“There’s two kinds of dangers… That we’ve arranged a society based on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it?
And the second reason that I’m worried about this is that science is more than a body of knowledge. It’s a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan political or religious who comes ambling along. It’s a thing that Jefferson laid great stress on. It wasn’t enough, he said, to enshrine some rights in a constitution or a Bill of Rights. The people had to be educated, and they had to practice their skepticism and their education. Otherwise, we don’t run the government—the government runs us“
Carl Sagan (Charlie Rose Interview).
Words are important – Crucially so. They are the means by which we tell our stories; to our children, to our friends and family, to anyone we meet. We are our stories. I talked about this early in the blog and how we live by the metaphors we use (see link) for they structure our beliefs. The late, great comedian and social critic George Carlin understood this profoundly. The Cabal and now the puppet technocrats running the world have been telling us stories for well over two hundred years. We know deep down the stories are fairy tales, but they have such an appealing aspect about them, we carry on believing – just like the common people in ‘The emperor has no clothes’ (refers to a situation where people are unwilling to acknowledge the obvious flaws or shortcomings of someone or something that is widely admired or powerful. It originates from a story in which an emperor is deceived into believing he is wearing invisible clothes, and only a child points out that he is actually naked. This expression is often used to describe situations where individuals are afraid to criticize someone due to their perceived importance or status. Free Dictionary)
And of course, the first casualty of metaphors is that they fail to describe the truth adequately, if at all. We get so intrenched with how the metaphors describe us we stop looking at what the words are actually saying. The words are all too often focused on tricking people to react from emotion rather than encourage them to reflect mindfully. There’s that word again – mindfulness, item 1 on my list of five.
We live within metaphor that we are the conquerors of the Earth, of mother nature herself. Yet we seem unable to actually get a domineering foothold. Whenever we think we do, some natural catastrophe shows us how ineffectual we have been. As Robin Wall Kimmerer says (Braiding Sweetgrass), “…the if-then formula isn’t working. People do know the consequences of our collective damage, they do know the wages of an extractive economy, but they don’t stop. They get very sad; they get very quiet. So quiet that protection of the environment that enables them to eat and breathe and imagine a future for their children doesn’t even make it onto a list of their top ten concerns… the litany of doomsday projections – they move anyone who is listening only to despair. Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power, and the power of the earth [to regenerate herself] … Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair… It’s not enough to just stop doing bad things… the goal is to emulate nature.” As Aldo Leopold emphasized to us with his ‘Land-Ethic’ we must become a part of the natural world and treat it as an equal.
Our current primary metaphors are rooted in war and conquest. This does bode well for any true restoration and repair of the planetary ecosystems. The land is not a machine with humans as the drivers. This mechanistic view of nature is a reductionist and materialist paradigm framed from an imposed engineering solution that implies humans can solve everything from an engineering metaphor. The broken earth problem is not a broken human problem, rather it is a need to see that the land is not broken and needing to be fixed, but to be left to restore itself with our assistance. It is our relationship to the natural world that needs changing. A new metaphor of mutual nurturing. If we care for the land, it will once again care for us. Indigenous cultures have been telling us that forever.
In her book, World of Lover, World of Self, Joanna Macy talks about The Great Healing, as humanity’s next “essential adventure of our time; the shift from industrial society to a life-sustaining civilization… Action on behalf of life transforms.” This is not to negate technology but to embrace it with wisdom that use a new metric. The question ought not be whether in any action we have the funds to do it – as the market economy insists – but whether the action promotes health and well-being for life. The new kind of economy will not be profit driven but health, well-being and wisdom driven.
My starting quote by Carl Sagan emphasizes that we need scientists who tell us the truth and we, the masses, are educated enough to know the truth from the metaphoric myths the Cabal and technocrats try to impose on us. And then Science can give us knowing; but caring and compassion comes from somewhere else – the human heart. It isn’t more data and technology that we need but a transformation that arises out of a spiritual wisdom using metaphors of partnership with Gaia. This would separate our current dilemma of two ideas that have been merged since the Medieval Renaissance; the process and practice of science as a way of understanding the world, and the scientific-mechanistic worldview that stems from a dominance engineering metaphorical story – the separation of knowledge from responsibility (Kimmerer).
We need to listen to the natural world, its processes and its natural economy. We may be clever, but we need to temper that cleverness with humility. “…we humans do have words. Language is our gift and our responsibility. I’ve come to think of writing as an act of reciprocity with the living land. Words to remember old stories, words to tell new ones, stories that bring science and spirit together to nurture our becoming people [of the earth.]
To Be Continued ……………
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