2 minutes ago
Post #202
Kafka Posts: 120 From: St. Petersburg FL
QUOTE(Drevpile @ Feb 23 2009, 05:49 AM)
So, If we all became hermits living in the woods without 'stuff' that makes culture 'bad' - we'd magically band together 'restore culture' (which is a paradox & a fallacy in the first] to something that we believe was 'better' than [it] is now?
-Wrong.
and in reply to pastup too...
you noticed zeitgeist eh? I'll get to that later.
I think the way to look at and approach is not in terms of cultural regression, -but re-integration.
There is something terrifically valid as an exercise in removing yourselves from: TV, common modes of entertainment, and getting into the woods for a bit. Even a little bit. I say that from the perspective of someone whose family did a Swiss Family Robinson' stint in pristine wilderness for several years.
But we were usually in and out from the city we never left it and -we were in no way self-sustainable. We didn't grow our own food, but built our own place (for 9 people) with a woodshed, tool shed, and four vehicle size garage), we lumbered our own heat, set up our own water, heated our own water, and did our laundry there outdoors even in winter, and so on. Some family members were out there for 120 day stints. -And even far longer. On the basis of this experience I feel I can informatively say, almost no one is interested in that amount of work to sustain a home out in the woods. And we weren't even feeding ourselves and that would have been pretty impossible. -Hunter gathering? I never even saw game where we were and there was precious little in terms of food out there. And that said we had electricity, but if it's coming out of gassed generators and your battery bank, and you had to set that up, you use far less of it. You value it as a commodity when it's up to you to fill the tank, and you put your music on once in a while, and that, my friend, is an event. That's a party.
Integration with nature means to me to develop a simple understanding we are one with it in the sense that, it keeps us alive, and it can make us die. It is also in terms of resources what gives us the nigh sum of our wealth and comfort...we need it for food, shelter, minerals, hydration, warmth, energy....and much more besides.
Integration with nature means simply absorbing it in terms of its inherent value in existing, soaking the beauty, and letting that permeate your sense once and a while rather than....everything else we put between It and us, to remind us...
And yes when you get back, that sort of sensory deprivation, or re-integration, gives you a clarity and objectivity looking at your own existing culture by stepping out of it for a bit. And that -in providing a different perspective, is of great value.
You can also get the same stimulation from travel abroad and I'd recommend this to anyone who can manage this somehow a little bit for their kids....and again my parents did this once for us, -they blew their savings on this one travel event to Europe and the ME for six months -which yes, means we'll have to figure out how to support them later. So, that's a risky trade-off; they took risks.
But that perspective change helps you integrate by broadening your view on how people live their lives which is very enlightening. -I think experiences like fan_in_japan's are invaluable.
but then thankfully they can tell us about it...by connecting, and re-integration is reconnecting in whatever ways you can with people, here included.
maybecrazy already knows I have differences about this but I question the position of Daniel Quinn, not from the stand-point of societal changes he/she's advocating since we agree on a lot, so much as the sense of, rolling back the clock equating with cultural regression, even though I know that's not where she's trying to go. But since hunter-gatherer lifestyle has come up again as 'the way to go', I want to mention an article I read in the last couple weeks but can't find for the life of me the link.
It had to do with Alaska natives that are literally starving right now due to...an unexpectedly harsh winter. This is even though they are not 100% hunter gatherer. And their kids are getting by on school lunches, and this article was about how they needed prompt financial support from the federal government - aid.
So for the 'eye-opener' -hunter gatherer 101: a bad winter means your tribe can starve. This is why we began storing food. 'Harmony' with nature means being wholly subject to it, -including just what one bad winter can do. (whoa climate change to boot)
Then there's the matter of carrying capacity/over-population.
Since maybecrazy/Quinn posits that we got 'off-track' with population by beginning to store food, (around the time of Sumeria), -I thought I'd point out that the exponential population explosion we are in the grips of was a very recent development. And while we have lots to point to for this, including -industrialization and changes in medicine etc. -I just want to add that when this all recedes in the rear view, I think we may look back and simply view it as a population explosion fueled by the discovery of fossil fuels as energy, -and the Haber-Bosch process...etc.
It's a chicken or egg question and the assertion that 'storing agriculture is where we went wrong' -is a moral judgment. Therefore it cannot be qualified scientifically. I don't agree.
However. I do believe in reintegration with Nature, from the simple practical standpoint of, -what can the planet sustain and where are we at in terms of the planet being able to? We are basically arriving at ways to quantify that, -to the point where we can quantify the ecological footprint in terms of the area of landmass it takes to support a given individual in a given country based on the energy consumption and consumption in general.
The implications from this sort of stuff is that we are waaay out of whack with what the planet can conceivably support if everyone's living standard was the same as the higher echelons, Europe included. Europe may be a little ahead of the curve, but the trajectory on that curve is still down.
we are in the throes of a population explosion....
And without fossil fuels, the figure that gets bandied about is that the planet could only support 2 billion people.
Quinn says if we opt for tribalism, the population will return to equilibrium naturally and...nicely. This is a lecture I would want to see because, ....the way Nature deals 'harmoniously' with a population imbalance, -is mass starvation die-off/collapse, -and in this instance, -if you were to judge that our harnessing of fossil fuels is an 'artificial development' of our own harnessing of technology, rather than something we're deriving naturally from the earth and therefore, -still part of the system, -well, we are far more egregiously 'out of whack' than natural systems permit, -so what sort of a collapse is, uh, necessary?
Given that hunter-gathering lifestyle means...the carrying capacity of earth would have to be far less than 2 billion, -as that includes agriculture, -I have big questions.
But re-integration with Nature would mean, figuring out how in the heck you wean from the fossils -cause, green house effect climate catastrophe, -if peak oil decline of availability in and of itself doesn't do it, -I think that means we'll have to.
But since that is a debate, leave it aside.
To me re-integration with Nature means integration of ethics actually.
Which means, -perhaps, re-introduction of ethics in the first place, - but if you look at the evolution of our common codes of conduct, and you look at the finite system we're in, you emphasize the codes that effectively keep you from harming each other and harming the earth's ability to sustain us by harming the earth, -by over-exploiting it....in the context of over-exploiting the earth and disenfranchising the future of earth, -our children, greed becomes a mortal sin. And it 'always' was a mortal sin. -Small example.
When I look at capitalism, I see a need for integration of ethics into capitalism, not to change it, but to restore capitalism to what it's supposed to be. Which was, -originally, profit based on production. -Which is not what it is now.
But you can restore ethics to capitalism by simply accepting reality. The reality being, we are in a finite system with finite resources.
But today capitalism profit margin is based on, warfare, the exploitation of disasters both human and natural, profiting from debt, profiting from ill health, and profiting from agriculture literally through the blackmail of life itself, by taking away its capacity to even be life.
If you just eliminated these aspects which are based on the principle of how corporations are defined solely on the legal obligation to produce a profit margin, you'd go a long way. If you just eliminated the corporate right of personhood , the rights of an existing individual, and how that device is used at the expense of many real individuals, just with that re-integration into reality, -you'd go a long way.
People don't remember that, as recent as the time of Dickens, (-Victorian era), financier bankers, the type running Wall Street today that skim profit on profit by share-trading (and all the other now endless permutations) on the 'real market' producing actual goods, -that facet of society was considered parasitic. Today that same parasitic faction has induced an economic crisis the likes of which we've never seen so they can scoop up all the real production as well, after having spun it into bankruptcy. In Dickens' time, lawyers were low life. (So were actors and minstrels. -Bottom of the barrel. Maybe only the last deserved to come up so far in society! lol.) -Re-integration? To my mind maybe peasant farmers deserve the greatest respect, they sustain themselves consuming the least...and work hard doing it...but Monsanto is out to utterly eliminate that way of life and so are a lot of things. And with a re-integration of our values in the context of reality, the real world that keeps us alive, maybe peasant farmers would be respected for doing so much with so little, and the tertiary bankers would again be viewed as parasites on society. Maybe that's just the reintroduction of values in our society, but you see what I mean. The reformation/reintegration of our values beyond the very limited confine of profit that isn't even profit, and the horrible weight in that all value derives from the accumulation of material/consumption (yer 50 grand purse), -and nothing else. Once upon a time I tried to point out that all this acquisition of material was simply a buttressing of our own identities to create a sense of self- worth, the bigger mansion you needed to do this could mean the less you had formed your identity inside, coupled with seeking constant preoccupation/entertainment so we didn't even have to examine ourselves ('cause we're scared to), -and the best little consumers were people with no interior sense of identity, and that's what is under attack today, because that way we make the best consumers...
I'm not implying regression to Dickensian times, -I'm implying the simple knowledge of this simple fact, -the perspective that gives you on what's happening today. That's knowledge of history. That's re-integration of the past, which is desperately needed. It doesn't have to be a lot. We're not historians. But we need our context in the world, enough of one, to assess why we are here today.
In the context of family, -re-integration -in the context of this post, means, you look at it as the chain of existence, not just your existence, -and that grants you the perspective, through the obligation you have to the past, and the future, to make the future better than what you left. Because what you've been born in happens to be far better than what the generations that sired you had to live through. At least I know that for a fact about my own.
That's because, they worked their collective a**es off, to try and give us, as best they could, a better future.
We for the first time in our collective history are assessing just what that means? Just what is quality of life anyhow? What is a better future? Because we've hit the material ceiling of what that can be in a way that's never happened before, and naturally the reverse of this is, we consumed nearly all the available resources in a way that's never happened before.
But no one wants to think this way because, then we'd question society today. Because for the first time in history, there's a lot of reasons to be pretty sure we're not giving our children a better future at all.
The population explosion forces us to re-calibrate everything. We are the only species that has ever gone through such consciously, which is no guarantee we are going to get through it any way but the drastic natural way.
Our brains may not help us at all. But we do have the ability to consider, where should our population be for quality of life? And because we are arriving at the ceiling of available earth resources left for us to consume, we are arriving at this question for the first time, just at the time where we've become developed enough to even observe where we're heading.
I don't think we can get well below 2 billion at the threshold of resource exhaustion we are at now, coupled with climate change, -any way but drastic. I just don't know how.
Maybe Ran Prieur does for all I know haven't read. The deep ecologists are positing a 90% reduction in population would be ideal.
Ideally from the earth standpoint and maximum number of species all getting a share of the land/water surface, it would. I just don't know how that's possible. Nor am I advocating it personally, though I believe in re-integration with nature.
I also believe in re-integration into communities on a much smaller scale that are far more self-sufficient is likely going to happen, -not because I advocate tribal living, but because the oil/fossil fuel decline and climate change will send us that way, nice or hard. But societal re-integration on this level would benefit us a lot too.
In terms of re-integrating our culture, I'm a blank. I believe cultural devolution is taking place. I believe we're being reduced to the most finite of aspect of our self-identity, or moral compass, and -how we enjoy, and what we enjoy, along with being reduced back to basic survivalism, in order to prevent our ability to attempt to enact any social change. This is happening because it makes us malleable and subject, and, we are being turned into a society where we serve capitalism, rather than capitalism serving us. They want workaholics who consume, healthy or sick doesn't matter, sick is profit. Death is profit too. War is profit.
and the quality of life we are headed for has been an implementation of the same old feudalism or class-ism or whatever you want to call it...a society of have's making extreme profit off a much larger second caste of have-nots who work, consume, and have no time/energy left for thought, or to even look up.
sorta like the bulk of workers in China today. wage slavery. another inversion of capitalism.
that's quality of life?
and if 'quality of life' is defined as continual search for immediate pleasure, the pay-off's of love, social connectedness and enrichment, pleasure in family that is living and enjoys one another’s company, pleasure in the world around us....they don't even appear anymore.
and the way to insure no one even realizes this is happening, is not to entrench a dictatorship of good ol' black shirts in boots parade stomping down main street. oh no, this is far more sophisticated than that.
No, the target is perception. the target is eliminating all wilderness so we'll never even remember what a pure stream looked like. Even where I lived in Canada, people already didn't realize, -they had no clue what a pure unadulterated river looked like. They thought it was just outside of town. But is was 90 km away and -there on that island, only about 6 were left out of 196, as the one 90 km away was being steadily destroyed.
The target is perception by modifying culture, by experimenting with, what do we perceive as quality? What will we perceive as quality if all perspective is eliminated? What will we perceive as quality if all we get for music is drivel and we're adapted to instant gratification, and the endless procession of fads?
And if we believe what we're here for, is just that, a series of instant gratifications?
(oops the danger of dropping religion. Don't get me wrong. I'm not pointing at revival...but re-integration of values is needful if no one believes that the reason we might be here, is simply to become better beings. or attempt to be the best we can be.)
it's the same danger as dropping...all aspects of culture, our historical perspective, the purpose/identity we derive through a scope of perceptive/dedication inside our family, even our national sense of identity is not being dropped in the interest of global connect, but again to make us unconscious of any loss.
So we'll be susceptible to losing our quality of life and having no reference to even define such....
In thinking on all this (gad forever)
I ran into stuff on this author, so I know this should be added:
Voltaire's Bastards, The Doubter's Companion and The Unconscious Civilization
His philosophical essays began with the trilogy made up of the bestseller Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, the polemic philosophical dictionary The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, and the book that grew out of his 1995 Massey Lectures, The Unconscious Civilization.
These books deal with themes such as the dictatorship of reason unbalanced by other human qualities, how it can be used for any ends especially in a directionless state that rewards the pursuit of power for power's sake. He argues that this leads to deformations of thought such as ideology promoted as truth; the rational but anti-democratic structures of corporatism, by which he means the worship of small groups; and the use of language and expertise to mask a practical understanding of the harm this causes, and what else our society might do. He argues that the rise of individualism with no regard for the role of society has not created greater individual autonomy and self-determination, as was once hoped, but isolation and alienation. He calls for a pursuit of a more humanist ideal in which reason is balanced with other human mental capacities such as common sense, ethics, intuition, creativity, and memory, for the sake of the common good, and he discusses the importance of unfettered language and practical democracy.
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't that the needed re-integration right there? It's certainly a big one.
JRS: I don’t generally like to say what I’m going to say before I’ve said it. Often because as I get closer to the event, I start chatting with people and wind up changing my mind. But I think we’re talking more about creative non-fiction because we’re finally shifting away from this artificial division between fiction and non-fiction.
JRS: If you actually think about those terms they sound like an academic interpretation of how writing’s done: on the one hand there’s made-up stuff, on the other are facts. In reality it doesn’t work that way. Take the example of Russia. If I were to cross-examine you on what you know about Russia from say, the Enlightenment through the Revolution, we’d probably find that 99 per cent of what you know comes from fiction—Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev—and almost none of it from what we’d call fact-based analysis. What does that tell you, that what you know is inaccurate? No, it’s probably completely accurate. So what we call fiction may not be fiction at all, but the ultimate way of discussing reality. Imagination is a way of getting at truth. That would be an interesting thing to talk about!
-Yes indeed!
So my closure is Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. My parting note about that is, didja notice how Billy used the F-word (fascism) in describing what Zeitgeist was about? -Because that is very much in line with this post.
