The Parable of the Marriage

[GliderGuider]

The Parable of the Marriage

These days humanity finds itself at the center of an enormous converging crisis. A wide variety of global-scale problems in ecology, energy and economics are joining forces before our eyes to threaten a massive disruption of the human experience. Inevitably we ask ourselves the question, “How on earth did this happen to us?”

I find metaphors to be very helpful in thinking about this situation. In this article I present a metaphor that I think has strong similarities to the situation we find ourselves in at the moment. It may help to clarify how this situation came to be, and why we are having such a hard time getting ourselves out of it.

The metaphor itself is unfortunately all too common in our culture – it’s the story of an abusive husband and his abused wife.

The husband in our story is not evil. He’s not a sociopath, he doesn’t beat his wife for pleasure, and he doesn’t lock his kids in closets to hear them scream. He’s just your average self-centred, culturally programmed Everyman. As an Everyman he has some fairly common attitudes. He believes that a man’s home is his castle; that a man has a right and duty to be the head of his household; that the household resources are his to direct; that a wife’s role is to serve and nurture her husband; and that children should be seen but not heard.

The wife in this little play is kind, generous and generally quiet. She accepts he husband’s leadership and control without much protest. She sees her role as being the nurturing helpmate. Whether it’s for her husband, her children, her home or her community, she is always making sure that everyone has what they need. She has a job as a nursing assistant at a local hospital. In her spare time she gardens, does a lot of community volunteer work, cooks for her family and maintains her home.

(snip the parable)

Now let’s change the identities of the players in our story and see what that change reveals about the bigger picture.

Into the role of the husband we cast modern industrial humanity. As the long-suffering wife we cast Mother Nature. The children represent all the other life that shares our planet. The part of the doctor is played by all the fixers of our culture – the environmentalists, the policy analysts, the city planners, the alternative-energy engineers.

When you retrace the story line with these new players in their roles, the broader message appears:

You may read the rest of the story at the link.