by Ibon » Sat 01 Jan 2011, 14:33:25
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SeaGypsy', '
')Psychologicly, I have very strong doubts about our ability to cope with empathy on a grand scale.
The way we have all been drawn into awareness of the sufferings of complete strangers all over the world, coupled with the endless guilt by association of being 'priveleged', is not good for our mental health. Nor is the coupling of this vague disempowering general empathy with only passionately caring about ones immediate kin an ideal state of mind conducive to positive manifestations of endeavour.
I believe we need to extricate ourselves from this uncomfortable non functional mode of existence.
We need to make a real effort at building our own community up and setting real achievable goals.
We need to escape futile guilt and take responsibility for what we can actually do.
The endless blah blah about fixing the system is a tiring waste of precious time.
Start a community garden project, a coparenting school, a land purchase fund collective, any kind of eco biz. Do something cool. It's not too late. Talk to your neighbours. The first stage of loving them.
I would like to comment on two main themes on your post. The model human society based on your experience with aborigines and the need to direct physical and spiritual energy away from the theoretical and apply this energy toward the examples you mentioned at the end of your post.
Like you I also learned a lot from native peoples in my youth mainly Cree Indians in Canada. I also employ only indigenous people on my project in Panama and learn a lot from them even though neither group lives in functional tribal groups today. It is very easy to point to aboriginal or indigenous groups whose lineage remains unchanged back from the Pleistocene and beyond as the model for humans. They represent an unbroken lineage from which we biologically evolved. It's essentially a no brainer to point to this tribal model as the ideal human society. For anyone with a strong ecological training or anthropology background how can we not resonate with this small tribal model and hold it up as the solution and eventual outcome of the collapse of our modern civilization. There is a powerful narrative here; we departed from this tribal model once agriculture, industrialization, discovery of oil propelled us to the current overshoot and dysfunctional lifestyle. This narrative wants to draw to its natural conclusion......collapse and returning to this wholesome tribal societal structure. When you see the societal breakdown, the collapse of biodiversity, the inhumanity of modern consumption lifestyle, the injustices to our fellow man and other species, and you then compare this to our tribal ancestors who lived within carrying capacity you cant help but want to draw this narrative to its natural conclusion.
Now I come to my main point in this post. As much as I personally resonate with this narrative I think it is false, simplistic, and wrong. Why? I believe that modern civilization is far more resilient than the challenges that peak oil, over population, resource depletion, climate change, and ecosystem stresses would indicate.
No doubt we are due for a brutal correction for all the reasons just mentioned. But you really have to stop a moment and ask yourself if these consequences will
break modern civilization or
mold modern civilization.
I see an unbroken lineage from fire, stone tools, domestication of animals, agriculture, industrialization, technology. It is the last two that led to overshoot and resource depletion. The catalysts of consequences will bring us back into carrying capacity but I don't think will break this lineage.
We are an extra ordinary resilient species (Kudzu Ape) and we will incorporate technologies and strategies to respond to the physical consequences of overshoot. Those consequences will also mold us culturally.
The pendulum will swing from globalization at any cost to a focus on community and sustainability. But we will not throw the baby out with the bathwater. We will incorporate technologies and urban living and sustainable aspects of governance and globalization together with knowledge we will draw from our ancestors as we now swing toward localization (not as an ideology but as a direct response to the consequences)
So the second part of your post about applying this knowledge to your local community, to start something and get off the guilt trip and theoretical is sage advice. It is a central theme of the 21st century.
But we need to break this quaint narrative that modern civilization and dense population of humans is going to be this anomaly and represent a dead end cultural development as we fall back to small tribal lifestyles.
We can't put the tribal humpty dumpty back together again. We are hunter gatherers in a deeper sense. We have gathered knowledge and hunted technologies that we will incorporate going forward as the castalyst of consequences unleashes a revolution dragging us down toward carrying capacity and drawing us toward community solutions.
In a deeper time perspective the war, inhumanity, injustice, disease and environmental stresses that will take us down to carrying capacity will be looked back upon one day as the fire that honed the steel of a new cultural paradigm. And that new cultural paradigm will have teased out the solutions of the moral dilemma we touched upon before.
It is too simplistic and really just a fairy tale narrative to see the outcome of human overshoot as a collapse of urban civilization, nation states and no longer any governance beyond a tribal group of 70-500 people. It wont happen. JMHO.
Patiently awaiting the pathogens. Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Ape
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