The Great Backlash

? 2024 Linda Buzzell and Craig Chalquist

The Great Turning initiative will promote and cultivate a spiritually-awakened, holistic, life-affirming counterpoint to support humanity to navigate the challenges of our times and encourage our evolutionary impulse toward a mature planetary civilization.

~ Mattie Porte, greatturning. net

Deep Ecology philosopher and ecopsychologist Joanna Macy has popularized the concept of “the Great Turning” in her Work That Reconnects movement. The basic idea is that industrial society must now transition from life-destroying Business as Usual to a more survivable Life-Sustaining Society. And by necessity this transition involves a Great Unravelling and Collapse of the old systems as we undergo this change.

The capital letters used by people in this movement convey the seriousness of these transitions.

Many of the liberation movements of the last few decades are rooted in this desire to create a more socially-just and Earth-friendly society. But as planetary and societal conditions rapidly worsen and old systems die, I think we also need to face up to another capitalized stage in the traumatic change process that’s happening right now: The Great Backlash.

As historically-reliable past systems, norms and climate conditions disintegrate (some call this the metacrisis), a growing number of frightened people in countries around the world now frantically long for the mythical stability and seeming-certainty of long-gone mores and strongman leaders. The American MAGA movement (“Make America Great Again”) is a classic example of this retro, nostalgic gaze. Wasn’t it wonderful when (straight, white, old, cisgender) men were in charge and everything was so orderly? When America seemed to rule the world, providing post World War II "global stability" during and after the Cold War and in the unipolar decades of the 1990s and early 2000s?

In the mid 2020s we now find ourselves in a multipolar world once more, with a growing number of global great powers competing for dominance as more and more uncontrolled conflicts and wars pop up around the planet. And all of this is happening as climate and environmental devastation rapidly worsens, economic splits widen and the super-rich become predators on the rest of humanity as they destroy Earth's life-support systems. Fears rise and the desire for certainty and stability leads people to welcome fascism back from its seeming demise. The Great Backlash has arrived.

So how can we who long for Life-Sustaining Society best deal with this virulent and horrific backlash? One answer is to help everyone envision in great detail what a healthy society might actually look and feel like - so we can begin to build it from the ground up.

Historically, at the heart of transformational cultural movements we always find some powerful vision that unfolds into a series of stories, practices, values, institutes: a mythology in Joseph Campbell’s sense of the word. A framework of tellings that help groups of people make sense of who they are and what they are doing here.

But as Campbell points out, the traditional mythologies find themselves increasingly relativized as technology and travel connect us globally ever more deeply. The volcano god of a particular mountain is not universal after all. The values that work in one society clash with those of another.

The mythmakers today are the creatives who build their visions into fiction, film, dance, art, and other expressive media. Mythopoesis replaces traditional myth. Because of this, it can serve what might be a next phase in cultural evolution: the creation of a hopeful, peaceful, inclusive, and Earth-honoring planetary mythology that can support the transition to the Life-Sustaining Society we long for.

The call for a new mythology is not new. We find it in Schlegel, Novalis, Schelling, and other European Romantics. Perhaps this idea emerged before its time had come. Today, a set of stories that draw on the world’s folklore to craft new kinds of tellings, celebrations, and performances might give us a sense—as the Kalevala does for Finland—of our common human heritage.

The Great Backlash is built on archaic patriarchal stories of domination and control. Stories offered by a viable planetary mythology would counter these regressions by creating more spacious, inclusive, and imaginative tellings about our human family’s place among other beings now struggling to survive and flourish. Such a mythology could also befriend scientific work without being reductively scientistic and partake of ecospirituality without being belief-heavy religious.

Bold, inclusive and caring visions can guide us forward as we struggle to cope with and counter the frightening daily reports of the escalating Great Backlash. Rather than succumbing to despair and inaction in the face of sick political movements like Project 25 in the United States, we can create and share our most enticing visions of the world we long for: Life-Sustaining Society. By remaining undismayed, creative and courageous against all odds, together we can work to build an Earth-harmonious, cooperative, joyful, inspiring and caring society that includes and cares for all beings.