Latest news with #MartinLeFevre
Scoop
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Scoop
The Only Good Catholic Is A catholic With A Small ‘c'
Opinion – Martin LeFevre – Meditations To idealists, imagination is the greatest gift and highest capacity we have as human beings. It isnt, insight is. But imagination is what leading lights of the left believe is the fount of spirituality and a just world. It's mind boggling, but to a significant degree, the left is placing its hopes for a better world in the new Catholic pope. There is no surer sign of the bankruptcy of insight and ideas from people who still care about the Earth, the poor and the marginalized. The legacy left is beginning to acknowledge that the roots of the global crisis lie much deeper than political and economic analysis. But liberalism's prominent voices offer only lip service to 'tending to the spiritually exhausted,' repeating bromides about 'the importance of hope and the power of storytelling.' Those who point out the inadequacy of such philosophical and spiritual shallowness are called 'particularly pernicious climate doomers propagating misery and incorrect narratives about how screwed we all are.' Apparently, the worst sin 'above all, is climate doomers guilty of failing to use their imagination.' To idealists, imagination is the greatest gift and highest capacity we have as human beings. It isn't, insight is. But imagination is what leading lights of the left believe is the fount of spirituality and a just world. To insist on seeing and remaining with things as they are, is, to an idealist, 'like bringing poison to a potluck.' Imagining a better world not only prevents one from seeing the world as it is however; it precludes meeting the challenges of the polycrisis, because to project an ideal — an idea of what should be — is to escape from facing, understanding and thereby changing what is. For the comfortably agnostic or the dogmatically atheistic, 'tending to the spiritually exhausted' goes no deeper than 'meditating on an antique violin as a symbol of sustainability.' Such tawdry blather contributes to hopelessness almost as much as Trump's demented policies. A 'climate doomer,' it turns out, is someone who doesn't subscribe to the theology of hope, imagination and storytelling, but points out that 'embracing uncertainty because history is full of surprises' is self-serving bullshit. Why is it foolish to believe history is full of surprises? Because life is full of surprises, while human history is variations on the ancient themes of conflict and war, greed and exploitation. Human nature hasn't changed since fully modern humans emerged tens of thousands of years ago, and the implacable culmination of the egoistic and fragmentary aspects of human nature are what we're up against in the digital age. Superficial spirituality becomes downright absurd when progressive editors quote Catholic theology in their editorials: 'Every one of us, whether we were born in the United States of America or on the North Pole, we are all given the gift of being created in the image and likeness of God, and the day we forget that is the day we forget who we are.' Does anyone, even a Mass-attending Catholic, believe that humans 'have been created in the image and likeness of God' anymore? That would make God one small Supreme Being. Antiquated theological issues notwithstanding, there's an urgent question: Can the left bring new, transformative insight into the relationship between the spiritual dimension and the political dimension? We can. The problem for progressives arises in trying to cut the global polycrisis to fit the Procrustean bed of inane doctrines such as man was created in the image of God, and irrelevant institutions like the Roman Catholic Church. On the political level, certainly the idea that a 'leftwing economic populism' can counter rightwing white nationalism is a non-starter. The left does not need economic populism anymore than it needs the theology and leadership of the Catholic Church. It needs new insights that infuse the political dimension with authentic spiritual experiences of wholeness and holiness in the individual. The irony is that the very progressives who accuse others of a failure of imagination are guilty of it, since they take human nature, and political and religious institutions, as givens, and continue to believe that activism with respect to them will bring about radical change. Clearly, until we stop giving priority to national governments and religious institutions, nothing is going to change. With regard to one of the two remaining superpowers, the USA, its pathocracy has become a circus-like diversion from the rapacious power of transnational capitalism. With respect to the other superpower, China, the ruthless suppression of individual freedom belies the fear of losing control. And since control is an illusion, the CCP has reason to fear. As far as the Catholic Church, I don't see how anyone can take a religion composed of costumed cardinals, bloated bishops and pedophile priests seriously. Even if the Church cleans up its act and gives away its wealth to the poor as Jesus taught, its beliefs and doctrines, rituals and traditions are not spiritual, but antithetical to experiencing immanence. Politically, the left's boilerplate theology of hope and storytelling is as irrelevant and ineffective in meeting the global crisis of consciousness (manifesting outwardly as the polycrisis), as the core Christian precept that 'we are all created in the image and likeness of God.' The left is looking to the pope because the world desperately needs an effective moral conscience. However, it's not going to come from any organized religion, or national government or inter-national institution. Nor is it going to come from AI, which will be smarter but no more intelligent than the human beings who program it. What can we do? We can ignite a psychological revolution within ourselves, and help create a global body of world citizens of great insight and moral suasion. Whole people who don't identify with a nation or religion and eschew power in perpetuity. The latter won't be possible without the former. And without a psychological revolution, the foreseeable future is very dark indeed. You don't have to be an oracle to see that.
Scoop
11-05-2025
- General
- Scoop
For The Love Of Sycamores
Opinion – Martin LeFevre – Meditations For a year there was no sign that the fire did any lasting damage, but then saplings sprang up around the base of the tree, and the next year its limbs began to fall off. First small branches, and then bigger and bigger limbs dropped off. Like a leper … One stormy night two years ago, two odious Englishmen chainsawed a beloved tree at 'Sycamore Gap' on Hadrian's Wall. It was a sycamore 'many considered part of the DNA of north-east England.' Though the Guardian is straining to find 'hope and optimism' in its malicious felling, this act of extreme vandalism has been correctly seen as a symbol of humanity's wider war on nature. Even so, are more and more people 'considering their relationship with the natural world?' For more than a decade, I took meditations under a great, bifurcated sycamore that sat on the bank of a small seasonal creek at the former periphery of town. Some of the most intense shifts in consciousness I've ever experienced occurred there. But after few years someone deliberately set a fire that swept through the still semi-wild area, and it charred the white bark of the sycamore. For a year there was no sign that the fire did any lasting damage, but then saplings sprang up around the base of the tree, and the next year its limbs began to fall off. First small branches, and then bigger and bigger limbs dropped off. Like a leper losing appendages, the tree was slowly dying. For a decade I continued to take meditations under the sycamore, and the awareness of its unhurried death lent a greater sense of urgency to my contemplations. The dying tree reminded me that the Earth is dying at the hands of man, and that an inward revolution had to ignite if humans weren't to decimate the planet and leave barren biological deserts to subsequent generations. Finally, after a severe winter storm one winter, I saw from a quarter mile away on the bike that the sycamore was gone. It had crashed across the creek in the night. I sat next to the massive trunk and wept. At first I was despondent, but then I observed how the saplings had already grown into a small circle of trees around the huge stump, little trees that would grow into fine sycamores themselves. Even so, the Earth is still dying, and hope and optimism are a lie. Here are a few passages from one of my meditations under that great sycamore. I don't reinforce their memory, since memories of previous transcendent states are an impediment to experiencing immanence in the present. Two hundred meters from the paved bike path, on the bank of a creek that flows full during winter and spring along the edge of town, sits a great sycamore. It's home to a pair of kites, a small species of falcon that has one of the most beautiful flight patterns in nature. I don't see the kites this day until I stand, after an hour's passive observation in the warmish sun, in a state of reverence and gratitude. But as I begin walking back toward the bike, the pair of gracile falcons alight the sycamore, and do an aerial dance directly overhead. One playfully dives toward the other, which in turn arcs away with exquisite grace, its slender white wings glistening in the last full rays of the sun. They cavort above the sycamore like this for a couple minutes, and I have the feeling they are performing before an appreciative audience of one. Then one of them peels off toward the fields and foothills, while the lone kite flies a short distance away, and hovers. Its fluttering, rhythmically beating wings effortlessly holds it in place as it searches the ground for any movement of mice or other prey. Miles away, the dark wall of the canyon stands out in breathtaking relief in the late afternoon sun. The lone falcon flies in short increments toward the foothills, pausing and masterfully employing the wind to remain stationary while scanning the ground as a golden light reflects off its white under-wings. At one point the kite completely stops fluttering its wings for a few seconds, and with a grace beyond words, drops to the ground, its wings pinned back in a 'V' as it silently plummets to the earth. It ascends without prey, and I soar away with it. There is the feeling of not just witnessing something rare and stupendously beautiful, but of being, in that state of heightened awareness, inextricably part of it in an ineffable way. When transcendent experiencing of the Earth and essence occurs after the mind falls silent in all-inclusive attentiveness, it's always unexpected and new. For a state of insight to ignite, there has to be a kind of agnosia — a temporary loss of the ability to recognize the familiar as familiar. That allows a full opening of the mind and heart, which is what the brain truly evolved for.
Scoop
27-04-2025
- Science
- Scoop
Ending Irrational Objectification Of Space Means Ending Rapacious Exploitation On Earth
Opinion – Martin LeFevre – Meditations Driving the new capitalistic/militaristic space race is a persistent, pernicious way of thinking. Though the polycrisis is the culmination of mans rapacious consciousness, even many progressives continue to believe it can be remedied externally, by more … I'm old enough to remember the naïve thrills of the first American spaceflights of Mercury and Gemini. I was in high school when Neil Armstrong planted that ridiculous American flag on the moon. Now, between SpaceX and Blue Origin, spacefaring has become a churlish and childish tourism and tech fantasy. A recent example of delusional technophilia is entitled, 'How space exploration can improve life on Earth.' Ignoring evidence and common sense, the author absurdly proclaims: 'We will not be able to combat global heating, biodiversity loss, pollution and so many other environmental challenges without space-faring. Going to space is in fact taking care of problems on Earth first.' He doesn't stop with that illogical claim. 'Tracking the consequences of government policies, distributions of wealth, and dozens of other more directly socio-economic phenomena have strong spatial dimensions that make space-based remote sensing indispensable.' Conclusion? 'Opposing space-faring unwittingly inhibits all this crucial activity.' In a classic bit of Trumpist reversal and projection, we're told that those who have 'a cynical, 'anti-space' ideology' would halt human progress. This self-declared geologist makes no distinction between the previous five mass extinctions resulting from meteor strikes or super-volcanoes, and the Sixth Extinction at the hands of a supposedly intelligent species. 'Extinction is a destructive force, but it also increases biodiversity; humans need to acknowledge that awkward truth if we want to survive,' he has written with astounding obtuseness. Stringing together a series of non-sequiturs, the writer doubles down: 'Anti-space ideology amounts to a critique that unwittingly embraces a politics of neoliberal austerity while ironically undermining our ability to deal with the manifold ecological and social crises we face.' The Western mindset is dying hard. The problem with space exploration is not ideological but existential. Exploiting the near-Earth environment is the highest expression of man's manipulation of nature. Nations and corporations have littered orbital space with space junk of planned obsolescence. And you won't be able to look at the moon in ten years without thinking of all the competitive mining operations on its surface. Driving the new capitalistic/militaristic space race is a persistent, pernicious way of thinking. Though the polycrisis is the culmination of man's rapacious consciousness, even many progressives continue to believe it can be remedied externally, by more technology. Space exploration has its place. However, only if enough people begin looking inwardly, rather than outwardly for the remedy to what is essentially a planetary, collective crisis of consciousness. Why won't 'improving our ability to get to space improve our ability to perform Earth systems monitoring – and thus to deal with climate change and other environmental crises?' First, because there is no connection between 'Earth systems monitoring from space,' and effectively addressing and redressing 'climate change and other environmental crises.' Indeed, there's an inverse relationship: the more we've been able to monitor the Earth from space, the more the climate crisis has intensified. Second, the fragmentary approach, which is implicit in the phrase 'climate change and other environmental crises,' lies at the root of the problem. Viewing the crisis in man's relationship to nature in terms of many 'environmental crises' directly contributes to a paralysis of analysis. In short, the Earth burns while the experts monitor it. Cui bono? Siloed scientists, absent-minded academics, colluding capitalists and militaristic madmen. Third, the shibboleth that science will save us is simply untrue, no matter how many Landsat and other space-based monitoring satellites we send into orbit. One has only to reflect on the 'scientifically conducted' thermonuclear detonations over the Bikini Atoll, which remains radioactively uninhabitable for its former people to this day, to realize that science can be used for good or ill. Fourth, the failure of imagination, or more accurately of insight that underlies the technophile mindset is egregious in light of the real and present danger to our already overheated atmosphere and oceans. The prospect of thousands more touristic, capitalistic and militaristic rocket launches, much less the energy AI energy sucks to support them, should give everyone pause. The crux of the matter is that the climate, pollution and Sixth Extinction crisis has its source in man's obsessively externalizing, extractive consciousness. Indeed, the ecological crisis is the ultimate manifestation of the crisis of human consciousness. Without radically changing the separative, fragmenting and extractive mentality, things will only get worse. Must techno-fools and their spacefaring children render the Earth a barren echo of its former beauty and diversity before they realize this? It's a question of basic direction: Do we continue with the Western mindset of pathological externalization and extraction, or can we restore the inwardness of the East within us as global citizens while proceeding with scientific and technological progress? Voracious individualism and consumerism overwhelmed the last gasp of a countervailing inwardness of ancient India a half-century ago. Despite its arrested development materially, ancient India provides an alternative to the obsessive materialism and externalization of the West. This is not a call to graft Buddhist traditions and practices onto moribund Western societies. That's been tried over the last 40 years and it has failed to alter the course of America, much less the now globalized capitalistic system. So what is a true breakthrough? Clearly it begins within us as undivided human beings, not in any scientific much less technological or political breakthrough. Such breakthroughs are completely secondary to the inner breakthrough in human consciousness that must occur if humanity is to survive and flower on this wondrous Earth.
