William Temple Foundation

After 20 years spent in conferences, roundtables and events talking about the climate crisis, I suddenly had no more to say. This blog is about what I found in the silence. 

I am not alone. In “At Work in the Ruins” Dougald Hine reports the same experience of having nothing left to say about climate change. The common origin, (as I interpret it), of our respective silences is respect for science, technology, engineering and economics, but the sense that those disciplines cannot and should not answer all questions about climate change. Some of the clues lie elsewhere.  Hine distinguishes the big and small paths to addressing climate change. The big path (amongst other things), 

“sets out to limit the damage of climate change through large-scale efforts of management, control, surveillance and innovation, oriented to sustaining a version of existing trajectories of technological progress economic growth and development”. 

The small path seeks 

“to build resilience close to the ground, nurturing capacities and relationships, oriented to a future in which existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development will not be sustained, but where the possibility of a world worth living for remains”.

I was on the big path with its coordinates of facts and figures, forecasts and strategies and the solutions-oriented destinations. It eventually left me lost and mute. Adrienne Buller’s conclusions about the limitations of so-called green capitalism added despair to my silence.  So, I slowly step onto the small path, trying as Hine refers to it as a “subtle, soft language of twilight” beyond certainty and solutions.  The small path is not one of idealism and indecision, devoid of science and reason though. As Dr Iain McGilchrist stresses in The Matter with Things, science should and must inform decisions on climate change and other crises, alongside spheres of enquiry beyond its borders, including the sacred.

It is nerve-wracking to write about faith or the sacred. As McGilchrist puts it, the sacred lies in a ghetto on the margins of Western mental life and it can be hazardous to invoke the word God. But what follows are not my ideas. I’m simply sharing the findings from the small path that refuse to let me ignore the sacred as a sphere of enquiry into a future laced with the effects of climate change. 

McGilchrist makes this discussion accessible. However, it was only when he mentioned ballet that I found the door into his work fully open. He said you cannot understand a ballet by measuring the impact of ATP hydrolysis on myosin in the dancer’s skeletal muscle fibres. Of course, that impact of ATP is there and is vital to the dancer, as are the years of discipline and the rigorous adherence to ballet steps that are practiced according to a universal language all over the world.  But all the discipline, technicalities and science of the ballet regime cannot explain what happens during the performance. Something sacred infiltrates the steps to create the dance. 

In Act 2 of Akram Khan’s Giselle, all the audience hears is the Willis’ pointe shoes as they bourrée, hair over their faces, fists clutching wooden sticks. There is no adornment, no staging, no fancy steps, very little music, but awe and menace flood the theatre through some alchemy that has something, but not everything, to do with months of rehearsal and bleeding toes.

From this meandering, the surprising result that came to me along the silence of the small path is an equation! By rights, any blog about bringing the sacred to the table of climate change solutions should avoid equations, but here goes with a suggested formula for approaching what Hine calls predicaments; something you have to live with, not problems.

(Knowledge/Humility +  Rehearsal ) = possibility X sacred =  predicament approach

• Knowledge (i.e.: what McGilchrist calls “Wissen”/propositional knowledge/knowing “that”) is the information needed from science, economics, technology, economics etc. as the essential foundation of the predicament approach. 

• Rehearsal is like the practice of action research, which checks the connections between different pieces of knowledge and sees how they interact with each other and the context as a whole system rather than as fragments.

• Humility is shorthand for recognising that knowledge and rehearsal don’t necessarily offer the complete pathway to approaching a predicament – just a possibility –  and that the sacred “multiplier” might give further insight.

• The sacred, by definition, cannot be explained. However, it is likely characterised in part by shared endeavour and collaborative enquiry. In practical terms, it might involve “testing” the first part of the equation (knowledge+rehearsal/humility) in Joanna Macy’s Council of All Beings. In such a setting, the voice of all affected by the possibility is explored, individually and collectively. The voice of the experts, the heartbeat of wood, the tears of the willow, the singing of ants are all heard.

Some readers may be frustrated that the equation might not necessarily produce an “answer.” This is because it is designed not only to find answers – if they are available – but also to draw attention to the mysteries of our planet that are better expressed as an object of awe than an object of knowledge. Herbert McCabe captures this saying

“when we speak of God, we do not clear up a puzzle, we draw attention to a mystery..”

This does not mean that nothing is done. Rather, as McGilchrist explains, the awe leaves space for the shattered pieces of our world, which still retain sparks of light, to be rebuilt.

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