Book Review: Joanna Macy's World as Lover, World as Self

Coming into relationship with each other and the world

I only recently became familiar with Joanna Macy and her work as I deep dive into a question I’m forming around climate and culture. I picked up her 1991 book, World as Lover, World as Self, at a used book store on my lunch break one day. I was intrigued by the title, which speaks to my interest in embodied practices, the spiritual aspect of the erotic, and the rejection of Cartesian dualism via processes of what might be called re-indigenization.

Initially I skimmed it, and would read a chapter here and there, but then it was on my shelf until this month when I could finally read it cover to cover as research for my own book covering these topics. (Yup, that’s happening.) I can now say it delivers more on integrating the self than on the eros of living in the world. Nevertheless, the Buddhist perspective offered here is a worthwhile bridge from the Western worldview to one far more ancient and far more applicable to the 21st century.

Interdependence will save us

Through numerous chapters culled and expanded from articles published elsewhere, Macy has organized four sections that can be perused, as I initially did, in any order, at any pace. Cycling through, from various angles, is her key message, and the Buddha’s central teaching: paticca samupadda, or the dependent co-arising of all phenomena. This concept is reflected in the teachings of popular Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh as “interbeing,” or the Bantu concept of ubuntu as popularized by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. 

Macy expands on and illustrates this concept with an overview of early Buddhist thought, modern applied examples, meditation exercises, and applications in the climate crisis and the anti-nuclear movement (the former having eclipsed the latter in urgency over the almost 20 years since publication). Of interest to a 21st century reader, Macy ties the concept of Buddhist non-duality to the then-emerging field of networks and systems thinking (and takes the subject even deeper in her book, Mutual Causality).

Un-western mind

While the idea of “world as lover” gets only an oblique treatment in the first chapter, the more thorough handling of “world as self”, and self as world, makes this crucial reading, even two decades on. Without being impenetrably academic, Macy explains the unspoken constructs of the Western mind and worldview, namely the central tenets of separation and hierarchy summed up in Descarte’s “I think, therefore I am.” She goes on to show how this arbitrary arrangement of our relationship with the world created and perpetuates the ecological conditions we are now hastily trying to reverse through technological means.

And that is why I think this book is still so valuable. I believe to reverse the suicidal impacts of self-inflicted climate change will take more than technological innovation borne out of the same mindset that created the destruction. Call it paticca samupadda, or call it re-indigenization, any teaching that will help us re-integrate with each other and the non-human world, flattening hierarchies, is worthwhile.

The first two are the most important chapters, what I would call required reading for anyone who wants to do the internal work to be better resourced for the external work of our times. Chapter One is a very good overview of Western mind, but Chapter Two, “Despair Work” is my must-read chapter for living through late capitalism - especially for the kind of educated White people who are concerned about the environment but also overwhelmed.

To take those teachings and ways of being into the erotic, and make the world your lover, I leave to your creative exploration…

x

Allie

Photo by Branimir Balogović on Unsplash