One day I think we will look back at our age and scratch our heads. We had never had it so good, and yet so many of us were filled with gloom that humanity was driving itself to extinction, along with most of the rest of the life on the planet. The shrill cheerleader of this collective fear – the pony-girl of the apocalypse - being a naïve teenage girl, honoured by many world leaders. We were fuelled by news reports that proclaimed the most alarmist speculations of ‘experts’ as gospel truth. News was never reported, as ever, unless it was bad news. What had the western world come to?
This apocalyptic thinking was nothing new. There had previously been fears of extinction from over-population, and then from nuclear war: the only discernible outcome of the nuclear threat was the end to all major wars. Perhaps the root of it all was an existential insecurity arising from the loss of our old moorings in Christianity, so starkly proclaimed by Nietzsche when he wrote that “God is Dead.” And the fact that humanity was going through a huge transition: people do not feel comfortable with change.
Meanwhile, the actual course of humanity was to continue to raise unprecedented numbers of people out of poverty, driven by a combination of the capitalist economic system, technological inventiveness and the consumption of fossil fuels, followed by the eventual shift to nuclear power. Alongside came an unprecedented flourishing of the natural world, due to the higher CO2 levels. Vast areas were allowed to become wild again, as humanity became more efficient at producing food for itself. The world population eventually levelled off as middle-class living standards became the norm. Many species did indeed become extinct along the way, but eventually a new balance was found as humanity completed its transition to a largely urban dwelling, technologically-based, culturally ever-renewing species. New certainties arose, limited as any certainty necessarily is, but enough to allay the existential fears of much of collective humanity.
Meanwhile the individual was left, as they always had been, with their own solitary self to deal with, and the option to project their own darkness onto the world, with which they would find a ready demographic of concurrence in the social media.
This is where our Shamanism will find itself. You can forget about a return to the old utopia, the ‘participation mystique’, that we project onto indigenous peoples. Our job is to keep clawing back that sense of belonging to the natural world which, if there is an absolute truth, is that. And the sense of it in an urban environment, which is where most of us in the West now live. And maybe the breaking down of the distinction between human-made and ‘natural’, as if the human ability to invent were somehow not natural. Don’t perpetuate the split that Christianity gave us into godly and worldly, that we may carry forward into ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’. The urban environment as inspirited. Maybe that is our job. But we need to feel it first. And that comes through treating it as alive. Give thanks to your car, your frying pan, your phone. Trust that Mother Earth knows what she is doing.
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