Redefining 'Positive': Collapse From Beyond The Human-Centric Perspective (Carolyn Baker)

[Tace]

Carolyn Baker -- Speaking Truth To Power

This article is an excerpt from Carolyn's forthcoming book The Spirituality Of Collapse: Restoring Life On A Dying Planet.

If we do not soon remember ourselves to our sensuous surroundings, if we do not reclaim our solidarity with the other sensibilities that inhabit and constitute those surroundings, then the cost of our human communality may be our common extinction.

--David Abrams, The Spell Of The Sensuous: Perception and Language In A More-Than Human World

Dec. 6, 2007 -- I occasionally receive hate email, but more frequently receive ones like this: "I've just unsubscribed to your email list. Your website is filled with negative stories and articles, and I need to keep a positive attitude and do what I can to make my world better."

How does one describe the tone of such a statement? Angry? Not really. Disappointed? Perhaps. Scared? Probably. But I think that righteous is the word I would use to describe this reader's perspective. By righteous, I mean a false sense of doing or feeling "the right thing", but the problem with a righteous attitude is that it often leads to detachment from reality -- not unlike Barbara Bush's comment that she doesn't want to trouble her "beautiful mind" with statistics about troop or civilian casualties in Iraq. It's all so American/Judeo-Christian-and, of course, Dale Carnegie: keeping a positive attitude so that we never feel badly about what's actually happening.

How unfortunate that someone like me would ask readers to feel the depths of their grief, fear, anger, or despair about the death of the planet and its inhabitants and talk and work with other humans to prepare for collapse! A righteous attitude bypasses those emotions and makes the state of our planet someone else's problem, not my problem. It communicates that one is above emotions and really doesn't want to soil his sanitized psyche with them.

The addiction to a "positive attitude" in the face of the end of the world as we have known it is beyond irrational -- even beyond insane. It's an obsession that could only be cherished by humans; it is, indeed human-centric, as if human beings are the only species that matter and as if the most crucial issue is that those humans are able to feel good about themselves as the world burns.

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[ananda]

1. Right on!

I'm getting so sick of people wearing those rose colored spinning target glasses or going lalala with fingers in ears when you want to discuss something truthfully.

Sue