My horizons have caring have been focused on the plants I have been tending and my lovely step-daughter and family with the future in mind.
I was given a swift kick in the vacation mindset to blog, however, after watching Mitt Romney's Speech at the GOP2012 and reading an article by George Monbiot entitled The Day The World Went Mad.
I encourage you to read the both pieces which point to clear indicators of some known issues of how our collective ignorance, conflicting horizons of caring, confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance play out when it comes to issues that affect us globally, like the melting of the polar ice caps.
Monbiot points out that on August 29th "a record Arctic ice melt had just been announced by the scientists studying the region. The 2012 figure has not only beaten the previous record, established in 2007. It has beaten it three weeks before the sea ice is likely to reach its minimum extent. It reveals that global climate breakdown is proceeding more rapidly than most climate scientists expected. But you could be forgiven for missing it, as it scarcely made the news at all."
He goes on to question why the British media focused on the proposed Heathrow runway and not this issue. He was questioning why we would ignore this issue at our peril and asking us to consider our limitations in caring and thinking.
I am coupling this with a small part of the Romney speech, although the whole speech was rife with examples of limited thinking.
After listening to Romney belittle Obama's already weak climate change initiatives last night you start to get a sense of how hard this is for us as human beings to consider and the conflicts inherent in caring on a species and planet level.
Romney: "President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans. And to heal the planet. My promises to help you and your family."
This is the challenge of our time.
We need to figure out how to care through time and history, into the future and make our decisions based on those who will come after us not for ourselves and our narrow gain in a narrow lifespan of our own 60 - 80 years. Typically, our species have not based our cultures (which, combined with our hard-wiring, are a key shaping force for how we think and see the world) on testing against real life, nor thinking through time to the future and certainly we wrestle with seeing "all men as equal".
We build stories in our cultures that orient our thinking to a certain level of expectation that rarely match up to what is most needed in reality. This is the dangerous complexity of our collective thinking that has brought us to this place. We can rethink ourselves.
WE need to be the giants whose shoulders those generations stand on. And as our generation stands on a precipice never before experienced by our species we need unprecedented thinking to move us forward.
We need the kind of thinking that draws on the lessons of that which has come before us. We need only look around a wee bit to see that we, in a smaller tribal scale have experienced this situation and failed to act - think of Easter Island. Against all possible reality they continued destroying trees to make sacrifices to the dead who would then provide everything they needed. Even in the face of conflicting evidence, as they suffered environmental degredation and deforestation which lead to unstable agriculture, their culture was so path dependent that they destroyed themselves and their ability to exist. Does this sound like any humans you know? The lessons are scaleable.
What is the stumbling block? I dare say it is not our technological abilities but our cultural limitations. We have ways of thinking and being embedded in our cultures, I don’t care what culture you are talking about that make it difficult to transcend our thinking and caring to that larger frame.
Caring for our species & the planet means giving up many things that are comfortable & convenient, perhaps even necessary to maintain our current economic levels. Our brains are hardwired for comfort and to justify the way we exist. I must insert here we can be rewire ourselves, no room for fatalistic thinking here, sorry kids. We do have to take the time to think through it and consider how we are hard wired
So here is a thought experiment. Think about the idea of lessening your fossil fuel consumption, think about how you heat in your home. For those of us in the North, becomes a very daunting idea to not use or have less heat in the winter, even no heat, right?
If you follow the thinking for a bit and you will encounter cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias that will tell you why you deserve to burn fossil fuels over another community without the same extremes. The problem is we all see our situation as the most dire and necessary. (For more on this explore the book: Mistakes Were Made but Not by Me)
Its a pretty straight forward caring conflict, my comfort vs global climate change. Now, I'm not saying that my using a heater in winter is the sole cause, of course not. But I am saying that our use, our path dependency, leads us to think a certain way about fossil fuels and how we need to use them.
That leads us to feel a certain way about "our" natural resources that narrows our thinking down into arbitrary geophysical lines and historical time lines. That leads us to "believe" in certain inalienable rights & privileges.
Then we may need to give up income for example and future income as well as Samantha Nutt points out in her book Damned Nations. Many retirement savings plans including CPP are funded by arms sales. (Not blowing each other up IS part of the story of us doing better on this planet, as far as I can see, please let me know if you disagree) By investing in bombs, guns, arms etc, as ALL CANADIANS are doing because of CPP, we are betting that and inadvertently hoping that people will use arms... which if you follow the thinking trail, means that we are betting on people killing each other.
We are so path dependent that we are struggling with making wise decisions. We are at a place where cultural provisionalism is no longer going to work for us, as a species. We need to understand what the real world needs, not the one we have made up in our heads.
If we draw on a broader story of life and humanity we may be able to right our boat, but that will be uncomfortable and require disagreement. Since we are so strongly driven by the need to belong (to our in-group, implying a need for out-group) and we are small troupe lazy primates, I suspect that in itself, not even the extreme demand for resources may cause more war & strife.
We do have the capacity to move forward. We can see, in pockets of our humanity a striving for collective caring. We can see people holding up their hands and saying stop, this is not right. We now need the way to assess our thinking, assess our judgements through a global lens so that we can do our best to lessen the stress on our species and our planet. And as much as I know that the world would be happier without us on it, I do still think, when I reflect on people in our generations, like Sophie Scholl, The Elders, Ray Anderson, Rachel Carson, Wangari Maathai - I know it is there, we are worth preserving.
The challenge of our time is collective conduct systems that draw on the best of what it means to be alive and human. Conduct systems that override culture.
Just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it can't.
