Bluevolution has to do with maturing into relationship with death and practicing endings in a way that values regret and knows the surrender of innocence. The question Bluevolution asks today is: What needs to die? Grief might reply, “the equation of continuance and growth with improvement—of Evolution with Progress.” Make no mistake: Progress is essential given the proper context and scope. Bluevolution moderates evolution’s progressive sense and gives back the sacrificial reality that always accompanies both evolution and progress.

 

Biological evolution applies at the level of entire species over geological timeframes, but its themes have been applied to create the idea that individuals, or classes of persons, may be singled out as unfit and human evolutionary progress served by discouraging them. This may be a covert and unexpressed position, but it is the unconscious elements of Evolution’s marriage to Progress that seem to become the most pervasive, deceptive, and destructive. Progressive ideas about Evolution are too often too simple. While a blue voice will not tell the whole story either, it brings out the often silenced underside of a conversation between private interest and public good that is couched in progressive terms. There follows the expectation of endless growth, which makes possible worldwide industry-driven climate change and the nationalization, and then globalization, of ecocidal corporatocracy. Slower, less growth-oriented, communitarian voices are underrepresented to the point of being made mute.

 

Only authentic scope and familiarity with limitation allow for real hope to begin again. Living in blue volutions can eventually free up energy for direct action toward beneficial change, but it does not guarantee this outcome. Available “blue fire”[i] from the experience of loss, anger, uncertainty, and the sudden knowledge that anything can change, can fuel the creation of communities that serve and support a life of civic freedom rather than desperation, and politics with humility and therefore integrity. Blue planning for the future has the potential to give children the message that being human is mixed and naturally ambivalent; that it involves legitimate suffering, is potentially sublime, and can awaken beauty and creativity in both individuals and groups. This is counter-cultural because the world is suffering a mass anesthetic[ii] unconsciousness that mutes Soul, the naturally dark imagination that is other/ autonomous, often far from the positivity widely associated with health. Perhaps this numbness has to do with trauma and the shock of global changes in the context of privilege and entitlement.