In the time that we have left, pt. 3

Octavia Butler is on the list

Sometimes, it takes an extraordinarily long preamble to get myself writing. That's why I bolded Octavia Butler's name above. To remind me, no matter how long it takes me to actually get to the point, when I do get there, I want to be focussing, however briefly, on Octavia Butler.

I've decided that I want to try and write everyday. And, as much as possible, I want to be writing the story of the Devolution Movement, real and/or imagined. But I'm going to have to be flexible about that everyday thing. I've never been a person who could pull that off. Nevertheless, in the broadest possible meaning of the term, I am a writer. I am a writer and I want to be a writer who writes. So, I've got to create a structure that helps me do that and I have to forgive myself when I don't.

But to facilitate both writing and forgiveness, I'm going to add interludes to the structure into which I'm trying to fit myself. That means that I am going to allow myself some days on which I write, but never, ever get to the point. I will call those writing fragments Interlude, as in "Interlude 1, " "Interlude 2," ad nauseam. Hopefully, there won't be too many such posts and quite a few more entries headed, "In the time that we have left..."

Anyway, Octavia Butler...

She saw so much coming in our shared future. She saw dystopia and she saw struggle. She called out white supremacy and she encouraged us to see that we are all hurtling into the same future and warned us not to deceive ourselves about the forces that would mobilize to maintain privilege and inequality.

Butler's book, The Parable of the Sower, was published in 1993. The book centers on the story of Lauren Olamina, a teenager who foresees a troubling future for herself and her tribe, and who conceives of a resilient and sacred community that seeks to bend the moral arc of the universe.

In an afterword to the book, Butler outlined the social, political, cultural and environmental conditions that shape the world we live in:

"...look where we are now, and...consider where some of our current behaviors and unattended problems might take us. I considered drugs and the effects of drugs on the children of drug addicts. I looked at the growing rich/poor gap, at throwaway labor, at our willingness to build and fill prisons, our reluctance to build and repair schools, and at our assault on the environment. In particular, I looked at global warming and the ways in which it is likely to change things for us...I considered spreading hunger as a reason for increased vulnerability to disease.  And there would be less money for inoculation or treatment. Also, thanks to rising temperatures, tropical diseases like malaria and dengue would move north. I considered the loss of coastline as the level of the sea rises. I imagined the United States becoming, slowly, through the combined effects of lack of foresight and short-term unenlightened self-interest, a third world country."

So, there we are. Olivia Butler's account of what she was thinking about when she wrote Parable of the Sower. That was 30 years ago. Butler was thinking about challenges that we are facing now years before they became even remotely visible to most of the rest of us. And though she wasn't quite saying that the change we need to undergo, if we are to survive the wrenching social and environmental dislocations ahead, must be a species-level change, she very nearly said something like that.

So, is Octavia Butler one of the prophets of the Devolution Movement?

Hell, yes.

In the time that we have left, pt. 2

 What work marks the early stages of a developing movement? Who does it? Are we already in the early stages? Whose work will history acknowledge?

How much or how little time should I spend figuring where exactly would I locate myself in the early history of this movement? Nowhere, probably. I've been in the peanut gallery for most of my adult life, doing whatever seemed most urgent at any given time. I certainly haven't been a thought leader in the nascent movement I wish to see gathering momentum. I haven't been an organizer or an activist. There were quite a few years when I mostly contented myself with emptying, then recycling beer bottles.

In any case, to calculate anyone's exact location in the multi-dimensional map of global movements begins, I suspect, with admitting that there has never before been a truly global movement. Unless, maybe, one supposes that the agricultural revolution was just such a movement. You know, the Agricultural Revolution, some 60-70,000 years ago? The one that made most of us farmers and pushed hunter-gatherers to the margins? Not a true movement, really. No hive brain at work there, either. But certainly an almost simultaneous global transformation. And, we would have to note that it's impossible to assess anyone's role in a transformation that began in prehistory, before there existed a single historian, or, even, a footprint thereof. Absent any model for assessing where anything actually starts or who started it, we probably need to begin developing some arbitrary criteria so that we can begin making a list of whoever might have made an early, and critical, contribution.

It's easy to imagine a reader arriving at this point in this post saying to themselves, or out loud to the universe, "what the hell are we talking about?" So, let's backtrack. This post is part two of an inquiry that began with yesterday's post. It is headed "in the time that we have left" because the earth is in jeopardy and almost all of the responsibility for that belongs to humans. We have so much to account for and no time for an accounting. The earth, the biosphere, the mass of all that lives and breathes and swims and flies and crawls is shrinking. The walls are closing in on us. If we and all the bio organisms around us are to survive what's coming in any remotely familiar form, we must become virtually unrecognizable to ourselves. We need to devolve.

And only a nearly universal consensus about the urgent need for human devolution will get the job done. So, again, what's the best next question? There must be nearly an infinity of possible answers to that question and I simply do not have the skill and ability to get to anything like a comprehensive answer to that question. Who does?

But I do keeping asking myself this question? Who are the pioneers who have/are/will catalyzing the movement in question? If there is already a list, who or what is on it? Again, a comprehensive answer would be one hell of a long list. But I say that no matter who qualifies for that list, one person who beyond any doubt belongs on that list is Octavia Butler. 

In the time that we have left...

How would a culture arrive at a decision to devolve? What would that mean? Surely, people would not devolve individually. We are not talking about returning to our evolutionary origins. Devolution, whatever that might turn out to be, would have to be a collective process, one that a whole society would agree to undertake, like, say, returning to human social groupings more typical of the period before the industrial revolution, or of the period before the agricultural revolution.

And why, in the world, would a people decide to devolve? It's not that the decision to devolve and getting there would happen very quickly. It might take generations. Or longer. How would a culture even arrive at a consensus understanding of what it would mean to devolve? How would that culture, our culture, ever be able to develop and implement a process that properly assessed the pros and cons of devolution?

These questions are not mere hypotheticals. It is possible to argue in favor of at least one substantial benefit that would arise from cultural devolution; the benefit that would accumulate (to whomever or to whatever) from the human species devolving from our/its/the current state of voraciously consuming more resources than our planet will ever, can ever, replenish, to becoming a species that lives more lightly in and on our shared biosphere.

How fraught would that process be? How troubled, and dangerous and unrewarding and potentially unrewarded, would the process of changing from existing collectively as a lunatic behemoth in constant struggle with our planetary home to becoming a species fully and productively adapted to an ecological niche in harmony with all other bio organisms and with the visible and invisible forces constantly working to build and level and bury and rebuild the world on which we travel endlessly through the galaxy? How troubled, and dangerous and unrewarding and likely unrewarded would that process of devolution be?

Can we put aside, for a moment, the obvious notion that such an outcome is not actually possible? How would the process begin? How many different people would have to arrive separately at the conclusion that our species must devolve if everything we love is to be saved? How many people would have to arrive individually at the conclusion that we must devolve in order to create a critical mass of such people, a collection of such individuals sufficient to so that they would occur often enough in the larger population to recognize each other and begin to coalesce as a movement advocating for and taking the first steps toward cultural devolution?

Ignite a global movement? Organized in what or whose interest? Gathering power from what source? From the suffering of people who would not survive to the moment when such an enlightened state is realized? Power gathered from the suffering, sucked from the lives of individuals who would be consumed in. the building of such a movement? How would a movement that aimed to protect all that we love calculate the sum of separate sufferings? How would a nascent movement arrive at the conclusion that the benefits from devolution would add up to far more than the sum of the sufferings incurred along the way? How would the movement decide that the collective moral injury suffered along the way to the utopian goal was an affordable cost?

How would such an infant movement quantify the possibility of failure, of incurring all the costs that must be paid along the way to never arriving at the proposed outcome? Of continuing the chase, no matter how long it took, fueled by the agonies of an infinity of humans who would necessarily suffer precisely because we never relented in our pursuit of a phantasm?