I think it was E.M. Forster who, when asked about the critical public response to A Passage to India said that 'humankind cannot bear too much reality.' His quote forms the issue I am grappling with in this section - the intention is to get this argument out in the front end of the text and then move forward. So its a bit of the book that will come early on, perhaps to be revisited in the concluding remarks. I need help with this section - big help!!
The problem is how to explore in a realistic way the issues that for most of us are simply too difficult to consider in any practical manner because either we don't believe what we are being told about, or we simply don't recognise the arguments being placed in front of us, they are either too abstract, or too big to feel we can deal with it in any personal way, or they are too far into the future, or they just represent too much of a threat to the way we do things...
I have recently been reading the work of Otto Scharmer from the MIT, USA. In making sense of his arguments I have found he points to a very important issue at the heart of our existing organisations. Scharmer says, 'Most leaders are unable to recognise, let alone change, the structural habits of attention used in their organisations.' His argument is that leaders have a significant blind spot that impedes their capacity to 'see' the world in which they operate in a fully rounded sense. This blind spot exists not only in 'our collective leadership but also in our everyday social interactions. We are blind to the source dimension from which effective leadership and social action come into being.' Scharmer explores in great depth the means through which such a blind spot can be uncovered, primarily examining how people attend to and respond to the situations in which they find themselves. In reading Scharmer's work, particularly in his eloquent exposition of Theory U, I became more aware of the impediment that I regularly face when attempting to explore issues related to sustainable retreat. It is not that people don't care, it is simply that their habits of attention are busy dealing with other priorities, and so the blind spot of sustainable retreat is amplified as just other noise, rather than something that they take into their 'inner self' to use Scharmer's term, they don't feel the message.
In work closely related to this theme, a recent lecture by David Selby from the Centre for Sustainable Futures in Plymouth, UK, connected to the notion of contemporary societies inability to deal with pain. His work has recognised how a consumerist society feels despair when confronted with argument that undermines everything upon which it is built and as a result it disregards the possibility that there might be bad news around the corner, preferring the fix of progress. The expression of critical views of existing culturally held norms puts most people in a state of personal anxiety. Our western culture is built upon the importance of the strong individual, and there is little place in that environment for emotion, fear, and the pain of views that resonate differently from the status quo. It is interesting because it could also represent a fear of connection, a fear that expressing concern in the world is a weakness - in effect a cultural blind spot.
It takes us into a strange place in the argument, because there is a great sense of defeatism surrounding the whole discourse of climate change, and sustainable ecological retreat - we are relegated to the role of victim before we even begin to try to do anything and make any changes. I think this is a result of our disconnection with the world. As Selby says, grimly, ' we live in a dark age where no one wishes to entertain the notion of global heating, we are unable to attend to the darkness because the addictive and compulsiveness of consumerism keeps us in denial and we choose instead to befriend our pathology rather than deal with the darkness.' Now I don't intend to dwell on the pain debate in this book, as I am not equipped to pursue the thinking very well. But it is interesting and it is a voice that is coming from many quarters in the form of reframing and transforming the discourse of change and I think that this is our route forward - to explore interconnectedness and use it as the language of re-connection with feeling as well as acting for change, and a common starting point can be emotion, in this case mourning, grief and renewal.
If the interdependence of all life remains just a mental concept, without power to affect our attitudes and behaviors, unless it takes on some emotional reality, we will I think remain quite stuck. As Joanna Macy says, 'We need to feel it, and our capacity to feel is stunted if we block out the pain within us over what is happening to our world. If we use "mourning" for the expression of moral pain for what humans are inflicting on the natural world this pain for the world includes not only grief, but fear, anger, and despair as well. Because these emotions are not encouraged in conventional society, and because they reveal the truth of our interconnectedness with all life, we allow them full play.' (Macy from the forthcoming: The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature).
Reconnecting us with our true capacity to care, for each other, and for the planet seems to awaken us to the interconnectedness of all life forms, our deep ecology. In the work of Scharmer it explores this in leadership, in Selby's work it comes strongly through in the importance of attending to the denial. I have come to see this way of seeing as an explanatory principle both for the pain we experience on behalf of the natural world, and for the sense of belonging that arises when we stop repressing that pain. It is I think, ultimately an expression of great hope, ... but we have to deal with it - personally and collectively.
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