Thoughts on Climate Week

The Biospheric Crisis as Sacrifice, Initiation, and Expenditure

I find myself hovering between ideas and intervals. Or perhaps the truth is… I don’t want the weight, the responsibility, of expressing what I truly think. I am afraid of pushing you, dear reader, away by brutal candor. I don’t know if I can trust you: Are we really in this together? Are you willing to walk the path with me, wherever it leads? Or will you, too, abandon me, reject me, as so many have, if I go too far?

I offer the following thoughts as an uneasy experiment: An adventure into the unknown.

I’m in the midst of Climate Week NY — not its most active participant. I suspect the reflections it brings up in me are quite different from those of most attendees. As a whole, I find Climate Week represents the bargaining stage in our collective, still-unexpressed, grief process. What interests me more than the expressed content — the endless drone of talks on tech solutions, market mechanisms, political processes — is the vocal tonality of the speakers. In many of them, I sense suppressed anxiety, even terror, that needs to be concealed, soothed, through the cotton wool of rhetoric, Ivy League intellect, East Coast irony.

Nobody cries on stage. Nobody screams in horror and falls in sorrow. Every speech is muted, modulated: TED-friendly. Instagram-ready. You would hardly know we are in the process of killing every wild organism on the planet, converting the entire fecund biosphere into a sterile, technocratic monoculture that will no longer support complex life, including human beings.

One of our problems, today, as a species is that we have become far too tame, domesticated. Warmth has drained out of things. This is true in suburbia and it is equally the problem in “woke progressive” culture, exacerbated by Smart Phones and social media. We simply lack soul-capacity to answer our existential emergency at the level of depth, fury, and sorrow it requires. The call is there, but not the response.

Technology has trapped us in a Panopticon. We are constantly surrounded by a forest of invisible eyes, where any mistake or error can lead to permanent ostracism or cancellation. “Woke” Progressives have created a culture of stifling conformism, imprisoning ourselves in a transparent cage.

I don’t totally disagree with the Dark Web thinkers who find in liberal progressives a tinge of totalitarianism: The smug performance of moral superiority depends on constant self-policing, on internalized self-censorship, and closed rhetoric.

I support the “rising of the feminine:” The feminization and the pacification of society. One positive polarity of the feminine is nurturing and self-care. One negative polarity or shadow side is an instinct to over-control and smother. The suffocating, controlling tendencies of “safety first” liberalism incites the masculine polarity to rebel from those constraints.