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At 10:30 25/03/99 -0600, Nan wrote:
>Is an intellectual trying to figure out a total vision of how to get to
>sustainability an oxymoron?
> Turner: "we did not have one plausible treatise
> on how we could get to a sustainable, peaceful future."
>
>Maybe my focus should be on healing myself from the addictions of the
>Dominator paradigm.
>
** Yes and no (as usual with generalisations and other
over-simplifications). Yes, those intellectuals who expect to, themselves
or with a few others, figure out a total vision how to get to
sustainability, are showing their hubris and/or are caught up in the
Dominator paradigm. Ecology (and even physics) is much too random and even
chaotic for _any_ plan or any leader to be useful for more than the first
few steps, i.e. setting the direction.
But _no_, intellectuals trying to figure out how to get to sustainability
is not so blind-stupid as to be called an oxymoronic cliché.
It just has to be re-done season by season, year by year, decade by
decade, taking into account all the real-life that has made itself evident
as those times pass.
** "Great visions", "Grand plans" and other such leadership methods may be
conforting to ordinary people, but if they aren't continually changed to
fit with the way thing actually turn out, they will fail.
** What faces us isn't something ordinary people can leave to leaders to
figure-out and implement. (the Dominator paradigm.) It's the ordinary
people, us, who have to go through the tiresome and difficult (for most)
process of figuring out what in our lives and expectations has to be
changed or got-rid-of, and what is so basic to who-we-are that we will hold
on to it come what may. With the goal in mind of reducing consumption to a
sustainable level.
** I am sure of what I've just said; I'm much less sure about the next.
[Anne Schaef:]
> " Alienation from our spirituality allows us to commit all manner
>of destruction on ourselves, other people and the environment.
> A new paradigm must, by necessity, be one that facilitates our
reconnection with our spirituality. In the new paradigm, there is a
recognition and an assumption that we are spiritual beings. This
assumption accepts the reality that we are, by nature, connected with what
we have called God and all of creation. It is through our addictions that
we shut off this awareness and alienate ourselves from this natural oneness."
> (Anne Wilson Schaef, Beyond Therapy, Beyond Science. p.304)
>
>
** A few decades ago, I realised that the facts and real-life observations
are reliable but the explanations of "why it is so" are suspect; I try hard
to remove them from any description. Including being suspicious of the
current Physics theories, which shouldn't really be called laws. They are
just useful, time-tested explanations.
** Talk of spirituality to me obscures or at least dresses-up the fact
that humans have separated themselves from the real world, "alienate[d]
ourselves from this natural oneness."
** _I_ don't find it of any positive value. I regard it as likely to be a
red-herring, so people go chasing off after greater spirituality in their
lives rather than getting down to the nitty-gritty of changing their
individual lives to drastically reduce their impact on the earth.
** It's a hard, tiresome job. I suppose some people can only do it by
using props like spirituality, Gaia, God and all of creation ...
I'd better stop here.
David.
** http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/6783/index.html#top
David MacClement <davd@geocities.com> , or davd@tao.ca for secure mail
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/3142/index.html#top