From “All My Bones Shake,” by Robert Jensen It may be that people always want to believe they live at the most important time in history, that their moment is the decisive moment. But even factoring in this tendency toward a collective sense of self-importance, it is difficult to ignore that the mulitiple crises we face today -- economic, political, cultural, and, most crucially, ecological -- have the potential to make impossible ongoing life on the scale we know it today. Even though predictions about the specifics of the trajectory are beyond our capabilities, we can know -- if we choose to know -- that we must solve problems for which there are no apparent solutions and face questions that go beyond the available answers, to borrow Wes Jacksons phrase. These threats have been building for the past 10,000 years, intensifying in the past two centuries to levels that only the foolhardy would ignore. . . WE ARE ALL PROPHETS NOW It would be seductive, as we stand at the edge of these cascading crises, to look for leaders. But where would they lead us? How would they answer the unanswerable questions and solve the unsolvable problems? Better to recognize that we are at a moment when leaders cannot help us, because we need to go deeper than leadership can take us. When traditional political and/or theological leadership fails, its tempting to want to turn to a prophet. But that too would be a mistake. This is a moment that cries out not for a prophet, but for prophets. It is time to recognize that we all must strive to be prophets now. It is time for each of us to take responsibility for speaking in the prophetic voice. . . . absent a radical change in our relationship to each other and the nonhuman world, were in for a rough ride in the coming decades.
Posted on: Thu, 23 Jan 2014 21:06:25 +0000
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