The Missing Element
I have been watching a tantalizing and enthralling movie by Renee Scheltema. Normal is Over highlights the incredible work of a number of my most esteemed colleagues and friends - including climate activist Paul Gilding, contrarian economists Kate Raworth, Bernard Lietaer and Charles Eisenstein, eco-feminist Vandana Shiva, science historian Naomi Oreskes, and environmentalist Lester Brown. A stunning cast if ever there was one.
Unlike Seaspiracy, a project featuring George Monbiot that was equally fascinating, but which felt more like a series of hammer blows to the heart in its fierce determination to shock the audience out of their complacent acceptance of nature as a resource to be used up, Scheltema's essay gently examines those patterns of activity that help explain how humanity is now quite possibly writing its own final chapter.
Normal Is Over chronicles the many ways humans have 'inadvertently' put our planet in peril. It tackles issues such as industrial methods of food production, climate change, species extinction and depletion of critical natural resources. By examining how our economic and financial systems connect all these things, the film offers a variety of solutions that could be implemented now - from practical everyday fixes to rethinking the overarching myths of our time. This movie feels closer to the overtly conservationist series Our Planet narrated by the English naturalist David Attenborough for Netflix in 2019.
One ingredient though seems to have escaped the attention of these filmmakers: the fact that the planet is going to be fine, that the phenomenon most under threat is human civilization, and that the single most potent element capable of shifting the balance in our favour frequently goes unmentioned and unsung.
Certainly it seems to me to be nonsensical to argue that the damage humans have wreaked on the planet, and on each other, has been deliberate or premeditated. Far from it. Most of us are naive, if well-intentioned individuals, who are just trying to get by the best we can. On the other hand there can be no doubt that a range of 'man-made' constructs and events have too often turned out to be short-sighted, imprudent, and patently tenuous - the effect of narrow perspectives, informed by an impulse to achieve explicitly self-serving (and thus limited) results.
Even though Scheltema tries to present her themes as the origins for our distress, they are actually the visible signs of a far deeper and more arcane concern: namely the evolution of the human psyche as it comprehends and comes to terms with changing external realities - or what we usually refer to as the human condition.
There seems to be a subliminal code etched into our collective subconscious that determines how each of us thinks and behaves. This code compels us to see and explain the world and our role in it a certain way. Other than a few scholars in the social sciences we have not examined this code closely, possibly because it is more intuitive than concrete. And because we're not aware of it guiding our preferences or decisions, it's a blind spot. As a consequence we tend to look for more visible behavioural evidence, equating this with scientific logic, as the more likely key to whatever impediments are staring us in the face. I suspect this code is also capable of explaining that which appears irrational and ineffable, if only we can find a way to decipher it.
The closest I can get to cracking this code - through observation, forensic analysis and more than a dash of speculation - is to offer the following memetic archetype for contemplation. Although I intend taking the liberty of generalising, I believe this model comprises the skeleton of a barely concealed, yet uncontested encryption. Potentially the single element that even now is determining our fate. I refer to the imbalance of gender that constrains human imagination and the potential for radical metamorphosis of the afore-mentioned human condition.
Modern sapiens inhabit a world-system that, for the most part, was designed by men for men. It is a world based on a worldview most befitting men and therefore, by dint of sheer logic, less suited to women. This schema evolved over the course of millennia. During that time women, almost universally deemed the 'weaker' sex, assumed less visible and vocal roles in society, which seemed culturally appropriate at the time. If women did occasionally side-step convention, speaking out or venturing brazenly into what were thought to be male domains, it was viewed as an anomaly - a rare and unwanted glitch in the system. In most instances throughout history, original ideas or discoveries made by women were disregarded - even to the point where kudos for theories, inventions and works of art, would routinely go to men. Women, it was most commonly presumed, were simply the carers who should focus on looking after the family. They were not sufficiently ingenious, quick-witted, or blessed with an ability for critical thinking, to entertain a career, nor were they capable of keeping pace with men in fields such as industry, politics, or professions like the law or medicine.
We will never know the truth about the contributions played by women in so many fields of endeavour simply because the task of recording 'what happened' (with very few exceptions) has been considered the responsibility of the 'leaders' in society, who all happened to be men - mostly middle-aged, white, Anglo-Saxon men too.
This remained the situation until fairly recently. For example, it was only really through Hollywood, and movies like Hidden Figures, that the public began to realise the importance of women in science. Men could not have stepped onto the moon without the mathematical genius of people like Katherine Johnson. And we still cannot be sure what role Mileva Einstein-Maric, the first wife of the famed physicist Albert Einstein played in the work that would transform contemporary physics.
The male gender - actually the white male agenda - is the default mechanism for most theoretical models, material artefacts, laws, institutions and methods in use today, whereas the female gender is restricted to one of matriarchal 'appropriateness' and emotional support.
Feminine ways of knowing have also been routinely discounted, at least in most modern societies - although that was clearly not the case within indigenous communities. In some cultures the status between the two genders is even more prominent with laws differentiating men from women, thus preventing women from undertaking specific tasks, like driving a vehicle, wearing certain clothes, or leaving the home without a chaperone.
Today, assuming we agree with my original proposition that none of this is likely to have been intentionally engineered, the situation has crystalized into an actuality that was not ‘conceived’ so much as ‘ill-conceived’. The result is a manufactured normalcy where over half of the population, and the crucial work that sector undertakes, is under-valued and frequently disparaged - even though women are responsible for many vital facets of the society - such as child development, social cohesion, and even the expressive wisdom of the species.
One cannot claim present demarcations between men and women were purposefully designed or hide malevolent motives. On the contrary, they evolved unplanned, little by little, and mostly because of perceived and actual differences between the sexes - both physical and mental. That the outcome could be so detrimental to the ultimate fate of homo sapiens is a truth we are only just beginning to concede.
We cannot say for sure what might have happened had a different set of design criteria evolved. If women had become the more self-assured tool makers and word warriors, for example, perhaps our civilization would have turned out to be more benign and wiser. What could not have been predicted or prevented when, over aeons, explicitly male-oriented beliefs were embedded into the ordained social order within that world-system, was that men would effectively create for themselves legal structures that legitimized their dogmas, alongside a moral code that venerated them, and sanctions that punished apostates.
In effect, the modern overwhelmingly patriarchal worldview was born - along with everything flowing from it, including the overarching conceptual models and archetypes we now mostly take for granted.
Thus, we blindly submit to a serfdom shaped by a warped inversion of logos (our purpose) and nomos (the management of that purpose), in which extractive modes of economic production, predatory growth, and mindless competition inevitably lead to cold inequality, ingrained discord, and deteriorating natural ecosystems.
We tolerate an apparatus of justice that services our brutal temperament for the inhumane punishment of those we casually brand miscreants, deviants, refugees and villains. Meaningless work is rewarded with an endless pageant of info-trivia and new gadgets. Worse still, political spectacle - comprising laddish rituals shored up by egotistical tyrannies, accidents of birth, and the lure of power and wealth, that serves no wiser purpose than its own glorification, and in which egocentric chauvinism outshines any capacity for artful governance - takes centre stage, is held to be the peak of intellectual chic, and thus beyond reproach.
Ours is a society engineered for non-generative practices. A society where progress is a delusion and in which an unhealthy reliance on technological innovation is viewed as a panacea for all ills. A society where youthful hope in the future has been pilfered and replaced by blind optimism and apathy.
The missing element is the equal contribution of women in a world designed not for relentless growth and constant war, but for love, empathy and inclusion. It is a world-system founded on an ecocentric worldview that values all life as sacred, and where our anthropomorphic tendency to destroy that which we do not understand, no longer persists as the crux of all that humanity can represent.
This world is currently absent. Yet we occasionally catch a glimpse of what might be possible in a world where the imaginal cells of feminist foresight are encouraged to inspire a better sense of balance between men and women, where more tender words are used to inform and negotiate, and where matriarchal law is vital in order to survive a male-dominated sprint to extinction.