Nurturing A Living Future
Includes Video of Darcia Narvaez's Presentation
I just spent most of a week with a set of remarkable women in Devon, England. Organized by Local Futures leader, Helena Norberg-Hodge (with assistance), our interdisciplinary group spent a day planning and then gave a daylong workshop and evening session to about 100, mostly women, participants. The focus was on our work investigating and promoting life-affirming lifeways, what was labeled “Feminine Futures”—with “feminine” here meaning the aspect of every human being that aims towards enhancement of living beings, human and non-human, and Earth. Humans in modernized societies need to re-build and trust their innate sentient knowledge, relearn how to live as part of and within a living planet’s wisdom, and organize their systems and practices to foster these things. We agreed that our aim was diverse Living Futures.
Local and Living Futures represent an emerging, worldwide movement that transcends political polarization. It re-embeds human culture in Nature, enabling locally diverse lifeways based on the landscape. “It means societies can move towards withdrawing their dependence on distant, unaccountable monopolies that produce our basic needs in high-input, mechanized monocultural systems on the other side of the world” (Norberg-Hodge, 2019, p. 15). Real, not manufactured needs, are the focus. “Localization means getting out of the highly unstable and exploitative bubbles of speculation and debt, and back to the real economy—our interface with other people and the natural world” (ibid).
Localization and Living Futures greatly contrasts with the modern dominant culture.
Mechanomorphism infects modern culture—the imposition of mechanical explanations for everything. This started with the splitting of mind from body that infected European culture, epitomized by Descartes. Descartes was so divorced from a Living Earth that he practiced vivisection on live animals, saying that their screams were just reflexes, not feelings; this view even spawned vivisection parties (Merchant, 1983). Mechanomorphism is the logical opposite of anthropomorphism, attributing human characteristics to non-human things.
An extreme version of mechanomorphism rules today, the corporate colonialism that forces us to treat the planet as if it were not sentient, as if it were not full of non-human persons, all for the sake of the unreal—money or capital. The runaway megamachine of corporate colonialism, that no one voted for, mesmerizes and corrals the leaders who keep it going. As Norberg-Hodge points out in her book, Local is Our Future, “Even the CEOs of large corporations and banks are driven by speculative markets to meet short-term profit and growth targets—they are under intense pressure to stay on top for fear of losing their own jobs and letting down their shareholders” (p. 13). The megamachine is largely invisible to us but affects all we do actively and psychically.
Economic growth of a business and the growth of GDP, national gross domestic product, are widely used as the measure of success. GDP is a fictional measure. First, it doesn’t matter whether production and purchases come from creative efforts or from natural disasters. GDP rises when hurricanes or wildfires destroy communities. GDP rises as people buy products to replace what was destroyed. Destruction raises GDP. Self-sufficiency doesn’t contribute to GDP, so the mega-culture justifies running people off common lands (enclosure) and forcing them into wage labor—GDP goes up and “poverty” goes down.
GDP is an example of a misincentive, one that encourages careless, thoughtless behavior. The USA is driven by such incentives and actions, actions that make more money but increase illbeing. For example, the ‘health-care’ (actually, ‘illness-care’) system in the USA is inattentive to wellness promotion (e.g., instead providing harmful medicalized birth practices, encouragement to use infant formula with long term effects), treating only the symptoms of resulting illness. There is big money to be made from lifelong sickly people.
Second, from a Living Futures perspective, the webs of globalization created since World War II operate irrationally. For example, large-scale production of monocultural products like soy and corn destroy soil over time and require palliative toxins (e.g., pesticides, herbicides, fungicides) that enter food, water, and air. Yet these harmful practices are subsidized by taxpayer funds due to corporate lobbying of and contributions to politicians. You probably assume that large monoculture, agricultural farms are more efficient than small farms. Only if you externalize all the damage that is done.
The global economic system is based on externalizing the costs of industrial production (environmental and social damage). In its narrow accounting, the economic system does not count the effects of economic practices on the health of people or planet. The massive use of long-distance shipping impacts climate and other aspects of the environment but is considered “efficient” because cheap labor is included in accounting, not environmental effects. One can ship parts of a product back and forth across oceans without any accounting for side effects. For example, transferring bottles of water (or apples, or x) produced in England to Australia and shipping the same kind of product produced in Australia to England increases GDP in both countries because the costs to the environment are excluded.
Countries exchange the same product across the world because of subsidies. Subsidizing fossil fuel companies and mega-agriculture make the wrong things cheap— burning carbon and producing and eating harmful artificial (processed) foods from an overabundance of a monocrop, for example, corn, laced with health-harming chemicals. All this irrationality is supported by beliefs in “progress,” human separation from Nature, Nature’s resilience, and a desire for more money.
The global rules that are suffocating our humanity and destroying the planet are only a few decades old; the worldview behind them is only a few centuries old. We can change them.
Always aiming for winning, at GDP or bank accounts or other artificial measures, keeps the megamachine of destruction going. Destruction starts early, at the beginning of a person’s life. Nearly everyone now is traumatized by inattention in early childhood due to parents and families being overworked and distracted. The consequent dissociation (divorce from feelings, perception, awareness) makes it difficult for individuals and communities to understand the big picture. At the same time, bad actors who seek power, distract everyone from the real problems by using us-against-them blaming—’it’s those immigrants who are causing all the problems’ (‘they are eating your pets,’ according to Trump).
How did humanity get off track and to this place of despair?
Famed therapist D.W. Winnicott observed that an undercared for infant who doesn’t receive early ongoing consistent responsive care from known, loving caregivers (a ‘good enough holding environment’) and instead is left in distress, begins to detach from their sensations, splitting from their body, mistrusting self and others. They cut off their heartsense and become, at the very least, anxious. “In the community it is the ill members who are compelled by unconscious motives to go to war and to attack as a defence against delusions of persecution, or else to destroy the world, a world that annihilated them, each one of them separately, in their infancy” (Winnicott, 1990, p. 34).
I saw an artistic rendering of this effect before I left England. I attended the musical, Hadestown, a free adaptation of the Orpheus and Euripides myth. The story was updated in a way that matched the main message of our Feminine Futures gatherings: The runaway globalization megamachine that governs our lives is killing our humanity and our planet.
Hades of Hadestown tells Persephone (the woman he stole from above-ground to be his wife who gets to return to above-ground half the year, bringing spring and summer growth):
Hades: “Lover, you were gone so long, Lover, I was lonesome so I built a foundry in the ground beneath your feet. Here, I fashioned things of steel, oil drums and automobiles. Then I kept that furnace fed with the fossils of the dead Lover. When you feel that fire, think of it as my desire— think of it as my desire for you!’
“Lover, you were gone so long, Lover, I was lonesome. So I laid a power grid in the ground on which you stood. And wasn’t it electrifying when I made the neon shine? Silver screen, cathode ray, brighter than the light of day. Lover, when you see that glare, think of it as my despair— think of it as my despair for you!”
His despair led to his overwhelming blindness and busyness, domination and destruction of others. We have a world of such wounded, dissociated people, including many bigshots who are heartlessly enslaved and enslaving others to the system. Like slaves, we work endlessly and wall off our emotions and relational responsibility to other humans and to Earth.
Hadestown’s enslaved chorus sings:
Workers chorus: “With a million hands that are not his own, with a million hands, he builds a wall. Around all the riches he digs from the Earth, the pickaxe flashes, the hammer falls and crashing and pounding.”
In a call and response, Hades asks the enslaved workers who answer like automatons:
Hades: Why do we build the wall, my children, my children? Why do we build the wall?
Workers: Why do we build the wall? We build the wall to keep us free. That’s why we build the wall. We build the wall to keep us free.
Hades: How does the wall keep us free, my children, my children? How does the wall keep us free?
Workers: How does the wall keep us free? The wall keeps out the enemy. And we build the wall to keep us free. That’s why we build the wall. We build the wall to keep us free.
Hades: Who do we call the enemy, my children, my children? Who do we call the enemy?
Workers: Who do we call the enemy? The enemy is poverty. And the wall keeps out the enemy. And we build the wall to keep us free. That’s why we build the wall. We build the wall to keep us free
Hades: Because we have and they have not, my children, my children. Because they want what we have got.
Workers: Because we have and they have not. Because they want what we have got. The enemy is poverty. And the wall keeps out the enemy. And we build the wall to keep us free. That’s why we build the wall. We build the wall to keep us free.
Hear the anxiety. The world is not safe. I am not safe. Threats are everywhere. Early trauma (infants left alone, left to cry, unrecognized, circumcised) breaks the continuum of trust in life, in Earth, in self. This is far from our millions-year-old human heritage, our nested pathway, which might have been physically taxing but is/was socially and ecological joyous. Our Living Past gives us a pathway for a Living Future.
Watch Darcia’s Presentation at the 17:45 Time Mark
REFERENCES
Eisler, R., & Fry, D.P. (2019). Nurturing our humanity. New York: Oxford University Press.
Merchant, C. (1983). The death of nature: Women, ecology and the scientific revolution. New York, NY: Harper & Row.
Norberg-Hodge, H. (2016). Ancient futures. Local Futures.
Norberg-Hodge, H. (2019). Local is our future: Steps to an economics of happiness. Local Futures.
Scheidler, F. (2020). The end of the megamachine: A brief history of a failing civilization. Zero Books.
Sorenson, E.R. (1998). Preconquest consciousness. In H. Wautischer (Ed.), Tribal epistemologies (pp. 79-115). Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
Winnicott, D.W. (1990). Home is where we start from: Essays by a psychoanalyst (compiled and Ed. By C. Winnicott, R. Shepherd, M. Davis). New York: W.W. Norton & Co.