The Anthroponomy Project ~ presentation to Creative Mornings, Cleveland (2016)

fritzbooks:

* Cleveland should become the first node in the Anthroponomy Project ~ a planetary project for humankind to become self-regulating, for humankind’s effects to not undermine its values.

* We are in the Age of the Anthropocene, but we should think of ourselves as in the Age of Anthroponomy.  The Anthropocene is a hyperobject.  The Age of Anthroponomy is a human-sized hope.

* The Anthropocene was coined by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2002 to signal the geological age in which Earth has been shaped by the human.  As Dipesh Chakrabarty wrote a few years later, human history has become a geological force.

* You should check out Neil Brenner’s Planetary Urbanization Project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design if you want to visualize the Anthropocene. 

* Morality is the core part of ethics.  Ethics is focused on living life well, living the good life.  Morality is focused on being right with people and all beings that deserve our respect.  It is interpersonal, whereas ethics more broadly is focused on self-realization.  The Anthropocene poses both ethical and moral challenges, but the moral challenge is the main one.

* Our planetary activity is undermining the three common human core values found across religions, cultures and in the United Nations human rights traditions: 

( a ) Humanity for our fellow humans:  the Anthropocene endangers vulnerable people globally.

( b ) Generosity toward our future generations:  the Anthropocene is deeply presentist, i.e., biased against the future.  It is giving to the future a destabilized and health-difficult planet with diminishing biotic quality.

( c ) Mindfulness and appreciation of the world of life:  the Anthropocene is widely regarded as risking a sixth mass extinction since life began on Earth.

* So our aggregate effects as humankind are undermining our core human moral values.  This is a kind of deep unfreedom, or heteronomy.  It can only be treated through anthroponomy.

* The ethical upshot is that we need to work to make humankind as a whole self-regulating, i.e. organized so that its effects do not undermine its values.

* How can we do this?  Some answers:

( 1 ) We have to begin to see political responsibility for our institutions as a feature of human decency.  If any of us who are aware and able are not working in some capacity to change or to support change of the institutions that are currently limiting us from anthroponomy, then we are being bad people.  Decent people support and promote anthroponomy.

( 2 ) We have to learn to think like a planet.  Aldo Leopold said that we should think like a mountain.  His time has been superceded:  we need to think like a planet now.

( 3 ) On that note, we have to begin to model vast time scales so that we can see them.  A good example of this is the Museum of the Earth in Trumansberg, N.Y, near Ithaca.

( 4 ) At the same time, we have to reshape our lives to resist the intrinsic atomization and antagonism of contemporary capitalism.  A good way to do this is through spiritual exercise, or what the ancient philosophers called askesis (the root of our word “ascetics”).

* Let me end by returning to the beginning of the geohistory of self-consciousness.  The ancient Milesians and Eleatics – working around what is now Greece, Italy, and Turkey some three thousand years ago – began to realize that thinking like a cosmos is the beginning of wisdom.  In various ways, they understood how “thought thinks the One.”

* A little less than a thousand years later, but almost two thousands years ago from us, the Roman philosopher Plotinus developed a series of meditative and contemplative practices to rise above ourselves and even our often debilitating or neurotic self-awareness to see the way that we are One, and how everything is One.  Of course Buddhism and Taoism have also done similar things.  If we are to attain a daily mindfulness of each of our duties to produce anthroponomy, then it will help to be as free of selfishness and neurosis as we can and to keep our mind on the planet and our oneness with all people present, past and future.

* After all, the Anthropocene is overwhelming, and Anthroponomy is a task for a planet over many hundreds of years, like building a cathedral. We will need emotional stability and a source of humanity in between.

Friends in Dubai, 10 years ago, behind Emirates Towers