The entire debate about whether or not the UK should remain in the European Union has become a negative, mud-slinging match with so many contradictory and baffling statistics being thrown about by both sides that it is hard to determine whose truth is more true!
I am sure few people will particularly care what I think, but here are my positive thoughts about why I want the UK to remain in the EU, with all its faults, and why I hope that the 18-44 age group, in particular, will bother to vote.
For those looking for a post about outer space and extra-terestialism, I’m sorry, you’re in the wrong place!
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the possibility of another world, a different kind of future to the dominant story we find ourselves in at the moment. Much of my reading and wondering over the last few years has been about this: Is another world really possible?
I know people have asked this question for generations and for some it has meant creating an alternative story, outside the dominant system in the hope that others will join it. For me, this is obvious in certain religious and political institutions. The same yearning has also led to many wonderful people movements (suffragettes, civil rights, gay rights etc), inventions and change. But nearly always, these catalytic shakings result in commodification and assimilation into the status quo. My good friend, Martin Scott, has written some very helpful and thought provoking things about the nature of people movements of late and I especially like the observation he makes about how such movements rise and fall. First of all they are ignored, then they are ridiculed. When ridicule fails and the movements become more threatening to the powerful elite, the strategy becomes one of hostility and when this fails, they are colonised. Colonisation leads to control.
The danger for any people movement is the acquisition of power. This is based on the old adage that all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. For me this is held fast by the current reality of the dominant system that holds its power through the triangulation of control through violence (particularly seen in the state of the exception), debt and law (both religious and political, especially when is oppresses or stifles creativity and freedom). But, another good friend of mine, Roger Mitchell, contests that love itself is the most powerful force in the universe and love does not have to be corrupted. If love is the prime choice before power, then power becomes subordinate to love and another world becomes possible (see ‘The Uncontrolling Love of God’ by Thomas Jay Oord).
Another world is possible, but my perspective is that it is only possible for it to be ‘recreated’ from within it. And that involves our eyes being opened to new possibilities and a determination that love must be our prime choice. Once we decide that we are first and foremost about love, it leaves nobody at all on the ‘outside’. It has a different set of priorities to those of the dominant form of power. It involves a new way of being together. Our systems can be transformed once we personalise them and realise that we are part of them. For me, this is the heart of what the christian narrative is all about (ignored, ridiculed, treated with hostility and then colonsied). It awakens the possibility within us, as individuals, communities and nations, of another kind of world, not a separate world within the world. A world where God is not mysterious but known to all as the One of Love, who does not dominate or control but gives love and life freely; not in some Utopian, hippy-like dream, but in the gritty reality and pain of every day life, pouring itself out from the choice of love. This kind of love does not demand uniformity, but calls us deeper into a place of union, a real belonging to the family of humanity in which our choices, values and behaviour become aligned with the hope we carry for the future. Once we decide that our underlying and first value is love, the possibilities ahead are very exciting!
I had the privilege of being part of a Love Politics Initiative the other weekend. A group of co-conspirators gets together two or three times a year to activate one another in reimagining a different kind of politics.
One of the people present was a man called Mark Rotherham, who is the closest thing I’ve ever encountered to St Francis of Assisi! At one point in the weekend, he led us in an extraordinary meditation about the inert gas, Argon and I hope that he will do it as a podcast for this blog at some point soon.
One of the things Mark said during the weekend had a profound effect on me and I have been mulling it over ever since. What he stated was this: “Democracy is not enough. What we need is biocracy.”
We are so intimately connected to every living thing and although we are facing the biggest ecological catastrophe we have ever known as a species on a global level, we are heading straight for it as though we are watching it in slow motion. And yet because we do not think of the ecosystems we live in as having a voice, we do not listen to them or give them a voice at our “democratic” tables. We absolutely have to stop, look and listen. We have to hear the silenced cry of the whales washed up on our European shores, with their bellies full of our plastic waste. We have to listen to the sea birds smothered to death in oil slicks. We have to listen to the melting glaciers and the fallen trees. We must listen to the dance of the bees facing extinction.
We must speak up for those who do not have a voice for themselves. We share this planet together. Human voices are not adequately speaking for those we share this planet with. Human ears are certainly not hearing the earth speaking to us. Democracy has failed the planet. Biocracy may be a saving grace.
reimaginingthefuture 