We have a crisis. No, it’s not the climate, a new pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the murder of innocents in Palestine, or even the fact that citizens in the most powerful country in the world elected a numbskull as their president last November.
This is a convoluted crisis that nobody wants to talk about. A crisis impacting our identity as a species on the one hand and our ability to create renewed purpose on the other. This crisis is a crisis of consciousness – one manifesting so deeply in the human psyche that it goes to the heart of our biological future here on Earth.
At one level it’s about our fading ability to make sense of the world we’re so busy creating in order to be able to live with (and adapt to) increasing novelty, brittleness and ambiguity. It’s also a matter of education – an issue concerned with the rites and rituals and instructions we use to induct young people into society. At another level it has to do with our expectations regarding what we commonly refer to as progress, especially the need to feel constantly wealthier, wiser and healthier than previous generations, even if that might be deceptive. And at a deeper level still, it points to an alarming impasse in our ability to visualise and design fundamentally different evolutionary paths to the one we are currently walking.
In particular, our ontological imagination has atrophied. Path dependency and self-righteous hubris have conspired to produce a status quo in which our minds have become shuttered to alternatives vis-à-vis who we are as a species, what it means to be human in a geological age we now dominate, and what obligations might fall on our shoulders in that new context.
This crisis is illustrated by the conduct of two distinct groups in our society: youth, who aspire to something other than what we have given them – a life experience I described in an earlier book of essays as the “unwanted gift” – and incumbent power. The latter group is persuaded that current modes, methods and concepts of organising, governing and managing embody the peak of achievement for our species. The former group are confused and anxious, not at all convinced that they even have a future given the precipitous nature of geopolitics.
Teenagers can be divided into two broad categories – attitudinal types arising from their stark experiences of the world and a mixture of angst and ennui that’s part of the zeitgeist. Some are tuning out of the constant drone of climate talks, the persistent pattern of politicians trying to patch up the present by repeating their mistakes, and the need for activism in that regard. They are protesting in the ways teenagers have always done – by rebelling, resorting to petty crime, doing drugs, or (quite literally) doing nothing. Others are engaging like their parents before them, in very 'baby boomer' consumeristic lifestyles, perpetuated by online social media shopping that encourages constant buying of more 'stuff'.
But the second group is even more concerning. Generally well educated, career-orientated, and ambitious, they are uncritically adopting the assumptions, models and practises of my generation – not seeing past basic failings and inequities that are built into the system and that are now, gradually, in many cases reluctantly, being acknowledged. These are the young men and women who go to the business schools or enter politics as staffers. They aspire to lead corporations and attend meetings by the World Economic Forum, creating wealth in spades. Inspired by the fame and success of celebrity billionaires, they’re the next generation of young entrepreneurs on a similar quest. Given their energy and enthusiasm, they’re likely to amplify whatever failings currently exist. And they will most likely do it with a naïveté that’s blind to the consequences.
If our future is one in which humans continue to extract, pollute, exploit and ill-treat each other and the planet in accelerating power games of desire and consumption, fear and retribution, today’s problems will simply intensify. We will destroy our species in waves of self-destruction.
My hope is that we can push through the obstacle of an ontological imagination constrained by history and greed to see that our relationship with the “more-than-human” world is key to our very survival. That will mean heeding indigenous wisdom before technological innovation shapes every material activity and accepting new obligations for stewardship and empathy that currently elude us.