Are we for or against ourselves?
Perhaps the better question
is: If we are for us, when will we start
acting like it?
If the questions above seem outrageous, out there, or
confusing, let me pause for a moment to offer some brief foundation on which to
pin these questions.
I was born in 1961, in Berkeley, CA, a city known for
radicalism and protest, then and now. My parents took us on marches. We
belonged to the Co-Op. We participated in early ecological efforts. (If anyone
can now remember the 1971 oil spill on San Francisco Bay, my mother took my sister and me on AC Transit to San Francisco, so we could all help in the rescue of
birds and beach cleanup. This was a very low-tech process at the time. I remember lots of hay
being spread about, to absorb the oil. While the beaches and bay were
eventually cleaned, despite the efforts of hundreds of people, many birds
perished.) We had family friends who had opted out and gone “off grid” by
retreating to communes. My parents were more on the side of opting in.
Being a child of the television era, I was acutely aware of
the news. Among my very earliest memories is of watching the funeral of JFK on
our small, black and white Motorola portable TV. Time inched forward through
strikes, assassinations, War, famine in India and Ethiopia. I knew that a war
had been declared, by our President, on poverty in our nation. I knew that the
Peace Corps, Red Cross and other groups were actively working to help people in
other nations stricken by illness and famine. I knew there was war against illiteracy.
Unrest was all around. Sometimes, I did not feel safe, but I always felt that
most people were working to make the world a better place for everyone. That is a little
about my background and those events that informed my understanding of the
world.
Today, I look back and see that the Progressive ideas, which
had their roots in three and more generations before my birth, have largely
failed. We can look at the history that has been written since and find a few
overarching reasons for these failures: Military Industrial Complex and
rampant, unregulated Capitalism. Progressivism and citizen activism have been
undermined by those moneyed interests that prefer maintaining hegemony over influence
and power to partaking of an equal share in human rights and justice.
War to bolster hegemony and claim on resources has cost more
lives and more money than could ever be imagined. Unrelenting capitalism has
enslaved entire populaces to create and exchange worthless junk, designed for rapid
failure, that quickly becomes refuse, littering our world with toxicity that
threatens to endanger the health and safety of all living beings.
What few people seem to realize, here in 2018, is that the world
economies are no longer tied to nations, but to corporations that wield enough
wealth and power to actively avoid the attempts of any governmental body that
would control them. My proof of this lies in the movement toward privatization
of the security sector, and to some extent in the numerous recent
wars/conflicts that seem to have been unilateral manipulations by certain
governments, but which have profited corporations engaged in “rebuilding
efforts”.
It is apparent to me that nationalities and governments no
longer hold the keys to human destiny, and this is why terror organizations and
nefarious cyber disruptors are currently so successful.
It is also apparent to me that no one at the top is
interested in civilization or social wellbeing.
What shocking things to say!
If only humans
could be accused of being anthropocentric! But, alas, we cannot.
If we were truly anthropocentric, we would realize that
anthropocentrism is a state that must be cultivated. The principal flaw of
capitalism is that it can only survive when people buy. But if the world is
populated by a few haves, the rest
being have-nots, ultimately means
that that having is an endgame. If
the captains of capitalism don’t get to work cultivating larger groups of haves (people who will be capable of
buying because they have knowledge, jobs and health, affordable housing,
adequate access to food and water), the “free-for-all” marketplace will die,
along with great swaths of the world’s population.
After that, all that is left is warlord military might à la Mad Max. And then, you capitalists,
watch out!
The solution, to my mind, lies in a benevolent
anthropocentrism, one that buys into a central notion that to keep the world
going, you need smart, cultured, engaged, and empathetic people of all shapes,
sizes, colors, ages, genders and cultural affiliations; caring people. Such people know that the earth and all life must be
stewarded, and that this cannot be accomplished by stealing, cheating, lying or
bullying, but by cooperation toward a common good for everyone and everything. We need to demilitarize the populace. We
need to find the root causes of violence, isolation, depression, misanthropy;
we need to weed them out by healing, hybridizing and nurturing wellbeing, by
loving. We need to dismantle predatory thinking and practices, and replacing
them with innovation that breeds life and purpose. We need to cultivate citizenship and personal responsibility that is manifest in every action built from
the bottom up, and (as business consultants never tire in speaking of) resonated in the tone from the top.
Evolution, that is I am talking about, folks. We need to evolve. We desperately need to become
something we clearly right now are not. We need to become truly human and
anthropocentric in the sense that being good to the world around us is the path
toward both meeting all our basic needs and providing spiritual fulfillment.
It is a simple idea, in the words of T.S. Eliot, “costing
not less than everything.”
Or, as Voltaire has his eponymous hero ultimately declare,
“repondit Candide, ‘Oui, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.’”
