery store. In fact, it’s much more problematic, surely. It seems to be very easy to forget how recently it was that we knew almost nothing of what we take for granted as common sense today. (Or, for that matter, how very new things like writing or the place value number system are...)
We might reflect on this and ask how the authors even formulated their critique? They themselves are creatures of the modern world and appear to know the story behind their chicken and of the circumstance and consequence of cell phone production. Surely their readers know as well (and they appear to assume as much.) So who is this mysterious other? They cite no study or meaningful examples, or really any evidence of any kind. We aren’t even told who we, the stupefied masses, are being compared to. Our grandparents? Fourteenth century Burmese rice farmers? Eighth century Vikings? Our hominid cousins, the Australopithecus? Who? We are simply asked to take their word for it, that we’re all growing blind and stupid. I’d be happy to take their word for it if it weren’t obvious that people across the globe appear ever-more meaningfully aware of the many complex interconnections that inextricably fuse them to everything and everyone else. (Thanks in no small part to the Enlightenment’s crushing blow against dogma, superstition, and all other forms of deeply blinding ignorance. ...Can you tell I'm getting mad?)
The authors would have us believe that the insights brought to us by the Hubble Space Telescope, or those of genetics, paleobotany, sociology, or anthropology, say – or any other field informed by Enlightenment thought, and their daily discoveries too numerous to name – have somehow degraded what was once a much deeper and more noble understanding of, and appreciation for, the “beauty, succor, and necessity of the more-than-human world.” Bah! This is just patently false and appears to me a shocking example of eighteenth century sentimentalism or nineteenth century romantic primitivism perhaps. It’s the myth of the noble savage we’re being served. And it’s crazy.
Most confusingly, the authors seem to change their minds in a later paragraph and call reductionism the “prevailing scientific worldview.” (Which is it, the Enlightenment or reductionism? These are different things.) But I think this makes their own misunderstandings clear. While the Enlightenment was an ideological stance, they’re focusing on a single idea, like reductionism, and conflating that with all Enlightenment thought and as the mechanism and premise of all science. Both are false. Reductionism doesn’t even feature in Immanuel Kant’s definition of Enlightenment as, “the freedom to use one’s own intelligence.” This is the real essence and thrust of the Enlightenment. And, in their crass assessment, the authors ignore the foundational principles of Enlightenment thinking that flowed from this novel idea: the free exchange of ideas, intellectual honesty, and the questioning of orthodoxy. (All as critical to good science as to creating a less dogmatic, tribalistic, and anthropocentric world.)
Further, and perhaps more importantly, unlike the Enlightenment, science is not at all a worldview or ideology. This is something that is getting (deliberately?) lost in the mix of their arguments. In writing as they do, the authors help their readers to mistakenly view science as a belief system; when, in fact, science is the opposite. Science is a method, a tool, for separating reality from one’s ideology and self-deception. It’s the tool we have for short-circuiting our assumptions, beliefs, and desires to help us actually nail down what remains when we strip all that confusion away.
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From here Leiserowitz and Frenandez move on to a section labelled Cornucopianism and Technological Optimism. Here they further their attack on science and technology by claiming that, “For centuries, the bounty of nature seemed unlimited. In the twentieth century, however, the world witnessed an explosion of scientific knowledge and technology and an accompanying exponential increase in human beings’ power to exploit nature.”
This statement is, again, so routine as to be ignored, even by trained, peer-reviewing academics. And yet, again, here we have what amounts to an anthropocentric and even Eurocentric worldview disguised as critique. (And, one more time, the authors stop making sense.)
Every word of this is problematic. They claim, “for centuries, the bounty of nature seemed unlimited.” I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure that (as far as we can tell – thanks, of course, to science) humans in our current form have been kicking around for at least 100,000 years or so (though some argue as long as 250,000 years.) So I don’t know why “centuries” is the stated timeline here, when even “tens of thousands of years” would still fall far short of the real time-frame. The only way such a statement comes even close to working is if we place the dawn of history at the time of Columbus’ discovery that he didn’t discover the Americas. (Even if you're just talking about Europeans kicking around Europe you’d be talking about a scale of thousands and not mere hundreds of years. So what are they talking about?)
Here the authors also continue to use the language of division and alienation, separating humans from nature and its bounty. Of course humans ARE (part of, composed and continually recomposed out of, wholly infused into and constrained by) nature. And, importantly, nature doesn’t “seem unlimited” as they assert. Nature IS unlimited – boundless and abundant beyond measure. If nature is anything at present it is diversity and abundance, from the cosmic down to the subatomic. Thinking otherwise is a narrow and bizarrely anthropocentric worldview (one Leiserowitz and Fernandez appear bent on forwarding.) These authors demand we see nature as frail, limited, and centered around us – despite being clearly and demonstrably none of the above. What is limited an frail are individual human lives and experiences (and even that of our species); and these are things that science and technology (from fire and stone tools to fMRI machines and Falcon 9 rockets) help us overcome.
Leiserowitz and Fernandez point to twentieth century Western technological advances, such as chemical pesticides and nuclear power, “mediated and inflected through existing social structures, norms, and values,” as being the source of a “radically new” problem. This again highlights the baseless, anti-historical character of their attacks. Why, for instance, not point to agriculture, the wheel, or the telegraph as the source of our troubles? Why not go back further? Certainly the Easter Islanders had technology, social systems, and cultural values in place (ones that other people at previous times would have seen as impossibly advanced) that allowed them to destroy their entire universe – from their own culture through to the very ecosystem that made their life on Easter Island possible. Similarly, popular theories of why the centers of Mayan civilization collapsed point to three major factors: overpopulation, exceeding the carrying capacity of the land (through over-hunting and exhausting their limited agricultural land), and rapid deforestation (resulting in local anthropogenic climate change.) Along with violent conflict, these are essentially the same suspected causes for the decline and disappearance of the Ancestral Puebloans, the first inhabitants of what is now the Southwestern United States. Does any of this sound familiar? Sure does! Where Leiserowitz and Fernandez see a newly emergent phenomena, something uniquely Western, I see the standard operating procedure of our species – going right back to the dawn of history. In my mind it’s clear that little, if any, twentieth century Western science or technology puts us in a “radically new” context. It seems plainly obvious that if global nuclear war were to ensue, or the worst case scenarios of climate change, what would remain would be the crumbling remnants of only our largest monuments and a few scattered members of our community trying to hang on to what little is left. Essentially we would all have an intimate understanding of exactly what it was like to be our ancient ancestors.
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Our intrepid duo continue to press on and address Balance and Compartmentalization within our current social structures and institutions. While a very sincere attempt at talking about social values and justice, Leiserowitz and Fernandez manage to reinforce the problem they propose to solve. They state that “climate change has often been described in terms of its impacts on non-human nature, such as glaciers or polar bears, with inadequate attention to the potential impacts on human beings or the implications for global environmental justice.” I think I know what they’re getting at; however, it's odd to argue against human-centered thinking, claiming that it’s the root of all evil, and then follow that up by arguing that we need to emphasize the impacts of climate change on humans and de-emphasize everything else.
Instead, what needs to be remedied here, in my mind, is not the focus on humans or inclusion of both human and non-human domains (in a kind of binary, a sort of yin-yang dualism) but the total annihilation of any distinction. Using this language (“human” and “non-human”) supports the kind of compartmentalization Leiserowitz and Fernandez say they seek to undo. They help maintain a false and pernicious dichotomy – one that further alienates people from the very elements that compose, sustain, and decompose them. I think we need to communicate this reality to people most deeply and urgently.
Luckily it’s not nearly as challenging as it might sound. Any seven-year-old can get a pretty strong grasp of it. It’s as hard as the following: “What is a tree? Point to the place at which the tree (or the polar bear or cloud or the sea) stops and ‘I’ begin.” It’s an impossible task because of course you ARE nature (the tree); nature (the tree) IS you: there is no external, separate, distant “other”. If you as a human need oxygen to survive, and that oxygen is generated by organisms that you think you are disconnected from then you’re simply confused. The tree is absolutely an extension of your body, as critical and connected as your kidney or spleen. And you are just so bound to and of the sun and the rain and the soil too. A polar bear or a tree, like a louse or the sea, and even the thing I call me, we are a porous and intractable discontinuity: a seamless waterfall of chemistry and energy composing, and then no longer composing, a flickering ensemble of networks and systems, juxtaposed and interconnected at different points and for different lengths of time and space. (And not in any trippy, hippy sense. Just open your biology or chemistry textbook.)
But the popular notion of a tree is as a kind of monochrome photograph of this flowing, morphodynamic, hyperdimensional tessellation. We insist the tree is singular, disconnected, two-dimensional, and now. The tree is none of these things. (Nor is the polar bear, your iPhone, a hurricane, or the pepper in the jar on my dining table.) We know this. So why pretend otherwise? Accepting a worldview of narrowness, scarcity, and frailty – the Leiserowitz/Fernandez frame – is stupid and boring and alienating.
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The last critique of this work I’d like to make concerns their assessment of the value and necessity of faith and spirituality – at least how these are framed in this article. The authors suggest we “invoke the language of faith and spirituality” for motivating people “to save the planet.” They tell us that the “sense of an enchanted, awe-inspiring universe and creation can reawaken a commitment to the Earth.” Leiserowitz and Fernandez maintain that “spirituality, ritual, and scripture are all vital resources to help accelerate this moment of transition.” Me, I hear this as the pleadings of religious demagogues and don’t know how else to interpret it.
Firstly, and perhaps most obvious, the planet doesn’t need saving. We and the species we are determined to exterminate do. The planet will survive and species will once again thrive. You know this. Secondly, morality and reverence are brought to religions by the people that practise them, they are not born out of the teachings of religion. And so it doesn’t seem to me, therefore, that religion is a necessary, or even useful, part of the equation. (For instance, most people cannot read any of the Judeo-Christian texts, or follow their tenets, without being compelled to do a whole lot of editing of all the very abundant abhorrent bits. Those who don’t are the murderous fanatics we get to read about on the news daily...) Thirdly, an enchanted and awe-inspiring universe is not on offer by any religion. Have you read the texts? I challenge you to point to a single example. We could ponder how scandalously minuscule and bland all religious worldviews are. For instance, thinking that the world is thousands of years old and not billions, is an error of scale equivalent to believing that the distance from Vancouver to Montreal is not three-thousand-seven-hundred kilometers but just ten meters. This is just how tiny and sad and confused people's thinking can be. So given this example as a template, what reason do you have for thinking the scale, grandeur, and mystery of other aspects of the universe aren’t similarly diminished and degraded by the rest of the religious canon (and all of its current and historical misinterpretations?) Lastly, religion is the only domain in which a lack of evidence is argued to be wise. Within most religious frameworks one need not defend an opinion or action with reasons that are based on evidence or that are even logically consistent. There you can get away with almost anything by pleading a belief born out of faith alone. Period. End of conversation. And this happens every hour of every day. While it may seem benign to some, this circumstance could not be more troubling or consequential. It’s precisely ideas of this sort that are untenable in a world in which important decisions have to be made and where consensus is valued. After all, when it gets down to it, when it really matters (as happens all the time), all we ever have (between individuals or whole tribes) is a choice between dialogue or coercion. If that's true, and I think it is, one’s openness to new ideas, to having one’s mind challenged and even changed, is humanity’s only way forward, as far as I can tell. Dogma (secular or religious) and anything that might support it is then, by my definition, in opposition to anything that even looks vaguely positive. How else can you possibly see things?
So the root problems facing our species at present appear to be that of social and biological evolution – the slow pace of change to our human hardware (our adrenal glands and frontal lobes: our over-active fighty bits and out under-developed thinky bits) and our human software (our beliefs and morals). And, not only does evolving these things into something more take time, time that many of us simply do not have, but I cannot find anything on offer in Toward a New Consciousness that will even help us move us in the right direction.
That being said, I don't think there's reason to despair. And the reason for positivity comes also from looking at our history. I would note that monumental (sudden, catastrophic, ridiculous, beautiful) changes are happening all the time, and that these often arrive in totally unpredictable ways and from wholly unpredictable places. For instance, no one anticipated the development of penicillin, the discovery of electricity, the fall of the Berlin Wall, nor the domination of Twitter as a communication tool, say. The sociologists and historians didn’t anticipate them, the futurists and technophiles weren’t writing about them, and the pundits spouting off on radio or television weren’t talking about these things either in advance of their arrival either... Still, one day, we found a different way of being, and millions of people's lives were suddenly and remarkably transformed – and things, as they say, would never be the same again.
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