Learn to See

We return to our summary of Brian McLaren's Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart. To read previous chapter summaries, click here.

Brian McLaren suggests that when we Westerners look at the world around us, we do so through rose-colored glasses, which have been given to us by generations of forebears. We receive them at birth and, unless something unusual or shocking happens, we don’t even realize we are wearing them. Different words for this “vision” are paradigm, worldview, social construct.

The glasses we receive color our world with a deep faith in inevitable progress, which most often means that everything is “transformed, Midas-like, into profit, and profit means progress, and progress means leisure, pleasure, power, safety, and fun.” (pg 91)

“We look at a mountain and see how many board feet of lumber or tons of coal it can produce, yielding a handsome profit. Our progressive lenses give us X-ray vision to see oil reserves waiting beneath the soil and ocean, worth billions. Our magic glasses give us miraculous powers. Behold! A miracle! Where others only see a forest or mountain or plain or seafloor, we see money!” (pg 90)

Now we are beginning to be confronted with reality. What we had thought to be true – that there was an unending supply of resources that would make us wealthy and happy – turned out not to be true, or in any case to be thrown into doubt. “It’s as if those augmented reality lenses bequeathed by our culture have filled up with oily smudges, annoying scratches, and deep cracks. Eventually, we wonder, “Maybe we could see better without the damned things?” (Pg 91)

“When we look at the world without those glasses, the invisible hand of the market no longer looks like the hand of God. Our civilization no longer looks collapse-proof. Our species no longer looks extinction-proof.” (pg 91) “The experience of doom invites us – and requires us – to see in many new ways.” (pg 92)

McLaren draws from Einstein’s discoveries that energy and matter are not separate things that can’t mix, but actually are two manifestations of the same thing. They are different expressions and experiences of – not so much a “thing” – but of events and processes. “It is a universe of constant motion, becoming, evolving, participating in relationships, decomposing, recomposing.” (pg 93)

All the things we have been doing to our world throughout the history of mankind, and especially since the Industrial Revolution, have contributed to the well-being or destruction of our world (environment), regardless of how small they are or how insignificant they seem. Everything we do impacts the “dynamic systems” (pg 97) that make up our world. Where before we have understood things two-dimensionally, the doom we face pushes us to understand the systems of which we are a part and on which we have such an impact as a “three-dimensional, dynamically interacting sphere of relationship.” (pg 97)

McLaren names four spheres across which our current situation unfolds:

“Our individual spheres interact with the many layers of the social sphere…which is part of the larger interdependent community of living things, the biosphere. And the biosphere is part of the larger sphere of Earth itself, the geosphere.” (pg 98) “The universe is a system of sacred circles, all related to each other, all needing each other. We are never alone.” Cherokee author Randy Woodley (pg 89)

Our task in this moment of danger and possible doom is to remove the rose-colored glasses through which we have understood reality and “see more truly” (pg 99). When we do that we will understand how much we have been blinded to how we have gotten to this point of unsustainability, and we will begin to see how beautiful the world – every aspect of it – is. “The green of dollars and the gold of coins will look tawdry compared to a mound of moss or a field of autumn grasses.” (pg. 99)

It is hard if not impossible for us to remove the rose-colored glasses. We will need help. We will need help from people who have and do look at the world differently. These will be people we have marginalized - some to the point of extinction – for many centuries.