Creating Sustainability in an Unsustainable Culture

May you live in interesting times
–Ancient Chinese curse

Is it understatement, a redundancy even, to say that there has been so much happening in and around our world of late? A deep fear of loss has been unleashed, a resurgent atavistic panic burns in the hearts and thoughts of human beings around the world, and as a collectivity of human concern, we yearn to be rescued from our problems, to “get the economy back on track,” to find a way to sustain familiar standards of living, and to once again, happily, loose consciousness by burying ourselves within the pervasive and peculiar Western myth of progress.

In the midst of this–what, exactly, does one call the forces that are currently affecting our lives and in our world? As I will explain, whatever this is doesn’t rise to the level of a catastrophe; more likely it is merely, as Nietzsche called it, chaostrophe. So, in the midst of our fear and panic, I want to take a moment to point to something deep and powerful working in the collective, as well as in the individual psyche, and it goes far beyond the implications that the concepts of depression, regression or progress call into awareness. Contemporary events are simply the Prima Facie manifestations of the powerful, and powerfully reordering, archetypal energies currently in play. Chaos is always the experience individuals have when their once-valid world begins to transform. Chaos doesn’t mean that humanity has gone off course, and chaos doesn’t nullify progress; in fact, chaos is always and in all ways an unavoidable and singular artifact of progress, a progress that is necessarily accompanied by change. In any event, it is naïve to believe that the concept of progress is always and only good. Progress may be as much a way of distancing from psychic or physical reality as it is a means of approaching an understanding of the world. In other words, progress may be psychologically defensive in equal measure to its ability to its societal benefits, so one must be careful to not be enthralled by what is, in its worst incarnations, an all too often comfortable cultural justification for moral degeneration and a grotesquely ruthless weapon of destruction.

I want to examine two fundamental psychological mistakes human beings make when trying to create sustainable environments of any kind, be they ecological, sociological, or psychological. The first mistake is what philosophers term a “category mistake,” or the kind of conflation of concepts that occurs when, for example, one mistakes essence for substance, quality for quantity, or archetype for form. Essence and substance, according to a remarkably prescient philosopher, Réne Guénon, are universal principles which serve as the two poles of manifestation–essence being the active and substance the passive principle: “…these two principles appear in [the world] under the aspects of quality and quantity respectively…essence is the principial synthesis of all the attributes that belong to a being and make that being what it is….” For my purposes in this essay I will define essence as immaterial, unquantifiable, and existing as pure potentiality while substance is material, manifest, and quantifiable. Substance is the materia secunda of the world (while the Prima Materia of the alchemists is more properly thought of as essence), and as visible matter, the artisan shapes it; it consists of bodies in motion or at rest, and it is the condition that belongs most exclusively to the world, which we humans then order, measure, and classify.

The second psychological error is a mistake of perception. Over the course of human history, human consciousness has changed. Originally humans inhabited the world in a state suggesting that very little, if any, self-identity existed. Human beings existed in units–in tribes, in familial and consensual alliances through which identity was located and found exclusively within the communal or societal group, a psychologically undifferentiated space that C. G. Jung has termed a participation mystique, a psychological situation which:

…consists in the fact that the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity [with the observed object] . . .. Among [modern] peoples it usually occurs between persons, seldom between a person and a thing. In the first case it is a transference relationship . . .. In the second case there is a similar influence on the part of the thing, or else an identification with a thing or the idea of a thing.

This Participation Mystique is the sort of consciousness that Jean Gebser, in his masterwork entitled, The Ever-Present Origin, has called unperspectival. Later, and uncommonly perhaps, in the ancient Mediterranean World a reorganization of human consciousness began and added another, a third, dimension to the human perception of space (this same irruption of consciousness began to express in Europe around the 13th Century). With knowledge of this added dimension of space, the human world was transformed: Leonardo revolutionized the world of art, Cervantes and Chaucer radically re-imagined the novel, Newtonian physics and Cartesian philosophy insisted that the world is not a mystery at all but rather, it is a logical, predictable machine, a machine of unimaginable complexity and precision perhaps, but a machine none-the-less and possible to be replicated by human hands. The ego emerges as the center of consciousness and human subjectivity, which necessarily experiences the rest of the world (and all non-human life in it) as a distant other, as object, and shifts its focus from a deep and sacred exploration of time (“Time resides in the soul” says St. Augustine) to a voracious obsession with space that results in the progressively stultifying materialism of the past two hundred years.

Parenthetically, I often think that the concepts of soul and space are antithetical. What I mean by that is that so often people describe their encounters with soul as having the quality of timelessness–of moments and experiences existing out of time; in a word, eternal. The eternal quality of the soul seems to bind it to contemplations of time: fleeting time, quality time, time of day, family time, me time, and the-only-time-we-have-is-now time, etc. Eventually, Enlightenment thought begins to distinguish between space and time: even the etymology of the word includes a definition from the early 14th Century identifying time with “limited space.” Feeling, essence, and quality abide in and are recognized through their relationships to time while behaviors and other quantitative phenomena are, to greater and lesser degrees, rooted in space. Space invites extension, in fact, space is axiomatically filled with matter and material (nature abhors a vacuum), and while spirit may precipitate in matter and therefore be found in space, as in the spirit of a place or an individual, soul is always attempting to dematerialize and will never be found in a substance, but rather only in the awareness of essence. This notion, as I will try to illustrate, has tremendous implications for the concept of sustainability.

Right now, at this moment in history, human beings seem to stand poised on the brink of another revolution in consciousness. Quantum physics, neuroscience, cybernetics, and postmodern spirituality are all suggestive of an invisible, perhaps even immaterial, reality that influences human experience and reality far more than the physical, mechanical world we find ourselves so comfortable in and so accustomed to. As a species, we seem to be on the cusp of developing what Jean Gebser described as “Aperspectival” consciousness, a consciousness that rests upon two guiding principles:
1) Latency: that which is concealed or hidden, and contains our past and present, and which already contains our future. “We are shaped and determined not only by today and yesterday, but by tomorrow as well.”

2) Diaphaneity, or transparency. The point of transparency is to expose everything latent (principle 1), everything hidden behind, in, and before the world, our past, present, and future.

Gebser insists that taken together, these two principles constitute a methodology (and that it is a methodology there can be no doubt, as Gebser makes clear, sometimes painfully so, from the six hundred and some odd pages he uses to articulate this methodology) that evolves from the experiences of human beings in transition, experiences that have embedded within them the concealed, latent intimations and intuitions of incipient futures which, as they become more distinct, clarify the experience of the present.

To my way of thinking, the most striking aspect of an aperspectival consciousness is the absolute lack of distance, a transubstantiation of time and space, in both the psychic and the physical sense. It is a form of consciousness very similar to that possessed by those we typically refer to as “enlightened” beings. Time, specifically the absence of linear time, is once again restored to its rightful place as an object of deep meditation and wonder; a focus upon essence and quality takes precedence over substance and quantity; space is rendered meaningless by experiences of soulfulness; and a conscious re-animation of the world is undertaken so that one sees oneself as a part of all that is, from a place of highly differentiated, spiritually aware consciousness (i.e. Thou art That) rather than from a place of undifferentiated consciousness as in the unperspectival way of being.

Finally, it seems to me that sustainability, as most commonly spoken of today, is not sustainability, per se, but rather a reaction to specific influences or circumstances that appear to be threatening. Constantly responding to a threat, or threats, is not a sustainable proposition. As long as sustainability is conceptualized as a set of related behaviors which are operationalized or exercised upon matter “out there” in the world, there will always be a psychic distance, and an actual physical distance, distance that creates unsustainable situations.

It is not, in fact, physical space that needs to be reclaimed and sustained, yet space is the insistent concern of issues of sustainability, and indeed the insistent concern of the modern era, perhaps of all eras. Man leaves his African cradle and ventures out into unknown space, occupying the subcontinent, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Eventually, Copernicus “discovers” heliocentric space; Columbus, only the most famous of innumerable (and earlier) ocean going explorers, and others become aware of Earth’s space; Vesalius deconstructs ancient certitudes about the body and describes the body’s space; Galileo looks even more deeply into outer space with his telescope; and on and on and on, constantly extending into space as object–as place, quantifying, measuring, and occupying every space we possibly can, and continuing to do so right on up to and beyond the very moment you read this article. The unsustainable result is that humanity knows more about outer space than it does about its own inner space primarily because inner space requires contraction rather than extension and intimacy rather than distance; knowing about inner space necessitates an understanding of essence rather than thingness, of qualities rather than mechanics; exploring inner space requires feeling awareness rather than behavioral awareness; comprehensive awareness of inner space requires a shift in consciousness from the perspectival to the aperspectival.

Sustainability, in order to be truly sustainable, has to emerge organically from an aperspectival consciousness and render distance itself immaterial. Only when one is intimately connected and equal to all other things will there be true sustainability; the familiar tradition of Primus Inter Pares is not enough to create sustainable futures for there can be no first among equals if there is to be true sustainability, there are only equals. Nor is the tradition of caretaker for the planet a sustainable model, for the shadow of the caretaker is the exploiter, and Christian mythology, to cite just one case in point, has yielded such extraordinary examples of shadow irruptions as to make us wary of any further impositions of that model on ourselves and the world. Even attempts to measure and quantify sustainability issues, while perhaps helpful in formulating a response to a threatening situation, is not the same as creating or implementing sustainability.

What will finally create sustainability is the soulfully realized experience that any suffering anywhere is one’s own immediate, personal suffering, and the human instinct to pure, unadulterated self-interest will do the rest. There will be an instinctual move to ameliorate the unsustainable situation. The missing piece is supplied by the transformational realization that we are not unrelated, unconnected, and separate individuals, but that we humans share the larger part of a genome with every living thing on this planet, which is itself a living thing.

I am not, by the nature of my emotional constitution an optimist, and I don’t believe that human beings can, en masse, create such a radical shift in consciousness any time soon. Such a shift happens slowly and gradually (after all, perspectival consciousness took some 1,500 years to coalesce), and more and more, it seems that we are simply running out of time. But even though I am not by my nature an optimist, I am encouraged by the fact that I am so often so spectacularly wrong in my analyses and beliefs, that such a shift could be happening right under my nose and I would not necessarily recognize it because, Nietzsche writes, “Each is farthest away from himself.” The only hope we have, the most sustainable refuge we have, is the soul–the Anima Mundi, and in it is, as Dante wrote, the love that moves the sun and other stars.