I am currently hunkered down working on a project close to my heart, editing my late friend and colleague Dr. David Fleming's incredible life's work Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It, for its publication by Chelsea Green later this year.
I did though hear about the pope's interesting new encyclical. It's well worth a browse (and do check out Rap News' take), but here are a few of my favourite lines:
"The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth." (yep, this is an official document from the Pope!)
"The ethical and spiritual roots of environmental problems require that we look for solutions not only in technology but in a change of humanity; otherwise we would be dealing merely with symptoms."
"Each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which we will never know, which our children will never see, because they have been lost for ever ... We have no such right. ... We seem to think that we can substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty with something which we have created ourselves."
"The strategy of buying and selling “carbon credits” can lead to a new form of speculation which would not help reduce the emission of polluting gases worldwide." (see last month's post)
"Our efforts at education will be inadequate and ineffectual unless we strive to promote a new way of thinking about human beings, life, society and our relationship with nature. Otherwise, the paradigm of consumerism will continue to advance, with the help of the media and the highly effective workings of the market.""Yet all is not lost. Human beings, while capable of the worst, are also capable of rising above themselves, choosing again what is good, and making a new start, despite their mental and social conditioning. We are able to take an honest look at ourselves, to acknowledge our deep dissatisfaction, and to embark on new paths to authentic freedom."
~~~
...I was immediately struck by the powerful juxtaposition with David Fleming's entertaining and eye-opening passage in the book on religion's role in our future, which is simply the best thing I have read on the matter, and indeed has changed my own thinking.
So I thought I'd allow you to share in the pleasures of this extract, at this apposite moment.
Religion has a curious relationship with truth. To tease it out, we will need to identify five forms of truth:
1) Material truth is direct, plain, literal description of reality. There is no interest here in exploring deeper implications, insights and echo-meanings.
This is the truth which tells you about the route taken by the hot water pipe from the boiler to the bathroom, how to make flat-bread, how to photograph otters, what Darwinism is, why a herd of cows’ milk yield is higher if the cows are named as well as numbered, what a well-tempered scale is, what a Higgs boson probably is, why pregnant women don’t topple over, whether you went to the pub last night. Accuracy is not essential: it does not have to be true to belong in the domain of material truth, but it does have to be the speaker’s intention that the other person should understand it to be true. It can use metaphor that helps to get an unfamiliar idea across. The intention is to provide a truthful and uncluttered description. Here facts matter.
For religion, there is material truth in its historical account, and in at least some of religion’s practical and ethical teaching.
2) Narrative truth (or poetic truth) is the truth present not just in story-telling but in myth, art and the whole of our culture. This is the truth of Pride and Prejudice. It is not materially true, in that it is fiction; on the other hand, it is true-to-life: it is as accurate an insight into human character as we have. Elizabeth Bennett’s story can neither be dismissed as untrue nor accepted as true; it is in the middle ground. It may or may not report the material truth, but the narrative says something that cannot be said in any other way. It has a shadow-meaning that extends beyond metaphor, and can lead to the discovery of material or implicit truths, as an explorer in search of the Holy Grail may discover and map real mountains and rivers.
Narrative truth makes sense of the roots of our word “belief”, which comes to our literal-minded age from a story-rich antiquity. It can be traced to the ancient Germanic root, galaubjan [to hold dear]; the Latin for “to believe” is credere, which comes from cor dare, to give [one’s] heart.
Narrative truth may be a parable with a clear message, or a story for the story’s sake, or the meaning may be forever unknown, a question to be reflected-on, perhaps the subject of a lifetime’s exploration. It is the domain of poetry, music, laughter; if you ask whether it is true, you are at the wrong party.
And yet, our culture regularly lacks the mature judgment necessary to distinguish between material and narrative truth. A work of art makes the question of whether it is true or not absurd. It is a category error and should not be asked. You might as well ask whether Schubert’s String Quintet in C major Deutsch No. 956 likes broccoli.
Although religion inhabits all five forms of truth, narrative truth is at its core, most obviously in its allegory, parable and myth.
3) Implicit truth is the product of reflection, and is particular to the person reflecting. Different people may reach sharply different insights which may, however, all be true, despite contrasts in emphasis and meaning. They are different in that they are features in the landscape of the observers’ different cognitive homelands. The differences may be consistent with each other, or they may mature into deep contradictions: “This is my territory”; “The ideal place for our honeymoon would be Scunthorpe”; “We’ve won”. All these are true or untrue depending on who is speaking, but all are in the category of implicit truth.
Religion’s implicit truth is the insight derived from deliberation; it is the guidance, comfort, inspiration and prudence derived by a person’s own participation in his or her religion.
4) Performative truth is the truth that is created by statements that do something: I challenge, I thee wed, I bet, I curse, thank you. The speaking makes the truth: a promise is brought into existence by being spoken: loyal cantons of contemned love make love come alive (for a variant – it does not quite qualify as a performative truth, but it is a good try – see: “Making It Come True”).
MAKING IT COME TRUE...
by saying it often enough
“So if it’s not focus that breeds success, how do you get a project as vast and ambitious as Eden off the ground? Simple: you just announce you’re going to do it. I discovered a technique that revolutionised my life. It’s called lying – or rather, the telling of future truths. It’s about putting yourself in the most public jeopardy possible and saying ‘I am going to do this’, so the shame of not doing it would be so great it energises every part of your being.”
~ Tim Smit, Executive Director and Co-Founder of the Eden Project, Cornwall
Performative truths can also be created by symbolic events or even thoughts. Contracts are an example – they may be recorded, but the contract itself has no material expression: you cannot see it or say where it is, and if minds change profoundly enough it may simply cease to exist.
The performative truth of religion lies in its ritual, as in the performance of the Christian Eucharist and other practices of religion which affirm and bring into existence a reality of identity and belief as real as, and in many ways the same as, a contract.
5) Self-denying truth is paradox which contradicts itself: it is (materially) true until it is spoken: the speaking of a self-denying truth kills it. Examples: “I refuse to admit my addiction”, “The religious belief which unites us so securely is in fact a useful falsehood”, “The reason we have such a loving relationship is that you remind me of my mother”. It is a matter of acknowledging the limits of what we can say without destroying the truth in the process: you can kill an insight by analysing it, love by telling it:
Never seek to tell thy love
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly.
I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart,
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears –
Ah, she doth depart.
Soon as she was gone from me
A traveller came by
Silently, invisibly –
Oh, was no deny.
~ William Blake (1793)
Self-denying truth is the opposite of performative truth. It is a statement which makes itself untrue. By unpacking a useful mystery you are making it no longer a mystery, and maybe no longer useful.
Religion involves a self-denying truth, in that the commanding authority of a myth is impaired, or even destroyed, when it is described as a myth. The author of this book, as a critic, affirms the truth of this description of religion – but, as an observant, he denies it and, instead, enters into the performative truth which gives religion real presence.
~~~
All five forms of truths, then, are exuberantly present in religion, which, if confined in the narrow space inhabited by material truth, decays into fundamentalism. There are paradoxes and shadow-meanings in all of these, especially in narrative truth and self-denying truth, yet all five are needed for the common purpose of making a future, which requires both brain and soul. Alfred North Whitehead, with the sureness of touch of a philosopher of science, captures it:
Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.
Religions are works of art – narrative truths affirmed by ritual; they variously assert the existence of many gods, one God, a mystical union of three gods in one, or their myth does not have a concept of God at all. The narrative truth and the ritual in which it is affirmed have essential functions for a community, for the individuals within it, and for its social capital, giving it identity and meaning.
Religion, like all other living things, dies if dissected; the dissector kills what he seeks to understand. It exists because it is performed, affirmed and loved. The view that dismisses religion on the grounds that it contains untrue statements is a solecism, a naïve failure to understand the significance of religion, the culture which it expresses, and the many natures of truth.
If a common practice celebrates the identifying narrative or myth of the community, if it is expressed in one or more of the arts, especially music, if there is at least a degree of repetition and constancy in that expression, and if it requires some, or many, members of the community to participate, it is, for Lean Logic, an expression of religion. At least to some degree. Binary definitions – this is/is not religious – have value only at the extremes, at which the identification of the religious is trivial in any case.
What is religion for?
Religion provides meeting places in which people can come together, building and sustaining the friendships of social capital; it is the hub through which needs are signalled and answered. That can be done in other ways, too, of course: by playing cards, or being a regular at the pub, or being on a committee. But religion can do it in ways which those other meeting places cannot. It enables a lot of people to participate in a collective activity, doing the same thing at the same time, to the same music. Its ritual is, in itself, of no direct practical value, and this makes it especially potent and effective as a statement by participants that they are there as members of the community. It delivers tradition to us – a present from the past – where core values are represented in forms of exceptional beauty. And it brings shared presence; in religious observance, friends, neighbours, beloveds and families face the same way.
The critic will point out that religion can bring strife as well as concord; that there have been many abuses of power; that some expressions of religion misapprehend their own myths – by, for instance, naïvely supposing the Creation Story to be fact. Religion, like every other human enterprise, comes with no guarantee of being done well. It can be more drawn to guilt than to joy, to the personal than the collective, to righteous narcissism than to communal care. Religion can be intolerant, sanctimonious and cruel. But it is hard to think of any political or social order to which those regrettable properties do not apply from time to time. The secular world, too, with chilling good intentions, and at whatever cost in lives and capital in all its forms, sometimes tries to build a new and secular Jerusalem.
But look again at what religion can do. Religion is the community speaking. It is culture in the service of the community. It is a framework for integrating care into the community’s life and culture; it takes charitable giving beyond the level of personal conscience and integrates it into the way the community sees itself and expresses itself.
Religion uses allegory, opening up the potent space of questions unsettled, paradoxes unresolved, beauty undescribed. It occupies, with benign myth, the space in the mind which, if vacated, is wide open to takeover by ideology. Akin to carnival, it provides powerfully-cohesive rituals that give reality to membership of the community and locate it as particular to, and steward of, the place; that invite emotional daring; and that also alert the community to time – to the natural cycles of day and season, as well as to its existence as inheritor from previous generations and benefactor of future generations. The ritual itself is a skilled practice recruiting the deep intellectual power which is available only to the subconscious mind. In all these ways, religion underpins the trust and permanence which make it possible to sustain reciprocity, the network of interconnected talent and service which makes the local economy real.
We cannot tell what forms the religion of future communities will take. Very small communities, with cultures shaped by a closeness to nature, which is held in respect and awe, could be close to pagan spiritualism – like the lelira of the Inuit and the shamanic religions whose rituals sustain the scripts which in turn sustain their local ecologies. On the other hand, cultures which are settled, more domestic than wild, and with a religion to match, may find themselves in the Christian tradition. If they do, they will inherit a proven, full-mouthed, full-blooded liturgy of great depth and brilliance, the existence of which – if they have formerly experienced only the winsome banalities from the time of the late market economy – they might not suspect. And they will also inherit the architectural expression of that liturgy – the churches – spectacular assertions that community is a mere prelude to the great fugue of overlapping mysteries, parables, affections and accomplishments that give us Gaia.
Lean Logic brings whatever values and insights it can to the task of holding community together in the absence of a robust market economy. Religion (Latin: ligare, to bind, + re, intensely) is the binding-together of people with stories, music, dance, emotion, death, spirit – all really about the celebratory making of community, and real enough to give your heart to.
~~~
Unfortunately, the religions of the world will not, in general, be in good shape for these creative responsibilities. There are four reasons for this:
The first is that religions have been shattered and depleted by the disintegration of social structure and the loss of social capital which have followed the advance of the market economy. Religion has been separated from its cultural context and become something that people come together to do, like rally-driving – a personal journey for you, because that is the sort of thing you like. At the same time, the advance of science and the literal-minded, disenchanted thinking that is widely taken to be the only sort of thinking there is has made it harder to recognise and accept the poetic discourse of religion. Challenged by science, its leaders and ministers quickly surrendered to the idea that scientific, material, truth is the only kind of truth there is. Argued on science’s own terms, the religions that have been exposed to the debate in any serious way have been routed.
Secondly, and for similar reasons, a large part of (at least) the divided and confused western Christian church, as it developed in the late twentieth century, has gone to great lengths to present the most plain-speaking of interpretations, abandoning the unchanging text needed if people are to have any chance of holding it in the memory. It has scrapped its liturgies and strained, instead, at spontaneity, and at presenting the simple message of personal salvation in literal terms to be accepted as material truth or rejected as false. When it is presented in those terms, many reasonable people have no choice but to refuse to accept a proposition which they reject as simply nonsense. In this way, the church has thrown out the whole set of implicit functions, narrative and allegorical truths which are integral to the artistic and cultural meaning of the community, and which are the essence of religion. Christian religion in the market economy has found itself drawn into the idolatry of reducing complex meaning and the reflective Imitation of Christ to an iconic Imitation of Marketing, falling for a technique which it can only do with breathless and piteous amateurism, in place of what it used to do with assured and numinous skill.
Thirdly, although at present there is a yearning for an expression of other, non-materialistic, non-scientific, spiritual values, the established churches almost completely fail to benefit from this. They are not on that wavelength and, for much of the spiritual movement in the world of strongly developed green awareness, the affirmation of a Christian faith stands at the opposite extreme from what they need. It seems cold and absurd, full of confident reassurance about an afterlife which is not only grossly incredible but an offence to people whose concern is focused on how much longer there is going to be a planet for this life. Established religion, especially the Christian church, seems to be the embodiment of urban, and human-centred, alienation from nature, while green values look for ways to establish some real contact with, and come to the defence of, the rural. The childishness of happy-camper services is disempowering; in contrast, the green movement’s central purpose is empowerment – to develop its intelligence and resources, to empower its members to act, having observed for themselves the extent of the ecological betrayal that has taken place at the command of centralised urban civilisation and its centralised religion since the invention of the plough.
The fourth handicap which religions have to bear as they find themselves with their new society-building and life-saving responsibilities is the mixing-up of religions which has taken place over the same period. There is no doubt that they have something to learn from each other, gaining insights through their faiths which may not be accessible in any other way. Every religion has something to teach; they are each best in some way: the Lean Economy, which will inherit pluralism, will have to derive advantages from them.
Nonetheless, pluralism is a self-denying truth. It contradicts itself with multiple claims to authority. If it is spoken too loud, the contradiction is fatal. It has introduced a sense of branding into the matter which, in itself, trivialises religious encounter: it effectively forces people to make an instrumental choice with the conscious mind between the seductive appeals of competing retailers in the salvation market, rather than undergoing a bit-by-bit discovery of meaning and affection at the level of the subconscious, starting in childhood when the foundations for this facility are laid.
Pluralism also means that society itself dare not favour one story over another, so collective expression of any one religion is an offence to the rest: many turns into none. Society is largely excluded from the benign vocabulary of ceremony, celebration, solidarity, spirit and belief provided by religion; the culture, scrubbed clean of allegory, is filled with secular kitsch.
But the act of transcending this pluralism is something in which art can help. When different traditions develop their artistic differences to the fullest extent, they may find common ground on which there is a chance that they can meet. You cannot argue with a song.
None of this is rational from the point of view of the market economy, whose instinct for worship is directed to its technology, but the idea that a society can be held together without either an energy-rich market or a culture-rich religion – that is seriously irrational. A coherent social order in the future will need a religion; a religion will need a rich cultural inheritance: it will give culture a real job to do, something to participate in, and not simply to be watched: something to give your heart to, to give you the moral strength you need to keep going because there is no big Something in the sky who is going to do it for you.
Lately we've seen the president of the World Bank and 'business leaders from the very carbon-intensive industries' pushing for carbon pricing (taxes or 'carbon trading' schemes). This is intended to demonstrate their deep change of heart and determination to start seriously addressing climate change, but to my eyes it is a deeply cynical, pernicious attempt to channel the passion of those deeply-committed to action on climate change into mechanisms that will only maintain the suicidal status quo.
Which is why I poured all my experience of ten years' work on the topic into this peer-reviewed academic paper, which I believe demolishes the case for carbon taxes or carbon trading schemes as the way forward, and shows a clear, well-researched alternative (though it took almost as much effort as writing my book!).
The paper, co-authored with Drs. Larch Maxey and Victoria Hurth, focuses on the TEQs scheme devised by the late David Fleming, the radical economist whose work was a core inspiration for the Transition Towns movement. Since meeting David in 2006 I have been rather inspired by his design for a policy framework for a society that really wanted to decarbonise. We may not live in that society yet, but it's nonetheless a rather important tool to have in the box.
Over the years that inspiration has led me to write and speak widely on TEQs (to audiences ranging from community groups, Climate Camps and Occupations to the UK Committee on Climate Change, the London School of Economics, the UK and Scottish Parliaments and the European Commission), as well as advising the UK government on their feasibility study into the scheme.
After David Fleming's sudden death in 2010, it fell to me to keep the fruits of his genius on the table, and so I created The Fleming Policy Centre to continue advocacy in light of the extensive media interest the scheme was attracting.
This new piece in the Carbon Management journal has emerged from all of that as the definitive paper on TEQs, covering its design, history and importance, and directly contrasting its hard cap on emissions with the ‘carbon pricing’ approach that has undermined public engagement with, and support for, climate policy.
I have written before about the shortcomings of global-scale action on global-scale problems, but local-scale action has its inherent problems too. Without a supportive economic/political framework in place, it is always swimming against the tide, and this can be exhausting and disheartening. As explained in the paper, TEQs provides the key framework to join up local and global scale efforts into an effective solution, making it clear to everyone - across all sectors - how to act on our intrinsic shared desires to sustain affordable access to energy and preserve a benign climate (see section on "Integration – cross-sector engagement, motivation and collaboration", pp. 8-10).
Not to mention leading to support and investment for human-scale, community-level initiatives and enterprises and local economies, making for more integrated, happier, resilient communities and a stronger sense of common purpose across society. I really believe that TEQs could catalyse a turning point towards a happier world and, more importantly, the extensive research done to date backs that up. Also, as discussed in the paper, unlike many other beautiful ideas, it actually has a hope of being implemented!
Rather than seeing our most committed people channelled into building inherently flawed 'carbon pricing' mechanisms, let's focus our energies on something genuinely radical that creates a fairer, more equitable world, and which enjoys greater public support.
I look forward to hearing what you make of our work, in the comments below or elsewhere.
~ UPDATE - This was my first venture into scientific academic writing (and likely last, after such an arduous process!), but I strove to ensure that academic-speak was kept to a minimum, and that the message is clear. So it is gratifying to see that only a month after publication it is already in the Top 10 most-read pieces that have been published in the Carbon Management journal and, according to Altmetric, in the top 5% most discussed articles among the 4 million or so that they track! That said, it will have to have one hell of an impact to tempt me into academia ever again ;) ~ ~ SECOND UPDATE - 23rd Sept 2015 - Tom Burke has published an exceptional blog post giving far more insight into the devious motivations of Big Oil in promoting carbon pricing. And in the meantime, our paper has become the most read in the history of the Carbon Management journal, and in the top 3% most discussed on Altmetric. Despite Big Oil's best efforts, word's getting out... ~
In the meantime, I have been 'offsetting' the pain of academic writing by indulging in some deeply nourishing artivist agnosticism with Reverend Billy and his glorious Stop Shopping Choir (spot me flyering around the 1m30 mark).
A little analysis and deep thinking is important - after all “action for action's sake is the last resort of mentally and morally exhausted men” - but too much makes Jack a dull boy... I must confess, I'm rather tempted to run away and join the church. My mother would be truly horrified!
I'll have to content myself with heading to the Reclaim The Power direct action camp this weekend :) See you there?
This is an excerpt from a longer video interview Rhonda Fabian conducted with Shaun Chamberlin at the opening of the New Story Summit in Findhorn, Scotland. Part of a Findhorn Foundation documentary initiative.
Transcript originally published in the Kosmos Journal.
--
Rhonda Fabian: Shaun, please tell me what Dark Optimism means to you.
Dark Optimism is a widely misunderstood term. I get a lot of people coming up to me saying, “Are you feeling dark today, or optimistic?” That’s not quite what I mean. Dark Optimism means being unashamedly positive about the kind of world we could create, but unashamedly realistic about how far we are from doing that right now.
So it’s not that sort of bright shiny optimism, which I can find quite frustrating. It’s more like, “Well everything isn’t fine actually", you know? It’s an ability to look at the more difficult aspects of where we are and what we’re doing, whilst also retaining a sort of deep faith in human potential. And also drawing on the deeper questions of why we’re really here. And does the state of the world in any way challenge our purpose in being here, or make that impossible? I don’t think it does.
Even if we are into a world of unstoppable, runaway climate change, for example. There’s still love to do, there’s still positive change to make in the world.
Fabian: How does it compare with the Dark Mountain movement?
Well, obviously they stole my darkness! (laughs) Actually, their name comes from a Robinson Jeffers poem. But Dark Mountain plays an incredibly important part enabling us to ask the questions that we’re often not allowed to ask. You know, maybe it is all too late. And if it is, what does that mean?
There’s a logical flaw at the heart of a lot of arguments that we make in “the movement” – whichever movement label you want to put on it – which is that we tend to look at things and say, “Well that won’t work, so we need this.” An example might be people saying, “Well renewable energy can’t ramp up fast enough to solve our energy crisis, so we need nuclear.” Or, “The mainstream parties aren’t going to give us what we need, so we need the Green Party." Or to not vote…or whatever. The premise isn’t the conclusion – they don’t join up! You might just as well say, “Renewable energy can’t ramp up fast enough to deal with our energy crisis, so we need sardines.” You’ve not said anything about the alternative. You’ve just said, “This doesn’t work, so that.”
And I think Dark Mountain addresses that to an extent. The argument we hear again and again in environmentalism is, “Should we be working for radical change, or should we be working within the existing paradigms?” So, people will say, “Well, you know, we don’t have time to wait for a revolution. Everything has to happen now, so we’ve got to work within the existing paradigms.” And then other people say, “Well, you know, if we don’t have a radical, fundamental revolution, then what’s the point, because we’re just addressing symptoms.” And both of those arguments, I think, are completely valid. Yet, you hear people arguing back and forth and back and forth about this and never finding resolution. They can’t admit that they’re actually both right.
There isn’t time for radical change, AND we need radical change. And so, if you can never accept that actually maybe they’re both right, and that we have to ask some really deeper questions about what that means, then you just end up with people over here having a nice career saying this, and people over there having a nice career saying that. And you never actually get to the deeper truth.
For me, Dark Mountain is a venue where we can ask those kinds of questions. Well, what if this doesn’t work AND that doesn’t work? And what if we don’t actually know of an alternative. Can we sit with that? Can we actually sit with that together? And can we have a conversation about what that means? To me that’s a really potent and fertile space.
Fabian: It says to me that there’s a place for sorrow in optimism?
Yes. Part of my journey over the last few years is that David Fleming, who was my mentor and very close friend passed away very suddenly at the end of 2010. And actually, we were just a few weeks away from launching a big project that we’d co-authored. So it was a very difficult and busy time. To try and hold that – deal with the work and bring it to the fruition we were both hoping for, whilst also trying to process the grief of the sudden loss of my – my good friend. And then just three weeks after he passed, my fiancée passed away very suddenly as well.
That was a profoundly challenging time. And I’m quite happy with how I moved through that. Yet, I don’t think grief is a process that ends. I think it’s a relationship that continues throughout your life. I sort of found over the past few years that when I reflect on and write about my personal grief, there’s a very strong correlation between that and the grief that many of us carry, maybe all of us carry, for the state of the world and the state of nature and the state of our society.
I think grieving, as opposed to loss, is a process of opening ourselves. When we suffer a loss that’s overwhelming, we shut down. Your body just says, “That’s too much”, right? “I’m gonna shut it down.” We shut down part of ourselves and that keeps us from being completely overwhelmed, but it also keeps us from being fully alive.
And so the process of grieving is the process of – of coming back to life. On a societal level, on a collective level, that’s true as well. Part of the reason we fail collectively right now to face up to the kind of damage that we’re doing in the world, is because the grief of it is so overwhelming, that the process of opening those doors again is incredibly difficult. Because behind them is a huge, overwhelming bunch of pain. So every time you open one of them again, there it is waiting for you.
And so you have to have the space to do that – to work through that pain. And it’s only by doing that that you come back to life and you start to be able to respond to these problems in a way that is more open, to look at it all in the round and say, “Okay. What is the most appropriate way of acting here?” Rather than, “Oh god, I can’t look at that. I’m just gonna keep my head down and work really hard at this thing, because I can’t look at the bigger questions.” Because the grief is still there.
Fabian: So if grief is a process, what about despair?
Well there’s a really interesting thing about despair, I think. It has a spark in it of deep motivation. I think despair can be described as looking at every possible scenario and seeing no hopeful one. But what that means is, if you can present someone in despair with one scenario that looks hopeful - that looks like a real possibility - then there’s this immense wealth of motivation to drive toward it, because despair is not a nice place to be.
If you can actually present someone with a possibility, even if it’s just a narrow possibility, then despair becomes this huge driver, this huge motivation that can achieve incredible things.
Fabian: Is this despair at the heart of Dark Optimism? Does that drive your activism?
For me, becoming whatever I am, whether that’s an activist, or whatever, was about selfishness really. It was about the perspective I hold that in a very real and important sense – we’re all one. And our well-being is completely interdependent.
From that sort of spiritual perspective, the suffering of others and the suffering of the world is my suffering. Consequently, you know, sitting on the sofa, watching TV, selfishly consuming, wasn’t very selfish because it – it didn’t satisfy me. It left me with this – this sort of pain about what was happening. And it was really uncomfortable for me as an individual.
And the only thing that could make me more comfortable, was to feel like I was facing up to these challenges, trying to engage with them in some impactful, positive way. That was the only way I as an individual could feel happier, more content, and more whole. And so, yes, that process of opening to the pain that we feel at the state of the world; the anger, or dissatisfaction, or sense of injustice, or whatever it might be that we feel when we look at how things are;
if we don’t try and face what we feel, and hear the call that it might give to us, then we’re shutting ourselves down. Then we’re becoming less alive.
The one piece of advice I would give to young people is to remember that you cannot NOT change the world. Whatever you do will change the world. If you take the most default option, you follow the most mainstream, down the line, ‘just keep your head down and get on with what they’re telling you to do’, approach, then that’s the world that you’re helping to create. There is no way that you can not change the world.
And so open yourself to everything that you feel about the state of the world. Don’t let anyone tell you what to do. But just ask yourself, “How do I want to respond to this in a way that isn’t shutting me down; that is opening me up; that is helping me be fully who I am.” And that will lead you for the rest of your life.
--
This is an excerpt from a longer video interview conducted on the 27th September 2014, at the beginning of the New Story Summit in Findhorn, Scotland.EDIT - 12th Jan 2017 - The video footage of this 14 min interview excerpt added above. The footage of the full 43 min interview is also available, here.
A couple of nice videos from my wanderings in August. I started with a few days at the ever-wonderful Transition Heathrow, to support them through their threatened eviction. You can see how that went in the short video above.
And then a coach was arranged from Grow Heathrow up to the Reclaim The Power anti-fracking camp in Blackpool, where I gave a couple of workshops, on TEQs and the Grow Heathrow eviction resistance, as well as doing my first Legal Observer training. The video below tells the story of that camp, and I certainly learned a lot there, as well as having a great time.
It reminded me in many ways of the Climate Camps - it's amazing what a group of committed people can build and achieve when nobody's telling them what to do...
Oh, and those with keen eyes might spot me in both vids! :)
Now time for an overdue month of reading, writing and generally catching up with myself before October's adventures in Scotland with Findhorn and Trees for Life.
This post was originally written by me as a guest post for Rob Hopkins' Transition Culture blog, but I have kindly given myself permission to reproduce it here ;)
4) Performative truth is the truth that is created by statements that do something: I challenge, I thee wed, I bet, I curse, thank you. The speaking makes the truth: a promise is brought into existence by being spoken: loyal cantons of contemned love make love come alive (for a variant – it does not quite qualify as a performative truth, but it is a good try – see: “Making It Come True”).
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