Stories Old and New

I do not view the frequent incidences of mass shootings and the emergence of racist billionaire demagogue Donald Trump as a popular politician as separate problems. Additionally, I do not view these two problems as separate from the fact that there is a garbage patch of plastic the size of Texas floating in the Pacific or the fact that if you were to weigh the large fish in the ocean you would find that total weight down 90% from what it was before the Industrial Revolution or the fact that eight of the last ten years have been the hottest years on record.

The extremes: the crazy extremes, the tragic ones, the absurd and farcical ones, the devastating extremes that we are witnessing are the manifestation of the end of a story. This story, which is in its final and terminal phase, contends that humans are atomized selves who can function independent of community and in a realm separate from “nature.” It is a mad story – and it is tragic that such a story could become so widespread, dominant and entrenched.  Mercifully, this mad narrative is on its final legs; its contradictions are more manifest with each passing day. Yesterday I heard a report on the radio from Beijing in which the interviewer asked a six-year-old girl if she knew what color the sky was. The girl responded that she thinks it is blue because she saw the sky one day. The little girl also remarked that she has never seen a star.

We know from the wars in the Balkans and now the war in Iraq  that when a force that maintains a society in place is removed (even if that force is a brutal and sociopathic tyrant, as in these examples), chaos is unleashed. As the previous story – one which goes back 8000 years to the dawn of agriculture, continued with the rise of empires, was distilled in the Enlightenment and reached its final and obscene apotheosis in the philosophy of the founder of modern marketing, Edward Bernays – truly begins to unravel and release its grip on Western consciousness, chaos will be unleashed. However, the degree of chaos and what emerges to take the place of our current moribund myth depends very much on us.

We are very fortunate in the United States to live in a place where vestiges of alternate stories have hung on among Native Americans, people of African descent and people from anywhere – including Europe and Asia – where the current dominant story did not completely obliterate previous lifeways and modes of consciousness. In summarizing the difference between Western and indigenous thought, writer Derrick Jensen has remarked that the greatest difference between the indigenous view of life and the Western view of life is this: indigenous culture views the world as subjects to enter into relationship with; the Western mind views the world as objects to be exploited. In his book The Reenchantment of the World, Morris Berman writes, “For more than 99% of human history, the world was enchanted and man saw himself as an integral part of it. The complete reversal of this perception in a mere four hundred years or so has destroyed the continuity of the human experience and the integrity of the human psyche. It has nearly wrecked our planet, as well. The only hope, or so it seems to me, lies in the reenchantment of the world.”

Alternate ways to interact with each other and with the world around us abound. These ways offer not only the hope for the survival of our species and our fellow Earth species, but offer a way of existing that can be much less fraught with the isolation, alienation and explosions of murderous rage with which we live now.

Dedicated to Leo Gonçalves, Vioarr Odinsson, Stephanie Ferrera, Emily MacDonald, Harvey Taylor, Christine Ferrera, Julie Gouldner, Janos Biro Marques Leite, Temple Crocker, Charles Eisenstein and all of those helping to remember, rediscover and reimagine our stories.