Tag: economy

How to read

The reading situation is always changing. In the 21st Century, changes in media (such as the ascendancy of the internet) have deeply affected our modes of reading. Here’s a short list of the main modes:

  • Searching – looking for something very specific in a text or a network of potential information – has been vastly speeded up and extended by access to search engines, as compared to the searching one can do in printed texts.
  • Browsing – meandering casually from text to text (site to site, page to page) on the chance of finding something interesting – is almost the opposite of searching, but has also been facilitated by the internet. It’s no accident that the software used for reading webpages is called a “browser”; it’s optimized for dealing with the miscellaneous. But if you have actually read this far into this page, you’ve entered a different reading mode, either skimming or scanning.
  • Skimming is the speed-reading mode you use for a newspaper or novel or “social media” page, when you just want to get the gist of the information or story without getting deeply involved in the text or expecting every word to be carefully chosen.
  • Scanning is a much more intense and concentrated mode in which you study the text closely without skipping over any of the details. However, even scanning does not necessarily involve the kind of deep immersion in a text that i call
  • Whole-body reading or the experiencing of a turning sign. In order to do that, you have to focus on the dynamic object of the sign through the text, to fully inhabit that universe of discourse.

Using the internet for this last and deepest kind of reading is certainly possible, but the practice seems to get swept aside by the habits of skimming and browsing encouraged by this medium. When we do get immersed in an e-text, it’s often something we found by searching, or something we’ve been directed to by some algorithm based on some database of our browsing habits, and this makes it all too likely that it will confirm our prejudices (the “blinkers of habit”) instead of challenging them. This will discourage critical thinking – which is an important part of experiential or deep reading – unless we make a conscious effort to choose with care what we read and how we read it.

The explosion of claims on our attention, and the resulting frustration, was noted even back in the 20th Century by Stanislaw Lem, in his 1985 review of a 1988 book (published on the moon) called One Human Minute:

Because advertising, with monstrous effectiveness, attributes perfection to everything—and so to books, to every book—a person is beguiled by twenty thousand Miss Universes at once and, unable to decide, lingers unfulfilled in amorous readiness like a sheep in a stupor. So it is with everything. Cable television, broadcasting forty programs at once, produces in the viewer the feeling that, since there are so many, others must be better than the one he has on, so he jumps from program to program like a flea on a hot stove, proof that technological progress produces new heights of frustration.… There had to be a book, then, about what Everybody Else was doing, so that we would be tormented no longer by the doubt that we were reading nonsense while the Important Things were taking place Elsewhere.

That book is imaginary, but in Lem’s review of it, ‘the microscopic capacity of human consciousness is revealed’ (p. 7) to every deep reader who acknowledges his own limitations.

But deep reading also requires ‘the spirit of freedom,’ as Virginia Woolf observed in a Common Reader piece called “How Should One Read a Book?”:

To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions – there we have none.

But to enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot.

Ideally, reading (including viewing, hearing and touching) ought to be a balancing loop in the guidance system – a way of trying out a less familiar perspective on the world, to find out whether it might make a difference to working or playing with it from then on.

review: Power

Richard Heinberg has been researching the central role of energy in civilization for years, and shown how the human addiction to oil has brought us to an unprecedented crisis. His new book gives us a longer and broader perspective on the deeper addiction to power in its physical and social forms. He draws upon insights from biology and anthropology to tell the story of the evolution of power, from the beginnings of life on earth through the development of social hierarchies up to the present, in a very accessible way.

The book’s subtitle is “Limits and prospects for human survival”, and he does explain the radical changes in human habits and systems which must be made in this decade if we are to salvage our planetary life support system along with the better qualities of our collapsing civilization. But given the history of how this situation has evolved, it’s difficult to be honestly optimistic about our prospects. Heinberg’s view is more realistic, for instance in this excerpt from the final chapter:

“There can be no perfect, stable society. Imbalance and impermanence are baked into biological existence. But we are in a particularly explosive moment now. History shows that overconcentrations of physical, economic, military, and political power create instability, and, in the past few decades, humanity has found ways to build and concentrate these kinds of power as never before. The strong likelihood is that we are headed toward what economists glibly call a ‘correction,’ though not just in stock market values but also in population and consumption levels. If we hope to minimize the shock and casualties, we will need to mobilize cooperation and behavior change, aiming to limit our own collective power at a speed and scale that are unprecedented.” [p. 356-7]

This is not a feel-good book, but it is a live-well book that everyone can learn something from.

Zero Carbon

New resource recommendation: Zero Carbon, an excellent weekly newsletter in which climate correspondent Chris Hatch sorts through the kaleidoscope of news, ideas, politics and culture to figure out what’s working in the race against climate change. You can subscribe at the National Observer link above.

This week’s issue begins with a focus on the new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) which says that on the “narrow path” to net zero, “there is no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply.” Needless to say, the fossil fuel industries are not welcoming the news. The newsletter covers some other responses to it and the data behind it.

Consensuality

Once again Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute has given us a concise overview of the situation we’re in (“we” being the whole Earth community) and what we could do to improve it. He outlines four broadly defined approaches to the transformation – choose one (or more) that appeals to you. I recommend it highly as a contribution to the global conversation.

As for my own contribution, i’m now revisiting Chapter 8, on Consensus and Community; Chapters 1 through 7 of Turning Signs 2 are complete as far as they go, and are available both online and in the downloadable version. Comments welcome as always.

A simple way to understand what’s happening … and what to do

We are living in transformative times. The title of this blog post is the title of an essay by Richard Heinberg which is exactly what the title says. I can’t think of anything else i’ve read that says so much that is so important right now in so few words. This is truly essential reading.

Inkling of the day, and Richard Heinberg’s

final point: life is about more than survival.

Collapse and renewal

We’re all wondering how many of us will survive the coronavirus pandemic, but in the longer term, many of us are wondering what remnants of our globalized civilization are likely to survive the collapse that is now under way.

In her 2015 book The Mushroom at the End of the World, anthropologist Anna Tsing addresses the question in her subtitle: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Those “ruins,” by the way, should be pictured not as crumbling buildings like the “ruins” of ancient civilizations, but as the ecosystems that have been systematically ruined by extractive capitalism.

Jeremy Lent also raised the question last fall on his Patterns of Meaning blog, ‘As Society Unravels, the Future Is Up for Grabs’. Here he applies the concept of “the adaptive cycle” to human society.

Scientists have studied the life cycles of all kinds of complex systems—ranging in size from single cells to vast ecosystems, and back in time all the way to earlier mass extinctions—and have derived a general theory of change called the Adaptive Cycle model. This model works equally well for human systems such as industries, markets, and societies. As a rule, complex systems pass through a life cycle consisting of four phases: a rapid growth phase when those employing innovative strategies can exploit new opportunities; a more stable conservation phase, dominated by long-established relationships that gradually become increasingly brittle and resistant to change; a release phase, which might be a collapse, characterized by chaos and uncertainty; and finally, a reorganization phase during which small, seemingly insignificant forces can drastically change the future of the new cycle.

As many other commentators are saying, the shaping of our “recovery” from the pandemic is an opportunity to change the future of the new cycle of civilization. It is clear that many of the people and subsystems of the now-collapsing global system are not going to survive, but chances are we can have some influence on how it all turns out. For more on this cyclical pattern, including diagrams of it and my own reflections on it, visit rePatch ·11 of Turning Signs.

thought for Earth Day

Every living thing on Earth plays a part in the biosphere.

The biosphere is not merely the stage on which we all perform; it is the whole performance.

A fascinating kind of anteater called the pangolin is the only mammal on Earth that has scales. Its scales are its only defense against predators. Unfortunately this defense is useless against the dominant predator on Earth, humankind. (Or as e.e. cummings called it, ‘this busy monster, manunkind.’)

In a human-dominated world, the pangolin’s scales are even worse than useless for its survival, because they have a high “market value,” meaning that too many humans “make a living” supplying that market.

Humans have scales too, but only artificial ones, often used for weighing things that have “market value” – such as pangolin scales. In the gigantically top-heavy artificial monster called “the economy” by its human constructors, pangolin scales far outweigh the lives of pangolins, just as “market value” outweighs the value of life itself, including human life.

Pam Jackson has caught the whole strange scenario in a small painting:

Scales

This has a special meaning on Earth Day 2020, as it’s been suggested that the pangolin might have been a carrier of the virus that jumped to humans to cause the COVID-19 pandemic. The pangolin – poached, trafficked and endangered – is as innocent as the virus itself. If anyone is to blame for the pandemic, it is the humans who “make a living” from an extractive “economy” which is destructive, on an overwhelming scale, to other players in the biosphere. The pandemic is just one symptom of the busy monster in self-destruct mode.

Earth Day should redirect our attention to the natural economy, the economy of the biosphere. As if our lives depended on it – for in truth they do, just like the lives of pangolins, ants and viruses.