The old future's gone: Progressive strategy amid cascading crises

--Finally, it’s worth considering the possibility that our species -- the human with the big brain -- is an evolutionary dead-end. I say that not to be depressing but, again, to be realistic. If that’s the case, it doesn’t mean we should give up. No matter how much time we humans have left on the planet, we can do what is possible to make that time meaningful.

Globalized tribal animals

I want to end by celebrating human beings. That may sound odd, given the rather grim nature of my remarks. But I think there’s a way to put all this in a perspective that is heartening. I return to Wes Jackson, who doesn’t shy away from naming the problems we face and holding humans accountable for our mistakes, individual and collective. But Jackson also often says we also should go easy on ourselves, precisely because we are a species out of context, facing a unique challenge. He reminds us that we are the first species that will have to self-consciously impose limits on ourselves if we are to survive. This is no small task, and we are bound to fail often. I believe that our failures will be easier to accept and overcome if we recognize:

--We are animals. For all our considerable rational capacities, we are driven by forces that cannot be fully understood rationally and cannot be completely controlled.

--We are tribal animals. Whatever kind of political unit we live in, our evolutionary history is in tribes and we are designed to live in relatively small groups, some would say of no more than 150 persons.

--We are tribal animals living in a global world. The consequences of the past 10,000 years of human history have left us dealing with human problems on a global scale, and we can’t retreat to gathering-hunting groups of 150 or smaller. Even if our future is going to return us to life at a more local level, as many think it will, at the moment we have a moral obligation to deal with injustice and unsustainability on a global level. That’s especially true for those of us living in imperial societies that over the past 500 years have extracted considerable wealth from others around the world.

What does this mean in practice? I think we should proceed along two basic tracks. First, we should commit some of our energy to movements that focus on the question of justice in this world, especially those of us with the privilege that is rooted in that injustice. As a middle-class American white man, I can see plenty of places to continue working, in movements dedicated to ending patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, economic domination by the First World, and U.S. wars of aggression.

I also think there is important work to be done in experiments to prepare for what will come in this new future we can’t yet describe in detail. Whatever the limits of our predictive capacity, we can be pretty sure we will need ways of organizing ourselves to help us live in a world with less energy and fewer material goods. We have to all develop the skills needed for that world (such as gardening with fewer inputs, food preparation and storage, and basic tinkering), and we will need to recover a deep sense of community that has disappeared from many of our lives. This means abandoning a sense of ourselves as consumption machines, which the contemporary culture promotes, and deepening our notions of what it means to be humans in search of meaning. We have to learn to tell different stories about our sense of self, our connection to others, and our place in nature. The stories we tell will matter, as will the skills we learn.

In my own life, I continue to work on those questions of justice in existing movements, but I have shifted a considerable amount of time to helping build local networks that can create a place for those experiments. Different people will move toward different efforts depending on talents and temperaments; we should all follow our hearts and minds to apply ourselves where it makes sense, given who we are and where we live. After starting with a warning about arrogance, I’m not about to suggest I know best what work people should do.

I am, however, reasonably confident that if we are to make a decent future for ourselves and our children, we have a lot of work to do. John Gorka also expresses that in his song: “The old future’s dead and gone/Never to return/There’s a new way through the hills ahead/This one we’ll have to earn/This one we’ll have to earn.”

We should not be afraid to face the death of the old future, nor should we be afraid to try to earn a new one. It is the work of all the ages, and it is our work today, more than ever. It is the work that allows one to live, joyously, while in a profound state of grief.

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