|
A Fourth Dimension of the Great Turning
Part I
by Bill Plotkin
Friday, January 3, 2025
This is the first part of a multi-part Musing (one per week).
If there is to be a livable world for those who come after us, it will be because we have managed to make the transition from the Industrial Growth Society to a Life-sustaining Society. When people of the future look back at this historical moment, they will see, perhaps more clearly than we can now, how revolutionary it is. They may well call it the time of the Great Turning.
~ Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown [1]
Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown see the Great Turning as taking place in three areas or dimensions that are mutually reinforcing and equally necessary. They identify these as:
- “holding actions” to slow the damage to Earth and its beings;
- analysis of structural causes and the creation of alternative institutions; and
- a fundamental shift in worldview and values.
These are three arenas of culture regeneration to which we each have the opportunity to contribute, the Great Turning being a multi-generational undertaking that will, with good fortune, extend far into our future.
The first dimension includes a great variety of endeavors to defend life on Earth — to save as much life as possible while our current economic, political, and energy systems collapse (the Great Unraveling) — including campaigns for progressive legislation and regulations, political actions and lawsuits that slow down the destruction of Earth’s life systems, and direct actions such as boycotts, blockades, whistleblowing, protesting, and civil disobedience. This is the more immediate, short-term work of conserving as much biological and cultural diversity as we can, which provides time for the next two dimensions of building a life-sustaining society.
The second dimension asks us to deeply understand and demystify the dynamics of the industrial growth society so that we truly know how it works and why it is both seductive and destructive, and then to create alternative sustainable structures and practices in all our major cultural establishments, including economics, food and energy systems, government, and education.
Joanna and Molly note that, in order to take root and survive, the alternative institutions created as part of the second dimension must be sourced in an ecocentric worldview, one that is profoundly different from that which created the industrial growth society. The generation and propagation of this life-affirming, relational, and animistic worldview is the third dimension of the Great Turning. They see the emergence of this shift in human consciousness in domains such as the grief that so many of us are feeling for a plundered world; in our new understandings from ecology, physics, ecopsychology, and other fields about what it means to be human on a finite, animate planet; and in our deepening embrace of the mystical traditions of both indigenous and Western peoples. Joanna and Molly deem this third dimension of the Great Turning to be “the most basic.” [2]
Joanna offers an additional articulation of this third dimension in her third edition (2021) of World as Lover, World as Self [3]:
The third dimension of the Great Turning, Shift in Consciousness, is, at root, a spiritual revolution, awakening perceptions and values that are both new and ancient, flowing from rivers of ancestral wisdom. These values are expressed in songs, sermons, stories, and demonstrators’ signs and banners, often with exuberance and humor.
This cognitive revolution is paralleled by a spiritual one. Ancient teachings speak to us now, showing us the beauty and power that can be ours as conscious, responsible members of the living body of Earth. Like our ancestors, we begin again to see the world as our larger body, and — whether we say the word or not — as sacred. This shift in our sense of identity will be lifesaving in the sociopolitical and ecological ordeals that lie before us.
* * *
When I look carefully at this third dimension of the Great Turning — at Joanna and Molly’s examples of the “insights and experiences that enable us to make this shift … in perception and reality” and their examples of the contemporary “ingredients and forms” that are catalyzing this shift (such as Gaia theory, deep ecology, ecofeminism, and ecopsychology) — they all appear to be facets of the shift in worldview, values, and consciousness that I call ecological awakening and the emotions (including grief) and the changes in lifestyle that follow from it.
Ecological awakening (or eco-awakening, for short) is the conscious and embodied return to one’s innate membership in the Earth community.
Early in childhood, most people raised in an egocentric culture, like ours in the West, lose this fundamental and vital rootedness. When we undergo eco-awakening, we shift from experiencing ourselves as separate from the natural world and as the center of life (egocentric) to experiencing ourselves once again as a native participant in our greater, animate Earth community of diverse species and habitats and as an agent or handmaiden for the flourishing of the web of life (the ecocentric worldview). During eco-awakening, we retrieve and reclaim our embodied memory that, as Joanna and Molly put it, “our world is a sacred whole in which we have a sacred mission. We awaken [BP emphasis] to what we once knew: we are alive in a living Earth, source of all we are and can achieve. … we want to name, once again, this world as holy.” [4]
Eco-awakening, then, is our return to our innate human ecocentrism after an exile of a few to many years of culturally imposed egocentrism. Awakening in this way constitutes the passage between two life stages that I’ve identified on the Eco-soulcentric Developmental Wheel (as presented in Nature and the Human Soul), namely from egocentric early adolescence (especially the sub-stage of Conforming and Rebelling) to the ecocentric early-adolescent life stage I call the Oasis. Our developmental task in the Oasis is to cultivate personal authenticity while at the same time achieving social acceptance or belonging in at least one peer group. In a healthy community, that peer group consists of people, like yourself, whose sense of identity is rooted in their everyday experience of their innate membership in the greater web of life.
Please note that by “early adolescence,” I mean a psychological stage, not an age range such as 12 to 15. My estimate is that 90% of people in industrial growth societies — egocentric consumer-conformist societies — never mature beyond early adolescence due to systemic human development oppression (SHDO) and the resulting scarcity of true adults and genuine elders. In a healthy society, the adults and elders are the ones who provide the principal support for the full-spectrum human development (FSHD) of children and youth.
As essential as it is to the psychospiritual development of contemporary people, eco-awakening is an artifact of industrialized societies because, in a healthy culture, children never lose their innate, instinctive experience of connectedness with each and every being of our animate world. My guestimate, however, is that only 10% of Western people ever experience eco-awakening — their passage from an egocentric to a healthy early adolescence. When they do, it can occur anytime from their teen years to very late in life.
My accompanying guess is that another 10% of contemporary people do not need to eco-awaken because they grow up in social and environmental settings in which their innate ecocentricity is fostered and sustained throughout childhood. They never “go to sleep.” But such circumstances are becoming increasingly rare. [5]
Add up these two groups and you have my estimate that approximately 20% of contemporary Western people are aware, every day, that they live in an animate, multi-specied, breathing, sacred world of relatives that includes bobcats, wild roses, ospreys, jumping mice, boletes, bacteria, granite, fir trees, rivers, oceans, mountains, and storms. Twenty percent is good, maybe even a miracle in the world as it is now, but it ought to be more; we need it to be more.
The goal of the third dimension of the Great Turning is to gradually increase the percentage of ecocentric people to 100%. (But perhaps the tipping point into an ecocentric society would occur when only 40 or 50% of its members are eco-awake.)
How do we bring about eco-awakening?? There are now, of course, countless organizations around the world working effectively and creatively in the field most commonly known as “nature connection.” But perhaps a fourth dimension of the Great Turning will be seen as a major support of the third — because some humans may be endowed with just the right gifts to enact, as one example, the role of nature-connection guide. [To be continued next week … ]
| 
