Failing Beings? The Inner Development Goals Might Help!

This event is cross-listed from the Sacramento Inner Development Group. Come discuss how we create solutions to the Climate Crisis. The attached paper is about Climate Literacy and uses a framework provided by the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) which is a rapidly growing global movement. You can learn more about the IDGs here but no need to use that link, yet, unless you are dying to know. Let’s put this Meetup into context first.

The introduction to the paper begins with “Given the urgency and all-encompassing nature of climate change, every person, community, and organization must eventually participate in a response. The primary challenge is no longer to develop new technologies or policy ideas. It is rather a challenge of collaboration and implementation at an unprecedented rate, scale and depth.”

Jonathan Rowson supposes that perhaps it is as the German Philosopher Thomas Metzinger says, that the climate crisis is “Conceived of as an intellectual challenge for humankind, the increasing threat arising from self-induced global warming clearly seems to exceed the present cognitive and emotional abilities of our species. This is the first truly global crisis, experienced by all human beings at the same time and in a single media space, and as we watch it unfold, it will also gradually change our image of ourselves, the conception humankind has of itself as a whole. I predict that during the next decades, we will increasingly experience ourselves as failing beings.” Are we really failing beings?

Rowson posits that there is hope in Metzinger’s assessment that our species has a present level of “cognitive and emotional abilities?” This implies that our abilities can grow - and so enter the IDGs (Inner Development Goals).

As Jonathan Rowson puts it in his Linkedin article, “We know, as well as we know anything, that human beings can learn and grow and change for the better. This is the premise of the IDGs, and this is why they are asked to speak at the White House in the context of Climate Week. In many ways, the IDGs are absolutely the right idea and the right movement at the right time…

And yet! Are the IDGs sufficiently challenging to incumbent power? How can we avoid losing years we don’t have to lose, in inner work that risks being merely socially performative, rather than figuring out what kinds of inner work might be spiritually, culturally, politically and economically transformative?”