Can we bridge the divide between the activist and the interior / personal side of ourselves? I think we’ll need to if we’re to deal with the intense challenges we now face. The intense challenges are the steps in the transition to a low-carbon future, steps we must collectively take, willingly or no. The problem isn’t a lack of technology so much as a lack of evolutionary preparedness in us. Integrating the activist and the interior / personal side of ourselves is a challenge we’ve scarcely considered. We’re going to.
Let me share with you how I came to notice this. For quite a few years I was active with friends in men’s groups and in ideas about men’s place in society. There were clearly two different constituencies of men who were involved at all in “the men’s movement”. One the “mythopoetic” men, were the drummers and dreamers who wanted to heal their wounds and be restored to a lost brotherhood and a larger circle of meaning. I’m most comfortable in this group myself. The other gang consisted mainly of men who’d lost their wives, children, finances, or all three and hadn’t seen it coming. For the most part, the activist group were angry and had little sense of their part – they already knew who needed changing. The personalists wanted to change – or at least heal – themselves.
Of course there were men who had a foot in both camps, perhaps one after an other, but by and large that split was evident. Through Everyman Men’s Journal, I was part of an attempt to hold space for the two over a number of years, one that only can be said to have failed.
Now as we face the biggest collective challenge of human history, a concentrated effort to make the transition to a low-carbon future, we need to mobilize the greatest resource at our disposal – ourselves. We need to approach the problem as if the fate of the planet and our grandchildren depend upon solving it, because they literally do. Else we’ll move from having a solveable problem to an unsolveable predicament that future generations, if they can carry on at all, will have to deal with. This must not happen. We’ll need both activist and personal smarts and skill to succeed.
The scope of the problem
Is our preference for one side or the other a problem we can learn to overcome, or a predicament we’re saddled with, one that is hardwired into us and can’t be changed? The answer involves understanding how we came to be such great problem solvers in the first place. We did it by solving innumerable evolutionary problems all of which took for granted a world with competition for resources, an “other” who had different interests than ourselves, and a wider field one could escape too.
No more. Now competition to get the most beggars us all, there is no other we can beat back without harming ourselves, and no place of escape. There’s no way forward except solving the critical situation we’re in, no Plan B.
Plan A has many descriptions but all involve dramatically reducing our carbon footprint. It’s simple and overwhelmingly scientifically “true” that it looks like getting ourselves down below 350 ppm CO2. This task dwarfs the challenge faced by protagonists in World War 2. Really it comes down to us figuring out what we’re going to do under the threat of an approaching tsunami.
Except that you can see a tsunami. Our peril is much slower but quite possibly as dangerous – or more so because the results don’t stop a mile from shore. Everything in us will scream to save ourselves with what we can. But everything that will work looks like cooperation, like working together.
Both the personal and the activist sides of ourselves will be impotent without the contribution of the other. The personal side needs to move past personal-enlightenment only (I spent a lot of time here!) – or at its worst assuaging its ego and licking its wounds – to a deep engagement with the challenge of our time. The activist part needs to understand the human dynamics involved, how deep is the challenge to who we think we are.
When we define the problem as rising CO2, we give it value in the outer world; we define it as an activist’s problem. And it is that! But it’s also a personal problem that’s right in our face. Evolutionarily we didn’t have to solve that problem before because we evolved without experiencing the world’s limits. But now we’re up against those limits and further ignorance is a survival issue, for our children if not for ourselves. (In fact, millions in the developing world are up against this survival issue right now.) Our plight results from our failure to understand the interconnected world.
One can imagine that every civilization that went global would come up against these same limits. It’s a crisis point in evolution and a necessary one. I imagine it’s part of “the way it is,” the way that evolution works. It gets to this point and then there’s a need for a jump.
Collectively we don’t see it yet and we don’t see our part in it. If we did, we’d be doing something about it. We’d be working together as surely as we would if an earthquake destroyed the block. But we’re not working together and meanwhile the doors of opportunity swing slowly shut, one after another – we’re already in an adaptation game, not a halting resource and climate effects game – we’re not yet taking the lesson.
Except we are! Everywhere the movement to waking to this plight is around. It’s a vast re-education process and we’re all in it. Every moment we make a new micro-decision, make the mouse click, make the purchase, say the word. Every moment is evolution’s next moment offering us the opportunity to make the evolutionary jump.
What do do?
It would be insulting and unhelpful to hold out a simple solution to this problem. Each person will have to find his or her own way.
But evolving local mini-cultures that can hold both sides of the divide would be a good thing to work on. Small groups in which people are welcome to show up with exactly what they’ve got, the good, bad, and ugly, while holding a willingness to act.
For me acting locally on common issues is the shortest and most likely path to bringing the two together. There’s room for deep feelings and room for celebration and room for work on practical issues pertaining to survival – growing local food for example. This movement is already well underway, by many names. I call it relocalization but it’s permaculture, Transition Towns, the local food movement, 350.org, Via Campesina, World Social Forum, and many more. In another way, it’s all of our longings.
We need cultures (in the sense of growing mediums) that can grow humans able and willing to act out of enlightened self-interest and for the good of the whole because that two-sided approach is needed now. People are turning to it because it’s vitally important and they want to do what’s vitally important.
