As we wake up to the deep challenges of our times, responding to them requires three kinds of action. Firstly, we require action that resists further ongoing degradation and damage to ecosystems and society. In addition to slowing and stopping the damage, we also need action, which creates alternatives in economics, social relationships, and production. But as well as resistance and creating alternatives, we also need action which enables a shift in the worldviews and underlying values which have accompanied our historical trajectory to the current point of crisis. We require a shift in consciousness. We require a revolution in our thinking and of the spirit, as Aung San Suu Kyi once stated during her years struggling against oppression in Myanmar. Without a revolution of the spirit, the forces that produced the iniquities of the old order would continue to be operative.
The truth of this can be seen in the countless historical moments of uprising, revolution, or social restructuring, which have simply gone on to reproduce the forms of oppression they were intended to address. Worldviews become inscribed in the socioeconomic structures of society. We also carry them around within ourselves, framing our cognitions, our understandings, our expectations that shape our lives. For our work to contribute to a real shift from the industrial growth society to an ecological and socially just future we must ensure that our efforts don’t themselves reproduce the old worldviews that got us here in the first place. If we want our social action to be congruent with the shift in consciousness needed for a real transition, we need to bring awareness to the views we carry and how they shape our social aims, our political objectives, and our strategizing.
How much do we still invest in our work for social change as a project of salvation?
One of the most important clusters of views inherited from the old order that are often carried over into sociopolitical work are views about time. In his work The Decline of the West Oswald Spengler writes, it is by the meaning that it intuitively attaches to time that one culture is differentiated from another. The way we relate to time plays a key role in shaping our world. Time is so fundamental, the assumptions so basic that we often assume time to be a given characteristic of reality, but different cultures and traditions give different meanings to time. They understand its structure differently. Consequently, they live in different worlds and interact with those worlds in different ways. At the heart of the dominant Western worldview, the spirit of the historical development of the industrial growth society is a fixation with the linear dimension of time. Our socioeconomic structures, political ideologies, and ways of living are all influenced by views about temporality that suggests it is directional, that we’re heading somewhere, and especially that that somewhere is somehow better.
The predominance of the idea that the most significant feature of time as its linear directionality can be traced back to the influence of Millenarian Christianity and its vision of history leading towards a salvational or damnational endpoint. This religious myth of salvation is repeatedly reproduced in secular political myths. It’s fundamental to the Marxist theory of history, as well as other utopian revolutionary traditions, and we can also see it in the ideological forms of neoliberalism with its now embarrassing claims of the end of history that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall. These grand narratives which tie human history to a deep, almost cosmological destiny have powerfully harnessed the passion and energy of countless people, but all too often with damaging results as they encourage a justification of means by reference to some idealized end. As Frederick Jameson pointed out, it was Marx’s view of the communist utopian end of history that provided the step from Hegel’s teleological and idealistic philosophy to the Gulag. And we’ve seen the same tendencies played out in the missionary rhetoric of globalizing freedom and democracy used to justify the invasion of Iraq and the ongoing displacement of Indigenous People.
Even where salvationist views of politics are tempered, a deep faith in progress still predominates. The liberal humanist view usually rejects the idea that we’re heading towards a predetermined endpoint, scoffing at the naivety of such utopian idealism, but continues to champion the history of humanity as fundamentally directional, namely upwards.
The core assumptions underpinning our growth based industrial development have been that growth will go on. Things will get better. Advances in technology, increasing production, more consumption, rising population are all monuments to humanity’s ingenuity and our wedded destiny with progress. Some of us are beginning to recognize all that as part of the hallucinatory self-image that shaped modernity. A deluding and conceited fantasy. The story is crashing against the non-negotiability of ecological limits. It’s threadbare weave is torn apart by mounting social tensions. The myth of more and more becomes shipwrecked on the rocks of simply not enough. And yet, even amongst those of us who feel the fading of those fantasies, how much the such deep views, ideas like the myth of progress, still underpin our political and social struggles and strategies. Have we really woken up from that dream? How much do we still invest in our work for social change as a project of salvation? To what extent seeking the new do we continue to reproduce the old spirit?
Many older and indigenous traditions ground themselves in a different view of time. For them, time is cyclical rather than the modernist obsession with the ever unfolding of newness. Time is shaped more in terms of repetitions and returns. As David Loy notes in his Buddhist history of the West such cultures emphasize the cyclical, the passing and returning of the seasons, the waxing and waning of the moon, the passages of growing, dying, and the regrowing of things that roots us here in our basic ecological identity. The basic ecological identity that salvational programs, both religious and political, seek to deny.
It’s not that pre-modern people are unaware of the linear dimension of time. No doubt a nomadic tribes person erects a shelter with a clear sense that her actions will add up progressively to a constructed temporary home. And yet the accumulative linear steps of construction take place within an awareness of the non-progressive aspects of life with an acknowledgement that one day what has been built will be dismantled or destroyed.
If we can give up the conceited notion that there are permanent historical solutions to human suffering, and that somehow we are destined to get there, we can begin to fashion ways of living that integrate the incredible ingenuity of humankind with a deep humility.
As a simple Buddhist refrain points out, the end of hoarding is dispersion. The end of building is destruction. The end of meeting is parting. The end of life is death, but this reminder of impermanence shouldn’t be taken to imply a fatalistic or nihilistic endpoint. Death in turn becomes the basis for life as the darkly composted forest floor reveals. What does this mean for our political and social projects? If there are no mundane achievements which resist the transience of things, if time is not assuredly ticking towards historical salvation, what is our politics for?
Buddhists sometimes suggest that we can’t fix samsara, the round of existence characterized by impermanence and suffering. All too often I think, such a position seems to serve as a rationalization for disengagement, justifying a kind of Buddhist quietism. However, if we’re not seduced by such withdrawal, not enticed to retreat into a life denying escapism, if we resist being pulled towards that developmental dead end, that Myles Horton called getting stuck on the inside, if we care to acknowledge the importance of attending to the social, material, and ecological conditions of life, it still remains crucial that we don’t invest in our sociopolitical action salvational expectations they cannot deliver.
Our political and social action may not offer a basis for some ultimate salvation, but they can create conditions which reduce and alleviate suffering, at least temporarily, sometimes for generations and in terms of ecological impacts, perhaps even for many generations. Sociopolitical action can and does have value, but we must be wary of oversubscribing power to our social actions that they do not have. We need to take care not to grasp at the permanence in what is not permanent. If we can give up the conceited notion that there are permanent historical solutions to human suffering, and that somehow we are destined to get there, we can begin to fashion ways of living that integrate the incredible ingenuity of humankind with a deep humility. We can stop arrogantly overreaching ourselves in projects which pit an inflated human will against reality, that seek to repress mortality, that vainly deny the limits we live within, and we might be able to apply our creativity to living with a renewed maturity, at least at times.
You can listen to this talk from Guhyapati here.
This article is a transcribed talk from the ecodharma audio series, Buddhist Reflections on Social Action, from members of the Ecodharma Centre Collective in September 2014. It is reprinted with permission.
