Is The Earth Enough?

Reflections on a New Voicecraft Series

Well?

Voicecraft

is a platform created by

Tim Adalin

which includes a podcast, YouTube channel, and also a private network for organising different dialogue spaces. Voicecraft welcomes authentic voices to dialogue with depth in response to key themes and questions of our time and deep time. You can find out more about this network, or get involved, at the following link:

• Voicecraft

The Voicecraft Podcast & YouTube Channel welcomes authentic voices to dialogue with depth in response to key themes and questions of our time and deep time.

Last month I was invited to contribute to a new dialogue series about humanity and the earth, with the first conversation opening with the question “Is The Earth Enough?”. The series is hosted by

Simon van der Els

, and includes integral theorist and shamanic philosopher

Layman Pascal

, as well as Hegelian-Jungian philosopher and professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies Sean Kelly. You can find the conversation below:

What you will find below are some of the key points that structured my contribution to the discussion:

1. Speculative mystery of the limits of human presence on the earth

   1. Discourse on the relation between humans and the earth often revolves around the question of limits, i.e. what is the earth’s capacity to host a superorganism like humanity, which is unparalleled in life history

   2. This lack of historical parallel opens a mystery about the human-earth relation which intensifies when we think about the human superorganism from the perspective of our inexhaustible drive

   3. Today the contradiction between the limits of the earth and the human superorganism’s inexhaustible drive become reconciled in fantasies of spatial expansion (e.g. colonising Mars, etc.)

   4. Fantasies of human expansion into space (e.g. Star Trek) are paradoxically anti-scientific/anti-Darwinian, in the sense that human biology is not adapted to non-earth environments, and would require transhuman modification

2. The human superorganism from our perspective

   1. When we think about the earth from earth’s perspective as opposed to the human superorganism’s perspective we can easily start to think in terms of metaphors suggesting that we are a disease (e.g. cancer of the planet)

   2. From my perspective it is important to view the situation from the perspective of the human superorganism, with the earth representing a contingent natural background that could have been other

   3. Historically, Western culture’s dominant fantasies about the future relation between earth and our species have been represented internal to Christianity’s “Kingdom of Heaven” and Marxist “World Communism”

   4. What these fantasies share is (1) a focus on the human soul/spirit and social-community, (2) an overcoming of late-stage capitalist relations, as well as (3) their failure in regards to actualisation

3. Structure of our self-appearance

   1. When we focus too much on an evolutionary perspective (the external change of the universe, history of the universe), we can forget to think from the perspective of the transcendental a priori nature of appearances

   2. The way we appear to ourselves on this planet structures the nature of our desire because we appear to ourselves in a state of impotence (e.g. infantile dependence, lack of motor coordination, cognitive development etc.)

   3. The nature of our desire is to become more than what we are, to reconcile the gap between our ideals (e.g. “Kingdom of Heaven” “World Communism”), and the actual material reality (e.g. individual division, tension, war, etc.)

   4. As a large-scale social project we have the challenge of both anchoring our species (family, community), as well as flowering as a species (state-level and supra-national containment), both of which seem broken today

4. Sexual asymmetry between men/women

   1. Today there is a tendency to denigrate and view men as inherently problematic or pathological but this view has yet to reconcile with the nature of sexual difference and its consequences

   2. We might entertain the hypothesis that one of the central differences of the sexes is that women are naturally closer to life, and men are naturally closer to death, which opens up different but complimentary ethical problems

   3. Women who chose to biologically reproduce have a natural invitation into a death that gives life in being de-centered vis-a-vis the child, whereas men need to more artificially manufacture a process of de-centering

   4. The rise of interest in Christianity among young men could be that it invites a process of de-centering in the meditation/reflection on the figure of Christ which could transmute and limit desire towards social care for the other

5. Generational maturation and constipation

   1. In the breakdown of generational connection many young men have lost connection to older father figures leading to problems of transmutation of desire for social purposes (need teachers, elders, leaders to fill this role)

   2. At the same time the older generation (Boomer, Gen X) seems constipated, in many ways blocking the flows of energy in the human super organisms body towards sacrifice for the next generations (Millennials, Gen Z)

   3. The human superorganism has a flow/distribution problem between generations which presents us with an impossibility that needs to be embraced to actualise the immortality of the species drive

   4. In this context we need to rethink metaphysical assumptions: we presuppose a need to overcome impossibility to unleash immortality, when we may need to include impossibility to unleash immortality (our species drive)

6. Political ideal and material

   1. Scientific materialists who recognise the metaphysical limits of their project start to unconsciously build religious systems in big grand systems/narratives which disguises non-thinking in a form of unreflective idealism

   2. The real religious-political problems today do not require new grand systems/narratives as ideals but a recognition that in the ideal the problems of international coordination have already been resolved (e.g. UN)

   3. The problem is that the ideal does not translate to the real or the material, in the sense that social coordination of the human body is mostly only actual on the level of international finance capital

   4. The problem of liberal democracy as the end of the political form and our inability to think a structure beyond liberal democracy represents a strange form of totalitarianism that presents itself to us as freedom

7. From Earth to Noosphere

   1. The earth in-and-for-itself is not enough for the drive of the human superorganism, because we are always forced to confront issues of the self and society (the earth here is just a background context)

   2. Problems of self and society always come back to questions about forgiveness, tragedy, failure, and impossibility which require both theological and political responses or dimensions

   3. Humans created civilisation to escape reduction to pure nature and earth, the question is whether we can engage in a civilisational process that accommodates a genuinely global relation to the human superorganism

   4. Thinking about the earth as a noosphere as a form of global superorganism is a very new problem and mode of thinking, perhaps less than 100 years old, but requires new philosophical attention