“How may we be transformed from consuming the world to resonating with it?” Some visionary speeches from Ireland’s polymathic President
As Heads of State go, Michael D. Higgins (the President of Ireland) is an outstanding figure - a poet, social theorist, and relentless standard-setter for his country.
His recent speech to the Engineers Ireland conference on October 2020 has just come to our attention - and it’s a stirring overview of what a sustainable economy, and more importantly culture, would look like in his country. But it’s an inspiration for anyone reading from anywhere.
Towards the end President Higgins raises some startling new understandings of the concepts we’ll need, to drive us towards planet-friendly societies:
Professor Hartmut Rosa of Jena University argues for the need for society to move away from ‘consuming’ the world to ‘experiencing’ it and ‘resonating’ with it.
Professor Rosa argues that quality of life cannot be measured simply in terms of resources, opinions, and moments of happiness. Instead, we must consider our relationship to, or resonance with, the world, or as Rosa puts it in his book, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World:
from the act of breathing to the adoption of culturally distinct worldviews, all the great crises of modern society – ecological, democratic, psychological – can be understood and analysed in terms of resonance and our broken relationship to the world around us.
This requires facilitating the transformative appropriation of every dimension of the world – how we are to exist; the relationships between ourselves and others and indeed with the natural world itself; how we may be transformed from consuming the world to resonating with it.
This, I believe, is a valuable contribution to the interdisciplinary task of understanding the complex sources of, as I would put it, ‘belonging in the world’, eschewing the modern-day preoccupation of being ‘consumed with consumption’.
I believe this “catastrophe of resonance”, to quote Rosa, which we have witnessed in modern times, is related to a growing narcissism, aggressive individualism and an emphasis on insatiable consumption and wealth accumulation.
All of which is such a far cry from the social justice, solidarity and fairness principles that underpin the framework for the Sustainable Development Goals and the United Nations 2030 Agenda.
In their recent book, Nurturing Our Humanity, Riane Eisler and Douglas Fry demonstrate how we can build societies that support our great human capacities for consciousness, caring, connection and creativity.
They reveal links between climate change denial and regressions to a so-called ‘strongman’ rule, assessing where societies fall on what the authors describe as a “partnership-domination scale”.
On one end of this scale is the domination system that ranks man over man, man over woman, race over race, and man over nature. On the other end is the more peaceful, egalitarian, gender-balanced, and sustainable partnership system.
A more equitable and sustainable way of life is biologically possible and culturally attainable: we can change our course. Understanding that most of our intractable global challenges can be tied to the dominator worldview is a starting point for a sustainable and humane world, a point overlooked in much of the discourse on the climate crisis.
More from the speech here.It’s very much worth sampling the range of President Higgins’s speeches and interventions, including:
“It is no longer sufficient to describe, however brilliantly, systemic failure. We must have the courage to speak out and work for the alternatives.”
— from ‘Confronting Planetary Emergencies’