Sunday talk blog: The teddy bear effect

"Why aren’t we, as individuals, clamoring for an end to
the Darfur catastrophe? Why aren’t we insisting on hydrogen fuel
technology? If we all agree that these things are needful, and if
that’s all it takes to convince our leaders to act, what’s holding
things up?"

Well — we don’t all agree.

You brought up Ken Wilber’s concept of the "telos of
evolution." That concept, simply stated, says: Each stage
of evolution solves the problems of the previous stage, but in
doing so it creates a new set of problems. So the telos, or end
of one set of problems, simply gives birth to another telos –
another set of problems.

And this is what we’re experiencing right here, and right
now. We have people on this planet functioning at a very
primitive and primal level, and we have people functioning at
such a high level that even their DNA is slightly different.

The telos we’re currently involved in requires that we deal with
this paralyzing disparity in human evolution. Fully half of the
American population either doesn’t believe in global warming,
doesn’t believe that it’s as big of a problem as the scientific
community says it is, or are narcissistic enough to cling to
their SUVs anyway. Turn to world events: Global poverty, AIDS,
cival wars, the list goes on, and you get antipathy by the same
fifty percent. And while the European population may be more
concerned about global warming and other environmental problems
than Americans are, where world events are concerned, they’re on
a par. Move to the second and third world, where communism, war
lords and drug lords, and terrorist fanatics reign supreme, and
the numbers climb precipitously.

So therein lies the short answer to your question: There is no
agreement. In fact, we’re a world divided, and that is mirrored
in the political landscapes from city hall all the way up to the
world’s governing bodies.

The good news is, those who are more evolved are more
than capable of addressing all of these issues. Not by fighting
(that’s the "mean green meme" way), but by engaging in
the politics of compassion. By addressing the fears of their
lesser evolved fellow humans, and thereby closing the gap, as
much as possible, between the disparate levels of
consciousness. Just as we don’t take the teddy bear away from
our children until they’re ready to let it go, we can’t ask
those clinging to their issue oriented teddy bears to give them
up. What we can do, is love them and keep their teddy
bear clean for them, for as long as they need it.

In practial terms, that means we can’t ask the world to give up
its love for oil and cars and all the things oil provides. But
what we can do is make sure the damage caused by drilling
for oil is closly monitored and kept to a minimum, while we work
to make clean fuel technologies a priority. While we can’t ask
agra-business to give up its GMO program, we can work to
encourage more honest research into GMO impacts on the
environment. We can improve the viability of
non-GMO/non-patented crops in poor countries. We can continue to
improve sustainable agricultural techniques and export those
techniques around the world. The possibilities are nearly
endless, which makes the future look pretty bright.

Metaphors For Life’s website