It is said that if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will jump out immediately and without hesitation, as any self-respecting amphibian would—but if you put it in a pot of cold water and slowly turn up the heat one degree at a time, the poor thing will eventually boil to death, fatally oblivious to the increasing threat its environment portends. Though fairly macabre (no frogs were harmed in the making of this blog post), this analogy pretty aptly portrays the condition of our current place in history, in which our entire world seems to be coming to a boil right before our eyes—a slowly culminating but inevitable transformation of history from one state to another. And we have, until recently, been largely oblivious to this—but now we are beginning to take notice, and like the frog who suddenly realizes that it’s getting just a bit too warm for comfort, we are collectively faced with an existential ultimatum—either jump out of the pot, or boil alive.
But can we jump out? Is there any hope for us at all? Can we possibly transform in time—and if so, how? On the one hand, transformation is an utterly mysterious process, often happening suddenly, violently, and without any warning at all. On the other hand, Western science has very proficiently demonstrated that evolutionary leaps—both biological and psychological—tend to occur when environmental pressures demand them to. According to the biological fossil record, this has usually been due to such things as drastic climate change or the geological merging of two previously isolated ecosystems. In terms of psychological development, when asking the question “why do people transform?,” we can look to the concept of the “dialectic of progress,” which essentially states that every new stage of psychological growth brings with it its own “good news” and “bad news,” the good news of each stage being the resolution of the bad news from the previous stage. Or, as Albert Einstein famously quipped, “problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.” We ascend the spire of psychological and cultural growth simply by solving our own problems—and every step forward comes with its own new set of emergent problems, which can only be addressed by taking yet another step forward, as consciousness continues to bootstrap itself ever closer to the evolutionary horizon. Read the rest of this entry
“The planet,” Jim Garrison is fond of saying, “is on a collision course with itself.” The monumental challenges of the 21st century seem dire indeed, almost insurmountable in many ways. And to make matters worse, only a portion of the population has the developmental capacity to fully recognize the complexity of our collective problems, while the majority of the world remains blissfully unaware of the impending catastrophe we seem to be heading toward. And many of those who can see feel utterly helpless to do anything about it, unable to find their own ecologically sensitive values reflected in the culture at large. And so they anxiously await what many perceive as the inevitable, a tsunami of global crises to wash over us all, rendering the fruits of human civilization undone in a single fell swoop.
Hurricanes, tsunamis, drought, global warming, melting icecaps, eradication of biodiversity—to many of us, these harbingers of our planet’s seemingly imminent environmental meltdown are becoming more and more apparent each year, while the need for effective and enforceable sustainability policies on a global scale are becoming more and more urgent.