We are hurtling toward a day of ecological reckoning. We should have acted many years ago to contain the damage and build a bridge to a different kind of civilization. Now we are faced with an increased population, worse pollution, dwindling resources, progressive biological destruction, much greater complexity, compounding debt, and enormous inertia in the system—a nexus of problems that have no separate solutions, only an aggregate solution requiring a total revolution in our way of life.
As generals have learned, even the best war plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy, but having planned is essential, because it forces you to imagine different scenarios and to prepare for the worst. In other words, planning is an inoculation against stupefaction and panic, so when things do not go according to plan, you are less likely to lose your head and quicker to make the necessary adjustments.
Gibbon: it was “the loss of freedom, of virtue, and of honour,” not the barbarian invasions, that doomed the [Roman] empire of the West.
I frequently emphasise that both hemispheres are involved in absolutely everything we do. It cannot, however, be an argument against hemisphere differences.
[T]here are emergent phenomena from the whole interconnected system at the hemisphere level, and neuroscience increasingly recognises that we should think in terms of complex widespread networks.
[James] Fowler’s work examines religion, in the broadest sense of that complex term, as the way in which we think about and relate to the ultimate nature of existence. Under that definition, even many forms of modern atheism and naturalism are really better classified as modernist forms of religious expression (Stage Four in Fowler’s construction). After all, they often represent strong conclusions about the ultimate nature of being upon which whole systems of cultural rules, norms, and ethics are constructed.
It will be a long time before we know whether the protests of 2020 can come anywhere close to fulfilling their ambitions—not just to change policing and criminal justice in America, but also to bring full equality to Black Americans. Because structures of oppression are much too big for any one of us to budge, in a sense white people are, as usual, off the hook. Systemic criticism produces gestural politics. During the pandemic the San Francisco Board of Education took on the project of changing the names of Abraham Lincoln High School, Franklin D. Roosevelt Middle School, and dozens of other “problematically” named schools, while keeping isolated and demoralized children out of all schools, whatever their names. Mastheads and tables of contents changed, pictures and statues were taken down, glass ceilings shattered, but no one honestly expected to do much about the material conditions of misery.
Before Montesquieu’s discovery, the only principle of change connected with forms of government was change for the worse, the perversion that would transform an aristocracy (the government of the best) into an oligarchy (the government of a clique for the interest of the clique), or overturn a democracy that had degenerated into ochlocracy (mob rule) into tyranny.
The doctrine which I am maintaining is that the whole concept of materialism only applies to very abstract entities, the products of logical discernment. The concrete enduring entities are organisms, so that the plan of the whole influences the very characters of the various subordinate organisms which enter into it.
Four different kinds of violent ruptures have flattened inequality: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics.
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