Cultivating A New Worldview For A Better World
How a new worldview, that fills the spiritual void of humanity, is emerging
In last Friday’s issue, I explored the confusion of not knowing what’s good and bad for us that, in my opinion, lies at the root of the many crises we face.
We know that our way of living is destructive, but we do it anyway – from destroying nature to make money, to working a meaningless job to buy status symbols, or doomscrolling through TikTok to relax.
I also made the case that this confusion is caused by a loss of inner diversity and wildness, which, similar to what’s happening in the “external” world, has been increasingly replaced by an inner technosphere and inner domestication or commodification.
We have not only industrialized and commodified most of the planet but also our own bodies and minds.
What’s more, I argued that we have become addicted to it. Which means that any attempt to solve our many interlinked crises, first and foremost, requires a therapeutic type of response.
Humanity needs a rehab! We need a therapy that fills the hole left by our loss of inner diversity and wildness, which we currently fill with a destructive way of living that only further industrializes and commodifies our outer and inner world, consequently feeding the addiction loop.
This framing, I believe, should take center stage when thinking about sustainability, regeneration, diversity, justice, and well-being initiatives.
What follows below is a first attempt to explore some concepts that I think will help us actually use this framing. Let’s get right into it:
Inner Rewilding
The more I dive into the idea of rehabilitating humanity through an inner rewilding (or re-humanization), the more excited I get about it. And that’s mainly because I see a growing amount of research, insights, and ideas coming out that relate to this topic. It feels like we are on the cusp of finally having a much more holistic view of ourselves and the world. All in all, I think there are two main elements that are important to explore here: How We Attend To The World and Our Embeddedness Within Nature.
How We Attend To The World
I just sat on the couch and spent 15 minutes going through Instagram Reels despite knowing that I always feel shit afterwards and that a walk outside would have been a much more enjoyable and healthier break. I wonder: Do I maybe have to lean into a different way of looking at this, if rational reasoning doesn’t really change my behavior?
“The fact that many of the sensory modalities that we use, and other creatures use, are being cut and fragmented now is a crisis on the same level as the crises of chemistry, of pollution, and of species loss. In fact, to speak of them as separate things is a lie, because climate change and species loss and the loss of sensory connection between creatures and sensory diversity are intersecting and tangled with one another. […]
If we’re not paying attention through our own senses, we have disengaged from the primary mode in which every creature since the origin of life has connected to its environment.”
Listening And The Crisis Of Inattention an interview with David G. Haskell
I find it strange that we humans aren’t able to more clearly detect what’s good for us and what isn’t. There is, of course, as I described above, the addictive element to it. But I think there is also another element, and I believe it has to do with our current way of knowing or, rather, our way of being. It feels like we have prioritized a very rational, intellectual, and mechanistic way of looking at the world at the expense of a more embodied, intuitive, or natural way.
“Hunters and trackers learn not only to understand intellectually a bunch of facts about the animal they follow, but to feel their way into the very being of the animal.” Ian McGilchrist
I’ve recently become fascinated by the work of Ian McGilchrist, a neuroscientist and philosopher, who argues that there is something fundamentally wrong in our current, modern times due to the way we attend to the world – this video here gives a great intro to his work. After studying the brain, McGilchrist concludes…
“…that there are two ways of attending to the world: one which seeks to take it apart and to manipulate it and the other which embraces it in its wholeness and connectedness.
These two ways of attending to the world are typical of the left and right [brain] hemispheres respectively. […] The right hemisphere looks at the world holistically, responding to its flow. The left hemisphere looks at the world analytically, seeking to break it down into things that can be manipulated.”
Now, here comes the interesting part – and this is, by the way, from a great little summary of his extremely detailed and expansive work by David McIlroy:
“McGilchrist [argues] that in modernism, the left hemisphere ha[s] triumphed resulting in ‘an excess of consciousness and an over-explicitness in relation to what needs to remain implicit; depersonalisation and alienation from the body and empathic feeling; disruption of context; fragmentation of experience; and the loss of ‘betweenness’.’ […]
In late modernity, we have mistaken the map, the theoretical schema created by the left hemisphere, for the reality of the lived world that our right hemisphere connects us with. The ‘consequences … are far-reaching – indeed devastating.’ Our lives are ‘lived’ under the shadow of the ‘dead hand of mechanism, scientism, and bureaucracy’.”
I think this phenomenon is best illustrated by the discussion about the Age of Average or Sameness that I see increasingly popping up. A piece I’ve shared recently described this in very poetic, sobering words:
“We live in undeniably ugly times. […] Despite more advanced manufacturing and design technologies than have existed in human history, our built environment tends overwhelmingly toward the insubstantial, the flat, and the gray, punctuated here and there by the occasional childish squiggle. This drab sublime unites flat-pack furniture and home electronics, municipal infrastructure and commercial graphic design: an ocean of stuff so homogenous and underthought that the world it has inundated can feel like a digital rendering — of a slightly duller, worse world.”
The problem that I see arising is that we’re kind of stuck in a feedback loop. The monotonous world around us causes inner monotony (and, as McGilchrist would say, more left-hemisphere dominance), which then produces a more monotonous world again. Eventually, this, I think, destroys a more holistic awareness and knowledge about ourselves:
“Even when we notice that self-coercion is happening, it may be difficult to depart from it simply because we don’t know what else to do. […] People operating from a lifelong list of “shoulds” have often completely lost touch with their intrinsic motivation.”
Non-Self-Coercive Productivity by Pamela Hobart
We don’t really know what we want, so we do what “the world” (or someone else) tells us to do, only to then detach ourselves even more from what it is that we want.
McGilchrist ultimately advocates that…
“‘Explicit reasoning needs to be counterbalanced by intuition (the synthesis of experience with unconscious reasoning) and imagination. [R]eality is neither undiscoverable, nor discoverable by the intellect alone, but by the whole embodied being, senses, feeling, intellect and imagination.’
Therefore, in order to find our home in the world, we need to approach the world as something to be embraced rather than manipulated. […] Our fundamental calling is to experience, to enjoy, rather than to analyse, to rejoice in rather than to exhaust.”
Understanding Ian McGilchrist’s Worldview by David McIlroy
Now, McGilchrist’s work is quite complex and intellectual, but what I find very interesting is that it links to what I’ve recently read in the now quite popular book “The Creative Act: A Way of Being” by music producer Rick Rubin, who became famous for helping popular artists become more creative. In the context of creation and art, he writes:
“We tend to think of the artist’s work as the output. The real work of the artist is a way of being in the world.”
Rick Rubin further calls this “tuning in”:
“Think of the universe as an eternal creative unfolding. Trees blossom, cells replicate, rivers forge new tributaries. The world pulses with productive energy, and everything that exists on this planet is driven by that energy. Every manifestation of this unfolding is doing its own work on behalf of the universe, each in its own way, true to its own creative impulse. […]
We are all particiating in a larger creative act we are not conducting. […] As artists, it is our job to draw down this information, transmute it, and share it. We are all translators for messages the universe is broadcasting.”
The main learning here across these two quite different gentlemen, I think, is that a program of rehabilitating humanity (or re-humanization) requires the nurturing of a new (or rather forgotten) way of attending to and embracing the world:
A new worldview!
Our Embeddedness Within Nature
I believe that we are entering the era of peak Anthropocene and that a new worldview that emerges from that era could fill that hole within us and help us cultivate that inner diversity and wildness.
“One indication that we may be approaching “peak Anthropocene” is that philosophical quests across the world are coming to regard human-centric modernity as a fraught detour in the long course of life on planet Earth.”
The Philosophy of Co-Becoming by Nathan Gardels
This new worldview links the ancient wisdom of indigenous cultures with new scientific insights, giving us a much more holistic and meaningful way of looking at the world, and thereby replacing modern societies’ story of separation, which assumes that we are all separate from each other, that some humans are superior to other humans, and that human beings are both separate and superior to the rest of the natural world.
“Climate change is a symptom of an inner crisis—a relationship crisis—which is intrinsically connected to other societal challenges such as social injustice and political conflict.”
What the Mind has to do with the Climate Crisis by Christine Wamsler
So how can we nurture this new worldview and thereby our inner diversity and wildness? Here are three ideas: Re-Synchronizing With Nature, Re-Humanizing, and Re-Indigenizing.
Re-Synchronizing With Nature
Building or improving a relationship requires great communication skills. If we want to embrace our interconnectedness and entanglement with nature more, we first need better ways of “speaking nature”.
David G. Haskell, a biologist and author of the book Sounds Wild And Broken, talks, for example, about the importance of listening – and he means really listening – to nature and what we can learn from that experience:
“When we hear the songs of birds that live in forests, particularly dense forests, they tend to be slow, whistled melodies, because that is the kind of sound that transmits well through that habitat. You go out to the prairie, and you hear lots of rapid trills and ups and downs in the frequency suite, because that is the sound that works well there. Go to the ocean shore and you hear cries of gulls and oyster catchers that carry over the tumult of surf.
And so the physicality, the materiality of the world, has, in a way, woven itself into the sonic diversity of the creatures that live within that world through this process of the evolutionary adaptation of each creature as they find a voice that works well within the habitat in which they live.” […]
I think of the senses as a way of tapping my body and soul back into the Earth to renew myself; that then allows me to go on and do the work of right action and of hope, because I’m nourished by my family, by sensory connection. By “my family” I mean the wider family of the living Earth. I think that is a very important part of renewing our relationship to the Earth.”
Listening And The Crisis Of Inattention an interview with David G. Haskell
I have also recently shared a piece with you about the emerging field of Environmental Linguistics, which aims to work with Indigenous communities to understand the environmental knowledge embedded in their languages.
“It was mind-expanding to learn that language can be connected to the environment in ways that I hadn’t really encountered before. […] For example, the preferred way to say “go” in Tuvan [Siberian nomads] refers to the direction of the current in the nearest river and your trajectory relative to the current. […] When I once hosted a Tuvan friend in Manhattan, he asked me, “Where’s the river?” So I took him to the west side of Manhattan and showed him one of the rivers. And he took note of it, so he could use the Tuvan topographic verbs properly in New York City.”
Indigenous languages are founts of environmental knowledge by Katharina Zimmer (interviewing David Harrison)
The words we use matter…a lot! Especially when it comes to describing the destruction that we are witnessing due to our current mode of living. Here is, for example, a different way of speaking about environmental destruction:
“Sumaúma, a platform for journalism written from and about the Amazon rainforest, shows the power of word choice in environmental storytelling. Launched in 2022 by Eliane Brum and Jonathan Watts, two award-winning journalists with experience writing for El País and The Guardian, it exposes the destruction and injustices happening every day in the Amazon. And it does so by using language that decenters human perspectives and experiences, toppling us from our self-proclaimed position of superiority to show the Earth through nature’s eyes.
Among the first articles published by Sumaúma was a piece by Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, a prominent shaman and leader of the Yanomami people, who describes the “wounds” inflicted on the forest by miners. Another article reports on the acceleration of deforestation in Brazil, and describes trees that are not merely “felled”—but “killed.” The numbers of trees lost are “numbers of lives,” and the final figure is described as a “death toll.”
Why We Need New Words For Nature by Becca Warner
Compare that language with, for example, how the UN Sustainable Development Goal number 14 is described: “Goal 14 is about conserving and sustainably using the oceans, seas and marine resources [emphasis added].”
One way to integrate new words and new language for nature might be through culture. I’ve previously shared a study that shows that since the 1950s and the increasing use of technology & home entertainment, nature has continually lost its relevance or mention in music, art, novels, and movies. The conclusion:
“Artistic creations that help us connect with nature are crucial at a time like this, when nature seems to need our attention and care more than ever.”
How Modern Life Became Disconnected From Nature by Pelin Kesebir & Selin Kesebir
So, how can we use media and culture, and create more music, art, novels, and movies that connect us more with nature? I think there is immense potential here for the creative people out there to, well, get creative! 😁
Lastly, a more integrated relationship with nature (both inner and outer rewilding) also requires being more in sync with nature. However, the way we currently keep time is very unnatural, consequently depleting our own natural time muscles.
“Clocks have made us “fatally confused” about the nature of time. In the natural world, the movement of “hours” or “weeks” do not matter.
Thus the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the sudden extinction of species that have lived on Earth for millions of years, the rapid spread of viruses, the pollution of our soil and water — the true impact of all of this is beyond our realm of understanding because of our devotion to a scale of time and activity relevant to nothing except humans.”
The Tyranny of Time by Joe Zadeh
Conversely, syncing our lifestyles more with nature’s “time” will help us restrengthen our connection to it. A renewed interest and new scientific insights about the importance of circadian rhythms is a great way to get started with this, as well as experiments with clocks that use nature to measure time (e.g. forest time), or new nature-based calendars, new rituals that connect us with natural cycles, circadian watches, and calls for being un-productive, rest as resistance, and “killing time”.
“Nonhuman life treats time as a mixed medium: entangled with the environment, dependent on other organisms.”
A Clock In The Forest by Jonathan Keats
While we might be scared to lose something (maybe economic productivity?!; “time is money” 😅) by turning away from our human-made, artificial time, there is so much meaningful knowledge, wisdom, connection, and relaxation to be gained by being more in sync with nature.
“In other words, naturally calibrated clocks and calendars integrate people into their environment. They guide traditional care and management practices including planting and harvesting. And they provide feedback. The feedback steadies the environment by bringing all who act on it into equilibrium. Time and the environment become indistinguishable. […]
By observing the trees and their embodied experience of time, I have been able to see the inadequacy of my wristwatch.”
A Clock In The Forest by Jonathan Keats
Re-Humanizing
Another key part of cultivating this new post-anthropocentric worldview that appreciates our connection and embeddedness within nature is to actually connect more, and in a deeper way, with nature – both to our inner nature (or wildness) and to other ecosystems.
The Japanese concept of shinrin-yoku might be familiar to many as forest bathing, which is described as “a practice of therapeutic [!!] relaxation where one spends time in a forest or natural atmosphere, focusing on sensory engagement to connect with nature”. Here again, we see a growing body of scientific evidence coming out showing us the many benefits of such practices. And this is also linked to new research regarding the power of “awe”.
Similarly, we have more and more people talking about the importance of gut health and the symbiotic relationship with our microbiome, the bacteria living in our tummy. Here, by the way, very interestingly, we are sometimes already changing our language. For example, I’ve heard the microbiome being called “a world within us” or “the soil within our body”.
Another aspect of nurturing our inner nature or wildness is, I believe, play. I have once shared with you an article by psychologist and author Peter Grey, which he aptly named The Play Deficit. In it, Peter Grey shows how a gradual reduction of children’s opportunity to play, coupled with the ideology that contracts learning and play (learning = work; play = taking a break), is correlated with an increase in mental health disorders, a rise in narcissism, and a decline in creativity. Grey consequently offers an alternative view:
“Playing is learning. At play, children learn the most important of life’s lessons, the ones that cannot be taught in school. To learn these lessons well, children need lots of play — lots and lots of it, without interference from adults. […]
We think of play as childish, but to the child, play is the experience of being like an adult: being self-controlled and responsible. To the degree that we take away play, we deprive children of the ability to practise adulthood, and we create people who will go through life with a sense of dependence and victimisation, a sense that there is some authority out there who is supposed to tell them what to do and solve their problems. That is not a healthy way to live.”
The words Grey uses here, I think, connect very well to my framing of inner domestication versus inner wildness.
Lastly, when it comes to strengthening our connection to other ecosystems, to the world out there, we need to talk about another crucial topic. Our current crisis of separation is also exacerbated by the fact that our economic model purposefully disconnects us from the stuff around us and its stories – including the materials it is made of, the places these materials come from, and all the people who have been involved in its making.
“Most of the stuff around us came from places that we have no direct sensory connection to. And, in fact, that disconnection is not just a side effect of the global economy; it is a necessary part of continuing the destruction. Because if you separate people from the consequences of their actions, then those actions will continue and short-term profit and gain will be made, but long-term loss will ensue.”
Listening And The Crisis Of Inattention an interview with David G. Haskell
On top of that, our increasingly digital lifestyles furthermore disconnect us from each other. Yes, we might have ten times more people we can send a quick WhatsApp to and hundreds or thousands of followers on social media, but when it comes to having someone to have a meaningful conversation with or to really rely on, things aren’t looking so great.
I find it so strange that, after an extreme period of having to physically separate from each other and de-socialize because of COVID, we see companies like Facebook change its name to Meta, announcing a focus on the metaverse (a non-physical world); OpenAI release a conversational AI, basically an artificial communication partner; and Apple bring to market screens that we strap to our faces like ski goggles in order to be even more immersed in the digital – i.e. non-natural – world.
Shouldn’t we actually do the opposite and build stuff that encourages physical connections and socializing?! An investment in digital connections is a divestment of our mind-body connections or as
writes: “When I learn to live as a machine—by choice or otherwise—I become increasingly incapable of attending to the world.”“Meaning in life is the degree to which people feel that connectiveness to themselves, to each other, and to the world that alleviates or ameliorates that anxiety, absurdity, and alienation, so that life is worth it to them.”
John Vervaeke, cognitive scientist and philosopher
Re-Indigenizing
Here comes the most amazing, positive news for you: All of the above is already underway in places all across the world. What’s basically left for us to do is connect with these communities and learn from them.
I am, of course, talking about indigenous cultures. And while I don’t want to put them all in the same boat. I do think that there are some commonalities between communities that live similar to how humans lived tens of thousands of years ago. And even the differences between them may be very interesting in terms of providing more local insights.
Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is a growing body of work that seeks to braid indigenous wisdom to Western science. For example:
“The Sami (in Finland) have seen and documented a decline in salmon in the Näätämö River, for instance. Now, based on their knowledge, they are adapting – reducing the number of seine nets they use to catch fish, restoring spawning sites, and also taking more pike, which prey on young salmon, as part of their catch. The project is part of a co-management process between the Sami and the government of Finland. […]
While the skill of aborigines with fire had been noted before the giant brushfires […] and studied before, it’s taken on new urgency. That’s why Australian land managers have adopted many of the ideas and partnered with native people as co-managers. The fire practices of the aborigines are also being taught and used in other countries.”
Native Knowledge: What Ecologists Are Learning from Indigenous People by Jim Robbins
And while TEK is mostly applied within the field of sustainability or climate resilience, I do think it should receive broader attention. The already mentioned environmental linguistics may be a good example of TEK spreading into other domains. I also want to point out the work by Julia Watson in the context of architecture, which I also shared here previously:
“Lo-TEK counters the idea that indigenous innovation is primitive and exists apart from technology. An emergent term, calling to mind the common phrase “low-tech,” Lo-TEK rethreads the fabric of innovation, rewrites the mythology of technology, and reconceives the primitive as innovative.”
Lastly, in my research, I also came across the implementation of indigenous wisdom within investing. Joshua Kauffmann calls himself an “animist investor” who embraces the philosophy of animism within his investment theory and practices at his company Ground Effect. Ground Effect describes itself as representing “the interests of life on Earth to realize ecological and spiritual renewal” and that their “activities expand co-evolutionary possibilities between humans and planetary life”. Joshua writes:
“Animism is not a philosophy that can be dispatched in a debate. For it is an embodied and intuitive way of being [!!!] that fosters an intimate way of relating to life as a whole.
Animism is my orientation to the world in its aliveness: our planet is alive, I am alive with it, and there is aliveness in everything being related. […]
With Ground Effect, our theory of change strives for a systemic integration of the sensual animist sensibilities with the rigors of science to embed “nature” in human decision-making.”
As a final thought: I think we are really at the beginning of something very exciting, a new worldview and maybe a new wisdom practice that really changes how we see ourselves and helps us rehabilitate and rewild humanity, and therefore fill that “hole” to break that addiction loop that I described.
There is, of course, still a lot to do and fight for, but I am, ultimately, super excited to see more writing, ideas, art, science, wisdom, practices, and playful stuff coming out this year and beyond, that will help us cultivate that new worldview, together!
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
William Butler Yeats
That’s it for this week’s Friday issue!
I know it was a looong one… So thanks a lot for making it till the end. Do leave a like and share the sh*t out of this, if you enjoyed reading this! 😁
See you next week,
Thomas
Thank you for your work, I am really enjoying it and it is giving me a lot to think about, especially in my training to become a yoga teacher.
I’ve been feeling a bit disillusioned with yoga lately and couldn’t pinpoint why, but after reading the ‘Why is everything so ugly’ article, I think I found my answer. The (at least Western) yoga world is also not exempt from this sameness and ‘ugliness’. Every teacher’s instagram page is.. Exactly the same.
But I think yoga is traditionally a great tool for this ‘inner rewilding’. At times, I fear that yoga has become a selfish, individualistic pursuit, a way to help oneself cope in this hellish, capitalist landscape (I am generalising). I want my teaching to open student’s eyes to the possibilities of new systems and new ways of living, a new worldview.
A crisis of inattention. We live in undeniably ugly times. Rehabilitating humanity by learning to embrace the world. -> you made my day! Thank you.