Cultural Rescue Attempt
The old story is breaking down. Our capitalist-industrial way of life is a choice, but there are other choices. It’s imperative to recognize this before we can change. We need a renaissance of citizenship, an ecologically literate society that challenges our learned behaviors at every opportunity. We’ve been living contrary to the pattern — denying death, denying limits, endlessly growing. Our economic system can’t tolerate any reduction in consumption, and for most people, the idea of setting limits on themselves is unthinkable. Economic progress is killing the planet, and nobody talks about it. There’s no language to explain the loss and make possible a politics of opposition.
Only when the cultural narrative is in overwhelming crisis is there a possibility of changing it. This is that time. We’re trapped between a failed story and a future powerless to be born. We need to speak in metaphors, in mythic terms. We need to change the language where “I’m connected” means I’m plugged into a tiny piece of irradiated, buzzing, lit up collection of murdered precious resources, participating in the totality of alienation. We need to change our language from techno to poetry. We are embodied organisms, embedded in Nature.
All of western thought is dominated by the model of hierarchy, but rhizomes are different.
Consider the rhizome. Rhizomes are thickened stems that grow horizontally under the surface of the soil. Bamboo. Banana. Taro. Iris. Aspen. Crabgrass. When you plant a rhizome, it takes off in all directions, and to get some, you just need a digging stick to break off a piece. The more you cut up rhizomes, the more they split. You never know where or when a rhizome’s going to emerge.
The rhizome is a model for grassroots organizing, and a metaphor. If we’re all together, centralized in one place, and we rise up in revolt, they’ll just kill us all. But, if each person develops our own connection to our local bioregion, they’ll never stop us all, no matter how organized they are.
We are cultural shamans, and while there may not be a lot any one of us can do to save life on earth, there are many little things that each of us at the end of every
We’re engaged in a cultural rescue attempt,. We need to force a shift in perspective as great as Copernicus about our place in the universe. We are not the center, but we are connected to the diverse and evolving web of being. We’ve got to see through the assumptions and fears, deep through to the pattern. We need to awaken to the warning signs of a world slipping away- in fire, in water, in our denial, in all directions.
We can’t think about anything critically because of electronically forced discontinuity, chaos, fragmentation of attention spans. Corporate culture keeps us all distracted by flooding us with free floating information about which we can do nothing. Information is data, is abstraction. It is not the same as wisdom. Often it is the opposite of wisdom. Perpetually disabled citizens make great shoppers.
This society is at war, and we need to cool the vibe down with our creativity and play with peace for a change. This consumer society takes revolution, rock and roll and the labor movement and turns them into mediums for selling beer, jeans and hair products. In the absence of critical thinking, we’ve been so deeply manipulated and lied to. Life isn’t about things or about ideas, but about relationships. The root word for “religion” is “re-linking”. We move in circles of mutuality and influence. Because we’re all connected, we need to start to grasp that there’s an ecology of everything.
In ecological post-modernism, we grasp the holy-is-ness, of the EcoZoic Era. We have to transform from our hearts, allow them to become heavy with grief and longing for nature. We speak, in the language of longing, of our dysfunction and denial, and we re-enter the mystery. The system’s rigidity will bring it down; lets dance that trance into the ground.
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