The Idols of Environmentalism
July 25, 2007 — Whitehawk
Greetings, all~
Rick was sent an article published in Orion Magazine, and he thought it might spark some thoughts and conversation here. It’s a formidable piece, spanning two issues of the mag – I am posting just a couple of excerpts here and providing a link further down for anyone interested to pursue.
Have a brilliant summer!
Whitehawk
The Idols of Environmentalism
Do environmentalists conspire against their own interests?
by Curtis White
Published in the March/April 2007 issue of Orion magazine
THE IDEA THAT WE HAVE powerful corporate villains to thank for the sorry state of the natural world is what Francis Bacon called an “idol of the tribe.” According to Bacon, an idol is a truth based on insufficient evidence but maintained by constant affirmation within the tribe of believers. In spite of this insufficiency, idols do not fall easily or often. Tribes are capable of exerting will based on principles, but they are capable only with the greatest difficulty of willing the destruction of their own principles. It’s as if they feel that it is better to stagger from frustration to frustration than to return honestly to the question, does what we believe actually make sense? The idea of fallen idols always suggests tragic disillusionment, but this is in fact a good thing. If they don’t fall, there is no hope for discovering the real problems and the best and truest response to them. All environmentalists understand that the global crisis we are experiencing requires urgent action, but not everyone understands that if our activism is driven by idols we can exhaust ourselves with effort while having very little effect on the crisis. Most frighteningly, it is even possible that our efforts can sustain the crisis. The question the environmental tribe must ask is, do our mistaken assumptions actually cause us to conspire against our own interests?
…
THE LESSONS OF OUR IDOLS come to this: you cannot defeat something that you imagine to be an external threat to you when it is in fact internal to you, when its life is your life. And even if it were external to you, you cannot defeat an enemy by thinking in the terms it chooses, and by doing only those things that not only don’t harm it but with which it is perfectly comfortable. The truth is, our idols are actually a great convenience to us. It is convenient that we can imagine a power beyond us because that means we don’t have to spend much time examining our own lives. And it is very convenient that we can hand the hard work of resistance over to scientists, our designated national problem solvers. We cannot march forth, confront, and definitively defeat the Monsantos of the world, especially not with science (which, it should go without saying, Monsanto has plenty of). We can, however, look at ourselves and see all of the ways that we conspire against what we imagine to be our own most urgent interests.
Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called “the visible God”: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions: working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out. It creates a hole in our sense of ourselves and of this country, and it leaves us with few alternatives but to try to fill that hole with money and the things money buys. We are not free to dismiss money because we fear that we’d disappear, we’d be nothing at all without it. Money is, in the words of Buddhist writer David Loy, “the flight from emptiness that makes life empty.” …
For more, visit: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/233 ~then come back and share your thoughts!
July 25, 2007 at 8:51 pm
While there is a lot to the idea that people define themselves by what they do for a living and by what they consume, I am looking for more hope than what this article offers on the topic. While not always effective, I don’t automatically conclude that efforts to restore the environment only help “sustain the crisis.” Inventions reaimed at reconciling how someone makes a living with how someone wants to live as a an attempt to reconcile important values and return to humanity. A lot depends on intention? The intention to give people more choices, versus, make money has a lot to do with whether something serves us or not.
August 3, 2007 at 8:29 am
I woke up at 4:00 am thinking about this article, which signaled to me that I needed to respond in some way. (At least that is how I interpreted it since I hate to think good sleeping hours were wasted!)
The basic premise of the article is correct – it is difficult if not impossible to successfully fight a system that we are actively feeding and “plugged into.” We can unwittingly “feed” and give energy to a system even though we vehemently hate it and condemn it. Having jobs, being consumers, funding lawsuits to fight big corporations and paying lobbyists and spin-doctors to promote positions are indeed all part of the system that is taking a serious toll on our environment and our lives. In my view, lawsuits and lobbying, at least in and of themselves, have never brought about true change. So how do we “unplug” from this system?
The idea that keeps coming to me is forgiveness. The only way we can get out of the cycle of blame, scarcity and fear is to start by forgiving. I think this applies to both our personal lives as well as our broader world. If we are going to get out from under the influence of big business, the media and politics, we have to forgive.
Forgiveness is challenging for me. In our culture, we often view forgiveness as either inconsequential or cowardly. I am often reluctant to forgive because I mistake forgiveness with approval or condonation, when in fact it is neither. It’s easier to hold onto self-righteous judgment and disdain, but maintaining a self-righteous and disdainful attitude drains our energy and provides us excuses not to act or change.
In the own microcosm of my life, I see that I have a pattern of working for very traditional “good old boy” organizations. Granted, there are a lot of them, but I seem to find myself attracted to situations that include an exceptional amount of elitism and chauvinism. I’ve changed countries and I’ve changed careers, but I still find this issue in my working environment. I have now realized that it is something internal. The only way I am going to be released from this is forgive them (not condone them). By forgiving, we get all the energy back that we have been pouring into hating the system. By forgiving, we release the hold the system or the situation has on us so we can walk away and move onto the next thing. We return to a position of abundance.
I certainly do not have all the answers for the environmental problems we are facing. When I read newspaper reports of oil drilling in wilderness areas, watch movies like “An Inconvenient Truth” and see us fight over precious natural resources in courts of law where a great deal of time and money is being spent without a satisfactory resolution, I feel angry, moralistic, helpless and frustrated. Then, I feel guilty when I spend too much money buying things at Walmart or Sam’s. We have to begin by forgiving – it is not the politicians, the retail markets or the oil companies just by themselves causing the destruction. We have to release our blame – both of ourselves and others before we can start to constructively act.
When we forgive, something internally changes within us. We have more energy, we connect with abundance, and as a result, we don’t feel so compelled to consume at least at the same rate. In a place of true forgiveness and true abundance, we stop filing the lawsuits and paying the lobbyists. Just naturally, we simply walk away from the retail stores and the big businesses that sell us things we don’t need. We find that we have other things to do when we don’t have to console or distract minds and hearts that are filled with scarcity and blame. We unplug from the system and stop feeding it.
August 13, 2007 at 5:42 pm
Wendy — re: forgiveness. Have you given the ho’oponopono technique a try? It is a Huna technique which involves, essentially, looking at whatever troubles or concerns you (past, present, or even possible future), and then forgiving YOURSELF for whatever way in which you might have contributed to the problem! It is quite a different experience, and allows you to take responsibilty (claiming power might be another way to view it) for whatever goes on in the hologram of existence (whether personally involved or not) … and in so doing, healing your own energy “leakage” or mismanagement in a universal energetic system in which all “votes” count, whether made consciously or by default. We are all connected.
There’s an evocative interview with Dr. Len, the Hawaiian psychiatrist who had unprecedented success with this technique, treating severely disabled patients in a state mental hospital. This interview (audio) is at: http://www.newsforthesoul.com/drlen.htm; I listened to the June interview, and now there’s a new one because ho’oponopono is really getting a lot of attention lately. You might find it worth a listen. It is at the very least a unique way of going about forgiveness!
There is also a website full of info: http://www.hooponopono.org. I’ve also talked about this in a post on this blog a few months ago, and as the person at the controls here, I am noticing many people surf into the blog while searching “ho’oponopono”!
I find it an interesting practice to work with. The other night, I “brought up” everyone and every THING I could think of in my life that had hit snags (throughout time), and forgave the aspects of myself that contributed to those situations. From there I moved on to world conditions and events. Dr. Len calls it “cleaning,” like energetic hygiene. Just thought it worth mentioning here after reading your comment…
September 9, 2007 at 9:59 am
Thanks for the suggestion. I remember reading your earlier posting on ho’oponopono but had forgotten about it. Fascinating work - I will keep focusing on it.