Consciousness and Civilization

[Lou Gold]

Santeri,

You are playing word games again. Expanding the citizenship realm and its rules balancing liberty and responsibility is not the same 'scaling up' as in spreading petro chemical agriculture monocrop agriculture to the world. There's a difference between one-size-for-all scaling-up and defending localized diversity through respect for all.

[Lou Gold]

I agree that if scale is the problem as such, we are in big trouble and hopeless dead end. World peace is a scaling problem. Iroquois Confederation was a step in scaling process towards world peace.

Lou, Cursed be the Peacemaker?

World peace is a scaling up of respect for diversity and not a one way fits all. This is the difference making the difference.

[SanteriSatama]

Santeri,

You are playing word games again. Expanding the citizenship realm and its rules balancing liberty and responsibility is not the same 'scaling up' as in spreading petro chemical agriculture monocrop agriculture to the world. There's a difference between one-size-for-all scaling-up and defending localized diversity through respect for all.

Yeah, didn't read carefully enough all the various meanings of "scaling", as the monocrop of my thought is stuck on the track of scaling what is good in local community to global level, into human size world peace.

But mysterious ways and so on, agriculture and fossil energy all part of the process we are living. Local diversity has been largely a tribe calling themselves The humans/The people in their language, and others not or at least less so. The problem we face today is in consensus terms overdoing the coevolution with annual hay plants and not knowing how to stop. .

[Lou Gold]

But mysterious ways and so on, agriculture and fossil energy all part of the process we are living. Local diversity has been largely a tribe calling themselves The humans/The people in their language, and others not or at least less so. The problem we face today is in consensus terms overdoing the coevolution with annual hay plants and not knowing how to stop. .

Anthropocentric advancing/returning to biocentric. A great mysteriousness.

[David_Sundaram]

But mysterious ways and so on, agriculture and fossil energy all part of the process we are living. Local diversity has been largely a tribe calling themselves The humans/The people in their language, and others not or at least less so. The problem we face today is in consensus terms overdoing the coevolution with annual hay plants and not knowing how to stop. .

Anthropocentric advancing/returning to biocentric. A great mysteriousness.

'Mysteriousness' is 'airy-fairy' (IMO), Lou.

'Shamans' (including Ramana types) whose 'minds' have been 'blown' are avenues to alternate possibilities/realities. What 'we' - who are really 'here' 'now' in this 'reality' need most, IMO, are engineer types who can design and spur people to implement practical solutions to current 'nature'-consequent problem-disasters as diagnosed (this is 'gnosis', fella) in my book:

"There were [past tense, Brother!] times, such as the period during which we were hunter-gatherers and simple herders, when rela­tively limited perspective and short-term design, governed by the instinctual imperative to “be fruitful and multiply,” were indeed sufficient. In a world where dominance has not yet been established by any particular species, creative purpose is well-served by general efforts towards material productivity and biological reproduction. Kept from over­expanding by inability to prevail, populations remain in dynamic balance. When no particular group monopolized the stage, the stream of Life moved forward smoothly, without interruption.

But [Butt to you, Brother!] drastic consequences ensued once we attained and consolidated a position of unrivaled ascendancy (as one species or another was bound to eventually, given Life’s inherent ‘upward’ aspiration). With others no longer able to functionally constrain our growth, we have since then repeatedly expanded past the point that our ecosystem could regeneratively support and sustain. Severe crises have contin­ued to recur as the needs and desires of increasing numbers of us have cyclically exhausted the productive capacity of our environment, precipitating ecological disasters and massive populational deletions. Again and again, as now once more, we have found ourselves caught in a tightening net, faced with life-or-death prospects in increasingly com­petitive relationship with one another, as available resources become insufficient."

and:

"Events and trends of this and recent centuries highlight the escalating process. As individuals and groups continue to multiply and aspire to ever greater power and attainment in the context of a finite setting, in addition to increasing levels of stress, more and more suffer unwelcome privation.a As returns gradually diminish, more and more have to work harder and harder to make a decent living;
and fewer and fewer of those who are functionally dependent are adequately provided for and protected (witness the plight of so many of our children!).

As exploitation becomes exhaustive, those at a competitive disadvantage sink into poverty and become increasingly malnourished and ill-effected by environmental pollution. Not just materially; analogous trends are evi­denced in realms of Mind and Spirit. The texture of emotion and awareness becomes more and more night­marish. Even­tually, all hell breaks loose—anomie, anxiety and frustration spread and build into an epidemic of loneliness, paranoia and rage, and finally explode, with more and more people trying to escape hopelessness, in an avalanche of insane desperation.

Synchronously, relationships break down. As people feel deprived or threat­ened, immediate self-interest eclipses empathy based on mutual identification. Respect and good­will fall by the wayside. Personal desires are opportunistically asserted as valid, even as their equivalents in others are adamantly rejected as unwarranted impositions.

Sociopathology proliferates. Love becomes a mere charade; more and more often, fanciful attraction just leads to a bed of thorns. Marriages more frequently fall apart; proportionally fewer true unions are formed. Homes become battlegrounds; family life degenerates into a horror-show, full of ill will and discontent. Parents become increasingly negli­gent and abusive; children more rebellious and insolent. Cultural transmission is disrupted as the young and the old become mutually unsympathetic, each begrudging the special considerations and opportunities the other, by virtue of organic status, should be afforded. Even institutional settings specifically designed to promote growth and well-being become wastelands, as more and more functionaries don’t truly care for their charges and their charges become increasingly dysfunctional and vindictive in response.

It should come as no surprise. As individuals and groups press up against and are reciprocally pressured by others, not of their liking or choosing, the desire to have and the fear of being had catalytically combine to spark distrust and inflame antagonism. In such context, some behave like lone wolves; others like dogs gone mad. Most, however, join in unholy alliance, not united by love of Life but by shared greed and common aversions.

Not recognizing [not fully IMO, Brother!] the desire for self-enhancement itself to be the underlying cause of the dissatisfaction and distress they experience and encounter, individuals and groups project blame outward, rationalizing that they and theirs are (or would be, if they didn’t vigilantly ensure other­wise) insufficiently given to and excessively taken advantage of. Denying their own duplicity and viewing others as par­ticularly villainous, as circumstances deteriorate, they justify uncharitability and deceit as legitimate means of getting ahead, and treachery and the wreaking of vengeance as fair ways of getting even.

Mutually beneficial arrangements for the sharing and exchange of labor and its fruits consequently break down. Alliance against alliance, ideology against ideology, ethnic group against ethnic group, class against class, and newcomers against the establishment, as well as in-groups against the outcast within them, rivalries become so cut­throat that enmity develops between people, wherever categorically different. Whether hypocritically hidden or openly done, incidences of criminal dereliction and abuse become more insidious, more violational, more widespread, and more frequent.

Recurrently, at the tail end of a period of relative 'abundance' during which all sorts of developments tend to flourish and proliferate, a dominant but unlearned species such as ours experiences an evolutionary crisis characterized by extremes of the forementioned abominations. Not as simply as the collapse of a weakened structure or the bursting of an overly distended balloon, more like earthquake activity and volcanic explosions, the growth of the complex of our pressures past the limits of multifaceted ecosystemic con­tainment occasions destructive disequilibrium in a series of episodes, with ones less catastrophic bracketing holocausts of major proportions.

And, unfortunately, as our capabilities naturally expand and increase, to the degree they continue to be one-sidedly deployed, they serve to magnify the scale and extent of the atrocities that are unleashed."

[Lou Gold]

'Mysteriousness' is 'airy-fairy' (IMO), Lou.

I guess that baiting with dismissive language in order to have something to hang your texts on is an unalterable habit.

Exploring the great mysteriousness with curiosity, care and respect is precisely what good science does. This is hardly 'airy-fairy'. Engineering with the intention to control must follow precautionary principles or be vulnerable to disruptive unforeseen consequences, as when invasion/disturbances of native forests unleashes emergent diseases. Part of honoring the mysteriousness is to grok that creativity is both constructive and destructive and to take full responsibility for the consequences. This requires a lot of careful attention, humility and loving kindness.

[Lou Gold]

David,

With regard to your text, truly practical solutions are local, which is why I so admire the views of Wendell Berry who I often cite. And, sure, to ignore the precautionary principle at the scale of a predatory species and culture inevitably leads to an initiatory apocalypse or baptism by fire.