American Distance

I began my higher education at Rockland Community College where I was lucky to come into contact with some really inspiring faculty who worked for the honor's program. Dr. Beisel had a mantra that he heaped on to students constantly: "test your untested assumptions."

Crisis has a way of testing our untested assumptions.

The American way of life is profoundly precarious. It operates heavily on many untested assumptions both ideological and material. As time passes without any serious test, the assumptions solidify, the molten mass hardens into what seems like truth or, even more dubiously, reality. But, invariably, the deeper reality of impermanence has a way of sneaking back in. We seem to pray that we can live our lives out until it comes to claim us individually, dodging what it would mean if it came for the soggy foundation on which we build everything else.

The immediacy of our day to day creates a kind of tunnel vision beyond which lie all kinds of realities we ignore.We ignore other human realities like poverty, hunger, inhumane labor, abuse, violence, and all kinds of depravity. And behind the human realities are the planetary realities that unfold: a whale turns over in the depths of a dark ocean, an owl blinks under a starry sky, arctic ice groans and snaps. These realities are so alien to most in spite of sharing the same physical plane as our day to day. And of course, beyond still is the inconceivable reality that lies outside this planet in the unending cosmic corridors where even the assumptions we consider to be most untestable start to bend and distort.

We live on a remarkably thin cultural membrane that is stretched across the the earth. We skate across it with suspended disbelief. The elaborate stories of our lives and our personhoods, the towering and teetering conceptions of our identities are built on fundamentally untested assumptions that knit together this cultural membrane that is stretched over the raw and wild reality of this planet.

We have lived inside a distance for a very long time.

"We must return to first premises" - Terence McKenna

We are distant from this fundamental wilderness. I don't just simply mean "nature," but all primary conditions connected to our survival. The wilderness of reality outside anthropocentric cultural narratives.

It's not hard to understand how we are distant from our own survival. Our food and warmth and clothing and health are delivered to us via anonymous externalities. But the bigger picture is that we have been distant from each other for generations: socially but really spiritually The cultural trajectory for Americans over the course of many decades has been a collapse inward, away from public space, shared experience, and common goals. Suburban isolation and sprawl, consumption over community, dead lifeless space devoted only to commerce, constantly externalizing value, sending it out of communities to centralized headquarters, and then once physical public spaces were gone, the division of the inner spaces began. The retreat from collective shared cultural taste; from broadcast national experiences to narrowcast self directed music streams and podcast microaudiences.

It's a cocoon that the membrane allows for.

Maybe ideas become endangered like species. Underneath the cultural membrane, ecosystems are collapsing. Species are vanishing. Balance is disturbed by our distance and the center cannot hold. Similarly, in our cocoons our distance from each other has consequences. We lose ideals the way we lose species. We lose elements of our humanity.

There is no more endangered idea than interdependence. There is no more severe hallucination and delusion than to ignore interdependence. Interdependence is fundamental.

Our society is sick because it is built on a distance from interdependence, a profound and violent ignorance of and resistance to interdependence. Interdependence is primary. It exists beneath the membrane. From the primary law of interdependence comes the wilderness that we have distanced ourselves from, the ecosystems that we have sent towards collapse. From interdependence between each other comes the better angels of our nature, the higher order social ideals, the fundamentals of civilization, the ideals that represent the fundamental nature of humanity: equity, justice, compassion, mutual aid, cooperation.

So many of the institutions we live by are in no way capable of or even meant for nurturing, fostering, proliferating interdependence. We are on our own... but the trick is we are on our own together. This is the great oxymoronic ourobourous nature of american politics. We look to political structures to foster and deliver humane ideals like  justice, equity, compassion... but they are structures so fundamentally divorced from the root of all those blossoms: interdependence. Still, the recognition of interdependence doesn't require permission or law or bill or vote or decree. It's a truth lying in wait that only requires acceptance. It's a question being asked quietly in the background of everything all the time.

"There's only one instant, and it's right now, and it's eternity. And it's an instant in which God is posing a question, and that question is basically, 'Do you want to be one with eternity? Do you want to be in heaven?' And we're all saying, 'No thank you. Not just yet.' And so time is actually just this constant saying 'No' to God's invitation" - Waking Life

"often, in light, on the open hills—

you can pass an antelope and not know

and look back, and then—even before you see—

there is something wrong about the grass.

And then you see.

That’s the way everything in the world is waiting."

-William Stafford

Crisis has a way of testing untested assumptions. We have a strange opportunity before us greater and more profound than any election. It's an opportunity to cast aside all false narratives, narratives of ego and identity, narratives of hatred and division, any and all narratives that deny interdependence. We have the opportunity to step outside the membrionic suspended animation world of american culture and touch our feet firmly on the ground of the primary wilderness of interdependence. This requires a return to physical immediate action. It requires us to actively and interdependently reconstitute social and communal fabrics based on equity, justice, compassion, mutual aide, and cooperation. We must build structures ourselves out of the clay and mortar of interdependence: community necessities, resources, funds, and relief must come together. We must physically cross the lines and boundaries drawn by our cocoons and reenter the primal space of interdependence and solidarity.

We must if we want to remain human.

If we want to rescue this crisis from the darkest outcome.

If we want redemption.