Story from Western Civilization

I'm writing this memo because I think there is more we can do that hasn't been tried. Levels of involvement in what is happening in the world that as a culture we haven't acknowledged that might help shift the frame out of which...

the: "no one cares or is trying except us"

the: "everyone is doing the best they can" (though somehow things are getting worse)

the: "few bad apples"

and

the: "Capitalism!"

explanations are the best we have.

This is a modified fragment of a much longer alternative to the story underlying our civilization's trajectory into oblivion. This post in particular concerns the roles of people's ideas of themselves in the violence we direct against each other and the planet, even people who consider themselves to be anti-racist and environmentalists. How can that be? Read on. If, at the end, you still don't see what I'm getting at watch the video that inspired the title. I also put down another link from Ishmael that does a neat job (6 minutes) of characterizing an often unseen dimension of our problems.

While the last post: ( http://thecurrentsintime.blogspot.com/2010/06/there-are-no-such-things-as-vegans.html )was more focused on the serious limitations of identity based politics, this entry deals more with how the fragile yet volatile self concepts, that our society's accepted metaphysical constructs and broken assumptions allow us to perceive them as real things, confine our perceptions of reality, and thus our potential for freedom, accountability, and essential adaptation--as a culture on a day to day basis.

First I will try to highlight the contours of the offending dimension of our perception of reality, then its effects.

The Abstract Ego

I / you . We / they . me / hippies . me / asians . me / nature . /

Definitions, names.

Our names are like the names of nations, words that suggest to us a unique and privileged destiny. We walk in different directions and all end up in the same place.

Our names and our faces, often our first ground of contact with the world around us, the labels for the files that people we meet and know keep on us, help constitute the continuous self concept we spend our lives working on behalf of, the little corporation we dutifully pilot knowing it is the only place we will ever be. Beyond our name and our face we are composed of the rest of our body, our hunger, our thirst, our pain, our literal point of view, and our thoughts. Our experience of these things is immediate, total, and private. We are the only things we know really exist; other people's experiences we only imagine.

Through this cosmic distance we are able to perceive each other as independent beings. Though we know, intellectually, that each of us has this visceral, though externally inaccessible experience, that we are removed from the experience of others constitutes the first rift among life-forms, out of which arises the ego, the little voice tethered to one's physical manifestation which defines itself or exists only in the contrast of what it is not.

That we only experience our needs creates a sort of priority towards satisfying them. The hierarchy of importance that emerges here is not without purpose. From an evolutionary perspective(if evolution was conscious(is it?)) an embodied experience serves to make sure one's appetites are pursued so that the organism can survive, breed, and its species can endure. Why do species, at a biophysical level insist on enduring? Really, whats the point? It is an internal drive that is preconscious and present in every living thing.

We do not, however, evolve and appear on earth with names, with mirrors to see our own faces. These additions infuse the ego with a greater sense of distinctness, and importantly, represent the first in the category of features that the ego uses to distinguish itself, but which don't pertain to differences in actual biological needs between it and other organisms.

This is the beginning of what I'm calling the abstract ego, the layer of awareness most humans are locked in; it relies on created lines, categories, between itself and others both for its sense of self and self worth, and to entitle its desires. It is the location of the process of falsely devaluing others relative to one's self, as well as the location of falsely valuing or devaluing one's self based on how one imagines one is seen by society. I say falsely because we do not have a magic variable inside of us that changes our value and thus who we are every time someone looks at, and categorizes, us; we imagine this variable, just as they--in only seeing a fraction of our experience and effects--are imagining the capacity to define our "worth".

Our attachment to the abstract ego, and all of the superficial distances(from the perceived outside) it requires to appear, are the chains holding our face to the mirror that prevents us from seeing our body, limits the sense of scale through which we would otherwise understand ourselves as Life, and thus our abstract ego makes us unable to fully contextualize self-preservation as being located in understanding and respecting connections.

The constant emphasis on applying different values to what the abstract ego sees as outside of itself conceptually breaks the deeper context, in which our experiences have their roots, into separate things in separate drawers, stacked by importance. Because everyone is working on a different imagined hierarchy, it is each ego's fight for space, a drawer at the top of the tiny fleeting world it lives in, and the entitlement to externalize consequences to others that that space affords, which paves the way for all of the evils we've seen in the world.

Unlike the self/not self entitlement of needs in which an organism must prioritize its hunger or instinct to breed over a contemporary's to survive, the way we develop in this society, our abstract ego is constantly exalting or lamenting the aesthetic and imagined rifts through which it appears, because, like the name it is attached to, the abstract ego is only an idea a person has about themselves, a value imagined and expressed through how they are categorically distinguished and rated. It constantly searches for differences, a Here, a There, with regard to (species, favorite futbol team, race, country, hair style, etc.) to clarify itself and thus assert its existence.

What makes these supports for the idea of the self inevitably superficial, constructions with shifting societal meanings but no transcendent significance, is that, beyond reflecting, more, a person's normative exposure than any intrinsic virtue, a difference among any of the category signifiers doesn't correspond to a difference in an organism's physical needs/vulnerabilities. What makes these superficial differences, which the abstract ego uses to define itself, dangerous, is that, although they don't inherently entail the need for competition to meet physical needs, throughout history the self concept and the layers of distance it creates in maintaining these distinctions(to maintain itself) (ex. I am not mexican, I am not a woman, I am not a cow, I am not a Jew) has been exploited to divide, to dismiss empathetic inclinations, to justify harm.

A separation of being, constructing one's self or another as a different thing is a distortion of the biological locality of awareness that enables one expression of Life to privilege itself over another expression of Life for survival, the struggle that impels new shapes and forms and strategies, Life's mechanism for persisting and thus branching out and becoming more resilient. Used outside of a context of survival it works against survival, by artificially making expressions of Life into different, greater and lesser, things, lubricating the kind of escalation whereby blood fuels not merely need, but wants, luxury, entertainment. And thus the conform or die posture of our civilization decreases diversity and thus Life faces the mounting threats to its eternal branching with more people but less perspective, less variety.

No one can raise a tide of oppression against a person or people for being a certain 'type' if, as a culture, we abandon the notion that there can be types. Once we stop thinking of ourselves, of each other, through analogies, we will cease to simply be better or poorer copies of our societies expectations and simply be, and do, for reasons that arise out of the intersection of our experiences and the conditions in which we find ourselves, rather than being assigned for us to carry out by our sex, our skin color, advertisers, what Precedent says is possible. The alternative is, of course, that actions be judged for what they do instead of people being judged for what their actions imply they are.

Evolution, in social terms, is stifled by the impulse to immediately translate every thought, look, expression into some faction, holding the meanings and possibilities and reasons behind them prisoner to the prejudice for or against that faction, the narrow view of it that is taken when one's value and entitlement depends on that thing being different, and therefore less.

If we were not cut off from our greater self, we would not have to derive pleasure from unnecessary competition between ideas of each other, and we would have more opportunities to see how communities based on openness, solidarity, generosity, stewardship provide you with far more than systems based on competition.

To me, oneness represents an acknowledgement of connections, our common destiny that is tied to our common vulnerability and our collective role in creating the world we live in. How does seeing from the perspective that, though we have differences, we are not different, play out?

Life, if it were some pervading force, some spark waiting to be born into the world is where we all started. Of all the untold trillions of conceptions across time and species and place we were born into the human body, a certain language, a certain sex, a particular upbringing, a certain education, many things that would define us were given to us without our intent, many of the things that would restrict us were installed long before we would ever come across the fragile dreams of alternatives. As sums of matter, we forget that we could have been anyone, any thing, and that what is shared, again reflecting the connection that is more significant than any of the differences, is that we all need the same things.

The background noise we don't notice we are always hearing is that we are all separate. What are you going to do with your life, rather than what are we going to do with our world. Because our name, our face, our idea is something we are constantly seeking external validation for, it has little meaning aside from that granted it by our peers and society, and it has a shelf-life of one lifetime, though the effects of indulging it can last many times longer. Because of its narrow horizons, the abstract ego has difficulty in recognizing how the pattern and culture of separateness that created, and is reinforced by, it is ultimately detrimental to the 99% of little bubbles like itself that are not floating off by themselves somewhere around the apparent top of the world.

These are the currents of our time.

Why can't we resolve our environmental and social crises? Our incentive structure is directed at our abstract ego, and so people are busy following capricious social meanings, being Green, Vegan, Progressive, Radical, Black, Queer, Not-a Hippy, Not-Gay, Conservative, a Man, Successful, A Good Person, whatever it is good to be where they live, all airs that are reached through symbols which only imply doing or being good, or, alternately, nobler or inferior actions and qualities. These qualities are sufficient to define essentialized ideals or caricatures, but are insufficient as ways of discussing real people, or as the basis for an essential cultural transformation which will require cooperation among much greater numbers than any of these categories can marshall from out of their current constituencies.

The knowledge system that suffuses the culture from which these categories emerge translates: doing something, or looking a certain way, or saying certain things into you being something else each something else existing in opposition to somebody else's being and the good person concept that they depend on. This relates to how the abstract ego, and the identities it is composed of, actually works against diversity, by tacitly demanding an "in or out" via every expression that is appropriated by or assigned to an identity.

Its very easy to be a "good person", all it requires is that when you do things to, or say things about, others that you wouldn't want done to, or said about, yourself, those others are a different or lesser type. This is easy to accomplish, all it takes is distance(ignorance) and language. So everyone steps up onto their imaginary pedestal and pours their poisons downhill, and you get the world we have today.

What we are dealing with is a framework that helps us determine when someone is a certain thing, and how to tell when other people are the same so they can be mutually thought of through each other. Establishing what something or someone "is", is not necessarily the same as establishing their value, but it establishes a place for value to be assigned, for meanings to be invested in. That knowledge about one person can translate into knowledge about someone else is the offshoot of these attempts to organize reality by category, which depends on the assumption that entities distinct enough to be cross-referenced can still be the same. A life form then goes from being its own specific expression to merely being a metaphor, a profile that encompasses all other forms that, your culture's signifiers for that category tell you, make it the same.

Ever wonder how you can go to a place and people can hate you without ever having met you before? It has nothing to do with you but their idea of you, your supposed membership in a sociological category that contains certain notions of causality, and has been valued or devalued accordingly.

This is how identity based or laden social movements stall and or reinforce the issues they are trying to overcome, by formally or informally emphasizing a relationship between certain attributes and a type of being. Meanwhile not being that type, because of the stigmas invested in it, is propping up someone else's idea-self. As was pointed out before, the is, the are, depend on superficial differences which result in idea distance, and so the shift(the return) to seeing ourselves as a part of the continuum of Life will be a supreme accomplishment for at least three reasons.

1. Unlike creating an identity based on hair color or what type of fruit you like, Life is substantive, and is consistent in terms of what things are entailed by being a Life form (what are the laws that have always applied to life forms that humans recently decided don't apply to them*). Thinking about how things effect Life or the capacity for Life to dynamically interact and persist provides a solid baseline for evaluating actions whereas currently standards reflect extreme biases towards one's perceived group.

2. Without being culturally supported in basing your orientations on what someone "Is", you have to look to see what actually happened, what was caused, and whether it benefits Life or destroys it or does neither, and evaluate accordingly.

3. Seeing yourself, as Life, in everything removes what is the principal justification for violence or exploitation, namely "____ is only a ___"

Our culture is riding the notion of "___ is only a ____" rapidly toward the end of a very short stay on this planet. Nature is selecting against, not humans, but this worldview through which we see ourselves as above all other life, and Nature as but a stockpile of resources that are there for our use and waste. It is only our belief in money, and the insulation concentrations of it afford certain swaths of the population, that has kept the steady degradation of our global life support systems a remote concern to so many. Through money, people are able to push the consequences of their lifestyles onto others, but only temporarily.

This is about evolution, survival, life attempting to spread its wings, moving past the temporary all important me, and the distance required to maintain it. To test this perspective, practice seeing yourself in everyone, every person, every creature, every tree, every rock, as life; not what you would have done if you were them, but who you could have been, who you are at the most important level. As the barriers fall away, as you gather an assessment of what events, processes, systems you are the sum of, and what makes you possible, the abstract ego loses its reign and you can observe it when it tries to create a separation, an attachment located in its sense of time rather than earth time/Life time. When you see yourself as Life, waking after four billion years of evolution to stare at a tree and recognize itself you approach a freedom, and a depth, that a self concept scheduled for only 80 years cannot imagine.

Thanks for reading. Please share your thoughts. Sorry about the dry form, every additional word decreases the chance people will read the whole thing and so there is a tricky balance between writing as comprehensively as possible and not overloading the reader with words.

If this was too hard to follow check out the other blog post, which though it contains many overlapping considerations has a somewhat different flow and emphasis.

The video that inspired the title:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms2klX-puUU

A reading of a few pages from Ishmael that focuses on beliefs about reality that we don't see from our cultural location:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssyD7Sjw7i8

* Read Ishmael pgs 124-133 (actually read the whole thing). If you want I will transcribe the text from these pages.