I basically agree with Brad or maybe the word "hope" is more accurate.
What I would also say is that in all of this there has been no mention of the
alternatives provided by the great American and African civilizations of the
past. Also, most of the great Oriental civilizations that have been mentioned
bear more relationship to the above to than to the present Euro-centered
version. Not to put the Europeans down. They seem to be doing much better at
this than their off springs at the moment.
There is only this raging adolescent called science whose advocates seem like
all adolescents everywhere predicting death and chaos as they are forced to move
from the growth phase into a more mature phase of balance and relationship. In
the last century with it's great scientific attitudes that gave rise to the
Mengeles and the Lenins we should have discovered, by now, that they do not
constitute the whole of reality and in my opinion not even a third. Science, as
Clifford Geertz has discovered for himself, does not tolerate being a part, it
must be the whole or it is garbage. "I want what I want when I want it." Sound
familiar. Well it is going to take time and that is the way it is with adults
and elders and with adolescents who discover for the first time that they are
mortal. I hope we can all get through this together. REH
P.S. the Titanic sunk for a multitude of reasons but all point to an arrogance
about ice that was terminal. It might have behoved them to talk to an
"ignorant" Inuit.
Jay Hanson wrote:
> From: Brad McCormick, Ed.D. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> >> >1. Draw your devastating conclusions from the experience
> >> >of the inperfect democracies we had so far.
> >>
> >> I draw my conclusions from the millions of years of human behavior --
> under
> >> every kind of society that has existed.
> >
> >Classical Athens, Heian Kyoto, Khajuraho [Medieval Cambodia],
> >the circle of the early 19th century American Transcendalists /
> >Unitarians.... There *have* been some (to borrow a phrase from
> >Elsa Morante's novel _History: A novel_) "flowers not weeds".
>
> This point is that ALL human development has had one direction: MORE STUFF.
> No society can last through perpetual declines in standards-of-living -- it
> collapses.
>
> Joseph Tainter, who has studied about two dozen societies that have
> collapsed, points out that energy is the key ingredient. Moreover, the only
> way to avoid dieoff, is through "extreme hardship".
>
> COMPLEXITY, PROBLEM SOLVING,
> AND SUSTAINABLE SOCIETIES,
> by Joseph A. Tainter, 1996
> http://dieoff.org/page134.htm
>
> [snip]
>
> Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will
> be. If our efforts to understand and resolve such matters as global change
> involve increasing political, technological, economic, and scientific
> complexity, as it seems they will, then the availability of energy per
> capita will be a constraining factor. To increase complexity on the basis of
> static or declining energy supplies would require lowering the standard of
> living throughout the world. In the absence of a clear crisis very few
> people would support this. To maintain political support for our current and
> future investments in complexity thus requires an increase in the effective
> per capita supply of energy-either by increasing the physical availability
> of energy, or by technical, political, or economic innovations that lower
> the energy cost of our standard of living. Of course, to discover such
> innovations requires energy, which underscores the constraints in the
> energy-complexity relation.
>
> CONCLUSIONS
> This chapter on the past clarifies potential paths to the future. One
> often-discussed path is cultural and economic simplicity and lower energy
> costs. This could come about through the "crash" that many fear-a genuine
> collapse over a period of one or two generations, with much violence,
> starvation, and loss of population. The alternative is the "soft landing"
> that many people hope for-a voluntary change to solar energy and green
> fuels, energy-conserving technologies, and less overall consumption. This is
> a utopian alternative that, as suggested above, will come about only if
> severe, prolonged hardship in industrial nations makes it attractive, and if
> economic growth and consumerism can be removed from the realm of ideology.
>
> The more likely option is a future of greater investments in problem
> solving, increasing overall complexity, and greater use of energy. This
> option is driven by the material comforts it provides, by vested interests,
> by lack of alternatives, and by our conviction that it is good. If the
> trajectory of problem solving that humanity has followed for much of the
> last 12,000 years should continue, it is the path that we are likely to take
> in the near future.
>
> [ The entire piece is archived at http://dieoff.org/page134.htm ]
>
> -------------------------
>
> Oil is going to "peak" in about seven years.
> http://www.forbes.com/forbes/98/0615/6112084a.htm
>
> Jay
