Critical Sustainability

Sustainability is a goal that seeks balance between people and planet through the domains of political, economic, cultural, and ecological activities. A key word in this definition is the concept of “balance”.  This is what we’re seeking to explore throughout the all of the teachings from the SolarPunk Sangha and create a philosophical framework that aligns with critical thinking towards the application of Sustainability. For something to be considered sustainable, broadly speaking, is a decision made amongst people, organizations, and/or governments in response to the unsustainable usage of people and planet. 

You might be familiar with the “green” environment-friendly perspective commonly associated with Sustainability; the “green” products we find in our local or online supermarkets, cleaning up trash in the ocean, or the growing conversion from fossil fuels to solar, wind, geothermal, and lithium powered batteries. Where did all these incentives come from? Is this sustainability? In many ways this approach to Sustainability is a rebuke towards corporate green-washing of the concept as they become even more clever (deceit) about their environmental impact. There are predictable origins to why these issues and trends arise, yet it is more important to have an agreeable way to categorize the way we transact with each other and with nature in order to determine long term sustainability for the prosperity of people and planet.

This is how the initial modules are structured in this Exploration, to guide learners along the thought process behind the social goal of Sustainability through a systemic analysis of our social realities. To continue briefly on the philosophical categories explored in the previous lesson, I will elaborate on the personal reasons why this material was selected and presented based on my research into consciousness. This written work corresponds to a recent visual project I’ve paused to produce my thoughts through educational courses, because as the old saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, which is more or less the output of short form video scripts, written lessons, or other multimedia content that discusses these subjects. If you have previewed my work already, there will be pages of future modules in other explorations (namely CivicNotes) that you’re free to browse and make the connections back to this cornerstone Exploration.

Ontology

Starting off with Ontology, the field of philosophy that deals with the process of Being. We will be highlighting the work of Roy Bhaskar, whom from the 1970s and on has made significant contributions to the field of ontology. Bhaskar is primarily known for the development of Critical Realism, which is a continuous philosophical process to further improve the way we understand science and further our comprehension behind the mechanisms of reality. Science, and in Bhaskar’s case of reifying social sciences, are highly politicized viewpoints on how we extract knowledge of the world and what we do with such knowledge. To provide a context and motivation behind Bhaskar’s work, in which critics of his later work scrutinized the “metaphysical turn” by the early 2000’s, suggesting a disagreement on the logic and rationale of identifying mechanisms, events, and experiments that produce social objects, such as the concept of an individual, metaReality, and the notion of transcendental. In a broader interest towards Sustainability, Bhaskar’s method of social sciences enables us to analyze social objects like the Nation-State, with its brazen impact of historic, violent policies that lead to the dehumanization of a targeted minority to systematically eliminate or subjugate generations of humanity (European-style colonization). The application of Critical Realism towards the political sciences will be explored in CivicNotes, another Exploration course offered by the Sangha. 

The aim of this module’s content will “flesh out” Ontology along the guidelines of Critical Realism and begin to incorporate the Circles of Sustainability method, along with other ontological frameworks, towards a basic model of the relations between people and society. It is important to note ontology in the computer sciences and information processing provides a self-contained knowledge structure that corresponds to their linked activities, there are elements in the Circles method that provides us a topography of collective human activities, yet this distinction is focused on humanity becoming itself.

Relating back to consciousness and consciousness studies, Ontology is a preferred place to start before getting into deeper metaphysical conversations as you may often find prefaced in religious scripture. Covered in the next section, I’ve prepared an extended metaphor utilizing the geometrical metaphor called the Tesseract. Ontology can be seen as the “planes” of social behavior, where they emerge as dialectics between what we know and what we do in the acts of social interactions, material transactions with nature, participating social structures, and understanding our embodied personality.

Epistemology

After discovering Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it led me down a rabbit hole of academic papers and videos related to critical pedagogy. Encountering a conversation between Noam Chomsky and Bruno della Chiesa (found in our media library playlists below) led me to della Chiesa’s Tesseract Hypotheses, a theory of knowledge representation through the aforementioned metaphor of the Tesseract. What became an interesting synthesis between Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar and Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus, whom della Chiesa studied under, evolved into a metaphysical link between Self and self-learning. Check out the full interview below.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ll6M0cXV54&list=PL9igVptbVx0taUjodRYwgmFgusjKsU0DQ&index=2&ab_channel=HarvardGraduateSchoolofEducation 

Epistemology lends itself to the dimensions of social knowledge, where the quality of information evolves to knowledge and skills towards a model of plural, generative way-of-being. Although the initial 2010 publication is limited to theories of language and culture, I will introduce Marshall McLuhan’s media ecology and a combination of bioecological models to the Tesseract to further represent the appearance of external objects (media) along with the biological, physical components of this knowledge matrix.

This module walks us through the development of the Tesseract and areas of epistemology that manufactures what we know and what we are capable of knowing. We are testing the limits of the way we obtain our knowledge today while investigating critically into the social nature of knowledge which can be surmised from the saying “A fish does not know what water is”. Furthermore, there will be resources and projects available for print related to media studies that will make this metaphor more concrete.

Metaphysics

This is where it gets spicy and why it is important to build a metaphor that allows us to analyze reality, Metaphysics is a dense and contested branch of philosophy that can deter many from realizing the implications of having the wrong view of the world. The content in this chapter introduces and compares ancient scriptures with modern quantum physics, giving us a few thousand years of refined knowledge on the topic to work with. We’ll introduce David Chalmer’s “Hard Problem” of consciousness, which summarizes the collective materialist interpretation of empirical observations made by physics and discusses its expository limitations. A key element to the philosophy of Critical Sustainability is the ability to reflect and adapt, this will become apparent through my interpretation of Berardo Kastrup’s work of Analytical Idealism and the whirlpool metaphors. This module leans into interpretations of Eastern philosophies and pairing it off with an interpretation of Quantum Field Theory to produce an adjacent theory in metaphysical idealism while connecting it back to the metaphor of the Tesseract. 

The discussion on metaphysics connects back to the Sangha’s objectives of establishing mindfulness and the curricula of activities we experience throughout life. Metaphysics touches on the philosophy of mind (Idealism) and collectively represents the perceived vibrational patterns we experience within our consciousness. There is another connection back to the Sangha’s mutual goals of consciousness raising, capacitation development, and liberation attaining, each of which originate from a metaphysical perspective to tap into our willpower to make transformative changes with our worlds. 

Circling back to my cultural heritage, this module is a synthesis of Eastern and Western thought. Being of Indian descent in diaspora disconnects me from the land where my family members got on a boat in British Calcutta and sailed thousands of miles to further themselves from the long sustained domination of colonial rule on the mainland, to the sugarcane fields of Guyana and Trinidad. The diaspora, due to European cultural invasion, is a significant occurrence that impeded the joy of consciousness studies from a global audience, while savagely occupying our minds with material possessiveness for hundreds of years. Understanding that our actions carry metaphysical values which impacts future events carries into the central theme of the final piece of the Critical Sustainability model. 

Axiology

In the time of writing this, there are concurrent genocides, near complete privatization of the U.S. economy with more resources going to the war machine and its adjacent policing apparatus, a culture of political violence leading to an attempted assassination of a former U.S. President, and the aforementioned climate catastrophe slowly unfolding and burning up the planet, and of course the countless issues that will follow. What a time to be alive! While we are able to, it benefits us to discuss a way forward that embraces dialogue with a common agreement on ethics, values, and the process of healing from this demonic ideology what many collectively label as Capitalism. Formulating an ethical and value driven framework is the objective behind this module on Axiology. 

Arriving at this module allows us to put together the final pieces of the Critical Sustainability framework that includes an alternative taxonomy of fundamental needs in relation to the global initiatives rhizome described in our previous lesson. Intrinsic to the design behind the educational content are the mutual goals of consciousness raising, capacitation development, and liberation attaining. The uniqueness of SolarPunk is its do-it-yourself attitude embracing their community and local environment for the flourishing and common distribution of resources and wealth, without it being exploitative towards other people and places. We will cover how these ethics and values are distributed into our political, economic, cultural, and ecological circles of social life and how we can transform participating organizations from within to reflect these ethics and values.

This module introduces concepts from a wide range of belief systems with a comparative analysis of how each culture evolved their Axiological systems while returning back to the objectives of mindfulness of our current conscious experience. There is a bit of mythology that is fun to use in communicating these lessons while balancing out the module with a final framework in mind, I will refer back to these lessons for future Exploration courses into various scriptures and their esoteric meanings such as the Bhagavad Gita (18 modules for 18 chapters) and many other texts from the Ancient East. 

Future Modules

A planned module related to Pedagogy of the Oppressed and an original theory of education I call the Finance Model of Education will be released after these initial four modules. The book is short enough where a chapter by chapter analysis can be provided, but I look forward to doing a live reading with members (sign up for our Patreon for more info), and use these discussions to further our understanding of the impact of our education systems as Paulo Freire witnessed back in the mid-20th century to today. In regards to the Finance model, it will be resemble an academic thesis and a thorough review of the invested impact culture, through the Tesseract model, and compare Freire’s Banking model of education to a modern zeitgeist.

Look forward to the next lesson on Non-Dual Spirituality as it is taught through Critical Sustainability and the SolarPunk Sangha!