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Visionaries

Visionaries that can change our world

1996 Visionary Introductory Essay
by interviewer & editor, Jon Spayde, UTNE Magazine

Do we really need a martian invasion to get us to behave like human beings and neighbors on planet Earth?

Artist Jenny Holzer's tongue-in-cheek recommendation is an insouciant and surprising way to re-see and re-think our dilemmas. So is Margo Anand's suggestion that what's wrong with the old men who run most of the world is an inability to internalize their Kundalini; and Lynn Margulis' challenging etymology of humility. We call these and the 17 other men and women in this section visionaries not necessarily because they can see into the future -- though some appear to possess this power -- but because they all have the ability to penetrate the present with little laser beams like these.

These thinkers, writers, activists, artists, ecologists, and philosophers are working to build, against great odds, a sustainable, humane future from the ruins (and the good living traditions) of our poisoned, brutal, but still promising global civilization, We have put them a question: What do we need now?

The answers range -- as we hoped and somehow knew they would -- from the personal to the political to the planetary and back again. As I compiled the section I couldn't help thinking of it as a sort of modern-day version of the collected sayings of Zen masters, Hasidic rebbes, or Sufi teachers. The other editors and I hope you find encouragement, challenge, and enlightenment in these compact statements of faith, these friendly goads to action.

One of the original "Utne 100 visionaries," the brilliant social critic, historian, memoirist, and poet Susan Griffin, recently published a book called The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society (Doubleday, 1995).

In its opening pages, Griffin carefully and gracefully traces the coming together of two ideas into a new spirit in the world:

"The understanding that nature is a source of meaning," she writes, "[is encountering] the hope for a just society."

That seems as good a touchstone as any for what makes the people whose words you'll read here different from most of the humane social and political thinkers who have preceded them.

For nearly all of them, planet Earth and what humankind is doing to it has stopped being one concern among others and has become the very framework of their thinking -- something like what History used to be for Marxist intellectuals. For most of these thoughtful people, all the renewals go forward together: political reform, social revolution, care of the self and of other selves, compassion for the ancient stand of trees and for the little backyard bird.

This seems like a lot of renewing to be doing all at once. But as these thinkers know, a holistic attitude is really the only honest, economical, and feasible way forward. What a relief. Thanks to the coming together of nature and justice, urban activists in the inner-city trenches are now allowed to be amazed and renewed by the ungovernable little ball of life a bird is. They are even allowed to meditate! And the middle-class meditator is freed from the bondage of self to explore just how far compassion must go if it's true -- deep into the inner-city trenches, for example -- and to rediscover that the great saints and mystics spent most of their lives in hard and even hopeless work on behalf of others.

A page or two after her nature/society remark, Susan Griffin goes on to note another, and deeper, transformation: The new thinkers are coming to see "knowledge as intimacy rather than power." It's a perfect explanation of the sensibility I felt again and again as I spoke with the contributors to this section. When Larry Dossey calls for a science that will invite nature to share its secrets like a friend; when Margo Anand bases social health on happy, exalted physical love; when William "Upski" Wimsatt, following Plato, defines justice as friendship, it's clear that intimacy is taking on new powers of explanation and inspiration. Intimate knowledge, whether it is of a butterfly, a neighborhood, a human, or an era of history, refuses to objectify, to enslave, to torture the one known into giving the knower what he or she wants to know; it is tactful, mutual, good-humored, the knowledge of the wonderer, the muser, the lover. It is dynamic and revisable. It fits into no corporate report or five-year plan.

I think this "new intimacy" means that a new definition of "the personal is political" is in the making. When we were using that dread phrase in the '70s and '80s, it seemed to mean that everything we did could and should be submitted to political scrutiny and a potential tongue-lashing. It was a way of testifying to the primacy of the "political."

Most of these thinkers have absorbed these lessons and tend to work for a balance between the realms: They move easily from face-to-face matters to enormous ones like ecological catastrophe and back again. They take care to show how much they have learned from their friends, their families, and the entire intimate, personal side of their lives, and -- in an inversion of the old "personal is political" formula -- how their intimate relations, and other small-scale and concrete presences in their lives, give them maxims for judging the worth of political practices and social schemes.

Of course, there are ways of seeing these trends as less than hopeful. Maybe these thinkers are embracing "the planet" on the one hand, and the community or bioregion or small circle of friends on the other, because of the failure of a whole range of institutions in between -- from nations to political parties to unions. If none of the thinkers in this section speak for the American polis with the thunderous tones and galloping certainty of grand old social prophets like Lewis Mumfortd and Dwight McDonald, it's because it has become hard to imagine a single voice that could speak for the multiplicity our country has become and insists on remaining.

Once you get started on the fractures that run through American society, of course, there's no end of things to say. Republican pundits fret about cultural Balkanization (as their party does its best to make the gulfs between classes permanent). But I found our visionaries -- who are, after all, not Beltway talking heads -- to be a breath of fresh air on this issue. To hear Bernice Johnson Reagon's application of her African-American experience to our common national neuroses and Gloria Anzaldua's deft use of Aztec ideas to illuminate a whole range of issues is to have an epiphany of sorts: These women aren't locked into the stories of their ethnic/historical identities, and they don't try to "transcend" them either. They use them as fine tools for understanding and action. They are powerfully, confidently themselves -- and the conviction with which they present their realities opens those realities to the rest of us, to our very great gain. You could say the same about the rest of these men and women.

By speaking for themselves, with compassion for the rest of us, they spread hard truth, dire warnings, and a startling amount of hope.