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The Ocean in a Drop: Navigating from Crisis to Consciousness
The Ocean in a Drop follows the quest of Roz Savage, a frustrated environmentalist and ocean adventurer, to find out why her own endeavours and the environmental movement more generally have failed to achieve change of the necessary scope, scale and speed. Her journey takes her from the environment through economics and politics into patriarchy and a global culture of domination – the domination of rich over poor, strong over weak, humanity over nature. She examines the tragic psychological flaws in the way we think, and the apparent inevitability of civilisational collapse, and deduces that our best hope is to transcend the current trap of runaway materialism. But how?
Exploring cutting-edge theories on the nature of reality and the relationship between matter and consciousness, she peels back the veils of our shared delusions to arrive at a new narrative about what it means to be human in the twenty-first century. She paints a bold, exciting vision of a future in which people and planet thrive.
Exploring cutting-edge theories on the nature of reality and the relationship between matter and consciousness, she peels back the veils of our shared delusions to arrive at a new narrative about what it means to be human in the twenty-first century. She paints a bold, exciting vision of a future in which people and planet thrive.
320 pages, Hardcover
Published November 24, 2022
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February 1, 2023
The Ocean in a Drop is a survey rather than a mine. Roz Savage’s restless, expeditionary intelligence seeks to understand the way world-systems operate together like waves buffeting the hopes, and the hope, of civilization. The wide scope, she’d say, is part of the point: to escape silos and confront the larger picture. Her prime motivation has been to sound an alarm about the gathering ecological crisis, but her method shines light on the way partisan interests and cognitive biases work together to blind us to our real self-interest.
Marine and nautical metaphors suggest themselves almost too readily, distracting from the deep (!) seriousness with which the book should be taken. We think of civilization as a system (or a system of systems), but it is not. Civilization, we may at least hope, is the use of systems for good outcomes, rather than for preservation and elaboration of the systems. But cognitive biases built into our neurology confine us to the tracks laid out ahead of us by partisan interests, which are inexorably designed to replicate the past.
Long supposed a tool of discernment, of objective investigation, cognition snookers us and skewers us. In fact it traffics in illusion. The partisan interests (not only those of political parties but those of any part which takes itself as the whole)— “free trade,” say, or “balanced budgets,” or the holy grail of “growth”—are aspect and example and result of the cognitive traps Savage details, chief among them confirmation bias. The genial good humor with which she recounts the sources of our governing illusions sits increasingly uneasily with the demonstrable failures of our intelligence to address the growing menace of their effects. “The narratives and values that form the foundation of our current civilization,” illusions which produce comfortable structures—comfortable for the ruling classes, at least—reinforce their hold on the affections and loyalties of even the less fortunate, making it increasingly unlikely that the more-of-the-same feedback loop can be disrupted. Emotional investment in the way things have been prevents us from recognizing the doom loop: we only recognize what we re-cognize, cognize over again. Thus the past cements itself in place.
Savage is rather good at the bon mot—“the beneficiaries of the old…have no interest in designing the new; it would be like asking a French aristocrat to design the guillotine.” And the “solutions” in the second half of the book partake of that elegant if simple impact. As we read through her admittedly rosy picture of 22nd-century civilization, the one that succeeds a hypothetical monster solar flare that has wiped out anything that depends on electricity, we begin to wonder if this idyll can be anything more than a picture, its nostrums simply ignoring distasteful realities. In such a cleansed civilization, “We would no more hoard intellectual property than we would hoard food, resources or money. It benefits everybody when we co-create and build on each other’s ideas.” Indeed? We think of Gonzalo’s vision of the golden age in The Tempest (my favorite maritime allusion!), a fond fantasy of establishing a new civilization on an undiscovered island, after the shipwreck. That generalization about hoarding has always been true for societies, yet the stubborn impulse of individual self-aggrandizement remains. If we are limited by craven self-interest, abetted by cognitive biases and filters, can we just choose to cast them all off and begin afresh? How do we enter a brave new world in the midst of a tenacious and jealous old one?
The simplicity of a bon mot or a new vision is unsatisfactory only from the perspective it critiques: our barnacled belief that life is a struggle; that achieving societal success requires individual effort, and accordingly must produce winners and losers (whence the dynamic of conquest); that more for you means less for me. The end purpose of Savage’s oeuvre (like Shakespeare’s) is to notice and then to supplant the assumptions which give us that governing perspective. Her work is prose, not drama or poetry, but in the final movement it partakes of poetry’s summoning of the spirit of human love. This shift of spirit is not accomplished like the gestalt shift that changes a rabbit into a duck, or a vase into visages facing each other. It is ultimately not a cognitive shift, but comes into power as a re-orientation of the whole being, its emotions and energies, its feeling of integration with the whole of life. When the insubstantial pageant of illusion fades—when you are the ocean in a drop—your heart is unspeakably full. The book prepares us to mine that fullness.
Marine and nautical metaphors suggest themselves almost too readily, distracting from the deep (!) seriousness with which the book should be taken. We think of civilization as a system (or a system of systems), but it is not. Civilization, we may at least hope, is the use of systems for good outcomes, rather than for preservation and elaboration of the systems. But cognitive biases built into our neurology confine us to the tracks laid out ahead of us by partisan interests, which are inexorably designed to replicate the past.
Long supposed a tool of discernment, of objective investigation, cognition snookers us and skewers us. In fact it traffics in illusion. The partisan interests (not only those of political parties but those of any part which takes itself as the whole)— “free trade,” say, or “balanced budgets,” or the holy grail of “growth”—are aspect and example and result of the cognitive traps Savage details, chief among them confirmation bias. The genial good humor with which she recounts the sources of our governing illusions sits increasingly uneasily with the demonstrable failures of our intelligence to address the growing menace of their effects. “The narratives and values that form the foundation of our current civilization,” illusions which produce comfortable structures—comfortable for the ruling classes, at least—reinforce their hold on the affections and loyalties of even the less fortunate, making it increasingly unlikely that the more-of-the-same feedback loop can be disrupted. Emotional investment in the way things have been prevents us from recognizing the doom loop: we only recognize what we re-cognize, cognize over again. Thus the past cements itself in place.
Savage is rather good at the bon mot—“the beneficiaries of the old…have no interest in designing the new; it would be like asking a French aristocrat to design the guillotine.” And the “solutions” in the second half of the book partake of that elegant if simple impact. As we read through her admittedly rosy picture of 22nd-century civilization, the one that succeeds a hypothetical monster solar flare that has wiped out anything that depends on electricity, we begin to wonder if this idyll can be anything more than a picture, its nostrums simply ignoring distasteful realities. In such a cleansed civilization, “We would no more hoard intellectual property than we would hoard food, resources or money. It benefits everybody when we co-create and build on each other’s ideas.” Indeed? We think of Gonzalo’s vision of the golden age in The Tempest (my favorite maritime allusion!), a fond fantasy of establishing a new civilization on an undiscovered island, after the shipwreck. That generalization about hoarding has always been true for societies, yet the stubborn impulse of individual self-aggrandizement remains. If we are limited by craven self-interest, abetted by cognitive biases and filters, can we just choose to cast them all off and begin afresh? How do we enter a brave new world in the midst of a tenacious and jealous old one?
The simplicity of a bon mot or a new vision is unsatisfactory only from the perspective it critiques: our barnacled belief that life is a struggle; that achieving societal success requires individual effort, and accordingly must produce winners and losers (whence the dynamic of conquest); that more for you means less for me. The end purpose of Savage’s oeuvre (like Shakespeare’s) is to notice and then to supplant the assumptions which give us that governing perspective. Her work is prose, not drama or poetry, but in the final movement it partakes of poetry’s summoning of the spirit of human love. This shift of spirit is not accomplished like the gestalt shift that changes a rabbit into a duck, or a vase into visages facing each other. It is ultimately not a cognitive shift, but comes into power as a re-orientation of the whole being, its emotions and energies, its feeling of integration with the whole of life. When the insubstantial pageant of illusion fades—when you are the ocean in a drop—your heart is unspeakably full. The book prepares us to mine that fullness.
Displaying 1 of 1 review