Crises and Opportunities[1]

Sam-Gill.com Blog – August 2009

Sam Gill

Since last spring I have become increasingly passionate about crises and opportunities. First I have come to accept the inevitability that in the next half century (beginning sooner than we dare imagine) there will be unprecedented crises precipitated by climate change even if the current wide-ranging economic and political crises are somehow brought under control with some sense of a return to non-crisis state. Second, I am committed to seeing the inevitable crises more in the terms of opportunity rather than loss and decline. As a religion scholar for over thirty-five years I find my age peers increasingly deferring to our junior colleagues to make decisions about the future and I imagine that the same attitude pervades their classrooms as well. I appreciate the intention, but I can’t participate. I find my passions elevating when I think of the future of the study of religion, the future of the academy, the future of the education at every level. It appears to me that there is little discourse or concern about the shape and character of these various planes of education in a future that will demand revolution under crises. While I may not be present for the results, I certainly want to lend my experience and my imagination to a vision of the future, and the long future at that.

In south central Java is the Buddhist stupa, Borobudur. I have visited it two times. In fact, I returned to Java just so I could spend more time at this place. It is enormous … beyond our grasp actually … and of unfathomable detail. Seen from the air Borobudur is a perfect mandala. It was built in a seventy year period from approximately 1760 to 1830 AD. The unity and coherence of the structure as a whole requires a single vision, a single plan. Such a vision could not simply unfold over the several generations of builders that worked on this structure; it had to be conceived by someone at some specific time. And that person or group had to know that they would be long gone and forgotten generations before the completion of the structure … and they were. Borobudur is my persistent inspiration for taking the long view, for doing all I can to imagine what I will never see. Surely the impending imminent crises are the very product of our failure to have vision on the order of that Buddhist priest so long ago. Vision today on his scale would be more on the order of several centuries in the future; so surely we can work on a vision of the future 10 to 40 years ahead. Further, the way we envision the future is a way of making ourselves in the present.

Borobudur may serve as inspiration in another way. It seems to me that the approach to the present array of crises is based on “fixing” what went wrong and “returning” to the way things used to be (or our imaginary perception of what that was). Yet my sense is that few now believe that anything like that is going to happen and most of those I talk with express the sentiment that they are rather pleased that the world will not go back to the way things were. They are eager for fundamental change even as they fear what that might be.

An article on the front page of yesterday’s Sunday New York Times (August 9, 2009) has spurred me to write about crises and opportunity. The headline is “Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security.”[2] Here is a brief quote:

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades … to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say. …

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorists movements or destabilize entire regions, …

… over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, … will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that culd demand an American humanitarian relief or military response …

It is disconcerting that we persist in seeing everything in the frames of terrorism and the military; they front for their silent partners, economic powers and interests.

I frankly don’t even care how likely this particular scenario is to occur because I believe that the world is approaching a tipping point where we will need to radically reinvent everything about ourselves as human beings and most certainly what it means to be human. This is an opportunity and it may be aided by the pressure of crises.

Lately I have become increasingly frustrated at the polarizing partisan selfish narrow-minded approach that prevails as the dominant mood and method in politics and education and every aspect of the world. I’ve wondered what level of crisis it would take to force real conversation, real concern, a more selfless, a less selfish approach to governing and living. Would the imminent rise of sea level over the next 10 year by 10 feet be enough? I actually wonder. Might we simply allow ourselves to be swept into total ruin simply because we cannot listen, learn, compromise, see the greater good?

But I can’t go there either. We all, all of us who can, must bring our greatest experience and imagination to reinvent ourselves and all that we are and do. And we must do so in the timeframe of the next ten to forty years.

I have wrestled with some of these issues related to the future of the study of religion and the academy in a recent article and I invite others to join this conversation. www.Sam-Gill.com I need to do more, much more.

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/science/earth/09climate.html?hp