Spacing Out

Are we ready to embrace the politics of oneness? This week I'm exploring how a cosmic perspective might help us rethink solidarity, power, and what it means to care for each other on a shared planet.

The whole

This week I’ve been spacing out on oneness — both what it means and how our daily lives connect to the vastness of the universe. Vastness, as in two trillion galaxies filled with a septillion stars (a 1 followed by 24 zeros). This estimate is based only on the observable universe — the real numbers are much, much larger.

When I think of oneness, the words that come to mind are integrity, openness, unity, and wholeness. Not wholeness as sameness or as a flattening of difference, but as a unified diversity — a coherence that doesn’t erase complexity.

Oneness feels like an expansive, inclusive word. It’s like a conceptual plasma — one in which we may both matter and not matter.

I just finished reading Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s strange and beautiful novel about six astronauts on the International Space Station, a research laboratory that circles our stunning planet sixteen times a day. It’s a meditation on oneness and a deep reflection on our place in the universe:

We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything.

The characters in the story engage in both observation and reflection, eventually questioning whether we humans can live together on planet Earth:

An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It’s not a fun wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend?

Maybe the best way to realize this fretful demand — especially in a time of political fracture — is through a renewed recognition of our unity with one another and with nature. Oneness.

Divide and rule

How does oneness apply to politics? In the wake of mass demonstrations for democracy in the United States, I am reminded of the Chilean protest song, "¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!” The people united will never be defeated.

And this is precisely why oneness is a dangerous word, at least for those who want to maintain or expand the concentration of power, wealth, and privilege. Forget connection and entanglement! The classical way to counter oneness is to perpetuate relationships of separation and difference, and to reinforce ideologies and -isms that that continue to pollute, degrade, marginalize, and destroy life. To act as if it life does not matter.

As narratives of oneness and solidarity gain traction, so too do the strategies that uphold the myth of separateness. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire describes the treacherous power of a “divide and rule” strategy. This tactic fragments communities in order to maintain control and power:

As the oppressor minority subordinates and dominates the majority, it must divide it and keep it divided in order to remain in power. The minority cannot permit itself the luxury of tolerating the unification of the people, which would undoubtedly signify a serious threat to their own hegemony. Accordingly, the oppressors halt by any method (including violence) any action which in even incipient fashion could awaken the oppressed to the need for unity.

As Freire points out, “the more alienated people are, the easier it is to divide them and keep them divided.” In contrast, solidarity builds strength through shared meaning and purpose. It is no wonder that “woke” is considered to be threatening, along with critical thinking and the development of social consciousness. Oneness is bad for the business of oppression.

One of the tactics Freire describes for maintaining division is to emphasize a “focalized view of problems rather than seeing them as dimensions of a totality.”

“Dimensions of totality” is a nice way of describing the fractal nature of oneness — totalities embedded in totalities that are embedded in totalities, and so on. Our contexts and characteristics may differ, but this does not diminish the power of oneness. Freire emphasizes that unity and organization can enable us to change our weakness into a transforming force for re-creating the world.

Perspectives Matter

I’ve been inspired by Freire’s writings, but I also acknowledge that his view of transformation as a process of becoming does not appeal to everyone; it has radical implications for traditional approaches to education and authority.

For example, a critique of “Paolo Freire’s Oppressive Pedagogy” in National Affairs reminds me that the same texts and concepts can be interpreted in quite different ways. It’s interesting that the author, David Corey, sees Freire’s pedagogy as a call to violence, whereas I interpret it as a call for communion — a deep, reciprocal process of listening, understanding, and co-creation.

The novel Orbital is like a field guide to the geography of the planet, as it describes all of the characteristics and quirks that make up the whole: the deserts, the lakes, the oceans, the islands, the storms, the cities, the coastlines, the lights, and the dark. As the six astronauts go round and round on their spacecraft, they scan the planet, georeferencing themselves to familiar people and places on Earth. Every day, they see the world from a new perspective:

Nell looks out and sees the promise of Europe on the watery horizon. She feels somehow speechless. Speechless at the fact of her loved ones being down there on that stately and resplendent sphere, as if she’s just discovered they’ve been living all along in the palace of a king or queen. People live there, she thinks. I live there. This seems improbable to her today.

Perspectives matter. It’s easy to forget that we live on a stately and resplendent sphere. Instead, we are caught up in individual and cultural identities that are clenched to beliefs that we do not dare let go of, including beliefs about what is possible and impossible.

We act like it’s normal to spend $2.718 trillion a year on military expenditures while letting 828 million people — or 10% of the world’s population — go to bed hungry. According to a recent report by the UN’s World Food Programme, “up to 1.9 million people are estimated to be on the brink of famine, primarily in Gaza and Sudan.” What would we have to believe to allow this situation on our planet?

If we stopped treating the planet as a palace for the powerful or a playground for the privileged, and instead saw it as our shared home, we might finally welcome and care for everyone.

Solidarity

One thing I noticed in Orbital was the lack of friction and tension among the characters. They worked together amicably and as a whole, as if they were an international microcosm of what we could be on spaceship Earth:

“Whatever they were before they came here, whatever their differences in training or background, in motive or in character, whatever country they hail from and hover their nations clash, they are equalized here by the delicate might of their spaceship.”

After spacing out on oneness, I find myself thinking about the high-risk situation right now on Spaceship Earth. What if we were to take Freire’s advice, and risk engaging in an act of love: “True solidarity is found only in the plenitude of this act of love, in its existentiality, in its praxis.” To do this, he says, we need consistency between words and actions, boldness to confront existence as a permanent risk, courage to love, and faith in the people. This is a beautiful way to describe the nature and politics of quantum social change.

We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

Image: Elena Mozhvilo / Unsplash