Forty years after Thomas Berry’s “The New Story,” new generations are seizing on the power of narrative.
In Berry’s view, a central cause of the West’s ecological hostility was its separation from nature—a separation that was at once spiritual, religious, psychological, emotional, intellectual, and philosophical. The root of the eco-destruction was an anthropocentric (human-centered) Western worldview that saw an existential gulf, a “radical discontinuity,” between the human and natural worlds.
In contrast to the Indigenous and Eastern cosmologies expressed in the Native American, African, and Asian traditions Berry taught to his students as founder of the History of Religions program at Fordham, the Western worldview generally saw humans as separate from the Earth and cosmos. And not only separate, but superior, with—as Berry noted ruefully—“all the rights and all the value given to the human, and no rights and no value given to the natural world.”
Throughout the 20th century, racist and sexist policies and practices were supported by narratives operating in families, schools, workplaces, and the media, as well as in political, economic and legal/judicial institutions. The civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s, and the feminist/womanist movements of the 60s and 70s can be seen, in part, as massive re-storying on a culture-wide level.
The Water Protectors at Standing Rock challenged much more than a pipeline. They confronted the cosmology of the modern world and its destructive, unjust economy. Like the movement for Black Lives—which also is a direct challenge to 500 years of a white, racist worldview—the visionary resistance at Standing Rock may help guide our way into future. By connecting ecology, social justice, and worldview and using the power of spirituality, dream, story, art, and action, these movements bring forth—in practice and politics and society—what is needed most: a cosmology of interconnectedness.
We need stories that stop abuse and create justice. Perhaps most of all, in this moment of widespread poverty and injustice, climate crisis, and mass extinction, we need stories that build movements.
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