Choosing Life. John B. Cobb, Jr.

in my own way, make a constructive difference in the world. Hoping to hear from you.

      Or, to be more honest, I know you’re hoping to hear from me.

      Deborah

      This book is for the Deborahs of the world. We are among them and perhaps you are, too. Like Deborah you may feel distressed and depressed about the future of the world. We feel this way, too. Nevertheless, you may carry a hidden hope for life that you can’t quite escape. It is a hope for the flourishing of life and its well-being. You hope for the well-being of your own life and the lives of your friends and family. You hope for the well-being of other people whom you don’t know, and who may live in distant parts of the world or close by. You hope for the well-being of the more than human world: the animals and plants, hills and rivers, trees and stars. No matter how dark the world can be and seem, there lies within us the flickering of a dream to be happy with others, such that our happiness and theirs are intertwined. It is a hope for what Martin Luther King, Jr. called beloved community. We call it the compassionate community.

      This hope has a very personal side. As Deborah put it: “I am a part of life, too.” And it simultaneously rooted in a desire to live in truly compassionate communities that are creative, kind, participatory, inclusive, diverse, inclusive, humane to animals, good for the earth, and spiritually satisfying, with no one left behind.

      We believe that the building of these communities in local settings is part of what Thomas Berry calls the great work of our time. It is “great” because it is important and necessary; it is “great” because it is creative and satisfying; it is “great” because it is more than us but beckons us from within the depths of our spiritual genes. What beckons us? It is something difficult to name but natural to feel. Call it “Life” or “God” or “Love” or “Beauty.” Let there be many names for it and also, when silence is best, no name at all. Named or unnamed, it is something that is on the side of life and that needs our cooperation for its fulfillment. As Deborah says, it hopes to hear from us.

      Deborah might think that, because she is a college student, she cannot yet enter into the great work, but this is not true. Education at its best is for the whole person, not simply for succeeding in the marketplace or developing research skills that will never be used. Education in the arts and sciences can play a role in the building of these communities. On the one hand compassionate communities have objective qualities that can be understood with help from the social and natural sciences. They consist of physical realities – streets and buildings, living spaces and commercial spaces, rivers and forests — that can be seen with the eyes, touched with the hands, and measured. But these communities also partake of forms of relatedness, qualities of heart and mind, that are best communicated through the arts and humanities: attention, compassion, connection, curiosity, devotion, gratitude, hospitality, imagination, wonder, imagination, playfulness, silence, and a sense of mystery, for example. In this book we speak of these forms of relatedness as spirituality. A compassionate community needs the objective and the subjective, the scientific and the humanistic, the practical and the spiritual, gathered into the unity of a general cultural ethos that is enjoyed by all, especially those who might otherwise be left out. Communities of this sort are the building blocks of what we call Ecological Civilization.

      Ecological Civilization is our name for a kind of civilization that is grounded in respect and care for the community of life, with special care for the vulnerable. We do not use the word ecological to name environmental problems alone. We use it:

       to evoke a sense of integral ecology that hears and respond to two cries simultaneously: the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor;

       to evoke an intuition that we are small but included in a creative web of mutual becoming filled with countless forms of life, all of which have their value and beauty, and

       to suggest that there is something like life or vibrant energy within the whole of the physical world, which means, in the words of the philosopher Whitehead, that “nature is alive.”

      We hope that you can hear these three meanings in our use of the word ecology: integral ecology, mutual becoming, and the aliveness of nature. An Ecological Civilization is a civilization in which the three ideas just named are part of the cultural atmosphere of the society as a whole, and in which they inform the politics, economics, urban design, rural life, infrastructure, and feeling tone of the society as a whole.

      Ecological Civilization can be embodied in many different settings and partake of many different cultural flavors: African, East Asian, South Asian, North American, South American, European, and more. It is a needed alternative to the kind of civilization we know throughout the world today. Some call it “modern” civilization; it might also be called “un-ecological” or, perhaps better, “dying civilization.”

      Truth be told, most of us live in a dying civilization grounded in the opposite of the three ideas named above. It is spread by the worst aspects of global capitalism and the shallowness of consumer culture, which is the ‘religion’ of capitalism. It is premised on the ideas:

       that human problems and environmental problems can be understood and solved separately, and that some human beings don’t really matter at all.

       that humans are skin-encapsulated individuals who are isolated from one another and who are apart from, not a part of, the larger web of life.

       that the more-than-human world – the hills and rivers, the trees and stars – is but a lifeless machine consisting of materials to be used and abused for human consumption.

      Part of the great work of our time – especially among philosophers and artists, scientists and theologians — is to critique these three ideas and to help all of us enter into an outlook on life that affirms integral ecology, mutual becoming, and the aliveness of nature.

      But of course we are not all philosophers, artists, or theologians. The great work can be undertaken in many other ways, and we naturally undertake the work from different walks of life. Waitresses and clerks, teenagers and the senior citizens, Baptists and Buddhists — our strength lies in our diversity. Our shared hope is that communities of this kind can emerge all over the world, each with its own cultural flavor. And it is that the world itself might grow into a community of communities of communities in which we respond to Life’s calling. Deborah’s hope is our own. We write this book to fan the fires of hope.