“The great illusion of the industrial age is the idea that we can develop our human well-being by plundering the planet and destroying its geological and biological structure, including its functioning. From the idea that what is good for humans is also good for the Earth, we must come to the understanding that what is good for the complex community of life on Earth is good for humans.”
Thomas Berry
This is the second extended part of my lecture about Thomas Berry at the seminar BECOMING NATIVE or Finding Home (Nové Hamry, 3.8.), which is based on the book by Thomas Berry The Great Work (Three Rivers Press, New York 1999) and from the article "Thomas Berry's Great Work" by Herman F. Green. In: The Ecozoic reader 1, No.1 / fall 2000. I accept the basic systematics of the three main principles of Berry's great work as proposed by Herman F. Green; this text draws its content from this essay of his. The aforementioned book by Thomas Berry will be published in Czech translation under the title Great work – our journey into the future at the end of the year from Malvern. In it, Berry shows that we are faced with a task that humans have never faced before, opening up to an understanding of our new, vast role in the Earth's story.
If Thomas Berry in his books The Dream of the Earth (1988) and The Universe Storey (1992, with Brian Swimme) dealt with the vast flow of history and evolution of the cosmos, his book The Great Work is a call to action, it is Berry’s most urgent book. Berry argues that in every historical period, people are given their “great work” to do. At one time it is to settle new lands, at another it is to build great cathedrals, to create works of art, philosophy, religion, or science, or to form new political structures and ideas. Our current great work, Berry argues, comes in response to the devastation of the planet caused by our human activities. It is not something we could have chosen, it is something we have been thrust into simply because we were born at a particular time and place. Our task may seem overwhelming to us, but just as this task is given to us by a power outside of us, we must also believe that we have been given the ability to fulfill it.
Today we are facing a collapse of the planet’s life systems that can only be understood in comparison with events that have marked major changes in the Earth’s geological eras, such as the extinction of the dinosaurs and countless other species at the end of the Mesozoic Era, which began our current Cenozoic Era. Our current task of transitioning from modern industrial civilization with its devastating environmental impact to a new, benign form of civilization is beyond anything humans have ever been asked to do. It is not simply about adapting to disrupted human life patterns, as was the case with the Great Depression of the 1930s or the last two world wars; today we must deal with the breakdown of the geo-biological system that has governed the functioning of the planet for 67 million years, when the Cenozoic Era ruled the planet. The great task ahead of us, the transition from the terminal Mesozoic era to the emerging Ecozoic era—if we humans are to be present on the planet in a way that benefits both the Earth and us, and thereby become functional participants in the larger Earth community—is, according to Berry, the need to reinvent (reinvent) man. We have a task that has never been articulated in our human adventure to date. From the earliest times of human history, we have been acculturated within a micro-phase understanding of our place in the Earth system, and yet today we find ourselves in a situation where we humans as a whole have a macro-phase impact on the world. We have become a geological force and must therefore learn to think macro-phase. In Brian Swimm’s words, “learn to think like a planet.” To articulate the place and role of our human community within the larger Earth system.
It means a fundamental reassessment of our role as humans, and it should be done in “real time.” On the one hand, we all share in the destructive impacts of the current modes of our civilization, and at the same time, we are called upon to make this transition towards a new mutually beneficial mode of our presence on Earth. The complexity of this task lies in the fact that this transformation involves us all. There is no “us” and “them,” no “here” and “there.” There is no frontal boundary that can be crossed, and there are no externalities that can be ignored in the name of a greater cause. Everything is in between. The transformation to which we are called is at once internal and external, regional and global, national and international, economic and social, individual and collective, familial and group, and for the first time in human history, it encompasses the entire human and nonhuman world, or rather connects both.
In this sense, Thomas Berry does not offer us some easy-to-master technique or path, but a comprehensive understanding of who we are as people, how we got here, and where we are headed in the larger perspectives of our lives.
Transition to the Ecozoic
The beginning of the transformation into the ecozoic is, according to Thomas Berry, internal in nature. It is a renewal of the sense of awareness of our mutual connection with the natural world and our participation in its primordial mystery and meaning, which we have lost in modern times. We are people who have lost touch with nature and who begin to heal as we begin to realize the physical and spiritual connection to the universe of which we are a part, as we begin to understand the magnitude and beauty of its existence. The possibility of accessing a sacred relationship with the cosmos is opening up for us today through the evolutionary story of the universe.
According to Berry, the transition to the Ecozoic cannot be based on making minor adjustments to mitigate the negative environmental impacts of an otherwise functional civilization, because our civilization, as Berry emphasizes, is fundamentally flawed in its conception and in its values, in its structure and activities and in its aspirations. To consider civilization only in its current form and seek to correct its shortcomings would therefore be a futile endeavor. First of all, it is necessary to understand why human civilization exists in the way it does today. To do this, we must understand how we got into this situation, only then can we know where to go.
The central error of our evolution, according to Thomas Berry, is our “mode of consciousness that has established a radical discontinuity between the human mode of being and other modes of being and has assigned all rights to humans.” This is the cultural pathology that Berry seeks to understand. According to him, this “deep distrust and aversion to the natural world” was caused, among other things, by the traumatic effects of the Black Death in the 14th century, the effects of which still affect the Western cultural tradition today. Berry further recalls Descartes’ philosophical “despiritualization” of the Earth “with his division of reality between the mind and the external world. From this perspective, the nonhuman world was seen simply as a mechanism . . . that could be, and even must be, used for human benefit.” This philosophical disenchantment of the world was supported for the next three centuries by mechanistic science, materialist economics, and anthropocentric politics, and increasingly deepened the division between the human and natural worlds.
This whole process of separation culminated in a sense in the European conquest of North America, which Thomas Berry considered one of the most fateful moments in the history not only of this continent but of the entire planet. “For the indigenous people, the natural world represented a manifestation of a numinous presence that gave meaning to all existence. According to the Europeans, this continent was there only to serve human purposes. The sole aim of the European settlers was to conquer it and reduce it to a mere usable object. … The fundamental problem was their attitude towards the land as primarily intended for human use.” Ultimately, this event led not only to economic exploitation and domination of the American continent and its indigenous people, but also became the beginning of later economic globalization and the power domination of the entire planet by industrial and commercial corporations that were born in the process of conquest and colonization of North America.
In the book The Great Work Thomas Berry describes how, in the 19th century, modern global industrial, commercial, and financial corporations gradually became the main instruments of planetary devastation, and how, as a result, in the closing years of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, we moved “from an organic to an extractive economy . . . setting in motion forces that disrupted the chemistry of the air, water, and soil to a degree that affected the entire web of organic life on the planet.” We replaced the organic economy, which is by nature a constantly renewing economy, with an extractive economy that is by nature terminal, dependent on the extraction of nonrenewable resources.
As a result, we find ourselves today, for the first time, facing finitude, the irreversible shutdown of the planet's major life systems, and we are ethically helpless about this situation. "Our ethical traditions fail completely when confronted with biocide and the extermination of the Earth's vulnerable life systems, and especially when faced with geocide, the devastation of the planet itself." Thomas Berry also reminds us of the fragility of our economy over a longer time scale, given its dependence on rapidly depleting oil resources; the depletion of oil in its readily available forms is, according to Berry, inevitable in the 21st century. Despite this dire situation, we enter the 21st century without any comprehensive program for the transition to some alternative form of sustainable economy, and instead embark on a frantic drive to ever-faster extraction and consumption of this precious resource that forms the crumbling foundation of the entire modern economy.
Thomas Berry offers three guides on our journey into the future, into the Ecozoic era: Viability, Intimacy/Community, and Celebration.
Vitality
Sustainability leads us to “develop a viable way of human presence on Earth.” This orientation is based on the belief that our current way of being on the planet is not viable because it is not physically sustainable. It is not physically sustainable because it is not in harmony with the constantly renewing processes of the functioning of the planet. Thomas Berry provides three paths to acquiring a viable way of human presence on Earth:
- Geocentricity,
- Self-restraint and
- Organic economy.
Geocentricity
Or a path centered on the Earth rather than on humans. According to Thomas Berry, we must move from a human-centered norm of reality and value to an Earth-centered norm of reality and value. Our human system is a subsystem of the Earth system, and therefore we must realize that “the community of all living species, including humans, is a greater reality and a greater value than the community of the human species alone.” According to Thomas Berry, all things exist within the dynamic order of the universe, and therefore the universe in all its processes—and for us, the Earth in all its processes—becomes the ultimate norm of reality and value. If we are to discover a viable path to the future, we must look at the Earth in terms of the functioning of all its natural processes and all its living systems. The question we must ask ourselves is not what we want the Earth to be, but what the Earth wants us to be.
Self-restraint
The cause of the disruption of earthly processes is the refusal of Western industrial society to accept the necessary limitations on its path to liberation. And this is not just liberation from the common diseases to which we are exposed, but even liberation from human conditioning itself. "It seems that some ancient force in the Western psyche perceives any limitation as a demonic obstacle to be removed, rather than as an empowering challenge."
This drive for unlimited liberation from the conditions of existence has created a kind of collective madness in human society. The quest for a perfectly sanitized world leads to a toxic world; the quest to produce an abundance of energy through an ever-accelerating process of extracting resources from the Earth and burning them has created entropy on an unprecedented scale; our quest to create a wonderland has created a world of waste, and we are losing, even within our psyches, the true wonderland of nature itself. To end this madness will require us to understand that these taming and limiting aspects of our existence, which oppose and limit us, are also the source of our liberation and our vitality. Accepting the challenging aspects of the natural world is, according to Thomas Berry, a primary condition for our creative existence within a community of living systems.
Organic (ecological) economy We must move from a terminal extractive economy to an organic, or ecological, economy that participates in the constantly renewing processes of the Earth and in this sense is similar to a tree. Today, on the other hand, we find ourselves in a terminal economy, not only as a result of the very predictable depletion of the resources that the industrial economy needs, but also because the living systems that were invented and developed by evolutionary processes over billions of years are now falling apart. According to Thomas Berry, some radical transformations proposed by ecologists are moving us in the right direction: “organic farming, community-supported agriculture, solar-hydrogen energy systems, ecological adaptations of our cities, the elimination of the automobile in its current form, the restoration of local village economies, education for a post-petroleum way of life, and law that recognizes the rights of natural modes of being.”
Intimacy/community
It is about forming one community of life with the other components of the Earth. According to Berry, the formation of this one community of life is the central theme of the great work. Berry argues that "no effective restoration of a viable mode of human presence on the planet will occur until the intimate relationship of humans with the Earth community and with the entire functioning of the universe is restored on a large scale." Until then, he believes, even heroic efforts to establish a more benign mode of human presence on Earth will ultimately fail. This integral community has, as Herman Green mentions, an inner dimension, which is intimacy, or the establishment of an intimate relationship with nature, and an outer dimension, which is an understanding of the substantive and philosophical meaning of man's integral relations with the other components of the Earth. "Intimacy" speaks of the inner dimension of this orientation, and "community" of its outer dimension.
Thomas Berry offers three ways to go in this direction:
- Connection of entities,
- Knowledge of integral relations and
- Reform of culture and institutions.
Association (community) of entities
Thomas Berry argues that the ecozoic era can only come about if we understand the universe as a community of subjects, not as a collection of objects. We can be one community of life only if we understand that we, the beings of the universe – human and non-human – are interconnected subjects. In the course of its historical and cultural development, the human community has established a “utilitarian” relationship with the non-human components of the planet, which it has come to understand as a set of resources for humans. Since the components thus understood lack human consciousness, they have no subjective integrity and therefore cannot be desecrated; they exist independently of humans and as such represent objects to be used for the benefit of us humans. From this perspective, their loss or extinction is of little concern. This view, which is considered realistic and pragmatic in our time, however, according to Thomas Berry, masks the true nature of reality. In fact, almost everyone who “looks at the ocean at dawn or sunset, or who looks at the night sky with all its shining stars…” “At every stage of our imaginative, aesthetic, and emotional lives,” we are dependent on our experiences of the external world of nature.
Not only are we connected to nature as an object of our senses, but we are connected to nature as a subject within our own experience. “The qualities that we identify with human . . . we observe throughout the natural world. Even at the level of elements we observe self-organizing capacities, including the potential to form intimate relationships. Every being has its own spontaneity that arises from the depths of its being.”
Understanding integral relations
The second path to moving towards a community of life is to recognize our integral relationships with the rest of non-human nature. In a practical sense, it is the recognition of the mutual relationships between all beings on Earth, which is the subject of the study of ecology. According to Berry, ecology must become the queen of sciences, not only of the natural sciences, but also of the humanities, economics, and all others. It should not be considered a separate field of study, but as “the foundation of all educational courses and programs.”
“Ecology is not a part of medicine; rather, medicine is an extension of ecology.” The same can be said of law, architecture, engineering, and other professions. To take the study of ecology seriously, Berry says, we must intensively study geography, which provides the means for “understanding the functioning of the Earth in its larger structure, including the integral functioning of its various regions into which it is divided.” This is not ordinary geography, however, but “ecological geography,” that is, geography informed by biology.
Knowledge of integral relationships must also come from our wisdom traditions. Thomas Berry notes four wisdom traditions that he considers particularly important. 1/ The first is the tradition of indigenous peoples, with its knowledge of the primordial permanent numinous presence in the phenomenal world and its sense of cosmic order, which becomes the ultimate reference plane of all human understanding. 2/ The second is the tradition of feminine wisdom, which combines “knowledge of the body with knowledge of the mind, soul with spirit, intuition with reason, the experience of consciousness with intellectual analysis …” and which allows us to experience the universe as something that has its origin in the original procreative and nurturing principle. According to Thomas Berry, women today are helping Western civilization to uncover its own androcentric nature, thereby saving it from destruction. 3/ The third tradition of wisdom is the classical religious and humanistic traditions, which provide a vast resource for understanding the numinous forces of the universe and for understanding the meaning, depth, and purpose of our human experience. 4/ The fourth tradition of wisdom is observational science, which has given us the understanding that “the universe came into being through a continuous series of evolutionary transformations over an immense period of time.” The drama of evolution involves the entire cosmos in an ever-unfolding adventure. In its final stage, this science has moved beyond a mechanistic conception of the objective world to an understanding that subjectivity is inherent in all our knowledge.
Reform of culture and institutions
When our consciousness is transformed by the understanding that we are a community of subjects in the universe and not a collection of objects, and that we are integrally connected to the rest of the Earth, we are led to reexamine our values and, based on this reevaluation, to reexamine the suitability of our culture and our institutions with respect to these new values of ours. This leads us to the necessity of a comprehensive reform of our culture and our institutions.
For example, our language as it stands, according to Berry, does not express a true sense of reality, value, and progress, and “the correction of language in relation to reality” thus becomes part of the cultural reform that Berry calls for. We need an educational system that will teach children the story of the universe and that will allow them to study the “book of nature” from their own direct experience. We also need a new industry and economy that produces a minimum of useless and sterile waste and where the preservation of the Earth’s economy is a primary concern. We need a new political order in which the primary influence is that of the environmentalist rather than the businessman. We need a new university that will teach students about our human role in the integral functioning of the Earth community.
We need laws that recognize the rights of the nonhuman components of the Earth and ethics that provide instruction to the human community about its interrelationships with the natural world. We need a religion that honors the creative process that operates throughout the universe. In short, we need to develop cultures and institutions that are based on the knowledge that the universe in its natural workings represents the highest norm and reality of existence and that human endeavor has meaning and value only as a functional part of a larger community of living systems.
Celebration
The third and final guide that Thomas Berry gives us is celebration, which leads us to “celebrate the universe in a special mode of conscious self-awareness.” It is in this vein that Berry most specifically addresses how we should understand our role as humans in relation to the larger community of life.
The universe brought us into existence for a purpose. We were genetically coded to be “for something” and “we would not survive unless we could fulfill some essential role within the larger earthly community.” We must understand this purpose in the unique capacities of “thought and speech, aesthetic appreciation, emotional sensitivity, and moral judgment” that we humans have been given. “In giving birth to the Earth, its living forms, and human intelligence, the universe has revealed, as far as we know, the most elaborate expression of its deepest mystery.” But why this beauty called Earth, of which we are an integral part? Thomas Berry finds the answer to this question in understanding the universe as a being that is “primarily a celebration. The universe celebrates itself in every mode of being,” he says, and if so, the universe must take special delight in expressing itself in the vast diversity of the Earth system and its unique capabilities. Within this system, "man can be identified as that being in whom the universe celebrates itself and its numinous origin in a special mode of conscious self-awareness."
That is why we are here; our fundamental role is to use the special abilities we have been given to think, speak, and express artistically to celebrate life in all its diversity and interconnectedness. But today we are somehow failing in this essential role. Our sojourn on Earth is distorted, and we must therefore recover the true meaning of our own humanity. Thomas Berry gives us three paths to take in this direction. According to him, this means rediscovering the human through
- critical reflection, story and shared dream experience,
- cosmic liturgy / cosmogenesis and
- meta-religious movement.
Critical reflection, story, and shared dream experience
Thomas Berry describes the task before us in a way that sums up his entire idea in one sentence: “The historical mission of our time is to rediscover man at the level of species, with critical thinking, within the community of living systems, in the context of evolving time, and through story and shared dream experience.”
Explaining his purpose in writing The Great Work, Berry says, “To some extent, this entire book can be seen as an attempt to identify the role of the human community in relation to the rest of the planet.” Our current understanding of what it means to be human originated in the Neolithic period, when the first agricultural communities began to form and when civilization as we know it was born. This civilization focused on improving the human condition through the cultivation and subjugation of the nonhuman natural world. With the advent of our modern technological capabilities, civilization as understood in this way has become dysfunctional. We are at a turning point where we must reconfigure civilization so that we can relate to the Earth in mutually enriching ways and thereby become functional participants in a complex earthly community.
The primary resources for this task are found in our stories and in our dream experiences. To move into the ecozoic future requires creative progress that can only appear “as a groping or as a feeling or imaginative process.” “The dream directs the action and in the larger cultural context becomes the myth that guides and stimulates our action.” Each of us participates in this dream process, and in our dreaming the future awakens within us. In our dreams we experience new archetypes for building a new human community. These dreams and archetypes are not our own creations, but rather a manifestation that transcends our active thinking and is shaped by our genetic code, the dream of the Earth. When we tell ourselves stories about our journeys into the ecozoic future, when we allow ourselves to dream the dreams of the ecozoic era, we rediscover the human. When we rediscover the human through critical thinking, story, and shared dream experience, we celebrate the universe.
Cosmic Liturgy/Cosmogenesis
The second way of celebrating the universe is that of cosmic liturgy/cosmogenesis. “We can think of the viable future of the planet more as our participation in a symphony or as our renewed presence in the great cosmic liturgy than as the result of some scientific understanding or socio-economic arrangement.” “The fulfillment of the earthly community lies in the rapture of the magnificence of existence itself and in the admiration of those mysterious forces from which all this was born.”
This cosmic liturgy, according to Thomas Berry, has two parts. First, it is the drama of the ever-renewing cycles of nature. This is the drama to which the original indigenous people were and to which, in part, they still are uniquely present; it is the cosmic liturgy with which they sought to coordinate their every human activity. Second, it is the story that we have only begun to learn in our own time, which is the ever-unfolding drama of the evolutionary development of the universe, reaching from the time of its initial flare-up to the present moment. This is the new dance of being that in our time can give renewed meaning to the first drama of the cycles of nature. This second aspect Thomas Berry calls cosmogenesis.
“Today,” says Berry, “we live not so much in the cosmos as in cosmogenesis; that is, the universe is constantly coming into being through an irreversible sequence of transformations that move in a great arc of development from smaller to larger orders of complexity, from smaller to larger consciousness.” We must begin to understand this evolutionary drama not only in a physical sense but also in a psychic sense. The sequences of evolutionary transformations in the universe are moments of blessing, according to Thomas Berry. Because they are experienced on a small scale in our own lives as creative moments, they are also instruments of blessing. The presence of the vast scale of the psychic dynamics of the Earth becomes the source of our own psychic energy as “we are present on the Earth in the next sequence of its transformation.”
Whereas in past centuries we were unconsciously guided by the evolutionary process, today the time has come when, in a sense, we must guide and animate this process ourselves. To be able to take on such a task, "we must feel that we are supported by the same power that brought the Earth into being, that wove the galaxies into space, that ignited the Sun and set the Moon in its orbit." “It is the energy that has brought life from the Earth to life and has brought about a special mode of reflective consciousness in man. It is the same force that has guided us as hunters and gatherers for millions of years; it is the same life force that has led us to establish our cities and that has inspired thinkers, artists and poets throughout the ages. These same forces are still present; indeed, we could feel their impact at this time and understand that we are not isolated within a freezing universe, burdened with an uncertain future and unsupported by some larger power.” “In earlier times we celebrated moments of seasonal renewal; now we must also celebrate the successive moments of transformation within the emerging universe. This story of the emerging universe is our central sacred story today.”
“While our sense of the sacred can never be restored exactly as it existed in earlier centuries, it can be restored in the mysticism of the Earth, in the epic of evolution. The path to embracing the full spiritual heritage of the human community, as well as the total spiritual heritage of the universe, is open today to every person. Within this context, it is possible to overcome the religious antagonisms of the past, to revive specific traditions, and to rediscover the experience of participation in the sacred universe that once dynamized and sustained human affairs.” When we are present to the sacred liturgy in its cosmic and cosmogenetic aspects, we celebrate the universe.
Meta-religious movement
The transition that is necessary from the Cenozoic to the Ecozoic era, according to Thomas Berry, can be compared only to the great classical religious movements - the emergence of Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism and Taoism, the spread of Christianity and the rise of Islam. Each of these movements involved a vast change in consciousness and a new orientation in life. These movements spread through the intellect, but perhaps even more so through some unconscious force that entered the human spirit and changed human culture. Thomas Berry speaks of the coming transformation as a meta-religious movement. One of the meanings of the prefix "meta" is "more complex" or "transcending", and this is the sense in which Berry uses the suffix "meta". What he imagines is a more complex and transcending religious movement. This movement is more comprehensive in that it includes not only a certain segment of human society, but the entire human society and the entire geobiological system of the planet. It is transcendent because it challenges existing religious traditions and existing cultures to enter a new context and a new dimension of sacred experience.
Although this meta-religious movement is based on a functional cosmology, built on the story of the universe, on a spiritual dimension, derived from an understanding of the mysterious development of self-organizing creative processes of emergence, on a restoration of an intimate relationship with non-human nature and a call to creative participation in a great work, it transcends all rational analysis into the realm of celebration. "Because the universe can ultimately only be explained in the context of celebration. It is all an overflowing expression of existence itself."
We humans, with our special capacity for conscious self-awareness, become celebrants in this vast cosmic liturgy. We do this through dance, as the Lakota tribe in North America do in the great Sun Dance. We do this through the revival of archetypal symbols—the Great Way, Death and Rebirth, the Cosmic Tree, and the Sacred Center—reworked into the context of the story of the nascent universe. We do this also through the renewal of spiritual discipline and communal ceremonies, which are enlivened with an awareness of the nascent beauty of existence and the beauty of the sacred process that created all of this and that keeps it in being, and that calls us to creative participation in the future.
And we engage in this celebration not only with members of our own species, but with all other species. For religion, and therefore this meta-religious movement, is in its deepest dimension a dynamic reality. This grand liturgy is not just a celebration of what is, but also of what can be. To engage in the celebration of what can be is to have the power to realize the potential of what can be and to heal.
As we join this meta-religious movement with all people on Earth of diverse backgrounds and traditions, as well as all other beings in the greater community of life, we celebrate the universe.