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World on Fire

September 19, 2020 by Charles Eisenstein

September 2020
This essay is also available in Portuguese and French.


Brazil’s Pantanal is the world’s largest tropical wetland, covering an area nearly the size of Britain. Only today, it isn’t so wet. After a summer of drought, catastrophic fires are raging that have devastated 2.4 million hectares of land already this year. (That’s more than has burned in California, Oregon, and Washington combined.) Its precious wildlife, including the world’s largest population of jaguars, are suffering irreparable damage.

What’s causing the destruction? The proximate causes seem quite different from what is causing the fires in California, but if we trace them back through enough layers, we get to the same deep cause and, therefore, to the same deep solution.

Since 2019, catastrophic fires have afflicted the Amazon, the Congo basin, Australia, Siberia, Argentina, and countless other places. While some on the political Right were in denial that anything unusual was happening, today the entire political spectrum is in agreement that something is horribly amiss. In the US, the Right offers candidate explanations like poor forest management, while Democratic politicians emphasize climate change. What they both agree on is that the current state of affairs in abnormal, unacceptable, and requires action. This, at least, is progress.

In fact, both sides are approaching the same truth from different directions. Let me start at forest management, pass through climate change via a back door, visit the blatantly criminal behavior behind fires in the Amazon and Pantanal, and arrive finally at the core of the issue.

Forest Management

Right-wing articles on the US fires commonly invoke the phrase, “Forests have to be properly maintained to prevent catastrophic fires.” Often their conclusion is that burdensome government regulation has prevented the timber industry from culling dead trees and managing forests wisely. The problem, of course, is that subject to market forces, timber companies have historically and up to the present managed forests according to profit, not wisdom. A further problem is that, superficially at least, it can’t be right that forests require human management,. Prior to twelve or fifteen thousand years ago, there were no humans at all in California, but nature took care of itself just fine.

The story is not so simple though – forests then as now required management. In pre-human times the management was accomplished by other species such as, in North America, beavers, salmon, and especially megafauna. The continent teemed with gigantic herbivores like mammoths and mastodons, who devoured sprouting trees, stripped bark, trampled vegetation, and pushed down trees like bulldozers. These “ecosystem engineers” created mosaic landscapes of forest and savanna, and made the forests less dense. After their disappearance soon following the arrival of humans, the humans replaced them as ecosystem engineers, using controlled burns and many other methods to maintain productive, resilient, biodiverse landscapes that were resistant to catastrophic fires. As Kat Anderson describes it in Tending the Wild:

Through coppicing, pruning, harrowing, sowing, weeding, burning, digging, thinning, and selective harvesting, they encouraged desired characteristics of individual plants, increased populations of useful plants, and altered the structures and compositions of plant communities. Regular burning of many types of vegetation across the state created better habitat for game, eliminated brush, minimized potential for catastrophic fires, and encouraged diversity of food crops. These harvest and management practices, on the whole, allowed for sustainable harvest of plants over centuries and possibly thousands of years.

A similar scenario took place in Australia tens of thousands of years earlier: human colonization followed by megafauna disappearance, followed by the exquisitely developed controlled burns and other ecosystem management techniques. On both continents, even when megafauna disappeared, other ecosystem engineers flourished: migratory birds, apex predators, beavers, insects, and so on.

In the last few centuries, forests and other ecosystems have come to be managed not for health, but for profit. Today we see signs of a turnaround as policymakers begin to recognize the necessity to reduce the fuel load in forests; sometimes they even consult traditional peoples who remember the old ways. Too often, though, profit motives pervert forest thinning practices, steering them toward producing salable lumber rather than forest health.

Furthermore, fuel load is much too narrow a focus in understanding today’s catastrophic fires. A century or more of deforestation and other land abuse has lowered the resistance of forests to fires and created drought conditions that exacerbate them. It’s commonplace to declare that climate change is harming forests, but it may be more accurate to say that harm to forests causes climate change, which then harms forests even more.

Forest clearcutting affects climate far beyond the oxidation of stored carbon. Without leaves, leaf litter, and roots to protect it, exposed topsoil washes away and the rainwater has no chance to sink into the earth. The resulting floods are inevitably followed by droughts. Why? A healthy forest transpires groundwater, maintaining moist conditions and extending the rainy season. Globally, at least 40% of rainfall originates from plant transpiration; in the Amazon it is 70%.

Forests also contribute to local, regional, and global cooling as the transpired water evaporates and rises into the atmosphere. Its latent heat is released when it condenses higher up, some of which radiates out into space. Furthermore, healthy forests emit ice nucleating compounds and particles, increasing cloud cover, creating rain, and reflecting sunlight back into space. Old growth forests perform these functions especially well (only 1% of California’s old growth forests remain). Here is a passage, slightly modified, from my book on climate:

Kenya, which has lost most of its forest cover over the last half-century, is also suffering persistent droughts and higher temperatures. Regions in Kenya where the daytime temperature in the forest might be 19 degrees record temperatures in nearby, recently cleared agricultural land of 50 degrees.… In Sumatra, land cleared for palm oil plantations was 10 degrees hotter than nearby rainforest, and stayed hotter even when the palm trees matured.

A real, living forest interacts with the water cycle in complex ways that science is just beginning to understand. (Much of the following is sourced from the fantastic book Global Deforestation, by Runyan & D’Odorico.) One way is by converting humidity to rain. Water vapor in the atmosphere doesn’t necessarily fall as rain, but may instead persist as haze in what is known as a “humid drought.” One reason for the formation of haze is an overabundance of small condensation nuclei, which prevents water droplets from becoming large enough to fall as rain. Pollutants, smoke from forest fires, and dust from desiccated soil are among the culprits in haze formation. Over forests, the condensation nuclei are mainly biogenic, including plant detritus, bacteria, fungal spores, and secondary organic aerosols originating as volatile organic compounds emitted by vegetation. These aid the formation of precipitation-bearing clouds rather than haze, and allow cloud formation at higher temperatures than abiotic nuclei do. Recent research confirms the increased cloud cover over and near forests. These lower, thicker clouds have a greater cooling effect than high-altitude clouds. According to one researcher, a 1 percent increase in albedo from forest-generated clouds would offset all warming from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

Healthy forests not only recycle rainfall, they also draw it in from the ocean through the biotic pump mechanism. Evapotranspired water vapor condenses to create low pressure zones, which draw new moisture-laden air in from the oceans and affect global wind patterns and, therefore, patterns of rainfall. When forests are damaged or destroyed, earth’s physiology is compromised.

In the western United States, the damming of rivers and the near-extermination of beavers has also done incalculable damage to forests and the climate. Dams prevent seasonal floods, alter silt distribution, lead to downstream erosion, and thwart migratory fish that transport marine nutrients to the forest and play a key role in food webs. Beavers create wetlands, augment biodiversity, and slow down water to mitigate floods and sustain water tables. In fact, extinguishing any species will weaken the whole forest (or any ecosystem), just as your health would suffer if you destroyed one type of tissue or cell. After centuries of habitat destruction around the world, it is amazing that Earth is still clinging to health.

Criminality and Ignorance

My Brazilian friend Alan Dubner described to me the “cascade of criminality” that is destroying the Amazon. First come the loggers, using sophisticated methods to evade government enforcement of logging bans. What’s left easily dries out and can be burned by cattle ranchers, who graze their cattle on what is trying to grow back. Then come the soybean plantations, exhausting whatever fertility remains in the soil. What’s left is basically a desert, useless to anyone but the mining companies who finish the ruination.

The more of the Amazon that is destroyed, the less rain it can pull in from the Atlantic ocean, and the more vulnerable it becomes to fires. The declining rainfall affects the rest of Brazil, from the Pantanal on south. In fact, the power of the Amazonian biotic pump is such that its destabilization alters weather patterns around the world.

The Pantanal is affected not only by changing weather patterns, but also by big hydroelectric dams and progressive encroachment by cattle ranchers. The great wetlands of the Pantanal become highly flammable when they dry out, giving unscrupulous landowners and speculators the opportunity to set fires. The renowned Brazilian environmentalist Marina Silva wrote me the following comment: “Orchestrated tragedy. This is what is happening in the Pantanal here in Brazil. Dismantling of environmental policies, cutting of resources to fight deforestation and fires, all of this in an action by criminals, the result could not be different.”

“What needs to be clear is that the fires in the Pantanal and in the Amazon are not accidental. They are part of a project and a worldview that despises the environment, which the government agrees with and encourages. It does not matter if it is the territory with the greatest diversity of mammals in the world, the largest humid area on the planet and with the greatest presence of jaguars.”

Let’s take a step back for a moment. The criminality Marina Silva speaks of is especially damaging because of conditions brought on by other criminality in other areas, for example the Amazon. Yet, we can’t entirely blame criminality for the world’s fires. After all, most deforestation and forest degradation is perfectly legal. The problem lies in the mentality and the economic forces underlying the destruction of forests, whether criminal, legal, or even unconscious.

Illegal logging and burning is on the same spectrum as the “poor forest management” conservatives blame for the fires in the US. To varying degrees, both suppress rather than participate in natural processes. They partake of the pattern of domination: physical domination built upon the conceptual demotion of living forests into mere things. The conservatives are, in a sense, correct, except that the “poor management” goes way beyond fire suppression to encompass modern society’s entire relationship with the forest. Furthermore, this poor relationship generates many of the conditions for which progressive politicians blame climate change. In a sense they are right too, except that climate change encompasses much more than greenhouse gas-induced global warming, and it is just as much a consequence as it is a cause of forest degradation.

Reverence and Relationship

While engineers, ecologists, and especially indigenous people can offer techniques to properly steward forests and restore them to resiliency, the transition to a healed world requires something much deeper than better techniques. More important is to learn to inhabit the source from which indigenous land stewardship practices arise. That source is a way of seeing, conceiving, and relating to nature. It is also a way of understanding ourselves: who we are and why we are here.

Fundamentally, the source of wise forest management is to see and know nature as a being, not a thing. That’s the best I can put it, but it isn’t good enough. The words themselves entrap me in error. Nature is not something separate from ourselves, and not even “things” are just things. Let me say then that traditional and indigenous cultures live in a world where being is everywhere and in everything, and humans are no more or less sacred than trees, mountains, water, or ants.

On the most obvious level, the view of nature-as-thing greatly facilitates the clearcutting, mining, stripping, and profiteering, just as dehumanization of other people allows their exploitation and enslavement. It’s the same basic mindset. But there is another problem too: the mindset of nature-as-thing prevents us from coming into the intimacy of relationship that is necessary to tend, heal, and cocreate with it to mutual benefit. It is like the difference between a doctor who treats you impersonally, as a “case,” and one who sees you as a full human being.

Last month, the state of California committed to a 20-year program of forest thinning which seeks to reduce fires through brush clearing, logging, and prescribed burns. This program is fraught with possible unintended consequences. When we understand a forest as an organism, a being, rather than an engineering object, we recognize engineering concepts like reducing fuel load as, at best, a first step. After all, a healthy forest requires rotting vegetable matter to nourish fungi, invertebrates, etc. that are crucial elements of forest ecology. How do we know how much brush to clear and how many logs to remove? We can only learn that through attentive observation and long relationship. Here, the experience of local first peoples can be invaluable, as they have built up that knowledge over countless generations. To learn from the inevitable mistakes that will occur in the forest thinning program will require humility, the kind that comes when one knows one is relating to a complex living being. Otherwise, we stumble from one error to the next, as when, in an effort to increase carbon sequestration, we plant ecologically and culturally unsuitable trees that end up dying a few decades later, leaving conditions even worse than before.

Another word for the attitude that I named as the source from which indigenous land stewardship practices arise is “reverence.” To revere something is the opposite of reducing it to a thing. Modern, educated people have long lived in an ideological matrix that says nature, at bottom, is merely a whirl of generic particles bumping around according to mathematical forces. What is there to revere? It says that purpose, intelligence, and consciousness subsist in human beings alone. The burning of the world calls us to awaken from this delusion.

From the attitude of reverence, we see things invisible to the engineer’s eye. We ask questions the utilitarian never asks. Paradoxically, in the end, the knowledge thus gained we be more useful – not just to the forest, but to ourselves – than anything we could accomplish from the exploitative mindset.

In truth, we are not separate from nature. What we do to the other, we ultimately do to ourselves. When the forests are sick, we are sick. When they burn, even if we escape the flames, something burns within us too. The social climate mirrors the geological climate. We may not recognize this truth as indigenous people do, but we are the land. Is it not obvious, looking at today’s political landscape, that a fire rages out of control?

I can’t easily draw a causal connection here, but it seems significant that uncontainable wildfires are contemporaneous with inflammatory rhetoric, heated debates, flaring tempers, burning hatred, seething distrust, and smoldering resentment. Just as dried out, fuel-laden forests burned out of control with a mere spark, so also have our cities burned as the spark of police murders touched the ready fuel of generations of racism; decades of economic decay, and months of Covid confinement. Our social ecosystem is as damaged and depleted as the forests that are so prone to fire. The matrix of complex relationships that we call community has to a great degree collapsed into simplified relations with impersonal institutions, mediated by money and technology. Social networks may give the appearance of community, but they lack the interdependency that marks a real community (or ecosystem). We can see now how fragile – or how inflammable – such a society is.

I won’t be so bold as to say that addressing our social separation will quell the fires. Yet, one can see how the project of land healing through reverence and relationship is congruent to the project of social healing, which, too, depends on restoring reverence and relationship.

The Doorway Called Enchantment

I live in the northeast of the land people call the United States. Here, fire is not much of a threat, yet. A few weeks ago I was walking with my brother in the woods behind his Pennsylvania farm, where the sloping land gives way to mountainside. We crossed a creek, a bare trickle in some places, dry in others. John told me that he had been here with an old-timer who said that in his youth, this creek was so deep and strong, even in August, that there were only a few places one could cross it. What happened to this being, this creek? Some locals say it is because too many wells were dug, drawing down the water tables and drying out the springs that feed the creeks. Others say it is because of the repeated logging of the mountain, going back to colonial times. Or maybe, I thought, it is again a long-delayed result of the cascade of changes following the extermination of wolves, cougars, and beavers. All these activities are an insult to the land and to the water, oblivious to reverence.

Ultimately, to stop the fires and turn onto a world-healing path, we must turn from domination and subjugation to reverence and respect. Sometimes that means adopting the role of a protector for vulnerable, precious beings, like Marina Silva is doing in Brazil. (Here is an organization she works with, along with others I mentioned in my 2019 article on the Amazon fires.) Sometimes it means stepping into the role of nurturer or healer, like the people reintroducing beavers, practicing regenerative agriculture, and building water retention landscapes. For someone in the corporate or financial world, reverence might steer them to choose life over profit in a moment where it takes a little courage to do that. That courage is a dilute version of the courage of South American indigenous activists who risk torture and murder by landowners, logging companies, mining companies, and their paramilitaries, because it puts something else above maximizing personal self-interest. It is thus an important act of solidarity.

Reverence brings courage. Reverence brings knowledge. Reverence brings skill. Reverence brings healing. It is the fulcrum of the great turning of civilization toward reunion with nature. Today the word has religious connotations, but this is not the kind of reverence that worships an idol. It is the reverence of the lover who looks into the eyes of the beloved and sees infinity.

If reverence brings all these things, then what brings reverence? It will not do merely to exhort people to be more reverent. The gateway to reverence is enchantment. A few days ago I stood with my son Cary, age seven, at Rhode Island’s last undeveloped coastal pond watching turtles. We felt what it was like to be those turtles. We could hardly stop watching them. In that moment, the thought that we would harm them for anything less than a sacred purpose was horrifying and absurd. We knew them as precious in and of themselves, not for any use to us. Few people, dropping into that moment, could escape that enchantment. Yet, every day, we participate in systems that treat turtles and much else as resources to exploit, or make them collateral damage in other exploitation. We cannot avoid this participation, for we live in that system, and that system lives in us. More and more of us no longer feel at home in it though. It cannot easily accommodate our reverence, our enchantment, and our true purpose of service to life.

Mining company executives or members of ranchers’ death squads might be far away from the doorway of enchantment. The principle of enchantment-borne reverence does not substitute for legal action, nonviolent direct action, and so on. However, a healed planet will not result from a succession of desperate holding actions. We need to ground ourselves in directly experiencing earth as obviously precious as the turtles were to Cary; to know her as a being and as an organism, and we need to spread that knowledge. Then we will have the clarity, the courage, the skill, and most importantly, the allies in unlikely places, to defend her vulnerable parts, to preserve and strengthen her organs, and to transition away from systems built on the mythology of earth-as-thing.



Previous: Un monde en feu
Next: O Mundo em Chamas

Filed Under: Ecology & Earth Healing, Political & Social Tagged With: climate change, control, environmental activism, Essay, interbeing, new story

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. valerie ariel says

    September 21, 2020 at 5:19 am

    Thank you – beautiful re: the turtle – and what you’ve given us here. I had read something the other day by an elder of a tribe in CA who told in his way of the fires and devastation since Forest Service has taken things over. He recalled the days when indigenous people took care with methods that had worked for centuries – how frustrating it has been for them when they have the wisdom and heart and that continues to be ignored, subverted.
    I was immediately struck by the photo. I’ve seen one painting like that photo and another a black and white photo in a frame both with the long fence trailing off in the fog. One was sent to me by a partner’s sister after he was found robbed and shot in the back of the head. Another was sent to me after dad died. For me this is the place between worlds – where we cannot forget the way ahead that it is not broken or lost – this is the bridge that calls us to courage to brave the unknown – to keep communication open – to see and dream and accomplish what seems so impossible at this moment – to move ahead – each step full of heart and trust and highest intention – the only enemy being to stop, to give up to forget that we can carry on and make a difference.

  2. Jean Wilson says

    September 21, 2020 at 6:51 pm

    Thank you, Charles, for another beautifully-written and insightful article.

    I would love to see the words “forest management” replaced by “forest CARE”, and forest carers. As you say, words can make such a difference.

  3. Howard Switzer says

    September 22, 2020 at 1:46 pm

    I agree, reverence for life is a critically important first step, recognizing our debt to the Earth Mother and her children, and that we have allowed a system that does not have any reverence at all for life to rule the world. As you have noted, production is turning life into dead stuff. The “system” has been identified, it is a fear-based system, as Bucky Fuller pointed out years ago, based on the fear of there not being enough to go around. That fear-based system has tortured and murdered humanity to make sure it is feared as well, the fear projected. And, as you say, it is a system that most of us participate in since we are given little choice. I think once we recognize the root system, the primary operating system, it becomes clear what needs to change. The fear must be overcome. We have an uncaring profit-motivated society because we have an uncaring for-profit money system, it is institutionalized usury and has profoundly negative psychological impacts on society and its agents as I have pointed out many times, Charles. The solution is a love-based money system. All that means is that money is created and issued for the for public purpose, for the general welfare, things like healthcare, education, a viable income etc. which, along with banning fear-based money, the economics of greed, will create the economics of care. It is about adjusting the ‘first cause’ of money. As you say, first people will have to obtain a reverence for life. Perhaps seeing the threat of losing all life as the catastrophe continues to unfold on an ever grander scale will arouse humanity’s reverence for life. I can only judge from my own experience, and the fact that I have gained such a reverence for all life, and that I along with others have identified the root problem of money, gives me hope. We have enormous opposition to overcome both physically and psychologically. We need to honor our connections.

  4. Mighk Wilson says

    September 22, 2020 at 2:35 pm

    I’m reminded of Jeremy Rifkin’s book, The Empathic Civilization. Empathy versus entropy. The newer generations give me hope. Thank you Charles.

  5. Angela says

    September 22, 2020 at 3:46 pm

    Wow. Thank you.

  6. Thomas P Tortorich says

    September 22, 2020 at 5:28 pm

    An excellent framing of the core issues no doubt. I can always count on an Eisenstein peice to get the wheels of my mind turning. I am left with some unanswered questions, and that is good. In this case, what are the solutions? What actions will change the point of view and perspective of our species, at the level of the collective unconsious? I think part of the New Story is a shift into more solution-oriented thinking.

    I’ve been noticing recently that it’s really common for books and documentaries in the Global Change genre to describe the problem for 75% of their length, then tuck the solutions away into the last 25%.

    What if we could reverse that proportion? Simply spend more time thinking about possible solutions.

    Forest Fires, the age of separation …. in a sense, all part of the same old story.

    Time for some Gene Roddenberry thinking….
    What, specifically, does the future look like?
    How do we get there?

  7. Jay says

    September 22, 2020 at 7:03 pm

    This narrative and this language and this piece are very powerful and I appreciate it very much. It helps me process and understand and will inherently inform my own narrative as I continue on with these types of dialogues.

  8. Frank says

    September 22, 2020 at 9:07 pm

    Excellent article, I knew most of the dynamics of forests working in rainforest education. However I liked your link with the social situation and forest fires, a link I haven’t considered before. It’s high time that we change our view of nature. I believe that ultimately the only remedy for the planet is a recognition that we are one with it. We destroy nature and we destroy ourselves. Let’s all plant trees again and care for our forests and other natural resources.

  9. Alexander Reid says

    September 23, 2020 at 2:14 am

    Real Forest care, RE: charleseisenstein essays/world-on-fire/
    Emerging trends in social filtering by the big players means the bop market are not seeing this message nor are they seeing any content the overseer deemed for our eyes only. Virtual cloud emerging networks are exploding with startups like SaveNatureFREE cloud and GroupsStartup virtual network Real caring means getting away from self promotion that make you so famous and popular that you lose something. Real Forest care takes 2 friend agreements that you will make this agreement to add 2 to the local hub. I say only chance here because without this mass emerging unity and activist working together all the rest is a wasted effort that has not the united front that we need to show them how loud our voice really is. by following up on our pledged to the planet (p2tp) we get the numbers required to make it happen. Great rewards in store for local members who start a local P2Tp hub nonprofit co-creation, co-visioning, collaborations are hot!

  10. Alexandra Hatfield says

    September 23, 2020 at 9:09 am

    Thank you for another eloquent and revealing essay. I am in agreement.

    We have some grieving to do as a people and we have some heart opening to do too.

    In my experience of guiding people enacting a wilderness solo fast I witness that an open-heart is essential for the enchantment. Folk living on the land without food and other attachments for 4-days and nights evokes many things including belonging and an open-heart. This act of communion with the Earth also lessens the activity of the concrete mind who’s essential nature is to split, polarise and differentiate.

  11. Mark says

    September 23, 2020 at 10:14 am

    Thank you for continuing to share your interweaving awareness of our relationships with all. Your essay helps to widen awareness of our mutual interconnected. We do not exist is separation. Aliveness is not living in fear. Life flows on currents of Love. Our ability to inhabit our self awareness, our sense of beauty and awe and our co-creative shared living interbeingness in relationship with all can be grown through practice, awareness, ritual and attention. This ability is inside us all. Are you ready to wake up this loving Awareness?

  12. Susan says

    September 23, 2020 at 11:06 am

    Charles, you neglected to mention the single-most devastating element contributing to the demise of our forests: geoengineering, weather modification, “solar radiation management,” raining toxic chemicals down on all living things, 24/7. Was that a mere oversight? When will you find the courage to call out our government’s nasty little secret?

  13. Robert Jenusaitis says

    September 23, 2020 at 2:59 pm

    Something that you did not mention, and I believe is crucial, is geoengineering which I believe is an ongoing practice which must be stopped. There is VERY little discussion of this in the mainstream.

  14. Curry First says

    September 25, 2020 at 10:10 am

    Reverance for reverence; let’s do it now and in meaningful manner.

  15. Carolyn says

    September 25, 2020 at 12:17 pm

    I took your words with me into the forest and reverently greeted the mosses and trees.

  16. Felipe Mardones says

    September 25, 2020 at 7:06 pm

    beautiful, thank you charles. Yes, see the turtles like Cary. Perhaps, seeing Cary through the eyes of the turtle.

  17. Ivana says

    September 28, 2020 at 9:56 am

    Thank you, Charles. I agree wholeheartedly, especially with the need for reverence.
    “We need to ground ourselves in directly experiencing earth as obviously precious” Absolutely! And to me, the main way we can do this is by reconnecting with our own private piece of the Earth which is our body and all the feelings and emotions that we find there – through various mindful practices involving presence, acceptance and compassion.

  18. Newton Finn says

    October 11, 2020 at 12:18 pm

    “If reverence brings all these things, then what brings reverence? It will not do merely to exhort people to be more reverent. The gateway to reverence is enchantment.” I agree that you have framed the key question for human survival, which would also entail the survival of most all living things that humans are in the process of destroying. But I’m not sure that “enchantment” is a strong enough term for that which elicits reverence for life, nor is this transformational process sufficiently captured in what, to me, are overly-abstract concepts like “interbeing” or “oneness.” I would much prefer that we go back to the language and concepts of Albert Schweitzer, who spent an intellectual lifetime distilling reverence for life as the elemental, universal value and then introducing it into Western civilization which had, unlike the East, paid little attention to it. Damn nice essay, Charles, nevertheless.

    https://newtonfinn.com/2017/12/18/two-rivers-one-spirit/

  19. Pauline Cadieux says

    October 24, 2020 at 7:13 pm

    Thank you Charles for drawing the connection between the fires ablaze in the world’s largest tropical wetland and the incendiary state of our global political, economic and environmental climate. Your words and insights offer a powerful invitation into reverence for our living Earth and as such already provide an important gateway to healing. My heart soars when I imagine how much more beautiful healing could happen if as parents we were all inspired to take time and nurture our own children by regularly sharing the kind of enchantment you and your son Cary experienced with the turtles?!
    As a footnote on your reference to people stepping into the role of nurturer-healer in particular by reintroducing beaver – and for anyone interested in knowing more – here’s a link to one such organisation, The Beaver Believers, which my good friend Nichole was inspired to work with https://www.thebeaverbelievers.com/

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Monarchs and Lightning Bugs

Pandemania, Part 4

Political Hope

Pandemania, Part 3

Pandemania, Part 2

Pandemania, Part 1

The Heart of the Fawn

Transhumanism and the Metaverse

Why I Won’t Write on You-Know-What

Compartmentalization: UFOs and Social Paralysis

The Good World

Central Bank Digital Currencies

The Economy Series

Reinventing Progress

Parallel Timelines

The Field of Peace

Love-gift to the Future

The Paradox of Busy

On the Great Green Wall, And Being Useful

Reunion

Division, Reunion, and some other stuff

Volatility

Into the Space Between

Wanna Join Me in a News Fast?

And the Music Played the Band

Comet of Deliverance

Divide, Conquer; Unite, Heal

A Path Will Rise to Meet Us

A Gathering of the Tribe

The True Story of the Sith

The Human Family

Elements of Refusal

The America that Almost Was and Yet May Be

Sanity

Time to Push

Some Stuff I’m Reading

The Rehearsal is Over

Beyond Industrial Medicine

A Temple of this Earth

The Sacrificial King

How It Is Going to Be

Charles Eisenstein, Antisemite

Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed

Fascism and the Antifestival

The Death of the Festival

Source Temple and the Great Reset

To Reason with a Madman

From QAnon’s Dark Mirror, Hope

We Can Do Better Than This

The Banquet of Whiteness

The Cure of the Earth

Numb

The Conspiracy Myth

The Coronation

Extinction and the Revolution of Love

The Amazon: How do we heal a burning heart?

Building a Peace Narrative

Xylella: Supervillain or Symptom

Making the Universe Great Again

Every Act a Ceremony

The Polarization Trap

I, Orc

Living in the Gift

A Little Heartbreak

Initiation into a Living Planet

Why I am Afraid of Global Cooling

Olive Trees and the Cry of the Land

Our New, Happy Life? The Ideology of Development

Opposition to GMOs is Neither Unscientific nor Immoral

The Age of We Need Each Other

Institutes for Technologies of Reunion

Brushes with the Mainstream

Standing Rock: A Change of Heart

Transcription: Fertile Ground of Bewilderment Podcast

The Election: Of Hate, Grief, and a New Story

This Is How War Begins

The Lid is Off

Of Horseshoe Crabs and Empathy

Scaling Down

The Fertile Ground of Bewilderment

By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them

Psychedelics and Systems Change

Mutiny of the Soul Revisited

Why I Don’t Do Internet Marketing

Zika and the Mentality of Control

In a Rhino, Everything

Grief and Carbon Reductionism

The Revolution is Love

Kind is the New Cool

What We Do to Nature, We Do to Ourselves

From Nonviolence to Service

An Experiment in Gift Economics

Misogyny and the Healing of the Masculine

Sustainable Development: Something New or More of the Same?

The Need for Venture Science

The EcoSexual Awakening

“Don’t Owe. Won’t Pay.”

Harder to Hide

Reflections on Damanhur

On Immigration

The Humbler Realms, Part 2

The Humbler Realms

A Shift in Values Everywhere

Letter to my Younger Self

Aluna: A Message to Little Brother

Raising My Children in Trust

Qualitative Dimensions of Collective Intelligence: Subjectivity, Consciousness, and Soul

The Woman Who Chose to Plant Corn

The Oceans are Not Worth $24 trillion

The Baby in the Playpen

What Are We Greedy For?

We Need Regenerative Farming, Not Geoengineering

The Cynic and the Boatbuilder, Revisited

Activism in the New Story

What is Action?

Wasting Time

The Space Between Stories

Breakdown, Chaos, and Emergence

At This Moment, I Feel Held

A Roundabout Endorsement

Imagine a 3-D World

Presentation to Uplift Festival, 12.14.2014

Shadow, Ritual, and Relationship in the Gift

A Neat Inversion

The Waters of Heterodoxy

Employment in Gift Culture

Localization Beyond Economics

Discipline on the Bus

We Don’t Know: Reflections on the New Story Summit

A Miracle in Scientific American

More Talk?

Why Another Conference?

A Truncated Interview on Racism

A Beautiful World of Abundance

How to Bore the Children

Post-Capitalism

The Malware

The End of War

The Birds are Sad

A Slice of Humble Pie

Bending Reality: But who is the Bender?

The Mysterious Paths by Which Intentions Bear Fruit

The Little Things that Get Under My Skin

A Restorative Response to MH17

Climate Change: The Bigger Picture

Development in the Ecological Age

The campaign against Drax aims to reveal the perverse effects of biofuels

Gateway drug, to what?

Concern about Overpopulation is a Red Herring; Consumption’s the Problem

Imperialism and Ceremony in Bali

Let’s be Honest: Real Sustainability may not make Business Sense

Vivienne Westwood is Right: We Need a Law against Ecocide

2013: Hope or Despair?

2013: A Year that Pierced Me

Synchronicity, Myth, and the New World Order

Fear of a Living Planet

Pyramid Schemes and the Monetization of Everything

The Next Step for Digital Currency

The Cycle of Terror

TED: A Choice Point

The Cynic and the Boatbuilder

Latent Healing

2013: The Space between Stories

We Are Unlimited Potential: A Talk with Joseph Chilton Pearce

Why Occupy’s plan to cancel consumer debts is money well spent

Genetically Modifying and Patenting Seeds isn’t the Answer

The Lovely Lady from Nestle

An Alien at the Tech Conference

We Can’t Grow Ourselves out of Debt

Money and the Divine Masculine

Naivete, and the Light in their Eyes

The Healing of Congo

Why Rio +20 Failed

Permaculture and the Myth of Scarcity

For Facebook, A Modest Proposal

A Coal Pile in the Ballroom

A Review of Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years

Gift Economics Resurgent

The Way up is Down

Sacred Economics: Money, the Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

Design and Strategy Principles for Local Currency

The Lost Marble

To Bear Witness and to Speak the Truth

Thrive: The Story is Wrong but the Spirit is Right

Occupy Wall Street: No Demand is Big Enough

Elephants: Please Don’t Go

Why the Age of the Guru is Over

Gift Economics and Reunion in the Digital Age

A Circle of Gifts

The Three Seeds

Truth and Magic in the Third Dimension

Rituals for Lover Earth

Money and the Turning of the Age

A Gathering of the Tribe

The Sojourn of Science

Wood, Metal, and the Story of the World

A World-Creating Matrix of Truth

Waiting on the Big One

In the Miracle

Money and the Crisis of Civilization

Reuniting the Self: Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the Ecology of Health

Invisible Paths

Reuniting the Self: Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the Ecology of Health (Part 2)

Mutiny of the Soul

The Age of Water

Money: A New Beginning (Part 2)

Money: A New Beginning (Part 1)

The Original Religion

Pain: A Call for Attention

The Miracle of Self-Creation, Part 2

The Miracle of Self-Creation

The Deschooling Convivium

The Testicular Age

Who Will Collect the Garbage?

The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies

You’re Bad!

A 28-year Lie: The Wrong Lesson

The Ascent of Humanity

The Stars are Shining for Her

All Hallows’ Eve

Confessions of a Hypocrite

The New Epidemics

From Opinion to Belief to Knowing

Soul Families

For Whom was that Bird Singing?

The Multicellular Metahuman

Grades: A Gun to Your Head

Human Nature Denied

The Great Robbery

Humanity Grows Up

Don’t Should on US

A State of Belief is a State of Being

Ascension

Security and Fate

Old-Fashioned, Healthy, Lacto-Fermented Soft Drinks: The Real “Real Thing”

The Ethics of Eating Meat

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Charles Eisenstein

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The Coronation

For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?

Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement. In coherency, humanity’s creative powers are boundless. A few months ago, a proposal to halt commercial air travel would have seemed preposterous. Likewise for the radical changes we are making in our social behavior, economy, and the role of government in our lives. Covid demonstrates the power of our collective will when we agree on what is important. What else might we achieve, in coherency? What do we want to achieve, and what world shall we create? That is always the next question when anyone awakens to their power.

Covid-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality. To interrupt a habit is to make it visible; it is to turn it from a compulsion to a choice. When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future. We might ask, after so many have lost their jobs, whether all of them are the jobs the world most needs, and whether our labor and creativity would be better applied elsewhere. We might ask, having done without it for a while, whether we really need so much air travel, Disneyworld vacations, or trade shows. What parts of the economy will we want to restore, and what parts might we choose to let go of? And on a darker note, what among the things that are being taken away right now – civil liberties, freedom of assembly, sovereignty over our bodies, in-person gatherings, hugs, handshakes, and public life – might we need to exert intentional political and personal will to restore?

For most of my life, I have had the feeling that humanity was nearing a crossroads. Always, the crisis, the collapse, the break was imminent, just around the bend, but it didn’t come and it didn’t come. Imagine walking a road, and up ahead you see it, you see the crossroads. It’s just over the hill, around the bend, past the woods. Cresting the hill, you see you were mistaken, it was a mirage, it was farther away than you thought. You keep walking. Sometimes it comes into view, sometimes it disappears from sight and it seems like this road goes on forever. Maybe there isn’t a crossroads. No, there it is again! Always it is almost here. Never is it here.

Now, all of a sudden, we go around a bend and here it is. We stop, hardly able to believe that now it is happening, hardly able to believe, after years of confinement to the road of our predecessors, that now we finally have a choice. We are right to stop, stunned at the newness of our situation. Because of the hundred paths that radiate out in front of us, some lead in the same direction we’ve already been headed. Some lead to hell on earth. And some lead to a world more healed and more beautiful than we ever dared believe to be possible.

I write these words with the aim of standing here with you – bewildered, scared maybe, yet also with a sense of new possibility – at this point of diverging paths. Let us gaze down some of them and see where they lead.

* * *

I heard this story last week from a friend. She was in a grocery store and saw a woman sobbing in the aisle. Flouting social distancing rules, she went to the woman and gave her a hug. “Thank you,” the woman said, “that is the first time anyone has hugged me for ten days.”

Going without hugs for a few weeks seems a small price to pay if it will stem an epidemic that could take millions of lives. There is a strong argument for social distancing in the near term: to prevent a sudden surge of Covid cases from overwhelming the medical system. I would like to put that argument in a larger context, especially as we look to the long term. Lest we institutionalize distancing and reengineer society around it, let us be aware of what choice we are making and why.

The same goes for the other changes happening around the coronavirus epidemic. Some commentators have observed how it plays neatly into an agenda of totalitarian control. A frightened public accepts abridgments of civil liberties that are otherwise hard to justify, such as the tracking of everyone’s movements at all times, forcible medical treatment, involuntary quarantine, restrictions on travel and the freedom of assembly, censorship of what the authorities deem to be disinformation, suspension of habeas corpus, and military policing of civilians. Many of these were underway before Covid-19; since its advent, they have been irresistible. The same goes for the automation of commerce; the transition from participation in sports and entertainment to remote viewing; the migration of life from public to private spaces; the transition away from place-based schools toward online education, the decline of brick-and-mortar stores, and the movement of human work and leisure onto screens. Covid-19 is accelerating preexisting trends, political, economic, and social.

While all the above are, in the short term, justified on the grounds of flattening the curve (the epidemiological growth curve), we are also hearing a lot about a “new normal”; that is to say, the changes may not be temporary at all. Since the threat of infectious disease, like the threat of terrorism, never goes away, control measures can easily become permanent. If we were going in this direction anyway, the current justification must be part of a deeper impulse. I will analyze this impulse in two parts: the reflex of control, and the war on death. Thus understood, an initiatory opportunity emerges, one that we are seeing already in the form of the solidarity, compassion, and care that Covid-19 has inspired.

The Reflex of Control

At the current writing, official statistics say that about 25,000 people have died from Covid-19. By the time it runs its course, the death toll could be ten times or a hundred times bigger, or even, if the most alarming guesses are right, a thousand times bigger. Each one of these people has loved ones, family and friends. Compassion and conscience call us to do what we can to avert unnecessary tragedy. This is personal for me: my own infinitely dear but frail mother is among the most vulnerable to a disease that kills mostly the aged and the infirm.

What will the final numbers be? That question is impossible to answer at the time of this writing. Early reports were alarming; for weeks the official number from Wuhan, circulated endlessly in the media, was a shocking 3.4%. That, coupled with its highly contagious nature, pointed to tens of millions of deaths worldwide, or even as many as 100 million. More recently, estimates have plunged as it has become apparent that most cases are mild or asymptomatic. Since testing has been skewed towards the seriously ill, the death rate has looked artificially high. In South Korea, where hundreds of thousands of people with mild symptoms have been tested, the reported case fatality rate is around 1%. In Germany, whose testing also extends to many with mild symptoms, the fatality rate is 0.4%. A recent paper in the journal Science argues that 86% of infections have been undocumented, which points to a much lower mortality rate than the current case fatality rate would indicate.

The story of the Diamond Princess cruise ship bolsters this view. Of the 3,711 people on board, about 20% have tested positive for the virus; less than half of those had symptoms, and eight have died. A cruise ship is a perfect setting for contagion, and there was plenty of time for the virus to spread on board before anyone did anything about it, yet only a fifth were infected. Furthermore, the cruise ship’s population was heavily skewed (as are most cruise ships) toward the elderly: nearly a third of the passengers were over age 70, and more than half were over age 60. A research team concluded from the large number of asymptomatic cases that the true fatality rate in China is around 0.5%. That is still five times higher than flu. Based on the above (and adjusting for much younger demographics in Africa and South and Southeast Asia) my guess is about 200,000-300,000 deaths in the US – more if the medical system is overwhelmed, less if infections are spread out over time – and 3 million globally. Those are serious numbers. Not since the Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968/9 has the world experienced anything like it.

My guesses could easily be off by an order of magnitude. Every day the media reports the total number of Covid-19 cases, but no one has any idea what the true number is, because only a tiny proportion of the population has been tested. If tens of millions have the virus, asymptomatically, we would not know it. Further complicating the matter is the high rate of false positives for existing testing, possibly as high as 80%. (And see here for even more alarming uncertainties about test accuracy.) Let me repeat: no one knows what is really happening, including me. Let us be aware of two contradictory tendencies in human affairs. The first is the tendency for hysteria to feed on itself, to exclude data points that don’t play into the fear, and to create the world in its image. The second is denial, the irrational rejection of information that might disrupt normalcy and comfort. As Daniel Schmactenberger asks, How do you know what you believe is true?

In the face of the uncertainty, I’d like to make a prediction: The crisis will play out so that we never will know. If the final death tally, which will itself be the subject of dispute, is lower than feared, some will say that is because the controls worked. Others will say it is because the disease wasn’t as dangerous as we were told.

To me, the most baffling puzzle is why at the present writing there seem to be no new cases in China. The government didn’t initiate its lockdown until well after the virus was established. It should have spread widely during Chinese New Year, when every plane, train, and bus is packed with people traveling all over the country. What is going on here? Again, I don’t know, and neither do you.

Whether the final global death toll is 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million, let’s look at some other numbers to get some perspective. My point is NOT that Covid isn’t so bad and we shouldn’t do anything. Bear with me. Last year, according to the FAO, five million children worldwide died of hunger (among 162 million who are stunted and 51 million who are wasted). That is 200 times more people than have died so far from Covid-19, yet no government has declared a state of emergency or asked that we radically alter our way of life to save them. Nor do we see a comparable level of alarm and action around suicide – the mere tip of an iceberg of despair and depression – which kills over a million people a year globally and 50,000 in the USA. Or drug overdoses, which kill 70,000 in the USA, the autoimmunity epidemic, which affects 23.5 million (NIH figure) to 50 million (AARDA), or obesity, which afflicts well over 100 million. Why, for that matter, are we not in a frenzy about averting nuclear armageddon or ecological collapse, but, to the contrary, pursue choices that magnify those very dangers?

Please, the point here is not that we haven’t changed our ways to stop children from starving, so we shouldn’t change them for Covid either. It is the contrary: If we can change so radically for Covid-19, we can do it for these other conditions too. Let us ask why are we able to unify our collective will to stem this virus, but not to address other grave threats to humanity. Why, until now, has society been so frozen in its existing trajectory?

The answer is revealing. Simply, in the face of world hunger, addiction, autoimmunity, suicide, or ecological collapse, we as a society do not know what to do. Our go-to crisis responses, all of which are some version of control, aren’t very effective in addressing these conditions. Now along comes a contagious epidemic, and finally we can spring into action. It is a crisis for which control works: quarantines, lockdowns, isolation, hand-washing; control of movement, control of information, control of our bodies. That makes Covid a convenient receptacle for our inchoate fears, a place to channel our growing sense of helplessness in the face of the changes overtaking the world. Covid-19 is a threat that we know how to meet. Unlike so many of our other fears, Covid-19 offers a plan.

Our civilization’s established institutions are increasingly helpless to meet the challenges of our time. How they welcome a challenge that they finally can meet. How eager they are to embrace it as a paramount crisis. How naturally their systems of information management select for the most alarming portrayals of it. How easily the public joins the panic, embracing a threat that the authorities can handle as a proxy for the various unspeakable threats that they cannot.

Today, most of our challenges no longer succumb to force. Our antibiotics and surgery fail to meet the surging health crises of autoimmunity, addiction, and obesity. Our guns and bombs, built to conquer armies, are useless to erase hatred abroad or keep domestic violence out of our homes. Our police and prisons cannot heal the breeding conditions of crime. Our pesticides cannot restore ruined soil. Covid-19 recalls the good old days when the challenges of infectious diseases succumbed to modern medicine and hygiene, at the same time as the Nazis succumbed to the war machine, and nature itself succumbed, or so it seemed, to technological conquest and improvement. It recalls the days when our weapons worked and the world seemed indeed to be improving with each technology of control.

What kind of problem succumbs to domination and control? The kind caused by something from the outside, something Other. When the cause of the problem is something intimate to ourselves, like homelessness or inequality, addiction or obesity, there is nothing to war against. We may try to install an enemy, blaming, for example, the billionaires, Vladimir Putin, or the Devil, but then we miss key information, such as the ground conditions that allow billionaires (or viruses) to replicate in the first place.

If there is one thing our civilization is good at, it is fighting an enemy. We welcome opportunities to do what we are good at, which prove the validity of our technologies, systems, and worldview. And so, we manufacture enemies, cast problems like crime, terrorism, and disease into us-versus-them terms, and mobilize our collective energies toward those endeavors that can be seen that way. Thus, we single out Covid-19 as a call to arms, reorganizing society as if for a war effort, while treating as normal the possibility of nuclear armageddon, ecological collapse, and five million children starving.

The Conspiracy Narrative

Because Covid-19 seems to justify so many items on the totalitarian wish list, there are those who believe it to be a deliberate power play. It is not my purpose to advance that theory nor to debunk it, although I will offer some meta-level comments. First a brief overview.

The theories (there are many variants) talk about Event 201 (sponsored by the Gates Foundation, CIA, etc. last September), and a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation white paper detailing a scenario called “Lockstep,” both of which lay out the authoritarian response to a hypothetical pandemic. They observe that the infrastructure, technology, and legislative framework for martial law has been in preparation for many years. All that was needed, they say, was a way to make the public embrace it, and now that has come. Whether or not current controls are permanent, a precedent is being set for:

  • • The tracking of people’s movements at all times (because coronavirus)
  • • The suspension of freedom of assembly (because coronavirus)
  • • The military policing of civilians (because coronavirus)
  • • Extrajudicial, indefinite detention (quarantine, because coronavirus)
  • • The banning of cash (because coronavirus)
  • • Censorship of the Internet (to combat disinformation, because coronavirus)
  • • Compulsory vaccination and other medical treatment, establishing the state’s sovereignty over our bodies (because coronavirus)
  • • The classification of all activities and destinations into the expressly permitted and the expressly forbidden (you can leave your house for this, but not that), eliminating the un-policed, non-juridical gray zone. That totality is the very essence of totalitarianism. Necessary now though, because, well, coronavirus.

This is juicy material for conspiracy theories. For all I know, one of those theories could be true; however, the same progression of events could unfold from an unconscious systemic tilt toward ever-increasing control. Where does this tilt come from? It is woven into civilization’s DNA. For millennia, civilization (as opposed to small-scale traditional cultures) has understood progress as a matter of extending control onto the world: domesticating the wild, conquering the barbarians, mastering the forces of nature, and ordering society according to law and reason. The ascent of control accelerated with the Scientific Revolution, which launched “progress” to new heights: the ordering of reality into objective categories and quantities, and the mastering of materiality with technology. Finally, the social sciences promised to use the same means and methods to fulfill the ambition (which goes back to Plato and Confucius) to engineer a perfect society.

Those who administer civilization will therefore welcome any opportunity to strengthen their control, for after all, it is in service to a grand vision of human destiny: the perfectly ordered world, in which disease, crime, poverty, and perhaps suffering itself can be engineered out of existence. No nefarious motives are necessary. Of course they would like to keep track of everyone – all the better to ensure the common good. For them, Covid-19 shows how necessary that is. “Can we afford democratic freedoms in light of the coronavirus?” they ask. “Must we now, out of necessity, sacrifice those for our own safety?” It is a familiar refrain, for it has accompanied other crises in the past, like 9/11.

To rework a common metaphor, imagine a man with a hammer, stalking around looking for a reason to use it. Suddenly he sees a nail sticking out. He’s been looking for a nail for a long time, pounding on screws and bolts and not accomplishing much. He inhabits a worldview in which hammers are the best tools, and the world can be made better by pounding in the nails. And here is a nail! We might suspect that in his eagerness he has placed the nail there himself, but it hardly matters. Maybe it isn’t even a nail that’s sticking out, but it resembles one enough to start pounding. When the tool is at the ready, an opportunity will arise to use it.

And I will add, for those inclined to doubt the authorities, maybe this time it really is a nail. In that case, the hammer is the right tool – and the principle of the hammer will emerge the stronger, ready for the screw, the button, the clip, and the tear.

Either way, the problem we deal with here is much deeper than that of overthrowing an evil coterie of Illuminati. Even if they do exist, given the tilt of civilization, the same trend would persist without them, or a new Illuminati would arise to assume the functions of the old.

True or false, the idea that the epidemic is some monstrous plot perpetrated by evildoers upon the public is not so far from the mindset of find-the-pathogen. It is a crusading mentality, a war mentality. It locates the source of a sociopolitical illness in a pathogen against which we may then fight, a victimizer separate from ourselves. It risks ignoring the conditions that make society fertile ground for the plot to take hold. Whether that ground was sown deliberately or by the wind is, for me, a secondary question.

What I will say next is relevant whether or not SARS-CoV2 is a genetically engineered bioweapon, is related to 5G rollout, is being used to prevent “disclosure,” is a Trojan horse for totalitarian world government, is more deadly than we’ve been told, is less deadly than we’ve been told, originated in a Wuhan biolab, originated at Fort Detrick, or is exactly as the CDC and WHO have been telling us. It applies even if everyone is totally wrong about the role of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the current epidemic. I have my opinions, but if there is one thing I have learned through the course of this emergency is that I don’t really know what is happening. I don’t see how anyone can, amidst the seething farrago of news, fake news, rumors, suppressed information, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and politicized narratives that fill the Internet. I wish a lot more people would embrace not knowing. I say that both to those who embrace the dominant narrative, as well as to those who hew to dissenting ones. What information might we be blocking out, in order to maintain the integrity of our viewpoints? Let’s be humble in our beliefs: it is a matter of life and death.

The War on Death

My 7-year-old son hasn’t seen or played with another child for two weeks. Millions of others are in the same boat. Most would agree that a month without social interaction for all those children a reasonable sacrifice to save a million lives. But how about to save 100,000 lives? And what if the sacrifice is not for a month but for a year? Five years? Different people will have different opinions on that, according to their underlying values.

Let’s replace the foregoing questions with something more personal, that pierces the inhuman utilitarian thinking that turns people into statistics and sacrifices some of them for something else. The relevant question for me is, Would I ask all the nation’s children to forego play for a season, if it would reduce my mother’s risk of dying, or for that matter, my own risk? Or I might ask, Would I decree the end of human hugging and handshakes, if it would save my own life? This is not to devalue Mom’s life or my own, both of which are precious. I am grateful for every day she is still with us. But these questions bring up deep issues. What is the right way to live? What is the right way to die?

The answer to such questions, whether asked on behalf of oneself or on behalf of society at large, depends on how we hold death and how much we value play, touch, and togetherness, along with civil liberties and personal freedom. There is no easy formula to balance these values.

Over my lifetime I’ve seen society place more and more emphasis on safety, security, and risk reduction. It has especially impacted childhood: as a young boy it was normal for us to roam a mile from home unsupervised – behavior that would earn parents a visit from Child Protective Services today. It also manifests in the form of latex gloves for more and more professions; hand sanitizer everywhere; locked, guarded, and surveilled school buildings; intensified airport and border security; heightened awareness of legal liability and liability insurance; metal detectors and searches before entering many sports arenas and public buildings, and so on. Writ large, it takes the form of the security state.

The mantra “safety first” comes from a value system that makes survival top priority, and that depreciates other values like fun, adventure, play, and the challenging of limits. Other cultures had different priorities. For instance, many traditional and indigenous cultures are much less protective of children, as documented in Jean Liedloff’s classic, The Continuum Concept. They allow them risks and responsibilities that would seem insane to most modern people, believing that this is necessary for children to develop self-reliance and good judgement. I think most modern people, especially younger people, retain some of this inherent willingness to sacrifice safety in order to live life fully. The surrounding culture, however, lobbies us relentlessly to live in fear, and has constructed systems that embody fear. In them, staying safe is over-ridingly important. Thus we have a medical system in which most decisions are based on calculations of risk, and in which the worst possible outcome, marking the physician’s ultimate failure, is death. Yet all the while, we know that death awaits us regardless. A life saved actually means a death postponed.

The ultimate fulfillment of civilization’s program of control would be to triumph over death itself. Failing that, modern society settles for a facsimile of that triumph: denial rather than conquest. Ours is a society of death denial, from its hiding away of corpses, to its fetish for youthfulness, to its warehousing of old people in nursing homes. Even its obsession with money and property – extensions of the self, as the word “mine” indicates – expresses the delusion that the impermanent self can be made permanent through its attachments. All this is inevitable given the story-of-self that modernity offers: the separate individual in a world of Other. Surrounded by genetic, social, and economic competitors, that self must protect and dominate in order to thrive. It must do everything it can to forestall death, which (in the story of separation) is total annihilation. Biological science has even taught us that our very nature is to maximize our chances of surviving and reproducing.

I asked a friend, a medical doctor who has spent time with the Q’ero on Peru, whether the Q’ero would (if they could) intubate someone to prolong their life. “Of course not,” she said. “They would summon the shaman to help him die well.” Dying well (which isn’t necessarily the same as dying painlessly) is not much in today’s medical vocabulary. No hospital records are kept on whether patients die well. That would not be counted as a positive outcome. In the world of the separate self, death is the ultimate catastrophe.

But is it? Consider this perspective from Dr. Lissa Rankin: “Not all of us would want to be in an ICU, isolated from loved ones with a machine breathing for us, at risk of dying alone- even if it means they might increase their chance of survival. Some of us might rather be held in the arms of loved ones at home, even if that means our time has come…. Remember, death is no ending. Death is going home.”

When the self is understood as relational, interdependent, even inter-existent, then it bleeds over into the other, and the other bleeds over into the self. Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationship, one no longer searches for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but looks instead for imbalances in relationships. The War on Death gives way to the quest to live well and fully, and we see that fear of death is actually fear of life. How much of life will we forego to stay safe?

Totalitarianism – the perfection of control – is the inevitable end product of the mythology of the separate self. What else but a threat to life, like a war, would merit total control? Thus Orwell identified perpetual war as a crucial component of the Party’s rule.

Against the backdrop of the program of control, death denial, and the separate self, the assumption that public policy should seek to minimize the number of deaths is nearly beyond question, a goal to which other values like play, freedom, etc. are subordinate. Covid-19 offers occasion to broaden that view. Yes, let us hold life sacred, more sacred than ever. Death teaches us that. Let us hold each person, young or old, sick or well, as the sacred, precious, beloved being that they are. And in the circle of our hearts, let us make room for other sacred values too. To hold life sacred is not just to live long, it is to live well and right and fully.

Like all fear, the fear around the coronavirus hints at what might lie beyond it. Anyone who has experienced the passing of someone close knows that death is a portal to love. Covid-19 has elevated death to prominence in the consciousness of a society that denies it. On the other side of the fear, we can see the love that death liberates. Let it pour forth. Let it saturate the soil of our culture and fill its aquifers so that it seeps up through the cracks of our crusted institutions, our systems, and our habits. Some of these may die too.

What world shall we live in?

How much of life do we want to sacrifice at the altar of security? If it keeps us safer, do we want to live in a world where human beings never congregate? Do we want to wear masks in public all the time? Do we want to be medically examined every time we travel, if that will save some number of lives a year? Are we willing to accept the medicalization of life in general, handing over final sovereignty over our bodies to medical authorities (as selected by political ones)? Do we want every event to be a virtual event? How much are we willing to live in fear?

Covid-19 will eventually subside, but the threat of infectious disease is permanent. Our response to it sets a course for the future. Public life, communal life, the life of shared physicality has been dwindling over several generations. Instead of shopping at stores, we get things delivered to our homes. Instead of packs of kids playing outside, we have play dates and digital adventures. Instead of the public square, we have the online forum. Do we want to continue to insulate ourselves still further from each other and the world?

It is not hard to imagine, especially if social distancing is successful, that Covid-19 persists beyond the 18 months we are being told to expect for it to run its course. It is not hard to imagine that new viruses will emerge during that time. It is not hard to imagine that emergency measures will become normal (so as to forestall the possibility of another outbreak), just as the state of emergency declared after 9/11 is still in effect today. It is not hard to imagine that (as we are being told), reinfection is possible, so that the disease will never run its course. That means that the temporary changes in our way of life may become permanent.

To reduce the risk of another pandemic, shall we choose to live in a society without hugs, handshakes, and high-fives, forever more? Shall we choose to live in a society where we no longer gather en masse? Shall the concert, the sports competition, and the festival be a thing of the past? Shall children no longer play with other children? Shall all human contact be mediated by computers and masks? No more dance classes, no more karate classes, no more conferences, no more churches? Is death reduction to be the standard by which to measure progress? Does human advancement mean separation? Is this the future?

The same question applies to the administrative tools required to control the movement of people and the flow of information. At the present writing, the entire country is moving toward lockdown. In some countries, one must print out a form from a government website in order to leave the house. It reminds me of school, where one’s location must be authorized at all times. Or of prison. Do we envision a future of electronic hall passes, a system where freedom of movement is governed by state administrators and their software at all times, permanently? Where every movement is tracked, either permitted or prohibited? And, for our protection, where information that threatens our health (as decided, again, by various authorities) is censored for our own good? In the face of an emergency, like unto a state of war, we accept such restrictions and temporarily surrender our freedoms. Similar to 9/11, Covid-19 trumps all objections.

For the first time in history, the technological means exist to realize such a vision, at least in the developed world (for example, using cellphone location data to enforce social distancing; see also here). After a bumpy transition, we could live in a society where nearly all of life happens online: shopping, meeting, entertainment, socializing, working, even dating. Is that what we want? How many lives saved is that worth?

I am sure that many of the controls in effect today will be partially relaxed in a few months. Partially relaxed, but at the ready. As long as infectious disease remains with us, they are likely to be reimposed, again and again, in the future, or be self-imposed in the form of habits. As Deborah Tannen says, contributing to a Politico article on how coronavirus will change the world permanently, ‘We know now that touching things, being with other people and breathing the air in an enclosed space can be risky…. It could become second nature to recoil from shaking hands or touching our faces—and we may all fall heir to society-wide OCD, as none of us can stop washing our hands.” After thousands of years, millions of years, of touch, contact, and togetherness, is the pinnacle of human progress to be that we cease such activities because they are too risky?

Life is Community

The paradox of the program of control is that its progress rarely advances us any closer to its goal. Despite security systems in almost every upper middle-class home, people are no less anxious or insecure than they were a generation ago. Despite elaborate security measures, the schools are not seeing fewer mass shootings. Despite phenomenal progress in medical technology, people have if anything become less healthy over the past thirty years, as chronic disease has proliferated and life expectancy stagnated and, in the USA and Britain, started to decline.

The measures being instituted to control Covid-19, likewise, may end up causing more suffering and death than they prevent. Minimizing deaths means minimizing the deaths that we know how to predict and measure. It is impossible to measure the added deaths that might come from isolation-induced depression, for instance, or the despair caused by unemployment, or the lowered immunity and deterioration in health that chronic fear can cause. Loneliness and lack of social contact has been shown to increase inflammation, depression, and dementia. According to Lissa Rankin, M.D., air pollution increases risk of dying by 6%, obesity by 23%, alcohol abuse by 37%, and loneliness by 45%.

Another danger that is off the ledger is the deterioration in immunity caused by excessive hygiene and distancing. It is not only social contact that is necessary for health, it is also contact with the microbial world. Generally speaking, microbes are not our enemies, they are our allies in health. A diverse gut biome, comprising bacteria, viruses, yeasts, and other organisms, is essential for a well-functioning immune system, and its diversity is maintained through contact with other people and with the world of life. Excessive hand-washing, overuse of antibiotics, aseptic cleanliness, and lack of human contact might do more harm than good. The resulting allergies and autoimmune disorders might be worse than the infectious disease they replace. Socially and biologically, health comes from community. Life does not thrive in isolation.

Seeing the world in us-versus-them terms blinds us to the reality that life and health happen in community. To take the example of infectious diseases, we fail to look beyond the evil pathogen and ask, What is the role of viruses in the microbiome? (See also here.) What are the body conditions under which harmful viruses proliferate? Why do some people have mild symptoms and others severe ones (besides the catch-all non-explanation of “low resistance”)? What positive role might flus, colds, and other non-lethal diseases play in the maintenance of health?

War-on-germs thinking brings results akin to those of the War on Terror, War on Crime, War on Weeds, and the endless wars we fight politically and interpersonally. First, it generates endless war; second, it diverts attention from the ground conditions that breed illness, terrorism, crime, weeds, and the rest.

Despite politicians’ perennial claim that they pursue war for the sake of peace, war inevitably breeds more war. Bombing countries to kill terrorists not only ignores the ground conditions of terrorism, it exacerbates those conditions. Locking up criminals not only ignores the conditions that breed crime, it creates those conditions when it breaks up families and communities and acculturates the incarcerated to criminality. And regimes of antibiotics, vaccines, antivirals, and other medicines wreak havoc on body ecology, which is the foundation of strong immunity. Outside the body, the massive spraying campaigns sparked by Zika, Dengue Fever, and now Covid-19 will visit untold damage upon nature’s ecology. Has anyone considered what the effects on the ecosystem will be when we douse it with antiviral compounds? Such a policy (which has been implemented in various places in China and India) is only thinkable from the mindset of separation, which does not understand that viruses are integral to the web of life.

To understand the point about ground conditions, consider some mortality statistics from Italy (from its National Health Institute), based on an analysis of hundreds of Covid-19 fatalities. Of those analyzed, less than 1% were free of serious chronic health conditions. Some 75% suffered from hypertension, 35% from diabetes, 33% from cardiac ischemia, 24% from atrial fibrillation, 18% from low renal function, along with other conditions that I couldn’t decipher from the Italian report. Nearly half the deceased had three or more of these serious pathologies. Americans, beset by obesity, diabetes, and other chronic ailments, are at least as vulnerable as Italians. Should we blame the virus then (which killed few otherwise healthy people), or shall we blame underlying poor health? Here again the analogy of the taut rope applies. Millions of people in the modern world are in a precarious state of health, just waiting for something that would normally be trivial to send them over the edge. Of course, in the short term we want to save their lives; the danger is that we lose ourselves in an endless succession of short terms, fighting one infectious disease after another, and never engage the ground conditions that make people so vulnerable. That is a much harder problem, because these ground conditions will not change via fighting. There is no pathogen that causes diabetes or obesity, addiction, depression, or PTSD. Their causes are not an Other, not some virus separate from ourselves, and we its victims.

Even in diseases like Covid-19, in which we can name a pathogenic virus, matters are not so simple as a war between virus and victim. There is an alternative to the germ theory of disease that holds germs to be part of a larger process. When conditions are right, they multiply in the body, sometimes killing the host, but also, potentially, improving the conditions that accommodated them to begin with, for example by cleaning out accumulated toxic debris via mucus discharge, or (metaphorically speaking) burning them up with fever. Sometimes called “terrain theory,” it says that germs are more symptom than cause of disease. As one meme explains it: “Your fish is sick. Germ theory: isolate the fish. Terrain theory: clean the tank.”

A certain schizophrenia afflicts the modern culture of health. On the one hand, there is a burgeoning wellness movement that embraces alternative and holistic medicine. It advocates herbs, meditation, and yoga to boost immunity. It validates the emotional and spiritual dimensions of health, such as the power of attitudes and beliefs to sicken or to heal. All of this seems to have disappeared under the Covid tsunami, as society defaults to the old orthodoxy.

Case in point: California acupuncturists have been forced to shut down, having been deemed “non-essential.” This is perfectly understandable from the perspective of conventional virology. But as one acupuncturist on Facebook observed, “What about my patient who I’m working with to get off opioids for his back pain? He’s going to have to start using them again.” From the worldview of medical authority, alternative modalities, social interaction, yoga classes, supplements, and so on are frivolous when it comes to real diseases caused by real viruses. They are relegated to an etheric realm of “wellness” in the face of a crisis. The resurgence of orthodoxy under Covid-19 is so intense that anything remotely unconventional, such as intravenous vitamin C, was completely off the table in the United States until two days ago (articles still abound “debunking” the “myth” that vitamin C can help fight Covid-19). Nor have I heard the CDC evangelize the benefits of elderberry extract, medicinal mushrooms, cutting sugar intake, NAC (N-acetyl L-cysteine), astragalus, or vitamin D. These are not just mushy speculation about “wellness,” but are supported by extensive research and physiological explanations. For example, NAC (general info, double-blind placebo-controlled study) has been shown to radically reduce incidence and severity of symptoms in flu-like illnesses.

As the statistics I offered earlier on autoimmunity, obesity, etc. indicate, America and the modern world in general are facing a health crisis. Is the answer to do what we’ve been doing, only more thoroughly? The response so far to Covid has been to double down on the orthodoxy and sweep unconventional practices and dissenting viewpoints aside. Another response would be to widen our lens and examine the entire system, including who pays for it, how access is granted, and how research is funded, but also expanding out to include marginal fields like herbal medicine, functional medicine, and energy medicine. Perhaps we can take this opportunity to reevaluate prevailing theories of illness, health, and the body. Yes, let’s protect the sickened fish as best we can right now, but maybe next time we won’t have to isolate and drug so many fish, if we can clean the tank.

I’m not telling you to run out right now and buy NAC or any other supplement, nor that we as a society should abruptly shift our response, cease social distancing immediately, and start taking supplements instead. But we can use the break in normal, this pause at a crossroads, to consciously choose what path we shall follow moving forward: what kind of healthcare system, what paradigm of health, what kind of society. This reevaluation is already happening, as ideas like universal free healthcare in the USA gain new momentum. And that path leads to forks as well. What kind of healthcare will be universalized? Will it be merely available to all, or mandatory for all – each citizen a patient, perhaps with an invisible ink barcode tattoo certifying one is up to date on all compulsory vaccines and check-ups. Then you can go to school, board a plane, or enter a restaurant. This is one path to the future that is available to us.

Another option is available now too. Instead of doubling down on control, we could finally embrace the holistic paradigms and practices that have been waiting on the margins, waiting for the center to dissolve so that, in our humbled state, we can bring them into the center and build a new system around them.

The Coronation

There is an alternative to the paradise of perfect control that our civilization has so long pursued, and that recedes as fast as our progress, like a mirage on the horizon. Yes, we can proceed as before down the path toward greater insulation, isolation, domination, and separation. We can normalize heightened levels of separation and control, believe that they are necessary to keep us safe, and accept a world in which we are afraid to be near each other. Or we can take advantage of this pause, this break in normal, to turn onto a path of reunion, of holism, of the restoring of lost connections, of the repair of community and the rejoining of the web of life.

Do we double down on protecting the separate self, or do we accept the invitation into a world where all of us are in this together? It isn’t just in medicine we encounter this question: it visits us politically, economically, and in our personal lives as well. Take for example the issue of hoarding, which embodies the idea, “There won’t be enough for everyone, so I am going to make sure there is enough for me.” Another response might be, “Some don’t have enough, so I will share what I have with them.” Are we to be survivalists or helpers? What is life for?

On a larger scale, people are asking questions that have until now lurked on activist margins. What should we do about the homeless? What should we do about the people in prisons? In Third World slums? What should we do about the unemployed? What about all the hotel maids, the Uber drivers, the plumbers and janitors and bus drivers and cashiers who cannot work from home? And so now, finally, ideas like student debt relief and universal basic income are blossoming. “How do we protect those susceptible to Covid?” invites us into “How do we care for vulnerable people in general?”

That is the impulse that stirs in us, regardless of the superficialities of our opinions about Covid’s severity, origin, or best policy to address it. It is saying, let’s get serious about taking care of each other. Let’s remember how precious we all are and how precious life is. Let’s take inventory of our civilization, strip it down to its studs, and see if we can build one more beautiful.

As Covid stirs our compassion, more and more of us realize that we don’t want to go back to a normal so sorely lacking it. We have the opportunity now to forge a new, more compassionate normal.

Hopeful signs abound that this is happening. The United States government, which has long seemed the captive of heartless corporate interests, has unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars in direct payments to families. Donald Trump, not known as a paragon of compassion, has put a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions. Certainly one can take a cynical view of both these developments; nonetheless, they embody the principle of caring for the vulnerable.

From all over the world we hear stories of solidarity and healing. One friend described sending $100 each to ten strangers who were in dire need. My son, who until a few days ago worked at Dunkin’ Donuts, said people were tipping at five times the normal rate – and these are working class people, many of them Hispanic truck drivers, who are economically insecure themselves. Doctors, nurses, and “essential workers” in other professions risk their lives to serve the public. Here are some more examples of the love and kindness eruption, courtesy of ServiceSpace:

Perhaps we’re in the middle of living into that new story. Imagine Italian airforce using Pavoratti, Spanish military doing acts of service, and street police playing guitars — to *inspire*. Corporations giving unexpected wage hikes. Canadians starting “Kindness Mongering.” Six year old in Australia adorably gifting her tooth fairy money, an 8th grader in Japan making 612 masks, and college kids everywhere buying groceries for elders. Cuba sending an army in “white robes” (doctors) to help Italy. A landlord allowing tenants to stay without rent, an Irish priest’s poem going viral, disabled activitists producing hand sanitizer. Imagine. Sometimes a crisis mirrors our deepest impulse — that we can always respond with compassion.

As Rebecca Solnit describes in her marvelous book, A Paradise Built in Hell, disaster often liberates solidarity. A more beautiful world shimmers just beneath the surface, bobbing up whenever the systems that hold it underwater loosen their grip.

For a long time we, as a collective, have stood helpless in the face of an ever-sickening society. Whether it is declining health, decaying infrastructure, depression, suicide, addiction, ecological degradation, or concentration of wealth, the symptoms of civilizational malaise in the developed world are plain to see, but we have been stuck in the systems and patterns that cause them. Now, Covid has gifted us a reset.

A million forking paths lie before us. Universal basic income could mean an end to economic insecurity and the flowering of creativity as millions are freed from the work that Covid has shown us is less necessary than we thought. Or it could mean, with the decimation of small businesses, dependency on the state for a stipend that comes with strict conditions. The crisis could usher in totalitarianism or solidarity; medical martial law or a holistic renaissance; greater fear of the microbial world, or greater resiliency in participation in it; permanent norms of social distancing, or a renewed desire to come together.

What can guide us, as individuals and as a society, as we walk the garden of forking paths? At each junction, we can be aware of what we follow: fear or love, self-preservation or generosity. Shall we live in fear and build a society based on it? Shall we live to preserve our separate selves? Shall we use the crisis as a weapon against our political enemies? These are not all-or-nothing questions, all fear or all love. It is that a next step into love lies before us. It feels daring, but not reckless. It treasures life, while accepting death. And it trusts that with each step, the next will become visible.

Please don’t think that choosing love over fear can be accomplished solely through an act of will, and that fear too can be conquered like a virus. The virus we face here is fear, whether it is fear of Covid-19, or fear of the totalitarian response to it, and this virus too has its terrain. Fear, along with addiction, depression, and a host of physical ills, flourishes in a terrain of separation and trauma: inherited trauma, childhood trauma, violence, war, abuse, neglect, shame, punishment, poverty, and the muted, normalized trauma that affects nearly everyone who lives in a monetized economy, undergoes modern schooling, or lives without community or connection to place. This terrain can be changed, by trauma healing on a personal level, by systemic change toward a more compassionate society, and by transforming the basic narrative of separation: the separate self in a world of other, me separate from you, humanity separate from nature. To be alone is a primal fear, and modern society has rendered us more and more alone. But the time of Reunion is here. Every act of compassion, kindness, courage, or generosity heals us from the story of separation, because it assures both actor and witness that we are in this together.

I will conclude by invoking one more dimension of the relationship between humans and viruses. Viruses are integral to evolution, not just of humans but of all eukaryotes. Viruses can transfer DNA from organism to organism, sometimes inserting it into the germline (where it becomes heritable). Known as horizontal gene transfer, this is a primary mechanism of evolution, allowing life to evolve together much faster than is possible through random mutation. As Lynn Margulis once put it, we are our viruses.

And now let me venture into speculative territory. Perhaps the great diseases of civilization have quickened our biological and cultural evolution, bestowing key genetic information and offering both individual and collective initiation. Could the current pandemic be just that? Novel RNA codes are spreading from human to human, imbuing us with new genetic information; at the same time, we are receiving other, esoteric, “codes” that ride the back of the biological ones, disrupting our narratives and systems in the same way that an illness disrupts bodily physiology. The phenomenon follows the template of initiation: separation from normality, followed by a dilemma, breakdown, or ordeal, followed (if it is to be complete) by reintegration and celebration.

Now the question arises: Initiation into what? What is the specific nature and purpose of this initiation?The popular name for the pandemic offers a clue: coronavirus. A corona is a crown. “Novel coronavirus pandemic” means “a new coronation for all.”

Already we can feel the power of who we might become. A true sovereign does not run in fear from life or from death. A true sovereign does not dominate and conquer (that is a shadow archetype, the Tyrant). The true sovereign serves the people, serves life, and respects the sovereignty of all people. The coronation marks the emergence of the unconscious into consciousness, the crystallization of chaos into order, the transcendence of compulsion into choice. We become the rulers of that which had ruled us. The New World Order that the conspiracy theorists fear is a shadow of the glorious possibility available to sovereign beings. No longer the vassals of fear, we can bring order to the kingdom and build an intentional society on the love already shining through the cracks of the world of separation.

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