13 posts tagged “m”
Thus the new vision we owe to science is one of real though tempered optimism. It gives us a measure of significance and rational hope in a world which appeared irrational and meaningless. It shows us man’s place and role in the universe. He is the earth’s reservoir of evolutionary possibility; the servant of evolution, but at the same time its youthful master. His destiny is to pursue greater fulfilment through a better ordering of the psychosocial process. That is his extraordinary privilege, and also his supreme duty.
Our new vision assures us that human life could gradually be transformed from a competitive struggle against blind fate into a greater collective enterprise, consciously undertaken. We see that enterprise as one for greater fulfilment through the better realization of human possibilities.
It is for us to accept this new revelation given us by science, examine it, and explore all its implications, secure in the knowledge that ideas help to determine events, that more understanding leads to more appropriate action, that scientific truth is an indispensable weapon against stupidity and wickedness and the other enemies of fulfilment, and true vision the partner of progress.
Archibald MacLeish in Our Altered Conception of Ourselves (I Louise B. Young (ed.) Evolution of Man, 1970)
So let us recognize human mysticism for what it really is: the rusting Excalibur* of our species, an old and vital streak of genetic madness that once rescued our kind from the brink of extinction, took us to the stars, and will run us through with dispatch when our little play is done. Ultimately, I have no real argument with mysticism, nor even with the fear and ignorance on which it feeds. The frail, the fearful, and the foolish – these are my animals.
Reg Morrison in The Spirit in the Gene, 1999
*a sword which made the user invisible
The popular discourse concerning peak oil and climate change includes concerns about collapse of the civilization as we know it today, imploding economies and the longevity of the American Way of Life. These euphemisms obscure the realty that survival is not an abstraction about societies, economies and cultures but rather about life and death of billions of people. Thus a change to a different way of living – a low energy way – is not negotiable. We need to reduce our use of fossil fuel or we will die. Skills of low energy living, proven over thousands of years, have atrophied in our culture and must be relearned. This will not be an easy process; hundreds of community practices must be rediscovered.
Plan C addresses the issue of survival by offering ideas and techniques for living with less. The strategies and tactics described are tools for a life long effort towards becoming a different kind of human being. My wish is that you, readers of this book, will find the creative seed within yourselves to transform your lives with all your heart, soul and strength, and, with joy and spirit, do this with your neighbors in your communities for the future of humankind and for all life on earth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I grasp the hands of those next (to) me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work.” It will not easy. But what generation has ever been given a chance and a challenge to transform its world?
Among those concerned about population and development, there were always two mainstreams: Population optimists and population pessimists. The optimists did not just consider all problems solvable. They consider the population growth of the present time the best proof for a positive connection between population and economic growth. Pessimists consider the growing population primarily a treat: From general poverty over famine to a general destabilization of the society.
We are not agreeing with any of these “schools of thought”. Because this book shows: Population development and human development are closely related. But there is no linear connection between the population of a region and the the standard of living of this region. Therefore will the last dilemma mentioned in this book remain unsolved: That our development efforts is aiming at a standard of living, that can not be sustained (can not be made general in an ecological perspective).
Rainer Münz et al in Wie schnell wächst die Zahl der Menschen?, (How fast is the population growing?) 2007
When the vague indications for a novel thinking beyond the capitalist paradigm should ever turn into political and societal changes, than intellectual insight alone, be it important and necessary, will not suffice. A radical transformation apparently demands more, either the final collapse, which can no longer be ruled out, or the emergence of a novel consciousness reaching beyond our narrow, selfish, anxious I. A consciousness based on an identification with the surrounding world, a feeling of being a part of the entirety, of which we indeed are a part, of which we are fed, supported and kept alive, a consciousness which needs no rules, which can be eluded, no moral imperative, which are considered depressing and restricting. A consciousness which considers that what is hurting the biosphere also is an injury and a treat of ourselves.
There are very little signs of the emergence of such a consciousness. But it is our only hope.
The real progress in our world is the development from the simple to the complex, a real act of creation, because in each step novel qualities emerge, which are not inherent in the parts of the created systems.
It is time for this development in each of us and in our surroundings, to provide a new step in our consciousness of the total. This is my attempt, pulled between despair, anger and hope, to give a small contribution thereto.
Lothar Mayer in Ein system siegt sich zu Tode (A system is winning for Death) 1992
In the same manner, though we cannot possibly expect to exclude riches and poverty from society, yet if we could find out a mode of government by which the numbers in the extreme regions would be lessened and the numbers in the middle regions increased, it would be undoubtedly our duty to adopt it. It is not, however, improbable that as in the oak, the roots and branches could not be diminished very greatly without weakening the vigorous circulation of the sap in the stem, so in society the extreme parts could not be diminished beyond a certain degree without lessening that animated exertion throughout the middle parts, which is the very cause that they are the most favourable to the growth of intellect. If no man could hope to rise or fear to fall, in society, if industry did not bring with it its reward and idleness its punishment, the middle parts would not certainly be what they now are. In reasoning upon this subject, it is evident that we ought to consider chiefly the mass of mankind and not individual instances. There are undoubtedly many minds, and there ought to be many, according to the chances out of so great a mass, that, having been vivified early by a peculiar course of excitements, would not need the constant action of narrow motives to continue them in activity. But if we were to review the various useful discoveries, the valuable writings, and other laudable exertions of mankind, I believe we should find that more were to be attributed to the narrow motives that operate upon the many than to the apparently more enlarged motives that operate upon the few.
Leisure is, without doubt, highly valuable to man, but taking man as he is, the probability seems to be that in the greater number of instances it will produce evil rather than good (….)
That the difficulties of life contribute to generate talents, every day's experience must convince us. The exertions that men find it necessary to make, in order to support themselves or families, frequently awaken faculties that might otherwise have lain for ever dormant, and it has been commonly remarked that new and extraordinary situations generally create minds adequate to grapple with the difficulties in which they are involved.
Thomas R. Malthus in An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798, Chapter 18
It is, undoubtedly, a most disheartening reflection that the great obstacle in the way to any extraordinary improvement in society is of a nature that we can never hope to overcome. The perpetual tendency in the race of man to increase beyond the means of subsistence is one of the general laws of animated nature which we can have no reason to expect will change. Yet, discouraging as the contemplation of this difficulty must be to those whose exertions are laudably directed to the improvement of the human species, it is evident that no possible good can arise from any endeavours to slur it over or keep it in the background. On the contrary, the most baleful mischiefs may be expected from the unmanly conduct of not daring to face truth because it is unpleasing. Independently of what relates to this great obstacle, sufficient yet remains to be done for mankind to animate us to the most unremitted exertion. But if we proceed without a thorough knowledge and accurate comprehension of the nature, extent, and magnitude of the difficulties we have to encounter, or if we unwisely direct our efforts towards an object in which we cannot hope for success, we shall not only exhaust our strength in fruitless exertions and remain at as great a distance as ever from the summit of our wishes, but we shall be perpetually crushed by the recoil of this rock of Sisyphus.
Thomas R. Malthus in An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798, Chapter 17
Most primitive societies had a far clearer understanding of carrying capacity of their environment and the need for limiting population size than western man. A true unbalance between birth rate and mortality rate has become a problem only in the last 100 years. It seems that we are not conceptually prepared to cope with this dilemma. “Thou shall not kill” is accepted by us without question as a legitimate restriction of the individual’s freedom. But we are not yet ready to accept as equally important the maxim TTho shall not produce more than 2-3 children.” And yet we can no longer include unrestricted procreation among the natural “freedoms” of man, if we define as freedom the right to do what we want, provided that is does not hurt others. Now that we realize how many of the evils of modern society are directly or indirectly the result of overpopulation, we know that the right of unlimited procreation should be removed from man’s freedom. If we does not grasp this in the very near future, it will be too late. It is most regrettable that the adoption of a healthier way of thinking about the perils of overpopulation is impeded by medieval, and in their effects extremely vicious, church dogmas. What good is it if those with enough brains to have a sense of responsibility limit themselves to 2 children, while those who lack it have 8 or 10? And what does this portend for the future of mankind? With governments, legislature and church leaders displaying callousness toward these problems that border on the criminal, it becomes the duty of every single individual to fight for sense and sanity in population policy. The only alternative is disaster for mankind.
Ernst Mayr: Populations, Species, and Evolution, 1963
The problem, though, is that it relies on a kind of magical thinking. It depends on the idea that there’s some new technology (cold fusion!) or some new method of organization (Marxism!) that can vaporize our problems. It depends, in other words, on the idea that we simply need to make one more, or two more, or a hundred more leaps in the same direction that we’ve been leaping. That we need another set of technologies that will allow us to dominate everything around us but with more efficiency, less waste, less mess.
It’s possible, however, that geniuses have long since been born who offer us the necessary advice – that it’s on the shelf and we just haven’t gotten around to using it. The long line of gurus and cranks that runs back at least to the Buddha and Christ suggested that we see the world in a slightly different way. They understood that the thing which makes us most fully human is not our capacity for restless expansion, for aggression and growth and domination (all of which we share with many other animals), but our capacity for self-restraint, for a kind of humility. That by making ourselves somewhat smaller we make ourselves truly human, just as fish make themselves fish by swimming, and birds by flying and mosquitoes by biting.
The technologies of restraint are many: the bicycle, the spoken word, and the hand offered in friendship and in help. And, in this time and this place, the technologies of contraception. They can be used as technologies of indulgence and self-obsession, but they can be the technologies of humility as well.
It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between on historical period and another, and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead – often not recognizing what they were doing – was the continuation of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached the turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which the civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained though the new dark age which are already upon us. And if the tradition of virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for Godot, but for another – doubtless very different – St. Benedict.
