Though I’m still interested in those moments of intense connection to transcendance/immanence that some call epiphany, I’m also interested in what I begin to think of as a new religion — though it’s not a religion as I understand it.
Probably you understand “religion” as institutionally defined groups of people who presumably see the world about the same way, either because where that system of meaning had developed or because of a sweeping idea that seemed to guide sustainable life. The problem that has developed is that these systems for human belief and behavior were designed in one place but now they’ve been moved to new places with different enough ecologies that they don’t quite work.
At the same time the environments are changing, not just physically and geographically, but in terms of human thought and ethical patterns which now must somehow include the whole planet. The paradigm shift that has most vividly come to my life is that between the agricultural patterns to the city/technical world. In fact, it underlies much of the difficulty of the US Constitution which was written by and for land-owners centuries ago.
The assumptions of the land-owning agriculturalist are that productivity is key, ownership is assumed, families are the systems, and consumption is local. It’s also based on white, Euro-trained, old men who identify with a subset of human beings who are all like them, excluding women, indigenous people, poor people, and people they “own.”
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html
Midway through the 13th century, for example, parts of the Northern Hemisphere started cooling. The causes were complex, but involved some combination of cyclical changes in the orientation of Earth’s rotational axis, repeated declines in solar radiation, random fluctuations in oceanic and atmospheric currents, and volcanic eruptions that temporarily shrouded the Earth in veils of sunlight-scattering sulphur dioxide.
Temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere fluctuated for a while before cooling sharply in the 15th century. They rebounded briefly in the 16th, then dropped across much of the world – including the Southern Hemisphere – later in that century. Temperatures in some places warmed briefly halfway through the 17th century, then cooled again until early in the 18th. After several decades of modest warming, renewed cooling beset much of the world until midway through the 19th century, when persistent warming finally set in.
Other examples of societies that thrived during the Little Ice Age are now coming into focus. In the Americas, Indigenous communities appear to have been especially inventive and resilient in the face of the Little Ice Age. In the 16th and 17th centuries, for example, Neutral Iroquoians in Northeastern America adapted to a cooling climate by shifting away from sedentary agriculture, prioritising hunting and building smaller settlements. Neighbouring Iroquioan communities, by contrast, migrated and depended on decentralised social networks to share increasingly scarce resources. Some Algonquian societies adopted the opposite approach, abandoning egalitarian social orders in order to more effectively defend cornfields from rival communities. Wabanaki raiders used an Indigenous technology, the snowshoe, to outmanoeuvre English soldiers. And in the American Southwest, Mojave peoples learned how to store and transport food as effectively as any Dutch merchant.
Like the Dutch Republic, the vast Comanche polity that surged to prominence across the 18th-century Great Plains seems both to have benefitted from and adapted to the cooling of the Little Ice Age. Beginning in the 16th century, chilly, rainy weather encouraged bison to migrate and then expand rapidly across the plains. While many Indigenous societies moved to take advantage, the Comanche soon dominated them by combining guns and horses for both hunting and raiding. By exploiting the vast and growing bison herds, the Comanche of the 18th century gained the wealth to raid or trade with societies across the entire Great Plains region. When frost or drought provoked food shortages in one community, another far away usually experienced different weather and therefore had enough supplies to make up the shortfall.
In our current swirl and tumble — confused by the desire to go-back! go-back! which is impossible — we still have not picked out some of the major globe-transforming forces. For instance, the indigenous people of the Americas are vividly aware of what the invading Euros did to them, but entirely blank when considering why people would leave places: like war, famine, little Ice Ages. And few in America have any notion of what the other end of Eurasia — China, India, Polynesia — were doing at the same time. Why didn’t India invade the “Indians”? Why did China mind its own business?
Come to that, why didn’t the indigenous people of the Americas — some of whom had big boats and some of whom probably washed over to America from Polynesia on the ocean currents — stage an invasion of London? (Leaving aside the question of what they would do with it if they conquered it.)
Incredibly, some people — often the same indigenous people who suffered from the old assumptions of how humans got here and what they should do about it — are clinging to the very systems that damaged them. But all along there have been people willing to use the new amazing scientific knowledge about everything from cells to galaxies. The hardships make maps of the underlying causes of change and sometimes tragedy.
So now we are all immigrants across Time, in a new place. Ten thousand years since the invention of agriculture, they say, which made it possible to overpopulate the earth and expose ourselves to deadly viruses in order to take their land. The viruses are indigenous, right? And we’ve about worn out our clever antibiotics. Spaceships are just another version of sailing ships and we forget how destructive those could be even to their crews, how chancy the profits were. Were they even profit rather than destruction?
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