Since the dominant narratives bringing forth the ongoing misadventure of industrial capitalism fail to properly situate the human soul in its actual time and place, any serious inquiry into the nature of our individual and collective situation must begin with an act of counter memory: we must ask afresh in each generation, who are we, and where did we come from? As Emerson suggested in his lecture on the American Scholar, we must discover an original relationship with the universe.
This does not mean we should jettison tradition. The “chronological snobbery” (Owen Barfield‘s phrase) of the progress-obsessed modern world is nothing to be emulated; rather, tradition must be consciously integrated instead of reactively rejected or habitually assumed.
In a cosmological sense, we are star stuff come to life upon a planet of immense but limited means. Our existence has taxed to the point of bankruptcy the potential energy of earth’s systems. Ecological entropy now threatens to destroy the monetary meaning that has replaced culture with commodities and nature with machines. Absent this monetary meaning, many of us no longer know how to eat or how to sleep, nor how to love, and especially not how to die.
Life on earth in 2011 is precarious, even doomed. And yet, isn’t this message of doom now also woven into our official narrative? Isn’t apocalypse the best selling plot in today’s mass media market? Everybody knows the old world is coming to an end, but because the horror of this reality is too much to take responsibility for, the majority of us sit on the couch and pretend it is all just another form of entertainment. Fantasy has replaced forthrightness, and imagination has withered to make way for shallow ideological affiliation with merely symbolic causes.
Of course, symbolism is no mere trifle: our sense of meaning is precisely what is at stake. How are we to conceive of the human presence on the planet? Are we a cancerous growth, or the incarnation of God on earth? Are we to become once again a spiritual instead of a consumptive and pleasure-driven species? Are we to replace industrial with initiatory cosmology? Is our role to worship, celebrate, and create, or to use, abuse, and destroy?
These are questions of the ultimate meaning of the universe, and their answers determine how we inhabit the earth. As the geologian Thomas Berry put it, ecology is simply functional cosmology. An integral ecology implies an awareness of the way our images of the cosmos quite literally come to transform its material reality: the mechanistic and disenchanted imaginary of industrial cosmology, for example, has pushed the planet into climate change and mass extinction, forever altering the future course of every species’ evolution. Clearly, such a cosmology does not function adequately as an ecology. It is based upon the mistaken assumption that profit is genuinely productive, when in fact, rising corporate profits are perhaps the best indication of declining ecosystemic vitality. Only plants are truly productive, since only they are capable of eating the celestial energy of the sun that produces and sustains all life on earth. All other biotic activities, human and otherwise, function only by transforming terrestrial energy originally captured by plants.
“Like all structures,” writes Alf Hornborg,
“the biosphere is composed of differences. If it is humankind’s mission to devise a coded system of signals to integrate this most inclusive of living systems, our monetary system must recognize those differences or continue to annihilate them” (p. 174, The Power of the Machine).
Modern industrial cosmology has lead to the dissociation of the human economy and the earth economy. Earth is a diverse community of organisms delicately balanced by millions upon millions of years of co-adaptation. This variety is crucial to its ongoing resiliency. Capitalism seeks to homogenize culture and nature in order to more effectively market its mass produced products everywhere on the globe. It has entirely transformed Gaia too quickly for Her species, including the human, to adapt. We are increasingly threatened by the worldlessness produced by an economic system that values profitability (the replication of money) over productivity (the recreation of life).
Only the “subversive implications of genuine spirituality” can reverse the spread of worldlessness, since, says Hornborg,
“the concept of sanctity is diametrically opposed to the notion of generalized interchangeability on which modernity is founded. To suggest a mountain or a person’s time are not for sale is incongruent with the basic premises of the modern project” (p. 236, ibid.).
In my presentation at Burning Man this year (2pm on Tuesday, Aug 30th @ Camp Cosmicopia located ~ 8 A), I want to suggest that ancient cosmology, specifically that emerging out of the Platonic tradition, has much to teach the modern mind about what it means to be human on planet earth. Modern cosmology is disenchanted, which is to say that it no longer integrates the reality of soul, whether that of the individual or that of the universe. Each human being is conceived of as an isolated atom of tragic identity lost in an immense storm of random, chaotic change. To even call this a cosmology is to stretch the meaning of the term, since industrialism offers no explicit vision of the universe as a whole. It denies wholeness, instead encouraging each separate individual to pursue its own selfish ends in the hope that its sense of dissatisfaction with life might find some temporary reprieve in the fleeting pleasures of consumption.
Platonic cosmology, in contrast, situates the human being in a living and intelligent universe. The life of the individual soul is understood to participate in the life of the World Soul. Though the trauma of birth makes it forgetful, the individual soul is said to be capable of remembering its origin in the everlasting Soul of the World by looking skyward and contemplating the holy rhythms of the circling stars above. The movements of the heavenly bodies are the visible signs of the World Soul’s invisible formative power. The heavenly motions reflect the earthly soul’s emotions, mirroring (not determining) its inner life.
Plato’s vision of the universe is initiatory, since it is a cosmology –a way of speaking the cosmos– that goes beyond mere secondhand description to direct participation in the meaning of the world. Modern cosmology tends to speak at or about the universe, while Plato sought to speak to and with the universe. The earth and the other planets are not merely chunks of rock, but ensouled creatures — gods, even. It is my opinion that we are approaching a crisis in scientific cosmology not seen since the time of Copernicus. We are on the verge of a new consciousness of a new cosmos, a transformation in our fundamental image of the world no less profound and earth-shaking than the emergence of the heliocentric theory. With this new cosmology will come a new culture, a new way of being human, based not on work and the replication of money, but on play and the recreation of life. Perhaps Burning Man provides a small a preview of the possibilities…
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?