Bluevolution means attending darker, compulsive images of the industrial shadow, the mismanagement of culture-manufacturing mythologies (“to instill consumption as a kind of inner compulsion”) that normalize the abhorrent as a cost of doing business. Tracking the cost-benefit calculation that devalues living beings is the stuff of the blues, but in the light of abhorrent images treated as normal it is easier to see the ongoing need to exhume, identify, wash, and bury for good images capable of holding on to belief despite being rotten. Exhumation begins by way of imagination and metaphor. In the fifth chapter of Building a Global Civic Culture: Education for an Interdependent World, Elise Boulding surveys “different kinds of literacies, and particularly [refers] to the lack of 'image literacy' or familiarity with imaging, as a characteristic of industrial societies.” She suggests “nurturing the capacity to image . . . as a way out of the trap of apathetic technological dependency.”[i] Many years before, this is the spirit with which Fritz Lang and Thea Von Harbou used their 1927 expressionist science-fiction film Metropolis to vividly represent as “Moloch” the devouring demon in industrial mythology. Bringing metaphorical realities closer to the surface of consciousness can also bring one closer to literal activism, perhaps political revolution driven what appears on TV, cinema, and computer screens every day: our slavery to comfort, thoughtless fearful institutionalized habits, casual savagery, and what I fear to be a growing addiction to terror. Bluevolution involves imaginative work with demons, death, gods, and other big ideas because they can change psychology and mythology in parallel. Some shift like this happened to Darwin.

 

Darwin was aware that his work would impact psychologies and mythologies, but he may not have known that, during the course of his work, his own theology would change. While he watched themes from his work alter cultural narratives of belief and practice, he too moved from being a potential clergyman to being an agnostic.[ii] As noted by Peters and Hewlett, in 1851 Darwin’s 10-year old daughter died of tuberculosis. It was this direct experience with grief that darkened his psychological landscape and likely changed his way of believing. In the midst of this significant grief Darwin’s worldview shifted.[iii] What was left of his acceptance of an institutional god-image fell apart and something more complicated emerged that reflected his actual experience. In the experience of the central figure of Evolution is the key turning that marks the central contribution of Bluevolution. I believe that, this time, it will be the kind of grief that changed Darwin that will again change contemporary society. 

 

As with Darwin, soulful responses may arise on the path of grief with healing potential to salve the problems unreflective belief has caused. Where evolution has become evolutionism, innocence must be lost before we can abandon systems heretofore allowed to continue under the assumption that continuance alone will produce improvements. Where Evolutionism is paired, for instance, with the work ethic and Puritanical never give up of the Christianity observed by Max Weber,[iv] it is hard to pay sufficient attention to those who have, are, or will be giving up life as they have known it: the foreign, the ill, the dying, and the dead.