Can We Survive Ourselves?

"Animates", bronze.

Increasingly I see civilization as pointed in an ultimately suicidal direction, not so much in orientation as in blind purpose.  Our relentless pursuit of material progress at the cost of all else will drive us right off a cliff!  We have been seeing evidence of this for years, but while the last several months should give us pause, like the proverbial boiling frog it doesn't seem to.

A year on, Japan's tsunami seems just another in a series of worsening similar crises where our hubris appears to emerge remarkably unscathed as we all–except for the Japanese, who have actually embraced conservation as a result– return as rapidly as possible to what we were doing before: stripping Nature it of its immediate energy as fast as we can. In fact the lack of a knee-buckling catastrophe that would cause a real re-evaluation– like a Japan-sized crisis in the most powerful nation on earth– only serves to underline this hubris and guarantee the spectacle of our coming fall. (I don't mean to minimize the great awakening toward the environment, but in comparison to the increasing dangers it seems retrograde.)

I'm not being facetious in saying that ART will heal the world.  Illuminated by Matthew Fox's remarkably clear 30-year-old vision Original Blessing I can safely say he and the many he follows (like Jesus) were right: it is human imagination that will lead us into the possible. We are drugged with the mind-numbing pursuit of material "progress", which turns up empty of meaning! Our hope is to let our imaginations run wild... And then take them seriously! We are far more capable than we let on!