The first of my six essays are now published by Amazon as a book, entitled Everything and Nothing: Essays on Climate Change and Cultural Transformation.
Like many men today I have become aware of a new momentum in the women’s liberation movement - nothing short of a global revolution. My own mother, married, as she was to a disabled and controlling man, my father, died prematurely in her early sixties. Amidst my grief was a mystifying but clear sense of relief, which I rationalised at the time was my response to her “escape” from a life which had left her depressed for years and which I felt I was powerless to do anything about.
I didn’t study natural science at university, having chosen the humanities in the sixth form at school. As a result, I grew up scientifically illiterate in the “two cultures” atmosphere of the last century. Art and human sciences seemed much more interesting than natural science anyway. It wasn’t until I started looking into the creative science writing of biologists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould that I realised how fascinating science really is.
Austerity is not just about economics, nor is growth. Neoliberal economics as the answer to everything seems to have become the default policy of the UK Conservative Party, as was evident in the past eleven years of its administration. Care, also, for the whole population - and demonstration of that care - seems to have been forgotten. At the same time, its failure to secure economic growth anyway and reduce the wealth gap was encapsulated in the recent disastrous brief administration of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, that revealed the final, ethical and financial bankruptcy of neoliberal ideology.
Many now believe we are in the midst of a revolution in consciousness. Climate change may be about the necessity of reducing our fossil fuel emissions to zero and addressing our over-consuming way of life in the modern world, but it is also an existential life-anddeath crisis, a crisis of consciousness which prompts us to ask how we have contributed to causing the climate emergency in the first place. It is also, at the same time, an opportunity to re-examine our relationship to the world and universe around us.
It was St Augustine who asserted, in that famous passage in The Confessions, that time is an illusion. “The past”, Augustine insisted, only exists as memory in the present while 1 “the future” is an anticipation from the present. Memory can be very fallible, while the future can turn out quite differently from our anticipation of it. It follows that the past and the future are, in other words, constructs of the mind.
In 2016 The Psychotherapist magazine of the United Kingdom Counsel for Psychotherapy published an edition, entitled “Climate Change and Radical Hope”, co-edited by two members of the Climate Psychology Alliance. My own contribution to this group edition was to describe how the different schools of psychotherapy might begin to work integratively within the organisation of the UKCP and how this might act as a psychological model for a collaborative approach in the world outside the sphere of the psychotherapy professions. Here is the original text of my own article, one of nine from CPA members.
In his latest book, Choosing Earth, about “Humanity’s Journey of Initiation Through Breakdown and Collapse to Mature Planetary Community”, Duane Elgin, who wrote the classic Voluntary 1 Simplicity back in 1981, suggests we - the human race - have three choices this century - 2 functional extinction, authoritarianism or transformation. Climate scientists are unanimous 3 about the prospect of a hellish future if we continue with fossil-fuel business-as-usual. Survival would seem to depend now either on giving power to a strong, authoritarian leader, or transforming ourselves to create a society that is based on freedom, truth, and goodwill. Choosing the latter is about seeing democracy as a way of life, not just a political system.
This is an article submitted to a special edition of the British Gestalt Journal on Gestalt therapy and climate change, but was thought to be too wide-ranging to be selected for publication at the time:
Gestalt Therapy in the 21st Century and its Relation to Buddhist Contemplative Practice. An integration of the new and the old for a world now facing, and experiencing, the threat of climate change and mass extinction.
The destructive and criminal war by Vladimir Putin - the 21st century “Tsar of Russia” - against Ukraine has shocked us all, despite the warnings our intelligence services gave us. The destruction, the cruelty, and the barbarity in the middle of Europe has left us incredulous, almost disbelieving what our news media are revealing. To respond with grievous anger and rage at such a war - and our helplessness to stop it - is only too understandable, though worse, and far longer, human atrocities, in which we are also entangled, are going on in many other parts of the world. It’s perhaps because Ukrainian families are so similar to ourselves that we are so affected.
It is well known that some of the great creative achievements of humanity emerge from periods of great suffering and anxiety, when we are faced with existential extremes. It hardly needs to be said that now must be the extremest, when the survival of all life on earth is threatened as a result of Western industrial civilisation. I write this as the negotiations of COP26 are ongoing and there is a face-off between the street activists…, demonstrating against what they see as the unreal blah-like discussions of the Parties, and the protracted debates, seemingly controlled by the rich nations, within the conference.
‘Climate change’ is an umbrella term which covers the whole gamut of the ecological crisis, such as ocean warming, deforestation, and the mass extinction we are causing. But it also includes an existential crisis for us - ‘the human phenomenon’. We have all the technical knowledge we need to fix climate change. What’s stopping us, though, is ourselves. There may be many and complex reasons for this, but the essential one is because we do not know who, or what, we really are. Nor, even more mysteriously, do we know that we don’t know who we are.
In 2017 I posted an essay on the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) website, entitled “Awakening. Further thoughts on Radical Hope”. This current piece continues the 1 theme since waking up is absolutely central in this twenty-first century. In the original essay I drew attention to two essential kinds of waking up: firstly, waking up to the evidence of climate change, our part in causing it, and what it means for the future of the planet; and secondly, waking up to ourselves. Perhaps it is awareness of this second form of waking up that will help us understand our denial of the first. After all, the challenge of climate change and mass extinction calls for a change in our own nature.
As Wendy Hollway discussed in her April and May Climate Psychology Alliance newsletters, it is difficult not to see the connection between the challenges of the virus and climate change issues.
While we are all still in a state of shock with the global lockdown and have only just begun to think about what it all means, we are becoming increasingly aware that fundamental changes are taking place at all levels and there is no going back to “normal life”.
At the same time there is a sense of relief for some of us that Coronavirus has broken through the unreality of our materialistic and high-consuming way of living. Who would have thought that a micro-entity could be responsible for confining the whole human race to their homes, leaving our cities deserted and quiet, emptying the skies of aircraft etc? It is impressive. What Greens have been campaigning about for decades, i.e. the reduction in global carbon emissions, the virus has achieved in a matter of weeks.
In her 2017 book,“No Is Not Enough”, Naomi Klein described the “lessons from Standing Rock” in North Dakota when the “water protectors” gathered outside the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to try to stop the Dakota Access pipeline ....... December 5th, 2016 was the Sioux’s “last stand” 1 against the most violent state repression. Many had arrived to stand with them, including a convoy of more than two thousand military veterans. What Klein found there when she joined them was a network of camps comprising ten thousand people. It had developed into a community, that was much more than just a resistance to the pipeline. In the words of Bull Allard, the official historian of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, it had become a school, not just here to protect the Earth and water but “to help humanity answer its most pressing question: how to live with the Earth again, not against it.”
This introductory chapter explains how I came to write these essays. Climate scientists are unanimous about the very uncertain prospects for the Earth and for us this century, given our continued reliance on finite fossil fuels and our reluctance to change to alternative and carbon-free fuel sources. What is extraordinary is our resistance to acknowledging the scientific facts and prognosticatIons the scientists claim. My argument throughout rests on the importance of a psychological and ethical exploration to account for our ignoring, or denial, of climate change and to emphasise the need to rethink human nature as it evolves in this twenty-first century. The idea of “the timeless axis” suggests the possibility of a re-newed consciousness beyond the modern categories of time, space and linear causality.
Buddhism and Shakespeare - along with all the poets - held that life itself is a dream - of happiness and pleasure or a nightmare of pain and suffering. One day very soon we will have to face the new reality - the unthinkable prospect of human-caused climate change and a sixth mass extinction - and find a new way through, or perish. There is a middle way between pleasure and pain, happiness and suffering, dream and reality, but we have to go beyond modern Western culture to find it. A new Axial Age promises a new balance - a nondual perspective on all our scientific, philosophical and political dualisms - which depends on the integration of everything, such as physics and meta-physics, or economics and ethics, but particularly the analytic sciences of the modern time-centred West with the universal Idealism of the timeless East.
Identity is a major issue today. More and more people are asking the simple question “Who am I?” and realising there is no simple answer. Similarly in respect of our social and ecological identity -the collective human phenomenon - and our place on the Earth and in the Universe. For instance, are we separate from nature or an integral part of it? The timeless, paradoxical question of the Zen tradition, “What was the nature of your original face before you were born?”, begins, in this post-modern and climate-crisis age, to make more sense. It is time we inquired into our essential individual and species identity rather than simply remain unconscious of who we are.
The French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, wrote: “All I can do is tell the truth. No, that isn’t so - I have missed it. There is no truth that, in passing through awareness, does not lie. But one runs after it all the same.” Now, in this postmodern world, we no longer believe in truth and we have stopped running after it. Absolute truth can never be “known”. It will always evade us. But relative truth is another matter. The three books in this review all consider relative truth even more important to “run after” in this time of climate and political crisis.
Towards the end of this essay I use a sentence from the Buddhist psychoanalyst, Mark Epstein’s book, Going on Being, as an epigraph: “You don’t have to change to awaken, you only have to awaken to change”. This suggests the importance and power of awakening, not only for consciousness itself but also for the actual changes that will inevitably accompany it. The most effective activism springs from, and is an expression of, the practice of contemplation and meditation. Mindfulness - in everything we do - can change our lives and the world about us.
I wrote this essay in 2015 as an attempt to clarify my thoughts about extending the aims of the Climate Psychology Alliance - and psychological thinking about the climate crisis - to include the wisdom of the perennial traditions. The thinking and analytical practices of our modern scientific culture have, arguably, led to the climate emergency. If there is a new consciousness emerging, then it must embrace a new vision of us - the human phenomenon - not an idealised one, but based on a global psychological and philosophical understanding that integrates both the scientific material knowledge of the modern West with the immaterial, meta-physical wisdom of the East.