One is that I'm a "White American." It was brought to my attention personally, by Mr. Stokely Carmichael, age 19, that I am a racist (and some other words). I was almost his age. I understood him, by some great stroke of luck, I don't know, but it woke me up to a world I had never seen before. The world I was born into.
The second is the work of scientists like Dr. Lera Boroditsky, whose research in linguistics shows that our worldview is so tightly correlated with language as to be one and the same phenomenon. And she found this working with bilingual Israelis.
You can't tell how your native language affects your prejudices, becuase it's buried in the part of language we can't hear or see. But it's there. We also form our identity there. And protecting that identity has helped that identity to survive -- and saved our posterior with it.
As long as I persist in this view of Others, the collapse gets worse. There may be other worldviews that perpetuate the damage, but this one has us slaughtering each other with abandon, by the billions, over bits of rock and long dead-and-carbonized vegetables.
This is old stuff. It's obsolete. It's going to end us if we don't deal with it, and move on. That's why it's an evolutionary thing, not an ideological thing. Cultural change starts with personal change.
None of us will survive life. All of us, as the future human species, may survive "climate change" (a milquetoast label for global warming). But collectively, we never accepted stewardship of the Biosphere, even as we took over control of its vital systems: instead we have been chasing "power." And now the moment has come when the fate of our planet is moving out from under our influence. We may have dropped the ball.
It is too late for a mass mobilization, despite worldwide efforts already underway; too late for sensible policies from wise leadership, despite some clear and effective practices being brought to bear. All this is now as likely to work as rescue by benevolent alien beings from outer space.
But we can change our collective self, by our own willpower, such that our behavior comes into harmony with life.
Our collective self seems unformed, a mere glimpse of a long distant future. Our entertainments imply ominous visions of a "hive-mind" or a bizarre, robot-driven super-totalitarian regime, deleting personal autonomy or agency, or love. But a collective self is only the expression of the way in which a critical mass of individuals lives. We have a collective self right now. It's insane, of course, and in total denial, or it wouldn't be prattling happily about how we don't have to start worrying about "climate change" for fifty years, when we'll have some cheap technical fix. Its mind looks more or less like Fox News.
The transformation of humanity's way of being is not possible by force, or education, or popular revolution. Our personal, individual ways of being make up humanity's way of being. We know that today, that way of being is consuming our natural and only home.
Individualism is killing us: individuality could save us.
The action of any individual is correlated (brain-science tells us) to perception. In other words, to survive, we act on what we believe is happening, every moment. But this belief is an interpretation, and nothing more. It is not the thing it represents, even when it's accurate.
To adapt effectively to conditions, we must adjust focus so that our perceptions are a match. A clearer image, an updated view, is what we need. We must adjust what we mean by "survive," and put species-survival ahead of identity-survival. We will rarely have to choose between them: this is a deep contextual shift. (To be overly technical, this is a paradigm-level change, but it is possible through language to alter our correlated perception and behavior.) We don't lose anything by undertaking such a change in our listening and speaking. And we could shift our trajectory away from extinction, there's that.
Our view of life is always distorted in some way: at best it is still only a view, a representation of life. As Fiona Apple sings, we can't see what we're looking through. But even if it's totally clean and transparent, we're still looking at life through something. We get to see an approximation of what's real.
We can address this distortion ourselves, personally, in a way that makes all the difference.
Integrity, and Attention
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