EcoGathering

For this lunar cycle, we’ll dissect the narratives told to us by modernity, and how they falsely shape our expectations for navigating the modern world. First up: progress, and its vital role in the mythmaking of empire.

Modernity has brought us more energetic and material prosperity than the royalty of antiquity experienced. This prosperity comes at an obvious, though intensely hidden, human and ecological cost. Most economists and CEOs want to convince us our levels of prosperity aren’t nearly enough, and we need more energy and more materials. Certain thinkers, such as Derrick Jensen, think that none of this industrial prosperity justifies the costs, and we should disband with our material and energy wealth altogether in order to save as much life on the planet as possible. Others, like Jason Hickel, think that we can maintain relatively high levels of prosperity – every human being can still own a laptop, for example – and we can still maintain a sustainable existence on the planet. Considering the myth of perpetual progress and the massive human population, how should we weigh arguments about our wealth? There are plenty of definitions of wealth outside of the dominant materialist, individualist, growth-based culture, so what really is wealth anyways?

Just as modernity has shaped the narratives of progress, population, and prosperity to its own benefit, there is a story of peace that we've been told which deserves some critical analysis and questioning. In a culture where "peace deals" are synonymous with a temporary pause on genocidal bloodshed carried out by an incredibly unbalanced power dynamic, our very notion of what "peace" actually is has become warped by our conditioning to witness and increasingly tolerate unspeakable violence. The question of peace must hold an aspect of social spatiality… peace where? And for whom? A pervasive "Protect your peace" type of neo-spirituality has arisen in modernity's hyper-individualized society. It requires its followers to ignore the very violences that their so-called peace depends on, as well as the conflict that inevitably arises from the unaddressed violences. But there is no peace in existing amongst the comforts of modernity when those comforts are dependent on the extraction and exploitation of other life.

Our realities are shaped by the physical world we inhabit; whether that's the nature that surrounds us, the humans we interact with in community, the food made accessible to us, or the stories that reach us, filled with knowledge our own realities or those far away. But just as much as we absorb these inputs from the outside world to shape our understanding of it, we are also exerting our own inputs into the realities of others. We all contribute to a greater understanding of the physical world which surrounds us, the Topia we exist in. In this lunar cycle, we will examine the different Topias, from the more familiar types found in literature, Dystopia and Utopia, to the more generative and less well-known genre of Thrutopia and Ourtopia.