A new politics requires a new mood, one appropriate for the world we hope to create. It should be a mood of gratitude, joy, and pride, not sadness, fear, and regret. A politics of overcoming will trigger feelings of joy rather than sadness, control rather than fatalism, and gratitude rather than resentment. If we are grateful to be alive, then we must also be grateful that our ancestors overcame. It is thanks to them and the world that made them possible that we live.
Excerpted From Break Through "Belonging and Fulfillment"
A new politics requires a new mood, one appropriate for the world we hope to create. It should be a mood of gratitude, joy, and pride, not sadness, fear, and regret. A politics of overcoming will trigger feelings of joy rather than sadness, control rather than fatalism, and gratitude rather than resentment. If we are grateful to be alive, then we must also be grateful that our ancestors overcame. It is thanks to them and the world that made them possible that we live.
The political theorist Jane Bennett suggests in The Enchantment of Modern Life, "This life provokes moments of joy, and that joy can propel ethics." Bennett's book is a happy deconstruction of the belief that the modern life objectifies and disenchants the world, robbing it of its mystery, ineffability, magic, and connectedness. Bennett insists that the world never lost its capacity to surprise and inspire. She argues for an ethics that begins with a commitment to affirming life in all of its joys and sufferings.
If popular psychological wisdom has it that you have to love yourself before you can love another, my story suggests that you have to love life before you can care about anything. The wager is that, to some small but irreducible extent, one must be enamored with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it in order to be capable of donating some of one's scarce mortal resources to the service of others.
The ethics, and politics, born from joy, mystery, and gratitude of overcoming adversity will be radically different from the ethics born of the sadness of living in a fallen world pervaded by fears of the eco-apocalypse to come. The truth is, there are still ancient redwoods to behold and great rivers to swim in. There is still the Amazon and the Boreal. There are still seven billion wondrous human animals, each one of us capable of making ourselves into something utterly unique. And there is still great wildness abounding inside and outside of ourselves.
YES YES YES! Remarkable post. Apathy is so easy to cave into given the apocalyptic fervor igniting our modern mood. But everything is still here and there is still so much beauty. Disenchantment becomes a selfish pursuit of fear and wishful thinking, as if the world is supposed to be perfect for our own benefit. Instead, we need to see external events not going our way as spiritual or moralistic training. There is still so much to be thankful and enchanted about.
Posted by: Preston at November 25, 2009 8:11 PM