Parallel Paradigms

And Post-Paradigm Possibilities

Originally this month was going to be a collection of “plant praises” – inspired by Elza’s daily writing exercises.  Those will appear soon, but first I need to share a perspective that has been taking shape over the past week.  So bear with me…

After reading John Michael Greer’s latest essay, Science as Enchantment, I started thinking about the way modern science functions as a religion, a belief system, a paradigm of thought.  This is a concept I have explored at some length in the past, but in contrasting this with a spirituality derived from direct experience of and participation with the natural world, some additional pieces started to fall into place.

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When I learned American History in school, I learned a particular story.  This continent was “discovered” by Christopher Columbus.  It was effectively “empty” – although yes there were some “Indians” who were sometimes helpful and sometimes violent – until it was “settled” from east to west by immigrants, fulfilling the “manifest destiny” of expansion. 

Discovery.  Settlement.  Filling emptiness.  Destiny.

This story has gradually, and rightly, been replaced by the story of the genocide and destruction of Indigenous peoples who had inhabited this continent for at least 10,000 years before being slaughtered, starved, and marched onto reservations.  This new story does a much better job of describing the Indigenous experience, but it is still missing something.  It recasts the Europeans as a sort of evil villains, projecting judgment backward from the present but without really seeking to comprehend what was going on in their minds at the time.  As far as I can tell, they truly believed the story that I learned in school, and they did not have any longstanding ethnic hatreds of Native Americans, any blood feuds, any long histories of border wars.  I don’t by any means wish to excuse their behavior, but I do want to understand  it in terms more nuanced than simply good and evil, victim and perpetrator.

It seems to me that there was a fundamental mismatch between European lifeways – with parceled-out lands and deeds and titles and churches and priests and towns and cities – and Indigenous lifeways such that the Europeans almost universally classified Indigenous Americans as not people.  It wasn’t just about greed and power and malice and guns and germs and steel, although all of those were involved.  It was also that the settlers actually perceived the land as empty, even when it wasn’t.

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In nearly every major religion, the truth was “discovered” by a prophet.  The prophet spread the word, and gradually the same truth became “settled” in holy texts and in the minds of priests and adherents.  Souls were effectively “empty” until they were baptized or converted, at which point they could embrace a “destiny” in heaven. 

Discovery.  Settlement.  Filling emptiness.  Destiny.

Evangelical Christian churches don’t usually send missionaries to Muslim communities, or Jewish communities, or even to atheist communities.  They send missionaries to tribes in Africa where there is no holy book, where souls are perceived as still available for conversion.  And coerced conversion is mild compared to the violence that devotees of major religions have brought to bear against practitioners of ecological and ancestral spiritualities in the not-so-distant past.

I don’t mean to suggest that major religions are bad or evil or even unethical.  All of them appear, to me at least, to contain a core of truth and love and to offer a rich and meaningful spiritual experience to believers.  Instead I want to describe the fundamental mismatch between a spirituality in which truth comes from a prophet, was written in a holy book, and is dispensed by priests and a spirituality in which truth is continuously and collaboratively created and is experienced directly and uniquely by each person.  The latter seems to generate a “does not compute” error in the minds of religious believers.  It is an emptiness to be filled, a void where demons might lurk, a land of lost and confused souls just waiting to be shown the light. 

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Scientific truth was “discovered” by Newton and Darwin and Einstein and other folks with famous names.  It was “settled” by experimental evidence and replication and peer review.  This set in motion an “Enlightenment” in which previously-“empty” minds were filled with knowledge and reason.  Technological advancement gave rise to a story in which humanity had a “destiny” to become masters of the Earth, to travel the galaxy, to transcend our messy and mortal physicality. 

Discovery.  Settlement.  Filling emptiness.  Destiny.

The scientific method is valuable and has contributed a richness of knowledge and a great deal of positive change.  I didn’t find my own ecological spirituality to be at odds with a scientific education, and I often found that a scientific understanding of photosynthesis and physiology and ecology actually enhanced my sense of awe and wonder and mystery.  I quickly discovered, though, that any discussion of underlying consciousness or nature spirits or metaphysical perception generated a sort of “does not compute” error among my peers and professors, who subscribed to an entirely materialist worldview.

Modern science has a why problem.  At its heart is a sort of stochastic nihilism that says the universe just happens to exist by random chance, and we just happen to have come into existence within it, and our consciousness and awareness are transient and purely emergent properties of our gray matter.  Any questions that cannot be answered through the scientific method – like why the universe began or why  we currently have tigers instead of tyrannosaurs or why electrons and atoms and elements exist as they do – are deemed irrelevant and assigned to chaotic happenstance.  Our incomprehensibly vast but rudderless, meaningless, unconscious universe is thus effectively “empty” and waiting to be filled, colonized, and manipulated by human consciousness. 

Just as the European colonists failed to recognize this continent’s Indigenous inhabitants as human beings from within their paradigm, so modern industrial civilization and its scientific paradigm fails to recognize – or even admit the possibility of – intrinsic nonhuman consciousness and self-awareness.

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All three of these paradigms – settler colonialism, evangelical religion, and modern secular science - begin with claims of discovery or revelation and then seek to spread – across space or across minds and souls.  They demand an external reference – looking outside oneself – for truth and understanding.  They are hierarchical and generate immense profits and power and prestige for kings and merchants, or popes and bishops, or tech tycoons and Nobel laureates.  They also generate immense suffering – in the form of genocide of entire peoples, or destruction of cultures and religions around the world, or poisoned rivers and clearcut forests and acidified oceans. 

What happens if we reverse these commonalities?  If instead of discovery we have perception?  If instead of seeking settlement we embrace change and uncertainty and mystery?  If instead of filling emptiness we acknowledge what is already there?  If instead of some defined or envisioned destiny we have collaborative creation?  If instead of looking outside ourselves for truth we look within.

The old paradigms are losing their power.  Settler colonialism is dead, and Indigenous peoples are reclaiming land and dignity.  Evangelical religions are losing more believers than they are gaining.  The edifice of science and its “Religion of Progress” are teetering in the face of finite resources, as technological “solutions” cause more problems than they solve, Elon’s rockets of destiny explode at a remarkable rate, and proclamations that “Science Will Win” sound increasingly desperate.

As paradigms collapse, the harms that they have caused become visible, and there is understandably a movement toward justice.  Social justice.  Environmental justice.  This seems like it ought to be a positive step, but in my experience it is nearly always caustic and divisive.  Justice is not harmony.  Justice is a balancing of scales, a determination of victim and perpetrator roles, an assignment of guilt, a verdict of reparations.  It is, in effect, a new paradigm of external reference, with membership in a particular group determining whether one is privileged or oppressed, dominant or marginalized, part of the solution or part of the problem. 

I am saddened to see movements for positive change – regenerative agriculture, seed stewardship, local food – fragmented into discord by advocates of “justice”.  Nearly all of us are descendants of victims and perpetrators, missionaries and converts, colonized and colonizer peoples.  We can, I should hope, acknowledge past harms and work toward equality without rooting our identities in old stories, unleashing long-repressed anger upon our would-be collaborators in weaving a new pattern.

Where then to root our identities?  How about in our direct shared experience?  In sowing seeds and reaping harvests.  In communion with old-growth forests and migrating flocks of kinglets.  In the joy of the first lilac bloom and the first ripe tomato.  In the glory of sunrises and sunsets, owls calling on moonlit nights, storm clouds and the soft sparkle of morning dew.  In conscious and reciprocal relationship with place, nourishing the land as it nourishes us.  In potlucks and song circles and poetry.  In birthing and raising children, caring for elders, nurturing friendships.  In seeing ourselves and each other first and foremost as human – conscious, aware, perceptive, imperfect, sometimes traumatized – rather than as members of particular group with all of the identities and prejudices thereof.

Such is the vision of an ecological spirituality, a story of being rooted in a universe that is neither a chaotic happenstance nor a divinely-created clockwork but rather a tapestry of coevolving consciousness – human and nonhuman – in which we will all co-create our future.