Humility

"Along with humility, we should be grateful for nature’s generosity, something I’ve learned from Indigenous peoples. They acknowledge the source of their well-being, clean air, clean water, clean food and clean energy — all things that are created, cleansed or replenished by the web of life around us. In the urbanized industrial world we inhabit, we tend to think the economy is the source of all that matters to us, and so we have little regard for what we’re doing to the natural systems that sustain us. It’s time to see with new eyes." David Suzuki, Environmentalism is a Way of Being.

The Sacred Masculine

Back in November I posted this quote from Christopher von Rueden. This View of Life: If Trump Wins the Presidency the Evolution of Men's Political Psychology Will be to Blame.

"We are more likely to hear “Be a man!” than “Be a woman!” in our daily conversations, in literature and in film, or in the news media. This is because manhood tends to be treated as more precarious than womanhood. It is typical of human societies that men are not granted the status of manhood simply by being male. Rather, manhood is achieved or lost, depending on display of competitive ability, skill, generosity, or other traits that signal value to others."

Since then I keep thinking about the sacred masculine as a contrast to misogynist thugs promoting hate on social media and right wing rallies. If gang rape, beating your wife, spewing epithets, humiliating others, comes to represent masculinity then we, as a species, are truly lost.

So I look for examples of masculinity which values rather than exploits life.

I think of David Suzuki who has never given up on the environment. His program The Nature of Things has helped to take an issue that was mainly in the realm of scientists and get us to care about it. That tenacity is a sign of sacred masculinity.

I think of Jack Layton who brought politics back to the essential struggle: "love is better than hate, hope is better than fear" at a time when cynicism seemed the only option.

I think of the 14th Dalai Lama who travelled around the world talking to people about power, community and survival, using simple words that everyone could understand. He was criticized for saying things that we supposedly all learned in kindergarten, as though corruption had made us sophisticated.

There are times when we do give up on basic principles of civil society and where we plummet to nihilism.  War is that which demands men fall into robotic campaigns. Rather than make Germany great, the Nazi's destroyed it and Europe by turning humanity into boots. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is another example of sacred masculinity as he, without weapons, stood up to the Nazi's and was tortured and executed.

Locally I think of Jeff Molloy, an artist, who said things like "Not on my watch" in response to news of bullies targetting visible minorities (particularly an incident of passengers on a bus attacking a woman for wearing a headscarf).  His manner was always on guard for justice. His work portrayed the brutality of the church towards indigenous people. He stood on his watch at all times. He died, too young,  after a long battle with cancer.

Men who speak truth to power, who live within nature rather than exploit it, who refuse to become mechanical parts of an almighty system, who maintain their humanity, integrity and sensitivity in support of the sacred feminine.

Remember the Monty Python song "Every sperm is sacred" that offended Roman Catholics? I think that song was a critique of misogyny embedded in man-made religions which turned  the teachings of  young prophets into movements of hate.  It goes on today. Rewriting anything that is life-affirming into a doctrine which promotes and elevates  a ruling hierarchy, giving it a stolen divinity.

It has been going on since the human brain developed into an instrument capable of strategic planning. This is the challenge. That although we are capable of manipulating masses, we can only survive if we care for all life on this planet. This is the work of the sacred masculine and sacred feminine.

Suzuki: humanity's collision course - a warning

What can we do?

1. “We must bring environmentally damaging activities under control to restore and protect the integrity of the earth’s systems we depend on.” It specifically mentions reducing greenhouse gas emissions and air and water pollution. It also highlights the need to address deforestation, degradation and loss of agricultural soils and extinction of plant and animal species.
2. “We must manage resources crucial to human welfare more effectively.” This one is obvious. Finite resources must be exploited much more efficiently or we’ll run out.
3. “We must stabilize population. This will be possible only if all nations recognize that it requires improved social and economic conditions, and the adoption of effective, voluntary family planning.”
4. “We must reduce and eventually eliminate poverty.”
5. “We must ensure sexual equality, and guarantee women control over their own reproductive decisions.”

This comes from the guardian spirit of intelligent self interest and science, thanks to the Suzuki Foundation.

Conversations for a Kinder World

As public relations expert and former David Suzuki Foundation board chair James Hoggan writes in I'm Right and You're an Idiot, "polluted public discourse is an enormous obstacle to change." How, he asks, do we "create the space for higher quality public debates where passionate opposition and science shape constructive, mind-changing conversations"? David Suzuki Foundation.

But we don't have to keep replaying the right-wing end-game propaganda.  Right now there are many websites, blogs, institutions who have done the work and who write to inform rather than obsfiscate.  All we have to do is get off our diet of sensationalist drama, forget the gossip, and spend more time reading the stuff that will give you information.  It means more attention to words and ideas but with practice we could restore our attention spans.

Here are some links that are kinder:

I'm Right and You're an Idiot 

David Suzuki Foundation 

Logical Fallacies

Charter for Compassion 

Council of Canadians 

There are also many news organizations that still uphold the importance of journalism and who rely on donations to keep going:

The National Observer

The Tyee

rabble.ca

Healthy Biosphere Means Healthier Humans - Suzuki

"Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, can be triggered by pesticide exposure. When we consider the vast array of chemicals spewed into air, water and soil, predicting those that may interact with each other and our genetic makeup to create health problems is difficult if not impossible." David Suzuki, Science Matters. A Healthy Biosphere Means Healthier Humans 

Profit must include more than just dollars.  We need a spreadsheet that measures peace, happiness, health and hope for the future.  In order to get this we need to recognize the power that has been forgotten.

Real power is what we have when we have choices and often we cannot see the power available to us.

For example, a young mother may not feel powerful when her newborn infant keeps waking at night, crying for attention.  She will feel drained and at the mercy of her baby. A young father will not feel powerful because the needs of his children exhaust his days.  But caring and loving children really teaches them about what is worthy of our attention .  Loved children often grow up to be responsible, creative adults, who have the tools to raise their children with empathy and good guidance. These families are capable of being functioning citizens who are then able to imagine how to contribute to a healthy society.

Where the emphasis in a family is about punishment and control rather than an observation of their childrens' needs they grow up blind to the powers of sustaining life.  Adults who were abused as children often cannot see how they are abusing their loved ones, and by extension cannot imagine how to create peaceful societies.

There are those who have survived brutal childhoods and still have learned about loving kindness as a social adhesive, but so many will fall under the false promise of power-over. It becomes a mindset of dedicated denial of the infinite power of life where great conquerors walk a thin tightrope in a spiritual vacuum.

Healthy humans learn how to use their power wisely.

Five Reasons B.C. Should Say No to the Site C Dam

1. It's bad business.
2. There are cost-effective alternatives.
3. The power isn't needed.
4. We can't afford to flood farmland.
5. The Peace has paid its price.

visit the post by Emma Gilchrist on Desmog Canada

And from David Suzuki:

(Credit: Gerry via Flickr) www.davidsuzuki.org

"B.C. First Nations chiefs recently travelled to Ottawa to urge the federal government to pull the plug on the costliest infrastructure project in the country. At an estimated $7.9 billion and growing, the proposed Site C Dam on the beautiful Peace River in northeastern B.C. has been criticized for spiralling costs, questions about whether the electricity it would produce is even needed, and concerns about the environmental and social impacts of flooding thousands of hectares of prime farmland, irreplaceable cultural sites and wildlife habitat. The government is expected to make a decision in October."

Broken Ground

image from frackingcanada.ca

"Canada lacks environmental protections enjoyed by similar nations around the world. We’re at or near the bottom in many rankings of wealthy, industrialized countries, placing 24th out of 25 on environmental performance indicators in a recent survey of Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries."  says David Suzuki, brokenground.ca

His article about the families who moved to Alberta reveals the sudden changes to their lives when oil drilling began, and within three years found themselves and their farms and homes surrounded by more than 100 rigs - without any stakeholder engagement. 

Globally the nightmare is magnified. Michael Klare writes in Twenty-First-Century Energy Wars (which first appeared in TomDispatch and now appears on Bill Moyers' site) "Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, South Sudan, Ukraine, the East and South China Seas: wherever you look, the world is aflame with new or intensifying conflicts. At first glance, these upheavals appear to be independent events, driven by their own unique and idiosyncratic circumstances. But look more closely and they share several key characteristics — notably, a witch’s brew of ethnic, religious and national antagonisms that have been stirred to the boiling point by a fixation on energy." 

Klare points out that "control over oil and gas ... translates into geopolitical clout for some and economic vulnerability for others." 

So our hunger for power has made us pawns in the wars over non-renewable resources and we may end up like those nations breaking under brutality and injustice, siding with whichever tribe we identify with for the spoils. If we continue to believe that "jobs and the economy" means jobs for us and a better economy for us, we only have ourselves to blame. 

David Suzuki Foundation: Pete Seeger: "From way up here the Earth looks very small"

"Like me, he was inspired by Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring to become a strong defender of the environment as well as human rights. In both social justice and environmental causes, he believed in the strength of grassroots efforts. As he told the CBC Radio program Ideas, "The powers that be can break up any big thing they want. They can attack it from the outside. They can infiltrate it and corrupt it from the inside — or co-opt it. But what are they going to do about 10 million little things? They don't know where to start. Break up three of them and four more like it start up."  David Suzuki - Science Matters

The Power of Public Opinion

David Suzuki informs us that almost "all species that have existed  are estimated to have gone extinct within an average of a few million years." We are an infant species, "a mere 150,000 years old" who have adapted and survived deserts, tundra, rainforests, wetlands and high mountain ranges. Furthermore, "we’ve accelerated the rate of cultural evolution far beyond the speed of biological or genetic change."

Can we survive a million years? Will we be around in a few million or the next hundred years?

George Monbiot warns that "Humankind’s greatest crisis coincides with the rise of an ideology that makes it impossible to address."  By the late 1980's, it became clear that our world "was in the grip of an extreme political doctrine" as it also became clear that climate change was man made.  This political doctrine makes conversations about planetary health obsolete. It claims only profit and greed counts in ways that would be morally wrong even to elementary school children.

The news is not so much the news but an inventory of violence, and you would think that Socrates, Jung or Arendt had never existed. An alien visitor would think that there is no such thing as intelligence, reflection or wisdom. They might suspect that mothers never loved their children and had tossed them out of their cribs to the machines of war before they could speak.

What so many crises suggest, is that we are ruled by a nameless monster whose tentacles have spread throughout earth's surface and our neural substrate.

Some call this monster plutocracy, or capitalism,  or hegemony, or institutionalized religion. I would name it media.

Media according to the dictionary is "the means of communication, as radio and television, newspapers, and magazines, that reach or influence people widely."  It is filled with intelligent design and people who are well meaning. But it is powered one way - from a wealthy elite down to the living rooms of the common people. It behaves as though we are all involved in what spins out, and represents our best interests, but it cleverly omits most, if not all, of the diversity among its citizens.

There still exists outlets that inform, such as CBC radio, Knowledge, TVO and PBS. There are online outlets that give contextualized reports such as StraightGoods, TruthDig, Rabble, and others. But all of these are funded by the people who care about civil society. Their budgets are minute in comparison with the mainstream media who have learned how to create entertainment instead of truth, for profit rather than humanity.

Gandhi believed in a truth force just as many activists do, who have dedicated their lives to creating change. That these activities don't get broadcast frequently is really a testimony to their authenticity.  After all you don't see million dollar advertising campaigns for needs, only to create new "needs".

So signs of public opinion can be found, but in smaller print, in smaller presses and in community halls. Sometimes they reach places of influence.

Joe Oliver, at the Canada Energy Summit hosted by the Economic Club of Canada, said  “If we don’t get people on side, we don’t get the social licence — politics often follows opinion — and so we could well get a positive regulatory conclusion from the joint panel that is looking at the Northern Gateway, but if the population is not on side, there is a big problem”.

Susan McCaslin, an award winning poet, organized a protest by hanging poems on trees in McLellan Forest east of Fort Langley, to protect the land from being sold to developers. She got over 200 poems and coverage in a national newspaper.

There are many other stories like this. Many activists working for the greater good who use their powers of logic, foresight, compassion and communication.  They stand on the side of a future for our grand-children that includes rich and poor, not just an elite.

Whether we survive for the next hundred or million years depends on this kind of commitment.