I've not pursued this forum as an active blog, promoted it for others to see, kept after it on a daily basis, used it as an expression of my personal world view, for myself and for others.
It's time to change all that. I've been reading and rereading the writings of Paul Cudenec, on Winter Oak and elsewhere. He has been a long time proponent of anarchism and Taoism and their interdependent associations, longer than I have, I suspect. As he has written in many ways, anarchism and Taoism are two sides of the same coin, a way of viewing the human world from an ecocentrict perspective. I think this may be my Way and my Time. So I'll be promoting this Journal and this web site hither and yon, mostly yon, and, at the same time dredging up my past style(s) of writing to bring this into the attention of others who may find my words of interest ... or not. So here its: My World and Welcome to It.
0 Comments
Many years ago I developed the concept of Pushing the Rope. I found that when I had to struggle to do something I thought I wanted to do; when nothing would go right; when there were constant interruptions; when it felt like I was climbing uphill against thorn bushes all angled against me; when it didn't flow ... it was something not worth doing.
I called this pushing the rope. A rope is made to be pulled, not pushed. It is not in the nature of rope to be pushed. Pushing a rope does not arise of itself. It is not Tsu-ran. Modern human civilization is pushing the rope. I've walked this path myself for many years and left Buddhism entirely, even Zen, though there is much in Zen philosophy that I retain, without the Buddhist trappings.
Zen without Buddhism is Taoism, which, of course, is not an ism, it is tsu-ran (Ziran), or "self-so-ing," that which arises of itself. Tsu-ran coupled with wu-wei (doing without intention) are the yin and yang of Taoism, the two sides of the Taoist coin that express the universe. The moral compass of Taoism is te, virtue/authenticity. That which embraces tsu-ran and wu-wei has much te. Contemplating the Lao-tsu and Chuang-tzu are good first steps on the path to tsu-ran. After reading and thinking for a while, the concept settles in and becomes, heh, heh, natural, as it should be. One can return to the texts as desired, just as one can take a dip in a pool of fresh water on a hot day. But once one understands the Way, one can get on with life and live it self-so. It is clear to anyone able to rise above the cacophony of modern daily life that the overriding vision of the dominant society, civilization if you will, is dysfunctional. Life based on continually increasing consumption of the components of the natural world is maladaptive, unrealistic and ultimately impossible. Those who die with the most toys not only do not win, they contribute to the overall failure of our species.
Eastern philosophies such as Taoism, Buddhism and Vedanta call this vision a “Way.” The Western Way is exploitation of all ecological niches, as quickly as possible, for the exclusive benefit of one species, Homo sapiens. An alternative Way, perhaps the Nature Way, would be a vision of humans living as fully cooperative, supportive and contributing members of viable ecosystems, taking no more than our share, such that all species have sufficient resources to lead a full and satisfying life. Humans have a handicap in this regard. We call it self-awareness, the ability to know who we are, to remember the past and imagine the future. Many humans constantly plan for a future that never arrives, based on memories of the past. Many don’t experience the present moment as the only reality, unaware that the past and the future do not exist. In reality, the present is the constantly moving interface between what was and what is yet to be. Many plants and animals store up food sources that are used in times when food is less readily available. This is not done as a result of imagining a future when food might not be available and storing more resources for that eventuality. Instead, plants and animals store food, internally or externally, as an adaptive strategy worked out over millennia of natural selection and evolution. In this way, plants and animals (except humans) accommodate changing environmental conditions in a complex adaptive process, in concert with all other species in their ecosystem. The success of any one species is dependent on the success of all other species. The failure of any single species affects all other species, as well. The failure of Homo sapiens to live in a Way that includes other species is already affecting all species, reducing biodiversity world wide, resulting in permanent species loss and disruption of complex ecosystems. Even if the human species does not absolutely fail and go extinct, our present Way is negatively affecting all other species and cannot long continue. For humans to continue on this Earth, we must develop a vision of ourselves as fully functioning members of viable ecosystems, a part of Nature, not apart from the natural world. We must stop killing the golden goose that bears the source of our species well-being and viability. This is not an easy task, as our current Way has overwhelming momentum toward the cliff edge overlooking the abyss of extinction. As we stand with our naked toes dangling in the breeze over the edge, we have two choices if we wish to survive: either take a step backwards, or turn around and take a step forward. We make this change one set of toes at a time. We become the change we wish to see in the world. We build a new vision that makes the existing vision obsolete. It’s a long process, and sure. It’s the Way of Nature. Mirrors within mirrors Jewels reflecting jewels The drop is in the ocean the ocean within the drop In a recent article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel titled Humans Evolved from Nature, Rachel Kippen, Executive Director of the O'Neil Sea Odyssey, wrote:
"Humans evolved from nature, our mutual, ancestral web obviously linking us to primates, but also to fish, and even sea squirts, who in their larval stage of development have the presence of a notochord, the primitive origin of our backbone and nervous system. All animals and plants have the vast majority of their genes in common." As seemingly unifying as this quote reads, it nevertheless emphasizes the separation of humans from Nature rather than our unity with the natural world. Humans are not evolved from Nature, instead, we are evolving in Nature. Also, the web that unites us is not just "ancestral." We are an intricately interconnected web of relationships among all living things and all aspects of the Universe with which we co- inhabit. So how did humans lose touch with this overarching reality? When did we turn away from the natural world, deny our unity with the all that is, and come to think of us as something unique, something greater than the rest of the Universe. And worse, when did we begin to believe that the Earth was created to serve only us, that we were to have ownership and control of the entire planet and everything upon and in it? I suspect it began with language, when we started naming things, including ourselves, to distinguish them one from another. The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnamable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things. - Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching In United States English, names tend to be abstract identifiers, names of things rather than actions or relationships. This is a fairly recent development as even in English speaking countries, the language tended to name places by the stories that accompanied them, and human names were descriptive of place and family relationships, e.g. Edmond ap Llewellyn (Edmond son of Llewellyn), Rodney de Monmouth, Maria Pedersdatter. In Wales and other parts of Great Britain, where small communities often had a lack of surname diversity, names frequently described a person's relationship with the community, such as "Evans the Pub", or "Tommy Two-Stroke." Over the years as Western civilization became more focused on material manipulation and accumulation at the expense of the natural world, our language has evolved to reflect our increased separation from the natural world. This does not imply that we can change a society's world view by changing its language. Understanding the relationship between language and culture, as Levi-Strauss explained, can reveal much about the underlying motivations for the perceived separation of humans from the natural world. In the physical dimensions, science is revealing the inherent connectedness of the all that is. John Muir's well-known quotation is more apt than probably he even realized. "When one tugs at a single thing in nature, one finds it attached to the rest of the world." Part of the dualism now affecting United States politics is a widening rift between those who view our society through the lens of interrelationships, and those who adhere to the view of separation between people and objects. If human societies are to continue into the uncertain future, it will be necessary to come to terms with the inescapable connections between human culture and the rest of the natural world. Covid-19: the pandemic of the Great Acceleration
Juan Humberto Urquiza García MR Online Originally published: CDMX Politico (April 11, 2020) The slight flapping of a butterfly’s wings can be felt on the other side of the world. Many people around the world are familiar with this ancient Chinese proverb. Today, this lovely metaphor has materialized and taken the form of a pandemic, wreaking havoc on a system where few felt safe and most had become accustomed to merely surviving. Despite the panic induced in many sectors of the population by the spread of this virus, we must remember that, both locally and globally, human diseases caused by viruses or bacteria have been with us for thousands of years, since our species began to walk the African steppes. They followed us when we domesticated the first animals and plants, were by our side when we built our first cities and have traveled the world in our carts, ships, trains, wagons and planes at an increasingly dizzying pace. Our relationship with disease is historical and painful because it shows us our biological and cultural limits. In other words, it shows us one of the many faces that death has. We can say that, largely thanks to the mass media and social networks, for the first time in human history the pandemic has acquired a global status, and that the system propagating the viral spread of statistical information on the disease is as effective as that of the virus itself. Sometimes, the news and analyses are so ambiguous that it seems that their intention is to confuse rather than to inform public opinion. Global environmental history, which has studied continental biological exchanges, has shown how various ailments, such as COVID-19 today, have spread around the world, demographically decimating populations that did not have the antibodies to deal with these biological agents. Some of the best known cases are the Black Death that struck Eurasia in the 14th century, or the smallpox or flu that claimed thousands of lives in indigenous lands during the conquest of what we now call America (in the 16th century). Thus, diseases and their spread through different regions of the planet were, are, and will continue to be part of the life of the world system and its global processes of interconnection. Human globalization did not begin with the first transoceanic exchanges, but we can say that with these exchanges it began dispersing throughout the world diseases that were unknown to the antibodies of other human populations. Earlier processes of global exchange, however, had other rhythms and scopes, the networks were more restricted and much slower, and as a consequence, the spread of diseases was less accelerated. This trend changed over time as humans developed machines and communication systems that allowed them to pursue more extensive processes of global change. In the first decades of the 20th century the world faced an epidemic crisis due to an H1N1, or Spanish flu, virus, but, despite its high lethality, its spread was not as rapid as we see today with COVID-19. This is because rhythms and interconnections in the flow of people and products around the world was not as dynamic as it is today. As an example, according to data from the International Civil Aviation Organization, airplanes transported approximately 1.647 billion passengers in 2000; a figure that rose to 4.3 billion in 2018. After the second half of the 20th century the world entered a global process that environmental historians have conceptualized as the Great Acceleration. In this context, the planet began to experience increases in the rates of exploitation of natural resources, population growth, exchange of products, and movements of people around the globe, to name a few factors. These processes set off a series of problems, including the warming of the planet, air pollution, losses of large areas of forest and jungle, pollution and shortages of fresh water, acidification of the oceans, and today we must add the accelerated spread of diseases such as COVID-19 as part of the challenges we are facing and will continue to face as a global society in the future. Today, some diseases that affect us as a species are focused in different regions, but there are others that, due to their planetary distribution and in the same way as inequality and poverty, are global and affect millions of human beings. Viruses and bacteria, like any biological entity, seek to reproduce by any means. For this they need to find hosts that provide them with the conditions for that purpose. Without intending to, diseases like the coronavirus will take advantage of the transport systems we have developed to accelerate their spread. The challenges we face with COVID-19 are not only epidemiological or technical, such that we can say that the disease is not just a biological threat to our species. The virus has taken on the dimensions of a cultural and civilizational challenge for all of us because it infects the poor, the middle classes and the most privileged on the planet. Of course, we must be clear that it affects individuals, families and countries in different ways. Despite this being a global challenge, the world has reacted differently: different nations have developed strategies and measures that have included closing borders, restricting social mobility, massive testing, and monitoring based on mobile device applications. Actions have not only been taken at the government level, but also by citizens, within the extent of possibilities that each individual or community has. These measures, as in other national crises, have been expressed in different initiatives and community support networks. In recent weeks, in Mexico and elsewhere, strategies have been adopted to deal with both the epidemiological and economic crises which have not been free of public criticism. What has become clear, although few say so openly, is that the economic model that relied on state deregulation in public health and other strategic areas has proven ineffective in different parts of the world, and our country is no exception. Everyone’s health cannot be in the hands of private companies. The health emergency caused by COVID-19 shows that we must drastically rethink the measures adopted since the Washington Consensus. The current crisis has changed our lives and will continue to do so for a long time to come. It is time for our generation to propose a different course, because this pandemic has shown us that the socio-economic model based on the Great Acceleration of consumption and the destruction of nature affects us all, and the poorest more than any. We must take collective action and learn from what is happening; the call to stay at home must be expanded in scale, and we citizens must channel it into collective action to take care of the global house that is our planet, because this crisis has also shown that the stoppage of activities imposed by the pandemic has allowed the planet’s ecosystems a slight respite, which we should try to maintain into the future. It is important to emphasize that changes are not the result of our ability or inability to imagine new utopias; rather great historical transformations are the result of our actions and abilities to adapt and seek new ways out of crises. Translated by Brian M. Napoletano and Pedro S. Urquijo Link to original article: www.cdmxpolitico.com I've recently been posting on an Ecosocialism Facebook page in an attempt to ferret out how Ecosocialism functions as an environmental orientation to Socialism.
As far as I can tell, it doesn't. Ecosocialism became an -ism in 2002 with the publication of Joel Kovel's The Enemy of Nature, an attempt to resuscitate moribund traditional Socialism faced with a declining biosphere under the assault of capitalist hegemony. Kovel's original vision was to sharpen anti-capitalist discourse and action by articulating capital's deleterious effects on the biosphere, including but not limited to climate change. Some five years later, Ian Angus created Climate and Capitalism, which firmly set ecosocialism in the context of climate change alone, leaving out all of the other environmental damage caused by capitalist exploitation and expansion. In essence, Ecosocialism starts with anthropocentrist Socialism and adds concerns for the environmental effects of capitalist to add currency and legitimacy to its argument. In contrast, Deep Ecology starts with a biocentric viewpoint that includes humans and human societies as an essential component. Or so it seems to me. “Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.”
― Edward Abbey
|
Author
We are each the source of our own inner view of the All That Is. This is my view. Archives
September 2022
Categories
All
Blog Roll
|