7. Fractal Four: Climate Hospitableness...The End?

Theologian Constance Wise said that “the tension between stability and novelty is one of the most important concepts in process thought.”[1] I have applied that idea using brown’s fractal concept to three major staging areas: personal, interpersonal or proximal communal, and distal communal. The fourth level, the global one, is by virtue of its complexity the one that is most likely to remain mysterious and opaque to any individual person’s moral observation and intention. There are very few people on the planet with the clout and resources to effect global climate remediation, but I suggest that to rely on this deus ex machina approach presupposes our belief that there exists some being or figure or power “out there” that can save us from ourselves.

It is simply not true.

Ivone Gebara said that in a “collective dimension the most important thing is neither autonomy nor individuality but relatedness.”[2] A telos of hospitality, faithfully and consistently applied by multitudes in incremental, iterative, localized invitations, ultimately has more power to restore the relatedness that hospitality asks of us than the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of the world.

It is also not lost on me that we may simply be too late to “save” anyone or anything that we value as life on this planet, that we have indeed already unleashed a terrible Newton’s Cradle of high-amplitude backlash that our habitat – and therefore life as we know it – cannot survive, and that we have only to watch the story unfold irrevocably, painfully, over the next 100 years.

I would argue it is in this case especially that a telos of hospitality must yet prevail. In fact, the effects of climate inhospitableness may be the unifying crisis that galvanizes humanity toward the kind of coordinated response needed for systemic change. We cannot know the outcome, we can only participate and observe, and hopefully learn.

I do have faith in the fractal interconnectedness of existence that allows meaningful change in the localized arena to transmit effects up and down the fractal relationship. Repairing all or most of our inward and interpersonal relationships, for example, done by enough people, begins to eliminate some of the traumatically disconnected priming conditions under which climate inhospitableness has expanded, uncontained. The pain of competitiveness that allows us to forget the hidden cost of "cheap labor." Of pollution, of manufacturing goods faster than we can consume them so we build in expiration dates, of having so much food but still so many starving. Of genocide. Of so much more.

This faith leads me to continue to strive for hospitality despite the ambiguity of the outcomes.

Or perhaps because of it.

Anyway, the end of the story is not yet written.

This is the seventh installment in a multi-part series on the constructive theology behind a "Ministry of Small Things." Read Part 6 , or go to the final installment, Part 8 in the series, "Epilogue: Visitation by a Paradox."

[1] Constance Wise in Hidden Circles in the Web, page 34.

[2] Ivone Gebara in Longing for Running Water, page 83.