Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
And you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’

The Times They Are A-Changin’ by Bob Dylan (1964)

Bob Dylan is a world-renowned musician who has won all the traditional artistic awards (some in multiples), as well as an untraditional Nobel Prize. I’ve never been a big fan of his singing but his lyrics (for which he won the Nobel) often are remarkable, and prescient. This early Dylan song is associated with the 1960s protest movements, yet it speaks as powerfully today as it did sixty years ago. The times are again, or continue to be, a-changin’.

We naturally look at history in relatively short segments, usually that of our own lifetimes. Yet we realize that to be understood, history needs to be viewed from longer perspectives. Genuine “turning points” are often too subtle to be recognized by the people living through them, yet we are hearing increasingly that we are in such a time right now.

It’s not particularly profound or original to believe that our descendents will view the 20^th century as the peak of Western civilization. Or, in other words, the beginning of its ending. Two world wars and a global economic depression were good signs something was seriously awry. The post-war boom of the ‘50s and ‘60s was thought to be the West’s rebuilding and start of its global domination. Soon, every major city in the world had its skyscrapers and jet airports. Rock became the first “world music” and the ubiquitous uniform of teens everywhere became t-shirts, blue jeans, and athletic shoes.

Today, however, that time increasingly seems to have been when, rather than rebuilding itself, the West jumped the shark. The Western culture of religion and music, literature and art was essentially replaced by consumerism. People were now free to create their own individual “cultures” and be whoever and whatever they wanted to be.

But that freedom came with a steep price and was often illusory. What should I wear? What should I listen to? What should I believe? The consumer marketplace quickly rose to the challenge of telling people all these things and much more. And, conveniently, it learned how to regularly change those answers so people would be forever chasing after “the latest thing.” The question the marketplace couldn’t answer, however, was: What the point of it all? The 1960s is when the oppressive shallowness of this revived Western culture began to be painfully apparent.

But there was another problem with consumer culture: it was unsustainable at a global scale. While it was the dream of the titans of industry to have people the world over all driving Fords or Chevys, it couldn’t be done. Deep down they knew that but figured they would never have to face that fact in their lifetime. The 1970s, then, is when the dog caught the car.

There was a dirty secret that had made industrial and consumer capitalism possible. Two of them, actually.  First, for the owners of capital to keep making all this stuff in their factories and corporate offices, and be handsomely rewarded for their efforts, required cheap labor. Rising wages meant reducing payrolls by either increasing productivity (e.g. computers, robots, AI) and/or moving production to less affluent locations (e.g. China, Mexico, India).

The second, literally, dirty secret, is that all this production required cheap natural resources. That is, these resources (water, oil, iron, copper, etc.) had to be acquired at a cheap price and used with little regard to consequences (e.g. pollution, global warming). So, it was in the 1970s that average wages stopped growing, while the costs of the environmental crisis began steadily rising.

Today, a half-century later, it has become obvious both that these trends are continuing with no end in sight, and that this is humanly unsustainable. Something has to give. And it will.

In essays and commentaries I read and listen to, phrases like “late-stage capitalism” and “end of empire” are increasingly common. Parallels with the decline of the Roman Empire are popular. Forty years ago, Yale historian Paul Kennedy wrote in his landmark book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, that it isn’t given for any nation to stay at the top indefinitely. All eventually decline, or collapse. So, many now wonder if America’s time as king of the hill is coming to an end.

Yet this crisis is more than yet another international power rivalry and changing of the guard. There is a sense that culture itself is floundering, that our political and economic systems are both ineffective and unjust, that our base institutions (government, education, health care, industry, religion) are all struggling with identity and performance, and that climate change will have unpredictable yet seriously destabilizing, and perhaps catastrophic, consequences.

Of course, the question that inevitably arises is, “What can be done about this?!” And I’m afraid the answer is, perhaps nothing. Which isn’t to say that the worst outcome is inevitable. Rather, it is to acknowledge that the scale and complexity of what is happening is so large as to be beyond anyone’s control. Which is also not to say that new governments or new laws, new discoveries or new technologies, or some great culture movement might not make a difference in how this all plays out. But there is no way to know how or whether such things will occur.

The question to ask, however, is not what is to be done but rather, how should we then live? In Luke 3, John the Baptist shocks his listeners as he rails against the evils of their society. “What then shall we do?” they anxiously respond. Rather than laying out a grand plan of social revolution, John turns personal and practical. “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none, and whoever has food must do likewise.” To tax collectors he says, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.” And to soldiers: Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.”

There are two common and unfortunate responses to our situation right now. One is the cynical denial coming from many of our elites. These are the ones building fortress-like enclaves in New Zealand to ride out any coming cataclysm. More common, it means increasing their wealth without limit and living as luxuriously, and wastefully, as possible.

For the non-elites (like you and me), a common response is despair, expressed in a myriad of ways, often unrecognized. These expressions tend to fall into two categories. One is anger, leading to acting out in various anti-social behaviors: random violence, joining fascist and survivalist movements, scapegoating minorities and other populations, religious fanaticism, and so on. The other response category is fear and anxiety. Here the behavior is often turned against ourselves, as in eating disorders and chemical abuse. The constant stream of frightening news stories leads to depression and social withdrawal in response to an ever-gloomier world. But there are other ways to respond.

A blog I follow has the straightforward title “Trying to Understand the World.” Its writer uses the pen name Aurelian (which is French but I believe his real name is David) and is a retired British diplomat, now living in France. He has had a wide range of international experience and provides sober, but also sobering, insights into the world’s current distress, focusing on political, military, and cultural matters. His post last week discussed things we will need to do personally if the world “come a cropper”, as the English say. But at the end he took a surprising turn to look at what may be the biggest mistake of modern culture: the inflation of the human Ego and the increasing time we spend inside our heads. He writes:

What, after all, do we gain from being permanently aroused, permanently ready to take offence, permanently providing a running commentary in our heads about everything we see and hear? What difference does it even make? It makes us tired, it makes us angry, it makes us upset and even despairing, and of course it achieves nothing. Or rather, it gives us the illusion of achieving something, and thus comforts our Ego. Shouting and screaming at the television or an Internet feed, joining in some Internet pile-on against a popular hate-figure vicariously associates our Ego with the subject and the outcome, like football supporters cheering on their team. But in the end, it doesn’t make any difference. Indeed, it actually makes things worse, because the anger you feel cannot, almost by definition, be directed against those who deserve it: it is projected against your friends, family and colleagues instead.

But all of that, as he says, is simply in our heads and we actually have the freedom to disengage from it whenever we want.

Once we understand that we are not obliged to react angrily or emotionally to things we cannot control or even influence, life becomes easier, and we become an easier person for others to deal with…. [We] begin to understand something that the Buddha taught, but is found elsewhere. You are not your thoughts, you are only that which observes your thoughts….

Once we understand [this], we can use various techniques to make ourselves calmer, more balanced, and better able to help ourselves and others….

We are talking here about disciplining and quieting the mind, improving concentration and ultimately recognising that a lot of what we call “me” has no objective existence, but is just a bunch of conditioned reflexes and accumulated habits. “I” cannot therefore be hurt by things I hear and see, because there is no “I.” This doesn’t lead to passivity though: finding a space between the riot of thoughts and emotions that we confuse with a “self” actually liberates enormous amounts of energy for doing things…. Indeed, putting the seething ego aside for a moment, and its incessant regrets and resentment about the past and its fears about the future, enables us actually to see the present for a change, which must surely be a good thing.

Aurelian goes on to touch briefly on the religious and mystical traditions which embody this understanding and are centered on nonduality, the belief that reality, including each of us, is essentially one. But that topic, he says, is for another time.

But what is key, I think, is that the Age of Ego, the Age of Me, is ending anyway, because it is driving our civilisation mad, and it needs to end perhaps more quickly than it otherwise would if anything is to be salvaged. The Age of Me excludes by definition consideration of that which is Not Me, and indeed promotes hostility, suspicion and fear, as we come to see others as a threat to our own Ego. Western Individualism, as it has developed slowly over the last couple of centuries, and at breakneck pace over the last fifty to sixty years, is not going to enable us to survive the future that is coming, unless we have the courage to tell the whiny little Ego to get stuffed for once.

I hope you realize that Aurelian has brought us to what I and many others consider the core of New Testament teaching. Two seemingly paradoxical statements of Jesus sum it up: 1) You must lose your life in order to find it, and 2) You must love your neighbor as yourself. The death of Ego is found throughout the world’s spiritual traditions. It is what Aldous Huxley called (1945) The Perennial Philosophy, though “perennial wisdom” is probably better (thanks Marshall Davis).

It may well be that our civilization has swung further away from that wisdom than at any time in history. Whether we can stop and reverse that swing before it’s too late is unknown. But we can individually be saved from its current madness by learning to “stuff” our own egos and thereby find“the peace that surpasses all understanding”, which is within each of us and is, in fact, our true Self.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’

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