Towards a New Ecological Paradigm

The medieval world was oriented to devotion as creatures of God and, in a parallel hierarchy, to submission to kings.

By Andrew Porter 

At crucial junctures in human life, old ways of thinking become inadequate or even intolerable and new models are needed to guide the possibilities of human life. Plato’s Republic, which advances the rule of experts, was partly written in reaction to the failures blamed on Athens’ partial democracy after the Peloponnesian War. Rousseau’s Emile sought a new framing of education completely in contrast to the norms of the eighteenth century. Today, to develop a new sweeping paradigm may seem presumptuous or unrealistic, but fresh ideas are vital – and increasingly imperative.

The validity of a well-crafted and well-articulated paradigm acts like the sun in late spring, leaving little room for rational opposition. There is not, of course, only one possible winning paradigm; however, one envisioned by, say, the writers Wendell Berry or Andreas Malm, seems to offer the kind that underpins a viable and non-dystopian future.

But, as the American historian and philosopher Thomas Kuhn warned, ruling ideas refuse to budge even when they should since many of their adherents are highly invested in their predominance. And yet, if ever there were a time both ripe and desperate for a new paradigm, this current juncture would seem to be it. Various looming catastrophes – climate change, regional conflict, rainforest loss, and political upheaval – threaten us like ever higher waves behind the already dismaying ones.

Each era has its own ruling paradigm. The medieval world was oriented to devotion as creatures of God and, in a parallel hierarchy, to submission to kings. The Renaissance advanced humanism and secularism with a flourish. The Enlightenment sprouted recognition of natural rights and democratic principles as the basis of society. Post-Enlightenment centuries have seemed convoluted and fragmented, unsure about humankind’s relation either to nature or to itself. A sound and successful paradigm, in acting as a clarion call, both taps and inspires human capacity. It continues to deliver on its promise of fulfilling human potential. We are rapidly learning that this potential is interdependent, with one another and with the natural world.

Today, the ruling paradigms of scientific materialism and growing income disparity capitalism tend to work off a strange set of ideas that tolerate social injustice, large-scale damage to the planet, and the growing wealth and influence of oligarchs. At the same time, counter to this, it seems that an undermining of too-long-held worldviews is also taking place in many novel forms, whether in physics, culture, politics, and understandings of nature. One fresh approach that seems most propitious is human ecology, an approach long shelved but in certain key areas making significant inroads. This might be called the Natural Life Paradigm.

The key component of a ‘natural life’ or ‘human ecology’ paradigm is an acceptance of and eagerness for integration with the limits and opportunities of whatever bioregion a community is in. The need for limits is obvious; less obvious is the opportunities for well-being and long-term sustainability this entails. The pursuit of happiness tends to reside in these ways of being, whether recognised or not.

The Natural Life Paradigm could solve many problems at once. What would an outline of such a paradigm look like? One way to approach this is to let ecological thinking engage in dialogue with social justice and metaphysics. Efforts and vision to improve anti-racism, human rights, climate change melioration, and gun control benefit as they enter into conversation with novel conceptualising about the nature of reality – to underpin the direction of betterment.

For instance, if education were oriented towards deep ecology, then it would have a real possibility of transforming economics and societal systems around a sustainable future. Education could be the springboard that develops new mindsets that value sanity, longevity, justice, and simplicity.

Such an ecological framework for human life nationally and globally would likely start by defining the optimal ways of being for individual and communal life. This might include abolishing industry other than small-scale manufacturing and reining in the excesses of agribusiness. Tribal communities worldwide have had a harmonious relationship with their natural environments and it is to be hoped that they will outlive industrialised humankind. Were citizens and leaders of other societal types to view nature, not as a larder of resources, but as fitting limits and opportunities, their core philosophies would have legitimacy. Such a revamped world would have a seven-generations mentality, acting with care for those seven generations ahead because they strive for the sanction of ecosystems and the Earth as a whole.

Such a world would have its own problems, but that is the nature of human existence. The future of humankind depends on the quality and accuracy of the theories we choose.

Above all, this new way of viewing things would need to be buttressed by a growing comprehension that the physical world is not material; rather, it would be understood as a mode of something that has variously been called Consciousness, Mind, Spirit, or more recently, ‘Non-physicality’. Quantum physics suggests something tending toward this in its reconstruction of matter into energy and fields. A new understanding of natural reality spurs a conception of ecology, including human ecology, as offspring of a larger ‘purpose’.

Likewise, social justice solutions could go beyond current wrangling and instead ground themselves in ecological principles that controvert overexploitation, unfairness, imbalance, and power used wrongly. Think of what might happen to industries, guns, cars, marginalised people, and corporations in light of Natural Life as a common value. There are, of course, downward and upward societal forces in any age, but crossing the threshold into sustainability holds the promise of a world that has fairness and integration as its watchwords.

Such new paradigm-development is all the more pressing in a world with higher and higher stakes. Some thinkers are eager to retool governing ideas and develop more conscious systems to frame human life, however diverse. Lance Newey, of the University of Queensland in Australia, says: “A number of countries are moving to the adoption of a wellbeing governance and performance framework….Many of these frameworks aim to measure the economic, social, environmental, and cultural wellbeing of the country.” He defines wellbeing as “the capacity of an entity (an individual, a community, an organisation, a society, the globe) to resiliently flourish”. 

Likewise, the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States presents human ecology as the pursuit that “touches us and everything that we touch to improve the quality of life”.  This is an approach that draws on science and the humanities equally.

Imagination is the first step to betterment. We need not be victims of unworkable, entrenched paradigms whose only claim to fame is that they cling on with a death-grip. A thorough and carefully conceived ecological paradigm can serve as the basis for a better quality of life, individually and societally. All the past models for how to govern or institute or act have had philosophical underpinnings. Today, it is time we refresh our perspective to prioritise human ecology – a strategy more worthy both of our intellect and our situation.

A Word to the Wise

Philosophy is a sailboat that deftly catches the fair breeze…

By Andrew Porter

We live in a time in which most people, were you to ask them ‘Do you think you’re wise?’, would look askance or confused and not answer straightforwardly. They are not prepared for the question by long anticipation and living in that habitat. But you might hear answers such as, ‘I’m wise about some things’ or ‘I’m pretty savvy when it comes to how to handle people’. But your question would remain unanswered.

Maybe it’s the circles I run in, but it seems that there's little to no hankering for wisdom; it is not prevalent. It is as if many people feel that moral relativism – the common zeitgeist – has taken them off the hook and they are relieved. But choices have a way of illuminating obvious help or harm. There’s really no getting off the hook.

Wisdom can be encapsulated in a reasoned decision by an individual, but it is always in tune with larger reason. One of the great things about Plato as a philosopher is that he walks around and into the thick of the question of wisdom with boldness and perspective. A champion of reason, he grounds human morality in virtue, but emphasises that it is part of a ‘virtue’ of reality: the nature and function of the ontologically real is to be good, true, and beautiful.

This immersion of humankind and personal choices in a larger environment seems a crucial lesson for our times. This odd and ungrounded era we live in does not have a ready and able moral vocabulary; it, more often than not, leaves moral nuance like an abandoned shopping cart in the woods. Why is Plato one of the best voices to re-energise as his philosophy applies to current-day issues and angst?

One of the problems of individuals and institutions in contemporary times is that they think they are wise without ever examining how and if that’s true. So often, they – whether you yourself, a spouse, a boss, politicians, or fellow citizens – assume a virtue they own not. This is exactly what Socrates, in Plato's hands, addresses. What are some of the problems in the world open to reform or transformation?

Certainly, social justice issues continue to rear their head and undermine an equitable society. Entrenched power systems and attendant attitudes are not only slow to respond, but display no moral understanding. Today, it seems there is a raft of problems, from psychological to philosophical, and the consequences turn dire. At the root of all actual and potential catastrophes, it seems, is a lack of that one thing that has been waylaid, discarded, and ignored: wisdom.

Plato crafted his philosophy about soul and virtue, justice and character, in alignment with his metaphysics. This is its genius, making a harmony of inner and outer

In the Republic, Plato himself oscillates between saying that a philosopher-king, the only assurance the city would be happy and just, would be a lover of wisdom and actually wise. In our time, the problem is a lack of desire to find or inculcate wisdom. Societies have, in general, hamstrung themselves. We do not have ready tools to care about and value wisdom, however far off. We do not, to any cogent degree, educate children to be philosopher-kings of their own lives.

Western societies and perhaps Eastern ones as well have not increased in wisdom because they have abandoned the pursuit. The task is left unattended. The current problem is not that the world (or smaller entities such as companies, schools, and individuals) cannot find a truly wise person; so-called civilisation acts wilfully against finding or even thinking about finding such. It is a mobile home that's been put up on blocks.

Philosophy can inculcate the kind of consciousness that the 20th century Swiss philosopher, Jean Gebser, called integral reality, which perceives a truth that, as he says, ‘transluces’ both the world and humankind (in the sense of shining light through). In short, philosophy holds the promise of educating. It is not a crazy old man on his porch, moving his cane to tell the traffic to slow down; rather, philosophy is a sailboat that deftly catches fair breeze – and moves us forward.

Life in the Slow Lane

Illustration by Clifford Harper/Agraphia.co.uk

By Andrew Porter

Three common plagues were cited in the early New England settlements: wolves, rattlesnakes, and mosquitoes. Our current-day ‘settlements’ – cities and towns – now have their own plagues: a crush of too many people, crummy attitudes, pollution, and retrogressive political actions. How do freedom and power play out amongst individuals and communities?

One lens that can help us gain perspective on our life in relation to necessities and obligations beyond us, is to think about our agency and our values. If we get it right about what freedom and power are, we might clarify what values we want to exercise and embody.

People pushed back against the wolves and did what they could against other ‘scourges’, most regularly by killing them. This seemed like freedom – power asserted. Over the centuries, peoples around the world – coursing through trials like wars and epidemics and bouts of oppression, as well as various forms of enlightenment and progress on human rights – have struggled to articulate freedom and power to make existence shine. To fulfill purposes is the human juggernaut; but what purposes? It is pretty vital that we figure out what freedom and power are in this time of converging crises, so that actual life might flourish. The trouble is, so many people are commonly thrown off by false and unjustifiable versions of freedom and power.

In our fast-paced life, we so-called civilised humans have to decide how to achieve balance. This means some kind of genuine honouring of life in its physical and spiritual aspects. The old work-life balance is only part of it. What does vitality itself suggest is optimal or possible, and how do we make sense of what's at stake as we prioritise between competing goods?

If a parent decides that it is a priority to take care of a newborn child rather than sacrifice that time and importance to time at work, they may well be making a fine decision. Freedom here is in the service of vital things. We might say that in general freedom is that which makes you whole and that power is the exercise of your wholeness. Or, freedom is the latitude to live optimally and power is potency for good.

Since freedom is eschewing the lesser and opting for and living what has more value, we had better do some good defining. All situations confirm that freedom only accrues with what is healthful and attends flourishing. If one says, “Top functioning for me is having a broad range of options, the whole moral range,” you can see how this is problematic. We as humans have the range, but our freedom is in limiting ourselves to the good portion.

Power is commonly considered that which lords the most force over others and exerts the biggest influence broadly. Isn’t this what a hurricane does, or a viral infection, or an invasion? If you look around, though, all the people with so-called power actually dominate using borrowed power: that is, power borrowed from others or obtained on the backs of others, whether human or otherwise. This kind of power – often manifesting in greed and exploitation – is mere thievery. And what about power over one’s own liabilities to succumb or other temptations?

For many people, life in the slow lane is much more satisfying than that in the fast one. However, the big deal may be about getting off the highway altogether. What I am suggesting is that satisfaction and contentment are in the proper measure of freedom and power. And the best definition for organisms is probably that long-established by the planet. Earth has in place various forms of ‘nature’ with common value-elements.

For us, to be natural probably means being both like and unlike the rest of nature. It is some kind of unique salubrity. An ever-greater bulk of the world lives in a busy, highly industrialized society, and the idea of living naturally seems like something that goes against our human mission to separate ourselves from the natural world. But the question remains: is the freedom and power that comes with ‘natural living’ an antiquated thing, or can you run the world on it; can it work for a life?

Kant spoke of our animality in his Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1794) part of the Critique of Pure Reason and part of his investigation of the ethical life. In this, he argues that animality is an ineliminable and irreducible component of human nature and that the human being, taken as a natural being, is an animal being. Kant says that animality is an “original predisposition [anlage] to the good in human nature”. We increasingly see that being human means selecting the wisdom of nature, often summed up in ecological equipoise, so that we can survive, thrive, and have reason to call ourselves legitimate. Freedom in this consists of developing greater consciousness about our long-term place on Earth (if such is possible) and legitimate power in in exact proportion to the degree we limit ourselves to human ecology.

Life on its own grass-centered lane has figured out what true freedom and power are. The Vietnamese Buddhist monk and global spiritual leader Thich Nhat Hạnh once wrote:

“Around us, life bursts with miracles – a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops....When we are tired and feel discouraged by life’s daily struggles, we may not notice these miracles, but they are always there.”

Figuring out the most efficacious forms of freedom and power promises to make us treat ourselves and others more justly.

Making the Real

Prometheus in conference…

By Andrew Porter

They say that myth is the communication of the memorable, or imitation of that which is on some level more real. Our inner myths – such as memory – make real what's true for us and we often communicate these lenses in stories, writing, art, and ways of being. What a person communicates, having been on their own hero's journey where they received the boon, is a kind of myth, a display of another place, where the animals are strange and the gods walk among us.

We even make the real in creating a fiction. But isn’t the real different from fiction? Is it a caveat to say that fiction can be more real than sensible experience? If we are true to the facts and the actual events as depth of the characters involved and the flavour of the scenes we’ve lived in, are we not recounting a legitimate ‘inner tradition’? The experience is fresh and new in the telling; storytelling is the power of connection.

In making our own version of the real, teller and listener infuse myth with logos and vice versa. Poetry (of all kinds), for instance, is the intermediary between heroic times and pedestrian hearing. It is in a sense audience to itself, living the amazement in the memory and memorialising. Like any genuine recounting, poetry tries to communicate with respect for the receiver and deep understanding of what may be received. This is as much to say that the poet is more than a bridge; they are the synergy of two depths of being: past heights and current receiver; both, hopefully, sacrifice their separateness for the joining. Is a poet perhaps most authentically themselves in the bringing together of self, experience, and the other?

To locate the real means to get at the meaning beyond the bare events. This is done, I think, via another kind of central dynamic, between knowledge and sensitivity, or between reason and instinct. This middle ground is intuition, perhaps, or understanding of a rich sort, mixing reason and emotion or hearer and other land. Wonder is evoked or elicited in the clarity of ten thousand stars finding their way to eyes and brain.

Communication of the valuable, we might say, promises a complementarity between the transcendent world and the mundane world. It believes in wonder and growth. Its ultimate lesson is the good, even if of human potential. It comprehends that the real must be translated, that an insight cannot be dumped out of a bag with a shrug. At best, the communicator can feel the blazing value of the extraordinariness they have been beautifully exposed to and the worthy receiver carries it on, retains it, preserves it. This is a vital synergy. Aren’t the best times in life of this kind, when existence illuminates itself? Imagine believing what the storyteller imparts, that the gods exist, though they were somewhat mundane at the time. Spirit seems to flow when its electrons are in motion with the charge of it all.

Stories we’ve all heard are ‘invented stories’. Were they true? Art can perhaps convey a truth better than any other way could; even nature, typically banking on sharp reality with no moonshine, yet supports interpretation. If we can produce and reproduce a synergy of muthos and logos, what integration of a person or a society might ensue?

One current issue is how we interpret our place and role in history. What story are we telling ourselves? Is it illusion of the worst kind? Do we need new myths? In our narrowness we likely have a very skewed definition of real. There may be a chance to make ourselves implicate in nature's order in a human way and understand this as true techne. The arts can show us its benefit. But I am not holding my breath.

In ‘making the real’, we make ourselves. Our best selves are likely self-controlled as well as free in a broadly sanctioned way. Why has culture dropped the ball on creating a good story that we can follow? And what blend of myth and logos makes reality sing? Our time is not for dancing around the fire with faux-animal-heads on, but rather, one that tells stories that get it right. Why, it could be that, somewhere, a band of people are creating them even now.

Rethinking Energy as Moral Energy

Nuclear fusion is again being offered as the solution to human energy needs.

By Andrew Porter

On February 9, 2022, scientists working in an English village near Oxford announced that in December they were able to generate a few successful sustained seconds of nuclear fusion. An article for CNN by Danya Gainor and Angela Dewan declared that:

‘A giant donut-shaped machine just proved a near-limitless clean power source is possible’. 

The energy machine generated a record-breaking 59 megajoules for over five seconds. Heat ten times hotter than the center of the sun – as high as 150 million degrees Celsius. The process generates tremendous pressure. And then the magnets overheat.

This kind of development is almost universally hailed as an advance. It promises to one day meet energy demand that burgeons with increasing human population. Such energy may be able to utilize the deuterium and tritium in seawater to power houses and businesses – as the crisis of climate change applies heat and pressure of its own. But I want to suggest that finding a source for more energy should not be the world's focus, as reasonable as it sounds. That there may instead be better uses of energy possible for us.

One person may argue: ‘We live in a contemporary world with vast energy needs and we have to develop the technology to address problems’. This the voice of what is considered ‘realism’. But as Shira Ovide, a New York Times writer, says: ‘Climate change and other deep-seated problems are hard to confront, and it’s tempting to distract ourselves by hoping that technology can save the day… But technology isn’t magic and there are no quick fixes.’ Another person may contend that the kind of worldview that got us into this mess will not get us out. So it is worth asking what really is beneficial, not just short term but long term.

The ‘glitzy’ new advance in nuclar fusion seems, on the surface, to be of benefit. But our high-energy-use ways are unsustainable and damaging. It seems to me that the task for communities, nations, and humankind in general is, in this time of planetary pressure and the retooling of mindsets, to generate human ecology, so we might live within natural parameters and carrying capacities. This is the opposite of finding new ‘resources to exploit’ for untenable practices and assumptions.

Now you may ask, ‘Well, if it's cheap and renewable, why not embrace nuclear fusion?’ Behind this question is the hope that there will be no reckoning, that we will not have to mend our planet-damaging ways. But our energy needs to be mental, cultural, and philosophical. Peter Sutoris, anthropologist of development and the environment, and author of Educating for the Anthropocene, says:

‘We must face up to the harsh reality that for all its achievements, our civilisation is deeply flawed. It will take a reimagination of who we are to truly solve this crisis’.

Who can seriously argue that it is not time to craft a new human way of being on Earth? This ‘new human way’ I imagine as much simpler, low-tech, and integral with other life forms.

The likelihood is very strong that people at all levels will reject a shift away from grabbing more energy. Rising sea levels will submerge huge swathes of coastline because of the industrialised world's aversion to ecological ways of life. But thorough-going, Earth-friendly ideals, were they chosen, could be the crucial spur to enact positive change in societies and provide an aim for what's accepted, embraced, and funded. The ‘tokamak’ fusion machine near Oxford cannot provide the needed energy. What is most pertinent for our time is inferably moral energy – along with philosophical clarity –  to steer us all away from human excesses and towards an attunement to natural limits. This is to suggest that the fusion that’s optimally generated is internal. 

That’s the real enterprise – the energy use – worthy of our savvy.

A Modest Proposal for Science

Posted by Andrew Porter

For several centuries, modern science has banked on and prided itself in ‘the scientific method’. This scheme of hypothesis and experiment has been useful and effective in countering superstition. Discoveries of all sorts have been made and verified, from the circumference of orbits to the range of elements to the function of organelles and proteins in a cell. Confirmation from experiment seems like a clear way to separate fact from fiction. But it is crucial to note that the scientific method also fails.

Recent conundrums of physicality, consciousness, entanglement, dark matter, and the nature of natural laws have spurred many to rethink assumptions and even findings. Our search for what is real and natural needs a new method, one that is in keeping with the natural facts themselves – natural facts not as reduced or squeezed or contorted by the scientific method, but as their own holistic selves. The method of approach and apprehending that seems to offer the most promising advance is that which consists of a whole person in a whole natural environment.

Why do I emphasise wholeness? Because facts shrink away at the first sign of partiality or limited agenda. Truth, conversely, tends to open itself to an apt seeker, to a method that goes whole at a host of levels. Nature tends to recognise her own, it seems.

Kristin Coyne, in an article called ‘Science on the Edge’ in the February 17, 2017 issue of the magazine, Fields: Science, Discovery & Magnetism, writes:

‘At the dividing line between two things, there’s often no hard line at all. Rather, there’s a system, phenomenon or region rich in diversity or novel behavior – something entirely different from the two things that created it.’

She offers various examples of the same: fringe physics, borderline biology, and crossover chemistry. Such ‘science on the edge’ is one aspect of the changes typical science is undergoing. Other researchers in areas such as telepathy and theoretical physics are pushing the bounds of science while arguing that it certainly is science, just a deeper form.

This suggested new method, that would largely overturn contemporary science, would measure, as it were, by that of nature’s measurements: it is anti-reductionist; it is synthetic more than analytic. As we are learning, it may not be too much to say that one has to be the facts to know the facts, to be a synergy of ‘observer’ and ‘observed’ at all levels. The knowledge gleaned from wholeness is like a star’s heat and light understood, not just the hydrogen and helium involved.

This idea of the ‘scientist’ in tune with nature in a thorough way would be the human equivalent of a goshawk whose instincts are a portion of Earth-wide wildness. No disjunct with results that turn self-referential and untrue. If one is studying an ecosystem, for instance, he or she, or his or her team, must, by the requirements of nature, be of the same stuff and of the same conceptions as the individualities, relations, and wholes of that ecosystem. So much more of the actuality reveals itself to the sympathetic, of-a-piece ‘observer’. If we ignore or shunt aside the question of what is a whole person, how can we ever expect to discern the deeper reality of nature?

It seems to hold true that the more receptive the subject is to the essence and character of the object, the better it is understood. Who knows one’s dog better: a sympathetic owner or an objective voice? If the dog is sick, perhaps the latter, but all the time the dog is exuberantly healthy, the former is the one who comprehends.

The goal, of course, is to elucidate facts, to unite in some meaningful way with reality. Delusion is all too easy, and partial truths sustain centuries of institutions, positions, governments, and cultures. Modern science started out as reactionary in the sense of being hostile to things like superstition or intuition or revelation. It substituted experiment and observation, keeping the studied apart from those who studied. This is fine for shallow comprehension, but it only gets you so far. It obscures another possibility, that is somewhat similar to the communion and connection between the quantum realm and the macro world.

I suggest that deep facts only reveal themselves to a person metamorphosed, as it were, into ways of being in keeping with the parts or portions of nature studied. All nature may be of this type, open to human comprehension only as that comprehension is within a whole person. What a complete person is and what a fullness of nature is might not only be a philosopher’s job, but the focus of science itself, re-trained to benefit from its transformed method.

The hint in current puzzlements is that science in the 21st century and beyond may benefit significantly by re-crafting itself. A transformed method might yield deeper or actual knowledge. That is, knowing as opposed to seeming to know, may require a new approach.

Jacob Needleman and David Applebaum wrote, ‘Unless scientific progress is balanced by another kind of enquiry, it will inevitably become an instrument of self-destruction.’

The ‘objective’ revolution need not be the last. In today’s world, we have the ball-and-chain of modern scientific ways and even scientism weighting our thinking; it would be good to free ourselves from this. But we are confused. About what of objectivity is liberating or limiting, and what of subjectivity is useful or obfuscatory.

A Sense of Time

A piece of artwork Melissa Taylor says that she made using newspaper and 
charcoal, when inspired by the song ‘Time’ by Pink Floyd

Posted by Andrew Porter* 

Plato calls time the ‘moving image of eternity’. Most likely because time and eternity are all tied up together or because time and eternity are a dialectic, yet concurrently an organic whole.

Perhaps that esoteric word ‘eternity’ means exactly this: the melding of ‘time’ and ‘timelessness’ – a covenant, as it were, to let freedom/order live, to let rationality have process and identity, to let life have its optimal day, to sustain a universe that is true to the good and the beautiful.

Actual time, meaning time in the full sense, is local mixed with non-local, only seeming simply local. This non-locality that is very much a part of time is like non-locality and entanglement in quantum physics. Space-time reveals that distance and no-distance are both true. Time is not change, as such. It is constancy as much as change, identity as much as process. And the best way to express this is to say that actual time is a thorough union of the concepts of ‘time’ and ‘timelessness’.

In this view, God would be time/timelessness, or some less awkward term, such as ‘time-full-ness’. No wait, that's still awkward. God would not see all time as a single view, frozen and fixed, but would, as it were, take something else seriously: the thorough integration of ‘time’ aspects and ones of ‘timelessness’—to create an attainment in accord with His values. The Divine may be or see neither time as discrete moments in sequence nor timelessness described as an atemporal block.

One of the biggest conundrums in thought has been the relationship or presumed relationship between time and timelessness. Scientists, theologians, philosophers, and perhaps your next-door neighbour wrestle with the complexities therein. It seems to be relevant to today's world as people try to sort out a balance between doing and being, between stress or contentment. Are they gripped by time or actually freed from it?

The philosophical issue closely relates to what we consider, if anything, Becoming and Being. We tend to like these categories because we think it makes things clear. But our real problem is likely that we assume what ‘time’ and ‘timelessness’ are – and then run off in the wrong direction.
Timelessness seems to have the advantage of being free from plodding pace as a chain of moments, but what could timelessness be without the duration and dovetailing of one phase with another?

Time is physicality; this is a claim that can be clearly made. But we have too many presumptions about timelessness. Current thinking tends to relegate the 'timeless' to a ‘block universe’. If it can’t move it must be a frozen reality and a view, say, by God that sees the big whole all at once. I think this block universe—an atemporality ‘fixed’ as much as space is, and relative one ‘place’ to another, is an untenable view. It only arises as a counterpoint to what we experience as time-passage.

The core of the, I think, wrongheaded, distinction is that temporal and atemporal seem to compete, to diverge, be some kind of opposite. But this is what I encourage us to reconsider. Nature actually shows a contrary impetus: not a separation of time and timelessness, but a convergence. We see clues that nature appears determined to be a composition, of what would otherwise be a non-unity; that is, a consolidation of time's openness and newness, of timelessness' freedom from measure as movement.

All reality—physicality, laws, energy, dark matter, spiritual reality—gives strong indications that it, rather than a bifurcation, is an amalgam, a mix, of what are only conceptually time-as-sequence and timelessness as a vision of the entirety. A further argument would point out that reality is the way it is precisely because it is a threading of the needle between ‘time’ and ‘timelessness’. The emergence of the Lesser Grass Blue butterfly in Hawaii is a fact that supports the idea that there is a synthesis of continuity and newness, a kind of absolute blend of becoming and being, process and consistent identity. The species is replete with aspects that require time; in one and the same species, there is an equal requirement for a flexibility of action across time, or regardless of time.

This melding of what would otherwise be ‘time’ and ‘timelessness’ (a singularity which everything is) both frees you and orders. You are neither wholly beholden to time as change nor locked in a space–time block that shatters choice in the moment. You are, rather, free to make decisions in an open present, and ordered to optimise those choices or ways of life by the transcendence of time that is inherent in real, actual existence. With a newfound time sense, we can be more in the swing of things. 

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Andrew Porter is a philosopher and educator who lives near Boston in the United States.
He can be contacted via email at <aporter344@gmail.com>

Advantages of Ecological Socialism

Image courtesy of Clariant. 
Today, companies like the speciality chemicals company
Clariant say that they are working to reposition
themselves as sustainable solutions providers

Posted by Andrew Porter*

Today, there is much greater awareness of the threat of Climate Change. Yet species loss, disruption of planetary systems, and widespread environmental degradation are allowed to continue. Over millennia, we have been very good at developing ways to respond to the environment; now the imperative is to develop the sharpness and capacity to respond to ourselves.

Surely it is apparent now that modern industrial overreach needs to be scaled back significantly. A number of systems might be devised for remedy, but the only ones that have any real chance of success revolve around human ecology and sustainability. Can large swathes of society rally around a call to protect ecologies and promote sustainability? Because underlining such a solution is the question ‘What's in it for us?’ I think that this question itself must be transformed by a new ecological attitude, what we might call an 'inner ecology.'

One ‘system’ that might guide a large set of cultural and societal factors toward a much better relationship between humankind and the Earth is what I call ‘ecological socialism’. It would require a re-orientation of society towards an integration of human needs and what is necessary to afford the natural world its sustainability. The ‘socialism’ of the idea means equal possession of the opportunities and limitations inherent in living within the governance of natural principles. It is both ethical and ecological to distribute limitations and opportunities equally: who could argue otherwise?

An integration of the planet’s health (preservation of biodiversity and habitat, clean water and air, soil conservation, and respect for the earth's climate mechanisms) and people’s lives maximises care of one for the other. Nature has its goals and man has his; unless they are integrated, sustainability will remain out of reach. Two primary principles that we might work into to guide and animate environmental preservation are:

1) Streams, trees, bays, animals, mountains, oceans, and so on, should have standing as holders of legal rights because they have moral rights in our mind. We are in this together, nature and man, and if we are a lame and destructive partner, this joint venture remains unviable.

2) Natural systems maintain health and balance as a core feature, and should become a core feature of our lives. This involves development and implementation of human ecology models. The process as well as the result is – rather than a frittering away of human capacity – a kind of wholeness.

Surely the present is the crucial time to address this. George Monbiot makes the point well in a March 15, 2019 article in The Guardian newspaper entitled ‘Capitalism is Destroying the Earth. We Need a New Human Right for Future Generations’.

‘At the heart of capitalism is a vast and scarcely examined assumption: you are entitled to as great a share of the world’s resources as your money can buy. You can purchase as much land, as much atmospheric space, as many minerals, as much meat and fish as you can afford, regardless of who might be deprived. If you can pay for them, you can own entire mountain ranges and fertile plains. You can burn as much fuel as you like. Every pound or dollar secures a certain right over the world’s natural wealth.’

Ecological socialism—moving away from current assumptions and forms of exploitation—seeks the sustainability of the natural world and also aims to sustain man, in some form, within this. A principal standard of ecological socialism is that human burdens on the planet are kept well below the Earth's carrying capacity for them.

Ecological socialism attempts to genuinely represent all life forms and natural systems as equals in its sphere of obligation, caring, and set of rights. Ecological socialism models human governance and society on the appreciation of ecological balance and advantages. It seeks to make organic goodness human as well as natural. Ecological socialism recognises that humans must be integral with natural ways for both humans and the Earth to thrive.

Some specific choices are clear. Industrial society must be phased out. Strategies must be found to bring human numbers down and encourage small-scale simplicity. I believe that ecology-centred education, with good assistance from the humanities, helps pave the way. The belief that the individual and society are supported best by harmony with and not antagonism with nature is the vital one.

The exploitive way of life, denying costs, is over. Ecological socialism integrates man and ecologies, making the human path forward one of integrity itself. This is a value worth crafting human life around. Currently, culture and societies seem not to mind demise. But ecological socialism aims to help people understand that a citizen is not a citizen unless responsible to oneself and to the Earth.

Citizenship is best defined as this dual responsibility—to help oneself and one’s circle thrive, and also to bolster the optimal flourishing of the ecosystems and planetary systems of Earth through non-interference. Ecological socialism is the best way to ensure this.

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Andrew Porter is a philosopher and educator who lives near Boston in the United States