Ten Tips on How to Save the World

photo from NASA/Wikimedia

I’ve used popular jargon for the title, because, as you’ll notice below, this is not political science, or any science at all. This is a riposte against the endless hours of brutal entertainment that suggests only might makes right. To save the world might be a heroic endeavour but I don’t believe it requires a Napoleonic campaign. It does, however, require the engagement of an alert mind and open heart. 

The instructions are simple. Learn from the bees, use your caring mind to gaze at the world, reclaim your power, reclaim your nature, hold onto curiosity, celebrate your creativity, give up blaming, live from a place of love, acknowledge your political self, and honour your spirit.

1. Learn from the bees.

Marilyn Hamilton, CEO of Integral City, told a children’s story not long ago, that is easy to remember.  Three key strategies enable bee hives to survive, which can teach us how to sustain the human hive  – take care of you, take care of others, take care of this place. Our ancestors learned how to do this but sophisticated social systems have alienated us from our own capacity to manage the hive. However, world crises shows we must re-engage in the process now.  

2. Use your caring mind to gaze at the world.

Look closely at the operating system, or the ‘apparatus’ as Simone Weil put it. Read ideas and opinions wherever you can find them. Ask yourself who benefits? Expand your gaze beyond your own immediate interests. Prepare to be disturbed but not defeated.

2. Reclaim power.

Power and all its parts: politics, wealth, language, science, economics, institutional religion, is not evil. What is evil is the way institutions have been corrupted from their original purpose – to serve civil society – into clubs of privilege. Good leadership is the conduit of responsible power which demonstrates humility, vulnerability, and serves the greater good.  Good leaders spend their powers to affirm and highlight the power in all. Infinite power is not a zero sum game, it is natural, inclusive and intelligent.

3. Reclaim our nature.

We are resourceful workers and stakeholders in our society. We are not a resource or a job description. We are not left, right, conservative or liberal – we are organic, politically mobile beings.  Labels are assigned to influence and control masses. We have courage, fear, anger, love and wisdom but they are not commodities, they are strengths that emerge and hide. The deadliest weapon of oppression is that which turns humanity and all of nature into a thing, a resource.

 

4. Hold onto Curiosity.

This is what keeps us exploring, examining, interrogating the conditions we live under or in. As long as curiosity is alive we shall never be content with serving an oppressive and corrupt social order.  

5. Celebrate your Creativity.

Music, theatre, farmers’ markets, poetry, gardens, maps, new political parties, conversations –  are the means of expressing and sharing our humanity.  Art is the what, where, how and who of our species as it yearns and evolves.

6. Give up blaming.

Blaming is not problem solving and the problem is not what other people do.  To solve problems we need to re-engage our power to care creatively, with curiosity and love.

8. Live from a place of Love

Love breaks apart the structures of false hierarchies. It demands attention to suffering and violence, and calls for healing. It insists on life as the source of knowledge.  Love is what drives great minds to take courageous stands outside of their particular disciplines for the greater good. Love is the openness to pain that makes injustice, corruption, cynicism and oppression unbearable.

9. Life is political.

You are an integral, intelligent, reflective part of a larger organism. Whether we survive as a species depends on protecting our earthly home from a system that enables a few egos to hold this planet ransom for the sake of temporary profit. There is no escape from politics. Its apparatus has been built on a grandiose delusion that refuses to see the natural world as sacred, and ourselves dependent upon its health. To be apolitical is to be a doctor standing at the bed of a dying patient, refusing to be involved because the disease is dirty. To dismiss the world stage and our part in it is to lobotomize the future.

10. Honour the spirit

The spirit is our energy. It imparts our intentions before we see them. It allows us to dream and care for the world beyond our own life span.  Imagination and love is the immortal  legacy we leave for our great-grandchildren.

These are just my thoughts.  What are yours?  What would you list as the top ten tips on saving the world?

As of Today

Yesterday I attended a memorial service for a man who was, and still is, loved among family, friends, and members of the congregation he helped to build.

From the time he knew his death was approaching to the planning of the memorial and the actual celebration of his life, the lives of about thirty people were consumed into creating this event.  People who held off sleep, housekeeping and other rituals of their life to think about, write, communicate, select, travel, arrange chairs and tables, cater, and clean up afterwards.  For the closest members of the family, including the man whose life was celebrated, the effort was extraordinary.  In a way it took whole life times across generations to come to this. Learning, striving, struggle, fear and joy, and ultimately the conclusion of this celebration was proof of the abundance of love.

As I think about the interdependent web in which I live, I see the same elements, the many celebrations of life, the art of living.  These include the skills of planning a dinner with love, cleaning the house and washing the dishes – all to celebrate the joy of food with company. I see the theatre festival built on thousands of hours of learning how to  write, stage, advertise, to garner an army of volunteers with lifetime training in their craft.  I see generations of scientific study and the institutions of learning that have endured centuries of change to produce the best doctors, lawyers, engineers and teachers, to sustain a functional civil society.

Our own children who have branched out to develop their own lives, struggle to nurture their own families which include their closest friends.  I think about their constant focus on researching and caring which all began with two egos who fell in love and decided to invest in life itself. I look on all these things and think – what a wonderful world! What wonderful surprising creatures we are. 

From the blessings of my life I have learned that building community requires me to listen to others whether I agree with them or not, to share my honest thoughts with them, to help others by working with their needs instead of giving advice, to co-operate, to do no harm, to find common ground and to celebrate their successes.  The energy I have learned to use in community is shared leadership.  

Then I turn on the radio and learn about another politicianwho won an election, not on nurturing the values most of us use every day, but on a campaign of fear and intolerance.  If I am to believe he was fairly elected how is it the voters give themselves wholeheartedly to life yet vote against the energies that nurture it?

How is it that we see power working in our lives when we work together, and yet we select the voices of intolerance, cruelty and bigotry as if the only power we have is to vote against those who are different.   How is it that we don’t get it when we are oppressed by transnational corporations, the 1%, the power elite – yet   we are outraged that those with less than us, may need help?

This is the gap in our understanding of how our power works.  It’s easy to gain more influence by funding movements built on fear and hate if power is already centralized in a system of values that keeps the masses unaware of their own value, their capacity to organize and to create the communities they want.

How do we teach people who celebrate life that the power they have can be good, as long as they don’t abuse it?  I guess that first we have to learn we are part of one family -  the whole interdependent web of existence.

Who Will Stand With the Innocents?

By Sam Hamill

"Fifty years ago, I found myself in the war-ravaged former nation of Okinawa, where some of the fiercest battles of the Pacific War had taken place, and where I began to learn of the true atrocities of the atomic bombing of Japan. I also heard there from fellow Marines first-hand accounts of the race wars in my own country, about lynchings, about Bull Conner’s dogs set on nonviolent civil rights marchers, stories I had known only from brief news accounts. I learned about how the impoverished people of Vietnam had driven out the imperialist French and now faced a growing American presence as they struggled toward their own democratic self-rule. President Eisenhower had spoken of our need “to protect our investments in tin and tungsten.”"

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Writing for Peace - a message from Sam Hamill