Climate change is an effect of human behavior. How do we address the cause, without delving deeply into what it is to be human? Simply protesting the effect is a bandaid over cancer.
As these mobile, intentional beings, we are linear and goal oriented, while nature is cyclical and reciprocal. We think of good and bad as some cosmic dual between the forces of righteousness and evil, but they are the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of life.
Consequently we are quickly and easily polarized, rather than seeing the infinite complexities weighing on our every action. While this spontaneity might be a useful reaction to immediate dangers, the function of cognition is not to react, but to reflect, in order that our actions are informed.
Being mobile, we have a sequential process of perception, in order to navigate, then tell stories to one another and build civilizations out of the collected knowledge, so we think life is some narrative arc, with a pot of figurative, or literal gold at the end. Yet we are more like nodes, building up and breaking down in some larger network.
Given this sequential perception and narrative based culture, we think of time as the point of the present, moving past to future, but it is change turning future to past. Potential, actual, residual. There is no physical dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it. Causality and conservation of energy.
So time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but no one refers to them as the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and, yes, environment. Not the sequence of thought.
The fundamental reason that different clocks can run at different rates is simply because they are separate actions. Think frequencies, or metabolism. No space travel required.
Yet because much of human history is about getting everyone following the same stories, playing by the same rules, dancing to the same tunes, using the same measures, trading in the same currencies, following the same clocks, we assume there must be some universal time, but there is rabbit time, turtle time, tree time, etc.
When we make everyone play the same game, for the same goals, it becomes a race and everyone is on rabbit time. Yet the turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died.
The reason that life manges to be so complex and dense, is because everything doesn’t all play by the same rules and dance to the same tune and fight over the same goals.
Think of reality as a dichotomy of energy and the forms it manifests.
Galaxies are energy radiating out, as mass/form coalesces in.
We have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, along with a nervous system to sort through and further coalesce the information precipitating out.
Society is that dichotomy of organic energies bubbling up, as civil and cultural forms coalesce in. Youth and age, liberal and conservative.
The anarchy of desire, versus the tyranny of judgement. The heart versus the head.
Since we have this linear, good versus bad paradigm, both sides of the dynamic see themselves on the path to that pot of gold, so those going the other way must be fools, or outright evil. Not as sides of a larger situation.
I could go on, but either you start to see the pattern and the point, or you don’t. We are not going to stitch back together what was, but either grow from the lessons to be learned, or repeat the lesson.
