Ecological Civilization and the New Enlightenment

摘要

DURING THE PAST CENTURY, we humans have become a truly global species with both the ability and the imperative to choose our common future by conscious collective choice. Growth in our numbers and the destructive power of our economic and military weapons of mass destruction creates the necessity; advances in communication technology that link us into a seamless web of global communications and in biological and ecological sciences that deepen our understanding of what life is and how it organizes give us the means.The unfolding collapse of three critical systems puts our common future at serious risk.These three system failures are interlinked, self-imposed, and threaten our species viability. All are a direct consequence of a takeover of our access to the essential means of living by global corporations that value life only for its market price, promote the idolatry of money, and sponsor those politicians who equate the corporate interest with the human interest. Awareness that something is going very wrong is sweeping global society, but with limited understanding of the nature of and reasons for the cultural and institutional system failure now playing out. Lacking such understanding, we look for solutions that tinker at the margins of a failed system grounded in false assumptions and values in the hope of making it slightly less destructive.Our hope for a viable human future depends on a deep system transformation supportive of an Ecological Civilization that brings people and planet into balance, nurtures innovation and creative expression, and provides all people an opportunity for material sufficiency and spiritual abundance. Already underway, that transformation is grounded in three foundational truths of our being:We humans are living beings.Earth is our mother — the source of our birth and nurture, andLife exists — can exist — only in communities of place that self-organize to create and maintain the conditions essential to their own existence.The Enlightenment of the 18th Century was grounded in the Newtonian image of a mechanistic universe. This image greatly expanded and deepened our human recognition and understanding of the order inherent in creation. In so doing, it set the stage for extraordinary advances in technology and social organization through which we came to dominate Earth and one another — leading to the great environmental and social unraveling now unfolding. At the same time, it undermined faith in an authoritarian Church and the divine right of kings and unleashed the forces of democracy and self-organizing social movements essential to successful cultural and institutional transformation. Together, these dynamics create the imperative and capacity to navigate a great human turning to the Ecological Civilization of our future.A now unfolding 21st century Enlightenment draws from the ancient wisdom of indigenous peoples, the great religious prophets, and the findings of contemporary science to greatly expand and deepen our human understanding of ourselves and our place in creation. Metaphysically it acknowledges the intelligence and consciousness the 18th century Enlightenment denied. Politically, it recognizes that we have only begun the journey to a truly democratic sharing of power.Why do we tolerate a system that strips away the relationships that define our humanity and reduces us to servitude to money? It traces to a fundamental aspect of our human nature: with the gift of language, we humans organize as societies around shared cultural narratives. Political demagogues have long recognized that those who control the framing narratives of a society’s culture, control its people.During the 20th century, corporate public relations and advertising specialists mastered the arts of cultural manipulation to create an individualistic culture of greed and profligate material consumption that serves well the short-term interests of a financial oligarchy. Once immersed in this culture, society lost sig