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TheFuglyStik posted:Reasonable point; repeated entreaties to discuss reasonable point Everyone else posted:Blah blah blah nuclear blah blah cloud whitening TheFuglyStik, if the discussion in this thread and on the forums at large (which themselves are vastly more intelligent than what you'll see the media spewing) are any indication, then the human race is already ten ways to hosed. Between the news about the permafrost and the European debt crisis that appears poised to become a global debt crisis, I think we've moved beyond the "What can we do to solve the problem?" stage to the "Holy poo poo, batten down the hatches!" stage. I'm no 2012 doomsday theorist by any means, but based on even the limited observations I am making, things seem very fragile right now and it is easy to imagine that they could unravel very rapidly. Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 22:33 on May 22, 2012 |
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May 22, 2012 22:24
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That's perhaps the thing that is most frustrating about this topic - to really solve it is going to require massive change on a cultural level, and the type of change required is not taking place at all. It feels totally helpless. It's like I'm a small insect that's trying to change the direction of a speeding train by buzzing my wings. No amount of "evangelizing" on my part will convince enough people to actually make a real difference, and the alternative is watching in horror as everyone suffers through the catastrophic collapse of the whole system, which is undoubtedly the direction we are headed right now (if the collapse hasn't already begun). Other than it being the cultural system I've lived in all my life, I have no great feelings for industrial civilization, so I don't think I'll really lament the loss of the system itself all that much. The human suffering that results from a collapse scenario is horrifying and depressing, though, and even more depressing is the realization that even if folks were to willingly give up our destructive lifestyle right now in order to head off collapse, we couldn't support anywhere near 7 billion people without it. There's no easy way out of this, and if there ever was, we should have been looking 20 or 30 years ago. I fear that all there is to do now is for each of us to mitigate as much suffering as we can and help as many people as we can.
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May 23, 2012 21:35
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McDowell posted:Nationalize the electric grid and convert it to localized no emission production? Sure energy costs will stabilize (or drop) but y'know, taxes Since you seem to be unaware of what is taking place in the world from an economics standpoint, let me catch you up - Europe is currently embroiled in a debt crisis. Greece is so deep in debt that they are cutting government spending at a rate that is causing rampant unemployment and social unrest. The "recovery" is stalling in the developed world, and the debt crisis threatens to tear apart the eurozone and throw a few more of its member states into the same situation that Greece is in. The United States is not even close to immune from the turmoil. Our debt-to-GDP ratio is dangerously high, and we've tacked on about 5 trillion dollars worth of debt since 2008. Many of the biggest banks in the U.S. are heavily exposed to European debt, and a Greek default may well kick off a double-dip recession. If the U.S. government manages to stave off recession with more spending and bank bailouts, we'd be setting ourselves up for a credit crunch, and we'd probably get to choose between the dollar being dropped as a global currency (a nightmare scenario) or austerity (see Greece). "The government can just nationalize the energy grid!  " is a totally unfeasible solution in the current economic climate.Climate change and resource depletion are problems that are economic as well as environmental. Both problems are massive externalities that have been ignored for years, and the cost is now showing up in insurance payouts and government disaster relief programs, as well as rising energy prices. Any solution that doesn't deal in both sides of the issues - economic and environmental - is wrongheaded, and represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what is going on.
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May 25, 2012 00:46
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You misunderstand me. I am not advocating austerity; I'm just trying to illustrate the predicament we find ourselves in. To nationalize the energy grid, you need the following things (bare minimum): - Political will, both on the part of the voters and the political parties - A government financial situation that is favorable to such an endeavor We currently have neither, and it's not likely to change anytime soon. You realize that all the goon hand-wringing in this thread represents a very small minority that isn't anywhere near mainstream thought in any country of the developed world, even though all the hand-wringing is completely justified? You are right in calling this a systemic problem, but I think it is much deeper than you realize. Humans are notoriously shortsighted, and I'd argue that "a system that can deal with far-reaching consequences," both geographical and temporal, has never been created in the entire history of civilization, unless you want to call a system that can putter along for a few centuries a success (I wouldn't). I think a number of you are stuck in the first couple of stages of grief - denial and bargaining. It's time to move past those, because acceptance is the only emotional state that will leave us capable of helping the overwhelming number of people who will need help. All the talk of renewables misses the more fundamental point - our way of life is not salvageable. There is no way to save it. We can spend all day imagining pie-in-the-sky scenarios of a far-left peacenik uprising that overthrows the power structure in order to nationalize the energy grid and save the environment (but of course we'll keep Apple computer products and industrial agriculture and maybe even a few McDonalds, because when the world is run by hippies, we'll be able to do all that stuff without resorting to enormously wasteful consumerism, right?), but such fantasies bear the same relationship to reality as Ninja Turtles cartoons. The ship is sinking, and we've reached the point where it's pointless to try and plug the leaks. It's too late for that. Worried folks like you and me need to start preparing the lifeboats. Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 02:58 on May 25, 2012 |
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May 25, 2012 02:39
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I think blaming this situation on capitalism is missing the forest for the trees. This is a tragedy of the commons situation, and it probably would have happened under communism or socialism all the same. Capitalism has definitely sped up the process, but I don't think we would have avoided it by getting rid of capitalism alone.
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May 28, 2012 04:53
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TheFuglyStik posted:I wouldn't say we're all hosed, but the depressing part is that those who are most vulnerable certainly are. People in developed countries will be inconvenienced or experience minor hardship, but that is all. It's the ones in the developing world who will be utterly hosed. In the short term, as sea levels rise and all of that, I think you're right. Long term, though, I think the opposite will hold true. People in developing countries are far less dependent on "the system" - electricity, running clean water, readily available medical supplies, etc. They are much closer to old ways of living and will have an easier time going back to those old ways when everything falls apart. Folks who are dependent on their cars, air conditioning, the Internet, electricity, and all that jazz, on the other hand, are going to be in a world of hurt. That's why I think it's prudent for folks like you and me to "disconnect" as much as possible. That way, when the poo poo hits the fan, we can teach others.
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May 28, 2012 18:45
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A lovely poster: I largely agree with you, but the thing is, I'm not saying that "old ways of living" are a solution to our current problems. That's because our current problems can't be solved. There is no way of reversing what we've done save letting nature run its course, so we're going to have to live with (or, for many of us including very possibly myself, die by) the results of our actions. What I am suggesting is that "old ways of living" (and I'm talking very old ways of living - small "uncivilized" societies, whether they be horticultural, pastoral, or hunter-gatherer) offer a sustainable lifestyle for the survivors of the catastrophe. We've spent thousands of years figuring out workarounds for our problems, whether they be economic, political, social, or otherwise. The downside of this is that we haven't taken the time to figure out where we went wrong and what the cause of the problems may be. I'd define "sustainable" simply as using resources slowly enough that you allow them to be replenished. Under this definition, not only are oil and coal use unsustainable, but agricultural civilization itself is unsustainable. There is no way to to get civilization to be sustainable, even if you were using the low-impact style of farming that was born in Mesopotamia 10,000 years ago. Rather than address this, the root of the problem, we have chosen over the centuries to cover it up and treat the symptoms by expanding and coming up with ever more resource-intensive technology. These kinds of fixes have never resulted in civilization being sustainable, they've only extended its lifespan, and the deeply tragic but inevitable end result is that billions (most likely including myself) will suffer and die.
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May 29, 2012 02:28
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If you disagree with me, that's OK. I think we're at a junction, though, where it makes the most sense to figure out what the root of the problem is rather than try to get ourselves out of our current predicament (which is looking increasingly hopeless). That way when all the bad stuff is over, we'll at least have an idea of what works. Do you agree that we're way off-track? Do you agree that continuing forward on our current track (and by that I mean the oil-and-coal based economy that we have) will result in catastrophe? The only additional leap that I'm making is that I think rather than continuing to move in the same direction but just change course a bit and hope it works (solar power, steady-state economy, what have you), I think we'd be better off carefully retracing our steps to see where we got so off-track. I've tried to do this on my own, and here's the interesting/disturbing thing: 1. Prehistoric humans were just as intelligent and emotionally complex as we are. There is zero biological difference, which means zero difference in capability. 2. Prehistoric ways of life were very resilient as well as inherently low-impact and nondestructive from an ecological perspective. If one society perished because of extreme weather or some other event, all the others went on just fine. Prehistoric societies also did not outstrip their own resources. On the other hand, we've got a situation where agricultural failure would result in global human devastation. We've also managed to completely outstrip the Earth's natural resources in about 10,000 years, which is the blink of an eye from a geological perspective. I don't think our problems are necessarily the result of humans being greedy bastards or anything like that, I think we're just heavily involved in a system that doesn't really work. The narrative that we're operating on is fundamentally destructive and broken. Why do you think the natives fought so hard when Europeans came to the New World? I mean, the Europeans had ships and guns and all sorts of other cool toys, so maybe the natives were just stupid and couldn't see how obviously advanced European society was? 
Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 03:45 on May 29, 2012 |
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May 29, 2012 03:37
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We can't. 7 billion of us is a massive population overshoot that will inevitably crash. Humans are currently using some 20% of the primary productivity of the planet, which is absurd and totally unprecedented in the history of life on Earth. It's a horrible tragedy. If I could take a time machine and prevent this from happening, I would. What I am suggesting won't stave off the crash, rather it is an attempt to get people to consider what is sustainable so that people who make it through will hopefully adopt a way of life that doesn't result in a similar disaster.
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May 29, 2012 03:59
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Again, what I am offering is not a solution, and I am not advocating genocide. Seriously, what you linked is so far from what I've said that I'm tempted to think that you're intentionally misreading or projecting your own biases onto what I've written. It's offensive, so please stop it.
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May 29, 2012 04:43
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Climate change is not the only reason why 7 billion may not be viable, though. You've also got to consider resource depletion (we are facing not only peak oil, but also peak soil and peak water) and loss of biodiversity (which puts the balance of all life on Earth in a very fragile state). If we could even solve one out of the three catastrophic problems (which seems unlikely considering mainstream political thought), the other two would leave us just as hosed. The issue is that most people try to think of what it'd be like to get away from an oil-based economy and they just stop there, without probing the problem any further. Getting away from oil is not enough. 7 billion people on this planet, as well as civilization itself, is what is not sustainable. Even if climate change were not a threat, we'd still be totally screwed by resource depletion and loss of biodiversity. There is no way that 7 billion people can use resources in such a way that the Earth is able to replenish them; it's just not possible. You end up having to take so many resources that other life forms are forced into extinction, and that loss of biodiversity eventually results in ecological breakdown. The fact that it has taken us 10,000 years to hit that point is irrelevant. Some have suggested that civilization itself was the result of humans hitting natural population limits in precivilized societies. This makes perfect sense to me, and it set in motion a strategy of trying to work around natural limits rather than live with them as best we can. It doesn't take rocket science to see that this strategy is going to bite us in the rear end hard sooner or later. We are not special snowflakes - we are just as bound by natural limits as any other life form. Let me say this again just to be totally clear, so that no one can attempt to twist my words: I believe a collapse is inevitable, and I am deeply saddened by it. Suggesting that a crash is inevitable is not the same as advocating or celebrating a crash. It's the difference between saying the ship is sinking and intentionally running the ship into an iceberg. Addendum: Nature has been doing its work for billions of years. The result of this work has been greater diversity and greater complexity. Millions of species work within millions of specialized ecological niches, and the ones that are not able to adapt to their ecosystems and environments die off. Nature selects for viable species, and on a more macro scale, viable ecosystems. When humans came on the scene, they worked within this system very well for millions of years. Millions of years of ecological stability. Now, in a mere 10,000 years, that has completely changed. What in the world makes you think that we could outsmart billions of years worth of evolution? Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 05:45 on May 29, 2012 |
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May 29, 2012 05:24
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Ronald Nixon posted:Your Sledgehammer, the points you made earlier are like those Craig Dilworth makes in Too Smart for our Own Good, have you read it? I haven't read it, but it is definitely on my list and I am familiar with his argument. I think where I'd depart from Dilworth is that I'm not so sure we can lay the blame so strongly at the feet of our intellect. Though it is difficult to compare the intelligence of two animals that are very different, there is ample evidence to suggest that dolphins have pretty drat robust cognitive abilities that may match our own. They haven't had any trouble living within natural limits. I think it was ultimately a complicated series of factors that lead us to diverge so strongly from the rest of the community of life. Our problem-solving ability certainly played a role. I've also heard an interesting argument similar to Dilworth's that rather than basic population pressure alone, it may have been some sort of environmental shift or environmental catastrophe that prompted us to take up agriculture and start ourselves down this path. The alienation from wild nature and desire for control that agriculture represents may have been a result of the psychological trauma of an event such as a flood or volcanic eruption. The argument then states that rather than healing emotionally by letting go and moving on, our ancestors continued to re-open the psychological wound by desiring ever more control. I forgot who made this argument; I'll see if I can dig up a link. All of these types of arguments are necessarily "just so" stories, but they are compelling. These types of critiques are why I'm suspicious of a technological solution to our current woes. Ideas like developing a solar-powered electrical grid or extracting resources from space seem perfectly acceptable on their face, but it strikes me as similar to treating an obese patient by giving them liposuction. You may have solved the immediate problem, but you haven't gotten to the root of why the person is having the problems in the first place. Our immediate problems may be climate change, resource depletion, and ecological destruction, but the root of our problems is the deranged inability to accept natural limits. The insanity and egotism of such thinking is best illustrated by techno-evangelists such as Ray Kurzweil, who has the hubris to presume that he as well as all (or maybe only rich?) humans will be able to escape death and become gods. Even when you move away from such extremist positions, though, the same kind of psychologically stunted thinking quietly pervades modern culture (and I am guilty of it myself). Solar-powered grids and space resources are an attempt to thwart natural limits once again, which will only make things that much worse when those solutions eventually fail due to unintended consequences. In a bit of dark irony, this provides a pat solution to the Fermi Paradox. I think these two comments really hit the nail on the head: Ronald Nixon posted:What you should also acknowledge is that it is technology that has created the problems, directly or indirectly. At what point do you think technology will turn from a net problem creator to a net problem solver? rivetz posted:Virtually all of our current problems are unintended negative consequences of our existing technology. We have consistently failed to measure the true cost of our technological innovations. Some of this is understandable, as it has taken centuries to see the negative effects of some of the stuff we've come up with. Mostly, though, it's just a blind spot that has been reinforced and self-perpetuated by our culture for hundreds of years. Without understanding the true cost of our inventions, it becomes impossible to weigh the cost with the benefit. Take smart phones, for example (and I say all of the following as a smart phone user myself). The benefits are immediately obvious to anyone who has used one - the range of possible applications of such technology is stunning. But what of the costs? Rare metals must be mined, and fossil fuels are used in the manufacturing process (think of all the machines that run on coal-fired electricity or oil) - both mining and fossil fuel use contribute strongly to ecological degradation. Consider all the damage and lives lost due to texting while driving. On a more subjective, human level, we must account for the poor working conditions of the people overseas who put together smart phones, as well as the cultural shallowing caused by a society of people with their noses in their phones all the drat time. It's obvious that many of these costs are completely overlooked. In fact, in many cases it is socially unacceptable to mention such costs, because people understandably do not like being made to feel guilty. If you add up all the costs, do the benefits outweigh them? The answer is unclear, though I'd personally say no, the benefits don't outweigh the costs. I'm not going to sit here and pretend that modern technology doesn't have huge benefits, but I think it's a legitimate question whether or not the benefits ultimately outweigh the costs. Many thinkers have explored a critique of technology as well as the related critique of civilization - Jacques Ellul, Fredy Perlman, Craig Dilworth, Jared Diamond, Derrick Jensen. Desmond also brought up another who has strongly influenced my views, Daniel Quinn. I'd encourage all of you to at least give one or two of those authors a look, even if you don't agree with what I've been saying. Quinn, particularly, has a very even-handed and clear-headed way of presenting the critique of civilization that smooths over some of the more disturbing implications enough that his readers (or at least this one) have some emotional and intellectual room to explore such a critique. That's part of the difficulty here - we as a society have to be willing to step back from our way of living enough to see it for what it truly is. As rivetz and Tactical Mistake mentioned, the subject of ecology is difficult to have conversations about, because people know we're in bad shape and they don't want to think about it. I admire this thread and the folks in it because at least we are talking about it, and I think we have a responsibility to talk about it with our families, friends, and coworkers. We as a society have got to open up about this and start talking to each other, or we're never going to gain enough understanding to prevent future crises. For me, it really comes down to this question: where did we go wrong? I think the one point in human history that represents the most profound break from ecologically stable and psychologically healthy ways of living was the adoption of agriculture 10,000 years ago. The consequences were immediately and overwhelmingly negative. Average life span went down, average stature went down, and health problems such as tooth decay went up. It's only very recently (like the last 100 years or so) that we've caught back up and surpassed the precivilized/pre-agriculture metrics. It really makes you wonder why we've stuck with it for so long. I think part of it is the illusion of control. It gave us greater control over the food supply - at least until the next drought. But that's the rub, though - the control that we desire will forever be out of our reach. We were born of nature and are a part of it, and we've never had control of it, even though we often like to imagine that we do. Even in our technologically advanced society, we don't have control. There are a number of things that routinely shatter such delusions - you need look no further than Hurricane Katrina or the earthquake in Haiti to see what I mean. The other thing that resulted from agriculture is that it gave some of us riches, power, and easy lives. Anthropologists make a distinction between immediate return and delayed return societies. Immediate return societies are one in which food is eaten shortly after it is gathered or hunted, without any real attempt at storage. Delayed return societies are the opposite; food is stored. The curious thing they've found about the difference between such societies is that delayed return societies (whether agricultural or hunter-gatherer delayed returners like the Kwakiutl) always produce social hierarchies. That's why Marxism succeeds as a critique of capitalism but fails as a replacement for capitalism - it simply doesn't get all the way to the root of the problem. I think our culture would do well to look at and attempt to understand how indigenous societies have lived and continue to live. They offer a very clear alternative to the "civilized" lifestyle, and what is surprising to me is how attractive an alternative it is (take a look at Marshall Sahlins' seminal essay, "The Original Affluent Society," for one example). The indigenous way is not a perfect way of life by any means ("Noble Savage" type idealism is certainly wrongheaded), but the Hobbesian view that such a life is "nasty, brutish, and short" is dangerously dishonest. Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 02:47 on Jun 1, 2012 |
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Jun 1, 2012 02:38
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The Entire Universe posted:I don't understand the issue with massive energy usage if humanity is capable of generating that energy with minimal to no harm to the biome. That's the thing, though - we've never been capable of massive energy use that doesn't harm the biome. Give me one example of massive energy usage that doesn't harm the biome, and I'd be glad to back away from my suspicion of technology. The reality is that even solar cells require large-scale processes that are inherently destructive (think of what is required to produce a solar cell). The Entire Universe posted:Same with technology using presently scarce resources. The major failure of this kind of strategy should be abundantly obvious to anyone who is paying attention to what is currently taking place across the globe. The Entire Universe posted:I don't understand the arbitrary argument against technology It isn't arbitrary. Take another look at what I said about cost/benefit ratios. "Sustainable" means using resources in such a way that you don't outstrip the Earth's ability to replenish them. Anything short of that is unsustainable. That simple. Under this definition, traditional agriculture is unsustainable due to soil degradation and habitat destruction. EDIT: nitpicky comment I wanted to make SonicBoom posted:the prospect of the universe running out of free energy eventually Interestingly enough, I'm not sure all the science suggests that this is actually what is going to happen to the universe. Take a look. Here's something else I find interesting. If the net energy of the universe is zero, and thus the universe is already in a stable state as far as energy is concerned, then why would the universe need to slowly burn out to reach a stable state? Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Jun 1, 2012 |
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Jun 1, 2012 03:36
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I see what you're saying. I guess what I'd say in response is that all the concern about the eventual end of life on Earth (and I'm not trying to single you out here, because it's just as depressing a thought for me) once again represents this central problem that I keep going back to, and that's our inability or unwillingness to take reality as it is and accept that humans aren't, in fact, all-powerful. The end of life on Earth is something that we won't escape, and therefore it is pointless to be concerned about it, in much the same way that it is pointless to be concerned about your own death. Both of them are phase transitions, the matter of your body or the Earth transforming into something else. This process has taken place since the dawn of time, and it produced us, didn't it? I try as hard as I can not to worry about it. What I would like to see is human beings live as long a life as a species as possible, and hopefully through speciation and evolution become a number of different and distinctly awesome things. In my opinion, the best way to achieve this is to turn away from the destructive path that we're currently on.
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Jun 1, 2012 04:17
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SonicBoom posted:I think this pretty much sums up my feelings on it too. It's very sad that life on Earth (not just human life) will (probably)end at some point in the very distant future. Similarly, I'm a little sad that I'll die at some point. However, it's just silly to let that inevitability distract you from doing something with your life and just enjoying being alive. Ideas like this one and this one have helped me to come to terms with it  Killer robot posted:And already causing mass extinctions, to give this "go back to a time when we didn't make irreversible changes" idea some perspective. Actually, the cause of Pleistocene extinctions is still being debated. Humans arrived earlier in the Americas than initially thought, and that has implications for the extinction events. It's not nearly as simple as "humans arrived in the Americas and almost immediately wiped out the woolly mammoth" like people think. Here's another article that supports this. The thing is, even if humans did cause some Pleistocene extinctions, there is a major difference between that and what is currently happening. When new animals come on the scene, occasionally some others are overhunted or lose their environmental niche and go extinct. If humans ever did cause that sort of thing, we wouldn't be the first animals to do so. There's a difference between some tens or possibly hundreds of species being overhunted and the catastrophic and near-total habitat destruction that is currently taking place. Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Jun 1, 2012 |
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Jun 1, 2012 04:55
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The problem with large-scale technological solutions such as cloud seeding is the high potential for unintended consequences. When you're talking about something like weather or an ecosystem, it is critical to understand that such systems are highly complex and behave in nonlinear ways, which means that our ability to accurately predict outcomes is limited (if not nonexistent). Reforestation is the best bet, because of all the options, it's the one we can be most certain will produce the intended outcome and nothing else.
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Jun 4, 2012 20:52
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Nevvy Z posted:How much water is actually removed from the fresh/potable water cycle when I take a poo poo in it? When 500 million or a billion people are making GBS threads in potable water around once a day each, it adds up pretty drat quick.
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Jun 4, 2012 23:10
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Problem is that those natural loops (water cycle, nitrogen cycle, etc.) have been formed and refined over literally billions of years, and they work just fine on their own. Trying to improve upon them is going to be a losing battle, and our efforts are necessarily going to be derivative of the work that nature has already done. Furthermore, why do it if nature already has it figured out? It's wasted effort. Much simpler to just stop dumping toxic stuff in the water, don't you think?
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Jun 5, 2012 01:48
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Wrong again, Troika.quote:The picture that emerges falls, in my estimation, within the broad outlines proposed by Frederick Engels in his now classic Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: the initial egalitarianism of human society included women, and their status relative to men declined as they lost their economic autonomy. Women's work was initially public, in the context of band or village collectives. It was transformed into private service within the confines of the individual family as part of the process through the specialization of work and increase of trade, both women and men lost direct control of the food and other goods they produced and economic classes emerged. The process was slow, and one that women apparently banded together to resist in various ways, judging from what we know of West African women's organizations and of patterned hostility between the sexes in Melanesia and other areas. You started off by saying I was advocating genocide (which was totally false on top of being extremely offensive), and now you're making baseless claims. I have never "clamored for the destruction of civilization." The suffering caused by such a collapse would be unimaginable, and I've never cheered it on. My argument has always been as follows: 1. Civilization is unsustainable Most civilizations are lucky to last a few hundred years. The entirety of human history backs up this point. 2. Civilization ALWAYS results in hierarchy. 3. Civilization produces enormous material wealth but results in emotional and psychological impoverishment. I haven't talked as much about the second and third points as they are outside the scope of the thread. I'd be glad to elaborate in a new thread.
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Jun 5, 2012 23:16
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I'd say you're right about women in civilizations with a low tech base, Claverjoe, but your observation does not translate well to noncivilized peoples. For one, the weaning age for noncivilized peoples tends to be 3-5 years, which is much later than most civilized people. This longer breastfeeding results in a hormone-induced lowering of fertility. Simply put, noncivilized women are not capable of producing nearly as many babies as civilized women due to extended breastfeeding. On top of that, women in noncivilized societies were treated as equals and possessed much more reproductive choice than most civilized cultures all the way up until the relatively recent womens' rights movement, which has evened the scales between civilized and noncivilized as far as reproductive choice goes. Arguing about how noncivilized people live by referring to "civilizations with a lower tech base" is not very convincing due to the profound differences between noncivilized and civilized cultures. You're comparing apples to oranges. We're also wandering quite far afield of this thread. I'll either start a new one tomorrow or resurrect one of the old ones I made along similar lines so we can continue this elsewhere. Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Jun 6, 2012 |
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Jun 6, 2012 01:22
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I'll just leave this here.quote:The Second Denial - Dave Pollard http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2011/07/30/the-second-denial/ I agree with the general thrust of the article even if I disagree with some of the details. What this kind of thinking demands is a radical reassessment of values and a total shift in worldview. The new worldview that emerges is one that Edward Goldsmith, in the book "The Way," calls an "ecological worldview." Other writers like David Abram, E.R. Sorensen, and Daniel Quinn have also explored this new worldview. The kind of thinking and feeling that is necessary to truly understand this worldview is so new and unfamiliar to me that I can only really get at the edges right now, but the broadest terms I can use to describe it are deeply subjective, holistic (by nature, it bleeds into all aspects of the human experience), and on the spiritual level, animistic/pantheistic. Of course, this means doing away with the old "rational-objective" worldview entirely. The notion of objectivity itself is what I'd call into question; we have the idea that we are fundamentally separate from the things around us, and that means we can observe them from on high and tease out some sort of universal, rational truth from our observations. A natural extension of this philosophy is the will to control and dominate those external objects, and that's where we run into insurmountable problems, especially when it comes to nature. The ironic thing is that the only reasons we have to justify thinking of ourselves as separate from nature are flimsy value judgements - that we are more intelligent than other species, that we are God's chosen species, etc. Of course, doing away with a rational-objective worldview has devastating consequences for science. However, I find it fascinating that the highest levels of science have been tiptoeing around such consequences for decades. Consider things like the interpretations of quantum mechanics, particularly the von Neumann interpretation, or the deterministic, purposeful randomness of complexity theory. At the physical extremes - cosmological and subatomic - our traditional, objective understanding of science breaks down entirely, and it seems that our inherent subjectivity has doomed us to never have the ability to ascertain the fundamental nature of the universe. The mysterious twist that I'm getting at is that maybe we have it all backwards in thinking that the universe has some fundamentally objective character that we can understand. I'm not saying that there aren't some universal rules we can observe - things like gravity and evolution - but perhaps the entirety of existence itself naturally has subjectivity, awareness, and even will of some sort. Consider that there are a number of physical constants that if adjusted even infinitesimally would completely preclude reality as we know it. Think about the sense of wonder in Carl Sagan's voice when he explains that we're all made of star stuff, or Einstein's statement about God not being a gambler. Richard Dawkins has even called pantheism "sexed up atheism." It's a great soundbite, but it totally misses the radical moral, emotional, psychological, and spiritual implications of pantheistic/animistic beliefs. A truly animistic grounding would have never lead us to our current techno-industrial enterprise. I realize that I am wandering far afield here, but to tie this back into the immediate discussion, I see this flawed objective thinking in a common lament of environmentalists, what I call the "I can't believe we're doing this to the world!" fallacy. The problem is that such a statement sees the world as something external to be acted upon. It isn't. We are as much a part of the world as the soil beneath our feet. The fact that we are the agents causing climate shift and ecological collapse makes it no less natural a process than if trees, aardvarks, or a meteor caused it. This isn't even unprecedented in the history of the Earth - the oxygen crisis was caused by cyanobacteria. Note here that I'm absolutely not saying that what's happening is a good thing, just that it is as natural as anything else. Even the term "environment" is problematic. We'd be better off replacing it with the word "home." It's funny to me that the way we test the intelligence of other species is through language - not just any language, but human language. Abstract thinking, all that jazz. What a silly approach! We're constantly having to move the goalposts, too, lest grey parrots or gorillas be declared as smart as us. If we were to ever encounter a species as intelligent as us on another planet, we'd probably fail to recognize it, because we'd be expecting rational-objective civilization builders. We are blinded by our civilized human nature, and we project our behavior onto all other life and make value judgements based on their performance. Do you think dolphins pass judgement on us because we are incapable of grasping the meaning and syntax of their chirps and squeals? We can't stave off collapse, but I hope that in the death throes of this society, some of us can begin to build a foundation for coming generations. Part of this, to me, is a new way of understanding our place in the world, and I'm happy to know that many others are already exploring new types of thinking. I highly recommend the Dark Mountain Project; the folks there are wrangling with the despair and grief of collapse as well as the challenge of a new worldview in a literary and artistic way that really drives at the psychodrama of what is going on. Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Jun 13, 2012 |
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Jun 13, 2012 21:40
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I know your pain. People just don't want to think about it, it's too disturbing, and I agree with what you said a few pages back - most folks have an intuitive understanding that we're toast in the short term. The only way they have of coping psychologically is denial and anger. I know that I haven't truly come to terms emotionally with the horrific implications, because it still feels distant to me, even if I know it isn't. My family is largely bewildered by what I have to say about this stuff. I tried talking about a much less devastating problem, the Euro crisis, with an acquaintance yesterday, and I was pretty much ignored. Take heart in the knowledge that you're not the only one with these thoughts. There are people here and elsewhere on the Internet and in the world at large who are beginning to come together to cope with the enormous loss as well as strive towards alternate modes of human existence. Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Jun 13, 2012 |
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Jun 13, 2012 23:11
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Here are the problems, though: 1. The things you are suggesting will never happen. Fossil fuel interests are too entrenched at all levels of society. 2. Nuclear generation, electric cars, so on and so forth are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic at this point. The permafrost is melting, we've reached the tipping point. Climate change has now entered into a self-sustaining positive feedback loop. It is literally too late; no "doomsaying" involved, just reality.
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Jun 14, 2012 01:13
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Since Dusz is the only one that seems to have a problem and the primitivist critique dovetails nicely with climate change, I'm going to continue the discussion in this thread. If a number of you would prefer otherwise or a mod would like me to take this up elsewhere, I'll be glad to take the discussion to the thread linked a few posts above and would invite all of you who are interested to join me. Anyways, on with the show.V. Illych L. posted:If you want to prepare yourself for the collapse of civilisation, go ahead, but it's such an unproductive assumption to argue from that you can hardly blame people who dismiss it outright. I see where you're coming from, Illych, but this is where you and I diverge. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the assumption you're making here is that noncivilized lifestyles are inherently unproductive, and those kind of value judgements and assumptions are exactly the ones that I think all of us need to be questioning. I'm also not trying to prepare myself for the collapse of civilization, because I think that the idea that you could prepare yourself for something like that is nonsensical. The collapse is going to be uncoordinated, unpredictable, and messy, and may take place on any number of timescales as global tetrahedron mentions. What I am trying to do is gain a greater understanding and appreciation of noncivilized lifestyles, including a practical understanding, as well as trying to show others why it would be unwise to return to an unsustainable mode of social organization in a post-collapse world. Dusz, your tone is unnecessarily hostile as well as offensive, but there are a handful of things that I feel merit a response: quote:Basically, the primitivist society would be inferior. Do you think you could look a member of the Hadza tribe in the face and say this to them? Assumptions like that one need to be questioned every time, because just like now, they are frequently thrown around without any evidence whatsoever to back them up. Whether or not something is "inferior" is a value judgement, plain and simple, and I personally feel that the one you are making is unwarranted. A year ago, I would have agreed with you and probably would not have questioned my own view at all, but we've reached a juncture as a species where the unwillingness to ask such questions has proved disastrous. Those of you who favor Dusz's assumption, I would invite all of you to question that assumption and do a little poking around on the net or in a library about immediate return societies. I did so and was deeply surprised and humbled by the counterintuitive conclusions that I came to. quote:Their dystopian idea of the future is a tremendous disaster that has to be avoided at all costs. The dystopic future that you are afraid of is now, and unfortunately, we're all going to have to experience it. However, if you're referring to a post-collapse primitive world itself as a dystopia, then you're woefully missing the kind of wild idealism and optimism that is inherent to the primitivist critique. To illuminate this, a question to ponder - is there any difference between human happiness and the fulfillment of human instincts? When I say "human happiness," I mean the deep sense of contentment that most of us hopefully experience at some point or other in our lives, not the fleeting moment of good feelings I felt when I finally beat Super Mario Bros. 3. When it comes to things like food, shelter, sex, love, social interaction and acceptance, and the ability to explore and display your own unique personality, I think that an open-minded consideration shows that noncivilized societies provide all of the above in a way that is physically, mentally, and emotionally more healthy than civilization. quote:Third, the person is a hypocrite. There is no doubt I am being hypocritical here. However, I see the exploration of a noncivilized lifestyle as a potentially lifelong project, and it is one that I am currently working on. quote:There is obviously a need for some kind of alternative civilization in general "One more big bandaid will surely cure the patient." The analogy of an extremely ill patient that displays many different symptoms is actually pretty helpful to understanding the depth of the primitivist critique. Ecological destruction is just one of many issues that it addresses. As I alluded to earlier, anthropologists divide the societies they study into two categories - immediate return and delayed return. Delayed return societies store food, immediate return do not. It's a continuum, with some existing at either end, and some existing in between. What they find over and over again is that delayed return societies invariably produce centralization and hierarchy. A few of the many possible endgames of hierarchy and centralization are things like "too big to fail" banks and sovereign debt crises. I'd also encourage you to take a look at John B. Calhoun's studies about population density and its effect on behavior. He crammed rats into enclosures with high population densities and the results were things like males becoming hyperaggressive and going on killing sprees. Compare this to civilization and I think you'll see what I'm getting at. A few off-the-cuff responses to common objections: You're advocating genocide. Not at all. Claiming that the ship is sinking is not the same as sinking the ship yourself. My stance towards civilization is and always has been one of peaceful protest and nonviolence. The average lifespan of noncivilized people is much lower than civilized people. For one, this is only true of the more recent, highly developed civilizations. Secondly, this disparity in average lifespan can be largely attributed to a higher rate of infant mortality among the noncivilized. A quick game of "Would you rather?": Newborns dying every now and again or 5 billion people dying in an unimaginable apocalypse? Nature shows us that there will always be some mechanism that limits population. The noncivilized are deeply impoverished. They do not see themselves as such. They are only materially poor. Material wealth does not track well statistically with happiness.
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Jun 14, 2012 04:27
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This is going to be an absurdly long reply, but I'd rather respond to everyone all at once.Dr. Gibletron posted:Your Sledgehammer, a lovely poster already mentioned some of the good ones. Derrick Jensen has written a number of anti-civ works including Endgame 1 and 2, A Language Older than Words, and The Culture of Make Believe. I haven't read any of his stuff yet, but from what I understand, he takes a more psychological approach and shows the sort of mental and emotional devastation that haunts the civilized. I'd also add that he advocates a more active form of resistance that I don't really subscribe to, but he has a number of fascinating ways of looking at the problems of civilization. Daniel Quinn's Ishmael trilogy, IMO, is the best introduction to the critique of civilization. The Ismael books are written in novel form and contain Socratic dialogues between the characters that paint a picture of Quinn's worldview. Quinn has a somewhat annoying habit of stopping short of the more radical implications of what he advocates, but in a way, that gives his readers some intellectual and emotional room to explore on their own. John Zerzan is basically the grandfather of the primitivist critique. His writings tend to have a more political bent and he, more than any other author I've read, seems to be really engaged in taking the cultural criticism as far as it can possibly go. I don't always agree, but I'm always impressed by his carefully constructed logic and the depth of his criticism. He takes a lot of flak for some of his more radical conclusions (I mean, hell, the guy calls symbolic thought into question), but I've found that his critics seem to coincidentally  overlook how academic and well-sourced his essays are.You've got folks like Chellis Glendenning and Fredy Perlman who promote explicitly noncivilized positions. There are also a wide range of environmentalist authors who arrive at what I'd term "primitivist" conclusions, among them Craig Dilworth, Richard Heinberg, Richard Manning, and Jared Diamond, as you mentioned. For understanding what noncivilized societies are actually like, modern anthropology is absolutely indispensable. Check out Marshall Sahlins or E.R. Sorensen. Colin Turnbull's book The Forest People is also outstanding. Here are some web resources I've found: The Dark Mountain Project - Lots of good essays here from a number of bloggers who explore the kind of thinking and feeling that goes along with the particular historical moment we find ourselves in. Dave Pollard's website contains his own chronicles and essays about exploring the collapse scenario we face and the noncivilized approach to life. The Anarchist Library has a number of good anti-civ writings from folks like Zerzan. Go to anti-civ under "Topics" and you'll find a huge number of essays. Ran Prieur's website is similar to Dave Pollard's and has a number of interesting essays. Mythodrome approaches primitivism from a religious/mythological perspective. Great stuff. Desmond linked to an article on The Anthropik Network earlier, and there's lots of good reading on there. I've had problems with dead links on there before, but a number of the essays are hosted elsewhere. ---------------- In a more general sense, though, you'll probably find that the new emotional avenues and out-of-the-box type thinking that a critique of civilization promotes will give you a new understanding of a wide range of things from all sorts of fields of study. At least, that's how it has affected me. From evolution to cosmology, a number of topics intersect with primitivism in interesting ways. I look back now and realize that for most of my life, I've come up to a few different intellectual boundaries, and primitivism was the missing puzzle piece. A character in one of Quinn's books tells another character that a deep enough understanding of the critique of civilization results in a mental shift where you become the primitivist message, and in your own personal understanding of it, you can bring it to bear on a number of other problems. I find primitivism reflected strongly in things like the political problem known as the Tragedy of the Commons, or the Mere Addition Paradox, an ethical dilemma formulated by Derek Parfit. One of Quinn's books contains an interesting version of the Prisoner's Dilemma the deals with cooperation and non-cooperation among noncivilized cultures. The spiritual approach to primitivism is best described by animism/pantheism, and animism is widely recognized as the "original" human religion. I've been pretty stunned to realize that there is a strong animistic/pantheistic/primitivist vein running through most modern religions. I personally rejected Christianity long ago for atheism, but I've recently been re-reading the Bible from a primitivist viewpoint, and the resonance is amazing. An itinerant preacher named Ched Meyers has explored this in a few essays that you can find online. Just look at the Garden of Eden story, which posits agriculture as a curse for the sin humans committed when they attempted to gain godlike knowledge. That story is traditionally understood as meaning that humanity is somehow inherently flawed or "fallen," but I think a closer reading reveals that there is some mysterious, implicit understanding that "God" (an animistic/pantheistic "force of nature") created things in such a way that civilization from its very birth sows the seeds of it's own destruction via ecological devastation (more on this later). Civilization is a non-starter due to the way humans evolved, and more generally, due to the way ecologies maintain balance. 10,000 years is the blink of an eye in geologic time, and it has taken civilization a mere 10,000 years to get to the point of complete ecological collapse. "God" spends the rest of the Old Testament repeatedly attempting to destroy civilization, and it's always through natural means - flooding, plagues, meteor showers, so on and so forth. It's no coincidence that agriculture and its accoutrements - things like complex irrigation systems, monocropping, and the centralized cities that result from agricultural settlements - strongly contribute to or directly cause things like desertification, flooding, and plagues. There's a deep synthesis here that stretches from religion to science to politics and everything in between for people who are willing to earnestly and open-mindedly poke around. Before I move on to another response, I'd like to throw out this little bit from Matthew that is such an explicit and neat summation of primitivism that it almost makes me laugh: Matthew 6:25-30 posted:“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? ------------------ Execu-speak posted:I think in the future our society right now is going to be viewed as criminal for what it has done. I agree, and I hope that it will prevent future generations from repeating our mistakes. r.y.f.s.o. posted:I would kind of like to go back to feeling like our animal natures have not already doomed us. eh4 posted:Humanity as a whole is a blind, non-evolving and incompatible part of any ecosystem it touches. This kind of thought process deeply frustrates me, because it isn't true. Humanity lived sustainably for millions of years, long enough for evolution to act strongly on us. A tiny portion of humanity still lives this way, and such a lifestyle still works. Human nature in and of itself is not flawed. It is only comparatively recently and only among civilized humans that we have become "an incompatible part of the ecosystem." A common rebuttal to my argument is to go on about megafauna extinction at the end of the Pleistocene as some sort of counter to the idea that humans can ever live in harmony with nature, but that rebuttal is flawed in a few different ways. For one, there is strong evidence to suggest that the megafauna extinctions weren't caused solely by humans. The deeper point, though, is that extinction is part of the game of life. Sometimes new organisms arise or already existing organisms move to other areas and in doing so outcompete or prey on other organisms which eventually go extinct. It happens routinely, and it is a perfectly natural process. There is an enormous difference between the extinction of a few species of megafauna and complete ecological collapse. Humans of all kinds may cause the former, but only humans living a very particular lifestyle have caused the latter. V. Illych L. posted:I'm saying that the political economy of material production will always favour civilisation. It did thousands of years ago, and it would again, even if all civilisation was burned to the ground (which I find seriously hard to imagine even in the very worst case of complete desertification and nuclear war, not with our extremely efficient means of storing information). An agricultural or pastoral society will always be better able to feed itself (speaking purely from calories harvested) than a hunter-gatherer society, and thus marginalise the hunter-gatherers. I pretty much agree with you on this point, and this above all other reasons is why civilization has spread across the entire Earth. I'd quibble with you on your statement that agricultural societies are better able to feed themselves than hunter-gatherers - it's more that agricultural societies are better able to produce more people than hunter-gatherers. I think that most anthropologists would back me up on this point. In fact, agriculture allows for unchecked population growth via the way it creates food. The unchecked population growth allowed by the birth of agriculture has a number of historical consequences. To feed the increased population but still have some food left over to store, an agricultural society must put more land under tillage, which will put them in direct conflict with neighbors. Hunter-gatherer neighbors stand no chance, because they are not able to produce the primary resource that wins wars - soldiers - in high quantities. Human history reveals a long process of noncivilized peoples being completely destroyed by civilized cultures. This will to repress or eradicate the noncivilized is disturbingly echoed in Dusz's sentiments from earlier. More importantly for our current times, though, the unchecked population growth caused by agriculture always results in ecological collapse. It doesn't matter what species or method, any life strategy that allows a population to surpass natural ecological limits (most pointedly, the natural limit caused by the relationship between predator and prey populations) will always approach the final, deadly limit of ecological collapse. If ants had adopted a life strategy that allowed for unchecked growth, the results would be the same as what humans are currently facing. Agriculture has resulted in the metastasization of the entire ecosystem. My biggest opposition to civilization is that it is simply non-functional. It just doesn't work; the result is always collapse. History supports this claim. What's that little aphorism about insanity? Something about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? the kawaiiest posted:It's easy to fantasize about this stuff when you're a healthy dude, but if you have health complications or disabilities, or if you are a woman, there's nothing comforting or good about this whole idea at all. Fatkraken posted:And remember that "so a few newborns might die" is not the end of it. In regions without access to any substantial medical intervention, women die in childbirth in huge numbers. Afghanistan is a good model because there is a lot of data because of the war, and a lot of variation in the availability of trained aid. I'll get to some general thoughts about people with disabilities, women, etc. in noncivilized societies, but I want to address Fatkraken's point about childbirth first. You are committing an enormous fallacy here. You're comparing modern industrial civilizations to less developed and/or historical civilizations. Noncivilized societies are nothing like civilizations with low tech bases, and when folks in this thread attempt to make points about hunter-gatherer societies by comparing them to "less developed" civilized societies, they are using flawed reasoning. There is strong evidence to suggest that childbirth in hunter-gatherer societies is easy and relatively painless due to their greater overall health. I will gladly provide as many sources as you feel necessary to convince you of this point. To get back to kawaiiest's concern about the disabled and women, I'll echo what Desmond is saying and again caution everyone involved in this discussion about projecting civilized biases onto the noncivilized. I understand your concerns, kawaiiest, and I sympathize with them. My grandmother had COPD and would not have lived nearly as long as she did without oxygen treatment. However, I'd argue that many of the worst diseases and disabilities that many of us in the developed world suffer from - heart disease, obesity, COPD, cancer, mental health problems - are a direct result of our civilized lifestyles. It's also important to note that a lack of modern, industrialized medicine does not mean no medicine at all. The noncivilized have notions of healthcare and its importance in human life. They don't abandon the disabled or elderly to die of exposure, even during tough times. Here's an interesting article on this very subject that I think you will find fascinating. Women are not oppressed in noncivilized cultures; they are frequently given equal standing or greater standing than the men in their societies. You also don't see women pumping out 5 or 6 babies during their lifetime in noncivilized societies, because they have notions of birth control as well, just ones that don't resemble ours. There is strong evidence to suggest that repression of women is an artifact of civilization. I posted about this subject earlier, and included some links to further information. I'll gladly provide more sources if people would like to see more. I'd encourage anyone to do a quick Google search and see what you come up with; I think you'll be surprised. Fatkraken posted:There is no period in human or even hominid history where we have consistently been nice to one another all the time. Our ancestors may well have wiped out entire subspecies of human. I agree with the first part, but be careful in what you are assuming about the interaction between Neanderthals and other early humans. 1-4% of the genome of modern Eurasian people comes from Neanderthals. With significant interbreeding between Neanderthals and other early humans, what we commonly see as "extinction" may actually be more accurately called "hybridization." Speciation is a pretty blurry boundary as it is, and speciation among early humans even more so. The reason why Neanderthals "disappeared" may well be that along with other early types of humans, they became us. If two slightly different populations of canines interbreed and eventually completely intermix into a third, hybridized population, does that mean that the first two populations went extinct? It certainly stretches the common meaning of the word. ------------------ To tie a nice little bow on this, I'll concede that I sometimes get frustrated when having this kind of discussion, because I'm swimming against the tide. Civilized culture tells us a number of convenient lies about the noncivilized. When people talk about the noncivilized (and I'm not singling out anyone here, but talking in general), they frequently bring to the table a large number of culturally biased assumptions that are demonstrably false upon close inspection. I understand how easy it is to slip into those cultural biases, because I do it all the time. The time has come now, though, with the crisis we face, to question those biases and call out the flaws. Anthropology is a relatively new academic pursuit, and it is really the first discipline to attempt to put aside biases and try to understand the noncivilized on their own terms. It just makes sense that the best way to understand the feelings, thoughts, and lifestyles of the noncivilized, from women to men to children to the elderly, is to just ask them about it and watch how they live their lives. They are just as human as you and I, and they deserve just as much respect and dignity as you and I do. The conclusions that anthropologists reach are frequently deeply surprising and humbling, and I'd encourage everyone here to do a little reading about anthropological studies of hunter-gatherers. To be convincing, though, the primitivist argument has to do more than just point out the flaws of civilization - it also has to point out the benefits of a "primitive" lifestyle, and that's hard, because there's the immediate feeling that we'd be giving up so much. I'll again offer this question to chew on, though - is there any real difference between human happiness and the fulfillment of human instincts? The most deeply held desire of everyone in this thread - social acceptance and love - was in place and provided for from the dawn of the human species. I think that agriculture and its products move us further away from those things, not closer. Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Jun 15, 2012 |
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Jun 15, 2012 05:27
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Fly Molo posted:Everything ends. But that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile for as long as it lasts. History also supports the claim that people like civilization, they like not having a significant percentage of their babies die before growing up, they like having a stable food supply. From where I'm sitting, primitivism just seems like a selfish philosophy. gently caress the weak, gently caress the disabled, gently caress women and children and everyone too weak to fend for themselves. It seems like a philosophy devoid of compassion, borne only from nihilism and perceived inevitability. Did you read any of the rest of my post, or just the part you quoted?
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Jun 15, 2012 05:57
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deptstoremook posted:In short: there's a reason that "survivalists" are almost always bourgeois western white men whose only disability is a lack of humanity. (Are there any non-white anarcho-primitivist theorists?) It's because they stand to gain the most from fewer social pressures to not rape and murder. My family is similar to theKawaiiest's, and they're really the ones I worry about when all these wet dreams about the new agrarian culture come up. Yep, those white western primitivists like Zerzan sure display a stunning anti-community "survivalist"-style lack of humanity as well as a strong desire to rape, murder, and pillage. I agree that the term "primitivism" is pejorative, but it is the term most frequently used by the culture at large, and it pretty well gets across what is being advocated by folks like me. I certainly don't see indigenous cultures as "primitive;" in fact, I think they're actually way ahead of us in terms of lifestyle. Disagreement is fine, but I'd really appreciate it if people would stop putting words in my mouth or making assumptions about the position I am taking.
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Jun 15, 2012 06:56
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The concerns about “primitivist” notions (or uncivilized, noncivilized, indigenous – whatever you want to call it) from folks like deptstoremook, the kawaiiest, and Fatkraken are easy to grasp. The people here who are advocating a primitivist critique – myself, Desmond, etc. – would be naïve, self-important douchebags not to understand and sympathize. As Desmond and I have both alluded to, the concerns that have been voiced affect us personally, too. I do not mean to come across as harsh or unsympathetic, and I’d like to personally offer an apology for the glib sarcasm in my response to you, deptstoremook. It was both unwarranted and inconsiderate. The reason for my frustration is that I feel that many of you are disagreeing with things that I’m actually not advocating at all. The cultural critique and new (old?) cultural vision I am advocating is both intricate and total. It is very easy to misunderstand or overlook some of the details. The most commonplace way that this happens is when people look at less developed civilized cultures and use those to make assumptions about the noncivilized. It is easy to understand why people fall into this trap, but that doesn’t make it any less misguided and wrong. Nearly every noncivilized culture that has ever existed has had some sort of contact with the civilized. The results of such contact are nearly always deeply destructive and irreversible. Even minor contact results in a type of emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual collapse of the noncivilized culture. The anthropologist E. R. Sorensen experienced this himself on one of his studies, and he offers a vivid firsthand account. It is an ugly and disturbing process. Out of the cultural void, the civilized mindset springs up almost magically fully-formed, with all of its attendant maladies and misery (Again, I urge you to read the Sorensen article. He describes the birth of “economic” notions, the civilized idea that there are “right and wrong” lifestyle choices such as what to wear, etc. Here's another Sorensen article that explores it.). In a nutshell, this is why you should never base your opinion of the noncivilized on less developed civilized cultures. I am basing my opinions on cultures that have completely rejected agriculture and animal domestication, and those cultures alone. The approach I am advocating is noncivilized lifestyle in its purest form – immediate return hunter-gatherer societies. The type of cultural collapse I’ve described explains why the remaining “uncontacted” tribes often display such fierce resistance and violence towards contact attempts. It often takes anthropologists decades to gain the trust of uncontacted peoples. We project civilized biases onto the noncivilized and assume that the reason they react violently is due to an inherent lust for bloody combat (the kind of “winner take all” mentality we see in civilized warfare and market economies) or some perverse desire for fresh human sacrifices to their violent, chaotic nature gods. Anthropology exposes those assumptions as falsehoods. No, the reason they react violently to contact is that they have witnessed the “progress” of civilization at a distance, and they want nothing to do with it. They have an implicit understanding of the human misery and devastation that goes along with the civilized lifestyle, and they want to avoid it at all costs. I for one salute them, and I feel profound admiration for their ability to resist empire. Most of them are also lucky in that their homes are “marginal” lands that are unsuitable for agriculture – jungles, deserts, and islands. I know what you are thinking – that my ideas drip with the worst kind of “Noble Savage” wankery, and that I have a naïve understanding of human nature. I will address this later, but for now I’d like to further elaborate on the concerns that have been voiced about the elderly and disabled. If you’d like to read what I have to say about the “Noble Savage,” skip down to the marked passage that is later in my post.*** I can paint a broad picture of the way the elderly and disabled are cared for in immediate return societies. It’s an outline, and a deep anthropological study would probably show minor variations among individual tribes. I am basing this outline (as well as the rest of my post) on a wide range of things I have read, snippets from here, there, and everywhere. For those who may not be fully convinced and would like to know more, I strongly urge you to dig around in a library or on the Internet; focus your study on the anthropology of hunter-gatherers. My lack of sourcing will probably be seen by some of you as a cop-out, and for that, even though it’d be enormously time-consuming, I’ll offer to dig up all the various sources I used to reach this understanding; just ask. Considering the formal rules of debate, it’s only fair to offer. The elderly are treated with deep respect, and their wisdom is taken very seriously by the tribe at large. Due to their long life, they have knowledge of things that may otherwise be forgotten, like where to find food and water in unlooked-for places when times are tough. The elderly are fully integrated into society and treated with just as much respect and dignity as everyone else, if not more so. Same goes for the disabled. They frequently become the spiritual guide of the tribe, which reflects both an understanding that people who are not able-bodied and have more time to think than others can come up with unique and creative solutions to problems, as well as a desire to assign them a productive role so that they may fully participate in the society. They are given opportunities to participate in the day-to-day life of the tribe to the fullest of their abilities, and they are treated with the same respect and love as everyone else. Their lives may end up being shorter than their peers, but they pass on knowing that they were loved and cherished by their community. Gone, but not forgotten. This outline becomes unclear when it comes to the profoundly disabled, people that wouldn’t be able to live without catastrophic intervention. I’d point out that many scenarios that necessitate catastrophic intervention in our society – things like heart attack, stroke, etc – are a direct result of our civilized lifestyle. In a tribal society, if a mother knows that her baby is so disabled that it is unlikely to survive for very long, the result is probably infanticide, where the mother would just abandon the baby away from the camp to die of exposure. The first reaction here is to recoil in horror, but you must understand the why and the subjective feelings of those involved to get a real grasp of this. There’s a tragic practicality here – if the child is unlikely to live for very long, then it is pointless and even wasteful to attempt catastrophic intervention of some kind. I think there is also the implicit understanding that even if the child lives, it will suffer enormously for the rest of its life. There is also the understanding that there must necessarily be some sort of self-limiting approach to population lest everyone suffer. Mothers who are compelled to commit infanticide do so with deep grief and a heavy heart. It haunts many of them for the rest of their lives. It’s something that they have to do, not something that they want to do. Compare this sort of lifestyle to what happens in even the most highly developed civilized cultures. The elderly are marginalized, shut away in nursing homes, and forgotten. Their knowledge and life experience go to waste, and their waning years are frequently profoundly lonely and idle. The disabled are shunned and/or approached with a sense of embarrassment. I like to think I’m a pretty caring person, but I’ll freely admit that I am guilty of this. When I see someone in a wheelchair, I find it hard to talk to them in a way that preserves their dignity. I’m always afraid that I’ll unintentionally say something offensive, or that by asking to help them, I’ll inadvertently give them the impression that I feel that they are less than me (which isn’t the case). It’s easiest just to ignore them. It’s tragic, and I should be loving ashamed. I could go on and on here. Disabled people have trouble getting jobs. The mentally retarded are shunted away into “alternate” classrooms that are nearly universally understaffed. The picture that emerges is one where the “less able-bodied” – the elderly, the disabled, the mentally retarded – are treated as second-class citizens, whether unintentionally or not. Our society is structured in a way that prevents them from fully participating. The most social interaction that most elderly and heavily disabled folks get is through the deep love and selflessness of their immediate families. There is also something worth pointing out about life-saving medical procedures. Nearly all of them involve deep indignity – being poked, prodded, various foreign bodies being inserted into yours. Tubes stuck down your throat or up your rear end, your chest being opened up by a machine. People elect to be put on ventilators or hooked up to various machines out of the quixotic desire for just a little more life, even if its one whose quality is profoundly reduced. We react in horror when we see our beloved family members in hospital beds, their bodies filled with tubes that run to all sorts of complicated machinery. We think quietly to ourselves that we’ll never elect for that later on in life, but when the time comes, we change our minds. It is an easy to understand and sympathize with, as well as deeply human reaction to the fear of death, but it comes with a number of unintended consequences. The deep sense of horror and various deranged reactions that surrounded the Terry Schiavo case are entirely applicable here. Please do not misunderstand me. I’m not trying to be judge, jury, and executioner for other people. Such an attitude is profoundly evil and would rightly be called so by anyone in this thread. I’m not saying we should take people off life support or cut benefits to the disabled. That kind of reaction would be deeply inhuman. I won’t judge folks who elect for life-saving procedures; in fact, I’d honestly probably do the same myself if I were in their position. For those of you who are concerned about how people with my worldview will react towards the disabled in a potential collapse scenario, I’ll offer this, which is what I would do in a position of political power – I would immediately begin stockpiling our dwindling resources to ease the poor, disenfranchised, elderly, and disabled through a collapse. If the electrical system shuts down, shunt all remaining power to the hospitals. Conserve and stockpile gas so that medicine gets to pharmacies and organ transplants get to operating rooms. It’s the most sympathetic, caring, and human response, and I think most of us would do the same. The simple and painful truth is that is never, ever going to happen. My best advice for the disabled/elderly/poor in a collapse scenario is to seek support in your communities, among the people who know you and love you. It’s the best way to ease through the transition. Likewise, able-bodied people should seek out opportunities to aid people who are less fortunate in their communities. Looking for a large-scale political solution in the crisis we are facing is foolish. People will rarely give up things to help a complete stranger. And it’s not really out of a sense of malice, just a part of our human nature. Remember, due to our tribal evolution, we can typically only see about 150 people at a time as fully human. Tribal societies work within this limitation; civilized societies try to thwart it and then have the gall and arrogance to be surprised when it doesn’t work out well. Our society is unintentionally structured in such a way that prevents a lot of good behavior. We are told over and over to eat right, get exercise, be nice to others, and help the poor. We fail at these things not out of laziness or malice, but because it is nigh impossible to do so consistently in civilized society. Our cities promote sedentism. Live in the burbs, sit in a car seat for 2 hours on the way to work, sit in an office chair, then go home and sit in front of the television. I could come up with numerous examples here. There’s a quiet desperation and suffering among even the most developed countries. Look all around you, and you will see it. The depression and isolation of the obese in a society that shuns them while it promotes unhealthy behavior. The seeming lack of sympathy among people at the top of even small companies, who, with even a moderate employee base, will be incapable of treating those they don’t know as humans instead of numbers or cogs in a machine. People toil away at unsatisfying jobs for 8 hours a day, their only escape being the idle chit-chat at the water cooler, a chance to joke around and play with their fellow coworkers. ***Compare all of that to noncivilized societies, and the difference is profound and overwhelming. The concept of “work” is foreign to them; even gathering and hunting food is a playlike activity. Everyone gets a say. People are treated with respect, love, and dignity. Their lifestyle is inherently healthy. It’s not so much that these cultures act in a way that is somehow superhuman or thwarts basic human nature – people still get pissed, disagreements take place, war exists, and though it is extraordinarily rare, every now and then someone murders another person in their tribe. The difference that I am driving at is that noncivilized societies implicitly account for human nature and are able, through the way their societies are structured, to capitalize on its most noble aspects while downplaying its worst ones – even war (more on this in a moment). Hunter-gatherer societies are custom-made by nature to fit humans best, across all levels of human experience – physical, mental, and emotional. It’s the kind of society we evolved in, and though we civilized folks are 10,000 years down the road, we haven’t changed much at all. Civilization, on the other hand, attempts to “perfect” human nature, to transform humans into some kind of completely benevolent, all-knowing, all-controlling gods, who are able to “manage” the ecosystem without destroying it. The fact that civilized cultures are confused and disappointed when this attempted transformation doesn’t work out reflects a deep cultural blindness. Again, I’ll be glad to provide the numerous sources I’ve looked at to come to this conclusion, though I’d encourage people to explore for themselves; it’s more meaningful that way. This civilized cultural blindness is perhaps most profoundly reflected in how we think noncivilized cultures handle war. We think that civilized war is just like noncivilized war, but that is false. Noncivilized warfare is constant and low-level, an attempt to enforce territory. A raid happens, a few people die, and then you raid them back, without any attempt to destroy or assimilate. One of the unintended but natural outcomes is population limitation that preserves ecological balance. The behavior between neighboring tribes is intricate and complex, and is best described by the game theory notion of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, or the term “frenemies.” Neighboring tribes fight, but they also trade between one another in a form of gift economy as well as have giant celebrations together (frequently to “make up” for combat) where they play matchmaker in order to avoid the negative effects of inbreeding. Civilized warfare, due to the resource strain caused by agriculture that I described in an earlier post, most often takes the form of total annihilation. One culture attempts to completely destroy the other and assimilate the survivors (usually just the women and children) in order to gain more resources. In the modern world of nation-states, we’ve managed to mostly do away with the civilized wartime tendency towards total annihilation (though it still occasionally and disturbingly crops up, a la the Holocaust), though we still fight over resources, and we’re still bound by the territory enforcement and basic revenge motives inherent to human nature that we see in the noncivilized. The difference is that we now possess weapons that can level entire cities and snuff out millions of lives in an instant. I’ve tried to keep this post calm and rational, but it’s really hard to shy away from more literary allusions and metaphors because this problem is just as much spiritual and emotional as it is physical and intellectual. You want to know what civilization is? Here’s what civilization is – a machine. It churns forward, eating up the Earth and turning out flashy technology and human misery as its products. We’re all caught up in it, cogs in its wheels, and at its unfeeling machine heart is an inhuman void. Pieces are flying off the machine, little wheels and pumps, and it’s beginning to groan under its own weight, yet it still plods forward. There’s the growing feeling among the people caught up in the gears, but suppressed, denied, and ignored by the people at the controls who reap the most benefits, that the machine is about to finally break down and collapse. The most ironic part of this tragedy is that the building of the machine was unintentional. I don’t know what caused ancient humans to take up agriculture; despite some remnant archaeological evidence, we can really only imagine. The picture that I intuit is one of a few isolated tribes – one near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, one near the Yangtze, others elsewhere – each reacting to something that we would term a “natural disaster” – maybe a flood in one case, a volcanic eruption in another, or some general climatological shift. Their tribes nearly destroyed, their people starving, they decided to move from some mild horticultural tendencies to full-blown agriculture as a hedge against further suffering. They didn’t have any clue of what would result – the alienation from other animals and plants, their brothers and sisters in the community of life; the immediate negative health effects; the fact that the grain stored in their granaries would produce a ruling class; the depletion and eventual desertification of the soil. They were just human beings having a very human reaction to crisis. They soon outgrew their own landbase, and as they continued to move forward, the cost of turning away from agriculture stacked higher. They couldn’t stop practicing agriculture lest many starve. Numerous opportunities throughout history have presented themselves to begin to turn away from our destructive lifestyle and move back towards something that worked – the collapse of the Roman empire, the end of various Chinese dynasties, the Black Death, 60’s counterculture, so on and so forth – but we failed to do so because we didn’t fully understand the problem. A handful of isolated individuals, now venerated as spiritual leaders – folks like Moses, Jesus, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Mohammed – began to wrangle at the edges of the problem and see civilization/empire for what it truly is. Though their own understandings of the problem were often confused or incomplete, I am consistently astounded by the depth of their vision and their implicit understanding of the far-reaching consequences of the civilized mindset. There are incredible similarities among what those guys were saying, and the general picture that emerges – simple lifestyles are more enlightened, love your neighbor, the meek shall inherit the Earth, heaven is right here on this planet for those willing to look, vague notions that everything is interconnected and aware/talk of reincarnation (bedrocks of animism/pantheism), etc. – all point strongly to an animistic/pantheistic/primitivist lifestyle and mindset that our ancestors experienced every day of their lives. History marched on, though. The teachings of those spiritual leaders were absorbed by civilization, further misunderstood and confused, and finally institutionalized into religions that promote further repression and violence (once again, I could go on and on here – the breathtaking violence of Islamic fundamentalism, the systematic repression of women by the Catholic church, on and on ad infinitum). Could society have ever transformed though the radical implications of the teachings (and their vaguely primitivist notions) of those spiritual leaders? Who knows. History is full of little incidents and accidents, intentional and unintentional, that forever change its course. I can think of one such instance in the life of Jesus that changed everything. Jesus’s message was mostly one of total nonviolence. He was just a dude who began to understand how bad it is inside the machine, and he pushed people, particularly the disenfranchised, to abandon it. One time, though, he got really loving pissed, yelled at some people, and turned over the tables of the moneychangers in the temple (money and its trappings are among the worst and most inhuman products of civilization). In that instant, in the eyes of the elite at the top of the empire he condemned, his message transformed from one of passive revolution and resistance to one of active revolution. One small moment, but from that point forward, his murder at the hands of the ruling class was inevitable. That murder, along with a few isolated mentions that he is a son of “God” (the universal, animating force that we are all sons and daughters of) have elevated him to the status of godhood for many people. It’s something that I don’t think he intended (though I’m obviously just guessing). Our culture has diluted his teachings so much that they are well-worn and toothless, their radical implications routinely misinterpreted or ignored (Give all your money to the poor! If that’s not radical, then what is?). We’ve seen other leaders and historical figures who had things to say about the inherent worth and dignity of all humans, and who advocated a cultural transformation, though not necessarily a primitivist one. Think Ghandi, JFK, MLK. All of them, murdered. How much higher will the stack of bodies have to be before you “civilized” people understand the kind of misery you are perpetrating, however well-intentioned? But still, history marches on. We’re now staring down a looming ecological collapse. People either don’t know what we’re facing or are completely unwilling to confront it and talk about it. Our society promotes short-term thinking over long-term thinking, but a good deal of this problem has to do with the fact that civilization is not molded well to fit basic human nature and behavior. People on this forum love to point out the stunning denial and magical thinking that is present in most right-wing political thought, but it is just as evident in left-wing political thought for those willing to look. The point I keep making about food storage producing hierarchy is exactly why communism’s legacy is one of failure. The leaders of communist countries see that their communist utopia is not working out and resort to repression or genocide to try to get their subjects to fit the mold. The most current failure of left-wing thought can be seen in all the proposed technofixes for the ongoing environmental catastrophe. Space escapism, nuclear energy, green technology, and so on and so forth are all proposed solutions that categorically fail to consider how we got here. Our problem is a lifestyle that is fundamentally unfit for humans as well as the surrounding environment, and a consequent massive population overshoot that resulted from this problematic mode of living. Proposed solutions like space technology or green technology will only succeed in kicking the can further down the road and dooming future generations to an even more costly disaster. A few folks in this thread have either directly or implicitly asked for me to describe the collapse itself, or what a post-collapse world will look like. I’m just flabbergasted, stunned, and frustrated by that response, as if I’m all-knowing or possess some sort of secret knowledge. I have no idea how the collapse will play out. I also can’t and won’t tell people how to live their lives. All I am trying to do is pass on the way I have begun thinking and feeling, and hopefully some people will listen. When it comes to the ecological crisis, though, including climate change, I’m certain that absolutely nothing will be done. The few climatologists and liberals who are loving terrified will continue to be angrily shouted down or ignored, just as they always have been. Average, everyday people will go on about their lives in quiet denial, with a growing subconscious feeling that something is profoundly wrong. The understanding is too limited. The monied interests are too powerful. Nothing will be done. When it gets so outrageous and so obvious that people can’t ignore it, that’s when we’ll spring into action, but by then it will be far too late. In fact, it’s already too late – the permafrost is melting, and an extinction event on the order of magnitude of asteroid collision has already happened. We’re in an extended Wile E. Coyote moment that may go on for decades. We’ve already plunged off the cliff, but we’re pinwheeling out into thin air because we refuse to look down. It took me years to get to the viewpoint that I currently find myself looking at things from. All these problems, all the many little ethical and intellectual dilemmas we bump into, are tiny little pieces in a large mosaic, but you have to back far enough away from civilized culture to really see it. It’s not easy, and it’s definitely a process at an individual level. It’s an ongoing process for me. I feel like a cultural refugee, straddling the fence between the civilized and noncivilized. I’ll never be the same, but I can’t talk about it in polite society. I’m a pretty normal dude, and I do pretty normal things. I pay my bills, work a full time job, go out with friends for drinks on weekends, flirt with cute girls at work, on and on. I love my family. I want to be a good person and I try to seek out the inherent goodness in others. I can’t talk about what I know, though, because the reaction among trusted friends and family is frequently bewilderment, and the reaction among mere acquaintances (who I never talk to about this stuff) would likely be social shunning if not outright hostility. That’s why I post in this thread. Though the reaction to a “primitivist” critique is still almost always reflexive dismissal (as ANIME AKBAR points out), climate change is such a big piece of the mosaic that maybe, just maybe, I can get a number of people in here to step back and really look. As Yiggy talks about, the coming ecological collapse may not get rid of civilization. I just want people to know that civilization is not the only option. The alternative lifestyle to civilization is not a nightmarish existence – quite the contrary. The noncivilized lifestyle recognizes quality over quantity. I’d rather have 40 or 50 awesome years than 80 so-so or miserable ones. The noncivilized lifestyle has a deep understanding that life may not always be “fair” in the eyes of humans, but there is always some sort of purpose or reason for what happens, so they take it in stride. They understand that they are not in control of the Earth, will never be in control of the Earth, and should not be in control of the Earth. They recognize their place among the rest of the community of life – animals are their brothers and sisters who give them life. They known that they, too, as much as any animal, owe a life debt to the ecosystem at large that will be paid in full when they die, their life force subsumed by the Earth and returned in the form of new plants, animals, and humans to further the game of life. They look around themselves and see overwhelming abundance, a lush green Earth teeming with a veritable smorgasbord of unique lifeforms. How could they not be happy, and how could they not see “God” or “the forces of nature” as fundamentally aware and benevolent, even though they do not always favor humans? They know that life and the universe have given them an extraordinary gift, and it is one that civilized people spit on and reject as “inferior.”
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Jun 17, 2012 04:22
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The question about the role of technology is an excellent opportunity to rein the discussion back in towards climate change. The difficult truth that we must be willing to confront is that climate change is a direct result of our use of technology. When the ecological footprint of human enterprises is considered, the ecological catastrophe we are facing is very easy to understand. Look around you. Every single thing in your home - your computer, all the furniture, the medicine in your medicine cabinet, the food in your pantry, the structure of your home itself - all of those things require both matter and energy to refine the matter. All that matter and energy has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the Earth. Much of that matter and energy we are taking for ourselves would have otherwise been used to support other life - all sorts of greenery as well as wildlife. Granted, most of our energy inputs come from fossil fuels, but my point stands. With this in mind, is it really any surprise that we've been party to a mass extinction? We can sputter, shut our eyes in horror, cry and wail, or get mad about this, but it'd be just about as effective as getting mad at gravity. There are certain rules at play here on Earth, and we are not exempt from them, though we may think otherwise. I am not saying that technology is devoid of enormous benefits. Go back through my posts - I have never said this. Will never say it. I'd be a fool to do so, because technology has a number of overwhelming benefits. Those benefits, however, do not mean there are no costs. For those of you expressing concerns about the availability of modern medicine in any future society - I understand and deeply sympathize. I've watched modern medicine vastly improve my life as well as save the lives of a number of family and friends. Modern medicine is a truly wonderful thing - nigh miraculous, even. However, I have a question that I feel must be asked - is it possible to provide modern medicine to ~7 billion people (why should any person be denied?) without resorting to mass environmental destruction and/or unsustainable resource use in order to create the medicine (including all the tools of surgery) and use it? This isn't a rhetorical question, either, and I'm not trying to be a dick. I'm honestly curious as to what you folks think. Here are the beefs I have with technology: 1. It is implemented without any genuine attempt to understand or predict the consequences, particularly the negative ones. The automobile is a great example. The greenhouse effect was well understood by 1896, and though I'm not positive, I'm fairly sure that it was understood that CO2 would be one of the byproducts of gasoline-powered engines, even as the Model T Ford was rolling off the assembly lines in the early 1900s. A clear-thinking and intuitive individual could have guessed that large-scale automobile use might eventually prove problematic, but most folks were so excited about driving around town that no one even bothered to wonder about those sorts of things. In many cases, the consequences of using a particular piece of technology are impossible to predict. The "Chicken Little"-type fears surrounding nanotechnology, though probably overdramatic and unlikely, illustrate this well. I shouldn't have to explain why extraordinary caution should be used when dealing with technology whose consequences are impossible to predict. 2. Even when technology has already been implemented and its various consequences are easy to track, it is still treated with a sort of wide-eyed optimism. The true cost is almost never considered. I went on at length about cellphones in an earlier post to make this very point. Do the damage and insurance payouts in texting-and-driving accidents factor into the price of my Iphone that I bought? Of course not. Likewise, the effects of climate change are not reflected in the cost of gasoline. Unfortunately, the costs always show up somewhere, sooner or later. We are seeing the cost of climate change show up in federal disaster relief programs and insurance payouts. We will probably soon see it reflected in rising food prices. --------------- The frequent charge here is that technology itself is neutral - it depends on how you use it. The type of environmental harm required to simply create some of our technology exposes this argument as nonsense. I can't think of any technology ever invented in my lifetime that has been all good without any bad. Thats why I remain skeptical of the proposed technological solutions to climate change - technology is what got us in this mess! Has anyone really stopped to consider what would happen if the energy needs of the entire world were provided by nuclear generation? What the hell would we do with all the waste? How would we create all the materials needed for the nuclear plants without dumping more CO2 into the atmosphere? How do we address the massive wastefulness of consumerism if everyone thinks that the energy they are getting is "clean"? You can't magically separate the positive and negative consequences of technology and only reap the benefits. That's not how reality works. We've got to weigh the benefits with the harmful effects. Is the good worth all the bad, if the bad takes the form of ecological collapse? EDIT: Here's a pretty awesome article on this very subject that gives a good sketch of the two camps that environmentalists are falling into: http://grist.org/article/shaw1/ Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Jun 19, 2012 |
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Jun 18, 2012 22:22
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4liters posted:No, climate change is a direct result of the choices we have made/had forced upon us by capitalism. Not all technology is mutually exclusive to preventing climate change and humanity needs people to have an educated and rational discussion about what to take forward, what needs to be improved and what to leave behind. the kawaiiest posted:Exactly. Technology is a wonderful thing. It is not the problem, it's the solution. If we use it right. Would either of you care to address my point that all technology, even the most beneficial, comes with a number of associated costs that are typically overlooked or ignored? We're at a point in time where we desperately need to look at things as they are in reality, not as we wish them to be. And Desmond, I'm not ignoring you - I'm really interested in what you're saying and I'll respond when I have some more time to reply
Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 09:47 on Jun 19, 2012 |
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Jun 19, 2012 09:09
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Westernized, capitalist, hyper-consumerist culture has a massive amount of inertia going. I'd speculate that nearly all of us posting in here really don't have any functional clue of what life was like before the post-WW2 consumerist boom. Extrapolate that a bit and it means that you have multiple generations who don't know anything other than a consumerist culture. In the US, anyways, it's kind of like this: the whole ship is pointed directly at an iceberg, but the ship is now so large and unwieldy that you have to spin the captain's wheel like it's the loving big wheel on Price is Right to barely get the ship to move a tiny bit. There are two factions who are fighting bitterly for control of the ship, seesawing the captain's wheel back and forth endlessly, and the rest of the crew has become so polarized that the two factions have forgotten about any other goals but gaining control of the ship. I think it's pretty clear what's going to happen. We're going to hit the iceberg. Accepting that inevitability now will better prepare you for what's going to happen later (not that anyone could truly prepare for ecological collapse, but at least you won't be surprised).
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Jul 11, 2012 00:55
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This is really evocative to me and I wanted to share it.quote:So do you think human existence is actually already collapsing? http://www.theecologist.org/News/ne...id_a_fifth.html I think this really gets to the meat of it. We're living in a fatally flawed narrative, one that is deeply damaging to ourselves and the world around us, and one that will ultimately prove unsatisfying to most people, if it's not already getting that way. We've got to come up with a new narrative. Hypothesizing about alternate fuel sources that allow us to keep consumerism is not a new narrative, it's just a naive attempt to give the old narrative a happy ending.
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Jul 11, 2012 02:02
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Chris Hedges posted:Cultures that endure carve out a protected space for those who question and challenge national myths. Artists, writers, poets, activists, journalists, philosophers, dancers, musicians, actors, directors and renegades must be tolerated if a culture is to be pulled back from disaster. Members of this intellectual and artistic class, who are usually not welcome in the stultifying halls of academia where mediocrity is triumphant, serve as prophets. They are dismissed, or labeled by the power elites as subversive, because they do not embrace collective self-worship. They force us to confront unexamined assumptions, ones that, if not challenged, lead to destruction. They expose the ruling elites as hollow and corrupt. They articulate the senselessness of a system built on the ideology of endless growth, ceaseless exploitation and constant expansion. They warn us about the poison of careerism and the futility of the search for happiness in the accumulation of wealth. They make us face ourselves, from the bitter reality of slavery and Jim Crow to the genocidal slaughter of Native Americans to the repression of working-class movements to the atrocities carried out in imperial wars to the assault on the ecosystem. They make us unsure of our virtue. They challenge the easy clichés we use to describe the nation—the land of the free, the greatest country on earth, the beacon of liberty—to expose our darkness, crimes and ignorance. They offer the possibility of a life of meaning and the capacity for transformation. I only included the first and last couple of paragraphs, but the entirety of this fantastic article can be found here. Hedges' insight applies to so much of what we're seeing right now, from economic instability to climate change. What it implies is a collective failure, but not the ones we like to commonly posit - a failure of governance, a moral failure of greedy corporatists, a failure of the unwashed masses to think or vote properly. On the contrary, Hedges exposes our failure as a failure of imagination. We've bought into the narrative of growth and progress so heavily that it neuters our ability to accept and understand reality. With most people, all of the grim realities of the ecological crisis get passed through a Westernized, rational-objective, growth-minded filter before the person even begins to think. I see it going on all the time, even in this thread. When that happens, the truth - that climate change represents a failure of the Western lifestyle - is rendered impotent. We've got to be willing to step out on a limb and imagine something new, or we'll never solve this problem. Don't get me wrong, either - I won't deny that greedy corporations and morally bankrupt governments have had a lot to do with climate change. The thing about those institutions, though, is that they only have the power that we allow them to have. Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Jul 12, 2012 |
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Jul 12, 2012 01:28
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Here's the latest from Bill McKibben (who's as sharp as always), and it ain't pretty:quote:Even if such a campaign is possible, however, we may have waited too long to start it. To make a real difference – to keep us under a temperature increase of two degrees – you'd need to change carbon pricing in Washington, and then use that victory to leverage similar shifts around the world. At this point, what happens in the U.S. is most important for how it will influence China and India, where emissions are growing fastest. (In early June, researchers concluded that China has probably under-reported its emissions by up to 20 percent.) The three numbers I've described are daunting – they may define an essentially impossible future. But at least they provide intellectual clarity about the greatest challenge humans have ever faced. We know how much we can burn, and we know who's planning to burn more. Climate change operates on a geological scale and time frame, but it's not an impersonal force of nature; the more carefully you do the math, the more thoroughly you realize that this is, at bottom, a moral issue; we have met the enemy and they is Shell. We've essentially reached the human civilization version of Donkey Kong's kill screen - there's no more game left, so we might as well just record our high score, put our initials up on the board, and call it done. The small outside chance that remains is a full-scale revolution that completely overthrows the American corporatocracy, which ironically gets more likely as the economy gets worse (there's no doubt that climate change is already having a negative effect on the economy).
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Jul 19, 2012 22:23
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Honestly, that sort of thing gives me hope. Whether or not our species continues, at least we haven't hosed things up so bad that life on Earth can't continue on as it has for millions of years. Maybe we adapt to what we've done, and maybe we don't. The good news is that life on the planet is going to keep on doing its thing.
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Jul 20, 2012 01:50
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He's not using weather events and calling it climate. All he's saying is that the current extreme variations we're seeing, as well as general trends (for example, we've broken an insane number of record highs and very few record lows over past decade or so, where the expected value would be roughly 50/50) are directly related to climate change, which is absolutely true. Did you read any of the stats at the beginning of the article? Also, have you done any research on how climate change affects the jet stream? If not, take a look; I found it really illuminating as well as frightening.
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Jul 20, 2012 02:14
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 Looks like tipping points are being reachedquote:Unprecedented melting of Greenland's ice sheet this month has stunned NASA scientists and has highlighted broader concerns that the region is losing a remarkable amount of ice overall. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/24/greenland-ice-melt-nasa_n_1698129.html?utm_hp_ref=green Unfortunately, that kind of news is getting more and more commonplace. As an aside, though, I'd like to talk about the idea that our environmental predicament has little to nothing to do with a global population of 7 billion. As the common wisdom goes, most of our environmental maladies are caused by the portion of the population living in the Western world, rather than the fact that there are 7 billion of us on this planet. The population level would have a negligible impact on the environment, folks say, if the West didn't use so many fossil fuels. I just don't buy this logic.*** It isolates climate change as the major environmental concern and tends to overlook or ignore other problems, like the mass extinction that we've caused. All of our environmental problems are caused by the scale of human activity (which is directly related to the fact that there are 7 billion of us wandering around); climate change just happens to be the most extreme example. Slash-and-burn farming is a great example of something that doesn't involve fossil fuels that is unsustainable precisely because so many people are doing it. I think most people in this thread would rather see a shift in energy use in the West as opposed to a change in consumption patterns. Fine, let's roll with that and play out the scenario and see what happens. Let's assume no shift in first world consumption. I personally think it is unfair to expect the third world to stay where they are at as opposed to emulating what the first world countries are doing (I think most of you would agree). So let's go ahead and assume that the third world industrializes in some way that doesn't use fossil fuels (which is a huge stretch, but bear with me), and that their consumption patterns catch up. Where does that leave us? The scale of human activity is already off the charts - we use around 20-30% of the primary productivity of the planet (which measures the energy produced by photosynthesis that sustains literally all the life on Earth). It's pretty simple to deduce why we are causing an extinction event, but I digress. With third world countries at the same level as the first world, that number will rise due to how much more land-intensive it is to consume large quantities of meat. We still haven't addressed how energy will be produced, so let's just say wind. Wind power - widely regarded as one of the cleanest energy sources - becomes very problematic when scaled up, though less so than fossil fuels. I'm fairly certain if you scale any form of energy up to the levels at which we are using fossil fuels, you'll start to see environmental problems. We know what happens when we use lots of fossil fuels, and the only reason that we don't know how large-scale solar, wind, or nuclear will affect the environment is because we haven't tried it yet. Fossil fuel use is the most immediate problem and is undoubtedly the problem causing climate change. However, the reason why fossil fuel use is problematic is because of the scale on which it is taking place. Ultimately, the scale of human activity is the problem, and that has a great deal to do with how many humans there are. To put it simply, the human footprint is way out of proportion to any other creature on earth - it has taken a good chunk of time from a human perspective, but that complete disregard for any semblance of balance is finally catching up to us. ***I think we are massively overpopulated, but please don't put words in my mouth - I don't think we should kill people or implement draconian birth control laws. I think that the third world should be allowed to pursue as much industrialization as it wishes - anything less is hypocritical. I've got a pretty strong anti-authoritarian bent and I don't think anyone should be told what to do or how to live their lives. I think that the bottom line is that we have painted ourselves into a corner and there is no telling how we'll get out. I have no idea how this overshoot will be re-balanced. We've made massive changes to the Earth's ecology, and the Earth that we are creating may end up being very different than the Earth we are used to living in, and there's no telling whether or not we'll be able to adapt to the new Earth.
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Jul 25, 2012 01:20
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No posted:So what do you do when you're terrified and angry about living in the most hopeless era for humanity ever? I try to approach the possible extinction of our species in much the same way that I approach my own death - it will happen eventually and there is nothing I can do about it, so my best bet is to live the most fulfilling, healthiest life I can, have as much fun as I can, and do everything I can to help other people. For me, a great deal of living a fulfilling life and helping others at this point means learning about resiliency, adaptation, and successfully sustainable ways of living and trying to pass that knowledge along to others. To really get a grip on the predicament we find ourselves in, you've got to drop the anthropocentric mindset. When you're able to get away from it, you'll realize that anthropocentrism, on top of being a very silly way of looking at things, is the prime reason why we've done so much damage. For a moment, consider things from a geologic perspective. The Earth doesn't care whether or not humans thrive or go extinct. The idea that we are the glorious "final product" of evolution is something that we have chosen to believe, and it has no bearing on reality. Mass extinctions have happened before and they will happen again - we aren't even the first life form to cause a mass extinction. Mass extinctions and climate shifts result in a short period of chaos (short in terms of geologic time), followed by an evolutionary explosion where lots of new life forms fill the empty niches and finally by a long period of stability. What we're doing now will result in the same sort of process - lots of cool new creatures will fill up the Earth. Whether or not we successfully adapt to what we've done is a big question mark, but life will go on. Just because you'll eventually die does not mean that your life is in vain. By the same token, just because humans will someday go extinct does not mean that our existence is meaningless.
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Jul 25, 2012 21:18
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It also requires a stunning level of hubris. From Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, which was written in 1989: quote:But because so much of our energy use is for things like automobile fuel, even if we mustered the political will and economic resources to quickly replace every single electric generating station with a nuclear power plant, our total carbon dioxide output would fall little more than a quarter. Ditto, at least initially, for cold fusion or hot fusion or any other clean method of producing energy. So the sacrifices demanded may be on a scale we can't imagine and won't like. Also, as I said earlier, it is the scale of human activity that is the problem. If you scale up nuclear to the level that we are currently using fossil fuels, I'd expect that we'd run into some major unforeseen environmental problems. For example, here's one proposed method for harvesting uranium from seawater: quote:Japanese researchers found out that they can harvest uranium from sea by cultivating genetically engineered gulfweed which will grow in sea at an unbelievable rate of two metres an year. The weed selectively soaks up heavy metals including uranium. Genetically engineered seaweed with an unprecedented growth rate that soaks up heavy metals, you say? Surely that couldn't cause any harm! (bioaccumulation of heavy metals in fish is a well-known problem)
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Jul 25, 2012 23:00
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 13:59 |
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Spiritus Nox posted:I don't get this. Are you saying that trying to preserve our own species and hopefully others that would also be threatened by Climate upheaval is hubristic? I mean, yeah, new technologies will inevitably pose their own problems, but there's no reason to assume that said problems are insurmointable or that, if they are, we shouldn't strive for the course of action that causes the least harm to our species and our planet. No, that's not what I'm saying. What I am getting at is that any large-scale technological solution - though it may significantly reduce carbon emissions - will rapidly land us in the same pot of boiling water that we currently find ourselves in. Again, the problem is the scale of human activity. Any technology implemented on a mass scale is going to cause ecological damage that will eventually affect us. It isn't hubristic to try to save our species. It is hubristic to try to save our species at the expense of everything else. Also, Spiritus Nox, this post of yours and the one you made a few spots down just drip with anthropocentrism. Our planet, you say? Tell me, who appointed us ruler? I'm not trying to pick on you (or you either, McDowell), and I know I'm being bitterly sarcastic, but I'm trying to make a point with my needling. Anthropocentrism by definition is an ideology that puts humans above everything else. We adopted this mindset millennia ago to our grave peril. Such a mindset means that we will do what we feel is necessary to protect ourselves in the short term, even if it includes doing harm to the ecosystem. We try to justify it by saying it's just a little bit of harm here or there, but at that point it is too late, we are sliding down the slippery slope. Up until we began to understand climate change, we've also failed to recognize that a little harm here or there being done by 500 million, 1 billion, 3 billion people equals a whole loving lot of harm. The problem is that this kind of thing will always end up biting us in the rear end, because we are completely dependent on nature. We fail to understand how dependent we are because many of us live our lives in totally sanitized, nature-free bubbles. Any solution that is grounded in anthropocentrism is really no solution at all, because anthropocentrism is suicidal. We protect ourselves at the expense of the rest of the environment, but we are completely dependent on it in ways that we do not fully understand. The complexity of the planet's ecology is largely beyond our comprehension. A quick aside to Shipon: Did you know that fish eat seaweed? Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Jul 26, 2012 |
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Jul 26, 2012 01:04
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