LIVING FOR CHANGE

Beyond Materialism and Scientific Rationalism

By Grace Lee Boggs

Michigan Citizen, Dec. 2-8, 2007

All over the world local groups are struggling, as we are in Detroit, to keep our communities, our environment and our humanity from being destroyed by corporate globalization. One estimate, by Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest ( Viking, 2007) is that, world-wide, there may be as many as half a million of these self-healing civic groups, mostly small and barely visible.

Many of these groups are inspired by a philosophy which replaces the scientific and reductive rationalism of 17th century western male philosophers (like Descartes and Bacon) with the ways of knowing of Indigenous Peoples (which includes the perceptions of trees and animals), and /or Women’s ways of knowing, based on intimate connections with Nature and on healing and caring which were part of European village culture prior to the 16th and 17th century witchhunts.

Modern science helps us to recognize the movement-building potential of these small groups. As Margaret Wheatley explains in Leadership and the New Science (Berrett-Koehler. 1999):

“From a Newtonian perspective our efforts often seem too small, and we doubt that our actions will contribute incrementally to large-scale change…

“But a quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently.

“Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system … We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. I have learned that in this exquisitely connected world, it’s never a question of ‘critical mass.’ It’s always about critical connections.”

After the splitting of the atom led to the atom bomb and the imminence of nuclear war, Einstein warned that "We will not solve the problems of the world, from the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." “Technological progress,” he said, “is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.”

Two months before Einstein died in 1955, he signed the Potsdam Manifesto, drafted by the world-famous British philosopher and peace activist, Bertrand Russell.

Recently, at Oregon State University, I learned from a German scholar, Rudi Nussbaum, that in 2005, the 50th anniversary of the Einstein-Russell Manifesto, an updated version, emphasizing the new, more empathic, ways of thinking implicit in quantum physics, was drafted by Alternative Nobel Prize Winner Prof Hans-Peter Duerr and signed by over 130 scientists and distinguished personalities from around the world.

”Quantum physics,” according to the 2005 Manifesto, “challenges us to emancipate our thinking from rigid structures so that flexible relationships can take their place. It becomes possible to loosen and gently dissolve the monostructural, centralistic constructions, forms of expression preferred by the materialistic/mechanistic world view.

“The new way of thinking merges the fullness of our perceptual abilities and mental movements. Conscious and unconscious motives for human thinking and action are equally acknowledged… A new evolutionary level is emerging in which a complex, unfragmented perception, is the foundation of our thinking, feeling, and acting.

“…Teachers and spiritual leaders are not the only ones who show us paths. We all have insights with the capability to remind each other of the potential inherent in us.

‘We have to abandon narrowed and mechanistic strategy patterns, reductions, and averaging cultures and people of the earth. Dialogue and exchange must and can be installed in all layers of life,...

“…If we continue to tilt our common playing field of life by unrestrainedly striving for power, so that the majority of humankind and a great part of all living creatures are slipping off, our problems will grow into a catastrophe.

“But the ground on which a new, sustainable organismic cultural variety grows is well prepared. A new and yet familiar image of humankind is emerging, originating from empathic people. We must create new knowledge and act in such a way that liveliness increases and diversity flourishes.

“We can trust that this power is active in us. For omni-connectedness, which we can also call love and from which life springs, is fundamentally inherent in us and in everything else.”

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