Toward a Planetary Society: Outline of a Strategy

COVID-19 has been a planetary crisis. And though the subjective experience of COVID has differed wildly depending on geography, culture, class, race, and belief system, at least a small part of the experience of COVID has been shared by all humans. This is unique in world history, though as commentators point out it is only the first of many such a globe encompassing trials. Given this inevitable future of planetary crisis (and I don’t just mean near-term global warming, I also refer to other existential risks such as pandemics, asteroids, and AI), I wonder if we can find a silver lining in this first experience of planetary crisis. 

It is well known to anyone with a bad boss or who has gone on a difficult journey that suffering is a powerful means of creating group cohesion. ‘The trial’ is one of the most ancient means of forging the social bond through rituals and rites of passage that reduce all members of society to a common substance. Anthropological thinkers argue that the periodic dissolution of civil society, and the de-individuation this creates, is potent means for small-scale communities to renew the social bond.

The question is whether such techniques can remain effective as the scale of society expands—eventually to the level of the entire planet. Within the monotheistic religions, perhaps the most similar practice is the fasting in the Islamic world during Ramadan. The daylong fasts reduce all members of society, regardless of station or identity, to the same substance, to a common body. The fast creates a mystical experience: the knowledge of unity with something beyond the self. In secularized state-based societies, the general social bond is almost non-existent, and instead we see a fracturing into smaller bonds based around identity/geography/belief system. Civil society rarely erodes, and thus we know ourselves as individuals rather than a seething, equal, and interdependent mass.

Indeed, COVID, a nation and planet spanning trial, has in many cases not generated planet wide co-identification, but instead the entrenchment of pre-existing ideological differences. Thus we arrive at the crucial question: are their biological limits to the scope of human identification and compassion? Can our faculties of empathy and care be stretched too widely? Even if we are equivalent to and interconnected with the rest of the planet not to mention the universe, can we actually only feel this in regards to select few?¹ 

It seems to me that to answer this question we must reverse the terms in which it has been asked. Rather than asking how it is that love can be expanded, we must ask how it is that love/empathy/compassion has become restricted. This is a reversal of terms that Einstein makes in one of his most repeated quotes:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.

By beginning with the ontology of humans and the universe—one-ness and interconnection--, Einstein introduces compassion as a logical result of fundamental ontology, rather than a biological human phenomenon, restricted in its scope to biological limits. A similar distinction is made by spiritual thinkers in differentiating between being loving and being love. Loving is a verb that occurs between differentiated subjects and objects; being love is non-dual, and entails identification with a singular unitary substance or void.

Initiating a revolution towards society-wide planetary-scale compassion necessitates that we consider the second, spiritual, form of compassion rather than just the first. We must see compassion and love not only as biological residues of natural evolution whose function was to create social bonds that allowed our ape ancestors to survive. As primatologist and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky emphasizes, the biology of empathy is far too often the biology of in-group empathy. Instead, we must see compassion as something far deeper and more inexplicable: the result of the capacity of humans to touch their own fundamental ontology. This ontology is non-duality and love, the transcendence of subject and object; it is one-ness and void, the fertile plain of both cutting edge physics and mystical experience. 

Einstein is skeptical of the possibility that cosmic compassion can be fully realized, and it is exactly because of our status as embodied, evolutionary creatures that the road towards non-dual compassion and love is so difficult. Its realization involves abandoning our fear of death and attachment to our own interests, learning to quiet every fearful evolutionary instinct that cries out me and my family first. It also involves abandoning our evolutionarily endowed and delusional world-constructing schema that differentiates between subject and object, cause and effect. These tasks, even in limited quantities, are daunting. But there is also a parallel simplicity to the task of connecting with our own ontology: it’s right under our noses, an inexplicable ocean we are in here and now.

Denying the attempt to realize planetary compassion on the grounds of impossibility denies humanity’s potential, as proven by the historical record. We boast a long line of prophets and mystics who have realized the capacity to expand their identification to the rest of the humanity, not to mention the cosmos. Jesus and the Buddha are only two of the most prominent examples, and they had the same brains and bodies we do. If we shed the idea of these people as myths or gods, and simply accept them as humans with an incredible capacity for spiritual-scientific insight, the potentials of the human become much more lucid. Humans, history proves again and again, have the ability of being more than human, of being cosmic, of realizing that we are cosmic. What would happen if we devoted the majority of our resources to cultivating this ability, cultivating love, on a society-wide level?² 

One also might deny this attempt on the grounds of pragmatism, but I argue that this denial is itself a pragmatic impossibility. If humanity is to survive into the deep future, not to mention ensure that the majority of the population leads rewarding lives, the cultivation of planet-wide, planet-encompassing compassion is a necessity. Humanity’s future depends on a revolution in human consciousness. Who knows if we are capable, but we have no choice but to try. 

The cultivation of planetary compassion will rely on the employment of socio-spiritual technologies similar to the rites and trials I began this essay discussing. By technologies I don’t mean physical innovations, but specific techniques of creating social spaces that induce certain sorts of individual experiences: mystical experiences. These are experiences that give humans insight into to the ground of their existence—oneness, impermanence, interconnection—and produce an ethics of love based on this insight.

This is where we can draw a distinction between the sorts of realization achieved by Jesus and Siddhartha Gautama. Whereas Jesus simply conveyed the insights of his mystical experience, the Buddha taught the arrival at this wisdom as a systematic practice. This is the distinction between religions and what I am calling socio-spiritual technologies. Mystical experience is too often translated into a verbal language that doesn’t suit it, and made into ideology or dogma.³ This is what happened when the direct and mystical scientific insight of the prophets was turned to religion. Religions rendered direct experience a calcified ideology and made love a rule rather than the result of a direct personal insight into the nature of reality. The modern religion of “human rights” is similar. Surely there are many who have felt the sanctity of this concept in a deep way. Now, though, it is employed as an ideological-legal truth, rather than being systematically cultivated as a personal sensibility. Socio-spiritual techniques do not teach or inculcate a specific ideology. Instead, they are techniques to facilitate individual experiences of de-individuation.

These techniques descend from ancient cultures in arts of chanting, dancing, meditation, and various ritual forms.⁴ They are being innovated in modern times by creative group facilitators and therapists.⁵ They can be catalyzed by plants and healers or special mountains and reverenced rivers. They can be sacred spaces, cyclical rituals, rites of passage, daily practices, or intensive retreats. Different people discover the ground of their own being best through different means: skateboarding, spray-painting, the silence of the forest.

One thing is clear: for our own human survival, not to mention psychic well-being, we must invest all of our energies into the implementation and development of such techniques, whether they be ancient and local or modern and cosmopolitan. Fear, habit, and our conditioning are powerful forces, which is why these techniques must become a central, recurrent part of the education system. They also must freely be made available to humans of all ages.⁶ It is vital that we empower a wide range of techniques so that the human ego cannot assert itself and make the practice of some techniques versus others a form of chauvinism and difference. Developing these techniques creates a sort of spiritual biodiversity. It is a recovery of roots—every culture boasts elaborate contemplative and artistic traditions—and a push towards the future. Cultural cosmopolitans can blend wisdoms from many different roots, and innovate new techniques with their own wisdom. What’s more, the rigors of the scientific method can be applied to the development and testing of these techniques.⁷

True change takes time, but the challenges to the planet force us to think about how we can scale change on a massive level right now. Human biology indicates the possibility of an exponential growth in planet-wide compassion and wisdom. A huge body of literature illustrates the importance of things like pre-natal environment, childhood exposure to stress, epigenetics, and inter-generational trauma. As future parents cultivate compassion and address their own traumas, kids will be born and raised with easier paths toward wisdom, and will then raise kids with less stress, and so on—a positive feedback loop. Similarly, stress has both external effects and inhibitory effects. Externally stress can manifest as aggression, which causes more stress for others and more aggression. A society-wide focus on healing stress halts this negative feedback loop. As stress is alleviated, many of the beneficial brain functions it inhibits become unlocked.

A turn towards the cultivation of insight and love as a cultural focus will not only serve to alleviate the suffering of many humans, and make our very survival as a species possible. It will also open up the horizon of what is possible for humans in an utterly mystifying universe. With a solid base, the deep future could find us an interstellar species, exploring the cosmos, meeting aliens, trying to figure out what all this is. I want to firmly say that planetary compassion is not some woo-woo idea, the provenance only of mystics who speak in riddles, old Californians, Disney movies. It is a goal we can realistically set as a species, and pragmatically begin working towards. We tend to discount the possibility of massive changes to the social order because we do not frequently imagine these possibilities, but history teaches another lesson. Systems like language, agriculture, writing, and capitalism were likely unimaginable before they were created and transformed human society and human consciousness in remarkably quick ways. In one talk Ram Dass compares humans discovering unconditional love to them discovering fire, and this could even be an understatement. This is not ‘the end of history,’ or at least we can make sure that it isn’t.

The road to planetary compassion begins with the support for individual communities to re-invigorate and widen the scope of their socio-spiritual technologies, and the empowerment of skilled and pioneering healers and innovators. The road also begins with the recognition that love is not at the pinnacle of human achievement, but is the very grounds out of which the human arises.⁸

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1 I am considering feeling and action concurrently: compassion not just as a feeling of care, but as a commensurate course of action.^↩
2 One might respond here that there have been humans like Mozart and Bach—surely this doesn’t mean that we are all capable of composing incredible symphonies! It doesn’t, but it does mean we are all capable of playing the piano, and even composing our own little tunes. It also means that if our society cultivated piano and composition above all else, within a few generations most people on the planet would be very good. What’s more, it’s statistically likely that many individuals with far greater talents than Mozart would have been produced. And I think love and compassion are far more fundamental human capabilities than composition and piano.^↩
3 This not to say that there is no place for words in transmitting these concepts.^↩
4 In differentiating between biological and cosmic compassion, I am not intending to re-inscribe the all too firmly chiseled mind-body divide. Indeed, so many socio-spiritual technologies are in fact invitations to re-enter and explore the body. The body is a means toward mystical insight, rather than something to be ascetically denied.^↩
5 Whereas in this article I am taking a person-focused approach to societal transformation, the wellness industry suffers pathologically from a complete immersion in this approach. Many of the modern purveyors of socio-spiritual technologies teach awareness or the heart as a path toward personal well-being or success in the corporate world. They lack awareness of the way in which the systems they coach their clients to succeed in concretely increase the suffering of others. The wellness industry is also almost entirely unaware of the underlying social conditions (capitalism, racism, sexism, the fracturing of community) that provide its industry such rabid clientele. While its techniques and wisdom often do hold genuine spiritual rooting, to be truly radical the compassionate wisdom it produces must be paired with social-historical understanding.^↩
6 I even think we should pay people to heal themselves, pay them to meditate or attend dance classes, pay them to do whatever they propose is meaningful to them.^↩
7 New physical technologies can also be applied to these techniques. The possibilities of virtual reality systems combined with ritual/meditative experiences seem especially potent.^↩
8 I want to nod to several principle objections to the approach I have outlined. I won’t address these objections fully here, but do want to acknowledge that they are on my mind. The first argues that just because people are good and kind doesn’t mean that they will actually help create any systemic change. I have met many incredibly kind people who nonetheless hold reactive political positions, or simply do nothing to understand or change already entrenched power structures. While the sort of wisdom and compassion I am arguing we cultivate is of a different variety than run of the mill kindness, it is also crucial to point out that awareness of systemic power structures and the move to revolutionize these structures is also an important part of the way forward. That is to say, it is unclear if a populace with an intimate understanding of the mutual interdependence between humans and the non-human world would necessarily turn our present society into an ecological society. There are power structures in place directly opposed to any sort of organic transition, not to mention individual incentives built into the system to keep sustainability a matter of thought rather than one of action. There are also power-structures in place and patterns of trauma-infliction that make it more difficult for some groups to realize the sort of compassion I am talking about. Thus, this piece is not a comprehensive outline of the way forward, but a sketch of one part of the approach. A second response is that of game theory. Even if a large group recognizes their own oneness, and through this recognition enacts principles of service to one another, humility, compassion, and self-sacrifice, it only takes one bad actor to exploit the rest. And there will always be self-interested bad actors. The bad-actor will initiate a frenzied return to selfish-ness among all actors who suddenly worry about keeping what they have and not being exploited. My initial response to this problem is that the rest of society will need to have cultivated a sufficient reservoir of patience and altruism to not adversely respond to the bad actor by either becoming selfish or responding punitively. This is also a problem that is easier to address through smaller systems of local governance. A third response is that mystical experience, and the loving living it produces is much harder to cultivate than I make it seem. The evidence for this objection is that of monks who spend their entire lives dedicated to this path. Ordinary humans don’t have that sort of time, commitment, or ability. That may be true, but I’m optimistic of what could be achieved if these techniques were integrated regularly throughout individual growth from a younger age. I’m also optimistic about the potential for incremental gains to snowball inter-generationally. It’s also worth mentioning that these techniques aren’t necessarily ‘work.’ They can be pleasurable, ease suffering, and contribute to a sense of meaning and community. Another response indicates that dropping humans to the level of ‘the Real,’ ‘beyond good and evil,’ may just as easily initiate destructive behavior, if not what we call ‘madness.’ As Zizek writes, Hegel too reverses the equation, but for him love is not the basis of reality: madness is. Hegel is fully justified in inverting the standard question of how the fall-regression into madness is possible: the true question is, rather, how the subject is able to climb out of madness and to reach "normalcy." That is to say, the withdrawal-into-self, the cutting-off of the links to the Umwelt, is followed by the construction of a symbolic universe which the subject projects onto reality as a kind of substitute-formation destined to recompense us for the loss of the immediate, pre-symbolic real. As Zizek goes on to emphasize, the Real is ugly, disgusting, terrifying. Zizek is right in many ways, but my sense is that a fear of the pre-symbolic is a phase to be passed through. Whether humanity can actually make it through is another question entirely. Another response has to do with the difficulties of making something as abstract as wisdom an operative principle in guiding education and local community organization. What constitutes wisdom? Who gets to decide who is wise? What if I disagree with the wise? A final, difficult response points out that many things of incredible cultural and aesthetic value, like the blues, come not from love, but from suffering, jealousy, the agonized cry of the individual who wants to stake their claim in the universe. Maybe, this response argues, to be fully human is to live out one’s separation from the whole to the fullest, rather than try to unite with it. As American playwright Arthur Miller wrote, the most compelling tragic heroes are those who refuse to accept their station and the order of the world. Even if they are eventually defeated by ‘the way things are,’ it is their grasp at the impossible that is meaningful. Fuck acceptance and gratitude, give me life. As deeply as I feel it myself, I am curious to what degree this myth of the agonized hero and this perspective of individual artistic creation is exclusive to the (modern) West. Which is not to say that a world with one-ness as a dominant knowledge and love as a dominant understanding would be one in which individual creation would be absent. If anything, it might flourish more than ever. ^↩