8 posts tagged “s”
We can have a country of smart voters. I hope we make the changes needed to have this kind of country. It would be a nice place in which to love.
Rick Shenkman in JUST HOW STUPID ARE WE?, 2008
There are many striking parallels between post-industrial men and hunter-gathering men. They are both highly mobile, non-territorial, non-soil-working, nature interested, much-leisured, function-oriented, small-familied, and altruistic. The most modern urban men are already to abandon, if they only knew how, civilization based on war and competition and on an industry so heavy that the human personality as well as the surface of the earth is stamped with its obscenity. Most important of all, the urban man today is less deformed, in spite of his lack of nature contact, than the peasants, farmers, and their small-town collaborators who have predominated the agricultural era. The modern city man was not born on a farm, and his world was not perverted by the spectacles of the barn-yard. New shifts in social thought bring urban man and hunting man closer in their mutual belief in traditional as opposed to existential behaviour, in permanence instead of progress, in small-group democracy rather than mass society.
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What has been sketched here is not a utopia. No enlistment posters are up. Through understanding ourselves the future can be shaped without revolution. It is time to confront the division between man and the rest of the nature, between ourselves as animals and as humans, not by the destruction of nature or by return to some dream of the past, but by creating a new civilization. As such, a cynegetic (hunting and its culture) world is not a vision of a lost paradise; it is inevitable, a necessity if we are to survive at all.
Paul Shepard in The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, 1973
Exposing Man’s mind to the laws of Nature may help him discover and apply whatever insight and foresight he possesses for dealing with the problems of relationships to himself and others, and to the universe. This way of thinking about Man and Nature and relationship and wisdom is new to most, and to be of value will require modern patterns of perceiving one’s self and others. New attitudes and behavioural patterns will follow.
It is simpler to conceive such notions than to apply them in everyday life. Nevertheless, it is far easier to reach objectives based upon sound concepts and hypotheses than upon those without basis. Hence the challenge with which Man is generally confronted at this point is to see himself as a biological and metabiological entity, possessing attributes capable of reversing some of the devolutionary trends. There attributes can also be directed and disciplined to facilitated and increase the probability of achieving a greater measure of fulfilment in life that has been possible until now.
Paradoxically, this challenge and hope exist in the face of enigmas more difficult to overcome than ever before, because greater opportunities for fulfillment are matched by correspondingly greater obstacles. For this reason, wisdom, understood as a new kind of strength, is a paramount necessity for Man. Now, even more that ever before, it is required as a basis for fitness, to maintain life itself on the face of this planet, and as an alternative to paths toward alienation or despair.
Jonas Salk in The Survival of the Wisest, 1973
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In a less imperfect world, people might realize that Earth’s problems could be resolved by voluntary population reduction, and would act accordingly before time runs out. That would be amazing and glorious, because humankind would have shown itself able to confront and reject its Darwinian inheritance of aggressive selfishness, its irrational addiction to blind faith, and its withdrawal from reality into political and economic correctness, by exercising its supreme gift: intelligence.
William Stanton: The Rapid Growth of Human Populations 1750 – 2000 (2003)
Thus, our generation confronts the ultimate paradox. We have the power to shape our own future and to make a possible better life for the entire human population. But the same power threatens not only the survival of our species, but the survival of those very qualities which give human life its quality and purpose. The key to the future is our ability to control the growth process by which that future is determined. We must become masters of the growth process if we are not to become its victims. Our present growth patterns are debilitating and self-destructive, based as they are largely on greed and unrelenting competition. It is eating away at the body and soul of our society and will destroy its very fabric if we do not bring it under control. A new approach to growth is the only way to secure the more hopeful, promising future which science and technology now makes possible. In the final analysis, it is the quality of growth that will determine the quality of life.
Maurice F Strong: Growth and the Quality of Life in Ritchie Calder (Ed.): The Future of a Troubled World, 1983
The art of living is always to make a good thing out of a bad thing. Only if we know that we have actually descended into infernal regions where nothing awaits us but “the cold death of society and the extinguishing of all civilized relations,” can we summon the courage and the imagination needed for a “turning around”, a metanoia. This then leads to seeing the world in a new light, namely, as a place where the things modern man continuously talks about and always fails to accomplish can actually be done. The generosity of the Earth allows us to feed all mankind; we know enough about ecology to keep the Earth a healthy place; there is enough room on the Earth, and there are enough materials, so that everybody can have adequate shelter; we are quite competent enough to produce sufficient supplies of necessities so that no one need live in misery. Above all, we shall then see that the economic problem is a convergent problem which has been solved already: we know how to provide enough and do not require any violent, inhuman, aggressive technologies to do so. There is no economic problem and, in a sense, there never has been. But there is a moral problem and moral problems are not convergent, capable of being solved so that future generations can live without effort. No, they are divergent problems, which have to be understood and transcended.
Can we rely on it that a “turning around” will be accomplished by enough people quickly enough to save the modern world? This question is often asked, but no matter what the answer, it will mislead. The answer “Yes” would lead to complacency, the answer “No” to despair. It is desirable to leave these perplexities behind us and get down to work”
E.F.Schumacher: A Guide for the Perplexed, 1977
It is only in the last days of the Cosmic Calender that substantial intellectual abilites have evolved on the planet Earth. The coordinated functioning of both cerebral hemispheres is the tool Nature has provided for our survival. We are unlikely to survive if we do not make full and creative use or our human intelligence.
“We are a scientific civilization,” declared Jacob Bronowski. “That means a civilization in which knowledge and integrity are crucial. Science is only a Latin word for knowledge….. Knowledge is our destiny.”
Carl Sagan: Dragons of Eden , 1977
The question is not, when populations will explode, but when and with which consequences for themselves and for the neighbours and for the economy and the environment of the world they (Third World Countries) will manage the demographic transition.
The principle of such transition is based on European experience and allows no conclusions for the South. The Third World countries are all in a worse situation than Europe at the beginning of the modernization: excessive births and population growth, as normal in parts of the Third World, was never experienced in Europe; and no such big populations, based on which – like in Asia - the population is growing today. Europe could cope with its moderate population explosion because the employment opportunities were growing and the death rate was reduced in accordance with social improvements. In the current Third World however, modern medicine is available in a kind of “technology transfer”; the sudden death reduction appears as a damaging blessing; the population will grow without access to corresponding increase in productivity and nutritional base. The population will grow still more as the parents are dependent on multiple offspring for their retirement.
This will close the vicious circle of poverty which will obstruct the demographical transition. Only true development will open the vicious circle: experienced progress and the realistic hope, the children will have a better life than the parents. Only then, considerations will emerge, to reduce the number of children. The obstructions for demographical transition are the same as the one delaying the general development. This fact was not recognised for a long time, which resulted in a time consuming conflict about the priority of population control or of economic and social modernization. Only a combination of both will bring success.
Josef Schmid in Reymer Klüwer (Editor): Zeitbombe Mensch (Time Bomb Man), 1993.
