deeply interesting not sure I agree with all of the details but gist of it is intuitively very appealing kind of article- Basically he says give up hope, but does he really mean give up unrealistic hopes in order to make more realistic hopes and plans, or does he mean give up hope and somehow morph into a non-human who isnt temperamentally incapable of not hoping beyond their imagination? Either hes unsure or hasnt finished making up his mind on that or hes playing both sides of the hope/no-hope tussle in order to get people to think about it more independently and emotionally accept it more deeply. It seems on the surface to contradict Common Cause valuesandframes.orgs conclusions, which were drawn from real data, but I guess/ interpret that its not telling people to use fear and despair in campaigning exactly, but to use honest realistic acceptance of grief and collective and personal guilt and get people to give up the kind of denial which pretends to be hope - e.g. the MH17 plane crash victims families still hoping and believing that they will be found alive eventually. Because of my background, I cant help comparing it to emotionally similar feeling religious bits - ideas like the way of purgation, the cataphatic way/ via negativa, William James in Varieties of Religious Experience pp.187,212 and 269 https://docs.google/document/d/1jood_NjNsTZHImw2vZ5hxbRbwrurbhlJnd1YqRS6oGU/edit?usp=sharing and the faith vs. works debate - is hope (closely related to faith) really genuine hope when it doest inspire an at least semi-realistic plan or at least a genuine attempt to make a plan? Hes most probably right that the time for talking about sustainability is over - weve gone way too far past too many tipping points, we initially caused this phase of climate change but now global climatic processes take over, and its far beyond our control: methane hydrates are exploding under the sea bed and out of the permafrost leaving 60m wide craters - the time for a recycling milk bottles level of response was probably about the beginning of the Industrial Revolution era (before plastic milk bottles were even invented). Now realistically all we can do is manage our own decline as graciously and peacefully and relatively painlessly as possible, and stop making it any worse, if only to heal our own grief and guilt about what weve done, as it almost certainly cannot be more than a token restitution. Im not convinced by his anti-technology bias, but I also dont think its intrinsically relevant to his main point, or even his side point about valuing wilderness and wildness for their own sake, i.e. biophilia, not as merely instrumental to human utility. nytimes/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-and-he-feels-fine.html?_r=0
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 08:25:44 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015