#8 A Hot Mess: Towards an Ecological Civilisation

Jeremy Lent argues that scientific findings in evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience and complexity theory offer us an alternative lens through which to view the world and our place within it.

To mark another year of record-breaking climatic events, Byline Supplement is republishing its exclusive series of articles from the August 2022 edition of Byline Times. For the latest, subscribe here

One of the most striking aspects of the meta-crisis civilisation faces is the chasm between the ­magnitude of the looming threats and the incremental ‘solutions’ offered by ­mainstream narratives.

The multiple problems confronting us are symptoms of an even more ­profound problem: the underlying structure of a global economic and political system driving our civilisation toward a precipice.

Think of our economic and political set-up as a faulty operating system with multiple bugs. Each time the software engineers fix a bug, it complicates the code, inevitably leading to a new set of bugs requiring even more heroic workarounds. Ultimately, it becomes clear that the problem isn’t just the software – a new operating system is required.

In human culture, there is an underlying worldview – assumptions about how the world works, what’s valuable and what’s possible. It often remains unstated and unquestioned, but is deeply felt and implicitly guides the individual and ­collective choices we make.

Our dominant worldview arose from a unique set of values that emerged in early modern Europe along with the Scientific Revolution, and are at odds with core values held by virtually every other culture in history. This worldview sees humans as selfish and competitive, and essentially separate from nature, which is nothing more than a resource to be exploited. These are serious ­misconceptions that have led us down an accelerating path to disaster.

There is, however, an alternative lens through which to see the world – one that emerges from modern scientific findings in evolutionary biology, ­cognitive­ neuroscience and complexity theory. This worldview is one of deep interconnectedness, which sees humans as ­integrally embedded in the web of life rather than separate from it, and recognises that what distinguishes humanity as a species is not selfishness but our instinct to cooperate even with those who are not kin.

This worldview offers the possibility for a new era that could be defined not merely by political or economic systems, but by a transformation in how we make sense of the world and our predominant values. An ecological civilisation.

In contrast to our current civilisation – which is based on extraction, exploitation and wealth-accumulation – an ecological civilisation would aim to create the conditions for all humans to flourish as part of a thriving Earth. Our economy, politics and mainstream culture would be transformed, leading to different values, goals and collective behaviour.

A fundamental idea underlying an ­ecological civilisation is to use nature’s own proven design principles to reimagine the basis of our civilisation. For example, while living systems are ­characterised by both competition and ­cooperation, the major evolutionary ­transitions were all the results of dramatic increases in cooperation.

The key to the effective functioning of all ecosystems is mutually beneficial symbiosis: a relationship between two parties where each contributes something the other lacks, and both gain as a result. In human society, symbiosis translates into foundational principles of fairness and justice, ensuring that the efforts and skills people contribute to society are rewarded equitably. Relationships between workers and employers, producers and consumers, humans and animals, would thus be based on each party gaining in value rather than one group exploiting the other.

In place of vast homogenised ­monocrops, food would be grown based on principles of regenerative ­agriculture. Manufacturing would ­prioritise circular flows with efficient reuse of waste products built into ­processes from the outset. Corporations would be restructured to require a triple bottom line including not just profit, but people and the planet. The driving principle of technology would shift from ­exploiting nature to investigating how to tend nature.

Waves of young people are ­looking for a new worldview—one that makes sense of the current unravelling, which offers them a future they can believe in. People who lived through the Industrial Revolution had no name for the changes they were undergoing – it was a century before it received its title. Perhaps the journey to an ecological civilisation is already ­underway – but we can’t see it yet because we’re in the middle of it.

Jeremy Lent is the author of the award-winning books The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning and The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe. He is the founder of the Deep Transformation Network.