science-fiction-economic-collapse

[alice wellintown]

A book I enjoyed: HERE ON EARTH A Natural History of the Planet By Tim Flannery

Here is an excerpt from a review in the Times.

Flannery writes well and with passion. Two things I admire. And, I
leanerd quite a lot from this little book.

But, as my husband is the scientist in the family, a not so famous
geologist, and I am just the infamous consumptive usher to a grammar
school, I've read, with kids, and what do they know?! afterall, the
Odyssey not a few times but more times than I care to admit and in
that ancient text the humans, and even the god-like men like Odysseus
who exemplifies the genius of craft, are just like us. The men, for
example, eat the oxen of the sun despite being warned by Circe and
Odysseus not to eat them, they do and the die. The men eat the lotus.
ANd, as one bright kid said, figurately turn themselves into pigs even
after Circe restores them to huam form after she makes swine of the
lot of them. Odysses, great leader of men, after using his wit and
craft to blind polyphemus, taunts the cyclops, gives his name and
address to the beast, a foolish and pridefull reversal of his
brilliant plan to save his men by telling the one-eyed canibal that
his name is Nobody. In the Land of the Dead where Odysseu talks with
his mother, Tiresias and others, including the mighty Achiles, we do
not sens that the world below, any more than the world above where the
gods live, is any thing to envy or model. Achilles, as we remember,
dececrates the body of Hektor undermining his heroic stature and his
ideal of friendship. Even in the myths that show the ideal, say of
friendship, Damon and Pyhthias, we encounter the beast that is us or
man.

But I love you all just the same and still I remain tied to the mast.
Sin oh song ye Pynchon listers and I will list and weep as Odysseus
and laugh like Keny Kesey.
Despite such flaws, “Here on Earth” is still a useful book, reminding
us that precisely the quality that got us into environmental trouble
may also get us out of it. After finishing his dark indictment of
modernity, Flannery outlines a vision of a planet saved by the same
mix of mind and technology that he criticizes earlier on. “The
destruction of our global commons thrives on secrecy,” he writes, and
technology has made it harder to hide despoliation.

Flannery writes hopefully of the potential for “re-wilding” ecosystems
degraded by 50,000 years of human activity. In the end, he
distinguishes his argument from the dire prognostication of Lovelock’s
recent writings and circles back to the brighter prospect described by
Alfred Russel Wallace. The one additional necessary ingredient is a
shift in values that will come as a result of active choice, not
natural selection. “We have trod the face of the Moon, touched the
nethermost pit of the sea, and can link minds instantaneously across
vast distances,” he writes. “But for all that, it’s not so much our
technology, but what we believe, that will determine our fate.”


Andrew C. Revkin is the senior fellow for environmental understanding
at Pace University and writes the Dot Earth blog for the Opinion Pages
of NYTimes.com.

On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 12:31 AM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
> "The irony of a post-scarcity setting is that our civilisation could
> have achieved it a century or more ago. Once again, the solutions are
> not technological but rooted in our own nature as human beings.
> Overcoming or improving our nature may require a moment of
> society-wide Satori. Whether we are ready for that yet is up for
> debate."
>
>
> This is where Spiral Dynamics and other AQAL disciplines help in
> mapping the terrain, and helping to show how it is we are where we are
> in terms of social and cultural development in the contemporary
> political morass. They aver that societies evolve and develop in paths
> very like those of individuals, which only makes sense in that in both
> terms we refer to humans. Individuals all begin at the same
> rudimentary stage of development, then develop along lines
> representative of what we might loosely call "skill sets". For
> instance, sports stars evince exceptional development along a line we
> could label kinesthetics; musicians and other artistis have especial
> aesthetic development; Einsteins and Schweitzers show strong cognitive
> development; etc. The point is, while we all show some development
> along all the many lines of development, no one excels in all of them,
> and some really go great-guns along one or a few lines as in the
> sciences or economics, for instance. We often call these folks
> geniuses, but they may have very rudimentary skills in, say,
> interpersonal relationship, morality, compassion, etc.
>
> Some people in every era of human history have out-developed others in
> their milieux. In some ways these folks are regarded as freaks, but
> they often inspire others to follow along where they pioneer the way.
> And just as everyone starts at the same stage, everyone also has the
> potential to develop to any point along the various lines; and the
> more people who take up the trail after a real trail-blazer, the
> easier it becomes for others to follow along as well. I think it's
> safe to say that most 'trends' can be cited as examples of this
> phenomenon, but not all trends have equal value in human development,
> and the vast majority get dropped relatively quickly. But the ones not
> eliminated persist and deepen and broaden both in their appeal to
> others and in their practical relation to social evolution.
>
>  Also, development along any line may consist of any number of steps,
> or stages discovered via states of awareness of the further potential
> ahead of them. These are insights, and can help an individual pursue
> the further training needed to achieve the next stage, or center of
> gravity, in the discipline.
>
> Societies develop according to the impetus of the developmental arrays
> prevalent among their participants. So we get societies of great
> technical and economic power, like the USA, which may show very poor
> development in ethical or spiritual intelligence. That's not to say
> everyone in the US is a moral dunce. Not at all. On the contrary, we
> have shown some profound capacities for recognizing and reaching out
> to help others in need--even when we get it all wrong and lend support
> to the bad guys, or send money and supplies that never reach the
> people most in need--we have the capacity for care and sometimes do a
> very good job of delivering. But, and this where it most hurts, we
> have developed amazing technological capacities and yet apply those to
> militaristic / dominance disciplines instead of using those abilities
> to discover more harmonious ways of living with others and with our
> host planet.
>
> The significant point here is that of the 'center of gravity'
> phenomenon. When you add up all the various lines of development in an
> individual or a group, you get a sort of central locus of overall
> development. For instance, to someone at, say, an 'autonomous' stage
> of cognitive development it may seem inevitable that conflicts arise
> and they try to rise to define those conflicts at the cognitive level,
> but if they are morally 'conformist', they may try to solve those
> arising conflicts according to the group with which they identify,
> and, furthermore, be rather intolerant of people who do not see things
> their way, all depending upon where their overall center of gravity
> is. This is because whatever insight we gain will always be
> interpreted back to our center of gravity, rather than up to our
> furthest developmental reaches. I think this combination really is at
> the heart of much of the current American political disjuncture. A
> great variety of people at relatively advanced stages of cognitive
> development take profoundly differing reads on the current milieu
> because they identify with differing views of moral and ethical
> virtue, but few can step outside their egoic attachments to fully
> recognize the needs and status of others with views different from
> their own. Once a significant portion of people reach a level of
> development comparable to, say, an Elizabeth Warren, in terms of
> cognitive and valuative measures, a number of things start to happen.
> They begin to see that their own interests are intimately bound with
> the general welfare of everyone else, which really inspires some folks
> with middling valuative perspectives but high cognitive ability and
> training, while really pissing off the folks with very good cognitive
> skills and relatively naive values.
>
> The point is that we could not have achieved a post-scarcity setting a
> hundred years ago, because there were not enough people who had
> developed beyond individualistic thinking and values. As more people
> see the concerns and relative effectiveness of their more
> highly-developed peers, they begin to lock into those values memes and
> start to develop in relation to that stage of perceived desirability,
> and ever more complex responses come into reckoning. Are there enough
> people yet at high enough stages of development to allow
> post-scarcity? Well, I think not, but there is some evidence that more
> complex and subtle values are entering the military all the time. I
> think that, ultimately, it will rely on where the military stands as
> to how far our society can go in terms of actually helping others
> instead of setting out to destroy them.
>
> All this is a very rudimentary reading of the overall schema AQAL
> offers, but I hope it reflects, somewhat, the potential this very
> complex, yet elegantly simple mapping technique offers. Whether it can
> prove itself useful in defusing the current mess, so that we can move
> into a position of offering stewardship rather than policing to the
> world remains to be seen.
>
> On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 1:07 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/dec/01/science-fiction-economic-collapse
>
>
>
> --
> "Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
> creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
> trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
> of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
> than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant