Basing Human Economy on Natural Rhythms
My friend Suzanne Mathis McQueen is writing a book on women's body cycles and ecological awareness. She asked me the other day, “wondering if you have a blog you can direct me to that speaks to our economic structure being out of alignment with the natural rhythms of the universe, and therefore the reason we don't have "honest economics" or a system that works?”
My response is read Herman Daly and David Abram. The former is an economist, the latter an anthropologist.
Herman Daly's basic message is, like a lot of environmental economists, that the environment is threatened by failures of markets, namely externalities and subsidies. But he goes further to say that markets, even if amended to account for full costs, still aren't enough. Overall size of human footprint and economy must be decided outside of markets. (This makes him an "ecological," not merely an "environmental" economist.) He proposes a third pillar and social objective of economics: scale, in addition to efficiency and distributive equity. Scale has a different manner of being determined than through markets. It is determined through deliberation and consensus, i.e. conversation.
Abram goes a step further to say that our written languages, particularly those that are alphabetic, have allowed humans to abstract themselves out of the world, the earth, and have set themselves to be "over" the earth to exploit it. They have lost connection to the natural intelligence of the earth -- a connection that is more present when only an oral language is the mainstay of the culture, as in indigenous peoples.
Putting Daly and Abram together and you can say that in order to determine the right scale of human activity requires people to sit down together face-to-face and orally deliberate the extent of human enterprise in their respective locale.
Abram further underscores Daly's point in that we are mistaken when we think that our information, including prices, are sufficient guidance to do the right thing. They are not. They are all symbolic and representational, not authentically felt, somatic, resonant, coherent with real earth and biological reality. The map is not the territory. But humans are going by the map too exclusively in their literal 'languaging,' information and market-price calculations. We are hitting the wall in our mental tendency to abstraction and desire to control through symbolization. We have lost our true guidance system. Discoordination with life and ecological mayhem is the result.
Core to a true guidance system is humans communicating with each other from an authentic, vulnerable place in order to decide how to collectively live together.
Ken Wilber makes this very point when he says:
"Gaia’s main problems are not industrialization, ozone depletion, overpopulation, or resource depletion. Gaia’s main problem is the lack of mutual understanding and mutual agreement in the noosphere about how to proceed with those problems. We cannot reign in industry if we cannot reach mutual understanding and mutual agreement based on a worldcentric moral perspective concerning the global commons. And we reach that worldcentric moral perspective through a difficult and laborious process of interior growth and transcendence. A global map won’t do it. A systems map will not do it. An ecological map will not do it." p. 311. Wilber, A Brief History of Everything.
"Ecological wisdom does not consist in how to live in accord with nature; it consists in how to get subjects to agree on how to live in accord with nature." Pp. 292, 293, Wilber, A Brief History of Everything.
These conversations have to be face-to-face, and therefore, “local.” All the nuances of body language and felt energy are much more present locally, than virtually.
The emphasis on local face-to-face conversations in order for humans to channel nature's intelligence are what Ralph Waldo Emerson and later John Dewey sought when they said, respectively,
“We lie in the lap of an immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841
“We lie, as Emerson said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as its medium.” John Dewey, 1927.