https://dexterchapin.substack.com
Stepping stones form a pattern, or not. Stepping stones lead somewhere, or not. These stepping stones will be about cultural resilience, education, and thrivancy via General Systems Theory and Natural History. I am fascinated by questions of how we know and what we know. I always look for patterns. Long-term, these posts are explorations of patterns that maybe I see locally, nationally, culturally, socially, and environmentally.
Previous posts are at the Substack site.
The latest Post:
Mother Nature – a path to the future
I spend a great deal of time wondering how we, as a species, a culture, and a nation, got to where we are today, and was this outcome inevitable. These are ontological, cosmological questions about which I am no expert, but I do know enough to not rank one cosmology above another. The following is not a nuanced discussion. That would require volumes and certainly more than I know. What follows is a brief outline of where we might go to create a viable future.
Stonehenge puts an exclamation point on the idea that I am not alone. We have been wondering about the nature and the natural order of the Universe for a long time. Painting with a very broad brush, our ways of understanding can be put into three buckets.1
The senior approach might be called a Mystical Unity. It is certainly found all around the globe, East to West, North to South. It is sometimes termed Animism and sometimes Pantheism. The bedrock is that everything, or pretty much everything, contains a spiritual component or essence. Classic examples would be the Central African “Ntu”2,3 and the American Indian “Great Spirit”. Often, this cosmology involves spirit guides and/or totems that nurture, protect, and educate. In this view, what we see, hear, or can respond to is the spiritual source. An individual’s personal agency involves making a path with, or counter to, an unfolding flow.
In the deserts of the World, we developed and refined the monotheistic, distant, creator, patriarchal god. This may be the 2nd oldest bucket. It has been around for a long time. In this view, a named creator does his creating, sets the rules, and then moves away, most often far away. Sometimes, he sends messages. Humans have limited free will. Primary agency rests with the creator.
The mechanistic, clockwork, Science and Physics based, worldview is the newcomer. If it has a god, it is most likely Newton or, perhaps, Einstein. Unpredictable events are informally named Luck, a nickname for the edge of Chaos. Individual agency is limited, similar to a guide boat on the on the Colorado River. It may go left. It may go right. To a limited extent, it may control speed but never direction.
A combination of these cosmologies has brought us from the neolithic to today. The science and the creator worldviews have been the primary drivers. At different points, they have been contentious, arrogant, territorial, and parochial. The result is it has not been a smooth ride, and we have ended up in a place that is pretty terrible. We are on the knife-edge of creating rates of physical, cultural, and social change that we haven’t seen before.4
The net result is we may be facing an Armageddon-like “bottleneck”,5,6 but we are not there yet. There are exit ramps and escape routes. To take the exits, we must develop new ontological stories and cosmologies to incorporating the positives from each of the three buckets.
Welcome to Mother Nature7:
-She combines the Creator and the Science buckets. The Universe is Anthropic. The weak anthropic version is that the Universe is structured in a way that allowed life and us to develop. A stronger version is the only possible universe is one that makes life, and us, inevitable.8 In short, Mother Nature’s laws and constants, as discovered by Science, gives birth to life, all life.
-Just as every child born to mother contains within itself some part of mother, we, in fact all life, contain a part of Mother Nature. That tree, your favorite pet, even trump, is stardust. Go to the references. Neil DeGrasse Tyson says it way better than I can.9,10 This is Pantheism, the Creator, and Science, all in a tight little ball.
-Mothers are nurturing. They provide. They guide. They protect, and they teach. This combines the totemic guide, and the creator’s plan. The Science component is expressed by the four types of ecological services: provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural,11 almost exactly parallel to the totemic guide.
-Mother Nature is very supportive, almost loving, but she has her limits. Mom allows humans an unprecedented latitude in agency. We can play “Calvinball” changing our rules and having fun on a big field, but she has her own explicit, and these days well known, boundaries that we cannot cross. If we do, the game comes to an end, sometimes quickly and sometimes not.
-None of the three buckets has a very clear to-do list. Animism and Pantheism don’t have an explicit list of goals. We really don’t have a clear explanation why the creator does some of the things he does. The closest Science comes to teleological explanations are the Laws of Thermodynamics. Mother Nature sometimes just must do what Mother Nature does; a wildfire here, not there, a tectonic plate moving now and not then, this person dying but not that person. The explanation is she cannot exist amid Chaos, but she thrives at the edge of Chaos.
The description could go on, but we see enough to understand that she is both the same as and different from the original three buckets. Those differences and similarities are crucial for building a new set of stories.
-This is not distant mother. She is right in front of you wherever you look and whatever your senses report. Not to put a too fine a point on it. What you can see, hear or respond to is family.
-Again, not to put too fine a point on it, you do not ravish your mother. Everything you can see, hear, or respond to needs to be treated with respect.
-We need to treat mom with an attitude of gratitude for gifts known and unknown, recognized or not.
-The coin of the realm is energy. Profligate spending, consumption, and waste wreak havoc on the family budget.
-We need to know that Mother Nature knows more than we do. She knows the World is flat*, diversity is not a luxury but a necessity, and what goes around comes around.
-You, me us, and them are deeply connected to Mother Nature by being autopoietic.12 We all develop guided by an internal network, including genetics and epigenetics, rather than an external agency.
-Mother Nature is the resilience and problem-solving champion of the World. Biomimicry and geomimicry are a path to salvation.
– Mother Nature is manifest in “Ecology and spirituality are fundamentally connected, because deep ecological awareness, ultimately, is spiritual awareness.”13
The modern science, clockwork cosmology containing the irrational end-stage capitalism model with its Calvinistic roots is the precise antithesis of the Mother Nature cosmology or model of the Future. The stories generated by Mother Nature create a guide to avoiding an Armageddon-like bottleneck. It is not too late, but it is not soon enough.
*No hierarchies
It is important that, at some point, I identify my bias. I am a Christian-Panendeist.
- Korten, David C. Change the Story, Change the Future. 2015. Berrett-Koehler. This is an important, short, accessible book
- https://dexterchapin.substack.com/p/spirituality-in-a-para-social-desert
- https://eajournals.org/wp-content/uploads/Beyond-The-Four-Categories-of-African-Philosophy.pdf
- I have suggested elsewhere that we are witnessing an “extinction burst” on the part of musk/trump. https://dexterchapin.substack.com/p/the-trump-musk-extinction-burst
- Https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226339611_On_the_Notions_of_Mother_Nature_and_the_Balance_of_Nature_and_Their_Implications_for_Conservation
- https://www.livescience.com/62754-warring-clans-caused-population-bottleneck.html
- https://www.earth.com/news/anthropic-principle-we-live-in-a-universe-fine-tuned-to-support-life/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g4d-rnhuSg
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya2aIxU2fsY
- https://earth.org/what-are-ecosystem-services/
- An autopoietic system is a network of processes which produces all the components whose internal production is necessary to maintain the network operating as a unit. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11084-012-9297-y
- https://quotlr.com/author/fritjof-capra