Make humanity great again
Big frameworks for seeing everything
As we all still are impacted by the Zelensky debacle, I want to talk about current events framed in a bigger picture. Here’s what a very good writer wrote in that regard:
Collectively, this is the descent into the Underworld. This dark descent, our myths tell us, is absolutely inescapable and necessary before we can rise again. When we rise again, we will finally understand, know, be able to hold, and appropriately treasure the fragile light of being — to enact our responsibility for the Earth and its woven tapestry of organic life. We will have, once and for all, overcome the illusion of separation.
Let’s face it: long before this devastating Trumpocalypse, our society was held in thrall by dark forces…a murky world of greed, corruption, deceits, shrouded by invisible conspiracies and complicities, where wealth is attained by the unscrupulous and limited rationality is used to control and constrain the imagination.
Obviously, we needed a total breakdown of the old order to see our situation for what it is. Now it is up to us: we can either work together to break through and overcome. Or we can die.
The writer goes on with this: “Or we will end up enslaved to techno-fascistic overlords.” I think a takeover of fascism is a red herring. With more disaffection from Trump all the time, and the fury of the electorate that opposes him, it's the oligarchs we should be protecting ourselves from. That’s the techno part of the above.
He also says, “I am finding, with wonder and astonishment, that I possess a faith I didn’t know I had. I feel a deep trust in the cosmic order and the Tao — the spiritual wisdom of nature and the invisible powers that protect and work for us. We have ancient stories written in our bones, inscribed in our genetic code: they prepared us for this time.”
That’s the biggest picture that he’s referencing, but it’s not a done deal that we’ll be okay. Even though it is the time we are prepared for, we may screw it up. My favorite cosmologist, Brian Thomas Swimme, says the universe took a chance creating humans because for the first time there was a species with free will. The universe created us so we could appreciate her, but we also could destroy her, and it could be sink or swim now.
Alex Evans’s Good Apocalypse Guide Substack is very good about the bigger picture. Here are excerpts from Apocalypse. Restoration. Emergence. Three myths to make sense of the polycrisis:
Humans have always faced periodic cataclysm…When we go into our community’s deepest memories of catastrophe, what do we discover?...our ancestors have bequeathed us three kinds of myths that can help us to stay afloat in conditions of breakdown and upheaval:
Apocalypse myths - which, rather than being about the end of the world, need to be understood as showing an unveiling of things as they really are; a revelatory moment of full disclosure, when illusions fall away.
Covid revealed who the real key workers are in our economy, and how they’re often the lowest paid, least visible, and most vulnerable among us. It revealed the vulnerabilities that come with interdependence in a globalized world. Above all, Covid revealed what really matters to us - with millions of us realizing amid months of enforced solitude that what we most want isn’t stuff, achievement, or status, but connection, belonging, and love…Apocalypses force us as communities and societies to look ourselves in the mirror and see who we actually are. It’s dramatic, frightening, and often painful - but it can also be cathartic and restorative.
Restoration myths - which tell of how a wound or rupture in the world is healed, and things are made whole again.
The Bible is a restoration myth. It starts with humanity expelled from a garden that has the Tree of Life at its centre…in the very last chapter of Revelation we finally regain access to the same tree...So how do you heal the breach and restore a broken covenant? In the old myths, through atonement - essentially, self-sacrifice…In restoration myths, the people doing the self-sacrificing - Gandalf, Anna, Obi-Wan, Aslan, Lyra, Will, Jesus - think they’re going to die. They do. But then something else happens. They get resurrected.
Emergence myths - which tell of how the death of the old also leads to the birth of the new, or even how we grow up as a species.
While self-sacrifice leads to rebirth, that does not mean that everything goes back to exactly the same as it was before. Instead, those that are resurrected come back changed…adversity can drive new understanding of ourselves, each other, and the world.
There’s another set of emergence myths that I find fascinating, too: those that invite us to think of ourselves as a species in its adolescent years…Adolescence is a time in which we test the limits, rebel against them, make mistakes, and learn from the consequences. It’s just part of growing up.
It’s a mythic framing that I think has deep relevance for us today. We’ve been growing up as a species. Our learning curve has been unbelievably steep. Of course we’ve made mistakes on the way. But now is the threshold moment, the supreme test. The risks are absolutely real. We might not make it. But the test only comes when we’re ready for it. And the prize - of initiation into adulthood, and taking our rightful place as co-creators and stewards, who act with real wisdom and rootedness - is immense.
What’s being revealed in this moment? What have we ignored or repressed, and what might we need to face up to, especially in ourselves?
What needs to be healed in this moment? Where are there wounds or ruptures in our society that need attending to, and what do our oldest myths have to say about how to do so?
And what might be trying to be born in this moment - in ourselves, in our communities, in the world - and how can we lean into the process?
About emergence / initiation myths, there’s an essay I’ve always loved by Rolling Stone journalist Michael Ventura, written back in 1989. At the end, he tells the story of a time when he was trying to console his partner’s 13-year-old son, who’d burst out sobbing that “everything is so fucked, it’s all so fucked, what’s the point, it’s all so fucking fucked” - a thought that many of the rest of us may also have entertained lately.
From The Age of Endarkenment:
“We are living through a dark age. An age, if you like, of ‘endarkenment’ -- and I don't necessarily mean that negatively. The world is a flood with dark psychic fluid, everything's stained with it. We all say we hate the stuff, but we don't act that way, we splash in it. It's an age in which, for reasons we can't comprehend, everything's being turned inside out, everything's imploding and exploding at once, and we can't stop it. And it's going to continue, it'll go on for a long, long time…So we can't find peace, we can't ‘win,’ it's not going to be all right…
“But that doesn't have to rob us of purpose; in fact it's the opposite, it implies a great purpose, that what each of us must do is cleave to what we find most beautiful in the human heritage -- and pass it on. So that one day, one day when this endarkenment exhausts itself, those precious things we've passed on will still be alive, stained perhaps but functional, still present in some form, and it will be possible for the people of that day to make use of them to construct a life that is a life -- that life of freedom and variety and order and light and dark, in their proper proportions (whatever they may be). The life that we'd choose now if we could.
“And that to pass these precious fragments on is our mission, a dangerous mission -- that if you were going to volunteer for crucial, hazardous work, work of great importance and risk, this might be the job you drew. And it isn't a bad job at all. Actually, it's the best job. That's what we're doing here. Trying to do. And it's no small thing, it's the best, man, it's one of the few things left to be proud of.”
Michael Ventura was a feisty columnist for our progressive L.A. Weekly. He was brought to my house, that was a gathering place for the New Age, for some event I held, and after that, without him using my name, I’d recognize it was me he was referencing to make fun of the far-outness of the time when he called me some version of that hippy on the hill.
Following up on the idea of “just don’t do nothing,” that I wrote about before, James Fallows, whom I recommended everyone subscribe to last week, is quoting an unnamed famous historian: “This is where hope will be reborn. Once again city by city. State by state. One small organization connecting with others. One person who stands up for principle and gives heart to the next.”
How can we the people get ourselves united? In the job I drew, to find ways for that to occur, I’ve been thinking about pep talks for humanity flooding the internet and inspiring us, and wondering how to get that to happen. For an example, this is the end of Jane Fonda’s acceptance speech for her Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award:
Click Here for a Special Treat
We are on Pip Watch for Jackie and Shadow, bald eagles in Big Bear, California, a couple of hours from me. It was three years ago when Jackie laid the last egg that hatched. This year, she laid three and we saw one hatching last night. It is thrilling to watch the eaglets breaking out of their shells! The three eggs were each laid three days apart, so the other two are to come. I keep my picture-in-picture on.
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Thanks for this Suzanne! I completely resonate with the notion that we are on the threshold of something radically new —as the several “myths” you cite suggest.
In that regard, I’d like to pitch a project idea and will e-mail separately.
Pep Talks For Humanity sounds like the right idea at the right time. Jane Fonda should inspire everyone.