This newsletter tries to capture a myriad of topics and commentaries and bring you greater purpose and clarity in your life and in the world. My hope is this can inspire you to greater heights of understanding and a create a better future for this planet!
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Now every-time I look at the moon in the night sky I always say that I am “Pro-Humanity.” Well, this is a recent manifestation in my consciousness. I’ve always had a deep yearning in me to understand our species. Help her see her ways, so that she can effectively move towards the greatest creative potential that harbors deep within her. An evolutionary step that can allow us to fully and collectively become an all encompassing and an all embracing creative species despite our destructive ways.
Yet, in me being ‘Pro-Humanity’ I immediately recognize that I stand directly face to face with the dark follies of ‘human-centrism’ and ‘Anthropocentrism.’ Sometimes I have to admit our humanity can be so blinding and it can render us unable to see for example the complex lives of dolphins, the existence of microbes in us, the movements of migratory birds and the living structures that life on earth dances all around us.
Out of pure narrowness it blinds us to our day to day actions and the effect we have on everything else. We are not seeing these things because we are only seeing what we are seeing. Our humanity should be a stepping stone into the cosmos not our commanding ship. Because of it we’ve placed our selves as sentient beings and codified this sentiency by removing ourselves from the whole and others.
In me becoming ‘Pro-Humanity’ doesn’t come without its own paradoxes. Growing up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, I was first ‘Pro-Guerrier’ family. I was loyal first to my kin. Then my worldview moved into ‘Pro-Haitian’ as I came to understand the history of my native Caribbean nation that started the new world and all her movements of liberty and justice from the 1800s onward.
Yet again moving to America in 2004, encountering her broken beauty and darkness, I saw parts of myself awakened to her complexity. I had now become over time something more.. a musician, a peacebuilder, a librarian, an entrepreneur, a writer…etc even so with each of these flowed their own individual pasts and history I came to understand. I had encountered so many people from different ethnic backgrounds and lived in so many communities that my identity had fragmented.
I was pro-Haitian and Pro-many more. Where would it stop? I embraced it all. It made me better. Gave me insights. Lighted inside of me and my inner-world began to thrive as it should and is the kernel of a more robust humanity.
Though we all harbor in us strong structures placed unto our meaning-geography from the moment we are born. We outgrow them yet don’t seek to build new ones. I have seen time and time again our arid meaning geography prevent us from seeing one another. From understanding one another. We are condemned to a size and cannot walk the shoes of one another because of it.
As a black men living in America, i’ve come face to face with the legacies of a Colonial world and imagination that still defines people’s thinking. It defines their behaviors in the most subtle ways and direct ways. It also birthed the incentivization structures of our current systems in how the cultural, political and economic winds flow. In how the have nots and haves are determined. Who is brought to the decision making table. How the power structures are built.
If you don’t believe me :
There are just four black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies
Writers of color are placed at a disadvantaged with the inequalities that face the publishing industry
Black founders receive less than 3% of VC Funding
There are 614 billionaires in the United States, and only 7 of them are Black
While people of color make up about 30 percent of the United States’ population, they account for 60 percent of those imprisoned
Racial demographics and startling facts from Brookings
How are we ever to address the cosmic problems facing our planets when the very inequities and the approaches we use still plagues and affect our world. These do not allow me to be ‘Pro-Human’ when the structures are inherently set up for my own reduction. Yes, some can argue its changing and has changed over the last few decades and its changing fast which why the times we live in excites me so much.
Kardashev scale
I remember the first time that Stephen Hawking, the late English theoretical physicist and cosmologist spoke to the “Kardashev scale” to describe theoretically trajectory of a civilization of sentient species on a planet could take as they look out to the cosmic scale. Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev, meant to measure the scale of a civilization’s technological advancement. It got me thinking.
I thought it was a great concept to frame human evolution. Our next step into the outer cosmos. Especially with the first stages being that humanity is able to come together as a whole to unfold all the energy and economic sustainability through collaboration amongst people and nations. Sadly, humanity is not even at “Type 1 Civilization.”
We are still very much tribal, at war and destroying our planet. Yet, attempts at globalization and universalization have often backlashed in many ways because of the narrow focus and imagination of those who attempted it. Sure they’ve lifted many out of poverty but it was on a scale that massively benefitted a specific group of people and had many other unintended consequences. This infinite frame of mind with finite resources on the planet is not sustainable especially with climate change.
I am left with many questions —
How can we as a human species reach Type 1 Civilization in such a way that we can still embrace where we come from and not repeat the same mistakes of the past?
How do we effectively become ‘Pro-Humanity’ if so much is at skate for underrepresented people and voices across the board on our planet?
How can we embrace this planetary consciousness where so much of our identities and worldviews are dogmatic, static and can be so tribalistic?
How do we become ‘Pro-Humanity’ in a way we can fully embrace the diversity of people, cultures and especially the many species in nature all around us?
Is the Kardashev and this prolonged concept of our collective even appropriate or limiting here?
For now, I’ll leave you with all of these questions to reflect upon that I’ve been wrestling with in this new year. If you have thoughts please do share them with a simple reply!
Thanks as always for reading.
In good spirit,
Fabrice