More Than Human

The Olympics is a spectacle promoting a lot of proud nationalism and obsession with winning. We might justify that as a harmless expression of instinctive competitiveness, which we once needed to prevent being eaten. 

Fine, but in a friendlier world, we need to shift attention away from who's the better predator to what we have in common. We need to get over ourselves and pay attention to our interdependence with everything that exists. 

If that all-inclusive reality is God, and if our metaphysics places everybody and everything on God's team, then everybody and everything is both winner and loser. In other words, it's not a game.

Nevertheless, we bring our vestigial instincts with us, and we want God to be on our side in the contest. As a result, our metaphysics is human-biased, tribal, egocentric. We won't be satisfied with a reality that leaves us needy losers. So we imagine ourselves (our tribe, our nation, humanity) as God's team. We're going to win and the 'others' are not. Too bad about the bees and birds.

Now get real (know God).

Go back far enough and we are distant cousins of bees and birds and all of the other species, even turnips. 

Life on earth has been evolving and diversifying for more than four billion years. Maybe 99% of species that ever existed on earth have gone extinct. Perhaps 8 million remain. They come and they go, and our turn to go is coming.

We would like to think we are different, that we can thrive indefinitely because God (reality) made us clever. The other species are just food or pets or pests or unimportant. We have invented a metaphysics that is good for humans without much regard for more-than-human life and the physical world we inhabit.

To be real, sooner or later there will be an end to humanity, either because we have messed up the planet, or a virus mutates faster than vaccines can keep up, or warring nations nuke everything, or the sun has run out of hydrogen. We share with other species unavoidable impermanence.

Yet we are a bit different than the others. We have more brain than bees and birds and turnips. We can accumulate knowledge and collaborate like a superorganism with billions of brains. We can use our knowledge to intentionally alter reality so we last a bit longer, assuming we get our metaphysics right. 

We haven't been getting it right.

Getting it right means respecting all things living and nonliving, and valuing the future more than cheap fuel and economic growth in the present. The old metaphysics lets us take what we can get and defer the consequences long enough that it won't matter, leaving the details up to God who has a plan and is taking care of things for us so we can win. 

Why would God (reality) be so obliging when we are busy messing things up?

Eventually, whatever we do, it determines how well we live and how long we survive. We are the intentional part of reality.

A new metaphysics will be more-than-human, recognizing the interdependence of all species and the physical world, a fragile, metastable global ecosystem continually evolving.

A new metaphysics ? 

Well, not so new. Forgotten. "Hoarding won't save us. All flourishing is mutual." This is precolonial indigenous metaphysics about more-than-human reality sustained by respect, restraint, reciprocity and generosity. It has been reimagined by Robin Wall Kimmerer in her essay, "The Serviceberry, an economy of abundance". (link in footnote)

Reality (God) evolves as everything participates in it. Metaphysics needs to keep up.

It's about more than people and the things we love.
God (reality) isn't going to fix things just for us.
We are the part of reality that cares.
If we don't care, God really doesn't care.
We are the part of reality that is intentional.
Since we're so smart, we could intentionally stop messing things up so we last a bit longer.

I'm sure I'm missing something. What's next?

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The Serviceberry, an economy of abundance: Robin Wall Kimmerer, (Emergence Magazine).

There Is No Clean Way To Be Alive: Jessica Boehme, Human-ing