The Problem With Cathedral Thinking
But communities have been thinking and planning together intergenerationally for millennia!
Cathedral Thinking is a widespread concept that caught my attention a few years ago. This concept “goes back” to European medieval times, describing the cathedral-building community’s ingenuity and long-term planning. It covers everything from architecture and engineering to new techniques, quarry, stone, and masonry, from seeding trees and forests to ceiling beams — how collectives can organize through time and interlocking and multigenerational projects. Cathedral Thinking celebrates the intergenerational collective's creative and inventive capacity to plan and build something together, spanning multiple decades.
However, enthusiasts of this concept tend to forget its geographical and historical context. Cathedral thinking is a recent concept that has tried to encompass the ancestry of diverse human cultures' ways of planning in deep time. It centralizes European history and culture as a reference (yet again). But it's inaccurate if we want to grasp the cooperative cognitive abilities of collective intergenerational planning.
Healthy, contextualized communities have been thinking and planning together intergenerationally for millennia, co-creating and co-generating with ecology and land. It definitely didn't start with planting trees to make the beams of cathedrals in 13th-century Europe (or seeding oaks for building boats for colonizing the world, for that matter).
Original Peoples all around the world, striving to survive the ongoing 500 years of genocide and ecocide, tell us that intergenerational collective thinking builds forests and regenerates ecosystems and not cathedrals. The Seven Generation Stewardship, from the Great Law of the Iroquois, speaks to this by holding accountability to think seven generations ahead and decide for the descendants. Or the Law of the Land of the more than 250 Australia's First Nations, singing song lines for more than 60,000 years, like the tale of the Rainbow Serpent, common in Dreamtime stories, symbolizing creation and the life-giving properties of water.
The swarm-like interlacing of time and space is much older, broader, and more plural than just building European cathedrals. When the sacred is in the land itself, communities take care of the seeds, nurturing the forest (lake or mountain) for its own sake, like the Original Peoples that planted the Amazon. These are intergenerational projects across species, and the entire forest is alive, a shrine for tools, medicine, play, food, water, and the sacred.
The problem with Eurocentric Cathedral Thinking is that it comes from the idea that the forest or the quarry are but resources for the cathedral. The cathedral celebrates the Western civilization (idealized) order, following a transcendent divine monoculture severed from ecosystems and the land. It exploits and extracts just for humans; it doesn't contemplate regenerative cross-species processes. Naming the human cooperative ability to plan intergenerationally this way keeps the anthropocentric invisible. It makes it impossible to consider how the intergenerational space-time, more-than-human planning, is life itself unfolding. It is a natural movement that doesn't make “civilized” humans exceptional but recalls that all human communities can be responsible stewards.
How about ecosystemic thinking instead?
References:
Unlock the POWER of CATHEDRAL THINKING - Characteristics & Examples
What is ‘Deep Time’ history of the First Nations People of Australia?
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I haven't heard of this term before. Thanks for writing on this topic.