A revelation in the garden

Humanity's future lies in an evolving relationships with the greater potential order in which both life and humanity is a participatory agent.

Ecocide

Recently I took another look at the notion of 'ecocide' - the rendering of damage to living systems being deemed a punishable offence. At first I had some resistance to this idea. Compliance with the law, whether local or international, was simply that - compliance. And opportunists would inevitably find a way to short-circuit its application for personal gain - just look at green-washing in the application of the corporate ESG program!

Ethics or compliance

Ethics was about free choice - it was not about compliance with externally imposed requirements - it was rather about inner value guidance. But in contemplation I came to realise that until we've woken up sufficiently as a human species, there is indeed a need for those with higher values to do their best to minimise the harmful human impact on living systems. Surely in human affairs there is a commonly accepted responsibility for those who have the capacity to protect the weak and the vulnerable. Similarly then there is a responsibility to do what we can to protect nature. So the notion of 'ecocide' might (hopefully) provide the necessary disciplining until we 'grow up'.

Ancient wisdom

This morning as I walked on our garden terrace the complex tangle of life somehow spoke to me. This living context that enables me to breathe and 'be' has evolved over vast millennia. Whether life has evolved by the simple process of discovering what works, a function of emergence of the complex interactions of living organisms, or a function of some exquisite design, the amount of wisdom enfolded in this life giving milieu is beyond comprehension.

Scientific knowledge?

In our human reading of it we take life's measurable data, convert the identified patterns into information, capture that in our scientific knowledge systems, and then pretend to 'know' how it all works. Yet, if measured against our human footprint on the regenerative capacity of life, we've still messed up.

Our science still struggles to show us how to come into a relationship with life. With biomimicry we can endeavour to model it, but a model remains just that - an artificial imitation - not the thing itself. We can attempt to describe its processes, but we cannot replicate those processes, we cannot create life.

Life as a resource

In a way, in our apparent cleverness, we've tended, especially with 'for profit' industrial agriculture, and industry generally, come to see living systems as a cow to be milked - its resources to be exploited and optimised by enhancing production. (Sadly we tend to see humanity this way too!) And with our growing hubris of the potentials of AI amplified genetic modification we make life the subject of our manipulative technology. It remains sourced in a disrespectful and extractive projection of our own materialistic worldview.

Mother earth

Life is not a cow to be milked, it is mother to be revered. Similarly humanity is not human capital to be exploited, society is the very context in which the individual becomes more fully human. And life is the milieu in which society can evolve to realise its deeper potentials.

Relationality and wisdom

Ultimately the inherent wisdom of life has been its capacity to find coherent co-existence through complex adaptive relationships. Evolution, rather than being a mere function of the survival of the fittest, has been a function of the thriving of the fittest relationships, of coherent ecosystems. And that means that the participating elements have found appropriate function in service of the greater whole - the great operational order.

Hubris

And herein lies our hubris. We have little inkling of the nature of the greater whole. Our mechanistic and reductionist worldview, sophisticated algorithms notwithstanding, simply cannot comprehend the fields of wisdom that inform complex vital living ecosystems. And so our faulty epistemology becomes our paradigm shackling reality. Until something changes.

Reverence for life

It was Dr Albert Schweitzer, while slowly travelling up the banks of the Ogooue River in Africa, who came to the realisation that the essence of ethics was reverence for life.

Ontological discontinuity?

But then our notion of life itself needs to change. It is not about complex molecular chains, its not merely about DNA and RNA, and its not about organic chemistry. Life itself is a new field, what E. F. Schumacher calls 'an ontological discontinuity', a fundamentally new greater order that cannot be described with reductionist logic. But it can be sensed and experienced.

Spirit of water

Think of it this way. Science tells us that water is constituted of oxygen and hydrogen. That is true. But the properties of H20 don't describe the nature and experience of water. Without water no life, without life no thought, no consciousness, no values, no dreams.

"...Unless a man is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom..." John 3;5

The words are easy enough to express - we are embedded in nature and hence we are embodiments of nature. That can take deeper meaning when life talks to us.

Beyond utilitarianism

And then our response is like to be more than respect, more than awe. As Schweitzer said, it becomes one of reverence. This is a worshipful response. And life includes us, we humans are nature too. So it includes my fellow human being - equally deserving of reverence. Schumacher put it well:

"Whatever we can destroy, but cannot create is, in a way, sacred."

This is the true essence of the humanistic worldview - beyond relativism and utilitarianism - more akin to Aristotelian virtue ethics.

Self-transcendence

The future evolutionary potential of humanity does not lie in sophisticated technology - it does not lie in artificial intelligence. Humanity's future potential lies in an evolving relationships with the greater potential order in which both life and humanity is a participatory and co-creative agent.

The realisation of that potential is self-transcendence. And that begins with the awakened individual. And that can very well begin in the garden.