A Few Thoughts On Earth Day

What we need to change to survive

“Falling,” 40”x72” 1985 oil on linen Aviva Rahmani

The image preceding this short essay is of a man floating free in air, his body's vulnerability completely exposed. When I painted it, I thought, "this is what social change will require. Tolerating that scale of vulnerability from men."

Five years ago, David Orr wrote, "If today is a typical day in capitols around the world, the dismantling of even the flimsiest laws protecting air, water, lands, biota, climate, and health will proceed apace, but mostly out of sight. Our common

heritage of lands and unique ecosystems will decline further. Today the interests of the wealthiest 1% will advance while those of the bottom 90% will recede." That followed up a lead quote from James Hansen, that, “It’s very hard to see us fixing the climate until we fix our democracy.”

Well, we clearly haven't fixed our democratic societies. Rather, we are now threatened with regimes reveling in precipitous decline in the service of less than 1% of the Earth's population. I would argue that the fundamental problem is how our culture rewards dysfunctional patterns. The most dysfunctional pattern I see is permission, specifically for men, to act out resentments rather than examine feelings that require vulnerability and openness to communicate with and find solutions to problems. I would further argue that the prevalent male ideal people are acculturated to accept, denies men any other expression of feeling than anger and the empowerment of that anger. The fact that that emotionally cripples men and abuses women, is the collateral damage that also destroys democracies and their husbandry of the Earth.

In this series of articles, I have analyzed the parallels between cultural narcissism and personal behaviors. In the language of "woke," the further parallel is to racism and sexism, embedded in the paradigms of fascism we are facing today. The psychological landscape that threatens to engulf our actual landscape reifies a Nordic, male ideal, which includes permission to act out anger. It is the paradigm Leo Tolstoy delineated in "War and Peace," almost two hundred years ago, reflecting an ideal that exalted (male) individuals rather than embark on a new historical science that may have been closer to the physics of complexity science: that reality is relational rather than subject to the power of individual agents. Notably, Indigenous cultures tend to have a long history of including women, even giving them priority power in tandem with an understanding of Earth rights and dependencies.

In the vein of my earlier arguments in these articles for a new analysis of transdisciplinarity, I would assert that the siloization of disciplines and cultural groups has paralleled the same cultural isolationism that divides and conquers even the most democratic Western cultures, of which the culture of the United States has been the most dominant, generally marginalizing the very groups that might save us from ourselves: the exemplars of DEIs of the world.

In receent conversation with several other (female) colleagues from the artworld, we have discussed the demise of a long-term trend that has rewarded the persistence of women artists who achieved recognition and support late in life. That has recently evaporated. In some Indigenous societies, older women are the people most respected as depositors of political wisdom and sources of guidance. In the United States, the particular marginalization of older women reflects the rise of fascist ideals that will destroy us. In a Fascist, narcissistic culture, only fertile women in service to patriarchies can be tolerated. Young women who can procreate to produce new consumers and acolytes. That also, incidentally, produces another kind of resentment that pollutes the culture. All other women and people of color are expendable. Older women artists aren't even in the picture.

The absolute chaos created by these cultural models are masked by shallow orderliness, such as was touted by the Third Reich, that the trains ran on time. In modern times, we are all witnessing the economic chaos unleashed by cultural narcissism at the expense of democracy and DEI.

As a young woman, I decided not to have children because I took the challenge of over-population seriously. Since the sixties, when that idea was current, the argument arose that the problem was the allocation of resources, not child-bearing. But since then, what has become apparent has been that it is the Western appetite for consumption in tandem with over-population and ceding authority to a small group of power-hungry men that will be our death knell. The men in question, blinded by their own narcissism and bolstered by flying monkeys, are incapable of the common sense, humility or compassion that permits good governance.

Today, that same pattern of consumption and the imbalance of power created by eliminating DEI has spread through-out the world. Many have noted that we now live in a world that consumes 3X the total available Earth's resources. In a narcissistic, patriarchal culture, the over-consumption of resources by a ruling elite, for example the grotesque examples of those who must fly to the Mars, at the expense of everything and everyone else depends on destroying democracy and crippling DEI. The present discard of marginalized groups that had recently gained a toehold until the present administration and its ideals, will certainly doom us if we can't reconsider our relationships. On this year's Earth Day, it might be a good time to reconsider those relationships and how what it means to be a man in this world skews those relationships and drives us into dangerous chaos.