Preface
‘Philosophising…involves finding the many particular ways of thinking that will be most helpful as we try to explore this constantly changing world’ (Midgley 2018 p.6)
In the following series of blogs I draw on and develop ideas I presented in a chapter for the collection Young People and Thinking Technologies for the Anthropocene (2022). Acknowledging and building on a growing interest in the contribution of philosophy to youth work, I explore the potential of Chinese philosophical traditions as a resource for thinking about, and through, questions of youth work and various forms of work with young people in the Anthropocene.
For a blog series these individual blogs may be considered both excessively lengthy, and numerous. This is hard to avoid, given the long history and richness of Chinese philosophy. At the same time, they unavoidably cover a limited selection of themes and ideas, one that I nevertheless hope will inspire some interest in exploring these philosophies.
A note: in citing the philosophical sources I draw on different translations and scholarly interpretations, and this means that although I use the standard pinyin, on occasion Chinese names and terms will be written in different (older, less commonly used) romanisation systems.
A copy of the sources I reference in this series can be found here: Blog series references.
Chinese philosophical traditions and the Anthropocene
In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the ways that Chinese philosophical traditions may complement and augment our ways of thinking about the nature of human experience and our relationship to the world – the ‘contextualised self’, which encompasses the understanding of the ‘self’ as inter-relational, interdependent, interconnected with/in the social world and the more-than-human world.
In this series of blogs I explore the potential of Chinese philosophical traditions, particularly Confucian schools of moral philosophy and Daoism, for enriching the philosophical foundations (the ‘thinking tools’) of youth work and various forms of work with young people in the Anthropocene.
Cai Guo-Qiang, Day and Night, 2009. Gunpowder on paper
A central concern for the Young People’s Sustainable Futures Lab (YPSFL) is the well-being of young people in the midst of the multiple crises of the Anthropocene. Young people, along with other myriad forms of life that share the Earth, will be – already are – the ones bearing the brunt of human-induced climate disruption, environmental degradation, mass extinctions, and other ‘environmental insults suffered by the earth’ (Albrecht 2016).
In previous blog series Alison Read and Grace McKerras have referred to studies attesting to the multiple impacts of the Anthropocene on young people’s education, life prospects, health and well-being, to explore the opportunities offered by, respectively, regenerative education and wild pedagogies .
Elsewhere, YPSFL notes that the climate crisis and collapse of Earth systems is a matter of intergenerational justice:
In the context of the climate crisis, current ideas about intergenerational justice are focussed on contemporary populations of young people, and as yet un-born generations, and the futures that our past and present actions will visit on these generations. (https://youngpeoplesfutureslab.org/themes/)
Concerned with prospects and possibilities for young people’s sustainable futures, a key, and self-evident, project for the YPSF Lab is the investigation of ways we may productively respond to the complex challenges of the Anthropocene, with particular focus on the well-being, the flourishing, of young people.
Health and human flourishing and the Anthropocene.
The ever-present and cascading onrush of urgent and chronic crises generated by/in the Anthropocene is intricately intertwined with manifold forms of human distress: physical, mental, spiritual. As Australian eco-philosopher Glenn Albrecht (2016) observes in his book Earth Emotions
‘In the Anthropocene…life is characterised by uncertainty, unpredictability, genuine chaos, and relentless change. Planetary distress is manifest in global warming, changing climates, erratic weather, acidifying oceans, disease pandemics, species endangerment and extinction, bioaccumulation of toxins, and the overwhelming physical impact of exponentially expanding human development. Moreover, the Earth’s distress has its correlates in human physical and mental distress. (Albrecht 2016).
Albrecht created the term Solastalgia to describe the particular distress that is associated with loss of the recognisable, ‘emplaced’, biophysical environment that is home, the ‘homesickness you have when you are still located within your home environment’ (Albrecht 2016). Solastalgia is:
the pain or distress caused by the ongoing loss of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory. It is the existential and lived experience of negative environmental change, manifest as an attack on one’s sense of place.
In the discourses surrounding ‘earth emotions’ young people are identified as a special focus of interest, a target of a different range of concerns. Young people have been described as suffering (while perhaps unaware of suffering) a multitude of harms to the mind-body-spirit, symptoms of a deep malaise connected with life in the Anthropocene/Capitalocene. For example, ‘nature-deficit disorder’ has been coined to describe ‘the negative impacts and human costs of the withdrawal of our children from nature and natural processes’ (Louv 2008, cited in Albrecht 2016), in response to which there have sprung up many creative programs and initiatives, ranging, globally, from bush schools, outdoor experience programs, environmental education to school gardens.
Conversely, Albrecht suggests that young people are likely to be less affected by Solastalgia than a form of ‘environmental generational amnesia’ (Kahn 1999, cited in Albrecht 2016), a term describing the process by which ‘with each ensuing generation, the amount of environmental degradation tends to take that degraded condition as the non-degraded condition – that is, the normal experience’, thus resulting in a loss of generational knowledge and experience of original ecosystems and environment.
An emotional experience – not specifically attributed to the young – Albrecht suggests, is the ‘emotional death with respect to nature [that is] taking place’
The emotional death I am thinking about occurs when some humans no longer even have a reaction to the end, death, or loss of nature. There is no emotional presence to bear witness, as all remaining biota are ignored as irrelevant to the life projects of individual humans
Albrecht, acknowledging the impossibility of ‘returning’ damaged ecosystems to their original state, proposes to counter and replace the emotionally terraphthoric (earth destroying), fatalistic, acceptance of the Anthropocene with ‘new intellectual orientations’ that draw on and build positive earth emotions to establish a new era – the Symbiocene, ‘where humans live in harmony with all other beings’ (Albrecht 2016). Recognising the interconnectedness of all living things, and adopting a ‘deep, mutually beneficial, symbiotic view of the cooperation present within life’, Albrecht presents a catalogue of Symbiocene principles comprising ‘the material foundation for all subsequent thought, policy and action’.
After a relatively short period of time (perhaps decades), there will be a point in human social development where almost every element of human culture, economy, habitat, and technology will be seamlessly integrated back into life cycles and processes.
Albrecht sees hopeful prospects in the emergence of ‘Generation Symbiocene’ (post Gens X,Y, Z) ‘which has the task of building the Symbiocene’.
[A]nimated by a secular form of spirituality, this will be a new (or reclaimed) “ecological psychology” that ‘re-establishes full human health (spiritual and physical) within total ecosystem health.
Cast adrift? Young people, connectedness and finding meaning in the Anthropocene
Concerns about the psychological and spiritual health of young people are not new, as ancient historical writings attest. In more recent times the Australian public intellectual Richard Eckersley (1988, 1995, 2005), citing evidence for the increase in mental health problems, and prevalence of pessimism and hopelessness among young people, argued that a deep psychological and spiritual malaise was affecting young people in modern Western cultures. He linked this to an increasing attachment to materialist values, individualism, consumer culture, lack of connectedness and sense of meaning. Young people, he argued, were the ‘social canaries’ of modern society – their poor mental health sounding a warning for the health of our society.
Eckersley believed he could discern a malaise in modern Australia that he connected in part with an absence of ‘spirituality’ – defining spirituality as ‘a deep sense of connectedness (with the world)’ (Eckersley 1988).
Since his publication of Casualties of Change – the Predicament of Youth in Australia in 1988, Eckersley has continued to develop these themes and has extended this analysis across subsequent generations (Eckersley 2012/2023), arguing that young people’s health is declining even further. Dominant measures of development, he says, ‘do not capture the more intangible cultural, moral and spiritual qualities that are so important to wellbeing. And it is in these respects that Western societies do not do so well’ (Eckersley 2023). Measures to address young people’s health and well-being must be based on an ‘ecological model’ of sustainable development.
Whether contemporary generations of young people are any less connected than previous generations is impossible to categorically determine. However, it is possible to trace certain features and values of contemporary society and culture that contribute to the feelings of isolation, and lack of connectedness. The increasing emphasis on the autonomous, self-reliant, isolated individual, cast adrift from supportive institutions and networks of care. An acceleration of the shift to individualised, fragmented and precarious lives. The proliferation of exploitation and conflict.
Exacerbated by the seismic changes that are being wrought in the Anthropocene, life for growing numbers of young people is characterised by the disconnection from the natural world and the Earth systems that sustain, nourish and support them in their flourishing.
Youth Work in the Anthropocene
The complex realities of the Anthropocene present new challenges for the professions that work with young people. Youth work as a profession is diverse, working across many different youth-focused sites and target groups. However, a defining purpose of youth work may be summarised as supporting young people to lead flourishing lives: to engage in the promotion and provision of environments, resources and support to flourish, to live the/a ‘good life’.
The Anthropocene, with its clear threat to young people’s flourishing, is, or arguably should be, a core concern for youth work. The climate and environmental emergencies, and associated social and economic disruptions occurring in the Anthropocene, are an unprecedented threat to young people’s flourishing.
How might we productively respond to these unprecedented challenges?
Citing Donna Haraway’s response to the challenges of thinking/acting in the Anthropocene as ‘staying with the trouble’, the YPSFL states that an aim of its research program is ‘to find, explore, and co-produce ways of ‘staying with the trouble’ that are ‘productive of new ways of thinking and of being and becoming in the circumstances that we (young and old) find ourselves in.’
In a similar vein, environmental historian Jason Moore observes that, if we are to solve the contemporary crises of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene (Moore 2016) it may be necessary to move beyond ‘old modes of thought’ to create more fitting thinking technologies: a ‘new paradigm’ – ‘new thinking’ relevant to the ‘zeitgeist’.
The ideas explored in the following series of blogs start from the premise that the challenges we face in the Anthropocene are fundamental to what are (or should be) the central concerns of youth work: that it is impossible to work with/for young people towards a vision of a ‘good life’ without recognising thatthe collective and cooperative effort involved in imagining a shared (human and non-human) future – sustainable, ethical, living lightly and well on the Earth – requires a reimagining of ourselves in the world. And that requires us to find our way (back) to a philosophy for understanding and living with/in the world that recognises ourselves as interconnected and interdependent with our ‘earth others’ (Plumwood 2002).
With these purposes and intents in mind the following blog explores the nature of a philosophy in/for youth work, and questions whether the Western philosophical traditions, while creatively and productively applied by some writers to youth work practice, are ‘fit for purpose’ in the context of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene.