I want to leave my country without leaving my home. Kirkpatrick Sale We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden. Joni Mitchell A couple months ago, my wife and I finally got down to Costa Rica on vacation, for 10 glorious days. We have been trying to get there for a while now, but you know… pandemic and post-pandemic and all that. As we … Continue reading Our Civilization’s Crisis of Place
Like all creatures, humans have made their way in the world so far by trial and error; unlike other creatures, we have a presence so colossal that error is a luxury we can no longer afford. The world has grown too small to forgive us any big mistakes. Ronald Wright Because the future has no image, the utopian imagination must reclaim, must resurrect, past ruins … Continue reading Three C-Words We Need to Embrace: Contraction, Community & Cleanup
The order which has been taken for granted suddenly appears queer and contingent. There is an appearance of the contingency of order. This is the main value of utopias. At a time when everything is blocked by systems which have failed but which cannot be beaten…utopia is our resource. The utopia seems to say something plausible, but it also says something that is crazy. By … Continue reading Recapitulation: How to Save the World
To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment….would result in the demolition of society. Karl Polanyi The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. Antonio Gramsci As the planet flounders and fails under … Continue reading The Great Interregnum
The development of new, alternative perspectives define utopia’s most basic function. May we not say then that imagination itself – through its utopian function – has a constitutive role in helping us to rethink the nature of our social life? Is not utopia – this leap outside – the way in which we radically rethink what is family, what is consumption, what is authority, what is religion and so … Continue reading Avoiding Armageddon: (2) Cracking the utopia code
If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and finisher. Abraham Lincoln In a pair of earlier posts about Rescuing the Future, we looked at the competing delusions on offer from our mainstream political camps, and how Covid has laid waste to these fantasies, leaving us floundering and exhausted. We are mired in an almost cosmic sense of “stuckness,” a foreboding that … Continue reading Avoiding Armageddon: (1) How to circumvent the Polarization Industrial Complex
Our way of life doesn’t need to be saved. The planet needs to be saved from our way of life. Lierre Keith (Bright Green Lies, 2021) In Part 1, we looked the landscape of our bankrupt popular visions of the future, visions that have been exposed as detached from reality, as Covid, Trumpism, and ecological destruction have shredded any shared sense that things might ever … Continue reading Rescuing the Future – Part 2
What if this ongoing fear of ‘collapse’ … is a narrative designed to quell a worse fear: that things might not collapse, but continue like this? That the Earth’s final wild frontiers may be tamed and diluted, ravaged and destroyed, and that we would not care much because we were too busy following the logic of our narrative to its endpoint, becoming our machines – … Continue reading Rescuing the Future – Part 1
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at. Oscar Wilde For so many of us, the couple form and the job wind up bearing the weight of all of our hopes and dreams and need for human contact, and they were never meant to bear that weight. We need human relationships that extend beyond the romantic or … Continue reading BHB: Bigger Home Bases – Reasons why we need to start living in larger groups now
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. Albert Einstein We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are. Talmudic Proverb Many thinkers…have argued that studying philosophy is learning how to die. If that’s true, then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age — for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. … Continue reading Utopia Now! Model communities & UBI: our last off-ramps to a sane, realistic future
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