The Dark Mountain Blog
Terms of Dismissal
posted by Paul Kingsnorth
1st August, 2010
I don’t think I’ve ever met a collapsitarian. At least if I have, they’ve never admitted it to me. It’s possible that some of my best friends may be collapsitarians in the privacy of their own homes, just as they may also be, in their own time and strictly in confidence, devotees of bestial porn or the novels of Jeffrey Archer. But it’s never come out in public. The same is true of doomers. I keep hearing about these people. Apparently they’re all around us. From what I can tell they’re a sort of political goth. They’re terribly difficult and probably socially inadequate. In a world free of austerity they would be entitled to psychiatric help, but these are straitened times.
But then I probably just don’t get out enough. These days I spend most of my time closeted on my hill farm reading Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and oiling my shotgun. For this reason I have never run into a nimby or a nihilist either. Self-declared reactionaries are also thin on the ground. Fascists are certainly in evidence here and there – I have one as my MEP – but they do seem to be considerably fewer in number than some would have me believe.
This is odd, because in the last year I have been called all of these things and more. I never knew it was possible to be, for example, a utopian nihilist. I would have thought that the varying political demands of being a fascist, a Romantic, a conservative and an anarchist all at the same time would be simply exhausting, not to mention contradictory. Apparently not.
When we wrote the Dark Mountain manifesto we knew that, if anyone read it at all, some people would hate it. Quite a lot of people, in all likelihood, given the challenges it laid down. ‘If you want to be popular’ we wrote, ‘it is probably best not to get involved, for the world, for a time, will resoultely refuse to listen.’ If we’re right about nothing else, we were right about that. Extreme reactions, from all over the spectrum, have been a feature of the response to Dark Mountain. For every email we get from someone telling us they’ve been waiting for us all their life, there’s a blog post by someone else calling us names. I find the name-calling very interesting, and have been musing on it a lot.
What we are dealing with here is what we might calls Terms Of Dismissal – let’s call them ‘TODs’ for short. TODs are a crucial feature of all political and cultural debate. Humans are social creatures and tribal animals. We exhibit a need, apparent in every human culture, both to band together with others and to mark ourselves out from other, opposing tribes. This behaviour spills over into politics daily, where it is disguised, often very thinly, as rational disagreement about policies or positions.
The function of TODs is to delineate tribes, so that other tribes may be easily dismisssed without the need to respond seriously to any arguments they might be making. TODs are, in effect, the grown-up equivalent of the kind of names you called each other in the playground. Remember when being called a horrible name at school would stop you in your tracks? Remember the inadequacy of that old saying about sticks and stones? Being called names is nasty. Calling people names, conversely, is very effective. We’ve all done it. It’s easier, and far more common, than engaging seriously and decently with people whose worldview you don’t share.
Take, for example, the increasingly polarised world of US politics: it’s almost the perfect example. The USA seems to me at present – as an admittedly outside observer who gets most of his information from various imperfect media sources – to be a land in which even pretences of rational disagreement are being abandoned in favour of angry tribal entrenchment. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the end of the American republic in any meaningful sense in my lifetime, and I wouldn’t be surprised either to see its slide to the hard right continue until it becomes something very nasty indeed. After all, this the most powerful and heavily-armed empire in world history, and it’s in increasingly precipitate decline.
But anyway: the point is that this country is currently so angrily polarised that TODs almost count as political debate. If you support Obama’s healthcare package, for example, you will be dismissed as a ‘socialist’ by millions of people. There is nothing objectively socialist about anything Obama does, but objectivity is not the point. This is a term of dimissal, remember. It’s dog-whistle politics: calling someone a socialist signals to millions of other people that they are not to be listened to. They are on the Dark Side. They are not One Of Us.
The same function is served on the left by the word ‘fascist’ (or, over here, the words ‘Thatcherite’ or ‘neoliberal’, which seem to be interchangeable.) Call someone a fascist and it’s pretty much debate over: after all, who wants to be seen having polite discussions with someone who wears jackboots and glorifies the master race? If you don’t like environmentalists, you call them ‘sandal-wearers’ or ‘Romantics’ or ‘hippies,’ or maybe just ‘communists.’ If environmentalists don’t like you they might call you a ‘corporate stooge’ or even a ‘nimby’ (ironically, since this is a term dreamt up by a corporate PR machine with the express purpose of discrediting environmentalists.) And so on.
Dark Mountain has had plenty of TODs thrown at it over the last year. We can’t really complain, and we shouldn’t blow our own trumpet too much either. Anyone who writes or speaks about the likelihood of a depleted future, and the false hope peddled by those whose various schemes for avoiding it are looking more ragged by the day, will be showered in TODs. TODs come into play when things are being said that are a threat to the inherent psychological assumptions of the listener. If you talk about the likely crumbling of our way of life, and ongoing crumbling ecosystems of the Earth on which we depend, you will have TODs thrown at you like rocks. Some of them will be from the business-as-usual crowd, but others will be from people who consider themselves campaigners for change, mainstream (albeit corporate) greens, and even radicals. Sometimes their tone will be mocking and sometimes it will be pious: they will huff and puff and call you ‘irresponsible’ for daring to publicly discuss what you believe to be the facts. You will find that your very desire to discuss these things, precisely because they are difficult, is not only called into question but is violently attacked.
There are all sorts of undercurrents at play here. One of them is that many people who consider themselves to be radical opponents of the status quo are nothing of the sort. George Orwell famously wrote, with typical over-statement, that ‘every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed’ and there’s certainly some of this going on today. It’s easy to rail against ‘the system’ if you think the system will always be there to rail against. If you start to believe that it might actually crumble, exposing you and yours to something much more uncertain and horrible, you may, in a very short time, find yourself converted into a reluctant but stout defender of the strength and vitality of the status quo. I’ve seen this happening to a few prominent green voices in the last couple of years, and there’ll be more of it to come.
But the main point, I think, is this: that when you are called a ‘doomer’ or a ‘collapsitarian’ or a ‘miserabalist’ or any of the other playground names that are currently doing the rounds, it is not you that is being attacked: it is the facts which are piling up to illustrate what is happening around us. I am currently reading Bill McKibben’s new book Eaarth, which I strongly recommend: it’s an important book, not least because it’s the first time that a prominent mainstream green writer has broken ranks. I’ll write more about it here when I’ve finished it, but McKibben’s essential point is that decline is already with us and that our task now is not to try and prevent the decline of industrial civilisation but to do our best to manage the descent.
The first third of McKibben’s book wraps up all the evidence you could possibly need to make this case, with hundreds of references. He explains the over-complexity of industrial systems, makes a strong case for peak oil and the inability of alternatives to fossil fuels to sustain anything like current levels of western comfort, looks at the likely retrenchment of economic globalisation and, most of all, scares the shit out of you with the ongoing realities of climate change which, in almost every single studied case, is moving much faster and more alarmingly than scientists had imagined. Climate change, says McKibben is not, as so much empty rhetoric would have it, a scary legacy that will face ‘our grandchildren’ if we don’t ‘act now.’ It was a problem for our parents: they didn’t tackle it, neither will we and the result is to all intents and purposes a new planet: one which will not act the way the Earth has acted for the 10,000 years in which we built our various civilisations. All bets on the future are off. It’s too late to go back.
I read and talk a lot about this stuff, but Eaarth still scares me. Part of me would like to be able to insult McKibben: throw some TODs at him and hope he goes away. But he’s too canny a writer and too good a researcher for that. That won’t stop some people trying. The ironic thing, for me, is that both ‘doomers’ and anti-doomers seem to want certainty. Doomers apparently long for the apocalypse. They want revenge on the world, or they want poor people to die, or they want to lead a revolution to erase the memory of their teenage acne (the tenor of the cod psychology at this point will depend upon the imagination and personal background of the name-caller.) Their critics, conversely, long to be told that everything will work out fine: that the life they know will keep on keeping on, that the tech will save us as it always has, that those who think it won’t are motivated by sour motives, or are just idiots.
The third possibility – that of a decline, painful and in many ways horrible, but far from unprecedented and also presenting opportunities – is the hardest notion of all to consider. It requires hard thinking, and action to negotiate challenges, and it doesn’t offer up any easy answers. It means that there’s no ‘cleansing catastrophe’ and no voyages to the stars. It might not work, and we don’t know how it will pan out. Neither pieties nor rude words can help negotiate it.
Posted by Paul Kingsnorth on 1 August, 10
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Hey, you forgot the ‘tree huggers’, Paul !
Me, I’m a quasi-reactionary-hard-core-crypto-nihilist-neo-taoist, dedicated to surreal shamanic situationalist survivalism, myself….
Vive la Révolution ! :-)
Good post Paul.
There are some very influential and strong arguments from the mainstream – see Matt Ridley’s recent “The Rational Optimist” – that, upon reading them, can cause even the staunch believer in the DM argument to waver. Books like ‘Eaarth’ are very important to counteract the prevailing view that, whilst there are ‘problems’ to deal with, if we remain optimistic and come together using our rational faculties and technological ingenuity, we can get through the 21st Century, not just fully intact, but better than we’ve ever been.
I think these are very, very dangerous words from people like Ridley, and that, far from lambasting the Romantics and the environmentalists and the doomers etc., our society should be examining critically the flaws in the tech-fix approach and exposing the myths inherent within. By lamely following Ridley’s prescription, we function carte blanche in our affairs, and thunder headlong into a disaster that the overwhelming majority will neither be prepared for nor understand.
Only then shall we really see who will ‘dare to be an optimist.’
Monbiot has comprehensively demolished Ridley on several occasions. Just one example :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/jun/18/matt-ridley-rational-optimist-errors
Quite staggering that Ridley can ignore the fact that he was bailed out by the tax paying public who were forced to clean up the mess he made at Northern Rock. Typical of arrogant sociopaths, blind to the harm and suffering they cause, the man has no shame.
You know, we used to be exhorted to admire the brave capitalist entrepreneurs who were willing to take risks, gambling on the success of some venture or other. We were told they were the blessed bedrock of the economy. But that’s not the game that they play. They privatise the profits, when things go well, and socialise the losses when things go badly.
The benefits get concentrated, funnelled to an elite minority, whilst the negatives, the externalities, get spread in a diluted form, onto everybody and everything else, to the extent that now they threaten the very future of life on Earth.
The minority who benefit from the system ( which must include most folks in UK, because where does the majority of UK revenue come from ? sources like BP and banking, which cause gross harm elsewhere, provide the pensions, pay for the military adventurism, all those jobs in the bureaucracies, the money in the treasury coffers which give politicians power… ) have no incentive to reform.
Remember, it was Matt Ridley’s uncle who devised the poll tax. He was also blind to the obvious crude injustice of his ideas, which only got stopped by smashing up central London, something that frightened the bankers and investors.
My opinion, nothing is going to prevent the ‘thundering headlong into disaster’, because the people who have their hands on the levers are too stupid, too uneducated, too deluded, too greedy, to change course. Things will only change when the dead bodies are piling up in the streets.
Now you have met a collapsitarian. Please read my book “Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse” which can be ordered at my site.
good morning
TOD means in German >>> DEATH !
regards waltgerbi, ch
Lee and wolfbird – yes, I’ve not read the Ridley, but I mean to, albeit through gritted teeth. I think the Ridleys of this world will always find a bigger audience than the McKibbens, for the simple reason that they tell all of us what we secretly want to hear. This is one of my reasons for believing that collapse, or decline at least, is now inevitable – has already begun, in fact. We have plenty of information about our predicament but we don’t act on it. We don’t even want to believe it. As a civilisation, I think we are drugged on choice, power and growth, and we will not take action until the shit hits us.
Carolyn – pleased to meet you! I will have a look at your work.
Walter – that’s great! My shameful ignorance of most foreign tongues means this is a very appropriate surprise.
No, it’s worse than that. TOD>>>The Oil Drum!
Paul,
‘The Ridleys of this world will always find a bigger audience than the McKibbens’. Agreed. However, ‘the Cheryl Coles (because I’m worth it) of this world will find a significantly bigger audience than the Ridleys’.
For 95% of the Western population (probably more but I was being optimistic), none of this has even registered (climate change, water depletion, general resource depletion, peak oil, desertification, etc). For example bring it up at one of those cosy, pseudo intellectual, middle class dinner parties and you’d get a better reaction if you’d farted loudly.
We are in a ‘downward’ spiral already. We know that, the politicians know that but the bulk of the population haven’t a clue and that is pretty scary. Disasters are better managed when you know where the escape slide is !
A post industrial, low energy, low resource future is not a disaster but actually probably a blessing for the vast majority of the world’s population and the planet itself. What we need (globally) are thousands and thousands of good stories, projects, examples, leaders, that can illuminate what looks like (if you are even looking) a very dark place currently. Only in this way will we stand a chance against those ‘that tell us what we secretly want to hear’.
All we can do is keep talking about it, coming up with the ideas and telling as many people as possible.
I may be being over optimistic here but I think when ‘push comes to shove’, and when presented with the facts, most people aren’t stupid and are in fact pretty resourceful and sensible (we may need to exclude the Matt Ridley!). Let’s hope so anyway.
Andy
Drill, baby, drill !
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2010/08/photo-gallery-drowning-in-oil.html
“We have plenty of information about our predicament but we don’t act on it. We don’t even want to believe it.”
Too true.
I want action. I wonder how people, those who can see where the present disastrous course is going, can distance themselves, other than by wearing a label ? Even a fresh label would be helpful. What we need is a word which sums up and symbolises a radically different view… all we have are useless worn out terms like ‘green’ and ‘left’ and ‘alternative’ and ‘environmentalist’, none of which gather up the immensity of what is occurring…
Teddy goldsmith gave a talk at my school over 40 years ago when I was 14. He convinced me (and most of my friends) that by the year 2000 the world would be running out of oil,water and other resurces and pullution and overpopulation would result in the end of civilisation within our lifetimes.
Acting on this assumption I moved to a smallholding in Devon where we have attempted a more sustainable lifstyle producing most of our own food and energy.
Industrial civilisation meanwhile appears to go from strength to strength. Friends and relatives who reacted with incredulity when we gave up careers to move here are now envious of our lifestyle and environment but remain unconvinced of any apocaliptic visions of the future. Even our children, born and raised here have no doubts that life will continue much as it has and have opted for careers dependent on the continuation of consumer culture.
Although at one I remain convinced industrial society cannot continue is it is for much longer I now make practical decisions about my own future on the assumption that the state and financial system will continue for my lifetime. In part this is due to the knowledge that my own personal future now only several decades and a pension and medical care have become of greater concern than before. However it is also in part simply due to the fact that I have spent most of my life preparing and waiting for something which so far has not happened and despite the evidence I somtimes wonder if I am guilty of wishful thinking when considering peak oil,global warning etc.
I’m a doomer and damned proud of it. Do I relish the thought of people dying? No, of course not. But I know every day in overshoot means another 205,000 people who will need to be removed, later, when it’s a lot less convenient. For the sake of a human future, please bring on the collapse of the omnicidal industrial economy.
I believe the USA will disintegrate within 5 years. Its demise is all but assured.
And I say that as an American.
Guy,
I’m struggling with some of this I have to say. I’m sure that we would both agree about the nonsense of perpetual growth and all of its implications. However, why would you wish for imminent collapse when it would mean endless suffering(now)for very many people (are you a parent ?). We know there are significant problems building up but time is actually precious and should not be wished away. The reason that I spend time on this website is that I believe it is our duty to inform as many people as possible about the problems that we face, discuss ways in which the worst of the problems might be avoided and paint a picture of a future that, whilst post-growth and low energy, could actually be better (for the global population and the planet) than what we have now.
The purpose of Dark Mountain was to create new stories and de-bunk old myths. All you are doing is carrying on the old, slightly wierd and boring apocalypse theme. If I want to see this I can log on to many a nasty, ultra right wing, supposedly Christian, nutty American websites (can I suggest you read John Michael Greer’s excellent book ‘The Long Descent’).
I may be wrong but I thought Dark Mountain should be (ultimately)about stories of hope not disaster. Take it from me, that as a previous cancer sufferer, your chances of survival are significantly better if you believe you will and want to survive than if you think you’ll die and put no effort into life affirming thoughts or activities. Whilst it might be ‘uber cool’ in some circles to take the approach you have, I’m not sure it will ever get too many people’s attention. To make a very simplistic point; if you want to sell an idea to someone, tell them how good it could be not how crap it will be.
Sorry for the slightly uppity tone of this but I think you might be barking up the wrong tree.
Cheers
Andy
I hope you’ll have a think about what it is you are really wanting to ‘bring on’ and whether it might not be better to dedicate your time to trying to alleviate its worst effects.
Hi willat larkworthy,
Edward Goldsmith, like his brother James, got some things right and some things wrong, as we all do. Predicting the future… well, you try to be as well-informed as possible, but it’s never going to be exact. There might be intervention by an asteroid or the Yellowstone super-volcano or global pandemic, some other entirely unforeseen catastrophe. But, from what can be estimated and measured and observed, ‘the end of civilisation’ has already occurred in some parts of the world, (e.g. Somalia ) and is imminent in others…
Life in UK, as of today, is probably better for the majority, than it has ever been. They reached the utopia that they dreamed of. NHS, low infant mortality, no more cholera and typhoid, reliable pensions, supermarkets full of goodies, and so on. But if you look at what props that up, the whole system depends upon casino finance, the ravaging and looting and exploitation of other people, other lands, the commons of the oceans ( 90% of the large fish have gone ), massive CO2 emissions, and so forth… it doesn’t take very much investigation to see that, in as objective terms as one can apply, ( I admit, it’s difficult to be objective ) the trajectory we have been following cannot continue… something is going to break.
A billion people already undernourished and going to bed hungry every night, and an additional 3 billion on the way, all desiring an ‘improved standard of living’, concurrent with climate chaos and peak oil, collapse of global bio-diversity, etc, etc, just isn’t going to work out well… as I see it, we’re teetering on the brink of World War III. If Israel attacks Iran, all the other powers get sucked into the mess, whether they want to be or not.
The time scale is the most difficult part to estimate. We tend to measure the time scale relative to our own personal lifetime, perhaps our children’s lifetime. But that’s not the appropriate indicator. We’re talking about historical events, which need to be seen in a historical context.
Fast, hard crash, or slow, soft crash ? We are not getting honest, enlightened, intelligent, responsible leadership from governments or politicians, so we just have to figure it out for ourselves.
Andy, I don’t think it’s about ‘selling’ anything. I don’t it’s even about persuading anybody to change their mind. It’s about getting a clear conception of the reality of the predicament. I take your point, re recovering from serious illness. But life IS a terminal disease. Only psychopaths and sociopaths take delight in misery and suffering. Nobody wants to see the Apocalypse in their lifetime, or their childrens’. We all hate seeing stuff we love getting destroyed and ruined. That’s one of the motivations that cause people to try and do something positive. But, it’s a delusion to claim ‘the problems can be avoided’ by wishing them away. Some stories don’t have a happy ending.
Wolfbird,
Thanks. Everything is about selling. You are trying to sell me your viewpoint now. When Paul writes a book I am sure he writes it in such a way as to convince you (sell you) that his ideas are the most appropriate. If we are not trying to convince people of the need to look for new stories that will provide a better alternative, in other words sell them the idea, then this exercise is simply ‘intellectual wanking’.
You are right it is absolutely about being honest about the predicament we face, and it is potentially pretty grim I’m not denying that. Once understood however, that doesn’t preclude you from looking at things in a hopeful way and trying to chart a better course. I absolutely believe that there is simply no point not being positive about where (ultimately) this might lead us. If not you may as well roll over and die. You are not wrong when you state that there will not be a happy ending (for everyone) but by the same token you are not being honest with those you might discuss this with, if you don’t acknowledge that ‘some’ good can come out of all of this and that it’s worth the effort to look for it.
Best wishes
Andy
ps enjoy your posts normally !
Excellent piece. The first part had me laughing out loud, almost choked on my sandwich at the idea of a utopian nihilist.
( omitted ‘think’ in 2nd sentence above )
Hahaha, ok, I’m an ‘intellectual wanker’, Andy. Not a very original term of dismissal though.
Don’t for one moment accept that ‘everything is about selling’. Sounds like Margaret Thatcher, to me.
But if that’s how you see it, that’s how you see it.
My impression, you’re pushing the ‘we can save the world’ agenda. I used to see it like that once.
“If not you may as well roll over and die.”
Don’t think that follows, logically. I don’t roll over and die, because I know I’ll die sooner or later, anyway. So why hasten the day ? I experience enough fabulous moments each day to make me want to continue having them. Like harvesting onions yesterday, with the companionship of my dog, perfect temperature, perfect sky, wonderful views, butterflies and flowers… life is exquisite, sublime.
You suggest that, without hope, it’s not worth bothering. I don’t have any ‘hope’. It’s irrelevant to my internal sense of well-being and my actions in the world.
Honestly, I’m not trying to ‘sell’ anything to anybody. I don’t care if anybody reads my comments or not. But seeing as I read and think about this stuff, I may as well pass it on, it’s easy enough to do.
There’s probably a lot of lost people on this Dark Mountain, stumbling around in circles, trying to find a sign or a path, getting stuck in swamps, etc.
I know my way around pretty well. I’m just sitting on a boulder enjoying myself :-)
Forget hope and optimism – look to Nature. That is neither hopeful nor optimistic. No place for pessimism either. Just be neutral, impartial, stoic. There is no need to save the world or the human race. They don’t need saving – at least not by us.
Wolfbird,
Thanks. OK. Maybe we are trying to achieve different things. I don’t disagree with your sentiment. Sounds like you have got life sussed and I’m pleased (genuinely for you). I get much the same pleasure as you I suspect from pretty simple stuff(I wish my onions were of a harvestable size however !). Perhaps the difference is that I think if you know what the problems are you should do something about it if you can.
Cheers
Andy
Thing is, millions of people died in the past. Does that bother anybody ? Millions of people will die in the future. Does that bother anybody ? Both are equally invisible, imaginary.
What about now ? Lots of people will die today. In myriad different circumstances.
Does that bother you ? It’s the reality of our situation. You can see some of it, on tv, or on the internet.
Most people are only bothered if it happens right in front of them, or if it happens to someone they know and love. The pain, loss and grief can indeed be overwhelming and unendurable.
But the dead, are, erm, dead. They don’t care any more. They are away.
The fear and dread is for ourselves. The shock, distress and anguish which we living ones fear that we might have to encounter. No ?
It interests me how so many of the conversations around this issue come down to hope versus despair. Quite understandably. I did a blog post on good and bad hope a while back:
http://www.dark-mountain.net/wordpress/2009/12/07/the-inadequacy-of-hope/
For me, I think Lee has it best. Stoicism. Be like the trees. Take what comes, move with the world, adapt. That, if Darwin was correct, seems to be as close to the meaning of life as we can get. Adapt or die.
Every time I give a talk on these issues, or write an article, I find something interesting. However hard i try to make it clear that it’s not about ‘giving up’ or ‘lying down and dying’ or being ‘nihilistic’, people don;t hear it. ‘Where’s the hope’? they ask me. ‘I’m not going to give up, even if you are’, they insist. ‘But I’m not giving up’, I say. They still don’t hear it.
The question I always then ask is: giving up on what? Hoping for what? People tend to go a bit quieter then. It seems to me that this is the old apocalyptic thinking at work: we can either ‘save the world’ much as it is, or die in the gutters.
I am convinced that, as McKibben puts it in ‘Eaarth’, the old world is already dead. ‘Hoping’ we can resurrect it is therefore pointless. A lot of pain and nastiness is coming our way, but also many opportunities to do what we can do. For me, the key is being in place, being in community, learning skills, understanding the land, getting the best from the past and taking it with me wherever we’re going. Doing this makes me very hopeful. Not for the future of ‘the world’ – that’s out of my hands – but for my own life and that of my family.
I’m hoping for the things Paul mentions – sense of place, community, learning, the land, tradition. I’m certainly not suggesting trying to resurrect the ‘old world’. You do indeed need to be stoic as well as aiming to live a ‘right life’ but this doesn’t just happen. You have to make conscious decisions to be able to adapt. That is what adaptation is. And why should you not seek to help people down the same path? That is all I am advocating / hoping for. I may be missing the point here and potentially getting into ‘violent agreements’ with some, but it’s a fine line that needs to be trod between acceptance (of what is coming) and arrogance.
Probably a conversation best had in the pub rather than drinking tea on a Tuesday afternoon.
Well, if anyone is anywhere near London on Saturday there’ll be a good opportunity to keep this conversation going over some beers:
http://uncivilisation.ning.com/events/dark-mountain-minifestival-at
This is certainly stuff that is well worth talking over at length, because it’s the core issue. But there is only so far you can get on t’internet before you hit a brick wall!
Paul,
Thanks for the offer. Unfortunately can’t make it. I’ll be at home trying to get creative with my ‘courgette invasion’. If anyone wants a whizz recipe for crisp, spicy sweet and sour courgettes let me know.
Yes, see the brick wall looming rapidly. Good stuff though and thanks all for the differing perspectives.
Cheers
Andy
Andy, as I indicated, I do not relish the idea of people dying prematurely. Ditto for every aspect of the living planet. But we’re clearly in ecological overshoot, and every day in overshoot … well, I covered that above, and you dismissed it.
Personally, I would gladly give me life to have the industrial economy come to its overdue end. It’s making us crazy and killing us, and we’re taking the living planet down with us. The industrial economy destroys non-industrial cultures and non-human life. I’m not a fan.
And hope, according to my dictionary, is just another name for wishful thinking. We’ve had enough something-for-nothing wishful thinking to last a long time, and it’s gotten us nowhere good. My own take on hope, including a definition of my own, is here: http://guymcpherson.com/2007/08/the-end-of-civilization-and-the-extinction-of-humanity/
“The Long Descent” is loved because it’s filled with the kind of wishful thinking we do not need. If you think the living planet can survive three more centuries of industrialism, in any form, I think you are sorely mistaken. Abundant evidence from global-change scientists indicate the planet will cease to support human life by mid-century (that’s THIS century) unless we terminate the industrial economy.
If it’s hope you’re seeking, please join me in bringing down the industrial economy while we still have something to hope for. Future generations will thank you for making a last-ditch attempt. They won’t be around to thank us if we make the planet uninhabitable for humans.
Think we are all ‘preaching to the converted’ here, which is rather pointless, except perhaps for the therapeutic aspect of a shared grief.
Ocean phytoplankton down 40% over last 50 years, UK farmland birds down 50% since 1960s, these are signs and portents, canaries in the coal mine, and of course, there are dozens, hundreds, more…
Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States:
The most comprehensive, authoritative report on Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States was released on Tuesday …
“As a result of human activities, the present carbon dioxide concentration of about 385 ppm is about 30 percent above its highest level over at least the last 800,000 years.”
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2010/08/graph-of-day-800000-year-record-of.html
Climate Change Impacts by Sector
Water Resources
Transportation
Ecosystems
Agriculture
Society
Human Health
Energy Supply and Use
Regional Climate Change Impacts
Alaska
Coasts
Great Plains
Islands
Midwest
Northeast
Northwest
Southeast
Southwest
http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/us-impacts/download-the-report
I’ll get a twinge of optimism when Monsanto is closed down…
http://the-new-american-republic.blogspot.com/2010/07/monsanto-worlds-poster-child-for.html
@Andy
“Perhaps the difference is that I think if you know what the problems are you should do something about it if you can.”
Yes, indeed.
But the problems are so vast, so numerous, so complex, so fluid.
It’s also kind of arrogant and hubristic to think we know what can be done. Look at history. What starts as ‘a good thing’ so often turns out to be ‘a bad thing’.
It’s almost a law, just look how frequently our wise politicians issue legislation which produces exactly the opposite of what they intended.
We could make a long list. We could agree amongst ourselves. But we are a tiny handful. The vast majority see things differently and reject our analysis.
Anyway, assuming we agreed the problems and the solutions. Then we’d have to have some power to make the changes. As obscure lone individuals we have very little power or ability to influence the course of events.
Sure, folks like Edward Abbey, Dave Foreman, Ted K., Zerzan, etc, come up with an analysis, spread the ideas, influence millions, and these ideas spread into the more moderate green groups and then get gobbled up by the capitalist industrialist dominant culture. That’s been happening for half a century. But it isn’t actually fixing the problem, is it.
I have tremendous admiration for people like Paul Watson, who walk their talk and organise resistance. I think everybody should try their utmost. After all, this is a battle of life or death. Everybody can do something. But we are not winning, and I don’t think we can win, all we can do is try, and thus maintain some self-respect and honourable ideals.
Edward Goldsmith’s phrase, the technosphere continues devouring, displacing, disrupting, the biosphere…
And, as far as I can tell, will continue to do so, until some ultimate catastrophe brings the process to a conclusion. In a nutshell, it’s Easter Island. There’s not many trees left…
Sure, if we had a charismatic leader and mass movement, like Ghandhi getting the British Empire out of India, like the anti slavery movement, or something, we could put pressure on governments and politicians to make effective changes.
But those kinds of movements, ( M.L. King is another example ) are built on fairly primaeval human drives, freedom, nationalism, whatever. Easy to communicate and explain.
What we are after is much more tricky. In your terms, Andy, it’s not just a hard sell, it’s an impossible sell. We want coal mines closed, we want air transport ended, we want car driving stopped, we want EVERYTHING that is not ECOLOGICALLY BENIGN and sustainable over the long term, to be phased out and brought to a halt.
No more corporate rape and pillage, no more pollution. That means, no jobs for those presently employed. That means no profits for the folks who deal in the shares. That means no investments for the pension funds. No tax revenue for the Treasury ( ‘for schools and hospitals’, hahahaha.. ) to spend on contracts with BAE Systems plc…
Even if the general public could be convinced that it was in their interests to stop trashing the planet, ( turkeys vote for Christmas ? ) there’s still the powerful sociopathic elite, the robber barons, who care about one thing only, their personal power, and will conspire to destroy any threat by any means necessary…
Also, this doesn’t just apply to UK or Europe, the whole game is international… how are we going to explain to India and Pakistan, to Israel and Iran, for example, that their political stances are obsolete and counter-productive and must stop ?
I used to think, that, rather than a head on violent revolution, it was preferable to gently shift the mainstream culture in a green direction, by education and example. That has worked to some extent. Everybody has heard of solar panels and organic veg. But I think we have run out of time with that strategy. Bottle banks and home composting and regular rants from Monbiot in the Guardian aren’t going to save a single species from extinction. They aren’t going to prevent the collapse of the biosphere.
People with a strong desire to survive need to gather into communities, build closed loop systems for food and energy. That takes a lot of time and work, and it’s no guarantee of survival, just a heck of a lot better than anything else.
As far as the rest are concerned…well, what CAN you do ? tell them they need to give up their job ? You know, that pastime that feeds the kids and pays the mortgage ? That label which gives them identity and status and approval by the wider soceity ? That income which pays to keep the car legal so that it gets to the supermarket and back ? Tell them to take all the money out of the bank and spend it on gardening tools and seeds, throwaway the tv and forget about the pension and holiday visits to theme parks and the lottery and football on the weekend… you know what the reaction will be…
Hey, be realistic, demand the impossible !
:-)
Come on, someone, tell me where I’ve got it all wrong… please ?
Guy and Wolfbird,
Thanks for both of the posts. There is an awful lot I agree with in both of them and our sentiments are, I’m sure, pretty dammned similar. My disagreement might be about how we begin to get to where we need to go and how radical it needs to be. I’m up to my neck in (mortgage paying) stuff at the moment but I will spend some time later on reflecting on what you have said and hopefully come back with some more, hopefully sensible, thoughts of my own.
Without wishing to be lambasted for my naivety, I’d love to know what your takes on Transition Towns are. I started out as a believer, then drifted in to the territory marked ‘deeply cynical’ but have found myself coming back to the ‘I think it’s got real potential’ camp. I only say this because one of the groups I ‘follow’ – Leicester, had a real surge when it first started (as is normally the case) but has continued to accelerate rapidly (in terms of level of involvement and scope of projects) since then. This is in contrast, I believe, to what normally happens with a ‘good idea’ that starts with a bang and then diminishes from there on in.
Additionally to this (and I have no idea what Paul’s view of TT is), my take on Dark Mountain is that ‘unpicking the myths’ is the doom laden bit, ‘writing new stories’ is the hopeful bit. Again you can call me naive, but I can’t see much in TT that does not overlap with the ‘writing new stories’ part of Dark Mountain (in the absence of anything ‘deeper’ surely it is one place to start). I’m sure you will all have your views on this.
Your thoughts would be really welcome !
Best wishes,
Andy
@Andy,
I remember that, when Arne Naess introduced Deep Ecology, rather like now re DM, there where loads of folk nitpicking, saying that the platform was weak here, or extreme there, or would never work because… and so forth, and his response was to say that the green front is very long, with many gaps, so there is space for everyone to find a place somewhere along the spectrum of ideas…
So, I’m glad that there is a Transition Town movement, I’m glad there’s Monbiot and Friends of the Earth, I’m even glad that Cameron went to the Arctic Circle to try and get some green cred.
Compared with effing Monsanto and BP and the Pentagon and Matt Ridley, TT is a glorious breakthrough…
BUT, compared to the overall state of the Earth and the human impact, well, very sorry, TT isn’t going to fix the problem….
It’s still a good thing to do, like planting one tree is better than planting no tree, compared to clear felling the forest. But just look at recent extreme weather events, Russia, Pakistan, China, the island of floating plastic and garbage in the Pacific, equivalent to the area of France, the projected demographic increase in human population, etc, etc… there surely are already eco-friendly towns in far off countries with low impact lifestyles, and at this very moment there’ll be guys introducing the latest Western ( Chinese ) products to ‘improve’ their lives and pull them into the consumer soceity…
I know I’m being negative and painting a bleak, horrible picture of the future… but really, I’m being as direct and honest as I can be, assuming that this is a forum for battle-hardened adults… and I know you have a mortgage and children, which must be your priority… I suppose that my vision is too grim for children. Maybe show them ‘the man who planted trees’ and talk about TT is the kindest compromise… ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2a4ti6uLMg
I like the idea of a long front with gaps in: I’d not come across that image before.
Seems to me there is another way of looking at this too: evolution. Transition is a good thing, I think. It’s flawed and limited, as all our initiatives are. Certainly it won’t ‘save the world’ – to be fair, I don’t think it is intended to. But where it is significant is that it is a broad, even global, movement which is hung on arguments about decline, even collapse, and the need to prepare for them.
Perhaps we need to see all of this, including DM, along a timeline of awakening to reality. If we had started DM five years ago there may have been a resounding silence. It is making some waves now because people are opening their minds to the idea that collapse and/or decline are on the cards. Two years ago, no greenie would countenance the idea that it might not be possible to ‘stop climate change’. Today, many of them talk about it in private. In two years time, I think it likely that most greenies will admit what DM has taken so much flak for saying: climate change is here to stay, if we’re lucky we can limit its worst excesses, but even to do that we would have to do something pretty radical pretty quick, and that’s not looking likely.
These are all baby steps in the right direction: baby steps towards getting real about how fucked the planet really is, how damaging our way of life really is and how unlikely it is that we can turn this oil tanker (apt metaphor) around before it hits the berg. Once you admit that to yourself you feel a sense of relief. I’m not sure I buy the arguments for the inevitability of the absolute worst case scenarios, any more than I buy light green wishful thinking, but I certainly agree the signs are bad. Bad for modern humans, that is: the end of industrial society would be good news for orcas and sun bears.
But we have to live in the world, and even baby steps towards admitting to ourselves that we are not in control and we can’t and won’t continue in this direction are good steps. Not good enough to ‘save us’ if by that we mean ‘allow us to keep living in our ecocidal bubble’, but good enough to at least help us adjust to the painful reality of a world in which we are not central, not in control and may soon be out of time.
There’s another thing to consider…
Seems to me that there’s a pattern, where, when human soceities get into difficulty, they become more authoritarian, stricter, more cruel. When there’s severe stress, shortage of resources, pressure from enemies, threat of challenges to the elite in power, and so forth, there isn’t room for the kind of liberal latitude that we are all accustomed to.
Social disorder and chaos usually produces a popular reaction demanding ‘strong leadership’…
So, I think it is highly likely that the luxury of classical Western democracy will be eclipsed by something far more brutal and frightening. It’s already happened, to some degree, in USA, since Bush. Who could imagine, a couple of decades back, that the Americans would openly promote detention without trial and extraordinary rendition and spying on their own citizens ?
Just like there are signs and portents of ecological disaster, I believe there are signs and portents of political disaster… I’m trying to remember the name of that woman who kept the British aeroplane industry alive during the 20′s and 30′s, because she knew there would be a war with Germany again… if it hadn’t been for her, there’d have been no Spitfires and Hurricanes and no Battle of Britain in the sky… anyway, my point is, some people are far sighted because they pick up on the clues. Others, the majority, are blind or ignore the obvious… I don’t wish to invoke paranoia, but anybody who has read Orwell and Huxley, or thought about the old Eastern European regimes, the Stasi, East Germany, Romania, Hungary, etc, indeed North Korea and Burma… it doesn’t take much imagination to catch the drift…
” Many people are indifferent to the disappearance of privacy — even with regard to government officials — because they don’t perceive any real value to it. The ways in which the loss of privacy destroys a society are somewhat abstract and difficult to articulate, though very real. A society in which people know they are constantly being monitored is one that breeds conformism and submission, and which squashes innovation, deviation, and real dissent.
The old cliché is often mocked though basically true: there’s no reason to worry about surveillance if you have nothing to hide. That mindset creates the incentive to be as compliant and inconspicuous as possible: those who think that way decide it’s in their best interests to provide authorities with as little reason as possible to care about them. That’s accomplished by never stepping out of line. Those willing to live their lives that way will be indifferent to the loss of privacy because they feel that they lose nothing from it. Above all else, that’s what a Surveillance State does: it breeds fear of doing anything out of the ordinary by creating a class of meek citizens who know they are being constantly watched.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/02/privacy/index.html
http://www.fastcompany.com/1675552/google-gets-close-to-cia-with-investment-in-analytics-firm-recorded-future
Wolfbird,
You are right TT isn’t going to fix the ‘problem’. It’s already beyond fixing and never was a sustainable option anyway so inherently flawed from the outset of the Industrial Revolution. Personally I prefer Black Cabbage to BMW’s. The whole consumerist society idea is brain twisting crap anyway! I’m not talking about fixing it for goodness sake. The best we can do, and what we must do, is adapt and this will undoubtedly be on the basis of lower population, less energy, conflict (initially), etc. Surely it is unarguable that anything that prepares people for the need to adapt has to be a good thing. TT is not a panacaea, neither is DM. Neither is anything else. The broad front analogy is appropriate however. To use my disaster analogy again, you get much less panic on a sinking ship when you know where the lifeboats are. Not as comfortable as the Captain’s Table in the State Room but somewhat better than the bottom of the ocean, or being killed in the crush !
What blows my mind though is the notion that things are so bad that we need (should consider) a revolution or whatever nonsense to turn the whole thing on its head tomorrow – not next week – tomorrow (no industry, no jobs, nothing other than environmentally benign activity). Nothing ‘stops on a sixpence’. That notion is utter bollocks. To use the Cancer comparison again, a patient may wish that all of the cancer was removed there and then – gone forver, but treatment is not like that. First you have to know there is a problem, then you have to accept the problem, then you have to talk to your family and friends and get them to understand the predicament you are in so they provide support, then you have to understand the prognosis, then come to terms with your condition and mentally prepare yourself, then plan the treatment, then have the treatment and hopefully by the end the specific cancer has gone. In the process other longer term problems may well have been created and your life will not be the same again, but hopefully at the end you’re not dead ! There is no alternative to that cause of action. People can jump up and down and stamp their feet all they like but they’ll be doing it in an empty room and no one will be listening, and what’s more precisely zip will happen to change anything. I think you are paralysed by fear which is different to being fearful.
Best wishes
Andy
Sheeesh, Andy, my dear fellow :-)
“That notion is utter bollocks. To use the Cancer comparison again, a patient may wish that all of the cancer was removed there and then – gone forver, but treatment is not like that. First you have to know there is a problem, then you have to accept the problem, then you have to talk to your family and friends and get them to understand the predicament you are in so they provide support, then you have to understand the prognosis, then come to terms with your condition and mentally prepare yourself, then plan the treatment, then have the treatment and hopefully by the end the specific cancer has gone. In the process other longer term problems may well have been created and your life will not be the same again, but hopefully at the end you’re not dead ! There is no alternative to that cause of action. People can jump up and down and stamp their feet all they like but they’ll be doing it in an empty room and no one will be listening, and what’s more precisely zip will happen to change anything. I think you are paralysed by fear which is different to being fearful.”
I now see why you have difficulty… you’re totally missing the point, you cancer treatment analogy is a perfect illustration… you think that’s the nature of our predicament ? There is no surgical fix, no magical formula, there is no daddy-in-the-sky who’ll make it alright for you…
It’s nothing like that at all ! There is no time for your leisurely counselling and talking to family and friends, the ship is sinking, going down fast, and all your carefully considered procedures are irrelevant to that course of events… try telling the wind, water and the waves, to wait while you organise your ‘transition’ to life jackets… sigh… try telling the water and the waves that there’s ‘no alternative to that course of action’… it’s got nothing to do with impatience and stamping feet, the crisis is with us, right here and now, this very day, this very minute, not in your imagined future… just that it’s not evenly distributed yet and hasn’t arrived knocking at your door… yet.
I suggest that you are assigning an importance to your civilized self which, in reality, does not exist…
Me, paralyzed by fear ? What a weird idea… I’m just looking hard at the bitter reality… it doesn’t scare me in the least… I’m not trying to comfort myself by illusions, which I see you are doing… you still think that there is some escape route, some orderly procedure that can be adopted, by which we can move to something that is acceptable to you, the patient will be saved by the miraculous skill of the surgeon, some transition town fantasy, or whatever…
Well, dream on, is all I can say… I’m not trying to persuade anybody to do anything, not even to alter their ideas…
I’m with wolfbird. It’s too late for anything except radical action. I am more fearful than wolfbird about the near future — evolution is odd that way — but I accept what must be done, and I am trying to terminate the industrial economy. It’ll probably cost me my life, but that’s a damned small price to pay.
Wolfbird,
Thanks. I think we may have to ‘beg to differ’ on this. I’m sorry that you have gone all apocalyptic on me again. There are very, very significant problems – yes. But black or white, salvation or apocalypse, salt or vinegar, rich or poor, wet or dry………… !There are f—ing grey areas ! And they demand attention not arrogance !
The wind and waves destroy things every day. They knocked down my sandcastle on the beach in St Ives. A hotel slipped off a cliff into the sea in North Yorkshire a few years ago. They’ve been flooding Bangladesh all of my lifetime. It is getting worse yes, but I am talking in degrees – you are talking in absolutes (now, not tomorrow – today stupid !!!) and I sincerely believe your approach is wrong.
When I was a kid, my Mum used to take me to London and the two things I still remember were ‘gentleman’ bankers in bowler hats and funny people with boards on their backs stating ‘that the end was nigh’.
The planet is probably more resilient than you think it is (before you jump down my throat there are increasingly intractable problems and they are getting worse). Industrial society is also probably more resilient than you give it credit for (and I would necessarily hope as well). We do have some time.
Ironically the approach you are taking ends up with the same net effect as all of the politicians that never manage to agree to do anything. The problem keeps on building up and up and up……….!
Best wishes
Andy
Guy,
Thanks for the link to your website. Looks good. I shall have a good read over the next few days.
Cheers
Andy
Please read what I have written again, Andy. You still seem to me to be completely missing the point.
Or points.
@Guy
“It’ll probably cost me my life,…”
I don’t think that helps. I don’t doubt your commitment or passion or love for the planet, which leads to such statements. However, part of the industrial economy is the prison industry. They’ll just lock you up and neutralise you that way, which is a bit of a waste, especially when you write so eloquently.
That said, it is strange how so many young men are willing to go and die for money, or for some jingoistic rubbish glorifying death on behalf of the nation, or the flag, or the monarch, or whatever… and yet, they are not willing to fight for their own survival, that of their children and grandchildren… I suppose it’s because they don’t understand the threat. They’re re-filled every evening by junk tv and the world as interpreted by ‘the news’, and incapable of seeing beyond that…
Wolfbird,
Certainly don’t disagree with your last quote. Couldn’t agree more in fact !
Andy
Andy, when I read :
” I’m sorry that you have gone all apocalyptic on me again. There are very, very significant problems – yes. But black or white, salvation or apocalypse, salt or vinegar, rich or poor, wet or dry………… !There are f—ing grey areas ! And they demand attention not arrogance ! …
It is getting worse yes, but I am talking in degrees – you are talking in absolutes (now, not tomorrow – today stupid !!!) and I sincerely believe your approach is wrong.
When I was a kid, my Mum used to take me to London and the two things I still remember were ‘gentleman’ bankers in bowler hats and funny people with boards on their backs stating ‘that the end was nigh’.
The planet is probably more resilient than you think it is (before you jump down my throat there are increasingly intractable problems and they are getting worse). Industrial society is also probably more resilient than you give it credit for (and I would necessarily hope as well). We do have some time.”
I think ‘Does this person comprehend the nature of our predicament ? ‘ and I shake my head and think ‘No’.
There are times when I can take all this very stoically, speak like a sage & lecture those around me. There are other times when I’m scared especially for my sons. Will the rich & powerful go quietly? Will they say “It’s a fair cop. We had it good for a couple of hundred years but there’s no money in this global hegemony business any longer. So we’re off.” I doubt it.
These people have a heritage of causing world wars to pursue & hold onto power. I don’t think they have gone soft. I don’t think they have no plan for what we believe is unfolding & are going to be brought down by the collapse. They simply want us to believe they have no plan.
One can only hope that they are human like the rest of us & they’ll cock up giving humanity a fighting chance.
Interesting, I just heard that some of America’s mega rich are giving away large portions of their wealth. The French aristocracy did the same, just prior to the French Revolution. Turned out to be too little and too late to avoid Madame Guillotine.
Bear in mind, this is Alex Jones, who is always over the top, but this is another creepy sign, straight out of dystopian novels…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm3PYZ0N7Dg&feature=player_embedded
How about this for a potential area of agreement:
None of us has a clue what is going to happen.
Short, sweet and unequivocally true.
We all know what the ‘signs’ are. We all interpret them according to our temperament, background, politics and mood. But we don’t know what will happen, or when, or to whom. Imagining that we know what the future will bring is like imagining we can control it.
In the meantime, there are good and bad ways for humans to live. We know what these are. We – all of us – are at the heart of Empire. We are in the bowels of the machine. We are trying to extricate ourselves: not because it will ‘save the world’, but because it might save our sanity, and may even save our children. This is good stuff.
Me, I’ve spent the afternoon scything grass and bracken in a nature reserve, listening to the call of the green woodpecker and feeling very much at one with the world. Nobody noticed, and it doesn’t matter. But it was wonderful, and it was right. That’ll do me.
Paul,
Thanks. If you’ve finished, fancy popping down to Liverpool to scythe my lawn? It’s knee high and I have no time to cut it as I’m spending most of my time arguing with Wolfbird !
Seriously though I too will go for the honourable truce. Helped me get some of my thoughts straight and so thanks to you all.
Now back to my courgette mountain.
Best wishes
Andy
I spent the morning scything, too. And nobody noticed, either. My take on a decent way to live, beyond the edge of empire, is here: http://guymcpherson.com/2010/03/going-back-to-the-land-in-the-age-of-entitlement/
Partial agreement from me, Paul.
I agree, that if you make your choices from what you feel, in your heart, in your soul, in your bones, to be good and right, that’s a pretty good guide. I believe we have an inbuilt sense of morality, just like little three year old kids know if a cake is shared out fairly or not.
But there’s some stuff that is counter-intuitive, especially in science, where it maybe takes a LOT of reading and study to get properly informed as to the fine detail of what’s involved, before you cab make a wise judgement.
Where I disagree. If anybody has ever kept an aquarium, with fish, snails, plants, etc. they have to learn that it’s difficult to keep it healthy. You have to have the right balance between all the factors, or else you just end up with a black slimy mess and everything dies. It’s part science, part an art, to set up an aquarium. It teaches something very important about ecosystems, because it’s a world in miniature. You do get signs which are very important. If the fish gasp at the surface, it means the level of oxygen in the water is too low. If the water goes cloudy, it may mean there’s too much decaying food. And so on.
These type of signs are the sort of thing that gardeners and farmers have to look out for. Plants needing water, or getting too much water, vine weevils and aphids and so forth.
We don’t know everything about how the biosphere functions, but we do know a lot, quite enough to be able to make some predictions and to watch for danger signs. My impression is that we have flashing red alarms going off all over the world, saying that we’re in deep trouble. Of course, that’s just the biology, the ecology, the natural systems. I think James Lovelock has the ( mostly, some things I disagree about ) right understanding of where we are headed if we don’t change course.
We’re also embedded in a social and cultural context, the civilisation, with it’s trade, finance, military, economic and political aspects. There also there are signs. But ecology trumps all else. If we haven’t got clean air to breath, clean water to drink, then none of the cultural stuff matters at all.
Small actions can have dramatic results. A bullet from woman who tried to assassinate Lenin missed its mark because she forgot her glasses. Maybe if she’d have remembered them, the whole subsequent history of the 20th C. would have been different.
But now I am back to agreement. Even if one can foresee oncoming events with considerable accuracy, most of the time there’s absolutely nothing one can do to change them. They are the results of huge tides, surges, millions of people all making their choices, like bees or ants, which add up to an enormous effect. Powerful individuals paying enormous amounts of money to propagate their agenda with PR and propaganda. People like Rupert Murdoch who can manipulate public opinion.
So yes, a wise person who values their mental health can devote their energy to the life around them, taking care of whatever needs cherishing and fixing. The collapse will run it’s course, just as other great events have in the past. It’s just the history of the human species unfolding.
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/index.html
This topic really needs a book long treatment to do it justice :-)
You know, it helps sometimes to step back, to maybe get some perspective….
Jared Diamond, on why soceities collapse…
http://www.ted.com/talks/jared_diamond_on_why_societies_collapse.html
and what we are losing, because the majority of people on the planet do not understand, or do not care, or cannot do anything to prevent it…
http://www.earthsendangered.com/list_html.asp
Agreed, Wolfbird, it’s not all about feelings. When I said ‘we know how to live’ I didn’t mean simply in terms of our emotional responses – though they are important and too often overlooked in our utilitarian culture. I meant we have countless examples, from history and also from contemporary life, of how to live wisely as part of both natural and human communities. There’ll never be a perfect human society, which is probably a good thing, but we know what we have to do, both in emotional and scientific terms, to create societies and cultures which stand as good a chance of any as lasting.
The fact that most of us, and especially us in the heart of empire, are not prepared to do them is the reason this juggernaut is headed for a spectacular crash. But while we can all agree on this, we don’t know when we’ll crash, or how hard, or what into, or whether we’ll survive and, if so, what our injuries will be.
No-one knows how the climate changes. We have not been above 300ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere for 800,000 years. Ice core samples seem to suggest that some previous climate changes have been rapid – the climate seems to have flipped from one state to another over the course of just a few decades. Great bubbles of methane are burping up from the Russian arctic as we speak. By 2100 this planet could be devoid of much of what we now know as life.
Or, it could not. The climate could change gradually, or some unknown feedback could kick in. We’ve no idea. This doesn’t mean the juggernaut won’t crash, it just means that assessing the impact at this stage is just educated guesswork. Which leaves us all room to try and prepare … something.
With respect, Paul, I disagree quite strongly with, “The climate could change gradually, or some unknown feedback could kick in. We’ve no idea.”
In my estimation, we have a fairly clear idea. The IPPC report was roughly correct, but underestimated the speed of the changes. However, I’d prefer, if possible to steer clear of this emotive subject, having recently got into a rather acrimonious haggle about it. It’s difficult to discuss the science of climate change, when there’s an army of internet posters who are convinced the whole thing is a hoax perpetrated by Al Gore, Prince Charles, and the rest of the Lizards, so as to increase taxation of the peasants and create a world government, and another army of shills for Big Oil and Big Coal, disseminating disinformation to try and discredit the science, etcetera.
I agree with Alex Jones re the crap that gets put into industrially processed foods, water, and so forth, but I think he and David Icke and similar peddlers of paranoia are badly mistaken regarding climate change. There’s so many people who don’t even understand what science is, that it’s easy to stir up the rabble into a frenzy, and if they arrive at this blog, it’ll become impossible to have any coherent conversation.
( If anybody’s interested, that messy exchange is here, I’m tinamou, FWIW.)
http://www.permacultureforum.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=849
Couple of points I’d like to make. First, re Jared Diamond. He says that if folks wish to survive and avoid collapse and systems failure, there’s a dozen or so factors involved, and we have to get them ALL right. So, it’s not only about climate change.
Also, we need to be clear whether we’re talking about what happens here, i.e. loosely, the British Isles, as a geographical entity, or whether we’re talking about the planet as a whole.
Let’s think in terms of British Isles for a moment.
You said, ” Which leaves us all room to try and prepare … something.”
I myself don’t expect to be around for more than a couple of decades, more or less. If it’s more, I probably won’t much care what’s going on anyway. So, there’s not a lot of point in my speaking from a personal, ego-centric, perspective, because it won’t apply to folks who are younger.
In any case, I think that speaking from any sort of anthropocentric perspective, almost automatically indicates that the speaker has not understood the problem. Any proposed solution which ‘puts people first’ will mean more disaster, because it is that underlying cultural assumption, that human well-being is what matters, which has got us into this mess. We need to change that notion, and get a deeper understanding, that everything is connected. Think in terms of the aquarium, I mentioned earlier. The fish depend totally upon the water. The quality of the water depends upon the plants, the snails, the balance of micro-organisms, the invisible bacteria, etc. We humans are the fish, in that analogy.
It’s going to be very difficult to achieve such a fundamental change in thinking, because the two major strands of British culture, Christianity and Humanism, both assume that people are what matters.
We have to move that cultural paradigm. Soil is what matters. Water is what matters. Air is what matters. Uncontaminated food is what matters. Woodlands, estuaries, bogs and marshes, hedges and scrub and habitat for wildlife are what matters. The health of the ocean that surrounds us is what matters. This is the aquarium that we are stuck in. If we poison it, and destroy the natural feedback systems, that’s the end of us.
This is not an aesthetic issue, about having a pretty countryside. It’s not about ‘unspoilt’ rural areas for recreation. It’s not even a philosophical choice, it’s hard scientific insights into how the system that we are in, the natural world, works. If we want to breath, to eat and drink, and continue as a species, we need to understand this.
What we have to do is to integrate our needs into that system, without further harming it. So far, historically, we haven’t learned ( or re-learned ) how to do that. You could call that the greening of culture, permaculture, or whatever term fits. Doesn’t really matter what the label says, what matters is whether it actually happens or not, and how long the damage continues.
I’m not optimistic. For a start, there’s too many people. All problems relating to resources and environment would be more easily solved with a much reduced population. It’s almost impossible to discuss that topic because it’s so highly charged.
Another tough one. I don’t myself think there is such a thing as a sustainable city.
Urban centres are not natural. They are like a fungal or cancerous growth which sucks the life out of their surroundings and eventually kill their host. That’s an unattractive idea for folks who adore city life, with its cultural riches and so forth.
There’s plenty of people, who have no clue about ecological constraints, who’d happily see the whole British Isles as one large city-airport-industrial estate-theme park-combination, concrete and tarmac and shopping malls, making lots of money by exploiting the rest of the planet, who can’t see the point of birds or fields at all. If that viewpoint prevails, we are as good as extinct.
Ecology trumps economics. We either understand that, and live with it, or we learn it the hard way and perish. Ecology trumps human vanity and ambition. We need to understand this, lose the hubris, become humble and modest, cultivate wisdom not ostentation.
Paul said, ” prepare… something ”
So, what’s the ‘something’ ? The billion dollar question. If I’m permitted to dream, ( and I’m not trying to sell anything, despite Andy’s belief ), I’d say we need to think in terms of Tolkien’s Shire, or Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian soceity, or the Kogi, or the Amish… a fairly low density network of rural communities connected by trade and barter, producing relatively low tech products, with as few artificial inputs as possible. We’ll have to manage without in vitro fertilization for childless couples, heart by pass surgery, aeroplanes, tv, all that junk that we take for granted. People had perfectly satisfactory and fulfilling lives without all that stuff. How come that in my short lifetime we suddenly can’t live without it ?
Yes, about 50 million people will throw up there arms in horror and outrage and declare me insane…
But, if you don’t like my suggestion, well, what’s yours ? Because the ‘business as usual’ trajectory that you’re all on, is taking you straight over the edge of the cliff and into the Abyss. If you can’t see it, if you don’t like it, if you deny it’s possible, then you’re not really looking… I don’t blame you.
Much of the damage we have cause is already irreversible, more tipping points coming up fast, and Peak Oil means much less energy available to fix things.
It’s not a pretty, pleasant prospect, is it. Too me it looks about as much fun as Auschwitz or the Black Death or nuclear and biological warfare.
But pretending isn’t going to fix anything, is it. We either consciously and deliberately design a new way of life, or, Mother Nature and her 4 Horsemen will wipe the slate clean for us, and maybe there’ll be something left after the bottleneck, or maybe there wont…
My guess, I’d say we have about five years, of “room”, before… well, I leave that to your individual personal imaginations to fill in the rest.
Well, people I talk to about climate change, who work on it daily and who know their stuff, are as unwilling to put their necks on the line as any of the scientists. Fact is, we know the climate is changing, and it seems very likely it will change deeply and widely and that the impacts will be devastating. But we don’t know the timescale and we don’t know exactly what the impacts will be because we don’t actually know how the planet works. That’s where our hubris meets our lack of knowledge, with possibly fatal results.
As for many of your other points – well, of course, they echo what we said in the manifesto. When I talk about ‘us’ preparing I am not talking about some grand national or international plan, some ‘Green New Deal’. That won’t happen – people don’t really want it to. I am talking about us as individuals and perhaps communities.
Talking about this on here is an act of preparation. Learning to grow food, banding together in communities, is an act of preparation. And – telling new stories is also. You talk about anthropocentrism being part of the problem. Quiet right – that’s a key focus of this project. But as people, we need our tasks. One task can be to start trying to think differently about the world.
I’m not overly concerned with planning some theoretically workable way of living for everyone. I’m bored with that kind of thinking. We’re going to muddle along, as ever, cut off from nature and each other, until the wave hits, and then we are going to wake up pretty bloody sharpish. What we wake up to is another matter. But in the meantime, there are still plenty of things that I think are worth doing. Having this discussion is one of them.
Wolfbird,
Enjoyed your last post very much. Your dream is my dream absolutely !
Cheers
Andy
Okay, thanks for taking the time to follow the line of thought, guys…
I’ll leave the climate points, maybe another time, Paul, because it won’t be constructive for you and I to squabble over that, and I’m slightly bemused by Andy’s switch from disagreement to agreement, because I don’t see where I’ve changed anything, by that doesn’t matter either…
Thing is, this series of comments has become circular, going back to the beginning… we’ve agreed, amongst ourselves, that we are at A, the problem. And we’ve agreed that we want to move to B, the answer to our problem.
But it’s all pie in the sky, because of the obstacles between A and B.
The obstacles being, predominately, ‘other people’. The traditional enemy. Hahaha.
So, what can we do about that ? This is the bit that Zerzan, Jensen, et al, all prefer to skirt around, because it is so difficult.
Do we just ignore the people who don’t share our view ? That’s no answer, because if they continue as they are, they make our goal impossible, don’t they ?
Do we kill them all ? Well, we are vastly outnumbered, and they have all the weapons. And if we begin to attack them, they’ll quite naturally decide to eradicate us. So, the Khmer Rouge solution doesn’t look too promising.
What if they decide they don’t need US, and begin exterminating us ? Do we resist ?
We can withdraw all co-operation with the system as it is, take stuff we need but give nothing back. I believe the American right wing survivalists call that ‘bleeding the beast’.
We could use dirty tricks, sabotage, monkey wrenching, to cause chaos at any opportunity that offers itself. That reminds me of Gulliver’s Travels. A million pin pricks.
I can think of a dozen other approaches, but none of the classical revolutionary strategies are going to work in present day UK. We don’t have safe havens in the mountains to assemble a guerilla army, the way it was done in the past. Most of us are gentle, middle class, peaceniks, not very well equipped for building and planting IEDs. If we see a dead body, even blood, we’ll probably be sick and have to spend a week in bed.
Even discussing this stuff probably means I’m infringing some stupid law re incitement to cause trouble, and if I’m not, it’ll only take them a few days to dig out an ancient one from the 1500s or whenever, or else write up a brand new one to further limit freedom of speech.
But there must be a way. It ALWAYS takes TWO to make a power relationship. The master and the slave. The master say’s ‘Jump !’, and the slave jumps. If the slave doesn’t jump, the problem instantly transfers to the master, who has to figure out a response to maintain the relationship. Obviously, the response is usually violence, inflicting pain and injury, torture. So then, typically, the slave gives in and submits to his role in the relationship.
If they beat the shit out of you, and you still refuse to jump. That’s the kind of problem Jesus gave the Jews and Romans. What do you do with people who don’t care if you feed them to lions ? What does the master do with slaves who don’t mind death ? If he kills them all, whose going to do the work ?
That’s pretty much the cornerstone of British soceity as it has evolved over the last couple of thousand years. Nowadays, the punishments inflicted on the slave are subtly graduated. You don’t get 50 lashes, you just don’t get any money. You know, those paper tokens, with a value which they conjure out of thin air, printed at the company print works, which you need to have, to exchange for food at the company store.
I believe there’s several cases in USA of folks who have unofficial food networks, that is, they grow their own fruit and veg, and share it, getting raided and held at gun point for hours. Seems incredible, but it makes sense. If you can support yourself, you’re free from the system. You don’t need the tokens from the bank to take to the supermarket, where everything you buy is recorded on computer and added to your personal file. The master loses some leverage… what if everybody started doing it ? then what ? got to nip that in the bud.
If ‘no money’ and hunger doesn’t get you back in line, the threat of spending 23 hours a day locked in a toilet cubicle, for months or years, often works. Being hung, drawn, quartered and your head impaled on a railing spike, or swinging from a gibbet at a busy crossroads are out of fashion, for the moment, but no doubt, still on the statute books, deep in the dusty archives.
Is it still legal to transport people to Australia ? dunno, but i wouldn’t be surprised. What about man traps ? Did they ever get banned ? Probably, likely they fall under a European Directive on Health and Safety these days…
You can see why talk of this type, dissension, mutiny, subversion, sedition, treason, insurgency, revolt, etc, is disliked.
The elite , the masters, don’t want trouble. It interferes with business, disrupts the flow of revenue, worries the investors. They require the passive useful idiots to do all the lifting and carrying, otherwise their carefully constructed machine grinds to a halt.
But it’s going to grind to a halt ANYWAY, because it unsustainable. That means it cannot be sustained. They want the train to keep on running, but there’s no more railway, no more track… just sand and rocks and mud and swamp… and then a 10,000 foot drop into the black chasm…
I don’t want it all to go down, because i will lose family and friends, and people i don’t know, as we are all one species.
I want a solution to the problem, as we are able to do it, but this is a widespread problem that divided communities, nations, species cannot implement.
My roll of the dice is industrial hemp. Could we not kill a lot of birds with the hemp stone, and not dismantle this system?
Mushrooms have a lot of positives as a food source and decomposer, and require little to implement.
Is it that simple? Hemp and mushrooms?
Wolfbird,
The ‘fairly low density of rural communities’ dream was what I agreed with you about. Not the ‘sit on a rock and watch the world go to shit’ argument !
Best wishes
Andy
Wolfbird, Paul, Andy, I have been following this discussion with great interest to see where it would go, and I truly think in the last few posts that some very important things have been said. I particularly liked your last post Wolfbird, in large part because it presents a view of possible human life that restores some degree of Dignity to the human species, and something that the Greeks called Sophrosyne, a term much misunderstood, and, quite frankly, obsolete in today’s world, both conceptually and linguistically.
I have been thinking lately that ‘dignity’ is something misunderstood and missing in this whole climate change/future of civilisation/human progress debate. In the renaissance, Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man equated dignity with what today we would call Humanism, and which had a profound effect on the enlightenment and its extolling of reason as paramount.
Conversely, I see humanism as being undignified, and that reason, far from leading us to a position of atheistic-supervention over the planet, must, if one is intellectually honest and has the requisite nerve, force us to embrace a conception of the human as created by nature, from forces and energies way beyond our scientific comprehension, and with a mind that is thoroughly limited but that can, with sheer effort, stretch to attain some sort of earthly wisdom that can bring inner peace. In this view, man is part of the whole, fully subordinated to it, and, if he is clever, must live with nature, in mind and body. Whatever anyone else says about the primacy of reason, the marvel of human creativity, or the magnanimity of our institutions and cities etc., is to me utter nonsense in comparison to the fundamental and inviolable law that human beings and all our fancy psychologies were nurtured into existence by the earth, which we must worship. I have seen people in my life disrespect their mothers, be offhand and surly with them, and take advantage of their good nature, and it looks unsavory and ugly. This is how much of the human race behaves towards its planet.
The point in my view is not about statistical evidence that we are ruining our planet, nor that the future is uncertain, or that we are destroying the earth for our children, or any technological, political, economic or scientific arguments. To me – and I except that this is an unusual and unpopular viewpoint – the real issue is that we are behaving like a bunch of undignified, narrow-minded twats. We get away with it by saying that it is for the best eventually, that it is to make the future better for people, that we may raise our standards of living, that we have a duty to express our intelligence and creativity in its highest order. Therefore, we are implored, we must not ‘give in’, we must ‘have hope’ and be optimistic for the future, that man will prevail and that we will, one fine day, sort all this out. That we will save this magnificent civilisation that we have struggled for millennia to build.
Well, I don’t buy it. Things are not getting better, they are getting worse. People think you are mad if you question the benefits brought by science. Science, we are informed in no uncertain terms, has assisted with the survival of mankind, that it has brought us untold benefits, and that it alone has, and will continue to do so, contributed to the betterment of mankind.
A quick look at that shows it to be spurious reasoning – the reasoning that we are supposed to extol. Mankind survived for a few million/hundreds of thousands of years without modern science. True, we had a science of sorts, a kind of experimental way of trying things out that constituted a rudimentary method, but it did not have the sophistication of the science of the last 350 years. Since the advent of the scientific revolution, far from improving the survivability of our species, it has brought us thundering to a possible extinction, due to: (a) Nuclear War (b) Climate Change disasters (c) Decreased resistance to disease and the possibility of pandemics (d) The consequences of disruption to ecosystems and our potential for growing food and eating animals (such as fish stocks) that are independent of the CO2 crisis (e) the possibility of artificial life or artificially intelligent machines going haywire and supplanting us (f) I’m sure there are a few more…The point is, that science has not improved our species’ survivability, it has severely compromised it.
What then of the individual – surely it has improved the lives of individual people? We live longer and we have, we are led to believe, a higher standard of health care and better quality of life.
Some facts which suggest otherwise:
(a) As Capra pointed out in The Turning Point, the reductionist biomedical model has not rid the world of disease, or made us overall healthier – it has simply eradicated some diseases, yet created other health problems. We have more cancer, heart disease, deaths on the roads, stress, mental health problems, blah blah, than ever before. On balance, he says, we are no healthier, just that some of the old killers have gone away (at least from the Western world).
(b) We are no happier than in the past. The countries with the most science, with the highest stakes in the Industrial economy, consume, by a long mile, the greatest quantities of anti-depressants and the like.
(c) We work longer hours and we are more stressed because of it. Jobs are less skillful, more boring, more irrelevant, and are more poorly paid for core services (such as farming, teaching). A teacher 50 years ago could support a family reasonably comfortably; now, he’d have no chance, without considerable struggle, stress and debt.
(d) We are told we become wealthier. No – there is more wealth, but also a far bigger wealth gap. Any psychologist will tell you that wealth is relative to what others have, not absolute.
(e) Technology has created worse goods, loads of cheap plastic shit. Also, mass pollution and waste. What of our technologies do we really need? Which truly make us better people?
(f) We are the subjects of an enormous propaganda machine (read Manuel Castells, Communication Power), such that, we no longer know who we are or what to think, or even, what is real. We are the classic case of the hopelessly enslaved who believe they are free.
(g) We are watched, and probed, and contained like never before. We can’t do anything, go anywhere, say what we like, etc., without some official watching, recording, judging.
The future is not bright and it’s not orange. It’s grey and dull and horrible. This will all only get worse. The announcements on trains won’t go away, they’ll get worse. The company that built the million pound system that tells us not to forget our bags, or which station we are at (my 10 year old daughter laughed the other day when the female voice announced where we were, and pointed to the sign and said we know where we are daddy! Yes yes I know, people who can’t see…) will only get worse, as year on year they need to improve it, or they have a better way of doing it, or they decide that the voice is out of date and the whole system needs to be re-configured, and so on.
The diseases won’t go away, or the stress, or the working hours, or the bullshit ‘products’ made from plastic that assume we are morons, or the anthropomorphising of everything, pleading with us to ‘buy me’, or ‘put me in the bin’, and the wars won’t stop (read Joint Operating Environment manual and its prognosis of the future conflicts), we will not get happier (and certainly not by teaching it in schools), and work won’t become more exciting and relevant and creative, and we won’t become better at surviving – certainly not better than the hard bastards who got us out of Africa and through the ice age.
We’ve become wimps in comparison – undignified, snot-nosed, pathetic, dumb, and needy. We are told otherwise, constantly; and of course, there are amazing people out there, and there is still lots of good in the world, and we create everyday beautiful music, dancing, jokes, and stories. There are still acts of kindness, and brilliant insights. And every now and again, someone comes up with something that really improves our lives. But, none of that is new. We’ve always done those things. That’s what being human is all about.
Oh, I see, thanks for that clarification.
And… ?? then what ? Please, not TT again…
( says he, sitting on his rock, watching the world go to shit…)
( That last comment was for Andy, btw)
Yes, great post, Lee. I love “…we are behaving like a bunch of undignified, narrow-minded twats. ”
I think not entirely our fault. Many are forced to remain in perpetual adolescence, it’s convenient for the system. Infantile, dependent on the syatem for all our needs. Much easier to manipulate juvenile bear cubs than full grown grizzlies… we are denied opportunities for full development. Kinda like Jung’s Individuation. Discovering who you really are.
Yeah, right on, Lee. Don’t think it’s right to lay so much blame on science. There’s a whole bunch of other strands, development of capitalism, classical economics, etc, etc, all tangled up with science.
The way I see it, science is like a kitchen knife, you can cut someone’s throat or peel the potatoes. It’s given us this computer and the internet and the ability to get insights into ecology, etc. Just that we are not sufficiently mature and wise to handle such a powerful tool, and the evil megalomaniacs will always try use any scientific discovery in the service of greater power and domination.
Generally, I’m in full agreement. Trouble is, once you’ve discovered gun powder and invented guns, and it’s in the public domain, you can’t disinvent them… how do we actually stop the arms race ? nanotechnology, surveillance drones, etc, etc, ?
These are the guys who are driving the train…
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2010/08/road-to-serfdom-inside-goldman-sachs.html
Lee – yes, indeed, and an excellent summary. It seems to me that this way of living is not long for this world though. Its own internal contradictions, plus what it is doing to nature, are bringing the blowback closer. In many ways, this is a good thing.
For me, the biggest challenge of all is the ecocentric challenge. When I talk about the ‘new stories’ Dark Mountain started out to bring into being, I am talking most of all about stories which see the world without humans at the centre of it. This is immensely difficult, in this culture. We live in a society built on human narcissism. Even when we talk about ‘collapse’ we focus on our own economics rather than on ecosystems and the world as a whole. To write as if we were not in control, not in charge, not at centre or the pinnacle, and to see the world that way – that, to me, is the key challenge to our humanity.
@Paul
‘Humans at the centre’….
Woman I knew, into horses and their behaviour, went to USA to learn more, came across ‘taoist’ horsemanship.
There’s that principle in martial arts, using the opponents energy to defeat them. Yin, rather than yang.
So, use the nature of the horse, rather than your own will, to tame the wild horse. So, instead of the trad British ‘breaking in’ of a young horse, by forcing it to submit by, often, quite cruel methods, the woman just sat on a blanket in the middle of the corral and did nothing… like any good zen buddhist, hahaha… and, first the young horse is afraid and panicky, circling the corral trying to be as far away from the strange object at the centre as possible. But, as hours pass, it begins to make tentative, timid advances.
The nature of horses, they cannot bear to be alone, they crave company, friends, the herd, to feel secure. In the absence of a real horse, the young horse hopes, perhaps, this strange being might be a friend not a danger… so, after any advances and retreats, eventually it’s nose is close to the woman’s face, and as it puffs breath from it’s nostrils, she puffs back. Which is horsie talk which all horse understand. And, shortly thereafter, the young horse loses it’s fear and doesn’t want to be apart from it’s new friend.
All this is done, in traditional taoist fashion, without effort or exertion. No need to bully and bludgeon the poor creature into submission and break it’s spirit, which is the way some people I’ve known used to do it.
I heard that story many, many years ago. The principle works for all creatures.
One way of looking at this ecocentrism, from semiotics or semiology, all living things are constantly sending out signs, signals, language ( to use that word loosely ). So, if you understand the language the creature speaks, you can communicate.
Amongst woodland birds, each species has it’s own unique alarm call. But all the species understand that alarm calls of the others, even though in a different language. Bit like a Frenchman, a German, and a Norwegian, hearing the siren of a police car.
I know it’s a commonly stated factoid that animals and birds differ from us, because they can have no concept of death ( implying, of course, that we are superior ). I consider that to be garbage. All the prey species are extremely aware of death, they live their whole lives doing anything they can to avoid it. They spend a lot of time being afraid, because they know that ‘something’ lurks in the shadows and wishes to tear them apart and eat them. So, what they really like ( a lot like some of us ) is tranquil security where they can feel safe and relaxed.
So, if one species, say a couple of geese, is at a pool and happily feeding and preening, another species flying by, say a pair of ducks, will think ‘ah, that looks ok’ and join the geese. As far as I can tell, all the prey species work this way.
So, if you make your human centre ( Zone 00 in Permaculture terminology ) gentle and kind, and always show consideration and respect for fellow creatures ( mostly by not frightening them ) they are delighted to gather around. Friendly gifts of food help :-)
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_uH8JDRwUtr0/SYaE67aA7nI/AAAAAAAAAbc/qaVl_BHgy9U/s1600-h/Zones.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zones_(permaculture)
If you move slowly and deliberately, they like that. If you gaze at them with an ‘ah, that’d make a dinner’ look, that freaks them out.
It helps to always appear the same. Birds and animals don’t understand the human trick over suddenly putting on a different colour shirt. Dumb humans don’t even realise that a change of clothes sends totally different signals.
I’ve had an adult wild rabbit, a doe, become totally unafraid. Not enough to be touched, but enough to eat from my hand. I sat on my proverbial rock ( that’s for Andy, hahaha ) on a very hot summer day, and she came and lay on the ground about a metre away, and a few moments later, her baby rabbits appeared and suckled from her teats.
Is this kind of thinking what you had in mind, Paul ?
James,
Hmmm, I suspect the mushrooms (fungi) may end up making a meal of us rather than the other way around.
Andy
@James
Yes, hemp is good in so many ways. Mushrooms too. Thanks for the mention. Doesn’t solve the larger problems though.
http://www.harmonikireland.com/hemp/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/25/food.foodanddrink
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2004/nov/07/foodanddrink.features9
McKibben on Global Warming
http://www.countercurrents.org/mckibben050810.htm
Ok there appear to be 63 posts, some of which are rather lengthy; and I should probably read them all, but I will possibly get lost if I do. Is that the height of internet bad manners? I don’t know.
Anyway, Wolfbird, you say “hard scientific insights”- no offence but those are lacking here. Your words might have some intuitive appeal, but its not science. One of the reasons you may seem to be “doomerists” is that you are not climate scientists, yet you speak with authority about probable outcomes w.r.t. the climate and its social consequences. Where do you get this authority from? This is why you might be perceived as “doomers” (although I have no doubt, the people labelling you/us such don’t know shit about science either).
You say it is simple fact that anthropocentric approaches are unsustainable. This is not axiomatic and requires justification. In fact your discussion of the aquarium IS anthropocentric, since it is primarily concerned with human survival. Is anthropocentrism really to blame? if so why? science please.
I should point out that I am not dismissing the emotional side of Dark Mountain Project, which I think is its strength. But if it is soully about the emotional expression of its members, that probably won’t be heading anywhere good.
Paul said, “For me, the biggest challenge of all is the ecocentric challenge… ”
and Andy said, he rejects my own “’sit on a rock and watch the world go to shit’ argument !”
As I see it, Andy doesn’t understand what I meant, which probably indicates that I didn’t explain myself clearly. The problem relates directly to what Paul said.
In this country, if I think about just about everybody I’ve met in my life, we have an unconscious cultural assumption that we have to be ‘doing’, as if it is US, and our efforts, which sustain the world, and if we cease for a moment, it is all going to crumble into nothing…
If you think deeply about this, it’s a totally ridiculous attitude. This planet, Earth, the Biosphere, has spent four and a half thousand million years, or so, doing whatever it’s been doing, without any assistance from human beings. That long procession of events produced US, we didn’t produce it.
Why don’t we trust ‘it’ ? Why do we believe that ‘we know better’ ?
I suggest it is because we have been taught, trained, to see ourselves and the world in ways that are deeply erroneous.
If you look at the last few centuries of British culture and the figures who have moulded our worldview, from Francis Bacon, Newton, to Churchill to Prince Charles, they are ALL totally useless as role models for the ecocentricity that Paul mentions. I’m a fan of Darwin, but the neo-Darwinists, e.g. Richard Dawkins, are equally useless. We simply don’t have ANY thinkers, writers, philosophers, to whom we can turn for guidance, if we want to know how to live in harmony with the rest of Creation, do we ?
( Maybe Lovelock, but then he gets into some very weird ideas himself, sometimes, like it being ok to throw away old oil rigs by dumping them in the ocean, and seeing the Amazon rain forest as ‘an aberration’.)
Lee came up with the splendid line, “…we no longer know who we are or what to think, or even, what is real.” That’s it, IMO. Not just for individuals, but for the whole of British culture ( forget the rest of the world for a moment ), we’ve drifted so far off course, we are not even facing in the right direction anymore, and are totally clueless as to how we got here and where to go next…
We can’t expect to get any leadership, because all of the elite, those with power, prestige, influence, are as hopelessly deluded and lost as any drunkard who can’t find his way home from the pub and ends up asleep in a ditch, because those with the expensive educations, the Blairs, Camerons, Cleggs, Monbiots, Ridleys, only get taught the ‘wisdom’ that’s inherited, from the Victorians, the Enlightenment, Classical Rome and Greece, etc, and thereis NOBODY in that whole thread of human culture and civilisation who has got it right.
Is there ?
There’s plenty who have wisdom and insight into military affairs, administration of cities, heroic figures, thinkers and poets and scientists, like Dr. Johnson and his dictionary, Mary Wollstencraft, Shelley, Faraday, Dickens, we have a huge list of folks like that, thousands of ‘em, social reformers, theologians, agriculturalists like Jethro Tull, great sailors like Cook, etc, etc, etc.
I cannot think of a single learned treatise that sees this world as the SOURCE of our being, to be cherished. Invariably, they see this world as a RESOURCE, to be exploited, controlled, manipulated, even for Wordsworth, it’s something separate, to be admired, rather than something within which we are embedded, something which has it’s own meaning and worth, quite apart from human vanity, into which we can belong, NATURALLY.
So, my ‘sitting on a rock’ doesn’t spring from lackadaisical irresponsibility, or not caring what happens. It’s not that at all. It’s difficult to explain briefly. I think we can trust nature, we can trust ‘it’.
We don’t need to do stuff. What we need to do is to STOP doing stuff. Because almost everything we do, compelled by a sort of collective egomania, by the deluded cultural imperative that we are so damn important, causes harm.
Paul – reference to your reply – “Nobody noticed, and it doesn’t matter. But it was wonderful and right.” This is how I have lived for the past 17 years or so – if we all did what felt ,”wonderful and right’ maybe we’d get somewhere.
@Dan Ross
Oh dear, what a load of old bollox…
“Ok there appear to be 63 posts, some of which are rather lengthy; and I should probably read them all, but I will possibly get lost if I do. Is that the height of internet bad manners? I don’t know.”
Might be wiser, if you’re determined to attack someone, i.e. ME
“Anyway, Wolfbird, you say “hard scientific insights”- no offence but those are lacking here. Your words might have some intuitive appeal, but its not science. One of the reasons you may seem to be “doomerists” is that you are not climate scientists, yet you speak with authority about probable outcomes w.r.t. the climate and its social consequences. Where do you get this authority from? This is why you might be perceived as “doomers” (although I have no doubt, the people labelling you/us such don’t know shit about science either).”
Look, we’re talking CULTURE. This isn’t a science blog. If you need to be provided with cites and references, I can probably back up anything I say with scientific support, if I could be bothered to. But that’s irrelevant here.
“You say it is simple fact that anthropocentric approaches are unsustainable. This is not axiomatic and requires justification. In fact your discussion of the aquarium IS anthropocentric, since it is primarily concerned with human survival. Is anthropocentrism really to blame? if so why? science please.”
Bollox again. We’re talking culture. Since when is human culture ‘scientific’ ? or even rational or logical ?
“I should point out that I am not dismissing the emotional side of Dark Mountain Project, which I think is its strength. But if it is soully about the emotional expression of its members, that probably won’t be heading anywhere good.”
I suggest go read the original manifesto and have a think, then come back.
@ Dorothy
Yes. Makes me wonder how much amazing stuff goes on throughout the country which never enters the discourse in the public domain, the real reality, as opposed to the pre-occupation with ‘news’, gossip, ‘reality tv’.
Not long ago, my neighbour spent 4 hours in the rain gathering sheep off the mountain. Just as the flock were being directed through the final gateway, they rebelled, split up, and all ran back up onto the mountain again. I think I’m the only person he told.
@Wolfbird – maybe those sheep were very wise and could see the ‘other side of the mountain’ when they were up there. It isn’t always as dark as it appears from the valley.
Hi Dan. Yes, we may have set a record for thread-length on this site.
Here’s what I wrote about climate change way back at the start somewhere:
‘No-one knows how the climate changes. We have not been above 300ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere for 800,000 years. Ice core samples seem to suggest that some previous climate changes have been rapid – the climate seems to have flipped from one state to another over the course of just a few decades. Great bubbles of methane are burping up from the Russian arctic as we speak. By 2100 this planet could be devoid of much of what we now know as life. Or, it could not. The climate could change gradually, or some unknown feedback could kick in. We’ve no idea. This doesn’t mean the juggernaut won’t crash, it just means that assessing the impact at this stage is just educated guesswork.’
I’m no climate scientist, but all the research and data behind these claims are in the public domain. It’s also all referenced in ‘Eaarth’, which I wrote of in the blog itself.
When I’ve spoken to actual climate scientists in the past I’ve often been distinctly unenlightened: like all academics and most scientists they tend to specialise in small areas of research and are often super-cautious about giving the big picture. The IPCC was created to synthesise all this work into a publicly accessible database of up to date findings on climate, and the IPCC’s scenarios are clear about where we are headed if we don’t radically cut back emissions, which we’re clearly not doing any time soon.
Of course, they can’t say precisely what will pan out as a result, which was my point. We should be careful about specific predictions, and certainly about timeframes. But we can see pretty clearly – based on the science – where we are headed.
I’ve not said ‘anthropocentric approaches are unsustainable.’ ‘Unsustainable’ is a meaningless word. My suggestion is that anthropocentrism underlies our politics, our ethics, our morals and the application (and the choice) of our science. This is not a problem because it can’t be ‘sustained’ r because there is some technical issue with its application. It’s a problem because, ethically, it is the wrong way to look at the world. This seems to me to be one of the reasons we are where we are: one of those underlying societal myths that DM came about to question and challenge. It can’t be ‘scientifically proven’, but we should be careful not to try and over-use ‘science’ as a crutch: something our society, and our environmentalists, do with tedious regularity. Demands for ‘facts’ and ‘science’ can often be ways of avoiding discussions of wider cultural and, yes, even ‘emotional’ topics which this utilitarian society feels uncomfortable facing.
Finally, I’m not sure that non-scientific responses, especially those here, are necessarily ‘emotional.’ I’d say they were more intuitive and rational in many cases. Though as you say, emotional responses are also key in working out how to live in the world.
@Paul
I wish the Global Warming issues could be avoided… it drowns out conversation about other the important issues… this is the bit that bugged me, Paul :
” We’ve no idea.”
Why do you say that ? No idea means no idea at all. But we have thousands of highly qualified scientists who say, although they can’t be exact or precise in every respect, we can expect such and such. That’s not ‘no idea’.
Just because we don’t know everything, doesn’t mean we don’t know anything.
Risk management comes into play. If someone said your plane flight had a 50% chance of crashing, would you still get on it ?
“…like all academics and most scientists they tend to specialise in small areas of research and are often super-cautious about giving the big picture. ”
Yes, exactly right, they each examine a tiny piece with a spotlight. Almost nobody switches on the floodlight and looks at the whole picture to get the context.
Here’s scientists, climatologists, discussing Mark Lynas’s Six Degrees, a couple of years back :
” If a reading of the published scientific literature paints such a frightening picture of the future as Six Degrees suggests – even while it honestly represents that literature – then are we being too provocative in the way we write our scientific papers? Or are we being too cautious in the way we talk about the implications of the results? ”
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/11/six-degrees/
What I meant there was that we have ‘no idea’ how the factors coming into play will combine to affect us. You’re probably right ‘no idea’ is too strong. But we need to be cautious about predictions; scientists are. We know what is likely to come down, but not in what order or where. It could be worse than predicted, not as bad, or any combination of these.
Interesting that you mention Mark Lynas, who I know. In recent years he has swerved strongly away from the line he took in Six Degrees. In that book he painted a truly frightening picture of a climate-changed future. He based it all, he said, on peer-reviewed science. These days he plays down the risk of catastrophic climate change, even going so far as to say that climate change is barely worth worrying about: the tech will sort it all out. He bases this view on … you guessed it, peer reviewed science. What does this tell me? That the science is real, but that the interpretation of it can depend, as much as anything, on the temperament of the interpreter.
Me, I tend to think that climate change stands a pretty good chance of turning into something genuinely catastrophic in a much shorter time than we expect. But I don’t know.
Hahaha, well, I really would prefer not to be diverted into climate change… there’s debates ranging on hundreds of blogs about that… ecocentrism is much more interesting to me, not many places discuss that, but was it this morning ? someone on the radio, re extreme weather events, said 14 out of 15 all time records have been broken this year. And it’s only August.
Remember what Jared Diamond said ? If soceity/civilization is to survive, we need to address about a dozen or so factors, over the next few decades, and we have to get them ALL right, because any one could be a cause of collapse and system failure…
How much weight should we give, “The likelihood of a very large scale war breaking out, in the next three weeks, is growing every day.” ?
http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/08.10/bombiran.html
I don’t think I give that website much credibility, myself, if it’s take on global warming is anything to judge by.
Very poor, junk science. Useless. I hope they are not better at judging Israel’s intentions. They might be.
http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/warming.html
Wolfbird, when I was a wee schoolgirl long, long ago, I was taught that the weather of the last 100 or so years (then) was unusually clement and cooperative. They knew back then we were heading into much more turbulent climes — well before “climate science.” I am with Paul. We just don’t know. The Earth decides. And if she decides to head into another ice age on a schedule set millions of years ago… then that’s what will happen. IMO, of course. Either case, we are badly screwed. I wish that people would stop arguing about who is right about the future and focus on what we know quite clearly, and of which there is a great deal of consensus: that we have trashed and poisoned the planet and we gotta stop. The more we buy into this polarized nonsense (on whatever topic) the less chance we have of coming together to collaborate on what needs doing.
I am coming across as critical here towards you, which is actually mostly false… I have been vastly impressed by this long thread, and your posts especially.
There is something you said, many eons ago in this thread, that I wanted to address. You said: when “human societies get into difficulty, they become more authoritarian, stricter, more cruel.” Actually, not so. You were speaking of civilized societies… which really are a blip on the timeline of H. sapiens. Pre-civ humans, by contrast, for 97% of our existence as a species, have lived in radically egalitarian, sharing societies as a response to the extreme challenges coming their way. This is what enabled us to survive previous global warmings (many, some much warmer than this one) as well as severe ice ages. Perhaps we have enough species intelligence to be able to … oh, I don’t know, start playing that old game again, seeing that this new game sucks. Eh?
Hi vera,
You wrote :
“I was taught that the weather of the last 100 or so years (then) was unusually clement and cooperative. They knew back then we were heading into much more turbulent climes — well before “climate science.” ”
I don’t know who taught you or what they were basing their ideas on, vera, but science has developed a lot, still is, with satellites, computers, much more sophisticated measurement techniques, etc.
‘Weather’ and ‘Climate’ are not the same thing. Distinct scientific disciplines, even though the general public often use the words interchangeably.
“The Earth decides. And if she decides to head into another ice age on a schedule set millions of years ago… then that’s what will happen. ”
The ice ages are explained by Milankovitch Cycles. We’ve been in the Holocene as a result. A relatively benign, stable period that permitted agriculture and civilization to develop.
“…we are badly screwed. I wish that people would stop arguing about who is right about the future and focus on what we know quite clearly, and of which there is a great deal of consensus: that we have trashed and poisoned the planet and we gotta stop. ”
Agreed.
“The more we buy into this polarized nonsense (on whatever topic) the less chance we have of coming together to collaborate on what needs doing.”
Even if everyone on this forum agreed, that still doesn’t solve the problem. As Copenhagen showed, international agreement isn’t happening.
Even national agreement in UK isn’t happening. CO2 continues to go up, all the mainstream politicians and the media, industry, finance, most of the public, all want more economic growth… which of course means more consumption, more pollution, more damage to the biosphere…
“I am coming across as critical here towards you, which is actually mostly false… ”
I expect I can cope with it, vera : ) , such mild criticism, so delicately expressed, I’m quite accustomed to having rocks thrown at me..
“I have been vastly impressed by this long thread, and your posts especially.”
Thanks for the compliment : )
“There is something you said, many eons ago in this thread, that I wanted to address. You said: when “human societies get into difficulty, they become more authoritarian, stricter, more cruel.” Actually, not so. You were speaking of civilized societies… ”
Yes, i was speaking of post-agricultural soceities, I’m not saying it’s an invariable pattern, just lots of instances where that happens, especially since the development of nation states. Another frequent pattern, if the economy is failing, start a war with a neighbour to maintain political power..
“…which really are a blip on the timeline of H. sapiens. ” Sure.
“Pre-civ humans, by contrast, for 97% of our existence as a species, have lived in radically egalitarian, sharing societies as a response to the extreme challenges coming their way. ”
Okay. But nobody was there to study the behaviour, so it’s a guess.
We’re primates. Baboon colonies adjust their power structure according to conditions. When life is easy, tend to be 3 or 4 female ‘queens’ at the top of the hierarchy, life is fairly relaxed and easy going. In a hard time, a drought, one alpha male at the top, and much more violence, making everyone keep their place in the pecking order. Not saying humans were the same, but it’s a clue.
Put the baboons into London Zoo, in a completely artificial environment, behavior becomes quite different again.
( Don’t ask me for cites, I read it long ago, i don’t remember where, but seemed reputable research ).
Look what happens in UK in what they declare to be ‘an emergency’. People have to go where they are told, property can be requisitioned, civil rights are ignored. The elite will decide they need to act ‘to restore and maintain order’. Fundamentally, that means force. ‘Do what we say, or else…’
“This is what enabled us to survive previous global warmings (many, some much warmer than this one) as well as severe ice ages. Perhaps we have enough species intelligence to be able to … oh, I don’t know, start playing that old game again, seeing that this new game sucks. Eh?”
There was plenty of space in those previous times, and very few people, and they could migrate to follow the thermoclines. Look what happens when people try to migrate now, other people don’t like it…
It’s not the climate change itself that matters, we are extremely adaptable, like all species, or we wouldn’t be here. We found ways to survive from the equator to the pole. But, the agriculture and cities which the vast majority depend on, developed in a benign, stable climatic period, and the changes are now happening too fast for us, let alone all the ecosystems, to be able to adapt. What with Peak Oil on top, and all the other horrors, I simply don’t understand how anybody cannot see that this ship is sinking fast, so to speak….
No real disagreement with you, though. I think folks would be much happier living in small egalitarian communities, and also more likely to survive…
Wolfbird, I am not sure if the ice ages are entirely explained by the Milankovitch cycles. For example, it looks like the last age may have been precipitated by the Toba eruption… or at least made much colder by it. And prior to that, for about 50,000 years it was back and forth between warmings and ices… maybe 10 such flips… eh… anyways, I like to avoid hubris and say, we really don’t know what the future will bring. We can only extrapolate and make conjectures.
International agreement will not happen. To put hope in “copenhagens” seems to me foolish. But we can have agreement among ourselves, and move on. Nah? :-) How about using the Natural Step pattern, settling more and more of what can be agreed on and acting on that?
“I’m not saying it’s an invariable pattern, just lots of instances where that happens, especially since the development of nation states. Another frequent pattern, if the economy is failing, start a war with a neighbour to maintain political power..”
Agreed. Oh and how about pyramid-building? Or roads to nowhere? That’s always been a popular choice… ;-)
As for egalitarian sharers, it’s better than a guess. Especially since these tribal systems survived all over the earth until recently. I don’t know about baboons, but with humans it seems the opposite. When things got lush and plentiful with the Holocene, humans relaxed their vigilance and allowed assholes more of a leeway. Big mistake…
I think a lot of people do know the ship is sinking; they are baffled and scared and unsure what to do. We don’t yet have an alternative to offer them… It is said that in the early days of Christianity, what made it so attractive is that they were able to say, look, if you’ve had it with the empire, come join us in the Way. That’s what we need, no? Except, I’d like to see 10,000 “ways”. Confuse the sh*t out of the bastards…
Hi again, vera,
I wanted to comment on your earlier remark, re your school days…
“They knew back then we were heading into much more turbulent climes — well before “climate science.”
Climate science is old !
Aristotle divided the world into torrid, temperate, and frigid zones around 300 BC.
Galileo invented the thermometer in 1610.
Torricelli invented the barometer c. 1660. Shortly thereafter he showed that temperature generally declines with altitude.
Hadley worked out the basics of the general circulation in 1735.
Fourier discovered the greenhouse effect in 1824.
Agassiz established that there had been at least one ice age in 1837.
Tyndall identified the major greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere as water vapor and carbon dioxide through spectroscopic lab work in 1859.
Langley got a rough picture of the absorption intensity spectra of different gases c. 1880.
Svante August Arrhenius proposed the theory of anthropogenic warming in a paper in 1896. In it, he prediced several features such as polar amplification, and made a numerical estimate of climate sensitivity.
In 1901, Angstrom and Koch thought they had shot Arrhenius’s paper down with a lab experiment on saturation.
In 1938, Callendar revived AGW theory.
In the 1940s, high altitude observations made during the war showed that absorption parameters changed radically with pressure and somewhat less so with temperature. This invalidated the work of Angstrom and Koch.
In 1956 Gilbert Plass once again reintroduced AGW theory. Since then, no one familiar with the field has doubted it.
Smagorinsky et al. wrote the first tentative global circulation model in 1955.
Manabe and Strickler wrote the first radiative convective model in 1964; such models are now a staple of planetary astronomy.
So climatology is a very old field, and even AGW theory predates relativity and quantum mechanics.
“I am not sure if the ice ages are entirely explained by the Milankovitch cycles.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
Yes, but research and understanding are ongoing. We’re trying to understand a complex system. It’s not so different to trying to understand how the human body functions, stuff like the circulation of the blood is now well understood, but there’s still plenty of mysteries, particularly the brain. Point is, we don’t need to have understood every detail to be able to have a fairly good idea as to what kills a human body.. e.g. asphyxiation…
Thing is, when surgeons and physicians were trying to understand, say, blood circulation or digestion, they made lots of mistakes, but it didn’t matter because there were always plenty of spare humans to operate on, to have another go…
We’re trying to understand the physiology of the planet, and we only have the ONE. We’re interfering with the natural system, by gross insults, clearing the forests, acidifying the oceans, taking the carbon out of the geological strata and putting it into the air, and all this ( inadvertent ) geo-engineering is being done without any regard for the consequences…
It’s hard to think of anything more reckless and stupid. Bluntly, being so foolish, en masse, we really don’t deserve to survive as a species…
Remember Aldo Leopold’s First Rule of Tinkering ? Keep all the bits ! By destroying biodiversity and forcing species into extinction, we are throwing away the bits, as if they don’t matter…
Anyway, I’m sure you’re aware of all this, so let’s put climate, etc, to one side.
You said: “How about using the Natural Step pattern, settling more and more of what can be agreed on and acting on that ?”
I’ve never heard of that, but it sounds okay… however it sounds as if you’re looking towards building an agenda for action ? Is that the aim ?
You said :
“..I don’t know about baboons, but with humans it seems the opposite. When things got lush and plentiful with the Holocene, humans relaxed their vigilance and allowed assholes more of a leeway.”
I think maybe the first Cities, Sumer, etc, were possibly the Big Mistake. They needed a stratified ant heap soceity, with organised labour, etc.
Maybe Gobekli tepe will clarify things, someday
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe
But again, let’s put that aside, because there’s endless discussion…
“I think a lot of people do know the ship is sinking; they are baffled and scared and unsure what to do. We don’t yet have an alternative to offer them… It is said that in the early days of Christianity, what made it so attractive is that they were able to say, look, if you’ve had it with the empire, come join us in the Way. That’s what we need, no? Except, I’d like to see 10,000 “ways”. Confuse the sh*t out of the bastards…”
Yes. “Roll up ! roll up ! This way folks ! Come this way, up the Dark Mountain… we don’t know where we’re going, all we know, it’s very dark… ”
Hahaha.
I like the dark.
More on Gobekli tepe
“People armed with arrows and flint knives built a series of temples in the middle of the fertile crescent thousands of years before the earliest civilization, and then deliberately buried them under thousands of tons of earth.”
http://www.erikorganic.com/green/9-steps-to-understanding-gobekli-tepe/
My favourite take on history, Fredy Perlman
http://www.primitivism.com/leviathan.htm
Full text online
http://www.raiazome.com/Fredy_Perlman–Against_His-story,_Against_Leviathan
and Jerry Mander
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/AoS/theSun.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EJ7xNEH2w8
I think we should be wary of speculating on what may or may not have happened before ‘civilisation.’ Where is the cut-off point between ‘civ’ and ‘pre-civ’ societies, and why does the nature of human beings change at that stage? I have spent time in existing tribal societies – many do still exist – and the ones I have experienced are very much defined by hierarchy and taboo, and what we would these days call ‘rigidly defined gender roles.’ ‘Traditional’ ways of doing things are, generally speaking, rigid in terms of social order: very far from being ‘egalitarian’ as we would understand that term. Because these societies are defined from day to day by scarcity – hunter-gatherers are much less sure about whether they will eat tomorrow than farmers or shoppers – they need well-ordered and strictly controlled societies.
Of course I am talking about my experience here, but this is the case also in many other tribal societies today. You can’t generalise too much (the Iroquios, for example, had a functioning grassroots democracy long before the ‘West’ seems to have formalised it as part of its nation-building project). But we don’t know how ‘pre-civ’ humans lived. We can guess, and project, but we don’t know. Ran Prieur’s Essay from DM issue 1 is quite good on this stuff:
http://ranprieur.com/essays/beyondciv.html
More to the point, it doesn’t really matter, because we are not there. We are here, and if things get tight there will be crackdowns, strictures, rations and machismo. Stockpile beans!
But other than this point, we’re surely all agreed on the basic here. We don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but we know the ship is sinking. It would be worth us looking for life jackets at this stage. It would also be worth us remembering that, while this vessel is crewed by hairless, territorial ground apes, it’s carrying as many other creatures as Noah’s ark, and they’re going to sink too.
I’m familiar with Ran’s thinking ( having spent a couple of years on his discussion forum, hey, if you do a search, wolfbird, you can read all my jabberings, for better or worse, hahaha ) and, for me, the most interesting bit in his ‘beyond civ’ essay is,
” The other issue is a question: Who are we? When you get below the level of culture, down to the level of biology or spirit, what is normal for us to do? What is possible? What is right? ”
Which makes the journey up the Dark Mountain a vision quest, a search for identity, not just for one’s own identity, but for our whole species…
What is our true nature ( if any ) ?
Tagonist did a splendid post on this topic recently
http://tagonist.livejournal.com/208365.html
I really like Werner Erhard on that subject… because it ties into my own personal favourite, Soto Zen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f17cu-TS-Tk
I see zen as a unique ideology ( child of buddhism and taoism, part philosophy, part religion ) because it’s ultimate purpose is to destroy all ideology, to become completely liberated from all conceptual chains. So, the final step on the zen path is to be free from zen…
However, the problem with ‘creating your self’, is that you can create an angel or a demon. So, zen training makes sure that the ethics of buddhism are firmly engrained, completely automatic, part of one’s nature, before you leap off into the void…
Wolfbird: “We’re trying to understand the physiology of the planet, and we only have the ONE. We’re interfering with the natural system, by gross insults, clearing the forests, acidifying the oceans, taking the carbon out of the geological strata and putting it into the air, and all this ( inadvertent ) geo-engineering is being done without any regard for the consequences…”
That nails is. Exactly.
Here is a link to the Natural Step.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Natural_Step
Am I building agenda for action? Well, it’s more like I am aiming to change the game we’z playing. The agendas will evolve out of that. I am not a friend of imposed agendas. And I love the dark… ;-)
Well, the first cities were (my private theory) tourist traps. I have thought hard why the Anatolians would build Catal Huyuk in the middle of a marsh, and create all that very weird art. To make people go there and fleece’em! Or make people resettle there and get rich on the old ponzi scheme that is urbanism… But, they were still quite egalitarian, at that time. Gobekli Tebe is a fabulous puzzle…
Fredy Perlman is one of my heroes, and I am proud to say, a compatriot. Grew up in the same town I did.
Paul said: “Where is the cut-off point between ‘civ’ and ‘pre-civ’ societies, and why does the nature of human beings change at that stage?”
This is precisely what I am hacking away at. My take is that this civ began with coercive domination. Human nature did not change. Humans began to play another game, socially speaking, which allowed the ascendancy of human predators.
Most tribals today are far from egalitarian sharing, though a handful still exist. Transegalitarian societies have been far more common in the last 100 years, and of course on to “chiefly” systems. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of documentation of the egalitarians, and plenty of support for the theory that in the hard days of the ice age, and in many places long into the Holocene, this was the social system that prevailed.
Yes, foragers are less sure of their food than shoppers, and that is why they are likely to practice vigilant sharing… if they allowed the assholes to wreak havoc, they get into trouble pronto. Assholes (aka aggrandizers) are expensive and dangerous to community well-being…
There is only one effective lifejacket, IMO. Radical cooperation.
Thanks for the Natural Step link, vera; that’s new to me, I’ll study it later.
Just one comment. It’s not correct to lump all gatherer/hunter folks together. There were/are a huge variety. It’s quite easy, in some places, to combine hunting expeditions with a bit of gardening at the places you stop off for a rest, so there’ll be something waiting to eat next time you take that route. Fish traps on rivers and coasts can provide a steady reliable food supply. So can positioning the community near a colony of walrus, or sea birds, or whatever. I don’t think there were any rules, people just discovered what worked. Some has very hard, difficult times, some had an easy life where the fruit just fell off the trees.
Anyway, where did we get too ? :-)
Ah, yes, ‘the ship is sinking’…. exponentially…
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/08/06/global-boiling-nuclear/
Plenty of scope for literary metaphors, re-arranging deck chairs, etc, but I’d like to talk about ecocentrism, if possible…
There’s been a lot of debate about the origins of agriculture, with many different theories. One that comes to mind, from John Seymour I think, that ants gather grains together. They may have done that for the wild wheat species, and humans would have noticed and done the same.. dunno,,,
anyway, I have a hypothesis of my own.
I believe ‘it does it by itself’. If you set up a place, a location, that’s right, the wild creatures will assemble, just as naturally as weeds colonise bare earth…
The scientists will scream in horror, but IMHO, all it takes is putting out the right vibe. Wildlife responds. I have the wild rabbits and wild ducks and rock doves and small finches and so forth, all in close proximity, sometimes too much so, because they come into my room…
I’ve pasted this below from a post on UK permaculture forum, because i’m lazy this afternoon :-)
I have thought of a pattern, but I don’t know the correct terms to describe it.
It’s an ecological pattern, a sequence of events. People will be familiar with, for example, the ways that jays or squirrels will take acorns and bury them for eating later,and some will be forgotten and so seed new oak trees. So there’s benefit to both the bird or animal and the tree.
This is a common pattern in natural systems, and some are so intricate and fantastic, that I myself, find it very hard to grasp how they could have originally evolved, in the first place, for example the Large Blue butterfly and the ants.
From my ( admittedly limited ) understanding of evolution and ecology, I had thought that these types of highly complex and chancy life stories, must have taken millions of years to evolve in a particular area where the the species involved had had the opportunity to interact.
However, I have rheas. They are a South American bird, ratites, related to ostriches and emus. They have been in Great Britain for about 300 years, but can’t be considered part of the native ecology.
So, this is my point, this is the pattern that I see :
The rheas seem to slot into the ecology just as if they were a native species. They eat fruits ( damsons ) off the trees, they excrete the kernel with their dung. The dung lays on the ground providing a fertilized patch of soil for the damson seed. The large native dung beetle comes along, drills a hole down into the soil and takes some dung down the vertical tunnel, where it lays it’s eggs. When the damson seed sprouts, it already has this ready made hole full of soft soil and manure, into which it sends it’s tap root. And eventually, will grow into a damson tree, providing more fruits for rheas.
But this isn’t a native, indigenous, system that has evolved over millennia. The damsons are man-made, a selected, cultivated species. And the rheas come from a different continent. And yet, both slot into a sort of archetypal pattern, with the soil and the dung beetles, where all gain mutual advantages. This isn’t a man made system that I designed. It just does it by itself.
Does that make sense ? I don’t know what the right name is for a pattern like this.
http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-chl/w-countryside_environment/w-nature/w-nature-wildlife/w-nature-wildlife-butterflies_moths/w-nature-wildlife-butterflies_moths-large_blue.htm
Pingback: Getting down to getting along « Leaving Babylon
Plus beans, of course. :-)
Wolfbird, I put your immortal line into quotes. Check out my latest.
http://leavingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/getting-down-to-getting-along/
( technicalities: I seem to have three comments still ‘awaiting moderation’, don’t know why. )
That immortal line was originated by Lee Rowland, vera, so the credit is not mine, although I endorse the sentiment.
Leaving Babylon looks cool, I’ll read it later.
Beans ? Yes. And forest gardens.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFbcn06h8w4&feature=player_embedded#!
Guess I’m just saying youre in danger of replacing “myths masquerading as facts”, with more “myths masquerading as facts”. A lot of things are possible. Whats probable is the crucial question.
Was a blast talking to you the other day paul. It occurred to me as I left what you’re doing is possibly quite psychologically demanding. Don’t overdo it.
@ Dan
“It might be thought that knowledge might be defined as belief which is in agreement with the facts. The trouble is that no one knows what a belief is, no one knows what a fact is, and no one knows what sort of agreement between them would make a belief true.”
Bertrand Russell, The Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Okay, philosophy has moved on since that was written… e.g. Richard Rorty
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7lB_wDaGJg&feature=player_embedded#!
“myths masquerading as facts”…
The point is, all we have are myths ( or, I’d prefer to use the word stories ), lots of stories, that’s what constitutes human culture, we are story-telling animals.
Science is a sub-set of human culture. Scientific stories, like the stories in a court of law, are supposedly connected to ‘facts’. That is, the elements of the story are supposed to be supported by some sort of evidence. That is, there should be some empirical data, stuff that can be measured, recorded, tested, analysed, accepted by peer review.
I’ve nothing against science, at it’s best. The scientific project has got to be preferable to superstitious junk, like, e.g. the idea that circulated in some parts of Africa, that having sex with very young children was a cure for HIV. Unfortunately, scientific knowledge can, and is, abused, just like other kinds of knowledge, in pursuit of power and profit, e.g. Monsanto
My point is that human culture is not scientific, never can be, never will be. It’s not rational or scientific to like pop music, or football, or for hem lines of skirts to go up or down each year. We’re a bunch of crazy monkeys, who tell each other stories.
Wanna see how attempts to introduce ‘science’ to culture have worked out ? Watch Pandora’s Box by Adam Curtis…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ6t5JA7OBA&feature=related
I agree, “what’s probable is the crucial question”…
Science is good for that. Scientists can offer likelihoods in percentages, with error bars, for a sheaf of possible scenarios…. probably better than going to an astrologer… however, as I see it, we are involved with ‘story wars’. Lots of folk promoting the myth of progress, for example. Some people promoting the myth of End Times. Lots of other stories entering the public consciousness every day… as i see it, Dark Mountain is a vision quest, a search for a satisfactory story that makes sense of what’s happening… it’s no good appealing to science, is it, when Avatar or the DaVinci Code are what grabs people’s attention…
What’s probable, IMHO, is that ‘things’ will get very much nastier, because we are witnessing global ecological meltdown, not just climate chaos, but another 3 billion humans added over the next couple of decades, when the carrying capacity of Earth is already exceeded, Peak Oil, death of the oceans, etc, etc, etc.
First, there’ll be much tighter controls by governments and elites to try to maintain the existing order, then it’ll slip into increasing chaos, then we get the big bottleneck, our numbers crash, and then, maybe, there’ll be a possibility to re-build some modest human endeavours. Depends what’s left.
Some people expect the Die Off in 5, 10, 20, 30, years. Some think the end of the century. Some say it’s begun already, viz. Russian fires and floods in Pakistan and China, etc.
Craig Ventner or Kurzweil will try and convince you that it’ll all be okay, because a techno fix will gallop up at the last minute on a white horse and the economy will boom and we can build those colonies on Mars…
I’m just telling you a story. My story doesn’t have a very happy ending. Other folks will offer more pleasant stories, of rural communities, pastoral idyll, a transition, a soft landing… I like those stories better.
But if you look at history, say, the Black Death… it’s much easier to organise into brutal ruthless groups who live by robbery, rape, murder, foraging and pillaging across the countryside, than it is to build fertile soil and grow vegetables and get power from water wheels… especially for people who have never done a day of gardening…
‘The human race is almost finished’… worth a read.
“it appears from here that through our partial knowledge and our inherent faults, we have got so many cataclysmic cycles in motion that we cant help but hit on one of them…all the nations on earth continue to arm for war, and nuclear proliferation continues, while none of the innate characteristics of this species which has its entire history at war have been changed…and as if those nuclear weapons werent enough, the militaries of the “civilized” nations also plan satellite actuated proton particle streams and laser or gamma ray death beams that can be effective mass killers (at the speed of light) from outer space, as well as exotic biological & chemical devices, new genetically engineered ethnic weapons that might well knock off everyone on the planet not preselected and/or properly immunized…”
http://geaugailluminati.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/the-human-race-is-almost-finished/
More on transhumanism…
http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10682/Default.aspx
“and as if those nuclear weapons werent enough, the militaries of the “civilized” nations also plan satellite”
Time to take the psychopaths down.
The whole business of human slavery is intriguing. I realised some time ago that this will be/is the most likely form of future energy that the system will go for. Its cheap, its sustainable (as long as you feed & house the slaves) & it controls the masses ie they’re all too knackered to rebel.
That led me on to worry about this: are environmentalists building their own shackles for the masters?
OK here’s the scenario. Obama gets up on TV one day from the Oval Office & says:
“You all know how dire the situation is with global warming, peak oil & the economy. I don’t have to spell it out to you people. I respect your intelligence too much. Many of you have been imploring governments and the international community for some time to take firm action. You all know my position on these issues and have been rightly expecting that I would take up the challenge on behalf of the free world for the sake of all our children.You know I do not shrink from doing what is right.
Tough times require tough measures, we all know that. So today the American government is taking a lead and is setting the example you expect from the worlds only super power that we fervently hope and expect will be followed by all other governments who cherish the future on this planet. Today all private car ownership in America is restricted to those in essential occupations. All others will surrender their vehicles to their local authorities and make themselves available as volunteers in the great cause of saving our planet. Similar restrictions will be placed on the use of public transport. Each one of you will be assigned a task to improve your local environment and to reduce the deadly emissions of CO2.
Now is the time to rebuild our communities destroyed by global warming and industrialisation. It is to each of you to play your part as set out by your local coordinators. Together we will save theis planet for our children. It will not be easy & each of you will be required to make sacrifices for your family and your community. But it will be rewarding and it will succeed.
Finaly in the words of that great American, John F Kennedy I leave this thought with you on planet earth: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you cn do for your country.”
So go to work my fellow Americans and all our fellow humans around the world in this the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. Now is the time to stay at home with our loved ones in our communities and build a new world. “Localise and volunteer” are our watch words. See that you do what you can. I know you will for your families and for your communities.”
The same day presidents and prime ministers across the world make similar speeches. Cheery environmentalists are the first to drive their cars to the nearest assembly point and volunteer for work. Others follow less enthusiasticaly.
@freewilie
Nicely written. You’d make a good speech writer, freewilie :-)
but I don’t think you’ll be able to blame the environmentalists, and if you think running a car = liberty, I think you’re crazy…
I suggest Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is as good a guide to future possibilities as any…
Thing is, as i see it, the vast majority of people are already slaves, they just don’t see it. Which is remarkable, a tremendous achievement from the Master’s point of view.
I mean, if you have to do something that you’d prefer not to do, to get some money, then you are enslaved. You are not truly free. Of course, that’s not the only way people are enslaved, they can be enslaved by the ideas in their heads. And, of course, it all depends upon how the word slave is defined.
If you think about slave plantations in the American south, they were organised with overseers, house slaves, field slaves, a few hundreds perhaps. Now, if you’re running a big estate, with many millions of slaves, how would you organise that ?
The Master doesn’t want the hassle of getting involved with the detail of their squalid lives. The easiest way is to give them just enough freedom so that they don’t boil over in rage, just enough to take on the burden of feeding and clothing themselves, let them take care of their own breeding and washing and transport and everything else, just so long as they don’t step over the boundary and seek autonomy. Give them their instructions via tv, and make them pay for everything they receive…
And all this can be taken care of, efficiently, with tokens, called money. If they don’t accept the rules, they get no money, and suffer and starve. If they are obedient and work hard, they get raised in rank, from field slave to house slave, or even overseer. Keep telling them how lucky they are to be free. They’ll believe it. They’re like chickens in battery cages. They’ve never seen the sunshine. They don’t know any different.
You know, when the powerful aristocratic land owners forced the Scottish people off the land, the great Highland Clearances, so they could be replaced with more profitable sheep, they knew they’d need to keep a few humans as labourers, so they worked out the minimum amount of land that a man would need to feed himself and his family, a croft, making it of such a size, that however hard the man worked, he’d never be able to be independent, he’d never be able to survive without also doing work for The Laird. The big trick is to get the crofters to be truly grateful for the wretched existence they are granted, and to ensure they never get the idea that there might be other options, other possibilities, alternative social systems, other ways of doing things….
Masters may be stupid in most areas, but they are not stupid when it comes to maintaining power and control and keeping their advantages. They’ve had thousands of years to perfect the art. Why bother binding slaves with iron shackles, when it is so very easy to attach the chains invisibly, in their minds…
However, once, long ago, there were indeed still some truly free people, people who had no master, had no money, did whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, went wherever they wanted…
@wolfbird
I agree with much of what you say.
Car = freedom. I don’t believe it either. I have spent several years campaigning against these machines. However I would suggest that most of humanity (sweeping statement!) see a car as equalling freedom. That’s the purpose of car advertising. You & I know that that is pish. Just like the pish around being a “house owner” Its all a smoke & mirrors job. These things actually enslave you because of the money they demand & the fact that you rarely actally get to truly “own” anything. But they have become potent symbols of a “freedom loving democracy”.
Taking away cars has strong symbolism under the guise of “saving the planet”. Also it removes freedom of movement in a bizarre way which the system will see as an important strategy.
I believe things could move this way & my poor deluded friends in the environmental movement could be the strongest advocates.
Using people’s beliefs as a weapon against them is another trick of the system.
Ah, ok, freewilie, I can’t argue with that :-)
Two things on my mind. First, it’s easy to get an intellectual understanding of ecocentrism, just takes a few hours of reading. The hard part is the practical application in real life…
http://www.ecospherics.net/index.html
Second, how do we deal with all the people who see things differently ? I mean, it would be nice if they’d just go away, vanish. The psychopaths, as vera called them above. All the walking dead, the one’s who haven’t even noticed they are alive. The ones who are enthusiastic about bio-engineering and geo-engineering. We could set up our utopian ideal, living in harmony with nature, whatever, but we still get global warming, chemtrails, intrusion by thieves, intrusion by authorities, etc, etc.
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
it is very evident that climate change is already taking effect in this decade”~
@wolfbird
Big questions.
To me there is no magic bullet as many would like to believe. We’ll have to muddle through, making it up as we go along.
Humans love to dress things up and complicate it. Especially the crazies. Keep it simple. Does it serve us and our world?
This whole business will evolve. At the end hopefully there will be some good people left holding the torch.
@ Lauren
“…in our current cultural climate, people will do almost anything to distract themselves from the issues and the facts that ought to matter. The great majority of people spend almost all their time discussing issues about which it is close to impossible to obtain a complete version of the facts, issues which are largely irrelevant in any case — when facts which are staring them in the face, and which carry unmistakably significant implications, are completely ignored.
If you have followed me along thus far, I think you might agree that this phenomenon is one worthy of note. One might well wonder at this point: what could possibly explain this studied refusal to acknowledge what is staring one in the face? Why would so many people be so resistant to facing what is plainly right in front of them? And the majority of people will not even acknowledge the existence of this problem: they will not admit that they are ignoring a crucial topic that is lying in plain view.
Nonetheless, they are. When the world continues to hurtle to what may well be its destruction, and when people refuse to even acknowledge what is happening, you are witnessing a worldwide version of The Big Lie: the lie is so huge, that its very size prevents people from identifying what it is right there in front of them, screaming the fact of its existence in their face.”
http://thesacredmoment.blogspot.com/2004/02/roots-of-horror-instilling-obedience.html
@freewilie
“Big questions.”
“Keep it simple.”
Life. Death. Beans. Forest gardening. I think it’s good to cultivate inner spiritual strength, Qi Gong or similar related techniques, to develop resources to cope with shock and adversity.
@ Lauren
Gavin Schmidt supports your line. IMO, he’s one of the best climatologists and I respect his integrity.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100812/ap_on_sc/us_sci_climate_breakdown
“The U.N.’s network of climate scientists — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — has long predicted that rising global temperatures would produce more frequent and intense heat waves, and more intense rainfalls. In its latest assessment, in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning panel went beyond that. It said these trends “have already been observed,” in an increase in heat waves since 1950, for example.
Still, climatologists generally refrain from blaming warming for this drought or that flood, since so many other factors also affect the day’s weather.
Stott and NASA’s Gavin Schmidt at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York, said it’s better to think in terms of odds: Warming might double the chances for a heat wave, for example. “That is exactly what’s happening,” Schmidt said, “a lot more warm extremes and less cold extremes.”
The WMO did point out, however, that this summer’s events fit the international scientists’ projections of “more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming.”
More transhumanism.
Personally, I think those people ( Kurzweil, et al ) are mentally deranged. They have no respect for the Universe, or life on Earth which produced us, or for what may be in the interests of sentient beings, they are totally obsessed with their own egomania, their self-important hubristic fantasies, and they assume they have a right to inflict all that crap upon the rest of us…
I rewatched the Zeitgeist stuff the other day. That’s the same. A slick, expensive, polished marketing spiel, for a techno-utopian fantasy, makes the whole planet into a meaningless plastic Disney theme park .
“Images of transhuman and posthuman figures, hybrids and chimeras, robots and nanobots became uncannily real, blurring further the distinction between science and science fiction. Now, no one says a given innovation can’t happen; the naysayers simply argue that it shouldn’t. But if the proliferating future scenarios no longer seem like science fiction, they are not exactly fact either—not yet. They are still stories about the future and they are stories about science, though they can no longer be banished to the bantustans of unlikely sci-fi. In a promise-oriented world of fast-paced technological change, prediction is the new basis of authority.
That is why futurist groups, operating thus far on the margins of cultural conversation, were thrust into the most significant discussions of the twenty-first century: What is biological, what artificial? Who owns life when it’s bred in the lab? Should there be cut off-lines to technological interventions into life itself, into our DNA, our neurological structures, or those of our foodstuffs? What will happen to human rights when the contours of what is human become blurred through technology?”
http://maisonneuve.org/pressroom/article/2010/aug/2/intelligent-universe/
And re freewilie’s previous point, about environmentalist’s naive inability to see where they’re being led… you know, we want clean power, to limit global warming, so what happens ? It’s used as an excuse, greenwashing, to clear even more virgin rain forest for palm oil monoculture, it’s used as an excuse to force people who are already living with low eco-footprints off their land, to build more meg-dam hydroelectric projects…
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2010/08/giant-hydroelectric-dams-pushing-tribes.html
It’s the logic of the system. That’s why unciv is the way to go.
IMO, transhumanism is just another way to do denial. There are so many of them nowadays. We all hurt from all the destruction of life. So some people go… bring it on! Destroy it all and turn it all into machines! Kinda a perverse way to mourn…
@ mr wolfbird
Are you using semantic issues about the definition of truth to avoid pursuing it? You make some interesting points, but it was you who in the first place professed to be speaking of “hard scientific insights”. I think careful reasoning, precise scrutiny of arguments is important. “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters” etc. You give a lot of links, but no really solid, sound arguments. I don’t like Adam Curtis’s documentaries for exactly this reason.
If we are simply in story wars; how am I to separate the good stories from the bad. I presume you don’t think all stories are as good as each other?
How would you define ‘truth’ Dan ?
Yes, if we want to deal with something where science is applicable, then fine, science is the best approach. An example would be the discovery of bacteria. Science can establish causal relationships which are solid, testable and repeatable.
But science can only address a limited area. That is, stuff that can be measured. Much of what is most important to human beings is not quantifiable by any scientific methodologies. Beauty, fun, fulfillment, alienation, desire, wisdom, etc, all evade scientific analysis. Science can tell us ‘how’ things in the universe work, but cannot offer any insight into why it exists, what meaning or purpose it may have, or how we should relate to it. Why is there anything at all, when it might be more logical for nothing whatsoever to exist ?
As I said before, this whole DM thing is about human culture. If you watched Adam Curtis review of Russia and America during the 20th C. both put their faith in science and attempted to apply it to social issues and human culture. I suggest both produced grotesque results. Did we learn anything ? Not if what you seem to be saying is anything to go by. That’s why I gave you a hard time earlier in these comments. I think it’s pathetic to repeat the same mistakes all over again.
Story wars ? Well, let’s think about that. We’re not going to settle it here, in this tiny text box, because folks have been hammering away at it ever since Protagoras and Plato. I take Nietzsche’s position, perspectivism, there is no ‘truth’, only many interpretations. You can select your favoured interpretation according to your purpose. I suggest American culture is dominated by pragmatic utilitarianism, that is, it selects interpretations that ‘work’. But just because something ‘works’ that doesn’t mean it’s ultimately true or right.
Remember, we’re not talking science now. We’re talking stories. We can’t apply rigorous double-bind tests for verification.
Selecting between stories used to be much easier, because you probably only heard one, the meta-narrative that was taught by parents and local soceity, e.g. the Bible. In this post-modern world, it’s become almost impossibly difficult. Where do you stand on UFOs, for example. Or chi ? Or homosexuality, or human cloning, or ghosts, or hiphop ? or any of the anomalous contentious phenomena on the borderlines of acceptability ?
They are all stories. They all have some sort of cultural impact. The arguments are interminable because they cannot be resolved by any final arbiter, in the way that scientific or legal disputes can be settled. It’s simply impossible to ‘prove’ that say, Cinderella is a better story than Little Red Ridinghood, or that Yeats is a better poet than Keats or that The Third Man is a better movie than Casablanca.
This problem, hermeneutics, was clear to philosophers in the 19thC. and people struggle with it all the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics
If you seriously want to know how I resolve it, personally, I can tell you, FWIW.
I’m a zen buddhist. I suggest that zen is an ideology for gaining liberation from all ideologies. That is, liberation from ALL the stories.
There is a danger here of adopting a victim mentality, if it hasn’t happened already. Let’s not bandy acronyms here, you are saying those throwing “TODs” are deniers, which is the same type of labelling you are talking about.
Your premise is that you are correct, and they are wrong. Therefore the reason they throw insults must be to hide their lack of counter-argument.
You base your argument on the likes of McGibben, what if he is plain wrong? The feeling of being sure you are right is what leads to entrenchment of views. It’s only when people ask “am I wrong?” that barriers to communication are broken down. That applies equally to the “pro” or “anti” side.
It’s true that unpalatable truths are often met with insults. However, that does not necessarily imply that if you get insults, what you are saying must be true.
@ Bob Cousins
McGibben ? You might at least try to get the name right, or am I wrong ?
And what if he’s plain right ? You willing to bet the planet, the future of life on Earth, the future of everyone’s children ?
“McGibben ? You might at least try to get the name right, or am I wrong ?”
LOL, relax dude, typos happen.
“And what if he’s plain right ? You willing to bet the planet, the future of life on Earth, the future of everyone’s children ?”
I guess humans are making thousands of species of extinct, but we have seen such events before. It’s a philosophical and moral question as to whether those species have an inherent value, and that is it wrong to knowingly destroy them. I can’t really get into that, but as a scientist I would observe similar extinctions events have happened before, and life is pretty good at adapting.
I also find it interesting the framing of the question, it attempts to cover all bets. Surely everyone cares either about Nature or humanity, or both? Similar framing comes up frequently when discussing green issues. “if not for it’s own sake, we should care about Nature because people depend on it”
As it happens, I can’t really care about either. What happens will happen, and I am certainly powerless to cause or prevent such global events. I’m afraid your Jedi guilt trip won’t work on me :)
The problem I have with these apocalyptic predictions is that many have been made before, and they have all proved to have been based on faulty assumptions. I also think anyone claiming to predict the future of a complex system with any certainty must have impeccable grounds or is very probably mistaken. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
The IPCC are probably the only group able to claim sufficient grounds for their findings, but their predictions are still somewhat uncertain and limited to climate.
People who have studied carrying capacity and concluded that we are due for imminent die-off are no where near close to providing sufficient proof, at best it’s scientifically based speculation.
I think in general though, people are willing to bet the planet. Industrial civilisation is a gamble (as intelligent life itself is an evolutionary gamble). “Going apocalyptic” is not going to persuade them of anything, even if it was provably true. Look at how people react to AGW. It looks like AGW will inadvertently ended the current Ice Age. We might be back to conditions when dinosaurs lived in the Antarctic.
Sitting on my rock, I am thinking “this’ll be interesting, I wonder what happens…” Unfortunately I won’t be around for the next million or so years to find out.
“As it happens, I can’t really care about either [nature or humanity].”
And how does that feel, Bob? Or do you figure you are a psychopath?
I am with you on general predictioneering. McKibben is doing a big “yank your chain” and frankly, I don’t see any indication that this strategy is working to wake most humans. Surely there are other strategies apart from pummeling people with horribleness and fear?
@Bob Cousins
“I guess humans are making thousands of species of extinct, but we have seen such events before.”
No, “we” haven’t. We were not there. This time it’s different because it’s the direct result of our human activity. It’s a choice.
“It’s a philosophical and moral question as to whether those species have an inherent value, and that is it wrong to knowingly destroy them.”
It’s also a practical choice. The ecosystems, composed of the various species, provide services upon which we depend.
It’s also a philosophical and moral question whether you have any inherent value. Would you object to your own destruction ?
“I can’t really get into that, but as a scientist I would observe similar extinctions events have happened before, and life is pretty good at adapting.”
Yes, 99% of species that ever lived, are extinct, isn’t that right ? But still no justification for causing the extinction of species which have survived. Yes, life is good at adapting, but the changes we are causing are to fast to permit adaptation.
“I also find it interesting the framing of the question, it attempts to cover all bets. Surely everyone cares either about Nature or humanity, or both? Similar framing comes up frequently when discussing green issues. “if not for it’s own sake, we should care about Nature because people depend on it”
As it happens, I can’t really care about either. What happens will happen, and I am certainly powerless to cause or prevent such global events. I’m afraid your Jedi guilt trip won’t work on me ”
I think I’m rather glad I don’t know you. You seem to be somewhat callous, complacent, smug, no sense of moral responsibility. As for ‘Jedi guilt trip’, I have no idea what you’re talking about.
“The problem I have with these apocalyptic predictions is that many have been made before, and they have all proved to have been based on faulty assumptions. I also think anyone claiming to predict the future of a complex system with any certainty must have impeccable grounds or is very probably mistaken. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”
They are not extraordinary claims. The extraordinary thing is that people are persuaded that the extraordinary geo-engineering we are doing is somehow normal and acceptable.
“The IPCC are probably the only group able to claim sufficient grounds for their findings, but their predictions are still somewhat uncertain and limited to climate.”
In many cases have been shown to have underestimated the speed of the effects.
“People who have studied carrying capacity and concluded that we are due for imminent die-off are no where near close to providing sufficient proof, at best it’s scientifically based speculation.”
So, you want to wait until it’s too late to avoid, and when the die off has happened, you’ll be satisfied, ‘case proven’ ?
In any case, ‘proof’ is a philosophical and mathematical concept, not a scientific one. Carl Sagan’s ‘extraordinary claims, extraordinary proof’ is obsolete.
“I think in general though, people are willing to bet the planet.”
Seems so. Do they realise that though ? Do the appreciate there is a choice ? Seems you don’t believe in free will or that the future is decided by what we do know now, and how we respond.
” Industrial civilisation is a gamble (as intelligent life itself is an evolutionary gamble).”
Is it ? You’re speaking from a God’s Eye view, I presume ?
“Going apocalyptic” is not going to persuade them of anything, even if it was provably true.”
I have said, I don’t think that there is anything that can be done, other than witnessing. However, I still try, as a matter of self-respect.
“Look at how people react to AGW. It looks like AGW will inadvertently ended the current Ice Age.”
What current Ice Age ? We are in the Holocene, between Ice Ages.
“We might be back to conditions when dinosaurs lived in the Antarctic.
Sitting on my rock, I am thinking “this’ll be interesting, I wonder what happens…” Unfortunately I won’t be around for the next million or so years to find out.”
Well, I have maybe 20 years to watch this mess unfold. There were some scientists with PhDs predicting exactly what we are seeing, (extreme weather events, Russia burning, loss of phytoplankton, methane from melting permafrost, etc, etc) 30 years ago, and they met exactly the kind of responses you make. if action had been taken then this whole climate chaos mess could have been avoided.
“I think I’m rather glad I don’t know you. You seem to be somewhat callous, complacent, smug, no sense of moral responsibility. As for ‘Jedi guilt trip’, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
LOL, there we go with the name calling. Great way to win people over. You seem to be arrogant, stupid, blinkered and ill mannered, so I’ll leave it there.
Good luck with the doom thing :)
And how does that feel, Bob? Or do you figure you are a psychopath?
Like a visitor from another planet. Detached, and therefore totally objective. ;)
I do have a sense of morals, but I don’t feel responsible for the actions of 6 billion other people. If humans want my advice, I would suggest we stop screwing up the planet, but people don’t ask. Their problem, not mine. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people absolutely sure they are right and will call you names if you tell them things they don’t want to hear… you know the drill.
wolfbird writes:
What current Ice Age ? We are in the Holocene, between Ice Ages.
“Glaciologically, ice age implies the presence of extensive ice sheets in the northern and southern hemispheres;[1] by this definition we are still in the ice age that began at the start of the Pleistocene (because the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets still exist)”
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age
You might at least try to get your facts right.
@Bob Cousins
“LOL, there we go with the name calling. Great way to win people over. You seem to be arrogant, stupid, blinkered and ill mannered, so I’ll leave it there.”
Well, thanks for the, erm, constructive contribution to this discussion, Bob Cousins. I may well be all of the above. At least I know we are not in ‘the current Ice Age’, which leaves me wondering what sort of a scientist you think you are.
You haven’t said anything new or interesting, you’ve just come across as the typical ‘detached, objective’, the living dead, no ability to empathise, Cartesian psychopathology, you know, the scientific tradition of that brilliant genius Descartes who cut up live dogs while insisting to his neighbours, who complained about the screaming and howling, that they couldn’t possibly feel any pain because they were just machines without any soul.
I’d say you are part of the problem, not part of the answer. Why would i want to waste energy to win you over ? It would take a miracle, or years of therapy, but it’s not for me to judge you, the readers can take their own impression, and you’re the one who has to live with you, so good luck with that, kid.
“Do we as a society really care about anything but our own lives ? Are we capable of seeing further into the future than tomorrow ?”
http://www.countercurrents.org/steve150810.htm
To Wolfbird and others of similar persuasion.For goodness sake shut up!!! It seems to me that a few people are going to wreck the whole Dark Mountain thing by indulging in a series of self indulgent rants, “articles”, etc which to my mind are not discussions. :-)
@Dorothy Keys
Hahaha, have you decided to appoint yourself as moderator, Dorothy ? What would you like to discuss ?
Bob: “[I feel...] Like a visitor from another planet. Detached, and therefore totally objective.”
But that’s an evasion, right, along with the wink? So… how do you really feel about the planet and nature?
Wolfbird, we are still in the Pleistocene, technically speaking, so Bob is right. Pleistocene = epoch of the Ice Age. Holocene is simply one of the interglacials. (I know that the scientists have decided by a fiat that Pleistocene ended 12,000 or so years ago, but it didn’t really, geologically speaking. The epoch of the Ice Age continues… unless something new and abrupt happens, we have another ice age heading our way.
@vera
I’ve been through the ‘totally objective scientist’ crap more often than I care to recall. It’s junk. We’re humans. Some people think that by ‘being objective’ they are somehow getting purer insight into reality ( whatever that is ), but all they have really done is denied and repressed a part of themselves, making themselves into some sort of crippled version of what it means to be truly human…
I don’t accept Bob is right about anything, hahaha, the glaciers have covered this mountain where I live, many times, and there’s no sign of them here tonight, so I’m not living in the middle of an Ice Age, this was the Holocene, but something new and abrupt did indeed happen, we burned all that oil and coal and cut down all those forests, so we’ve upset the cycle, and it’s now the Anthropocene…. the climatologists can tell us when the next Ice Age would have been due, if nature had followed it’s course, but now all bets are off…
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2010/08/ice-sheet-in-greenland-melting-at.html
I’ve been told I’m stupid, ill mannered, self-indulgent, etc, hahaha, whatever next ? Good thing I’m not a fragile, tender plant, eh.
Wolfbird: read my lips. Nothing happened to usher in the Holocene, apart from the last ice age finally letting up. Civilization’s hubris said, oh, this is “us” so let’s pretend that this is an altogether different thing from the Pleistocene; we deserve to name our own age! Bunkum, my friend.
Will burning all that oil etc. bring the end of the Ice Age Epoch? Maybe. Maybe not. Trying to outguess the future is an unrewarding undertaking.
Well, I don’t know, vera, we seem to be viewing this Ice Age thingee in very different ways… I’m going on what I have read about written by the climatologists. The Holocene was/is a remarkably stable benign period, between Ice Ages, which permitted humans to move northwards, and to develop agriculture and cities, which lead to the present situation, so-called civilization.
It’s not that hard to guess the future, is it ? much of it is simple cause and effect. The Greenland ice melts, the sea level rises, etc. That can all be predicted with some precision.
Where do we differ? Yes, Holocene is what you say it is. It is also what I say it is. (?)
Yes, global warmings and melting ice and seas rising… it happens all the time in the history of Gaia. It was damn hot several times in the Holocene. It was brutally hot in the interglacial before this one… hippos swam in the Thames. That’s how the planet goes. Whether humans cause it, or volcanoes cause it, or the sun flares, or some other thing, it has been happening with regularity.
Can we please move on? We have an agreement about the general mess. Why this temptation to keep on dwelling on one facet of it, and demand exact agreement?
Oh, I think the apparent disagreement is only looking at in through different time scales…
Yes, Snowball Earth, Pangaea, Gondwana….
I think that this ‘thing’, we call it world or Earth or planet.. or, looking outward towards the heavens, Cosmos or Universe… is unutterably, inexpressibly, awesome and mysterious. We know *nothing*. All that we have are the descriptions of certain processes, gleaned by science over a few centuries, which give some insights into some aspects of what surrounds us. If anything, that little that we do know, makes it even more weird and peculiar. So, why don’t we all wonder around zonkled by the wonder and strangeness of it all ? How do we manage to make that staggering magnificent miraculous ‘thing’, where we live, into a drab boring dull place where we need tv and computers and movies and holidays to make life ‘interesting’ ? It’s like a kind of disease that afflicts people and turns them into zombies…
“Snowball Earth, Pangaea, Gondwana….”
I don’t want to create a misunderstanding. I am talking 100,000 years ago. Continents in place, several species of humans roaming about. You know… our world. It was so hot there for a while that hyenas and lions hunted all over Europe along with the neanderthals.
Anyways. Zombies. You know, I prefer to think of them as little as possible. I am finding myself thinking a *lot* about the dicks, though. :-)
@vera
Erm, ‘dicks’, as in the male organ, or as in a term of dismissal for stupid people, vera ?
Yes, I know about the lions and hyaenas and so forth…
I think It’s interesting to think about the Earth, prior to any humans, say, 10 million years ago. What was it then ? In the absence of human mental conceptions. Did it have meaning, any meaning, or was it meaningless, until we came along and created a meaning for it ?
How could it be correct to say that it had no meaning, when it had the potential to produce us ?
Or, perhaps it is correct, if our own existence is meaningless. Which, I suppose, is the point that Sartre and Camus arrived at, some half a century ago….
I don’t share that viewpoint. For me, it’s deeply meaningful, I’m not separate, I’m comfortably embedded. But that’s because this area is not densely populated, has been relatively poor and remote, for a long time, so there’s not been much reason, or the resources, to make the changes that have obliterated the ancestral traces, the workings of previous generations, in other areas. It’s a scruffy neglected corner, where the marks and remnants of some seven thousand years of human activity are a reminder of this period, since the glaciers melted away.
Maybe that’s the story which invokes, conjures up, some of the meaning…the palimpsest.
If I look out of my window at the panorama of countryside, hills, houses, woodland, sky, the falling rain…
Nobody knows what that is. All we have done is to apply labels to particular features. Those labels, names, descriptions, are useful to allow communication amongst ourselves. But they don’t explain anything whatsoever… do they.
We overlay a patchwork of words, symbols, sounds, to re-present the character of the landscape in an intelligible fashion. We forget the artificial expedient imposition of our mapping, mistake the finger pointing for the actual moon that it is pointing towards. Ultimately, ‘it’ remains a total and inexplicable mystery.
Contemporary culture seems to have completely lost sight of that fact, the mystery. Anything out there is seen as, well, just ‘stuff’, and we unconsciously assume we are free, indeed, have the right, to alter or change it in any way we wish…
“Erm, ‘dicks’, as in the male organ, or as in a term of dismissal for stupid people, vera ?”
Heh. Not a term of dismissal… more like a term to wake up and smell the coffee… and no, dicks are not necessarily stupid at all. There are many very smart dicks. I think I’ll have to write a post about it. :-)
I never did buy the whole thing about no meaning… It’s amazing and sad how much philosophy is self-indulgent armchair babble…
Oh, I love reading good philosophy, I think it’s sad how little of the understandings of philosophers has filtered out into mainstream soceity where so much rubbish is spoken… :-)
I mean, philosophy is just thinking, trying to think rigorously, about life and what’s good and what’s bad, and so forth, isn’t it ? Everybody does it, only some people are better at it than others and get called philosophers… some of ‘em get a bit carried away, that’s for sure, but it’s a hard, dangerous task, to think about what has not been thought of before… epistemology, ontology, ethics, hermeneutics, I love it :-)
Some favourites…
“We all perform actions. And whether or not we reflect on the kinds of actions we think we should perform, the kinds of principles we think we should live by, or the kinds of persons we think we should be, we will end up performing some actions and not others, living in accordance with certain principles, and developing a particular character. It will be true of one person that she ruthlessly pursues her own interests; of another that she drifts along, allowing her actions to be determined by the preferences of those around her; of another that she tries to preserve her image of herself as ‘virtuous’ only as long as it is not too inconvenient to do so; and of another that she tries to respond to others with generosity and honesty and respect, even when this is difficult. Even someone who tries to live by no principles at all — say, by flipping coins instead of making choices — still lives by the principle of allowing her actions to be determined by chance.
This being the case, it makes sense to try to figure out which principles we think should try to live by and which sorts of persons we think we should try to be, just as the fact that we will probably have to earn our living by doing something gives us reason to try to figure out which job we want and to try to get it. If we don’t think about which job we would like to end up with, we might find ourselves spending eight hours a day doing something we hate, when a little forethought would have prevented this. Similarly, if we do not try to figure out which principles should guide our actions, we could wind up needlessly living by principles we find odious.”
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2006/03/about_morality.html
Gödel
http://www.slate.com/id/2114561/
Mary Midgely
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Midgley
Krishnamurti
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKvz3BdB2EE
Wittgenstein, ” What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein
That’s one of the best lines in all of Western philosophy, IMO. There’s only so far that thinking thoughts can take you… after that, what ? Well, that’s where zen comes to our rescue, to take us beyond the limitations of language and thinking, to go much, much deeper…
http://www.ciolek.com/WWWVL-Zen.html
So now I’ll shut up….
( for a little while, anyway ;-) )
Gotta look all that up?! Brother… ;-)
Meanwhile, check out my strike against dickery.
http://leavingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/08/18/dickology/
@ vera
Don’t think I go along with your dickology analysis and argument, vera. Did it arise from my exchange with Bob Cousins ?
Seems that there’s a good argument to be made, that, if you wish to persuade people to change their mind, then some methods work better than others, sure. And a polite, respectful conversation is preferable to flinging insults, at least amongst friends.
However, this is ‘teh internets’, millions of rabid egos shouting, the epitome of the Tower of Babel… There are some obscenities that people *should* get furious about, like the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, like the Israelis killing Palestinian children with white phosphorous, like Monsanto trying to control the global food supply, like the Arctic ice cap melting… swearing and cursing people you hate and loathe and despise is appropriate sometimes, etc, etc… but throwing language at another person is basic human stuff, and if you think that another person’s mind can be changed by a rational, logical, reasoned explanation… well, good luck with that, it’s worth a try…
IMHO, Bob Cousin’s fundamental world view is mistaken. Is he going to change it because of anything I write in a text comment ? Doesn’t work like that, does it.
I can explain *why* I believe he is mistaken, if that helps, but, of course, it doesn’t.
FWIW, it’s a fundamental premise of the deep ecology platform that belief in an objective comprehension of nature ( as Bob indicated, ‘detached and objective’ ) is like belief in a flat world seen from above, without depth, and that such cool, disembodied detachment is an illusion, and a primary cause of our destructive relation to the world. ( That’s taken from Arne Naess ).
In other words, to be ‘objective’ makes the person into an object, less than fully human…
In other words, the Enlightenment project, since Bacon and Descartes, which believed that ‘truth’ is dis-covered via reason *alone* isn’t capable of fixing the mess we are in.
Even if Bob, or some other person, found those lines persuasive and convincing, all they are is a few intellectual pointers, easily forgotten. Really, to understand what deep ecology is about means some discovery of a deeper transformation of outlook, something that stirs or shakes the whole being, the reward for a long, profound, arduous quest towards what it really means to be a human being.
I looked at some of your reference links…
“I used to believe telepathy was real, or at least plausible. I remember being frustrated that the county library didn’t have any books on developing one’s telepathic talents. What started me down the road to not believing in telepathy anymore was my science teacher in Junior High telling me it didn’t work. He didn’t insult me or anything, he just told me that it didn’t exist. Here was someone I respected, an authority figure, telling me my belief was wrong. I didn’t believe him right away; it would take a year or two more, but he gave me a push in the right direction.”
http://www.ooblick.com/weblog/2010/07/14/the-dont-be-a-dick-heard-round-the-world/
That’s a good example.
I completely disagree with the conclusion. I also followed that path. Then I learned what telepathy really is, and I make use of it . I also learned that trying to discuss it with anyone is a total waste of time. The best response, if I must make one, is to say ‘It works for me..’ and leave it at that.
The idea that the *only* way towards understanding is via rational thought, is a delusion, a fundamental mistake. I could add ‘IMO’, but it’s NOT opinion. It’s practical experience. It’s beyond words, really, beyond thought, perhaps could be expressed by the idea ‘a change of heart’… which leads to a change in one’s sense of identity, one’s place in the scheme of things…
What causes such a change ? What could cause such a change ?
Consider the questions Theresa Kintz raises in her foreword to Zerzan’s Running on Emptiness :
“It is in this context that we are then forced to consider the following questions: What are
the origins of this estrangement ? Why do we ignore the nature of our own bodies and
minds ? Who decided we needed mechanization, electricity, nuclear power, automobiles
or computer technology ? Has one single man-made item been a necessary improvement
on the earth ? Why do we put the survival of all species on the planet in peril for our
exclusive comfort and gratification ? How did we come to dedicate our lives to
maintaining this mad tangle of supply and demand that we call civilization ? And finally,
what will it take for us to give up on the artificiality of our grim modern lives and cleave
instead to what is natural ? ”
http://www.archive.org/stream/RunningOnEmptiness_564/ROE_djvu.txt
What a lovely rant, wolfbird. Sweet. Little to disagree with, though I am rather heartbroken you did not agree with dickology! Sniff, double sniff! ;)
Gosh no, it was not precipitated by your exchange with Bob, which was quite mild mannered. It is part of my larger project, which intends to look at the world run over by dicks, trolls, psychopaths and other denizens of the netherworld and figure out what to do. Recognition seems to me the basic first step, eh?
Anyways, I quite agree with your take on the “objective” God eye’s view that has proliferated the last several hundred years.
Is attacking persons sometimes appropriate? Yes. I would call it a strategy of last resort. Because it’s war, isn’t it. And if we want to build a world where war on other people — even in words — is not readily resorted to, don’t we have to cultivate an exchange that builds another way to relate, even within despicable situations?
You bring up the issue of trying to get people to change their minds. I am in the middle of rethinking this as well. It seems to me that “trying to change other people” is part of the domination paradigm. I am starting to back away from it to see what may evolve, where I am available to those who are ready to change their own minds. Eh… wolfbird, if I had a penny for each instance where over the years I have spent arguing with someone, trying to get them to see what seemed obvious to me, I’d be a rich woman. It was fun, sometimes, and taught me a lot about argumentation itself, but looking back, I doubt that it accomplished much for the other person.
So to answer your challenge: I don’t think reasoned argument works very well to change people’s minds. Neither, however, does biting the other person’s head off.
I think Theresa Kintz’s paragraph would be a worthy catalyst for a whole future volume of Dark Mountain Journal. Did “we” decide all those things? Or were individual human beings forced into it by the logic of the system? Fascinating stuff.
@ vera
This covers the argument topic rather well…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y
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