Volume 26, Number 1 April 2004
Community: The World’s Future
by Brian Swimme
Swimme will keynote the CTA Conference Nov. 5 in Milwaukee (see page 8). With a Ph.D. in mathematical cosmology, he is Director of the Center for the Story of the Universe, San Francisco. After a 10-year collaboration, he and Thomas Berry in 1992 coauthored “The Universe Story.”
The cartoon version of our civilization is that we’re all materialists, so we don’t have a sense of a larger significance beyond us. In our materialistic Western culture, our fundamental concern is the individual. The individual, and accumulation—of whatever it might be. Is it fame? Is it money? We put that as the cornerstone of our civilization. That’s how we’ve organized things. Now there are mitigating factors, but I’m giving a cartoon version. What’s necessary is for us to understand that, really, at the root of things is community. At the deepest level, that’s the center of things. We come out of community. So how then can we organize our economics so that it’s based on community, not accumulation? And how can we organize our religion to teach us about community? And when I say “community,” I mean the whole earth community. That’s the ultimate sacred domain—the earth community.
These are the ways in which I think we will be moving. How do you organize your technology so that as you use the technology, the actual use of it enhances the community? That’s a tough one. So long as we have this worldview in which the earth itself is just stuff, empty material, and the individual is most important, then we’re set up to just use it in any way we like. So the idea is to move from thinking of the earth as a storehouse to seeing the earth as our matrix, our fundamental community. That’s one of the great things about Darwin. Darwin shows us that everything is kin. Talk about spiritual insight! Everything is kin at the level of genetic relatedness. Another simple way of saying this is: Let’s build a civilization that is based upon the reality of our relationships. If we think of the human as being the top of this huge pyramid, then everything beneath us is of no value, and we can use it however we want. In the past, it wasn’t noticed so much because our influence was smaller. But now, we’ve become a planetary power. And suddenly the defects of that attitude are made present to us through the consequences of our actions….
What’s amazing is that, as humans, if we dwell on anything, after a while we become fascinated by it. It doesn’t matter what it is. The ability to dwell on things is uniquely human because we don’t have such fixed action programs as other species do. We can forget about everything else and just dwell on something. I call it the power of gawking. We can pay attention to whales or to the hummingbirds and just become fascinated by them. It’s noticing in a deep way, or contemplating, and my intuition is that as humans allow themselves to be fascinated by the other creatures, these species will awaken the psychic depths in the human that respond to their beauty. And then we become convinced that in some amazing way, they are essential to us. We can become amazed by how essential they are for our zest, our sense of well-being or happiness. Chief Seattle said that if the animals were not here, we would die of loneliness. I think that a deeper feeling of care begins with allowing ourselves to move into awe—with all of the different creatures, no matter which ones we’ve picked. If we would attend to them, we would see their colossal grandeur. Abraham Heschel said that awe is the first step into wisdom. You can just sit and watch fish and think of how they’ve developed over hundreds of millions of years and imagine what they’re experiencing, and after awhile you’re sunk into contemplation of ultimacy. This is what I think is the first step toward compassion.
Excerpted from an interview in Enlightenment magazine.