Tag Archive | Collapse

Ahmed Afzaal: Teaching at Twilight

Ahmed Afzaal: Teaching at Twilight
REVIEW: Teaching at Twilight: The Meaning of Education in the Age of Collapse (Cascade Books, 2023)
David R. Weiss – February 16, 2024

What does it mean to come, slowly … reluctantly … irrepressibly to the conclusion that higher education today at its best, at its most “successful,” is in reality equipping students to ably accelerate the collapse of planetary systems and human civilization? For Ahmed Afzaal, associate professor of religion at Concordia College (Moorhead, Minnesota), it’s meant reframing his whole understanding of the vocation of teaching—and issuing a call to his fellow faculty in higher education to do the same. Most significantly, to do so, not one by one, as individual teachers, but collectively, in a concerted effort to reshape education.

Afzaal is convinced that Collapse—“the ongoing and unstoppable unraveling of our global civilization due to ecological breakdowns” (1)—is underway. In response, in Teaching at Twilight: The Meaning of Education in the Age of Collapse, he argues that higher education must reimagine teaching for it to remain a meaningful vocation for those who carry it on—and for it to offer a meaningful education to students. Indeed, the stakes could not be higher, as he notes “the remote yet real possibility of human extinction later this century.” (1)

This sounds alarmist, but Afzaal’s writing conveys high regard for the academy, honest respect for his peers, and deep care for students. He expressly sets aside the objective tone of standard academic discourse to press his case with humanity and humility … while sounding an alarm long, long overdue. The text includes regular “Reflection” pauses. These sidebars allow Afzaal to honor the uniqueness of this book: it sets the vocation of teaching within the larger existential question of civilization’s demise. He wants—needs—access to his readers’ hearts as well as their minds.

Teaching at Twilight unfolds in four parts.

Part I, “A Time Like No Other,” describes the Predicament we face today: the “fundamental dysfunction” of civilization. In short, while we’ve found ways to immeasurably improve our lives in the relative short term (decades, generations, centuries) those very same improvements have been consistently (and immeasurably) undermining the viability of our planet in the long term. That Predicament has found its current expression in “industrial capitalism with continuous economic growth, coupled with a culture and lifestyle whose prime directive is ever-increasing consumption.” (20) It’s a system that demands constant growth to remain “healthy,” but constant growth on a finite planet is unnatural, unhealthy, and finally inevitably fatal.

In Part II, “A Crisis of Meaning,” Afzaal explores the vocation of teaching, the deep meaning it holds for those who find great joy in nurturing the minds of others. Persuaded as he is that the world today’s college students will grow into over the next thirty years (yes, his timeframe for Collapse is that short—and realistically so) is going to look nothing like the world of the past thirty years, he believes education ought to prepare them for tomorrow’s world rather than yesterday’s. (Education has already aimed to prepare students for “tomorrow,” but until now, tomorrow has always presumed progress; no more.) The “crisis of meaning” in this section’s title is the moral injury teachers will increasingly “endure [as] an unceasing assault on our conscience” as they come to recognize the extent to which the present educational system is housed inside industrial capitalism and is designed to serve this “omnicidal maniac” as it assaults the planet. (87)

Part III, “A Learning Journey,” first lays out why, even for scholars, it can be hard to acknowledge truths so challenging as Collapse and suggests some ways that scholars can instead strengthen their capacity to encounter Collapse. Then, in six short chapters (133-181) Afzaal offers a concise and devastating account of Collapse. In very accessible language he explains how we’ve reached a point where Earth is in danger of “flipping” into a new state “no longer compatible with complex societies … or with life as we know it.” Afzaal adds immediately, “the optimist in me wants to believe that civilization in its present form will fall apart well before we reach that point” [of undermining life altogether]. (170) This is bitter medicine, indeed.

Finally, in Part IV, “A Way Forward,” Afzaal explains why he believes educators (rather than administrators) need to take the lead on changing how education happens. Although administrators have the power of their positions, the very power and position of being administrators compromise their ability to drive change far enough or fast enough. Faculty, however, have their first loyalties to the truth of scholarship (which affirms Collapse) and the wellbeing of their students (who deserve an education that prepares them for Collapse). Hence his clarion call to leverage those loyalties alongside academic freedom to drive conversations that drive transformation in education.

A few specific insights merit special mention.

In Part II Afzaal offers an extended, insightful discussion of practical versus substantive rationality as forces shaping human culture and the role of our left/right brain hemispheres in how we attend to the world (91-107). Here he draws on the work of psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, and philosopher Iain McGilchrist (The Master and His Emissary, 2009; The Matter of Things, 2021). He suggests that practical rationality (short-term problem solving) governed by the left hemisphere (geared to power, control, and manipulating things) has gained ascendency over substantive rationality (the carrier of values and wisdom) and the right hemisphere (which considers the world via relationships).

The “goal” isn’t to pit one hemisphere against the other (they’re both necessary), but, per McGilchrist, the right brain is the seat of wisdom while the left the expert at efficiency. The right hemisphere “deserves” to be the “Master” and the left the “Servant.” Unfortunately, perhaps dating back to the birth of patriarchy, but surely with unfettered frenzy under industrial capitalism, the left hemisphere and practical rationality have run amok, showing off their brilliance and innovation … while burning up the planet. In light of this, Afzaal calls for education that rebalances the hemispheric partnership—not because it will forestall Collapse, but it may produce students better able to navigate Collapse as it engulfs then.

Afzaal is adamant BOTH in acknowledging the impossibility of averting Collapse AND in declaring this does not mean giving up. He believes there is much that education can still offer to promote “a softer landing.” To begin, he says we need to teach a more complete/complex understanding of our predicament—that it is so much more than “mere” climate change. It is, ultimately, the whole range of natural and social systems being strained beyond breaking by the global capitalist system. It is the entire thrust of human civilization in this moment that threatens to annihilate us. And it would require literacy in systems thinking and multi-disciplinary collaboration to really teach this.

Afzaal concludes that we need to ground our motivation elsewhere than success. We need to act out of loyalty to our values … even if our efforts face, as they may well, impossible odds. Education cannot bestow magical powers to undo immeasurable damage to the planet, but it can—and it ought—bequeath a sense of awe before the natural world. Such awe will immerse us in mourning. Striking that for Afzaal, Teaching in Twilight means not only offering a stark intellectual understanding of Collapse but also inviting students to feel fully the cost of Collapse in beauty and in life. Finally, education can—and ought—ground the nobility of human character in embracing life-honoring values as ends in themselves. This is Frankl’s notion of “the last of the human freedoms.” (212) In the face of Collapse, we can model—and teach—the choice to be human.

Teaching at Twilight is an understated marvel simply in that it says the quiet part out loud (and without shouting): Collapse is upon us. Because it’s posed as an invitation to begin an urgent conversation, its closing ideas remain underdeveloped but suggestive. Afzaal presents a compelling call for his fellow faculty to join him in breaking silence around Collapse, choosing integrity, honesty, action, and the pursuit of meaning as their compass points. The full fruit of Twilight will only ripen as collegial conversations occur. But Afzaal has broken the ground and scattered good seed.

* * *

David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, “writing into the whirlwind” of contemporary challenges, joys, and sorrows around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, peace, and family. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in Writing into the Whirlwind at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.

Collapsing with Care: An Introduction

Feb15

Collapsing with Care: A Field Guide to Meaning-Making as the World Unravels
David R. Weiss – February 15, 2024

This essay marks something of a new stage in my work. Since setting climate as the centering theme of my writing at the very end of 2015, I’ve been writing “occasional” essays around the climate crisis and, more recently, Collapse. “Occasional” here doesn’t mean “now and then”; rather, it means most of these essays have been sparked—occasioned—by a recent news story or an event in my life. They’re written in reaction to something. As a result, there’s been no larger overarching pattern; they’re more or less a kaleidoscopic set of reflections, each new one shaped by the latest turn of the world.

That’s about to change.

I’ll continue occasionally (in both senses of the word) to respond to happenings around me, but it’s time that the heart of my work shift toward a larger picture and a longer arc of my own choosing. Last August, when I introduced my current theme of “Writing into the Whirlwind,” I made clear my conviction that we are now irrevocably headed toward Collapse—the entangled unravelling of the ecological, social, and political foundations of our shared life. I’m now going to center my writing about preparing for and meeting Collapse.

Honestly, I rather intended for this shift to happen in sync with the beginning of my Second Tuesday talks last September. A handful of personal “life complexities” conspired to delay me. But now it’s time for me to reflect openly, directly, consistently, and coherently about how we meet Collapse. This is critical because, while we cannot avert Collapse, we can still choose how we meet it. And being active, thoughtful, and in partnership with others will make all the difference in whether Collapse tests our humanity … or altogether undoes it.

There are many persons better equipped than me to write about the science of Collapse, the technology that may cushion Collapse, or the creation of alternative social structures to help navigate Collapse. But I am well-equipped to write about the inward aspects of Collapse. So, I’m committed to focus on “Collapsing with Care,” offering something of a “Field Guide to Meaning-Making as the World Unravels.”

That is, I hope to help us understand the inward (psychological/spiritual) facets of Collapse that helped make it inevitable; grasp the inward attitudes and appetites that must shift if we are to meet Collapse with a chance at surviving it; and chart the inward dispositions and skills that will be essential as Collapse overtakes us.

There will, of course, be an abundance of external challenges to meet as Collapse unfolds. And we’ll need new knowledge and practical skills to navigate a most unfamiliar planet—but it’s my belief that unless we also do the inner work that sustains our capacity to care for each other and prepares us for meaning-making as the world unravels, we won’t be ready or able to fully make the changes in our outward behaviors or take up the challenging tasks that will be needed to make life livable. The infrastructure of our future life lies inward. And I believe I can help us in crafting that infrastructure.

There is, admittedly, a certain audacity in setting myself to this task. Even while confident in my ability to help craft that infrastructure, it’d be easy for me to name a dozen (or more!) persons who undoubtedly know more about this than I do. There’s also a measure of daring-balanced-by-doubt. Now that I’ve “announced” this project, the possibility of public failure-to-follow-through becomes real. There is a certain “safety” in holding back and keeping quiet. And yet I’m driven to do this. I believe I have something distinctive to say … and a distinctive way of saying it.

I read and listen and reflect with a poet’s perspective. Yes, I occasionally do, in fact, write in rhyme, but that’s not what I mean here. By poet’s perspective I mean that I have a rare gift to perceive unexpected connections and relationships between images and ideas that often produce rich insight for me—and for others. Whether across disparate disciplines or between disparate voices in related disciplines, I can bring notions together such that they “spark.” That gives me reason to believe that my writing around “Collapsing with Care” will do the same in worthwhile ways.

Additionally, I write with empathetic eloquence. I don’t simply craft words that read well together; because I listen well in between writing, I have a knack for crafting the words my readers have been seeking to name their own intuitions. In the two decades I spent focused on writing about welcoming LGBTQ persons in faith communities, I heard—countless times—from readers, that I had gifted them with words to hold the truth of the convictions that had been rumbling in their hearts. So I believe that my writing around Collapse—writing that by its very subject is unsettling—can also carry an anticipatory empathy for my readers.

I should be clear, neither poetic perspective nor empathetic eloquence are postures that I “adopt” for their usefulness. They simply reflect how I “naturally” encounter the world. As such they represent distinctive gifts I can bring to this most important, most existential conversation.

Lastly, I am undertaking this project for the sake of those I love. Of course, I hope my work benefits many, but my motivation has its deepest roots in my own children and grandchildren, in other family and friends, and in the communities to which I belong. As much as I am driven by the gifts I carry, I am equally driven by the names I hold in my heart. Convinced that Collapse is already dawning on planet Earth, with its repercussions set to ripple across the physical and social landscapes of our lives, how can I not invest my best energy, my most creative thinking, my finest words, on behalf of those I love? And so, this is what I will do.

I trust that my understanding will grow and deepen as I work on this. I expect some of the ideas I begin with will be recast along the way. All the more reason … to begin. Let me start by explaining briefly the choice of words in my (tentative) title, Collapsing with Care: A Field Guide to Meaning-Making as the World Unravels.

Collapsing: Simply put, from this very first word, there will be no more sugar-coating of tomorrow. We are collapsing and we will be collapsing for the rest of our lives. I can offer no more quiet assent to “hope.” Collapse is our future. (Obviously, “hope” is a loaded word, and I’ll have more to say about it along the way. But when hope is used to avoid facing the hard truth of Collapse, it becomes shorthand for denial, and we can’t afford that any longer.)

… with Care: Whatever “hope” we want to claim now has to do with our character and compassion as we collapse. Cultivating a capacity to act with care toward ourselves, one another, our fellow creatures, and the planet itself, is the foundation of hope. In the midst of Collapse, hope can no longer be the belief that “things will get better.” It must become the conviction that compassion—the concrete practice of care—is worthwhile no matter what.

A Field Guide: While I’d like to imagine this as a book that folks will read from start to finish, I also hope it becomes something of a prized reference that they refer back to again and again, like a “field guide.” Further, we often think of a Field Guide as a book that helps orient us to unfamiliar terrain; that’s precisely what I hope to do here: provide an orientation to the inner terrain of our hearts and minds as we move into Collapse … and as Collapse engulfs us, framing our lives.

… to Meaning-Making: For over 40 years, since my introduction to the work of James Fowler on Faith Development and to existentialist literature and philosophy, both of which happened during my last year of college, I’ve been persuaded that our capacity for (our hunger for) meaning-making is the quality that confers humanity on us. Our sense—even when desperate and doubtful—that meaning can be made is what enables hope or faith. And living with hope or faith is what anchors our humanity—our capacity for care. This “Field Guide” aims to point us in the direction of meaning-making when the terrain beneath our feet—and beneath our souls—becomes entirely unfamiliar.

… as the World: Collapse is all-inclusive. It will claim large swaths and multiple dimensions of the natural world. It will strain and eventually shatter the formal institutions and political structures as well as the informal cultural assumptions that govern our social world. And it will shake to the core the roots of our inner worlds: religious beliefs, moral convictions, and basic humanity. Collapse is coming for just about everything.

… Unravels: Collapse is not a singular event; it is a process that will be long, with predicable turns and unpredictable twists. Some aspects will be precipitous; others will unfold more slowly (across generations—if we’re lucky). Right now, we are “caught” in liminal time—unable to prevent Collapse, yet able in some crucial ways to brace and temper our outer and inner worlds for what is to come. Perhaps even to fashion the inward and outward skills that will assist us in preserving and transforming humanity for life in a Collapsing world.

All of that said, there are also a handful of things I should be explicit in saying I’m NOT doing. These include:

I am not planning to make any specific predictions about thresholds or tipping points in the natural world. I’m not a climate scientist or any kind of Earth scientist. Early on in the Field Guide I will review the science I find most compelling regarding Collapse but chronicling and anticipating the details of Collapse in our physical world is work best done by others. I’ll be reading along.

Likewise, I am not planning to make any specific predictions about societal/political breakdowns. I’m not a political or social scientist. While I do foresee real chaos on this horizon—as an unavoidable consequence of the physical upheavals ahead and the way they’ll stoke our fears and threaten our values—I’m not in a position to forecast the specifics.

I am not planning to offer any financial or real estate advice. I see people post questions in Facebook groups: What should I do with my retirement savings? When will the banks go under? Should I look to purchase property where I can grow my own food? These are real questions (or they will become real questions at some point), but I’m not equipped to address them. If I do well what I am able to do, you’ll be in a more grounded place inwardly as you wrestle with such outward questions.

I am not planning to offer any homemaking skills. It goes without saying that Collapse will carry away many of the conveniences we now take for granted. So, yes, reclaiming many lost or lapsed homemaking skills will be extremely beneficial (indeed, maybe lifesaving). But my focus is on the inner work that will allow us to reclaim such skills from a place of gratitude and joy rather than resignation and fear. My gut belief is that while the inner work often seems intangible and almost impractical, shifting our posture to welcome the radical simplicity that is coming our way may be the single most practical thing we can do.

Finally, I am not planning to propose or develop any alternative community models. Many of our current models (shaped/misshaped by capitalism) have proven destructive of our outer and inner worlds, so fashioning new ways of organizing our common life will be essential. It simply isn’t my particular expertise or focus, and I think it’s important for me to do what I can do, to do THAT very well—and to know those limits and not exceed them. There are others already doing this critical work, and I’d rather support their efforts than do an incompetent job of mirroring them.

There is always more that could be said, but that’s enough for an introduction to this project. I’m not sure whether this Field Guide will ultimately become a print book or an online resource; that will become clear with time. I’ll incorporate some of my best writing from the past few years, but I’ll write much of it fresh. This will be a living, organic project, unfolding in real time right now. It could easily become a never-ending project, but I believe it’s more important to bring it to completion in time to be useful to as many people as possible. I won’t offer a timetable; but, as I said, I’m driven, so I won’t be dawdling.

I’ve set up a dedicated page on my website to gather my writings around Collapse. Alongside my blog posts, this page will be my virtual “work bench,” where various pieces get fine-tuned and finally assembled. While I’ll continue blogging on a variety of topics, this project will be the center of my work, and I’ll use many of my Second Tuesday conversations to discuss this work as it unfolds. I’ll welcome your help!—whether in person on Second Tuesdays or in dialogue across my blog. My writing will be enriched by your questions, comments, and honest reactions. So I warmly invite you to join me in a living conversation about the things needed for our hearts and minds so that we might truly “collapse with care.”

* * *

HEATED: The Climate of Politics in a Collapsing World

Jan9

HEATED: The Climate of Politics in a Collapsing World
David R. Weiss – January 8, 2024

I am unsure where or how to begin. I’ve made multiple false starts over the past four days. Partly it’s how much I have to say—so many disparate (but ultimately related!) threads—and I know I can’t fit it all into a single short essay. So, I fret and overthink. But it’s more than that. It’s also—likely more so—the heaviness I hold inside. Altogether, for four days now, I’ve found myself restless and distracted almost to the point of frenzy. It’s a strange place to be. I love writing, and I have plenty of time to write these days. But sometimes I dread what I feel driven to write about.

My sense is that climate is rewriting the state of American politics (and possibly this election) in ways most people can’t even imagine. Of course, most people realize that climate is going to be a primary topic in this election cycle. After all, 2023 was the hottest year on record for global surface temperature, and 2024 promises to give it a run for its money. How could anyone run for office and not address the climate crisis—even if only by denial? But my concern in this piece is not with what the candidates may or may not say directly about the climate. It’s that climate (and collapse) will produce an entire politics that is HEATED in ways that will make this election—and each future election—a referendum on the very character of human community.

This scares me. Not least because even among those folks with whom I usually find common cause (the progressive flank of the Democratic Party) I fear there is as yet little real appreciation for how thoroughly climate/collapse are going to foster campaign rhetoric and public mania that will make for an unrecognizable political landscape. The Left will easily be caught between dismissiveness and disbelief right up until democracy closes its doors altogether.

This essay is about that dread.

Three years ago, late on the afternoon of January 6, 2021, I was struggling to make sense of what I’d just watched play out on national television: an insurrection against the government of the United States. I scribbled words in real time into one of the spiral notebooks where I gather thoughts—some of which later find their way into essays. Here are three sentences I wrote down that day:

“This is inverted ecological demographic anxiety: the militant even irrationally fanatical denial of what your subconscious knows to be true.”
“Make no mistake: the [January 6] assault on our very imperfect democracy had no interest in perfecting it, but in annihilating it, and therewith it hoped to annihilate any claim that finitude and diversity are twin poles of our reality.”
“This [January 6] mayhem is the eruption of ecological extractive demographic anxiety.”

Now, fast forward to just last month, when Trump bragged that he was only interested in being a dictator for his first day in office: “On Day 1 we are closing the border and we are drilling, drilling, drilling. After that I am not a dictator, OK?” But these two goals—closing the border and endless drilling—express precisely what I identified three years ago as the roots of the January 6 insurrection: ecological extractive demographic anxiety and the attempt to annihilate any claim that finitude and diversity are twin poles of our reality.

This is HEATED campaign rhetoric intended to stoke public mania. And, thus far, among Republican voters, it is carrying the day. Behind the fury of the MAGA/Far Right crowd—and the candidates who play to them—lies a deep and growing anxiety over the inescapable (and increasingly undeniable) finitude of our world and the inexorable press of diversity that results both from shifting internal demographics and external migration patterns.

But it’s more than just building a border wall and drilling for oil. And it’s the “more than” that we really need to wrestle with. And the “more than” gets complicated fast. And the “more than” drives my dread. This is not to say that there’s nothing we can do with respect to this HEATED political climate. But there’s nothing easy or simple to do. And if we don’t grapple with the complexity even some of the harder things we attempt may miss their mark. So, in keeping with the tagline of my current work, “writing into the whirlwind,” here’s sort of a whirlwind tour of (just some of) the complexity behind my dread.

Migration isn’t going anywhere. Migration patterns are themselves driven by socio-political stresses (such as famine and war) exacerbated in recent years by the worsening climate crisis—but those current stresses are also the long-term result of U.S./Western foreign policy decisions (including covert actions) made decades ago in service of insatiable U.S. material appetites that (often intentionally!) eroded the socio-political conditions in countries of the Global South.

Specifically, those decades old injustices assailed the political aspirations and frayed the civic fabric of the same societies whose worsening conditions now lead desperate persons to flea northward—while those same injustices were, decades ago, busily enabling our patterns of consumption that sowed the very seeds of climate collapse that furthers migration today. Migration and climate are inexorably intertwined—they have been throughout human history and no less so in recent decades.

This means no “immigration reform” will be just or workable unless it reckons with our past complicity in creating the roots of the crises in other countries—and recognizes that as climate breakdown progresses, the migrants crossing our borders are fleeing unlivable conditions in their homelands that our patterns of consumption right here have created for them.

Collapse is here. Already now. This is a hard bleak truth we can’t entirely grasp yet—because the same history of injustices that has now made collapse inevitable, has also insulated most of us in the U.S from its first immediate effects. Thus, many on the Right continue to deny the ecological crisis altogether, while many on the Left accept the reality of the crisis but continue to believe we can still sidestep catastrophe. The unnerving but essential truth is that ecological collapse is now an unstoppable force shaping our future. We may yet be able to mitigate the degree of catastrophe (although even that window is closing—fast!) but collapse itself now has an inertia that is beyond our capacity to stop. And the longer we wistfully imagine otherwise, the less time and energy we have available to meet the reality of collapse with civic creativity and community compassion.

This collapse will be physical, the result of human-driven ruptures in our climate and other planetary systems. But it will also be social, the result of cascading stresses on civilization systems that cannot (or will not) adapt to the new, fractured world that is now our home. I believe this unfolding collapse is sensed (subconsciously, but viscerally) even by those who deny it—and it shapes their anxieties and actions. As a result, during this election year, collapse will be a “silent partner” with an uncredited but oversized voice in political rhetoric. (This is already in evidence.)

Although no politician will likely campaign on a platform of preparing for collapse, the stakes of this election cycle, especially at the federal level, will be decisive in determining whether as a nation we are merely ill-prepared or acting with stupendous malevolence over the next four years—and beyond.

We have “entered the bardo.” This is a notion from Tibetan Buddhism recently invoked by Joanna Macy. The bardo is the liminal (threshold) space in between worlds. To say we have “entered the bardo” is to recognize that the world we have known is now effectively closed off from the world that awaits us. There is a chasm between present and future—between this year and the next, more decisively between 2024 and 2034—that will not be crossed by merely flipping calendar pages. There exists “in the bardo”—between worlds—a moment when nearly everything is up for grabs. Freefall or paradigm shift, calamity or transformation. Likely a mix of both.

What’s critical in the bardo is that we not cling to the past, to the supposition that somehow what came before can reliably predict what comes next. This has often been true. But no more. Indeed, as we cross planetary systems tipping points, Earth itself is entering its own bardo (like it or not, we’re going along for that ride). But, for us, to acknowledge we have entered the bardo in our present socio-political context, is to confess (to hold with conviction) that tomorrow (next year, next decade) will be radically disconnected from today—because of unfolding ecological collapse and the impact that will have on every facet of our lives. Knowing we are in the bardo confers a certain freedom, even as it guarantees nothing. Many possibilities imagined in our past will be foreclosed, while a handful of unforeseen possibilities may present themselves. The bardo does NOT make collapse avoidable; it does mean that we might position ourselves (at least in some ways) to encounter collapse rather than simply finding ourselves swamped by it.

Our democracy is at the edge of eclipse. We could vote it away in the next election. It’s easy to blame this on Trump, and he has amplified this danger like no other American political figure in recent history, but the roots of this fraught moment go back further and deeper in our past. Still, Trump, his political allies, and his popular base pose the largest threat to U.S. democracy in my lifetime. If they have electoral success in 2024, they will set out to dismantle civil rights, social justice, and environmental progress for years to come. And they will seek to effectively guarantee rule by a corporate-backed, white-interested minority for the foreseeable future. This is far from certain, but it is dreadfully possible.

The Right’s agenda is driven by inverted ecological demographic anxiety. Unwilling to face a world with finite limits and diverse others, the Right—whether in Trump’s transparently vengeful and authoritarian rhetoric or in the more “nuanced” extremism of his competitors—has no viable political strategy other than to stoke these anxieties and then simultaneously promise false (self- and other-destructive) solutions to them. To be honest, while Democrats by and large have more “humane” messaging, their overall economic agenda remains unequivocally ecocidal, and their immigration policies fail the tests of justice and workability given earlier.

Here’s the difference, though, and it does matter. Establishment Democrats, while clearly beholden to monied interests, have not targeted democracy itself. And so long as (small d) democratic practices are in place, there is at least room to maneuver; at least opportunity to exercise politics as harm reduction and perhaps, if we are wise and savvy enough, to use it to imaginatively experiment for the common good. The GOP, however, which is increasingly entangled with if not undifferentiated from the Far Right, seems poised to dispense with democracy altogether. And that difference matters: it has consequences for us, for our global neighbors, and for flora and fauna across the planet.

It isn’t just us in the bardo. Our political adversaries are in there with us.

The age of information anomie is upon us. Anomie means lawlessness. Few of us have yet realized how fragile—fractured—information has become in recent decades. Information is the infrastructure of the world itself: the patterns revealed in physics, the structures and relationships observed in chemistry; the DNA maps discerned in biology. The material world IS matter given form by information. Similarly, the infrastructure of organized human community rests on reliable social information—commonly held data regarded as trustworthy. The stability of our society is built on this. And our capacity to press the case for improving—further humanizing—society (deepening understanding, expanding rights, etc.) hinges on being able to use the relative solidity of current information. But today information itself is under assault. To be blunt, this assault amounts to humanity unmaking itself. When information fails, language itself teeters on noise.

Just in the past few days Donald Trump and then Elise Stefanik (New York representative and Chair of the House Republican Caucus) began referring to those arrested for their violent roles in the January 6 insurrection as “hostages.” This is nothing other than an attack on information. Not a war of words, but a war on words. Trump has done this “in plain sight” from his first campaign, throughout his presidency, and right up into the present. His “charisma” is fashioned out of disinformation—and its lure on some significant portion of the public.

Propaganda has a long, storied history. It has thrived—for centuries—in government messaging and hate-group narratives. That’s not new. What is new is the extent to which the digital age has made disinformation at once a cottage industry accessible to anyone with the internet and a state/corporate program capable of being scaled up to an overwhelming force. We know that as early as the 1970’s U.S. oil corporations began promulgating disinformation regarding the climate with the sole goal of sowing doubt about science. For sake of profit, they chose to weaken the infrastructure of human community. In the 1980’s the Soviet Union (and now Russia) expanded its disinformation efforts globally. Driven less by profit than the lust for power, the express purpose of these streams of disinformation was ultimately less about making false stories believable than about so flooding the world with fiction-as-fact as to render Americans (and others) incapable of sense-making. To transform information into confusion.

More recently social media companies—driven by a thirst for both profit and power—have found that algorithms can process information about us in ways that undo us. It isn’t just that these media create “echo chambers”—perfect storms that exponentially amplify bias into prejudice into hate into action. It’s also that these echo chambers “work” by employing algorithms (as well as both cottage-produced and corporate/state produced disinformation) to throttle our amygdala (“lower” brain) into a frenzy of fear and anxiety. Which is to say, they “succeed” when they dampen (or even shut down) the frontal lobes of our cerebral cortex, our “higher” brain where critical thinking, creativity, and compassion are born. AI-generated content, including deep fake technology, will make this even worse. This is what I mean when I say social media employs algorithms to process information about us in ways that undo us. Social media weakens our access to our higher brain; it lessens our humanity.

There is an eerily relevant reference in the 2016 movie Arrival, which features a plot about first contact with intelligent alien life that has come to Earth. As a small circle of linguists around the world work feverishly to decipher this alien language, they encounter an ambiguous phrase that might be understood as referring to a “weapon”—or a “tool.” Of course, for the humans and their response to the aliens, everything hinges on whether the aliens are speaking about a weapon or a tool. In an even deeper irony, what the aliens are speaking about is language itself.

The stark reality we face, as we grapple with other steep challenges and as we enter an election cycle with enormous stakes, is that today language, images, and information are all rapidly being turned from a once trustworthy tool into a high-tech weapon—to be deployed against the human community itself. As if there weren’t already enough dread on my (and your) plate!

But we dare not stop at dread. The task now is to ask, how does it help us to recognize the core anxieties beneath the tremors that rock the HEATED political landscape in front of us right now? What insights does this offer as we navigate our choices—and personal relationships—in 2024? How do we respond strategically, creatively, compassionately, and humanly to those whose anxieties over finitude and diversity are being used to unmake democracy and lessen humanity? I don’t know. But that’s what I’m leaning into in the weeks ahead.

I’m leaning into my dread, so I can discover what’s on the far side of it. I hope you’ll lean with me.

* * *

January 9 – Conversations in the Commons

Jan3

COMING: Tuesday, January 9, 2024 @6:30-8pm
Conversations in the Commons with David Weiss

NOTE: This announces a local (St. Paul) in-person event, so it won’t be accessible to many of my readers. But I want you to know that it’s happening. As I’m able, I hope to offer similar opportunities in a Zoom format … if you’d be excited for a Zoom option in the future, please comment or message me.

I am pleased to announce my FIFTH “Conversations in the Commons” around my work “Writing into the Whirlwind” coming up on Tuesday, January 9, 6:30-8pm

HEATED: The Climate of Politics in a Collapsing World

In my recent blog post, “Slippery When Wet,” I reflect upon my unexpected tears in response to my Nicaraguan son-in-law’s U.S. citizenship ceremony. They were NOT tears of joy but rather profound anguish over the tenuous politics of his new country. Divisions in our nation run deep these days and the rhetoric (especially on the Right) is fringed with fear and barely hidden hate. We’re far from the only country rocked by a resurgent Right, but this is our country, and it’s impossible to not feel a personal sense of anguish and threat in such an uncertain moment. Still, understanding some of the tectonic plates that shake the ground beneath our feet might also ground us as we meet this moment as best we can. I believe the climate crisis and the prospect of societal collapse are clear (though largely unrecognized) drivers of the current political climate. In this month’s Second Tuesday conversation we’ll ask what it means for our politics to be so … HEATED.

Please read “Slippery When Wet” in advance of Tuesday’s conversation. And look for one more new blog (which will be titled, “HEATED”) that I hope to post in the next couple of days. Of course, you don’t need to read the essays in advance, but the conversation will be richer if you do! Bring your comments and questions; I’ll bring mine.

If you plan to come, please RSVP by email (drw59mn@gmail.com) or on the FB event. This isn’t “required,” but it helps me make sure the room is set up appropriately.

Key details:

Location: Zion Lutheran Church, 1697 LaFond Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104. No parking lot, but plenty of street parking right near the intersection. Unfortunately, Zion’s building is not (yet) accessible; an elevator is coming in the next year!
Entrance: You can now use the courtyard entrance at the right/east end of the building on Lafond. It’s the most direct way to the Conference Room. Or you can still use the door along Aldine Street near the alley (especially if you come early for the meal). Plenty of signs (maybe even a smiling person) will guide you to the Conference Room.
These evenings are no cost to you. I set out a donation basket if you feel moved to put a couple dollars to benefit some aspect of Zion’s ministry or a cause dear to me. But all that I truly ask is your presence and participation!
The second Tuesday of each month Zion hosts a gluten-free, nut-free, vegan community meal. You’re welcome to come early for this pay-as-you-can meal served in the church basement. But you do need to RSVP separately by 8am Monday for this. Find important details about the meal below.

I hope you can join me for “HEATED: The Climate of Politics in a Collapsing World” on January 9!

ABOUT these Conversations in the Commons: In a creative collaboration with Zion Lutheran Church and their commitment to serve as a “community commons” in their neighborhood, I host “Conversations in the Commons” around my “Writing into the Whirlwind” every Second Tuesday—from 6:30-8pm. These evenings are a chance for me to share some of my recent work (or some of my favorite writing) and then open things up for conversation. I’ll typically identify the blog post(s) we’ll be discussing at least a week in advance so you can read them ahead of time and come ready to engage! Each evening, I’ll offer a few opening reflections, and then invite you into conversation. My work has always been enriched by conversation, and that’s more important than ever today.

OUR next conversation is on Tuesday, February 13, 2023. Topic to be announced closer to that date. (I had announced one topic for January; then illness, holidays, and other events conspired to change those plans. From now on, because “the Whirlwind” can easily shift, I’ll be announcing next topics closer to the actual dates.)

The 2nd TUESDAY COMMUNITY MEAL AT ZION LUTHERAN CHURCH

These full meals (served all day, from 11am to 7pm) are prepared by chef Colin Anderson of Eureka Compass Vegan Foods as part of his passion for food solidarity. Each Community Dinner at Zion benefits their Food Justice programs and Thursday food shelf program. You can read more about them here: https://eurekacompassveganfood.com/community-dinner.

Here are the important details:

Make Colin’s life easier by pre-ordering your Community Dinner meals no later than 8am on Monday. That’s his shopping day. Here are the preordering instructions:

Email eurekacompassveganfood@gmail.com to let Colin know HOW MANY meals you need and WHEN you’re coming. (If you’re coming for my 6:30p “Conversations in the Commons,” you’ll want to arrive 5:45-6p and dine in. We WON’T be meeting in the dining area, so you’ll want to finish your meal there and then head to the Conference Room at 6:25p.)
NO PAYMENT IS NECESSARY, but cash contributions are accepted the day of the dinner. If you’d like to contribute with a credit card, indicate how much you wish to contribute when you email your pre-order. You’ll receive an invoice by email that you can pay electronically via a prompt on the invoice.
Show up on the day of the dinner at your designated time, and we’ll have your meals ready for you! If you have any questions, just send us an email! We’re happy to connect!

Each meal is gluten free, nut free, and vegan to make it accessible to as many in the community as possible. Other allergens such as corn and soy are rarely used. These meals are always offered “Pay what you want/can.” No one is turned away for lack of funds. Each Community Dinner has a philanthropic partner and half of all contributions at Tuesday dinners benefit Zion Lutheran’s Food Justice programs and Thursday food shelf program.

For Crying Out Loud

Jul15

For Crying Out Loud
David R. Weiss – July 15, 2023

I am in favor. (Of crying out loud.) As the title declares, I am for crying out loud. I’d almost go so far as to say, in this moment of ecological crisis / climate breakdown, that if anything can save us now, it’s tears.

It’s more complicated than that though. And “save us,” seems like overreach. We’re in this for keeps. And by “keeps,” I mean collapse. There is no turning back at this point. You could make the case that back around 1970, had we dared to throw the emergency brake on fossil fuel burning—and also on our rapacious consumption—we might have averted the catastrophe that now passes for our children’s and grandchildren’s trust fund. But it’s at least equally possible that by 1970 the forces at play—industrial, technological, economic, political, and not least cultural and religious—had achieved so much interlocking inertia, that the emergency brake wouldn’t have budged, even if someone had tried to throw it. No, we’re in this for keeps.

There is no green tech coming along fast enough (or without its own nightmarish ecological costs) to save us—not to mention no coalescence of political will anywhere on the horizon. And, to date, every great green hope paraded in front of us, promises to sustain unfettered growth on a finite planet, the single biggest lie in all of Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history. Hence, by “keeps,” I mean collapse.

There is no saving us—if by that you mean the restoration of some semblance of the bright future we imagined in our youth. And there is no saving us—if by that you mean the smooth orderly transition to a simpler way of life that aligns with the planet’s abundant but oh so finite capacity. Oh, we will transition to that “simpler” way of life, because ultimately Earth will align us with its capacity. But it will not be smooth or orderly.

Like ill-tempered toddlers we will be dragged kicking and screaming (and dying) into alignment. Indeed, the kicking and screaming has already started. But it will get worse. The dying, too—already started … and to get worse. No doubt there will be tears aplenty spilled along the way. But that weeping, while it may be momentarily cathartic, will not save us.

The tears that might save us will be of a different sort. These will be tears not for what is happening to us (or to those nearest), but for what is happening to the world around us. Tears for others. For all others.

We long for a magical solution to our ecological peril. Let me tell you, this is as close to magic as it gets. Gut-wrenching magic, though. Here is the supreme truth of our lives: we are one. Every shimmering wave, every twinkling star, every quivering quark, and every creeping critter—ONE. Interwoven. Pulsing. Breathing. Kin.

And we—humans as a whole, though, of course, it is hardly the whole of us—have unleashed a system that is DESIGNED to rip apart the interwoven-pulsing-breathing fabric of creation. To position us as “above”—meaning against all others. To extract, exploit, extinguish life-beauty in the name of accumulative progress as though death-making is our noble purpose in life. Global human civilization is built on the notion that we can kill the planet without killing ourselves. The superficial truth—the low-hanging fruit so to speak—is that we can’t. Our way of life is wrecking (has wrecked!) the support system needed for the very life we cherish most: our own. Oops.

Munch recalled that he had been out for a walk at sunset when suddenly the setting sun’s light turned the clouds “a blood red.” He sensed an “infinite scream passing through nature.” Wikipedia

But the supreme truth—the priceless pearl—that may yet help us tend to the wreckage left in the wake of our death-making civilization is this: all that we have exploited-extracted-extinguished … all that we have reckoned “other,” so as to set our lives against it … all this is interwoven-pulsing-breathing-dying KIN. We are one. And if we dare open ourselves to that truth, the tears will come from a very different place. No longer born of self-interest, we will weep for kin-interest, all-interest, one-interest: for the entire gamut of life-beauty that is under assault from the inertia of our empires.

Such tears will threaten to undo us. How do you weep “in moderation” for the loss of so much? The loss of so much finally known as kin? It will be gut-wrenching. And it will be magic. Because the deepest power accessible to us in the universe, the ground of authentic human agency, the womb of holiness if you wish, is to live from the awareness that we—all—are ONE. Interwoven. Pulsing. Breathing. Kin.

That awareness—should we choose to avail ourselves of it—will dawn with tears. In another age, perhaps it could arise from blissful reflection or immersion in the natural world. In this age of ecological wreckage wrought by us, it will dawn with tears … or it will not dawn at all. And yet, behind-beneath-beyond those tears is the power of the universe beckoning-begging-empowering us to act with empathy-outrage-love-care.

There will be need for more than tears in the days to come. Awe and gratitude, laughter and joy, skills-sharing and community-building, and loads of hard work, too. But we fool ourselves—it’s actually much worse than foolery; it’s a deadly delusion—when we think we will do and do and do some more and save the tears for later. The tears are the saving. They are the echo of ONEness in our soul, the opening of empathy, the ground of our power, and the roots of our resolve. Right now EVERYTHING hinges on our willingness to weep. And I’ll keep saying that until you join me in declaring yourself—

For crying out loud.

* * *

David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, doing “public theology” around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, diversity, and peace. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in writing Community Supported Theology at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.

The Boy Who Harnessed …

May16

The Boy Who Harnessed …
David R. Weiss – May 16, 2023

Last night our housemate, Deandre, invited us to join him in watching The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2019). It’s a powerful, inspirational movie. Margaret and I had read the book together on a long road trip, maybe a decade ago, so we knew the story, but it was still quite moving to see it brought to life in film.

It’s a true story, set in Malawi, in southeast Africa, in 2000-2001. William Kamkwamba is a teenager in a small rural village who has a knack for tinkering. He fixes the small radios used by the subsistence farmers in the village (including his father) to track weather and politics, the twin forces that determine their fate. William is intuitively bright and self-taught; he scavenges most of his repair supplies—wire, old batteries, and more—from the nearby garbage dump.

But William’s tinkering is set against a backdrop of desperation in the village. Unpredictable weather patterns, ranging from drought to downpour. Corrupt government pressure to sell off the trees that protect the fields against flooding in order to feed families in the short term. Followed by inadequate humanitarian aid during the ensuing famine. The villagers are under intense economic and social stress. At times they betray both tradition and one another, though less from malice than from the fracturing pressure mounting on all sides.

The fracture lines run right into William’s family as well. His mother has a fierce determination that the children be educated, and his father has worked hard to send both of their children to school. A man of deep integrity but lacking in great vision, as the famine settles in, he can no longer justify William’s school fees … or his absence in the fields. (Although by now the ground is so parched that doubling their labor merely doubles the futility of their efforts.)

Meanwhile, William, who had been given informal access to the school library after being removed from class for unpaid fees, has deepened his understanding of how electricity works—and what it can do. In the depths of his family’s—his entire village’s—desperation, he begins to imagine the difference it would make if he could use electricity to “bring rain” from beneath the ground giving them a real measure of security in their harvest.

But William’s daring vision is still complicated by family dynamics. His father cannot fathom how the wind, which only whips the dust about, as far as he can tell, can be such a force for good as William describes. It is entirely beyond the world his father knows. Nevertheless, somehow, at the age of 14 and using mostly scraps from the nearby dump, William indeed “harnesses the wind”—designing and then building a wind turbine that charges a discarded car battery that drives a salvaged pump that brings “rain” up from the ground to irrigate the farmland.

It is a miracle, but one wrought not by suspending the laws of nature but by understanding them and then imagining how to harness them in new ways for the good of his community. The miracle is what happens at the intersection of his mother’s belief in education, William’s own persistent imagination, his father’s faltering-but-final trust, and his community’s deep need. Right there.

Of course, I encounter almost everything these days with ecological collapse on my mind. (Sorry not sorry. I have a job to do.) So, as I watched William persist vis-a-vis the skepticism of family and friends who could not recognize the promise of his vision—until he brought it to pass, it occurred to me, that I am determined to be “the boy who harnessed grief.”

For years now, I’ve been convinced that the single most “promising” response to the climate crisis is the honesty and depth of our grieving for the world’s pain … at our hands. And it’s been true, both for our culture in general, but also as the most typical reaction to my specific writing and speaking, that we want as little to do with grieving as possible. We are perhaps willing to acknowledge the damage we’ve done to this “pale blue dot” … and grieve for that ever so briefly, if only we-can-swiftly-and-definitively-turn our-attention-and-energy-to-fixing-it.

But what if the only “fix” possible is to sit with the world’s pain? For a long—long!—time.

Yes, we will need to do things besides grieve. BUT STOP RIGHT THERE! You don’t get to do any of those other things except as you are steeped in grief. Grief—pure and simple, strong and steady—is the wind we must harness to do the rest of what must done. Nothing will guide or sustain the rest of what we do except grief. But more than merely a means to our doing, grief must also become an end of our being, our common calling as humans.

This is NOT about wallowing in sadness or shame or guilt. We may well have sadness, shame, and guilt to process, but this grief is about being present to the world. Having christened ourselves homo sapiens (“the wise human”), our only course forward now is to rechristen ourselves homo compatiens (“the suffering-with human”). Every other pathway leads ineluctably toward (literally, “unable to squirm free from”) further alienation, deeper ecological damage, and more catastrophic collapse.

But choosing to feel the world’s pain, to allow grief to drive the turbines of our soul, is to invite Earth and all her company of saints to step out of the It-ness to which we have consigned them for far too long … and into the Thou-ness that has always been theirs, citizen-companions alongside us in the web of life. When we endeavor to acknowledge deep in our hearts, when we dare to seek to suffer with the pain that is theirs, we experience an apocalypse—a revelation—of sorts. We can.

That is, despite all the tales we’ve told ourselves about being separate from, better than, distinctly different and otherwise-destined than the Earthly company round about us, we are, in fact, in beloved truth: KIN. And that irrevocable kinship remains, latent in most of us, but waiting to rise in our grief. At this point in human history, on the cusp of ecological collapse, only our kinship with all that is has the capacity to re-root us in the unconditional energy of life and love. And in this perilous moment, that kinship can only be accessed … welcomed … received—on terms of grief.

Because right now, alongside its awe-inspiring, lingering-languishing beauty, the world as Thou can only be known intimately by knowing its wounds. And nothing less than intimate knowing—whole-hearted suffering-with, grief that runs deep into our bones—can guide the rest of what we must seek to do and, perhaps more importantly, the mystery of who we must become.

I understand, my harping on grief seems obsessive. But the impatience you feel to move on is the measure of your reluctance (unwillingness? fear?) to allow the depth of the world’s pain into your heart. Once it enters, … you … will … slow … down. Because the thrum of such profound and widespread grief stretches out time until each heartbeat is brimful of the world’s pain. Then—like lightning splintering across the sky—those turbines, long stilled in your soul, will start to move. And you will realize that all this time, you have only guessed (and poorly so) at life. At last, re-joined to the whole web of life—now weeping, raging, loving, laughing—grief will bring you home.

I am determined to be the boy who harnessed grief. For the good of my community. (That’s you!) It’s gonna take a miracle, so wish me luck. And consider where you fit in the intersection. I’ll meet you. Right there.

* * *

This IS the Kobayashi Maru

May10

This IS the Kobayashi Maru
David R. Weiss – May 10, 2023

It’s true, there are days that the company I keep wears me down. I’ve made the abyss of ecological overshoot my conversation partner. The banter is not cheery.

Overshoot, in a nutshell, refers to the reckless plunder of the planet in the present, borrowing heavily against the wellbeing of the planet in the future. It is living in excess … until the biosphere—and the “sociosphere”—collapse in exhaustion. And it has become so normal as to be almost boring.

Did you notice, back on March 13, when the United States went into overshoot? I didn’t. But that was the day—just 72 days into the year—by which the average U.S. consumer had consumed their entire year’s worth of goods. From the Ides of March onward, we are borrowing from (well, stealing, since there is no plan and no way to pay it back) the wellbeing of tomorrow. We are plundering the planet. The mantra of our lifestyles having become, “To hell with those who come after us! Born too late; it’s just their fate: they’re screwed!”

It is not a mantra to be morally proud of. But it is the mantra of consumer capitalism (and its close kin: misogyny, white supremacy, homophobia, anthropocentrism). It is the mantra SUNG by the socio-economic structures of our lives. It is the mantra in which we are entangled. And, even if we are “lucky” enough to die before the debt comes due, it is the mantra that will exact repayment—in the form of catastrophic system-wide ecological-economic-social collapse in the lives of those who come after us. Some of whom we have birthed and named and raised with love ourselves.

Except for the super-wealthy, that mantra is indiscriminate. As our life choices carry its chant, we may assume that those damned to hell by the illicit leisure of our lives are surely ones unknown to us. Those born in distant lands or those whose humanity is hued different than our own. But unless the balance of (stolen!) “wealth” in your bank account is measured by multi-millions or more, your hope to buffer those of your choosing from calamity will be next to nil.

Which brings us to the Kobayashi Maru.

The Kobayashi Maru is an imaginary civilian spaceship in a training exercise of the same name in the Star Trek universe. In the exercise, Starfleet cadets encounter the Kobayashi Maru, disabled in hostile space and facing certain disaster. Their training has formed them to seek to rescue the ship, even if it means endangering their own crew and vessel. But the exercise was set up—designed—to be impossible. Every attempt at rescue would result in the loss of both vessels and all lives.

The point was to force a cadet-in-training to encounter a no-win situation. Because at some point, as a starship captain, they might well face a no-win situation out in the field. In the simulation, the rational response—to ignore the moral claim of the imperiled lives and focus on protecting their own crew and vessel—is immoral. While the moral response—to risk (and inevitably lose) one’s crew and vessel in a failed rescue attempt—is irrational.

Were it left there, Star Trek would’ve had its own mythic motif of existential tragedy. But this is Star Trek, and Captain James T. Kirk is not the author of Ecclesiastes. Instead, according to Kirk’s own admission, he was the only Star Fleet cadet to ever “beat” the Kobayashi Maru test—because he cheated. After losing twice, he managed to reprogram the simulation to make winning a possibility.

Today, in a world too far into overshoot to simply ease back, we face the Kobayashi Maru dilemma. It would be immoral—on the scale of global ecocide—to make no attempt to alter the trajectory of overshoot, which imperils countless Earth ecosystems and individual species—including humanity. And yet, if catastrophic system-wide ecological-economic-social collapse is now inevitable, are we not faced with a truly no-win scenario, where even doing the right thing “too late” is no more than noble failure?

Yes and no.

Unlike the Star Trek simulation, our present dilemma wasn’t exactly “designed” to be no-win. Perhaps a hundred years ago (maybe as few as seventy-five years ago) there were still different choices available to us, with different outcomes possible. “Winning”—achieving sustainable balance on a small planet—was theoretically possible, with the right mix of wisdom, reverence, humility, restraint. But since the Great Acceleration (dating roughly to 1950), Western “civilization”—which can only honestly be described as the deliberate desire to plunder the planet by any means necessary, hence the quote marks—has pretty much nailed the gas pedal to the floor of the car, making even the desperate desire to slow down beyond difficult. So, by now, “design” is a moot point. We can argue about who did the nailing, and the list of villains would be legion, but most of us (in the “developed”—that is, the plundering—world) have been complicit. We are in a no-win scenario.

Still, while I am loathe to lionize Captain Kirk, there is a glimmer of subversive grit in his willingness to cheat the system in order to save the innocent.

Now, before you get too excited, let’s get realistic. Collapse is coming. It will be catastrophic. And there is no “win” that avoids this. At this stage of overshoot, there is no amount of green technology, no sudden onset of political will power, no miraculous new course set by corporations that can make this anything other than a no-win scenario. All hopes of “reprogramming” our dilemma in a way that preserves the reigning values that created it are OFF THE TABLE.

That is, the only way to re-program the Kobayashi Maru dilemma that we face, is to change the very scripts that guide the program while also recognizing that even if we succeed, at its best, “success” will look like a slightly cushioned collapse and will result in (perhaps, and if we are truly fortunate) some smattering of human communities able to regroup and persist on the far side of collapse. This is thin success by any measure.

Except by the measure of imagining any other way “forward.” Because every other imagining is death. By that standard, changing the scripts for even thin success … is a win. It is the only heroic aspiration on the table. And an aspiration only effectively exercised … collectively. (I cringe to say it, but we must decide to channel James T. Kirk together. I’m sorry.)

Still to come: reflections on the damning scripts that got us here (the core assumptions—the “code”—that creates the systems that frame the range of possible outcomes). And then reflections on the subversive scripts that might let us “rescue,” even if only as a badly battered vessel, the Kobayashi Maru … and the innocent lives on board that imaginary spaceship called Tomorrow.

* * *

Meet Me in the River

May2

Meet Me in the River
May 2, 2023 – David R. Weiss

I am awash in grief you might say. It is the sacred ether in which I “live and move and have my being” these days.

If the words sound familiar, they’re from Acts 17:28, where Paul employs them to describe our subsistence within the life of God. In fact, he’s quoting Epimenides, a Greek philosopher-mystic-poet from six or seven centuries before him, who coined the phrase in a poem to Zeus. In both cases, the meaning is that our human existence is rooted in a Reality larger than ourselves—and that we can only navigate our own lives meaningfully in the humble recognition of that larger Reality.

For me, that larger Reality is perhaps best called Compassion. I see this as the driving force in Jesus’ life. Not some abstract ideal, but the animating energy moving through his being yet also in some mysterious way much larger than him. Compassion—literally, “to suffer with”—is the dynamic disposition of the cosmos to promote the birth of whole worlds and the flourishing of ecosystems and communities. In theological verbiage: God.

But today, in this place, in this time, Compassion most often tastes salty. Like tears of Grief.

Our world is dying. The wounds inflicted on the biosphere by our industrial civilization continue unabated. Indeed, what we like to call “civilization” is more accurately described as the relentless malignancy of the life patterns chosen by the dominant societies on this planet.

For at least fifty years the scale of that malignancy—our imbalance with the rest of the natural world—has been public knowledge. “Debatable” only by those whose interests aligned with wealth rather than wellbeing. And yet from the wealthy individuals and corporations who twist politics to promote profit … to the socio-economic structures that constrain the choices available to most of us … to the cultural-religious worldviews that form our appetites and imaginations … we continue to accelerate toward collapse as if there is no tomorrow. Which, come to think of it, there won’t be—on account of that ongoing acceleration.

But still, it seems an act of gratuitous violence to slam ourselves—really, our children and grandchildren—into a brick wall as hard as possible. Isn’t there something to be said for kindness on the cusp of collapse?

Hence, Grief.

Ironically, it’s often experiences of beauty and community that trigger grief for me these days. (See, for instance, my earlier pieces on “Even Beauty Cannot Save Us” from February 2022 or “Two Things True” from July 2022.) Sunday afternoon Margaret and I attended the Apollo Chorus concert out in Plymouth. Listening to a men’s chorus sing with gusto and joy surrounded by a community of folks happy to hear their music. Beauty and community rolled together. And grief. It is a sort of wistful recognition that there are moments in which humanity shines, in which creation gleams. Moments to be treasured … soon to be endangered … if not extinct.

Hence, awash in Grief. And yet, it is a good grief.

Our world is dying. And in such a time as this being as fully connected to the world as we can is our only pathway toward integrity and humanity. Disconnected—whether pretentiously (and falsely) set above or despairingly (and just as falsely) set alone—we are figments of a faulty imagination. We are human, only to the extent we are wed to the humus (and everything else!) in the world around us. And there is no honest relationship with the world that is not awash in grief.

To clarify, there is no authentic relationship with anyone or anything that does not require an openness to grief. To meet any aspect of the world, from fellow creature to entire ecosystem, as a Thou rather than an It, is to be open to curiosity and awe, joy and grief, in relationship. But today, the level of grief that is prerequisite to being connected to the world is so immense as to be daunting. And almost our entire way of life is oriented toward avoiding grief. (The most obvious exceptions being those industries [e.g., funeral homes, burial services] that manage to monetize its inevitability. The most laudable exceptions being hospice and other “pro-death” movements that aim to honor the place of death and grief in life—laudable, but as yet marginal movements in society at large.)

No wonder, then, that our default disposition toward grief is avoidance. By entertainment … travel … shopping … when all else fails, by frantic distraction.

But here’s what comes next in a dying world: collapse and chaos. Followed by brutality and inhumanity. And the only way we can avert these outcomes in ourselves and our communities is by opening ourselves to grief. As never before. On a scale near unimaginable. Grief, especially as communal practice, is the only portal through numbness and into authentic relationship with a world so badly wounded as ours. Grief at what we have done to our fellow human beings … our companion creatures … the Earth itself … the planetary systems that are the very womb of life … and, not least, to ourselves.

There is no way across the gaping chasm of these wounds except to grieve them in full measure. And in that grieving to invite empathy into our hearts (our lives!)—to allow the echo of our buried kinship with all that is to rekindle itself.

Worlds are born on geologic scales that our minds can hardly conceive. It took almost three billion years of one-celled organisms flourishing in Earth’s oceans for the first multi-celled organisms to appear. Worlds die on scales less grand, but often just as inconceivable because their dying begins unnoticed—and because we are keen to dismiss the rumors of their impending death.

But “keenness” cannot confer capacity. And whatever capacity we once had—perhaps just decades ago—to avert this dying, has been forfeited in exchange for continued ROI (return on investment) and for extended “ease and convenience.” And now the dying is a done deal. The details left to be negotiated concern the scope, the devastating breadth and depth of death, and the speed, whether a few decades or a few generations. But the continuity of our “civilization”? That’s off the table.

The goodness in Grief is that it is the only bargaining chip we have of any value. Its value is to birth empathy, to rekindle kinship, to cultivate kindness and compassion, to convene community, and, if possible, to carry humanity from one side of the chasm to the other. Floating, as it were, on our tears.

We will need a river of them. And—we will need to let go of this shore in order to cross. So, this is my invitation: meet me in the river. Let’s cross together.

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