A New Enlightenment

The original Enlightenment (1600s and 1700s) was much about understanding/explanation via reason and science rather than via religious mythology and dogma. It yielded a lot of insights about physical laws.

A second Enlightenment began (1800s) when we started to look squarely at (a) who we are, and (b) our relationship to the “web of life.”

We had tended to be resistant to this information . . . recall the denial when Darwin and Freud talked about our animalness.

To acknowledge the basic natural reality, to live directly within the web of life in the way that the other animals do, is too raw, awesome, precarious, disturbing, frightening for human consciousness. We need mediation … the “cocoon of culture.”

But we’ve gone too far with it; we’ve gotten too far away from the basic, natural ways. Aboriginal life was full of cultural mediation and mythological constructions; but after the Neolithic Revolution we initiated trajectories of “development” whereby the constructions became material. Over a period of millennia the urban-technological labyrinth grew up around us and enclosed us.

We now suffer from hypertrophy and over-complexification; “the planet” suffers from our unsustainable over-exploitation, species bloom, ecocide. Looming are huge crises and challenges … which sounds (and, of course, is) foreboding. Yet, in a sense, the most important thing to understand, to consider, is the possibility that a major turning point, toward ecological enlightenment, has begun.