We need a new religion: on Religion 2.0

(Taken from Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/solarpunk_girl/status/1118069102030073856)

We need a new religion. Post-modern science paves the way. Mutual aid between species, intricate webs of symbiosis and dazzling complexity of the Web of Life. This is the topic of my lecture series at Schumacher College. Will publish recordings soon.

Many people have been contributing to this emergent religion over the past century - people like Lynn Margulis, James Lovelock, Monica Gagliano, James F Scott, Peter Kropotkin. I call this "post-modern" biology.

Post-modern biology is biology that started to show us that our way of seeing the way Life works is incomplete. Life is not based solely on competition, "survival of the fittest", "Nature red in tooth and claw". Life is based largely on cooperation, symbiosis and solidarity.

If you go out with a hammer, everything you find is a nail. Darwinian science informed economics, and economics in turn informed the evolution of science. When we looked at bacteria, we saw disease-causing agents. We didn't see the cooperative mats and biofilms.

Then Margulis comes out with her Endosymbiotic Theory. Her paper was rejected from scientific journals 15 times before finally being accepted. She was mocked and ridiculed. We now know that each of our millions of cells house once-free bacteria which fused with our cells.

The lens we interrogate Life with is changing. What you look for is what you find. Suddenly we are discovering interspecies solidarity, complex and wondrous symbioses, interspecies communication: Being Alive is a Team Sport.

Post-modern science is holy and sacred in itself. Patterns of cooperation and mutual aid in Nature and a total reverence to Nature's complexity and intelligence can unite all humans. So can a reverence at humanity's gifts and technologies. We must use them in the right way.

@RichDecibels #microsolidarity is a pattern of this new religion. Connect patterns of human solidarity and social justice with post-modern science and reverence for interspecies solidarity and we see what it could look like.

Nature shows us the way. We just haven't been looking right.

#religion2.0 #interbeing #solidarity #mutualaid #symbiosis #interspecies #networks #biofilms #nature