A Psychohistory of Modernity

	Book review on Hell and High Water by McIntosh, Alastair (2008) Reviewed by David Lorimer published in Network Review No 98
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Subtitled 'climate change, hope and the human condition', this is much more than another despairing analysis of the human response to climate change, looking deeper to underlying causes and the complex ways in which we avoid facing the enormity of our predicament. Alistair McIntosh is visiting professor of human ecology and the University of Strathclyde and is also a campaigner for social justice and land reform.

He grew up on Lewis, with its connections to folklore and a wider view of the nature of reality that gave him an insight into our underlying connectedness as humans. The two parts of the book reflect the subtitle, with one on climate change and the other on the human condition. No one familiar with the field and the current state of science will find anything surprising about the first part, although it is written primarily with the impact on Scotland in mind. One focus is the eccentric programme on Channel 4 claiming that the whole business was a hoax perpetrated on an unsuspecting public. Alistair dissects the producer's motivation and distortions but shows that the programme did strike a chord among those who would prefer to believe in business as usual. Our dilemma is that industrial lifestyles are destabilising the planet but we still expect rising prosperity within a context of a limited carrying capacity.

Public ambivalence does not empower our politicians to take decisive preemptive action, so we agree that something must be done while continuing our present habits: 'in a democracy we only get the politics that reflects who we are'. Alistair does not think that green capitalism is the answer because, as he demonstrates in Part 2, growth depends on continuing creation of artificial wants and new markets. In addition, the scale and pace of the problem does not correspond to our wiring to react to immediate crises.

The second part of the book gives it real originality. Here Alistair analyses the human condition, relating inner to outer and social to ecological dimensions in a systemic fashion. Hubris tends to drive us to overreach, and ecological devastation has been responsible for the collapse of previous societies on a smaller scale, as Jared Diamond has shown. This time, however, we are talking about the planet as a whole.

Associated with this hubris is a level of violence and predation, which Alistair argues leads to a hollowing out of the soul, a loss of inner substance; and it is precisely this inner substance that can make the difference between collapse and breakthrough to a new level. Consumerism has also played an important part in colonising our identity and diverting the heart's longing from the genuinely liminal to the artificially liminoid.

The real process is one of mystical death as we transcend our separate egos into a larger sense of Self that is one with the flow of life itself and is informed by the underpinning love experienced by mystics the world over.

Here we need to recover our lost feeling intelligence prefigured in the writings of Adam Smith and Francis Hutcheson in the Scottish Enlightenment. The most searing personal episode in the book narrates the loss of the Alistair and Verene's son, stillborn

on New Year's Day 2007: the tragic meeting point of birth and death. In the 1980s, Kenneth Ring and others speculated on the possibility that the planet herself would undergo a neardeath experience, which itself represents an initiatory process of death and rebirth. One of the outcomes of the process at an individual level is what he calls a 'spirituality of interconnection' which is a basis for hope rather than optimism.

In the current situation optimism may be said to resemble wishful thinking while hope is an attitude that enables one to take a positive view and act accordingly. To this end, Alistair proposes, reflecting AA, a twelvestep programme including such measures as rekindling the inner life, cultivating psychospiritual literacy, expanding our consciousness, developing non-violent forms of security and regenerating community of place.

As can be seen, these proposals address a number of levels, which is surely necessary in addressing the complexities of climate change. As Woody Allen quipped: 'we have found the enemy and it is us'. We cannot address the outer issues without also addressing ourselves, which is precisely the hardest thing to do. This penetrating book will give readers the courage to ask uncomfortable questions and recognise that we ourselves are part of the problem and must become part of the solution if there is to be one.

 

 

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