Photo by Mike Schwedler 2018
Last spring, I took one of the online seminars offered by The Institute for Social Ecology. The readings we discussed, most of them by and about Murray Bookchin and Antonio Gramsci, addressed questions of organization and activism. It was, to over-simplify, the old question of revolution versus reform.
The answer I took was to reject the either/or. Yes, work outside existing political structures to create democratic alternatives. And yes, work I inside existing political structures to make them more friendly to these alternatives.
When I try to graft—again, crudely, without nuance—this both/and answer onto the topic I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, Arthur Koestler’s essay, “The Yogi and the Commissar,” I arrive at something a little suspect.
The Yogi believes the location of change is the interior. It’s the consequence of an adjustment in the flow coming from the “invisible navel cord” connecting to the “all-one.” What one wants to do is to keep the flow strong and free of obstacles.
There’s no need, I don’t think, to get hung up on the religious language. If actions are shaped by an individual’s epistemological perspective—how they understand the world to be, what they believe to be true about it–then the Yogi’s work might be given a more secular framing. Instead of imagining a deity or the all-one as some supernatural, superpower source that we try to plug into, we might think in terms of better epistemology. The concept of a less-impeded connection to the “all-one” might be replaced with the concept of greater accuracy in the way we account for the living world.
The Commissar, in contrast, believes that change is the consequence of action on the exterior. Change is the result of piecemeal interventions—arrived at under the guidance of an agreed-upon blueprint. The Commissar’s episteme is set, one might say. The Yogi’s episteme, on the other hand, is still under construction. It’s still open to feedbacks and adjustments. It follows, then, that the Yogi’s work has the potential to be radically revolutionary. One doesn’t know what might come of an interior adjustment. The Commissar’s piecemeal work is more practical–of the kind we associate with reform.
This conclusion is the reverse of what is expected, and so I have my doubts about its soundness. I’m only essaying here. But I’m essaying for a reason. When the radio wakes me up in the morning, and I hear a summary of the news, I go through a little daily battle. How to push back against the sinking feeling? How to resist? I can do some inside work. I can contemplate how my actions may or may not correspond with my beliefs about how the world is. I can strive for greater accuracy. I can also do something on the outside. Lately, that’s been working the phones and registering voters and hopefully, if the weather cooperates, some block-walking this week.
After November 6, I don’t know what the outside work will be.
But the inside work is on-going. The goal is revolutionary, transformative change. I don’t mean in the sense of overthrowing an existing political structure. I mean in the sense of overthrowing an episteme; I mean a revolution in the dominant understanding of how the world is, how people are, and what’s valuable.
That’s the way folks on the Yogi side of the spectrum have spoken of radical change in the past–as a transformation of values. My research found calls for a transformation of values in the 1950s and 1960s, coming from Allen Ginsberg, Lewis Mumford, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gregory Bateson–though they all put it in very different ways. More names could be easily added, from those decades and from others, to create a very long list, indeed.
It’s not hard to find similar calls for a transformation of values today, some more explicit than others. I read one from Jeremy Lent, just last week. I’ve mentioned Lent before on this blog in connection to his book, The Patterning Instinct (2017). In an essay called “We Need an Ecological Civilization Before it’s Too Late,” Lent writes
The crucial idea behind an ecological civilization is that our society needs to change at a level far deeper than most people realize. It’s not just a matter of investing in renewables, eating less meat, and driving an electric car. The intrinsic framework of our global social and economic organization needs to be transformed. And this will only happen when enough people recognize the destructive nature of our current mainstream culture and reject it for one that is life-affirming—embracing values that emphasize growth in the quality of life rather than in the consumption of goods and services.
I heard another call for a transformation of values, listening to a year-old interview with the environmentalist and journalist George Monbiot. Discussing his book, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis (2017), Monbiot argues that we use the term “climate breakdown” rather than “climate change,” a case many have found persuasive. Monbiot also speaks of the need for a “massive re-think, a radical transformation” and “an over-arching, massive new narrative” to counter the old, hegemonic narrative that has “thwarted” our “good nature.”
That sounds like inside work to me.
Photo by Mike Schwedler 2018
But before reading the Lent post and listening to the Monbiot interview, I read the October 8 press release from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As with many such reports from like groups and panels, its language has been called boilerplate and unavoidably conservative. Yet in the very first paragraph, it calls for “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”
What kind of changes are those, if not radical, transformative, and revolutionary?
13 Thoughts on this Post
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Anthony, Thank you for this post. The “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” will require getting beyond the either/or and us vs them framing. I agree that it is an epistemological shift. As I see it, political conflict becomes the demonizing of the other side and not seeing all people as human beings. It’s easier to think right/wrong, man/woman, black/white, nature/humanity rather than “and” as in we are all in this together and all suffer the poverty of this type of thinking. I have been thinking about the Me Too movement and all the repercussions of that emerge from demonizing men, failing to see that they too are trapped in a system of what counts as successful masculinity. Unproductive anger and entrenchment on both sides have been the result. To be clear this is not a defense of wrongs to be called out but part of explaining the why. Some of this is due to our fixation on power and I don’t think we fully understand what it is and how it works. So redefining power is part of a new epistemology.
The Yogi is seeking the reality of interconnectedness through the practice of non-dual thinking (and it is a practice). This is part of the perennial tradition across religions and natural philosophy, which means “to bind up.” Every religion and transcendental way of thinking is a path for bringing a broken dualist reality together. This is being acknowledged across religions ( and sciences) and the Franciscan Richard Rohr has made this his primary work.
Practically for me, this means is that one must always seek to see every single human being as broken not defective, bind up, and resist oppositional thinking of any sort. It also means to work for those things that we believe will bring this about aware of our contribution to the problem we are trying to solve. Here I have arrived at the end of this post. Let’s keep practicing non-dual thinking which will show up in our actions. Thanks!
I appreciate this comment very much. For me, it adds in missing parts and expands the ideas I was trying to work with. When I was writing the post I thought several times of your book, The World Come of Age, and your recent posts for this blog, how the persons you discuss could be added to the list I mentioned.
I’m right there with you on “redefining power” as part of a better epistemology, and probably the most crucial part. It’s as overwhelming a problem as is climate change, itself. Koestler’s book, The Sleepwalkers, is about Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton and the construction of modern physics and cosmology. As Koestler tells it, these thinkers struggled mightily with explaining power. They were never satisfied with that piece of the puzzle and had to sort of set it aside.
Thank you for reading and weighing in, Lilian.
Good post, Anthony.
The other day I had occasion to teach my students about Scylla and Charybdis. I mean, I used it as a metaphor in class (I was talking about the New Deal, of all things), and then I realized from my students’ faces that I was speaking gibberish, so I explained what the monsters were, and what they mean for us when we say we are forced to pass between them, the impossible yet urgent task of finding a way through their deadly contraposition. Odysseus calculated the cost and cut his losses — something that works only if there is but a single hero in the boat, a single story to unfurl.
Well, everybody has a story.
That doesn’t mean everybody is a hero. It doesn’t mean everybody is as badly hurt as they are badly hurtful — but it means such a thing is theoretically possible. It means everybody is human. That’s not much to look at as possibilities go, but I guess one must start somewhere.
That’s what I am grappling with at my blog today — a kind of follow up to my MeToo posts. Denying the power of those who have done harm or the pain of those to whom harm has been done will not work. Finding a way through the hazardous seas between power and pain requires something like justice (making things right) and something like mercy (making things work) and something like grace (making things whole).
I’m working on it. Or, to be more accurate, it’s working on me.
Thank you for the comment, L.D. I like that last sentence, the way it brings together all the important concerns, rather than separating them or putting them in conflict with each other. When you associated the word “grace” with “making things whole,” I couldn’t help but think of Lilian Calles Barger’s comment above, about the concept of “to bind up” in the perennial tradition.
The problem with grace is the sourcing. It’s a tough gig to count on broken people — who are also breaking people — to make things whole. But there’s no other game in town. And maybe I’m too quick on the draw with calls for grace anyhow. How long is too long to be angry at all the charming MeToo men in the history of one’s life? If I’m ready to sing “…and the healing has begun” or whatever, that’s well and good (not sure I’m all that ready, tbh), but a recognition of the need for grace (which may be something that exists only in ideal form, and cannot in fact be found) must make room for a recognition of others’ need for something like the opposite of grace — not vengeance, but yes, justice. Making things right. And my god, I have to wonder how many women who have been demeaned and disrespected and damaged would consider their need for justice satisfied by something as simple as an honest apology. Still, though we might theoretically recognize grace as the way out, general calls for grace are ill-advised, because our lives and our brokennesses are utterly asynchronous, though their collective effect is something we all experience together. God help the fool who says that “it’s time” for women to “move past” #MeToo to a readiness for healing / forgiveness / graciousness, etc. It’s never going to be time for “women.” But it might be time in some woman’s life. Or it might not be. (More on that here.)
“Impossible but urgent” seems to sum it up. What I find frustrating in pieces like Jeremy Lent’s (it’s a whole genre) is that they end where i’d like them to begin. Yes, we must do this, and we must do that … (I’m always suspicious of over-reliance on the subjunctive) but, first, who is this “we”? And second, how do “we” get there from here?
Thanks for the comment, Murray. You raise reasonable concerns, no doubt. And when you mention genre, here are three names that immediately come to my mind, maybe because I’ve read their books fairly recently: Naomi Klein, George Monbiot, Giorgos Kallis. Short posts and essays can’t include much in the way of nuts and bolts, but books do get into questions of “we” and “how.” Klein describes existing resistance movements and politics; Monbiot economics and politics; Kallis economics and existing degrowth movements; Lent offers more on what I would call history of ideas and epistemology. But he thinks about who and how a lot, too. Many, if not all — and I would include Amitav Ghosh, too–suggest that “we” Americans listen more closely to ideas and activism coming from the global south, a suggestion that addresses both who and how. Still, as you say, “urgent but impossible”: when it comes to climate breakdown and the hegemonic narrative behind it, we meet paradoxes and binds no matter which way we turn.
A call for a transformation of values, while it may very well be a necessary component of the solution, seems directed to those who already have achieved a certain level of material comfort and security: if anyone is likely to heed a call to focus on the quality of life rather than the consumption of goods and services, it’s likely to be people who already enjoy an adequate level of access to basic goods, services, and “life chances,” such as clean water, enough food, some employment opportunities, adequate shelter, some ability to access cultural/educational resources, to express one’s views, and so on.
There’s little point in directing an anti-consumption message to, say, the tens of thousands of people who risk their lives every year to try to get from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe, or from Central America to the U.S., since their basic needs are not being met to begin with. That they are confronted by Northern governments (esp. the U.S.) increasingly shutting borders aggravates matters. The connections of the migration/refugee crisis to the coming climate catastrophe may be indirect, but I think the connections exist.
J. Lent is a highly educated, successful (former founder of an internet company) person whose sense of urgency about the medium-term future of the human species should be widely shared, and whose ideas (along with those of similar views) are worth heeding. But calling for a transformation of values, culture, and basic economic arrangements without focusing more specifically on how to change behavior (esp. in the richer countries), and without addressing directly the problems of systemic economic and political inequality as well as extreme poverty, seems at best incomplete.
I would agree with your last sentence, Louis, and then hasten to add that all those mentioned above had/have concrete policy recomendations.
Fair enough, Anthony, and I realized after posting my comment that you’d made that point in the exchange with M. Reiss, above.
Further thought on this comment. KIein, Monbiot, Lent, and others identify a direct connection between climate breakdown and the current refugee crisis. The basic needs of a great many suffering people are most certainly on their radar and indeed central to their calls for both immediate action and transformational change.
Thanks for challenging me to think further on this point.
I happened to come across the following advice, attributed to Donella Meadows’ book Thinking in Systems. I found it relevant: “So how do you change paradigms? In a nutshell, you keep pointing out the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep speaking louder and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.”
The paradigm of never-ending growth and consumption has to change because people in places of economic and political deprivation aspire to be consumers like affluent people. Consumption without consequences is the global ideal. The aspiration has to change and still deliver a human level quality of life for everyone.
Here are a couple of past posts about the degrowth movement with links to other resources.
https://s-usih.org/2018/02/degrowths-light-touch/
https://s-usih.org/2018/03/degrowth-igniting-a-political-imagination-of-joy-guest-post-by-luis-i-pradanos/