The Renaissance, meaning 'rebirth' in French, was an era in European history during the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by attempts to revive and surpass the ideas and accomplishments of classical Greek antiquity. It emerged after the Black Death, as movements often do following significant societal disruptions. For the Greeks, nature involved analyzing laws universally derived from observing the natural world and applying them within the political realm, the polis. Thus, society was a concept defined by nature.
"He is richest who is content with the least,
for content is the wealth of nature."
–Socrates
The American Renaissance is a call to revive the memory of the best aspects of our Greco-Roman roots in politics, law, philosophy, science, literature, ethics, art, and architecture—as well as the wisdom of indigenous cultures which have cultivated subsistent, sustainable practices for eons. To amend the American "manifest destiny" to include the ancestral knowledge of the 574 Indian tribes of North America, the South American tribes like the Inca and Aztec, Mapuche, Guaraní, and Yanomami. The Polynesian tribes such as the Māori, Samoans, Tahitians, Tongans, Cook Islanders, Hawaiians, Niueans, and Marquesans, and all other members of our species who have successfully lived in harmony with their lands, enjoying the variety of life forms within the natural environments of which they are intimately intertwined. By reconsidering the roles of student and teacher of the colonized and colonizer, we can balance our technology and ecology for the benifit of all.
"I do not think the measure of a civilization is how tall its buildings of concrete are, but rather how well its people have learned to relate to their environment and fellow man."
- Sun Bear, Chippewa
American Exceptionalism has failed, at least in terms of its origin. What started as a march across the Great Plains toward progress and prosperity has expanded to a deviation toward global annihilation. For a species to build an alternative process for their evolution based on extraction for exponential growth on a planet with finite resources is exceptionally ironic, given the fact that nothing else in nature operates in the same way. In no uncertain terms, capitalism has worked splendidly for those who have embraced it without question, but a society with billionaires is a testament—not of success—but of failure. To believe in the trickling-down of that which has been consolidated is a fallacy of the very ideology. The failure of capitalism as a means to provide for the collective needs of humanity within the laws of ecology is the undeniable reality of our time. A truth once universally accepted will create the will necessary to return us and our environments to a more natural process of evolution. To again place our trust in observation of the natural world and the evaluation of anthropological needs to determine what technology and industry are beneficial and what are detrimental to both humanity and ecology.
Most of us have no choice but to live our lives, willfully or not, participating in the system we are born into. We are taught from birth what is expected of us within a culture dependent upon corporations for food, housing, travel, entertainment, and employment. We are also taught that personal wealth is the metric by which to judge and be judged. As a result, we now live in a world created in pursuit of projects once envisioned to extract the maximum profit without a deep evaluation of anthropological relevance and ecological consequences. The glaring elephant in the room is the automotive industry and its infrastructure—created on behalf of the fossil fuel industry.
At this point, it is hard to envision a world without cars (and various other petroleum-based products), but had the industrialists created a world based on anthropological needs and ecological law, our communities would look much different. We would all be housed in communities inspired by past cultures that promote equality, inclusion, and autonomy. We would be living in harmony with nature within an infrastructure inspired by the wisdom that creates life and not be living through a mass extinction. Now, more than ever, we have all the tools and knowledge to heal the world they wittingly continue to destroy, but change requires our collective demand for an alternative. We can no longer allow the fossil fuel industry to continue to extract and release Earth's 3.8 billion years of stored carbon back into the atmosphere. We can no longer afford to have the money we pay them—for the products to which they have bound us—be used to gain political favor from those in government willing to perpetuate the false narrative of the need for their product.
America is following a familiar process of the rise and fall of countless empires. However, the corporate consolidation of wealth in 21st-century capitalism has created an unprecedented scenario where a demagogue is able to pursue his delusions of grandeur and world domination through the promise of extracting even more wealth for the billionaires who financed his campaign. Men with excessive egos, lifestyles, ambition, and unquestioning devotion to the human-centric system that has enriched them. Men who seek to attain tax dollars to pursue childhood fantasies of space travel, but whose abilities to colonizing life on another planet are made apparent by their disregard for the one that spawned them.
Clearly, we have reached a point in our industrial experiment with generations so removed from natural environments that the populace disregards political choices working to amend what has been destroyed in favor of those promoting the same doctrine that is, without doubt, leading us toward an inevitable demise. We should be wary of those raised in environments degraded by industry who admire the men who built the cage that confines them—men who were never taken camping as children, slept under the stars, or spent multiple days backpacking in the wild places that awaken the senses lying dormant within their genome, waiting to make them feel alive, humble, and a part of something bigger than themselves.
"Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect."
- Chief Seattle, Duwamish
Humanity stands at a fork in the road. We must decide if we wish to venture down the path that will lead us back to communities recognized by our humanity, or continue our servitude to corporate board members and stockholders. The power they have acquired through a system built on the invention of false needs and addiction is beginning to unravel. They know this and are desperately trying to maintain the narrative of their proclaimed authority, even against all signs that their system is a catastrophic failure. Given what we now know to be the consequence of a culture built on the conquest of others for the extraction of their labor and resources, it is time to accept the reality that an unsustainable culture has no justifiable claim of supremacy. A culture based on an ideology of dominion over all life and resources and a societal model built on exponential growth has but one outcome—oblivion.
Change is scary, but less so with an understanding of what will be gained. We can revive our standard of living by focusing our American ingenuity on a return to our fundamental human need for participation in the creation and maintenance of autonomous communities where we work directly with and for the people with whom we share our lives. The systematic breakdown of community and ecology brought about by the belief in the American manifest destiny serves as a lesson in humility, but we can learn from what we got wrong. We can pull from the ashes of the Industrial Revolution the combined knowledge of our technological and industrial successes and failures to create village structures that take into consideration the anthropological requirements the titans of industry of the past neglected to consider, and the importance of which the techno-industry often disregards today. By letting go of insidious products and services for corporate profit, we can again focus our attention on convivial communities and a destiny manifested by nature.
"No rain, no rainbows"
- Hawaiian proverb
Comments