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Progress is bigger and more shows up as:
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Quantity over quality shows up as:
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Antidotes include:
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Probably the central story of our culture—which I think has replaced a lot of the religious stories that used to be at the heart of our culture—is the story of progress.
What we say is: it is possible, through human ingenuity, to create a utopia. We have a story that tells us that human beings started as ignorant savages and are moving through a series of progressive steps, in which, at every point, they get cleverer, they get richer, they get smarter, they develop technologies which allow them to live longer, they learn more. Eventually, that ends with us probably leaving the planet and colonizing the stars, or living forever, or downloading our brains onto silicon chips. It’s a kind of technological rapture that sees time in a linear fashion rather than in a cyclical fashion. It sees an endless series of steps, every one of which improves things in the material sense from the one before. I don’t think it’s historically true. Actually, what happens is that things tend to rise and fall in cycles. But it has an enormously powerful grip on us, and it informs everything from our view of the past, which we increasingly believe was a savage place in which our lack of technology and science drove us to a sort of misery and poverty, to our view of the future, in which we assume that more technology and more scientific focus and more centralization will take us to a kind of paradise. And so we have this story that we believe in which everything continues to get better every generation, and our job is to keep that process going. I think once you believe that, then you are stuck in a very linear narrative. You are unable to see, you are unable to learn much from the past on your own, and you are probably unable to learn much from the mistakes of the present as well. |
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Dr. Barbara Holmes, in her groundbreaking book Race and the Cosmos, writes (pp. 28-29): We can now admit in retrospect that Western cultures shared a profound naiveté about liberation. The path toward an egalatarian society seemed linear and goals were deemed to be determinate and reachable. Yet, deterministic models of freedom created mirages of confusion that lured the unwary. The idea of liberation as a definitive "overcoming" enticed a generation with phantom promises of "progress." ... I am suggesting that we view issues of race and liberation from the perspective of the cosmos, and that we begin to incorporate the languages of science into our discussion of liberation. This is a reasonable choice, given the reality that the universe is an integral aspect of any human endeavor, even when it is a taken-for-granted backdrop for our activities. I am challenging all justice seekers to awaken to the vibrant and mysterious worlds of quantum physics and cosmology. Recent discoveries on cosmic and quantum levels are as dramatic as the realization that the sun does not rotate around the earth. All of the narratives that frame reality have been unsettled by the Hubble telescope's unblinking eye and strangely responsive but unseen quantum elements. From cosmic and quantum realms we learn that we are connected to one another in unexpected ways. Theoretical physics suggests that, even when separated, entities that have once been in contact will react to changes in others. The truth is that our images of life in community changed when we realized that the world was not flat. Everything will change again when interhuman dominance is seen as a false construct in the universe. A level playing field is being offered to those who can grasp the concepts as tangible precursors of freedom. As amazing as it may seem, the physical sciences offer creative rhetorical tools that may help us to rethink the dynamics of race relations within the broader context of the cosmos. |
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We can choose to be accountable to people and to principles. Accountable is another word for support; being accountable means to support people and to support principles or values knowing that we need to hold the inevitable tensions that occur. Our current culture prioritizes profit over people; we vision a world where people and all living beings come first, where we honor the idea of seven generation thinking and the interdependence of all with all. We honor realizing that in the short term people need jobs and housing and health care and sometimes, in order to pay the bills, we have to work for corporations or institutions that are perpetuating the devastation of humans and animals and plants and air and water and sky. Nonetheless we do all in our power to maintain our connection to each other and to the trees and to spirit and to all that nurtures our ability to thrive together. We practice over and over again so that we grow our ability to prioritize each other rather than power or profit.
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White Supremacy Culture | Offered by Tema Okun
first published 2021 | last update 8.2023 |