Can we “deep think” our way out of our messes?
Apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and other forms of dystopian thinking seems to dominate both our fiction and our daily news cycle. “Fiction” includes movies, TV shows, poetry, photography, paintings, and music as well as prose. Such strains have run thru human thinking since Ancient times, of course, as one only has to look to the various holy books alone. Our obsession with all things “doom and gloom” as worldwide catastrophes, however, dealing not only with the global collapse of human civilization but with the extinction of our species, with omnicide of the biosphere, and with even the destruction of the planet itself seems to emerge en masse during the First and Second World Wars and the Great Depression. This fixation really took off during the Cold War and became even darker during the Global Long War on Terror, the Great Recession, and the unexpected rise of proto-fascist authoritarianism. The End Times have always been nigh, but never more so than at any time right now. What must we do then to deepen our thoughts, open our hearts, extend our minds, and expand our collective consciousness?
Edith Boulding, a Norwegian-American woman traumatized by the Second World War, once wrote our society suffers from “temporal exhaustion.” She became a Quaker and a peace activist during the war and went on to become a sociologist. As such she sought to understand peace and what was required for peace by first understanding the nature of conflict, violence, and war.
“If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future,” Dr. Boulding wrote in 1978. Her words are telling, prescient even. The notion there is only now, nothing else exists in this moment already passing other than the present, so be here now because the future is now therefore all that matters right now and right here is the place and time of here-now grew increasingly popular during the latter half of the Twentieth Century. As technologies developed to rapidly interconnect all of us around the world our sense of time sped up. Going go-go-go! 26 hours a day 8 days a week 400 days a year discombobulated us. Thinking broadly across so many time zones as we bombarded ourselves with the chaotic conflation of real news, fake news, daily news cycles, and instantaneous social media literally left us physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually exhausted.
We were are so overconnected we became disconnected. We became disconnected from our selves as well. The looked-for novelty compressions and transformations of the controversial Time Wave Novelty Theory championed by the late ethnobotanist and psychonaut Dr. Terence McKenna resulted not in any kind of ascendance but crashed and burned in ridicule, shredded maths, and then promptly forgotten. Neither time nor history ended, however, despite the increasingly chaotic nature of our own seemingly out-of-control complexity. “Temporal exhaustion,” indeed. To crash against the End of Time would have been the eternal Rest of Death so many may’ve yearned for but whose permanence so few desired. So we carry forward as we speed toward futures we simultaneously yearn to know yet dread to behold.
The BBC crafted “Deep Civilisation,” a multimedia dive into the depths of our species’ relationship dynamics with itself, with civilization, and the overlapping cascade of crises avalanching down upon our planet. “Deep Civilisation” challenges us to consider the long view and what steps to take so as “to think in deep time.” It’s an excellent and provocative presentation. Some of the BBC links are listed below in Sources.
Furthermore, organizations such as The Long Now Foundation and its building of 10,000 year clocks and seminar trainings on how to think long-term challenge us further with seeing our short-attention span as a pathology we must overcome as we struggle to overcome conventionally-recognized pathologies such as infectious diseases and cancers and in turn recognize aging as a disease. We will not solve our worldwide, long-term wicked problems with short-term thinking. We will fail if we continue to shrug and say, “Whatever, frakkit.” Humanity will surely fail if we stay addicted to instant gratification and hypertribalistic nihilism. We need to sit a bit with long-count clocks, reexamine the nature of true peace, and not jump up to fight, flee, or freeze every time the sky falls a little bit closer.
Sit still before dancing. Aye, sit still for a time before jumping up to dance and to dance mentally alert, emotionally aware, and with all of our bodily senses wide open. We cannot ascend above, submit to, or transform our global challenges. Instead we must face them together and resolve them! To do anything else gambles away life for premature death.
William Dudley Bass
Friday 24 January 02020
Tuesday 28 January 02020
Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Earth
Sol
Sources:
BBC ones here:
“Deep Civilisation,” The BBC Future Series:
http://www.bbc.com/future/columns/deep-civilisation,
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-to-civilisation-collapse,
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190218-the-lifespans-of-ancient-civilisations-compared,
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170418-how-western-civilisation-could-collapse,
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190705-bbc-future-at-hay-festival-how-to-think-longer-term.
The Long Now Clock and Library organizations:
The Long Now Foundation, http://longnow.org.
The 10,000 Year Clock, http://longnow.org/clock/.
See my earlier recent article, “Cooperation and Genocide in Concurrent Homo species,” https://williamdudleybass.com/cooperation-genocide-concurrent-homo-species.
Copyright © 02020 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.