The Science of Collapse

[ish mailian]

Knotting back into Peirce and the Metaphysical stuff of 19th Century
American Philosophy, known by its confusing name, Pragmatism;
 when we look to that very easy to read introduction to this period in
American intellectual history, Menand's book, _The Metaphysical Club_
we find, as the pendulum swings, at least in America, and specifically
in New England, where, still, America's intellectuals are
concentrated, but we find the pendulum at perigee (closest to the
Earth), as Utopian movements,  Romantic movements, Reform movements,
and, at the same time, an intellectual rejection of institutions,
begins to confront slavery and heads into civil war.

Peirce, of course, is keen to distinguish his pragmatism from James's
and that of tothers who emphasize individual conscience.


from Menans's _The Metaphysical Club_ pg.13
Abolitionism arose out of the Second great Awakening, the evangelical
revival that swept through New England and then upstate New York
between 1800 and 1840, and that also spawned temperance, women’s
rights, and other social reform movements, along with a number of
utopian and religious sects, most famously the Mormons.  The
foundations of the abolitionist movement were therefore spiritual and
anti-institutional.  Abolitionism was a party for people who did not
believe in parties—a paradoxical law of attraction that turned out to
be ideally suited to a Unitarian, Transcendentalist, and generally
post-Calvinist culture like New England, a culture that was
increasingly obsessed with the moral authority of the individual
conscience.  The American Anti-Slavery Society, the movement’s
organizational arm, had relatively few members, membership in an
organization being the sort of thing that tends to compromise the
inner vision.  But it had many fellow travelers.

On Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 5:00 PM rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> this has much resonance for Pynchon readers I think
>
> *https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/21/collapsologie-constructing-an-idea-of-how-things-fall-apart/
> <https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/21/collapsologie-constructing-an-idea-of-how-things-fall-apart/>*
>
> *Collapsologie*—or, as Servigne and Stevens define it, the “applied and
> transdisciplinary science of collapse”—proposes to free environmentalist
> thought from the linear or progressive understanding of history implicit in
> such faiths as “sustainable development,” “green growth,” or the energy
> “transition.” The story of human societies, which Servigne and Stevens
> suggest is ultimately the story of their interactions with their natural
> environments, is circular. The pendulum of human history swings between
> moments of our being harmoniously embedded within natural processes and
> periods of population concentration, political centralization, and an urge
> to transcend the earth’s resource constraints. We develop economies of
> scale, agglomerate extractive industry on a grand scale, but ultimately
> overexploit our natural foundations.
>
> “We must prepare small-scale, resilient bio-regions,” Cochet told me, on
> the scale of only a few thousand inhabitants. Economic circuits must be
> scaled to local ecosystems and resources, eschewing global supply chains.
> Visions of the good life that are predicated on unlimited mobility and
> expanding human wants must be replaced by an ethics of rootedness, the joy
> of living and working in a defined space. Our assumption of history as an
> unending process of centralization and unification—toward the universal
> state—is running up against an ecological wall