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neonvincent
My comment from Dark Age America: The End of the Market Economy.
Pinku-Sensei said...Your contrast of the market economy with the economy of barter and mutual obligation in feudalism reminds me of your taxonomy of the primary economy of production and extraction, the secondary economy of manufacturing, and the tertiary economy of finance. I now realize that it's not just finance, but all forms of intermediation that compose the tertiary economy.
Also, your account of how the current economy is doomed to fall with the civilization that it is part of and how a new, more sustainable economic system will rise in its place fits with one of the key characteristics of ecological economists I pass along to my students: The current economic system is unreformable in order to make it more sustainable. It will have to be completely replaced, either by building a parallel system, which Joel Salatin advocates and government blocks, much to his frustration, hence his complaint that 'everything he wants to do is illegal,' or by waiting for the current system to collapse and having a new system grow organically. That contrasts with the ecological economists, who think reforming the system is worth doing. These are the same "bright green" people that you wish to make a bargain with. Got any takers on that?
Speaking of collapse and decline, last week was a bad one for the supporters of private spaceflight. First, an Antares supply rocket exploded during launch, then SpaceShipTwo crashed during a test. Fortunately, a Russian cargo ship arrived and the ISS is supplied through the end of the year. As for Justin Bieber's quarter-million dollar thrill ride to the edge of space, that will have to wait.
As for reform and protest against the current system, today was the Million Mask Mark to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day. I'm sure that resulted in some fireworks, pun intended.
Greer: Pinku-sensei, exactly. It's all very well to talk about reforming the system, but that would require the people who profit from the system as it is, and generally have a lot of control over it, to relinquish their profits and hand over control to the reformers. Will that happen? Not in a month of Sundays.
My comment from Dark Age America: The Hoard of the Nibelungs.
Pinku-Sensei said...I recognized your central story about buried gold as an expanded version of one I'd read on Ugo Bardi's blog a few years back. He described how the wealthy from the terminal (pun intended) Roman Empire had buried gold coins in hopes that they would recover their value some day and then compared it to people who held rental properties but boarded them up instead of renting them, holding them off the market until rents increased again. Bardi did mention that the "some day" eventually returned for the value of gold--about a thousand years too late. He didn't expand on how those hoards of gold would bring hordes of bandits, causing more misfortune than good fortune for the would-be survivalists of the Fifth Century C.E.
On the subject of pointing out the counterproductive nature of gold and the nature of money as shared belief instead of something objectively real, I wonder how many angry comments you're going to read (and probably not pass through moderation because of swearing) from goldbugs who believe that money is real and that gold is the most dependable and natural form of real money. Or will it be like my musings about gifts of pink lingerie to fairies a couple of weeks ago, where it was just you and me?
@Marinhomelander "[T]heir various sideshows that keep people distracted. i.e. Pro sports. Too many American men worship at the Temple of Ball. Too few practice common sense observation and preparation in their lives. There isn't really enough time or residual mental energy to do both."
Stop the circuses, and people might notice that they're running out of bread. However, I suspect that they'll want their circuses back first. I've been observing for years that, if one interrupts their entertainment for long enough, Americans and others in the industrialized world will clamor to stop whatever is in the way of their amusement, unless it is itself sufficiently diverting, and have their fun back. That's why Detroit, in the middle of bankruptcy, had their summer fireworks show and holiday parade continue. As for the cessation of entertainment, including sports, resulting in an awakening, don't count on it. It's too easy to keep the show going right now. That's why both our entertainment and what passes for our news consists of zombies, gangsters, and sideshows.
Greer: Pinku-sensei, oh, I expect the gold bugs to show up in force. I remember what kind of a ruckus got stirred up a while back when I pointed out that the price curve of gold over the last fifteen years shows a classic bubble-and-bust pattern.
My comments on Facts, Values, and Dark Beer.
As I wrote, if he's not reading you, he should be, and maybe you should reciprocate, if you aren't aware of De Young already. The press release includes links to his profile page and to an article in Frontiers in Psychology titled "Some behavioral aspects of energy descent: How a biophysical psychology might help people transition through the lean times ahead" in case you or others wish to follow through. De Young's CV indicates that he's been working on this subject for years.
Speaking of preparing people for lean times ahead, I caught a showing of the 2011 documentary "Prophets of Doom" on H2 (History Channel 2) Sunday. Among the featured experts were James Howard Kunstler, the late Michael Ruppert, economist Dr. Nathan Hagens, author John Cronin, and computer scientist Dr. Hugo De Garis. Each spoke about their scenarios for the collapse of civilization.
What I found most interesting was when they had mutually contradictory ideas about the end of industrial civilization and the resulting clash. One such was De Garis describing his fears of The Singularity. I didn't think that would go over well with the rest of the guests and particularly with Kunstler and Ruppert. Sure enough, Kunstler told De Garis that he thought that the resources and finances needed to support the research for artificial intelligence would dry up before the technology reached that point. The result was that De Garis came away convinced that the other issues were far more pressing than his particular worry. In particular, he became most concerned about water shortages. I suspect that if you had been on the panel, you'd have said something even stronger, as I recall artificial intelligence was one of three technologies you considered impossible or just utterly impractical in "The next ten billion years," the others being nuclear fusion and interstellar travel.
11/19/14, 7:59 PM
Pinku-Sensei said...On another note, io9 posted an article about what looks like a false start for civilization, How Farming Almost Destroyed Ancient Human Civilization. It describes the formation of mega-villages like Çatalhöyük in Turkey and Basta in Jordan between 7500 BCE to 5700 BCE, then their abandonment. Settlements of that size, which could have held thousands of people, were not re-established until Brak and Uruk were founded about 2,000 years later. Unlike later urban centers, which were abandoned because their populations outstripped their resources, one expert quoted in the article thought that they collapsed because their populations outstripped their belief systems. Now, that's an interesting thesis relevant to the project of your blog.
My journeys around the web have found two other items from Southern Illinois University that might be of interest to you and your readers. First, ‘Toil and Rubble’ will explore endings . It advertised a piece of performance art, “Toil and Rubble: Media in Ruins.” According to Lindsay Greer, a doctoral student in communication studies who co-directed the production, “this is a show about endings, resisting them, and in the meantime, living.” that topic sounds familiar; also, any relation? Second, an article germane to last month's "The Buffalo Wind," Researchers study bison return to Illinois. The Nature Conservancy has re-introduced bison to Illinois, trucking 30 animals from Iowa, Missouri, and South Dakota into the Nachusa Grasslands. The Buffalo Wind is starting to blow already.
Greer: Pinku-sensei, I saw de Young's paper -- if he's a reader of mine he hasn't written to me, but he may well have reached the same conclusions himself. They seem perfectly obvious to me. ;-) Many thanks for the links.
Mary/Magicalthyme: Pinku-Sensei, if you follow your own links to De Young's paper, you will find he quotes and links to JMG as a source. I read through part of his paper and then couldn't take much more. He states that that behavioral psychologists were behind the "green consumer" movement. My suggestion to him is get himself outside of his mental box by replacing the term "consumer" with "people" or "human being."
I have a vague memory of a time when at least on tv news people were called people, instead of consumers (or "human resource units). Personally, I resent the change.
Ervino Cus said...(PART II)
Pinku-Semsei, onething and Yupped objections, are, IMO, in the same vein: they object that *based on what we know now* the future evolution of the T/Sm will only be, in the best case, a refining of the actual techniques. But, IMO, this is the same kind of reasoning that where utilized in the late '800 to say that "all that have to be discovered has been" and now all we have to do is catalogue the discoveries already made. What I mean is that we cannot say what, using the S/Tm, will become of our species tomorrow (in a "Singularity" context, if you wish to use this frame of reference) based on what we, with our *actual* vision, can imagine. Limiting our approach to the future in this way lead to the "flying machines with flapping wings" of the late '800 popular iconography.
And, yes, I know that very probably I will be "pushing daises" from a lot of years if/when this will become possible, but, again, this is not about "me & my toys" as someone said last week, but about the evolutive possibilities of the entire human species.
Last but not least, where I totally agree with you is when you say "it may well be that the most important thing that can be done by people who value science and technology is to figure out what can be preserved through the difficult times ahead, and do their best to see that these things reach the waiting hands of the future". But this will presuppose that our species WILL have any kind of future in which this knowledge could be retrieved and used. And a collapse as the one you postulate (and to which I too, unfortunately, agree is in the making) makes this seems to me quite dubious (I mean: do you really think, for example, that the hundreds of nuclear reactors will all be disposed of in a regulate way when the push come to shove?).
I hope with this post to have made myself clear about why I ask "why bother" if our actual civilization become an impossibility due to the demise of our actual T/Sm-based system. In my opinion it is so hard to "falling back" (cfr. "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson) both from this T/Sm *present* AND from the kind of *future* the T/Sm paradigm could bring to our species, and so harsh the alternative that is realistically imaginable will supplant them, that I really don't see any reason in the awaiting struggle to survive, even if any kind of survival will be possible, to, at max, have a "quiet" life of sheparding to look at. "Testosterone poisoning", as someone said last week? Hubris? That is not for me to valuate: anyone is, obviously, free to have its own opinion of mine.
What I recognize now is that last week probably I made a "dialectic" error in using the "free pillaging for all" metaphor in my original post (it was an impulse post, not a planned one), but, again, it was ONLY intended as a "strong" example of to what IMO could become the "new normal" in some years (cfr. "Soft Apocalypse" by Will McIntosh; "A boy and his Dog" by Harlan Hellison, etc.), NOT my recommendation for a blueprint for future actions.
Ok, sorry for the long "rant", but I dunno if I will have in the next days time enough for following the flux of comments...
Cheers
Ervino
Stephen Heyer said...Sort of an interesting article at http://io9.com/how-farming-almost-destroyed-human-civilization-1659734601.
In it Annalee Newitz argues that:
“In a sense, agriculture was a technology that came before human civilization was ready. It gave humans the means to grow into large settlements and proto-cities. But we'd spent tens of thousands of years as nomads before that, and weren't yet ready to abandon our ancient beliefs that no family should ever accumulate more than its neighbors. As a result, our earliest experiment with urbanism ended in failure. When the going got rough, with bad harvests and disease, humans preferred to abandon their nascent urban creations because we had not yet developed a social structure that would allow us to cope with the difficulties of city life.”
I kind of wonder if something like that is happening now, I wonder if our political and social systems are utterly incapable of dealing with the bewildering, complex, near Godhead science and technology, not to mention parasitic financial system, we already have, let alone the accelerating rush, the mad race against collapse, to birth, if not a singularity, at least an event horizon by the middle of this century.
In other words, I wonder if a lot of the problems we are running headlong into, such as resource depletion, are problems a better, more effective political and social system could deal with fairly easily.
Oh yes! And there are some offers of such “superior systems”. I have contacts who hang around the edges of what some (conspiracy enthusiasts) might call the Illuminati and solutions do get suggested, the problem being that even they baulk at the question of what happens to the surplus population, which is most of it.
NOTE: I just noticed that Pinku-Sensei has already posted on this article. Still, great minds and all that stuff…
My comment from Dark Age America: The Suicide of Science.
"Those readers who are old enough may even remember when continental drift was being denounced as the last word in pseudoscience, a bit of history that a number of science writers these days claim never happened."
I not only remember those days, I teach my students about them as part of a lecture on the nature of scientific revolutions. Continental drift was the victim of the third line of attack on heterodox ideas that you've described at your other blog the past two months. There was no accepted mechanism for it that conformed to accepted knowledge, so it was rejected for decades until new evidence from new scientific instruments was interpreted by new people to the discipline of geology to come up with one. Reinterpreted as plate tectonics, it's now the paradigm of geology, the central organizing idea in the field.
That rejection and later acceptance of continental drift forms the basis of an anecdote in An Inconvenient Truth, which I'm showing to my students next week. Al Gore uses it to introduce the quote attributed to Mark Twain, "It isn't what you don't know; it's what you know that ain't so that gets you into trouble."
"What Oswald Spengler called the Second Religiosity, the resurgence of religion in the declining years of a culture, could have taken many forms in the historical trajectory of industrial society; at this point I think it’s all too likely to contain a very large dollop of hostility toward science and complex technology."
That's already happening with creationism and it's beginning to show up on the right as hostility to climate science and social science and on the left as hostility to GMOs, although the secular left has yet to start using religion to justify its position. When Discovery News has to frame its explanation of radiometric dating in the context of a debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham of the Creation Museum, it's obvious that the side hostile to science is strong.
(Pinku-Sensei posting from my LiveJournal account)
Greer: Pinku-sensei, exactly -- I have several denunciations of continental drift in my book collection, and all of them rely on the fallacy of "if the cause isn't known, the effect didn't happen." It's frankly eerie watching rationalists deny their own past, e.g., by insisting that the rejection of continental drift didn't happen. "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia..."
