Imagine a Future Beyond the Tip of the Last Ice Berg…Pull up the Parking Lot!
December 18, 2007
Greetings everybody, I have been so busy tying up loose ends of this year in preparation for the next year that I have not yet had an opportunity to read everything I wanted to read. Thus Al Gore’s Nobel Acceptance speech of 10 December has only now hit my radar. It is worth the read, and some parts in particular have relevance to the role of Creative Artists in society.
The Words of Writers and Poets
It is noteworthy that the words of writers and poets have informed the cause of which Al Gore has become a global symbol and a very real Global Champion for Life. I believe his words are important. Many trumpet what I have already written nearly two years ago for the State of Our Culture and Civilization series, which give the Creative Artist’s assessment of what’s happening in our world and our civilization, with a view to looking at what we can do to help resolve these problems. It’s not just global warming, that is the problem that is quite literally the tip of the last iceberg.
Earlier this year we had 100 ice bergs float majestically up the eastern coast of New Zealand. Many flew out to land on them. If they were not a news copter, or plane carrying journalists and scientists, I cursed the stupidity of their wealth.
The Songwriters too: Paradise or Parking Lot?
Do you know the song? It’s called Big Yellow Taxi, by Joni Mitchell.
The answer is:
We chose the parking lot.
Pretty dumb.
Leaves me numb
Wondering
what intelligence really means
As the bird song dies
And the breeze has no leaves to flutter
Only toxic particulate matter
So I take a deep breath
And hope I don’t die
As I pull up the parking lot
Wrote that lyric in the time it took you to read it. It’s an answer to the global criss problem (one of ‘em anyway). Not the best answer, but then it’s inconvenient, and that last line’s a metaphor for the concept we have trouble facing because of the inconvenience it signifies to our “lifestyle.”
The uncomfortable guilty feeling that accompanies the idea of pulling up your parking lot, that’s what is preventing humanity from resolving this problem.
The marketers got it wrong, it’s not a lifestyle at all. Civilization as we live it today is a Deathstyle. To call it “a lifestyle” is a misleading misnomer that makes us comfortable making stupid decisions that let a few elite others lead ‘a lifestyle’ hundreds of times removed from how the rest of us live a hand-to-mouth existence in an age that’s characterized by unsustainable burdens.
A Lifestyle would promote life not be inimical to it. So all those “lifestyle” magazines, they’re not. They’re consumer mouse traps. You know what happens to the mouse in the trap, don’t you. If they live, they get experimented on. A few ‘lucky ones’ get to be pets.
Another Question and an Answer: Go Quickly Far Together
The other day my sister asked a question, that I had also been discussing only weeks earlier, “Why don’t we have solar panels on every single roof?” It’s a good question, but it ignores the basic truth that making and delivering all those solar panels would exacerbate the problem of global warming. We would be better to turn off the power and park the cars. Not going to happen, it’s too late for that.
Human beings always underestimate the effort involved in doing something. We can’t underestimate the management of this particular crisis and the effort that needs to be engaged upon. As Al Gore said in his acceptance speech:
There is an African proverb that says, “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” We need to go far, quickly.
Yes, that is the degree of urgency required and we are in danger of underestimating the effort; as always.
We must abandon the conceit that individual, isolated, private actions are the answer. They can and do help. But they will not take us far enough without collective action. At the same time, we must ensure that in mobilizing globally, we do not invite the establishment of ideological conformity and a new lock-step “ism.”
Collective action, that’s the term. Collective action without loss of identity, that’s the phrase.
That means adopting principles, values, laws, and treaties that release creativity and initiative at every level of society in multifold responses originating concurrently and spontaneously.
Principles that release creativity.
This new consciousness requires expanding the possibilities inherent in all humanity. The innovators who will devise a new way to harness the sun’s energy for pennies or invent an engine that’s carbon negative may live in Lagos or Mumbai or Montevideo. We must ensure that entrepreneurs and inventors everywhere on the globe have the chance to change the world.
He missed one, you need Creative Imaginations, you need Creative Artists. But when we need it most creativity has been under assault and squashed by most societies through the education system since the industrial age began. “You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone” or you most need it.
When we unite for a moral purpose that is manifestly good and true, the spiritual energy unleashed can transform us. The generation that defeated fascism throughout the world in the 1940s found, in rising to meet their awesome challenge, that they had gained the moral authority and long-term vision to launch the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, and a new level of global cooperation and foresight that unified Europe and facilitated the emergence of democracy and prosperity in Germany, Japan, Italy and much of the world. One of their visionary leaders said, “It is time we steered by the stars and not by the lights of every passing ship.”
I know there are those suspicious of Gore, but people are too suspicious anyway, and the suspicion itself is a symptom of the degree of decay present in this culture we call civilization. It’s good to be savvy, good to be circumspect, good to have doubts, but to the extent that it blinds you from making observations that are real? No, that’s not good, that’s stupid.
The point is well made that we work best and achieve greater things when we work together, but to do so addressing the issue is one thing for action, but the underlying causes, the philosophies and ideas that drive them must be addressed too, otherwise history has this horrible way of repeating itself. So a rethink of the principles and ideas that have driven civilization are important and that means flipping the social order on its head. Those who have held power, created this situation. They are the wrong people to hold such power. It is long past time we learned that lesson.
Adopt Principles that Release Creativity
Al Gore said “That means adopting principles, values, laws, and treaties that release creativity and initiative at every level of society in multifold responses originating concurrently and spontaneously. This new consciousness requires expanding the possibilities inherent in all humanity.”
What changes humanity’s ideas fast enough? Works of art & entertainment. So we need to adopt this idea of principles that release creativity and look to what we as Creative Artists can do to bolster and support that, and this means undertaking a critical examination of our culture and society, across many levels, and that is why we at the Free Articulator have been developing the State of Our Culture and Civilization–the Creative Artists’ Viewpoint over the last several years.
The old world is crumbling, it frankly, needs to crumble. It’s a deathstyle, not a lifestyle.
Imagination and Creativity have been trampled on over the last hundred years or more of industrialization. The education system was designed to marginalize people who were creative, as you’ll know if you’ve listened and watched the video of Sir Ken Robinson speaking at TED on the subject of “Do schools kill creativity?” He pointed up what we all, already knew. They do. They were designed that way. And you have to ask these questions: “Why? Why were they designed to kill creativity? Who stood to benefit from such a practice and idea?” And “Why would they want to do that?”
The Tip of the Last Ice Berg
I don’t think it’s all hopeless, though I know we teeter on the edge of a precipice from which there is no recovery while we people this earth. Though I do despair that we are not doing enough, fast enough; I still see cars moving on the road. Mine is parked. I use it only if I have to, and then I time it so I can do everything on one day. One drive has to accomplish much or be an emergency, or I don’t want to turn that fossil fuel burning combustion engine over.
“Global warming is a symptom of the stacked problems of civilization”
The “tip of the last ice berg” is a metaphor for the nature of the problem the human race is facing. It’s not ONE problem. Global warming is a symptom of the stacked problems of civilization facing us all; stacked problems that created the crisis where we, mankind, the human race, has threatened All Life on this planet with extinction.
Extinction!?
When we do master that particularly pressing and hot problem, and we do have an opportunity to do so - slim and getting thinner like ice on a puddle under a blazing sunny sky - then the very problems that created this situation and the ideas behind them need to be addressed.
The Precarious Position of the Global Opportunity - the Kind of Globalism We Really Want
Pulling together to resolve the shabby way we treat our planetary home creates more opportunities to act as the human race in common endeavor. That affords us an opportunity. We must not lose sight of that opportunity, when we rally as the world to manage the climatic catastrophe we have created, we must then move on as the world to the next matters, and here is where we as Creative Artists have an important role to play.
When we launch the Free Articulator’s New Look in a few days, we will be in a position to do a lot more to move forward, with plans that have been in the wings for decades coming to fruition. Thanks for playing your part.
It’s a perilous (and precarious) business trying to create something from nothing more than dreams, when others are working on well-funded nightmares that end any hope of creative imagination finding a better more solid reality.
What would world peace be like, really? What would it be like to live in a world that just gets along and we really do have the equal right to pursue life, liberty and happiness in and with respect of each without our existence being more constantly under threat of some sudden fall from a precarious position at best?
We must change the world we live in, each of us, as best we can. It’s the only one we’ve got, and even if we had more worlds to live in, we’d still have to share them and get along. Not simply abandon the problems here and go off to repeat them somewhere else.
Are we mature enough as a race to do that yet?
I have my answers, I’m reasonably sure they’re not much different than yours at the moment.
Regardless of all this stuff, we wish you all the very best of the festive season, and hope the seasons will continue to mark the passage of time on this jewel that shines on the far flung spiral of a galaxy we’ve yet to set foot in. But first we need some better answers and a better way of making life less precarious than what we have engaged in over the last 200 years of “progress.” It’s not progress at all, it’s not even the fabled better mouse trap; it’s just a trap, for us. So as the year closes I urge those who create to:
Imagine…real solutions.
Maybe we don’t really need to trap the mouse. Maybe we don’t have to have a tree museum, either.
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