Lecture: Handling Humanity’s Insanity. Rethinking our Place in Nature through Classical Chinese Philosophy

Abstract

Handling Humanity’s Insanity
Rethinking our Place in Nature through Classical Chinese Philosophy
Graham Parkes

Why the extreme term ‘insanity’? Because the way that we in the developed countries are currently living is beginning, through its impact on the climate and the biosphere, to render the planet uninhabitable. We know how risky the situation is thanks to the idea of ‘planetary boundaries’ that Earth System scientists have elaborated, but we show no signs of slowing down. This talk examines the roots of this insanity and proposes some ways of handling it.

A large part of the problem is a prevalent idea of who we are as human beings. A right-wing libertarian (neoliberal) ideology has convinced many people that we are basically autonomous individuals in competition with each other, and free to extract from the natural world whatever we need to satisfy our desires for material comfort, as assured by continued economic growth.

Another factor behind our blindness to the severe risks of climate breakdown and the destruction of biosphere integrity is ‘the post-human spectacle’. Our enthusiastic immersion in information technologies and social media tends to reinforce Cartesian ‘indivi-dualism’, keeping us narcotised in a virtual world of ‘representations’ and oblivious to the dangers of our actual situation on planet Earth.

We find more plausible and beneficial understandings of who we are in Indigenous philosophies from numerous cultures, but for pragmatic reasons we do well to draw from corresponding ideas in the ancient Chinese philosophical tradition. (Without enthusiastic cooperation from China it will be impossible to slow global heating and preserve the integrity of the biosphere.)

Based on a cosmology of qi energies (which has parallels in Presocratic thought in Greece) the classical Chinese thinkers regard us not as individuals but as relatives—closely related to other humans (in the case of Confucian thought) and to the myriad other beings on the planet (according to the Daoists). Ideas such as reciprocity (shu) and sympathetic resonance (ganying), the effect on the heart-mind (xin) of over-use of technology, and the vitality (qi) of socalled ‘inanimate’ things can help us think more productively about our precarious situation.

While revising our self-understanding to a saner mode, we can be making much needed changes in our social, political, and economic institutions, which would let us avoid the worst—and live more fully human lives.