Symptoms of Soul Scurvy, and a Vision of Health

Particular phenomena only offer their deepest lessons when we can see the more basic spiritual dynamics at work, which have to do with the soul’s need for nourishment, as well as the dependence on nourishment characteristic of both suffering and liberation. 

All things depend on nutriment. When we suffer, it happens because we nourish suffering. When we experience happiness and love, it happens because we nourish happiness and love. To persist in suffering, we must continue to feed it. To experience deeper well-being, we must nourish well-being, and ultimately we must nourish our soul, the souls of those we love, the souls of all beings, and the soul of the world. 

LoveWisdom is a basic need, the basic food for the soul. When we have a vitamin deficiency, we start to develop symptoms that can be healed when we properly resolve that deficiency. Nutrients for the soul work that way too. We can, from one perspective, see all nutriment as nutriment for the soul, and we can see all deficiencies as relating to the soul. But we can also speak more directly about deficiencies of the soul, and there are some general expressions of an acute need for LoveWisdom. The main negative symptom is suffering, and in addition to that general condition we can cite some more specific symptoms: 

1) I am suffering

2) I feel afraid and/or anxious

3) I feel stupid

4) I feel powerless

5) I feel lonely or alone

6) I feel my life is meaningless, my life doesn’t matter

7) I feel unloved and/or unlovable

8) I cannot say that I really—really—know who and what I am

9) I feel I cannot make a difference in the world

10) I am not living the life something in me longs to live

11) I feel disconnected from Nature

If you have experienced any of these feelings (they often arise both as thought and as feeling, so in many cases we could call them thought-feelings), then you have experienced a need for LoveWisdom.

If you feel weak, tired, sore, and show certain other symptoms, a medical doctor may tell you that you have scurvy, and you need vitamin C. If you exhibit the symptoms listed above, or certain others (there are in fact many, including feeling weak, tired, and sore), a Soul Doctor may gently hint to you that you have a kind of soul scurvy, and you need a dose of LoveWisdom—really, that you need a steady diet of LoveWisdom.  

Many situations in life can trigger symptoms of soul scurvy or other kinds of soul depletion. The disorder is already there, but sometimes it takes a certain kind of life situation to make the symptoms appear in an acute form, so that we can sense them consciously. The most extreme situation we face that will demand LoveWisdom, the one that sometimes encompasses all of the above symptoms, is this one: I am dying.  

We’re all dying, of course. But usually we don’t deal with it very directly. However, when it’s right in our face, we will need LoveWisdom to cope, even if the death we are facing most directly is someone else’s. It is important to see that these seven symptoms of LoveWisdom deficiency may arise because someone we love, or even a perfect stranger, is suffering in some way. 

It may seem like we have begun to belabor the point, but let us again emphasize the fact that intelligence (as typically conceived) and formal education (as we currently conduct it in mainstream “W.E.I.R.D.” cultures—”western,” “educated,” industrialized, “rich,” and “democratic” . . . only one of those terms needs no quotes around it) don’t offer much help and healing in these matters. That doesn’t mean we should write them off as worthless, but that matters of Wisdom, Love, and Beauty do not genuinely yield to cleverness, information, or agendas.  

For instance, highly intelligent people can do very stupid things, and they can feel quite stupid at those times or any other time. Moreover, people with high IQ and advanced degrees certainly suffer, and they may suffer tremendously. They may criticize themselves harshly, or even hate themselves. They may feel quite powerless in the face of many kinds of injustice. They experience grief and loss, including a loss of meaning. And—all of us will die. 

For several reasons, we need to remind ourselves of the very relative importance of so-called intelligence and formal education. One reason has to do with the fact that LoveWisdom can feel intimidating. Because of its life-and-death nature, and because it may ask us to face things we don’t want to face, or let go of things we have gotten used to holding onto, it can feel scary. So, we will seek for many ways to get around the heart of LoveWisdom, and one of the ways we do it is by claiming we are not smart enough to understand LoveWisdom, and that LoveWisdom is “heady” and full of “abstractions”. Some people rather deliberately use their big intellect to do a lot of work that never gets to that heart, the heart of wonder, the heart of sacredness, the heart of wisdom, love, and beauty. Either way—whether we claim LoveWisdom is heady and abstract, or we actually seek out intellectual stimulation—we go off into abstractions, consciously or unconsciously attempting to escape the matters of life and death, flesh and blood, grace and grit. We cannot escape Sophia. Wisdom is no escape. And Sophia’s Love is closer than any door. 

We also face the problem that we have gotten used to “formal” education that qualifies as dysfunctional in many ways. Our culture doesn’t invite us to look into the soul, and the soul has very little presence at any level of formal education. Thus we know little about the true nature of our own heart, mind, body, world, and cosmos. We gather lots of information, but wisdom, love, and beauty do not reduce to “information,” and do not arise from “information”. Moreover, they resist all agendas. 

We might get an advanced degree, even a doctorate, in less than five years. But wisdom does not usually arise in such a short span, especially if we have done nothing but read and write (typically about rather abstract things). The same holds for love and beauty, for love requires ongoing nourishment, and beauty ultimately comes from our whole quality of being, something we cultivate as a matter of ceaseless practice.  

It is not impossible to realize wisdom, love, and beauty in a w.e.i.r.d. university setting, but we won’t find a robust track record of success there (nor in a w.e.i.r.d. culture in general). So we have to prepare ourselves to rethink the nature of learning, and to watch out for the many ways we may seek to cut ourselves off from LoveWisdom—just as we need it most. 

I say this in part because I saw a lot of fear in my own university students when I taught in that system, and I still see it in clients and in the public at large—not just fear, but fear altogether with hope, craving, clinging, confusion, addiction, and aggression. This fear, craving, and so on arises from many causes, among which the sad fact that politicians and others serving the structures of power and domination use fear and craving (even to the point of stoking addiction and aggression) to keep the majority more governable. Fear and craving provoke a response in us that happens to work well for the form of society we live in. It keeps conquest consciousness in place, helping to stabilize it and even deepen it.

We may also notice a slightly more realistic kind of fear that can arise when we consider the state of the world. When my students would read about the levels of pollutants in the environment, the condition of our air, soil, and water, the levels of consumption in the dominant culture, and so on, they typically experienced a good measure of fear, anxiety, and even despair. Thankfully, among its purposes and virtues, LoveWisdom helps us face this very reasonable kind of fear and find ways to work with it, to transcend it so that we can do some good in the World.

Such a perspective eventually leads us to seeing the need for a revolution in education—and in many other fields, including economics, politics, and medicine, health, and healing. But the main point comes to this: We all experience certain symptoms of suffering which we can begin to see as evidence of a need for LoveWisdom in various forms.

There may be “positive” symptoms too. For instance, we may experience the following: 

            1) I love someone (or something)

            2) I feel inspired or excited

            3) I feel hopeful

            4) I feel happy 

These four may look less like symptoms, less like signs of potential deficiencies of soul nutrients. Indeed, they aren’t always, directly, symptoms of a deficiency of LoveWisdom, but they still typically signal a need for it, because when these experiences arise we will handle them better if we have practiced LoveWisdom.

We should of course acknowledge that we sometimes convince ourselves we have fallen in love with someone, while those close to us who care about us may see it as a disastrous delusion. We must also acknowledge that people can do terrible things in the name of love.

But even if we love someone in a fairly genuine way, and it seems like a potentially healthy relationship, we want to know how best to take care of that love, how best to take care of that being, to nurture their happiness and their spiritual growth, and to alleviate their suffering as far as possible. We want to be the fullest, richest version of ourselves for them, realize our greatest potential in ways that support and delight them. That demands LoveWisdom.

Moreover, our very love for someone evokes our creativity and intelligence. Love conjures up our wisdom. Just to love someone, if we love sincerely, means opening the flow of wisdom, love, and beauty in our lives, and that’s something we want to do in a skillful way, not simply allowing things to go along haphazardly. This also holds for feelings of inspiration.

Hopefulness is another matter. Hope can sometimes be practiced in a relatively healthy way, but it often has to do with a kind of escape from the present moment. It’s a subtle thing, and we can look at it in more detail another time.[1]

For now let us say that, when we feel hopeful, we need to acknowledge that we may in fact imagine our happiness lies elsewhere, and we may lack a profound trust in ourselves and in life. In truth, our happiness is always here and now—a most obvious thing that we must continually practice and realize.

LoveWisdom helps us to discover that the conditions for our happiness are already available to us, and that we do not need hope as a basis for working positively and skillfully for the benefit of all beings. Happiness here means a sense of a deep well-being, a joyfulness of heart that has a quality of peace and wonder. That can differ from what we might habitually pursue.

The wisdom traditions teach us a hard lesson: Often the very thing we chase after to secure our happiness will not ever do so, and may lead to further suffering. Worse yet, we find many people practicing toxic positivity and forms of happy-go-luckiness that lack wisdom while also functionally ignoring the real suffering, injustice, and degradation in our world. That kind of happiness can do a lot of harm.

LoveWisdom teaches us how to cultivate and care for the genuine kind of happiness in ourselves and others, which goes together with the genuine well-being of the world. And LoveWisdom teaches us how to come to a resounding kind of trust in ourselves, a kind of gentle, humble, yet unshakeable confidence in ourselves and in life. We no longer need hope, because we have touched the very nature of things, and found a refuge that never fails.

I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.

(Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα. Δε φοβούμαι τίποτα. Είμαι λέφτερος.)

~ Nikos Kazantzakis 

We should also note here that, in relation to human hope, fear, and delusion, one of the most dangerous things in our world is a human being feeling excited and inspired by their agenda. This problem arises as part of the symptomology of conquest consciousness in particular, and traditional cultures have myth and stories that teach us about the need for wisdom in relation to our inspirations.

It’s not that inspiration is bad so much as that we tend to confuse inspirations from mere impulses and agendas. Conquest cultures teach their citizens that they can have whatever they want—all they have to do is take it. True inspiration comes as something sacred, it involves a lot more giving than taking, and it arises in a space beyond hope and fear.

A few more soul symptoms: 

1) I have lots of ideas, and I even have the sense of knowing or feeling as though I have a gift to offer the world, but I cannot seem to find or follow through with these ideas and this gift

2) I feel I do not fit in, I do not belong

3) I experience a lot of hesitation, self-doubt, self-criticism, self-sabotage

4) I hate myself, I hate my life

5) I feel uninspired—and/or ungifted

6) I experience nightmares with some regularity

7) I never remember my dreams

8) I hate my job

9) I feel invisible

10) I feel a lack of purpose in my life

11) I have an addiction

12) I feel a need for healing

13) I experience intense emotions that are painful to me and even to others

14) I have difficulty getting in touch with my emotions and/or my real needs

15) I feel a basic sense that something is not right in my life, but I am not sure what—or, sometimes, I think that everything is not right, and that feels hopeless

16) I feel like I must have something to give to the world, but I don’t know what it could be or how to get started

17) I have trouble making decisions

18) I feel as though I keep screwing up, and I seem to make the same mistakes again and again

19) I just don’t feel good enough; I feel deeply unworthy

20) I feel something is really wrong with the world. I have seen or experienced intense suffering, violence, degradation, or other harms and ills, and they seem to be both senseless and preventable or transformable. But I feel powerless about changing them. Sometimes I feel I will be overwhelmed. I cannot stand to see human beings oppressed and violated, to see rivers polluted, to see species driven to extinction. And at the same time, I cannot see how to actually make a difference.

21) I don't have a regular spiritual practice, with help from qualified teachers

We have made only a partial list here. All we have to do is look out at the World, look with care at the injustice, the inequality, the wounds in the body of the Earth and in the bodies of her many beings, including our human kin, and we directly sense our need for wisdom, love, and beauty.

The experience of these and other symptoms can range from an unconscious tension to something consciously deadening, painful, depressing, anxiety-provoking. It is like any other kind of symptom: We are getting signals that we need to heal something. If we can feel it, we can heal it. LoveWisdom offers us the possibility of healing, which means something more than the alleviation of symptoms or some kind of cure. It means insight into the nature of ourselves and our world. It means becoming what we are. 

Let’s pause again to breathe. It’s always good to pause and breathe, and you needn’t wait for my invitations to do so—though it may be nice to accept them when offered.   

Out-breath and

In-breath

Know that they are

Proof that the world

Is inexhaustible

              ~Ryokan 

The final two items on the list above is are rather important ones. They relate to a kind of anemia of the soul, or, better put, a cultivated ineptitude or impotence of the soul. An anti-Culture works toward this weakening of the soul.

Inverted totalitarianism and inverted consumerism depend on souls denuded and de-Wilded, deluded and degraded, distressed and distracted, stoked into aggression and addiction, seduced into fear, craving, ignorance, and confusion. We have to feel too weak and unwise, too ineffectual, too insignificant to make a real difference in the world.  

The philosopher Noam Chomsky gets at this in the following excerpt from an interview:  

The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that’s far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that’s in fact what they do. I’m sure they are using their common sense and intellectual skills, but in an area which has no meaning and probably thrives because it has no meaning, as a displacement from the serious problems which one cannot influence and affect because the power happens to lie elsewhere. (The Chomsky Reader, p. 33) 

Chomsky has tremendous confidence in the intelligence of ordinary people. In this interview, he marvels at how much people know about things like baseball and football, and how they have seemingly intelligent and sophisticated views on these things, and how they will openly challenge and debate reputed experts. People have a great deal of intelligence and creativity, but these get directed to things that have little genuine Meaning, and little impact on structures of power and domination. 

A friend of mine tried to start a tech company a few years ago. It was one of the standard little start-ups: A creative idea and a team of intelligent designers and programmers working hard to make it the best it could be so as to compete in the glutted marketplace. One of the people he hired had formerly worked at Apple. During his time at Apple, this fellow worked on a small team of very bright and well-educated people who spent years working on a single “problem”: how to optimize the feeling of the click on the mousepad of an Apple laptop.

Such a scenario fits our culture perfectly: We do not want a team of brilliant people working on how to save the whales, clean up the rivers, reduce inequality, or dismantle structures of power and domination; we want them working on whatever perpetuates Sorrowville. If you show any talent for or attraction to science and math, the culture will do its best to get you building weapons or laptops, or writing code or inventing new financial instruments. If you show any affinity for the arts, the culture will do its best to get you into advertising or so-called “design” work (user interfaces for tech, packaging designs, website development, logos, fashion, and so on).

We put as much of our individual and collective intelligence into Sorrowville as we can, and that includes giving people as little leisure time as possible, and encouraging them in thousands of ways to use that leisure time to perpetuate Sorrowville even further. As Chomsky puts it: 

Now it seems to me that the same intellectual skill and capacity for understanding and for accumulating evidence and gaining information and thinking through problems could be used—would be used—under different systems of governance which involve popular participation in important decision-making, in areas that really matter to human life. (The Chomsky Reader, p. 33) 

We have plenty of individual and collective intelligence and creativity to actually cultivate the whole of life onward, to transform and rejuvenate life in a holistic and healing way, to resolve the self-imposed problems of humanity and co-discover-create a better World.

We need to organize our culture and our society in ways that facilitate the proper functioning of our creative intelligence—which includes larger ecologies of mind. In other words, our creative intelligence doesn’t exist in our skulls but in the larger world. Without proper orientation and focus, and a skillful and realistic view of ourselves and our world, all our energies go to waste—to the benefit of structures of power and domination. As Chomsky puts it: 

The gas station attendant who wants to use his mind isn’t going to waste his time on international affairs, because that’s useless; he can’t do anything about it anyhow, and he might learn unpleasant things and even get into trouble. So he might as well do it where it’s fun, and not threatening—professional football or basketball or something like that. But the skills are being used and the understanding is there and the intelligence is there. One of the functions that things like professional sports play, in our society and others, is to offer an area to deflect people’s attention from things that matter, so that the people in power can do what matters without public interference. (36) 

Note what becomes “useless” and what becomes “useful”. This sort of thing often happens with the dualistic thinking that characterizes Sorrowville, and the present case might remind us of the example of “development”. When we look at all the things the dominant culture refers to as “development,” we may begin to sense quite clearly that “development” means degradation, destruction, extraction, and so on.

When we come to a point that it feels “useless” to apply our intelligence and creativity to reduce suffering in the World and to somehow try and make the World better, we have fallen prey to a pattern of insanity. At such a time, “useful” application of our intelligence might seem to be something totally useless to life, useless to the conditions of life, useless from the perspective of WisdomLoveBeauty, but quite useful to that same pattern of insanity, because it keeps the pattern going.[2]

This doesn’t mean we should avoid Making use of our creative intelligence in ways that feel joyful, exuberant, playful, and deeply engaging, but that obsessing over baseball statistics while the conditions of life collapse all around us seems to lack ethical sensibility, and ultimately counts as self-destructive.

How do we break the pattern of insanity? We have to realize that this pattern makes us insane, the pattern is our insanity. Thus our insanity is not “inside” us in any simple sense. Yet, as we feel unwell from it, we either withdraw “inside” to deal with it, or engage in things “outside” of us, putting our focus “out there” in a manner that also avoids the real issues. The psychologist James Hillman offers some insights into this that resonate with those of Chomsky: 

The vogue today, in psychotherapy, is the “inner child.” That’s the therapy thing — you go back to your childhood. But if you’re looking backward, you’re not looking around. This trip backward constellates what Jung called the “child archetype.” Now, the child archetype is by nature apolitical and disempowered — it has no connection with the political world. And so the adult says, “Well, what can I do about the world? This thing’s bigger than me.” That’s the child archetype talking. “All I can do is work on myself, work on my growth, my development, find good parenting, support groups.” This is a disaster for the political world, for our democracy. Democracy depends on intensely active citizens, not children. (Hillman and Ventura, 1992: 6) 

The book from which this quote comes has a telling title: We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy — And the World’s Getting Worse. Hillman does think we can shift, but probably not by means of current psychological paradigms: 

 . . . when people are out of their minds or disturbed or fucked up or whatever, in our culture, in our psychotherapeutic world, we go back to our mothers and our fathers and our childhoods.

No other culture would do that. If you’re out of your mind in another culture or quite disturbed or impotent or anorexic, you look at what you’ve been eating, who’s been casting spells on you, what taboo you’ve crossed, what you haven’t done right, when you last missed reverence to the gods or didn’t take part in the dance, broke some tribal custom. Whatever. It could be thousands of other things — the plants, the water, the curses, the demons, being out of touch with the Great Spirit. It would never, never be what happened to you with your mother and your father forty years ago. Only our culture uses that model, that myth. (17)[3] 

Development matters. No doubt. But we will perhaps come-to-see how this fascination with the child archetype relates to our loss of Wildness, and our loss of the sense of Sophia’s youthfulness, Her aliveness and aloveness that maintains a beginner’s Mind—even in an expert body. To draw narrowly from a limited set of archetypes amounts to an ignorant attempt to limit Sophia Herself, and this locks us into patterns of insanity.

Again, we must ask: How do we break the pattern of insanity? How can LoveWisdom help? This is a crucial question for us. Our thinking together, by means of these words, by means of sharing this World, has to do with that question.

In one way or another, we will have to become more visionary and more wild. We will need to resist the pattern of insanity, and begin to create ecologies of well-being, ecologies of health and healing, sacred ecologies of insight and inspiration, ecologies of peace and joy, ecologies of spiritual realization.

We will have to inquire together, and come together to sense, come into the hundred sacred senses, come together to commune and communicate in a common ground of wisdom, love, and beauty, come together to feel and sense—to make sense and to attune, to taste and dance, to open to visions of how to cultivate the whole of life onward, to evolve and transform life onward, to realize life, and realize our true nature and purpose.

That may seem lofty. In a more “practical” key, quite in alignment with that seemingly lofty tone, Chris Hedges offers some interesting thoughts:

We must sever ourselves from reliance on corporations in order to build independent, sustainable communities and alternative forms of power. The less we need corporations the freer we will become. This will be true in every aspect of our lives, including food production, education, journalism, artistic expression and work . . .

The longer we pretend [a] dystopian world is not imminent, the more unprepared and disempowered we will be. The ruling elite’s goal is to keep us entertained, frightened and passive while they build draconian structures of oppression grounded in this dark reality . . . Even if we cannot alter the larger culture, we can at least create self-sustaining enclaves where we can approximate freedom. We can keep alive the burning embers of a world based on mutual aid rather than mutual exploitation. And this, given what lies in front of us, will be a victory.[4] 

This is a good place to take another break, even if you have a practice of reading full chapters. We need to look a a few more symptoms of soul scurvy, and these will prove the most challenging to face. And yet, our discussion of these symptoms involves some of the most important things we will consider.

In reflecting on the quote above, we may see some rather positive things in what Chris Hedges has to say. No matter how on or off track we find his suggestions, we must come-to-see, come-to-seeing that we need something else, something that will allow us, will empower us to realize a way out of this mess, to open to a way precisely where we think no way can be found.

Hedges’ suggestions, at least in this brief passage, won’t really do that. We must sever our reliance on corporations (as Hedges suggests), and we must also see what we can actually rely on. Where is our true refuge?

The longer process of writing that included writing these lines has involved an ongoing witnessing of destruction and degradation. News about the state of our ecologies has gotten worse and worse. Hedges has witnessed the same unraveling as he has done his best to challenge the structures of power responsible for it, and rally the rest of us into much needed revolution. Not long after writing the passage above, he wrote this one:

There is one desperate chance left to thwart the impending ecocide and extinction of the human species. We must, in wave after wave, carry out nonviolent acts of civil disobedience to shut down the capitals of the major industrial countries, crippling commerce and transportation, until the ruling elites are forced to publicly state the truth about climate catastrophe, implement radical measures to halt carbon emissions by 2025 and empower an independent citizens committee to oversee the termination of our 150-year binge on fossil fuels. If we do not do this, we will face mass death.[5] 

Even over the past three years, an incredibly thin slice of geological time, the future has become grimmer in prospect—which really says something. Already in December of 2012, at a conference of the American Geophysical Union, Brad Werner, of the Complex Systems Lab at UC San Diego, delivered a paper titled, “Is Earth F**ked?” Such language does not occur often in science—not only the expletive, but also the urgency it conveys. Consider the full title of his paper: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism.”[6] In other words, Dr. Werner attempted to argue, by means of dynamical systems theory, that the time has come for revolt. We could therefore characterized his paper as a scientific argument for political/ecological revolution, based on the simple premise that we might like to avoid the situation in which our planet is “f**ked,” as well as the evidence of how things stand right now, and how well we seem to be doing at resolving the matter within the political, economic, and philosophical frameworks currently dominating the discourse around climate collapse.

Lest we imagine this kind of thinking an isolated case, let’s consider a blog post from 2013 by Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change and Deputy Director of the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change. In this post, Anderson argues that a price on carbon cannot keep us within the 2 degrees centigrade target which some scientists put forth as the (possibly dangerous) upper bound for relatively manageable climate shift. He writes the following: 

Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony. And if that’s too challenging to countenance we should be honest and reject 2°C as either too onerous an endeavour, or acknowledge that we lack the courage to try.[7] 

Such apparently science-based arguments (whether we accept them or not) hint at why we might want to characterize this as a crisis in philosophy—but it will take a little more work for us to understand this properly.

Not long ago, Paul Ehrlich of the Department of Biology at Stanford, and John Harte at the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley, published a paper called, “Food security requires a new revolution.”  They headline the paper as follows:

A central responsibility of societies should be supplying adequate nourishment to all. For roughly a third of the global human population, that goal is not met today. More ominously, that population is projected to increase some 30% by 2050 A central responsibility of societies should be supplying adequate nourishment to all. For roughly a third of the global human population, that goal is not met today. More ominously, that population is projected to increase some 30% by 2050. The intertwined natural and social systems, that must meet the challenge of producing and equitably distributing much more food without wrecking humanity’s life-support systems, face a daunting array of challenges and uncertainties. These have roots in the agricultural revolution that transformed our species and created civilization. Profound and multifaceted changes, revising closely-held cultural traditions and penetrating most of civilization will be required, if an unprecedented famine is to be avoided. 

And they encourage a Revolutionary Spirit: 

But events like the civil rights revolution in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 show that, when the time is ripe, sudden change is possible even when seemingly very unlikely [73]. You can be sure complex adaptive systems will produce emergent properties, and they are not necessarily all bad. What is obvious to us is, however, that if humanity is to avoid a calamitous loss of food security, a fast, society-pervading sea change as dramatic as the first agricultural revolution will be required – and one where the consequences will be carefully considered. Will change be sufficiently great not just in food getting, but in human demographics, consumption patterns, especially in the energy sector, and in norms? For the new revolution to succeed the changes will both require, and help promote synergistically, new forms of governance and of economic relationships. And only then might the resulting nutritional bounty be equitably shared over the planet.[8] 

In spite of the call for “new forms of governance and of economic relationships,” we may think the crux of this challenge relates more to the global south than to those of us in the seemingly comfortable north. But Nature’s Necessities may force us to think again.

Jason E. Smerdon of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, co-author of a recent paper on upcoming droughts in the U.S. Central Plains and Southwest, had this to say about the work done in producing that paper: “Even when selecting for the worst megadrought-dominated period [of the past], the 21st century projections make [those] megadroughts seem like quaint walks through the Garden of Eden.”[9] Quaint walks through the Garden of Eden. Startling language. And we must add to this the fact that what water we do have to drink has become dangerous. Allaire, Wu, and Lall (2018) found that millions of people in the U.S. drink unsafe water each year, with the range of threat verging up to 28% of the population in any given year. But, this marks a conservative estimate of danger, because we have not regulated all the chemicals that make their way into our water and into our bodies, our HeartMindBodyWorldCosmos. Nor have we determined the interwoven activity of these chemicals.

The Environmental Working Group found that the water in 42 states contains 141 unregulated chemicals and another 119 regulated chemicals.[10] Even if the glass of water we drink violates no established safety standard, that may only be due to the fact that what’s in the glass has no established standard, and furthermore that, while the many chemicals in our glass might be at a level declared safe by this or that standard, we have no idea how all of them together will affect us, today and over the course of many years.

A more recent report by the Environmental Integrity Group and Earthjustice (with data available only after the range of the study by Allaire, Wu, and Lall) found that ground water in 39 states contains unsafe levels of toxins from the burning of coal. The study found that 91% of coal-fired power plants have made the drinking water in their environs toxic.[11] We must see this as a kind of violence, injustice, immorality—a violation of sacredness that our culture inflicts on us and on all sentient beings. It is a cultural and structural violence—ecocidal, genocidal, suicidal—and it often unfolds in such a way that we cannot see the pattern of insanity very easily.

Things look equally challenging if not more so with respect to food. Currently, food availability remains chronically uncertain in many parts of the world, affecting billions of people, and drought will persist and intensify in areas of the U.S., the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere for the foreseeable future. A recent scientific model puts us at a permanent disjunction between supply and demand for food by 2040, which does not take into account possible tipping points we might cross, or ones might have already, unwittingly crossed. To quote Dr. Aled Jones, Director of the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University, where the model was developed:

We ran the model forward to the year 2040, along a business-as-usual trajectory . . . The results show that based on plausible climate trends . . . the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots. In this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption.[12] 

In a committee meeting Jones was quoted as saying, “The financial and economic system is exposed to catastrophic short-term risks that the system cannot address in its current form.”[13]

A paper by James Hansen and others should intensify our concerns. Our global conversation about climate collapse has typically taken 2 degrees centigrade as an upper bound, long disputed as a dangerous one. We are currently on track for 5 or 6, which has been called a “science fiction” scenario in terms of its dystopian effects. Even getting to 2 degrees will take critical insights and seemingly impossible action.[14] Thus the title of Hansen’s paper gives a clear indication of the seriousness of our situation: “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 degrees C global warming is highly dangerous.”[15] In light of all this data, we can understand why the British economist Nicholas Stern titled a recent article, “The Next Two Decades Will Make or Break Humanity—Why Are We Waiting to Fight Climate Change?”[16] Stern has said that, “Whatever way we look at it, the action we need to take is immense.”[17] And we should note again that we are not talking about avoiding far-off events.

The World Bank, not known as a bastion of radical or alarmist suggestions, recently released a report projecting that, on our present course, we will see 100 million people thrust into “extreme poverty” in just 15 years (Hallegatte et al. 2015). It behooves us to take that figure as conservative. Even setting aside everything else we know, consider the ethical implications of allowing such a thing to happen, and consider the political ramifications when that number of people decide they will not go gently. Indeed, we should pay attention to the findings indicating that we can link 40% of all deaths to pollution and environmental degradation.[18]

These contextual elements constitute an altered state of philosophy and culture, an altered state of functioning. No one has ever philosophized this way—which means no one else has functioned, has participated in and perpetuated their culture under these circumstances. Let’s not mistake that for the trivial notion that no one has ever philosophized under “precisely” these circumstances, or that no one ever philosophized in conditions of crisis (by any or all three definitions of the term).[19] Instead, we come upon the more disturbing perception that no one has philosophized with scientific evidence that the collapse of the very conditions of life on the planet could occur before their very eyes—and because of their actions, including the failure to navigate the crisis with greater wisdom, love, and beauty.

As a note to fellow professional philosophers, let me say that, it seems to me—and I am continually willing and almost hoping[20] to be wrong about this—but it seems to me that we as a discipline need to Recognize and genuinely Confront the apparent fact that we are, according to the latest science, in the midst of a mass extinction and a potentially dreadful and catastrophic shift of the conditions of life as we have known them.[21] The last mass extinction took an asteroid to accomplish. We are accomplishing this one just by living our lives, which includes virtually every aspect of how we philosophize, how we do business, how we get healthy, how we try and help ourselves and our world.

It includes the way we think, our style of consciousness, our sense of self, the way we teach and learn, the coffee we drink, the cars we drive, the books we purchase and publish, the food we eat, the phones we use, the many trips we take, the sheets we sleep in, and on, and on, and on. We are all seized by a lifethreatening case of soul scurvy, and a principle symptom seems to be our incredible incompetence at educating our citizens about this crisis, and making widely available the resources of the wisdom traditions of the world to help us.  

We cannot overstate this point: The world is falling apart because we have soul scurvy, and we precisely need the nutriments of wisdom, love, and beauty—which means the teachings and the practices found in the wisdom traditions of the world. Wisdom, love, and beauty have to do with practice, not with theory (or theory all by itself).

Our citizens need revolutionary suggestions, the very ones we find in the wisdom traditions. But self-help gurus and academic philosophers keep teaching the same crusty agendas and syllabi, even if they put a new gloss on them.

If the way we teach LoveWisdom, if the way we offer self-help, coaching, education, training, and business and technology development could heal the soul, heal the World, then I would endorse it wholeheartedly. As things stand, we seem to need a radical transformation in our way of knowing, including our way of knowing what LoveWisdom is, what health and healing are, what self-help is, what economics is and must be.

We have as few as 60 harvests left. 60. And it takes 1000 years to cultivate an inch of topsoil.[22] We face a collapse of the insect populations—and these are some of the most successful species ever to appear, so let us think how it might bode for humanity.[23] The latest U.N. report (and these reports tend to be conservative in the wrong direction) gives us, gives the world, a 12-year ultimatum.[24] We have just over a decade to avert catastrophe, but actually to still leave ourselves with serious consequences from our long history of incoherence, unskillfulness, and ignorance—our long history of not embodying our own highest values.

It can feel both heartbreaking and morally horrific to condemn so much of the human and more-than-human world to painful and irrevocable destruction. Consequently, it can feel impossible to philosophize, to think and to take skillful action, without acknowledging the level of suffering in the human and more-than-human world arising as a result of our current way of life, our current “forms of life and forms of discourse,” our current approaches to helping ourselves, each other, and the world.

Moreover, it seems we should see ourselves realistically as just another species. We have some wonderful technology, and we have proven relatively adaptable and innovative. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, we must see ourselves as a very recent (youthfully ignorant), soft-bellied, hard-headed creature who may not fare any better than the millions of other species we eliminate. Even if that seems too strange to contemplate, we can easily understand, based on the science we have, that millions of people already suffer needlessly because of climate collapse, and that we will likely see hundreds of millions or even billions more people suffering and even dying in the lifetime of almost anyone reading these words. 

We might agree to see this as a serious moral issue, worthy of the consideration of our ethicists. Or, we may think this discussion has verged into “politics” or something philosophically inappropriate. But one of the most important questions we can consider together is whether such assessments hold in the altered states of philosophy we now face, and those we may face in the future.[25]   

In this altered state of functioning, in the incredible situation we face today, our political and economic views need serious reconsideration. In some sense, political parties and economic theories no longer matter. What we “know” must become doubted, for “knowledge” has brought us to endarkment. We have come from the “enlightenment” promises regarding reason and science to the current endarkenment that has us poised on the edge of ecological catastrophe, by means of technological and economic “development” or by means of nuclear accident or war.

We now face, a “sacred duty to rebel in order to protect our homes, our future, and the future of all life on Earth.”[26] Any genuinely viable and vitalizing way out will only come from original thinking, and this thinking we do not yet wonderstand.

As things continue to fall apart, we may join our fellow citizens in fancying, perhaps to our own chagrin, that a certain intellectual tradition had some valid points which we should have incorporated into the way we have organized society, nothing in neoliberalism, Marxism, or other political or economic views will save us for two reasons.

First of all, to say it again, the nature and scale of the crises we face are unprecedented. No already-existing intellectual tradition has a ready-made answer. We find ourselves in uncharted waters. Most of us experience the daunting nature of this, how it all feels unfixable, how we need to just keep living from day to day, and how we secretly hope that, surely, someone will figure something out.

But who will figure it out? On what basis? On what will they rely? Anyone trying to solve the problems we face will very likely do so on the basis of the same kind of thinking that got us into them. Instead of joining our fellow citizens in hoping someone will figure things out, we should perhaps just begin to join our fellow citizens—in thinking, thinking as we have not yet truly arrived at it, original thinking in activity, thinking in dialogue, thinking with our original mind. As Hedges puts it:

If we do not shake off our lethargy, our anomie, and resist, our misery, despondency and feelings of helplessness will mount. We will become paralyzed. Resistance, especially given the bleakness before us, is about more than winning. It is about a life of meaning. It is about empowerment. It is a public declaration that we will no longer live according to the dominant lie. It is a message to the elites: YOU DO NOT OWN US. It is about defending our dignity, agency and self-respect. The more we free ourselves from the bondage of fear to throw up barriers along the forced march toward ecocide the more we will be enveloped by a strange kind of euphoria, one I often felt as a war correspondent documenting horrific suffering and atrocities to shame the killers. We obliterate despair in our acts of defiance, even if our victories are Pyrrhic. We reach out to those around us. Courage is contagious. It is the spark that ignites mass revolt. And we should, even if we fail, at least choose how we will die. Resistance is the only action left that will allow us to remain psychologically whole. And it is the only action left that has any hope of halting the wholesale extinction of the human race, not to mention most other species.[27] 

Even though we may agree with much of what Hedges invites us to consider, we should keep our mind of LoveWisdom, our heart of WisdomLoveBeauty, and move with great care, so that we do not allow the old thinking to perpetuate itself. Recognizing this, we can contemplate some of the more troubling symptoms of soul scurvy. We will do that in a future post.

#wisdomloveandbeauty 
#lovewisdom 
#ecology 
#ecoliteracy 
#ecospirituality 
#ecosensualawareness 
#philosophy 
#cultivatingthemindofbeauty 
#creativityasapracticeoflove 
#creativityasanactoflove 
#consulting #coaching 
#communityoflife
#sacred
#sacredcreativeordering
#hundredsacredsenses
#enteringtheheartofwonder
#originalmind
#windhorsemandala
#windhorsewisdom

[1] Indeed, hope can be exceedingly dangerous. As Ronald Wright (2004) puts the matter:

“Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create even more dangerous messes. Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.” (123) In a foundational way, hope can create distance between ourselves and reality. The basic energy of pushing or pulling tends to go against reality rather than with it. When we push, it typically arises as either overt or highly subtle forms of fear, anger, aggression. When we pull, it typically arises as overt or subtle forms of hope, craving, clinging. LoveWisdom begins at the end of hope and fear, when we accept things as they are—without falling into passivity, but, on the contrary, finally unleashing our full empowerment and participation in life.

[2] This and the previous sentence could probably stand bold print, but that seems a bit shouty. This situation has reached crisis. We should say it again and again: We face a Spiritual Emergency of the first order.

[3] Recall here, again, the WEIRDness of the dominant culture: “western,” “educated,” industrialized, “rich,” and “democratic”. We have to put all but one of those words in quotes.

[4] https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-world-to-come/

[5] https://www.truthdig.com/articles/extinction-rebellion/

[6] Abstract available at http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012AGUFMEP32B..04W

[7] Available at: http://kevinanderson.info/blog/why-carbon-prices-cant-deliver-the-2c-target/

[8] Ehrlich, Paul R. and Harte, John, “Food security requires a new revolution,” International Journal of Environmental Studies, 29 Jul 2015, DOI: 10.1080/00207233.2015.1067468

[9] http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/3232

[10] https://www.ewg.org/agmag/2005/12/national-tap-water-quality-database

[11] https://www.environmentalintegrity.org/reports/coals-poisonous-legacy/

[12] http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42191.htm 

[13] Ibid.

[14] See, for instance, Bill McKibben’s, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” Rolling Stone, July 19, 2012. It is McKibben who rightly calls 5 degrees a “science fiction” scenario.

[15] Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss., 15, 20059–20179, 2015, DOI:10.5194/acpd-15-20059-2015  The recent COP21 in Paris produced a document acknowledging 1.5 degrees Celsius as a critical target, but it contains no binding and actionable plan for making this happen—and, again, we are on track for well more than 2 degrees at this point.

[16] http://www.alternet.org/books/next-two-decades-will-make-or-break-humanity-why-are-we-waiting-fight-climate-change

[17] http://climatenewsnetwork.net/stern-warns-that-humanity-is-at-climate-crossroads/

[18] Pimentel et al. (2007). Ecology of Increasing Diseases: Population Growth and Environmental Degradation. Human Ecology. DOI 10.1007/s 10745-007-9128-3

[19] As environmental philosopher Dale Jamieson put it: “The core problem is that this is a completely unprecedented problem.”  (http://www.climatecentral.org/news/fifty-years-after-warning-climate-talks-19637) It does not seem that philosophers in the academy have grappled or wrangled or turned to face this with any degree of sufficiency. Though some may do so, we need a mass movement of LoveWisdom . . . professors of philosophy must come together to become philosophers—and we need each other for this.

[20] I wouldn’t go so far as to “hope,” since philosophy begins at the end of hope, and at the end of fear.

[21] Ceballos et al., “Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction.” Sci. Adv. 2015; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1400253

[22] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/

and https://www.monbiot.com/2015/03/25/3703/   But the reader may like to do some further research. We have a Soil Crisis Altogether with our Soul Crisis. And 60 harvests might be generous.

[23] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature

and https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/20/insectageddon-farming-catastrophe-climate-breakdown-insect-populations  In the latter piece, Monbiot characterizes farming and fishing as more dangerous than “global warming” and general pollution. Our Way of Knowing Farming is fully infected with our Soul scurvy.

[24] https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/

[25] “Altered state” indicates that the Context of philosophy has altered or changed significantly, and it carries the same connotation in our present Context to say, “We are philosophizing in an altered state” as it would to say that when we had gotten drunk or taken a strong dose of sleeping pills.

[26] https://www.brightest.io/cause/extinction-rebellion/activity/international-rebellion-for-climate-justice-global/

[27] https://www.truthdig.com/articles/extinction-rebellion/