AfterThought

We begin with where the podcast started: one of the characteristics of the contemporary world, which is both an active contributor to, as well as a passive reflection of, its being in crisis, is that in contrast to the modern worldview’s ideal of some magisterial overview, our current moment refuses any such overview. Such an overview appears now as impossible and implausible; part of the modern-Western-cum-ultramodern-global mythology we need to put behind us. Instead, we are all caught up inside this global moment, caught up in a plurality of incompatible worldviews and contradictory stories, incapable of escaping our inherence in this complex diversity and forced to make our way with great uncertainty. How to live in this moment, without resorting to either hopelessness or despair or inauthentic hope, with the courage, resolve,  and above all, the compassion, that is needed? And beyond living in this moment, how are we to transform ourselves in the midst of the ending of the world such that a new human being emerges, ready to live – viably, sustainably, resiliently - in the new world that will come after the ending of the old?

(Note: many of the references made to hope and the psychology of climate change in this episode were already given in the notes accompanying Episode 5.)

A couple further references on hope:

Joanna Macy (who was mentioned in Episode 5 as well) remains a psychologist of global climate change par excellence: https://www.joannamacy.net/ .For some of her work on “active hope”, see https://www.activehope.info/joanna-macy.html

Jonathan Lear’s analysis of hope for the Crow nation as it struggles to survive is rich, deep, and pertinent: Jonathan Lear. (2006). Radical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation.

Relative to references made to a non-ego actor invokes the work of Bruno Latour and “actor-network” theory, Donna Haraway, and others, that helpfully focus on breaking down nature-culture, passive mechanical natural subject vs active conscious human agent, dichotomies.

For example:

Latour, Bruno. (2017). Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the new climactic regime.

Haraway, Donna. (2008). When species meet.

In this episode, (part one of our two-part conclusion), we aim to tie together – like a nice bow on a Christmas present, know what we mean? – a number of themes (“thoughtlines”) raised throughout the series that present a diverse number of strategies for thinking the present. We engage the notion of thinking strategically relative to scale, and compassionate readings as preferable to egocentric ones. We recur to the theme of “sitting with” rather than getting things done, a spiritual demand the ego resists. How to affirm community rather than technology; the importance of thinking in critical, two-sided terms rather than in polarized terms; and equally, the importance of identifying resources to deal with the present moment rather than a focus on solutions.

The identification of the ego with power structures greater than itself, raises a whole host of questions around ego identity as healthy vs unhealthy; around tribal identity and tribalism and its transformation with the emergence of civilization. What role does mythology play relative to this complex set of issues? What about the psychology activated when confronting civilizational collapse? Are there psychologies that recognize consciousness beyond that of the conventional ego?

References

Civilizational collapse gets named on a few occasions, explicitly citing Jared Diamond as best-known example.

Joseph Tainter, 1988, “The collapse of complex societies”, is perhaps “the classic” that begins a subfield of study on the theme.

Jared Diamond’s book is from 2005: “Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed”

Reference is made in this episode to conventional psychologies of the ego wherein health means well-adapted to society, over against more radical or spiritual psychologies that see the ego itself as the problem and society as problematic enough such that being adapted to it is unhealthy. Arguably, the whole psychodynamic tradition, from Freud to Jung as its founders, right up the whole field of “transpersonal psychology”, plays on the conventional/spiritual distinction. (See, for example, Freud's "Civilization and its discontents" (1930) from which this episode derives its title. )

Norman O. Brown brilliantly explored within psychoanalysis some of these themes in his works “Life against death: The psychoanalytical meaning of history” (1959) and “Love’s Body” (1966)

An example of that distinction (overt in the title already) is by Daniel Brown, Jack Engler, and Ken Wilber, 1986, “Transformations of Consciousness: Conventional and Contemplative Perspectives on Development”

A favorite psychologist of mine (i.e. Chris) who articulates the notion of being "positively maladjusted" to unhealthy society, alongside the theme of ego-death or “disintegration” as potentially positive is Kazimierz Dabrowski (“Positive disintegration”, 1964). See the website https://positivedisintegration.com/

Terror-management theory also gets mentioned: for this theory, see Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski, 2015, “The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life”.  https://ernestbecker.org/resources/terror-management-theory/

Power manifests in a regularly recurring historical pattern: when there is a successful critique of the dominant power and its institutions and accompanying mythology, the critique in turn becomes institutionalized as the new center of power and new mythologizing and in that process falls into a corrupted form of the original.   This pattern emerges with civilization, disrupting the community basis that is normative for the human ego: as collective power structures scale up, the ego scales up its identification. Thus the origins of this recurring historical pattern are evolutionary and psychological: dating back to the emergence of homo sapiens sapiens around 200, 000 years ago, the individual ego identifies with collective power structures greater than itself in order to counter its weakness and anxiety over survival. Today collective power - modern highly industrialized technology supporting an economy of infinite growth - has attained a global scale of destructiveness, and we must divest from our identifications with it.

In this episode, our deep dive into the Axial Age meets the podcast theme of the importance of scale.  The themes of thinking at different time scales, our effort of following a "thoughtline" through changing historical scales, is provided its psychological underpinning: scaling up is an identity-project undertaken by the human ego.  To shift away from operating at global industrial scale, which operates above all through a consumptive appeal to the ego, towards instead thinking, living, and investing in our local communities, requires massive political reorienting premised on a deep economic transformation away from consumption. Beneath these massive changes, is a correspondingly powerful spiritual and psychological challenge to deny ourselves – a challenge which makes the inward turn of spiritual practice and its transformative potential indispensable.

References:

Alternative economic models were mentioned, Schumacher’s “Small is beautiful” explicitly:

Schumacher, E. F. (1973) Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if people mattered. http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/

A contemporary proposal is Kate Raworth’s “doughnut economics”:

https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/

Samuel Alexander has done a great amount of work on “degrowth” and “sufficiency economy”:

http://samuelalexander.info/

Helena Norbert-Hodge has articulated a powerful defense of “local futures” and a focus on the “economics of happiness” (along with a 2011 film of that name)

https://www.localfutures.org/

“Voluntary simplicity” is a theme that interweaves all of the above; see http://simplicitycollective.com/or the 1981 book of the same name by Duane Elgin.

We continue our discussion of the Axial Age begun in the previous episode, in terms of how our current time is (and is not!) a type of second Axial Age. Some key aspects of the Axial Age - as a highly self-conscious response to perceived crisis, as critique of existing power, as presenting an alternative spiritual vision of what could be, the marginality of its positioning relative to centers of power, and the crucial importance of living in small-scale communities and undertaking spiritual practices of meditation or contemplation aimed at transforming the self through overcoming the ego - are engaged and related to our current times.

References: the following are some examples of discussion of  the present as a second Axial Age

Ewert Cousins , 1992, Christ of the 21st Century (New York, NY: Continuum).

Adam Bucko & Rory McEntee, 2015, New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Living (New York: Orbis).

Ilia Delio, 2020, Re-enchanting the Earth (New York: Orbis).

This episode introduces our listeners to "the Axial Age", the time period of the middle first millennium BC.  The adjective "Axial" is derived from the notion of an "axis" as a dividing line, but within history. Karl Jaspers coins the phrase, although the notion of a "dividing line within history" around 500 BC was a scholarly thesis since the 1700s. It serves as a precedent for our time: it, too, was a time of "the world in multiple crises". Specifically, many of the great Old World civilizations of Eurasia undergo their own version of a "great acceleration" of power, with attendant volatility. The myths, religion, and spirituality, of those civilizations, undergo a revolutionary transformation.  Visionaries of the time articulate the crisis as imperiling our humanity, criticize the politics and religions of the time for their role in developing such dehumanizing power, and argue for a higher spirituality that breaks through the mythical ceiling into claims of universality and transcendence.

References:

Karl Jaspers first presents "the Axial Age thesis" as such in his post-war book:

Jaspers, K. (1953). The Origin and Goal of History. Yale University Press.

I (Chris) finished a book last year on the Axial Age:

Peet, C. (2019). Practicing Transcendence: Axial Age Spiritualities for a World in Crisis. Palgrave.

The following books/anthology are relatively recent, excellent introductions and overviews:

Armstrong, K. (2006). The Great Transformation: The beginning of our religious traditions. Knopf.

Baskin, K., & Bondarenko, D. (2014). The Axial Ages of World History: Lessons for the 21st Century. Emergent.

Bellah, R. (2011). Religion in human evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Belknap.

Bellah, R., & Joas, H. (Eds.) (2012). The Axial Age and its consequences. Belknap.

Globalization means that economically, industrially, technologically, all humans have become interconnected. In this episode we argue the other side to the globalization story is a great diversity that we summarize as living in different cultural, religious, spiritual, metaphysical, realities - in a word,  different mythological worlds. Globalization from this side of the story means the coexisting together of different mythologies without reconciling their differences. How to understand this plurality? What is its relation to scientific objectivity, and to claims of universality? Recognizing the climate emergency, how to undertake a solidarity of action without reconciling all of our differences? Our discussion continues to think the theme of mythology developed earlier, but now pursues this thoughtline in the contemporary context of a pluralistic globe.

Resources

Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade are two of several twentieth-century scholars who develop a deep insight into myth.

Campbell, Joseph. (1949). The hero with a thousand faces. Pantheon Books.

Eliade, Mircea. (1963). Myth and reality. Harper & Row.

Campbell also features in The Power of Myth, a PBS documentary series in which he's interviewed by Bill Moyers.

The phrase “overshoot” refers to the recognition that since 1970 human demand globally on earth systems (our ecological footprint) exceed what those systems can supply (the Earth's biocapacity). (Since 1987 an “Earth Overshoot Day” has been implemented, as the day in that year when we exceed our annual resource budget.)

See, for example:

Catton, William. (1980). Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. University of Illinois.

The 1972 Club of Rome Report on “the limits to growth” is regularly cited as one of the “classic” articulations of overshoot”

Meadows, Donella, Meadows, Dennis, Randers, Jørgen, and Behrens III, William W. (1972). The limits to growth. Universe Books.

If key to the modern Western worldview was the discovery of deep space, deep time, deep process, and deep consciousness, and a corresponding conception of no limits, what follows after that worldview’s demise in 1945 with WWII undoing European power? Does a new worldview and mythology emerge? (No, not exactly, but the old one unravels, and is unravelling...) Acknowledging that myth can mean everything from an impossible story proved false to a profound articulation of our existential belonging, our discussion ranges across a diversity of understandings of myth within our globalizing moment.