Community, Consciousness and the Road to Freedom

An excerpt from Prisoners of the Real, an intellectual odyssey from ancient knowledge to planetary consciousness

By Greg Guma

We must reconcile two realms of experience that have long been viewed as separate — the political and spiritual. The keys to a synthesis have been found in ecological consciousness and the post-modern politics of Gaia.

Community begins when its members see their common purpose and relation to the whole, a living togetherness that is the essence of sister and brotherhood. In that sense, few true communities currently exist in our post-modern world. 

            Most of our cities and towns have no real centers, and we devote little time to defining what holds us together. That work has mostly been turned over to elected representatives and appointed bureaucrats. Their "rational collectives" leave little space for warmth or friendship in the press of political and economic reality. Visions of togetherness are usually viewed as romantic fantasy, conceivable at all only in terms of their concrete effects.        

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            Dionysian collectives, in contrast, are the seeds of an organic commonwealth that place true solidarity at the center of social experience. Every act of true friendship, every moment of selfless aid in our rationalized "post-industrial" world, brings social transformation a step closer. This is true community building, and it occurs whenever autonomous actions create dynamic unity.    

            The Dionysian path is known by many names — metaphysical reconstruction, holistic epistemology and deep ecology, among others. Critics rightly note that attacks on rationalism and "instrumental reason" often go too far, ending in rejection of all forms of purposeful activity and a retreat into the mystical haze of nature worship and “magical thinking.” Wary of the cult of technique, cultural revolutionaries sometimes confuse technology with practice and reject all human inventiveness as wanton dominance. In truth, however, it is possible to make peace with nature even while acknowledging the separation created by our consciousness. As Christopher Lasch explained, "Nature sets limits to human freedom, but it does not define freedom."

            Ecological and systems thinking provide a theoretical foundation for the Dionysian approach. The former encompasses the realization that structures that may appear rigid in nature are actually manifestations of processes in continual flux; the latter has moved beyond analysis of complex machines to an understanding of relationships and integration in living systems. After 2000 years of reducing the world to smaller and smaller building blocks, science has finally turned its attention to principles of organization. Every organism is an integrated whole, a living system. Families and communities exhibit the same characteristics of wholeness as cells and ecosystems.

            Yet this metaphysical reconstruction also involves reconciliation of two realms of experience that have long been viewed as separate — the political and spiritual. Marx's claim that religion is the "opiate of the people" has been as debilitating as the notion that enlightenment is a purely personal pursuit, fundamentally incompatible with the "dirty" world of social action.

            The keys to a synthesis have been found in ecological consciousness and the post-modern politics of Gaia. Together they form a new cultural paradigm — planetary consciousness. With roots in myth, Gaia re-emerged as an hypothesis, out of research on the auto-regulation of the Earth as a living system. According to James Lovelock, originator of the hypothesis, "the entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, can be regarded as a single entity." Studying the nature of Earth's atmosphere, he and other researchers discovered that it is not merely a biological product but instead an active system designed to maintain a chosen environment within the biosphere.

            Since this initial research Gaia has developed as a theoretical and artistic context, embraced by social critics, articulated in music, and developed as an eco-social organizing principle. There is talk also of a Gaian mode of consciousness, one acknowledging that science has a myth-making quality. Closely linked to ecological concepts, Gaian consciousness recognizes that opposites can — in fact, must — coexist.

            This emerging form of spirituality is politically consistent with certain strains of Green thinking, in particular deep ecology, holistic feminism, community-based populism, and bioregionalism. All of these incorporate a subtle awareness of the oneness of life, the interdependence of its limitless manifestations, and its cyclical processes of change and transformation. The sense that we are connected to the cosmos as a whole is a spiritual revelation that ties together the disparate expressions of this new consciousness.

            In The Spiritual Dimension of Green Politics, Charlene Spretnak argued persuasively that Green concepts of inter-relatedness and sustainability open the way toward what she called postmodern spirituality. Human beings, she wrote, are social and interconnected, and the boundaries between us are more illusory than we normally think. Taking account of the nature reverence buried within most religious traditions, she concluded that a spiritual grounding can not only answer a deep hunger in modern experience, but also mesh comfortably with the Green tendrils that have sprouted around the world. Like others who are attempting to describe the next stage of humanity's journey, she found herself in a region where cosmic consciousness and political analysis meet.

            The key to a new age, says historian William Irwin Thompson, is the acceptance of difference, "the consciousness of the unique that contributes to the understanding of the universal." The main danger is what he has labeled "collectivization through terror," the stamping out of differences. Just as mono-crop agriculture does violence to nature, a mono-crop society — essentially the extreme of an industrial mentality — would be deadly to human nature. Even Green politics, which may yet develop an ecology of consciousness, could instead become a fundamentalist ideology, rejecting flexibility and promoting a Luddite contempt for innovation.

            "The real secret of freedom," Thompson once wrote, "seems to lie in the ability to deal with ambiguity, the capacity to tolerate noise and yet hear within its wild, randomizing abandon the possibilities of innovation and transformation."

Questioning Nationalism, Globalism and the UN

Imagine living through 1945. As World War II ended 75 years ago, the UN was born and two nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan. To commemorate and reflect on these pivotal events, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) has created a timeline. Ever since 1945 people, their governments and civilization itself have been faced with a momentous dilemma: how to choose law and cooperation over power and domination. Check out the WILPF timeline,  follow the history of that momentous year, and start local discussions of the events that changed our world. For example, release of The Franck Report on June 11, 1945...

You might not recognize the name, since the report was kept secret at the time, one of many WWII documents whose un-censored versions only became public decades later.  Signed by several prominent nuclear physicists who worked on development of an atomic bomb, the Franck Report recommended that the US not use the atomic bomb as a weapon to prompt the surrender of Japan. 

Here are some thoughts on a related topic: Can the UN be reformed? 
World Order and Cultivating Community

The liberal international order is currently being challenged by populism in nations that built and long supported it. It is also being tested by rising powers, particularly China, and other states that hope to restore their prominence. Some go so far as to say the old order is fractured at the core, which makes a major conflict more likely. At the same time, the world faces a growing number of global challenges that cannot be managed effectively by national governments alone. 

The United Nations is still considered by many people as the key feature of this fragile World Order, and is certainly treated as one of its major institutions. When nations don’t abide by its resolutions, they are often accused of violating international norms or even law. In short, the UN is assumed to be a global democratic government. But this is at best aspirational, and, in some serious respects, misleading. 

The UN Security Council certainly isn’t democratic or liberal. Veto power is held by the winners of World War II; large parts of the world have no say. A handful of nations can impose sanctions, with immunity from counterclaims. And even if all other nations acted together, they could not impose sanctions on the Big Five.

So isn’t calling the UN General Assembly “the most democratic and representative body” a bit misleading? Beyond the power imbalance already described, India (1.3 billion people) and Luxembourg (613,000) each have one vote! And although the General Assembly passes all manner of resolutions, its members know there is no credible way to enforce them. Is it democratic when most of the votes are cast by representatives of authoritarian regimes, with leaders who couldn’t care less what their people feel? Is it accurate to call the UN liberal when representatives of brazen human rights violators have for years led its human rights bodies?

Given all of this, do nationalists have a valid point when they charge that the UN violates national sovereignty? Shouldn’t it at least be more representative? And how about all the international governance carried out by other international organizations, and through informal bodies like the G7, G8, and G20? Their decisions aren’t binding on those who dissent, but at least they try to operate by consensus, Is this a more viable way to go? 

The world obviously needs stronger, more effective forms of global governance. But it doesn’t look ready at the moment to be governed like a liberal democracy. Instead, premature attempts to overcome nationalism have fed populism. 

One of the problems may be insufficient community building. People have a basic need for recognition and respect, and these are linked to a sense of identity and community. Since the 1980s the US has tilted too far toward individualism and lost a sense of communal values. If that is part of the problem, does it also point toward a solution? 

At the same time we have lost a sense of shared values we have experienced rising alienation, resurgent populism, institutional breakdown, and Donald Trump. It is not a coincidence. But perhaps we can cultivate a greater shared sense of community, even in supranational forums, and eventually extend it to their governing bodies. The trick is how to do it without creating more alienation and pushback.