/tag/transition

19 quotes tagged 'transition'

Publisher: Zero Books (2014)

Publisher: Founders House (2015)

That movement [towards sustainability] was backed by a loose coalition with diverse and often conflicting goals, and it faced strident opposition from a large sector of the public, but it had the support of government officials who were worried about the price of dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and who also felt the need of politicians to appear to be doing something about the crisis du jour, which at that point was the high cost of energy. Some members of both parties opposed the movement, though others on both sides of the aisle backed it; some corporate interests opposed it, while others recognized that alternative energy just might turn out to be the next big thing. The entire movement, however, was based all along on the gamble that the American public would be willing to tighten its belt and plunge into the transition to an ecotechnic society even when the bills started coming due in earnest. \n On the other side of the game was a coterie of Republican politicians and strategists who guessed that when push came to shove, the American public would crumple. When a chapter of accidents put their candidate into the White House, they bet the future of their party on that guess, and won. The election that mattered here wasn't Reagan's relatively narrow victory in 1980, but his landslide in 1984, when most of the nation registered its approval of a policy shift that spared them the costs of the transition to sustainability. It was after the latter election that the axe came down on funding for appropriate tech, and Woodsy Owl's iconic 'Give a hoot - don't pollute!' ads vanished from the airwaves.

225-226

Grandiose visions of vast renewable-energy buildouts and geoengineering projects on a global scale, of the kind being hawked so ebulliently these days by the prophets of eternal business as usual, fit awkwardly with the reality that a great many industrial nations can no longer afford to maintain basic infrastructures or to keep large and growing fractions of their populations from sliding into desperate poverty. The choice that I discussed in last week's post, reduced to its hard economic bones, was whether we were going to put what remained of our stock of fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources into maintaining our current standard of living for a while longer, or whether we were going to put it into building a livable world for our grandchildren. \nThe great majority of us chose the first option, and insisting at the top of our lungs that of course we could have both did nothing to keep the second from slipping away into the realm of might-have-beens. The political will to make the changes and accept the sacrifices that would be required to do anything else went missing in action in the 1980s and hasn't been seen since. That's the trap that was hidden in the crisis of our age: while the costs of transition were still small enough that we could have met them without major sacrifice, the consequences of inaction were still far enough in the future that most people could pretend they weren't there; by the time the consequences were hard to ignore, the costs of transition had become too great for most people to accept - and not too longer after that, they had become too great to be met at all.

204-205

It's worth being precise here: for the rest of the time our species endures, we will have to deal with much more sharply constrained energy supplies than we've had handy over the last few centuries. That doesn't mean that our descendants will be condemned to huddle in caves until the jaws of extinction close around them; I've argued at quite some length in one of my books that the endpoint of the mess we're currently in, centuries from now, will mostly likely be the emergence of ecotechnic societies - societies that maintain relatively high technology on the modest energy and resource inputs that can be provided by renewable sources. I've suggested, there and elsewhere, that there's quite a bit that can be done here and now to lay the foundations for the ecotechnic societies of the far future. I've also tried to point out that there's quite a bit that can be done here and now to make the unraveling of the age of abundance less traumatic than it will otherwise be.

141-142

The skills, resources, and lifeways needed to get by in a disintegrating industrial society are radically different from those that made for a successful and comfortable life in the prosperous world of the recent past, and a great many of the requirements of an age of decline come with prolonged learning curves and a high price for failure. Starting right away to practice the skills, assemble the resources, and follow the lifeways that will be the key to survival in a deindustrializing world offers the best hope of getting through the difficult years ahead with some degree of dignity and grace. \n Collapse now, in other words, and avoid the rush. \n There's a fair amount of subtlety to the strategy defined by those words. As our society stumbles down the ragged curve of its decline, more and more people are going to lose the ability to maintain what counts as a normal lifestyle - or, rather, what counted as a normal lifestyle in the recent past, and is no longer quite so normal today as it once was. Each new round of crisis will push more people further down the slope; minor and localized crises will affect a relatively smaller number of people, while major crises affecting whole nations will affect a much larger number. As each crisis hits, though, there will be a rush of people toward whatever seems to offer a way out, and as each crisis recedes, there will be another rush of people toward whatever seems to offer a way back to what used to be normal. The vast majority of people who join either rush will fail. Remember the tens of thousands of people who applied for a handful of burger-flipping jobs during the recent housing crash, because that was the only job opening they could find? That's the sort of thing I mean. \n The way to avoid the rush is simple enough: figure out how you will be able to live after the next wave of crisis hits, and to the extent that you can, start living that way now. If you're worried about the long-term prospects for your job - and you probably should be, no matter what you do for a living - now is the time to figure out how you will get by if the job goes away and you have to make do on much less money. For most people, that means getting out of debt, making sure the place you live costs you much less than you can afford, and picking up some practical skills that will allow you to meet some of your won needs and have opportunities for barter and informal employment. It can mean quite a bit more, depending on your situation, needs, and existing skills. It should certainly involve spending less money - and that money, once it isn't needed to pay off any debts you have, can go to weatherizing your home and making other sensible preparations that will make life easier for you later on. \n For the vast majority of people, it probably needs to be said, collapsing now does not mean buying a survival homestead somewhere off in the country. That's a popular daydream, and in some well-off circles it's long been a popular way to go have a midlife crisis, but even if you have the funds - and most of us don't - if you don't already have the dizzyingly complex skill set needed to run a viable farm, or aren't willing to drop everything else to apprentice with an organic farmer right now, it's not a realistic option. In all likelihood you'll be experiencing the next round of crises where you are right now, so the logical place to have your own personal collapse now, ahead of the rush, is right there, in the place where you live, with the people you know and resources you have to hand.

136

To say that there's a curse on industrial society is simply to use an archaic metaphor for a point I've been discussing in these essays since The Archdruid Report began six years ago, which is that the consequences of industrial society's mismanagement of its relations with the planet will not go away just because we don't want to deal with them. That metaphor has a range of relevant features, and one of them is that any effective response to the curse - or, if you will, the predicament of our time - has to begin by taking stock of the ways that each of us, as individuals, contributes by our own attitudes and actions to the mess we're in, and then making appropriate changes. \nAfter six years, I shouldn't even have to say that daydreaming about running off to some conveniently unaffordable eco-homestead in the country doesn't count. Unless you're in a position to do that, and the vast majority of us aren't, that's simply another evasion. What's required instead is the less romantic but far more productive task of adapting in place: figuring out how, living where you live now, you can place much less of a burden on the biosphere, and help other people do the same thing. It probably has to be said that perfection isn't a reasonable expectation here - there's a long learning curve, and our culture and built environment place significant obstacles in the way - but a great deal can be done nonetheless. That can easily lead into activism of various kinds, for those who feel called to do that specific kind of work; it can also lead in plenty of other constructive directions.

98-99

Machines, as I think most of us have noticed by now, make very poor replacements for human beings, and the reverse is almost as true. Shifting from a machine society to a human society in the wake of peak oil, then, is not simply a matter of replacing one set of components with another that happen to be human. It's necessary to replace attitudes, values, and expectations that are suited to machines - and nearly the entire modern worldview can be summed up in these terms - with the very different attitudes, values, and expectations that produce good results when applied to human beings.

67-69

Nobody wants to be reminded that using less, so that our grandchildren would have enough, was the road we didn't take at the end of the Seventies. Still, the road we did take was always destined to be a dead end, and as we move deeper into the first half of the twenty-first century, the end of that road is starting to come into sight. At this point, we're faced with the prospect of using less energy, not because we choose to do so but because the energy that would be needed to do otherwise isn't there any more. That's the problem with living as though there's no tomorrow, of course: tomorrow inevitably shows up anyway. \n This late in the game, our remaining options are starkly limited, and most of the proposals you'll hear these days are simply variations on the theme of chasing business as usual right over the nearest cliff. Whether it's Stewart Brand's nukes, 'Drill Baby Drill,' ethanol or algal biodiesel or some other kind of energy vaporware, the subtext to every widely touted response to our predicament is that we don't need to use less. The same thing's just as true of most of the ideologies that claim to offer a more global response to that predicament; the one common thread that unites the neoprimitivists who claim to long for a return to the hunter-gatherer life, the conspiracy theorists who spend their days in an increasingly frantic orgy of fingerpointing, and the apocalypticists who craft ever more elaborate justifications for the claim that somebody or other will change the world for us, is that each of these ideologies, and plenty others like them, function covertly as justifications to allow believers to keep on living an ordinary American lifestyle right up to the moment that it drops away beneath their feet. \n The one option that doesn't do this is the one next to nobody is willing to talk about, and that's the option of using less. \n Mention that option in public, and inevitably you'll hear a dozen different reasons why it can't help and won't matter and isn't practical anyway. Can it help? Of course it can; in a time when world crude oil production has been bouncing against a hard ceiling for most of a decade and most other energy sources are under growing strain, any decrease in the amount of energy being wasted on nonessentials makes it a little easier to keep essential services up and running. Will it matter? Of course it will; as we move into a future of hard energy constraints, the fast at least a few people get through the learning curve of conservation, appropriate tech, and simply making do with less, the easier it will be for the rest of society to follow their lead and learn from their experience, if only when all the other choices have been foreclosed. Is it practical? Of course it is; the average European gets by comfortably on one third the annual energy budget as the average American, and it's been my experience that most middle class Americans can slash their energy use by a third or more in one year by a relatively simple program of home weatherizing and lifestyle changes. \n I'd like to suggest, in fact, that at this point in the trajectory of industrial civilization, any proposal that doesn't make using less energy a central strategy simply isn't serious. It's hard to think of any dimension of our predicament that can't be bettered, often dramatically, by using less energy, and even harder to think of any project that will yield significant gains as long as Americans cling to a lifestyle that history is about to relegate to the compost bin. I'd also like to suggest that any proposal that does start out with using less energy should not be taken seriously until and unless the people proposing it actually do use less energy themselves, preferably by adopting the measures they urge on others. \n That's how effective movements for social change happen, after all. Individuals start them by making changes in their own lives; as the number of people making those changes grows, networks emerge to share information, resources, and encouragement; the networks become the frame of a subculture, and as momentum builds, the subculture becomes a movement. It's indicative that the two movements that had the most impact on American culture in the second half of the twentieth century - feminism and Christian fundamentalism - both emerged this way, starting with individuals who changed their own lives, while any number of movements that tried to make change from the top down - again the climate change movement is a good example - failed to achieve their ends.

The Society of the Spectacle

Author: Guy Debord

Publisher: kindle import (0)

The fact that anarchists have seen the goal of proletarian revolution as immediately present represents both the strength and the weakness of collectivist anarchist struggles (the only forms of anarchism that can be taken seriously—the pretensions of the individualist forms of anarchism have always been ludicrous). From the historical thought of modern class struggles collectivist anarchism retains only the conclusion, and its constant harping on this conclusion is accompanied by a deliberate indifference to any consideration of methods. Its critique of political struggle has thus remained abstract, while its commitment to economic struggle has been channeled toward the mirage of a definitive solution that will supposedly be achieved by a single blow on this terrain, on the day of the general strike or the insurrection. The anarchists have saddled themselves with fulfilling an ideal. Anarchism remains a merely ideological negation of the state and of class society—the very social conditions which in their turn foster separate ideologies. It is the ideology of pure freedom, an ideology that puts everything on the same level and loses any conception of the “historical evil” (the negation at work within history). This fusion of all partial demands into a single all-encompassing demand has given anarchism the merit of representing the rejection of existing conditions in the name of the whole of life rather than from the standpoint of some particular critical specialization; but the fact that this fusion has been envisaged only in the absolute, in accordance with individual whim and in advance of any practical actualization, has doomed anarchism to an all too obvious incoherence. Anarchism responds to each particular struggle by repeating and reapplying the same simple and all-embracing lesson, because this lesson has from the beginning been considered the be-all and end-all of the movement. This is reflected in Bakunin’s 1873 letter of resignation from the Jura Federation: “During the past nine years the International has developed more than enough ideas to save the world, if ideas alone could save it, and I challenge anyone to come up with a new one. It’s no longer the time for ideas, it’s time for actions.” This perspective undoubtedly retains proletarian historical thought’s recognition that ideas must be put into practice, but it abandons the historical terrain by assuming that the appropriate forms for this transition to practice have already been discovered and will never change.

Beginner's Guide to Revelation: A Jungian Interpretation

Author: Robin Robertson

Publisher: Nicholas-Hays Inc (1994)

63-68

So the first four angels bring the concept of darkness more directly into our lives...Then the fifth breaks through the mundane into the deeper world that lies beneath, a world in which there is no separation.

55-56

Our brains are continuously projecting the future from the past, and feeding that information to our sensors. We proceed on the basis of that extrapolated future unless the sensors note some discrepancy which has to be dealt with. This seems to correspond exactly to what we know of the operation of the collective unconscious. It is continually drawing on pas experience in order to feed forward its best estimate of the future. At any given moment in time, the collective unconscious is composed of all the experiences of the past, all that is going on presently anywhere among humans, and organic projections into the future based on the first two components. \r\n\r\nHowever, we find ourselves at a unique point in history. Very soon, we will reach the point where there are more people alive in the world than have lived and died in all previous ages put together; as one radio sage put it: 'the dead will become a minority.' I believe this shift is the same as the shift which we have been discussing throughout this book. As long as past experience vastly exceeded current experience, the collective unconscious was inherently conservative: ritual and structure outweighed novelty. Archetypes changed so slowly as to seem eternal. When current experience exceeds past experience, the situation reverses: novelty and change reign supreme. Archetypes should come into existence in dizzying numbers, many staying around too shortly to register. But some stable new archetype, some 'living symbol,' should emerge in an astonishingly quick fashion (by comparison with the glacial scale on which archetypes normally emerge), an archetype powerful enough to overwhelm the archetypes created by the entire past experience of mankind.

31-32

Each church has a particular sin, each a a characteristic flaw in a time of transition to a new belief system, a new level of consciousness. In one town, Ephesus (2:1-7), the people no longer cling to a central belief; 'thou has left thy first love.' But to those who overcome their fears and return to their deeper beliefs, 'to him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God' (2:7). \r\n\r\nAnother church, Pergamos (2:12-17), is composed of those who may hold to their beliefs inwardly, but are content to sit silently and watch as others do evil. The people of still another city, Thyatira (2:8-29), have listened to a false prophet (Jezebel) and followed her teachings instead of God's. The congregation of another church, Sardis (3:1-6), with no hope for the future, choose to live only for the day and turned to dissolution. Another city, Laodicea (3:14-22), in some ways the most condemned by the alpha and omega, is composed of the wishy-washy, the lukewarm, neither accepting nor rejecting anything anymore, content merely to go whichever way the wind blows. \r\n\r\nAnother church, Smyrna (2:8-11), is composed of those who are suffering greatly in these times, but manage to hold to their faith, even though others persecute them. They are already suffering martyrdom for their beliefs because of the sins of others in their midst: 'the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan' (2:9). The alpha and omega reassures the faithful of Smyrna: Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer...be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life (2:10). \r\n\r\nHowever, only one city, Philadelphia (3:7-13), has fully satisfied God. The people there have never deserted their faith; nor have they yielded to dissolution. They have seen the new way opening before them and have already started to make a transition to the new. Therefore, alone among the cities, their people will not suffer and will not be exposed to temptation.

And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon because as blood;\r\nAnd the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.\r\nAnd the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.\r\nAnd the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains (6:12-15) \r\n \r\nAs before, the cause of the suffering is too sharp a self-definition, an inability to change. The new only causes pain if one can't - or won't - give up the old, or can't tolerate the paralyzing state of chaos that intervenes between the old and the new. It is just the 'great men' of the existing world - those who are too strongly defined within the terms of that world - who have to descend into darkness before they can come up reborn. They, too, have to give up their old definition. \r\n \r\nWith the opening of this sixth seal, the world as we know it comes to an end. Just as God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, the seventh seal marks the hiatus between worlds, a time of chaos which we, stuck in the old mold of being, can only experience with 'fear and trembling.

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: University of Toronto Press (1978)

430

Of course these scientisms about man begin with something that is true. That nutrition can improve health both of mind and body is true. The class struggle as Marx studied it in the France of Louis Napoleon was a fact. The relief of hysterical symptoms in a few patients by analysis of sexual memories probably happened. And hungry animals or anxious men certainly will learn instrumental responses for food or approbation. These are true facts. But so is the shape of a liver of a sacrificed animal a true fact. And so the Ascendants and Midheavens of astrologers, or the shape of oil on water. Applied to the world as representative of all the world, facts become superstitions. A superstition is after all only a metaphier grown wild to serve a need to know. Like the entrails of animals or the flights of birds, such scientistic superstitions become the preserved ritualized places where we may read out the past and future of man, and hear the answers that can authorize our actions. Science then, for all its pomp of factness, is not unlike some of the more easily disparaged outbreaks of pseudoreligions. In this period of transition from its religious basis, science often shares with the celestial maps of astrology, or a hundred other irrational-isms, the same nostalgia for the Final Answer, the One Truth, the Single Cause. In the frustrations and sweat of laboratories, it feels the same temptations to swarm into sects, even as did the Khabiru refugees, and set out here and there through the dry Sinais of parched fact for some rich and brave significance flowing with truth and exaltation. And all of this, my metaphor and all, is a part of this transitional period after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

304

We, at the end of the second millennium A.D., are still in a sense deep in this transition to a new mentality. And all about us lie the remnants of our recent bicameral past. We have our houses of gods which record our births, define us, marry us, and bury us, receive our confessions and intercede with the gods to forgive us our trespasses. Our laws are based upon values which without their divine pendancy would be empty and unenforce-able. Our national mottoes and hymns of state are usually divine invocations. Our kings, presidents, judges, and officers begin their tenures with oaths to the now silent deities taken upon the writings of those who have last heard them.

302

Scholars have long debated the reason for the decline and fall of prophecy in the post-exilic period of Judaism. They have suggested that the nabiim had done their work, and there was no more need of them. Or they have said that there was a danger that it would sink into a cult. Others that it was the corruption of the Israelites by the Babylonians, who were by this time as omen-ridden from the cradle to the grave as any nation could be. All of these are partly true, but the plainer fact to me is that the decline of prophecy is part of that much larger phenomenon going on elsewhere in the world, the loss of the bicameral mind. Once one has read through the Old Testament from this point of view, the entire succession of works becomes majestically and wonderfully the birth pangs of our subjective consciousness. No other literature has recorded this absolutely important event at such length or with such fullness. Chinese literature jumps into subjectivity in the teaching of Confucius with little before it. Indian hurtles from the bicameral Veda into the ultra subjective Upanishads, neither of which are as authentic to their times. Greek literature, like a series of steppingstones from the Iliad to the Odyssey and across the broken fragments of Sappho and Solon toward Plato, is the next best record, but is still too incomplete. And Egypt is relatively silent. While the Old Testament, even as it is hedged with great historical problems of accuracy, still remains the richest source for our knowledge of what the transition period was like. It is essentially the story of the loss of the bicameral mind, the slow retreat into silence of the remaining elohim, the confusion and tragic violence which ensue, and the search for them again in vain among its prophets until a substitute is found in right action. But the mind is still haunted with its old unconscious ways it broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollow-ing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still. As the stag pants after the waterbrooks, So pants my mind after you, O gods! My mind thirsts for gods! for living gods! When shall I come face to face with gods? — Psalm 42

249

temporal development of the preconscious hypostases can be roughly divided into four phases: Phase I: Objective: Occurred in the bicameral age when these terms referred to simple external observations. Phase I I : Internal: Occurred when these terms have come to mean things inside the body, particularly certain internal sensations. Phase I I I : Subjective: W h e n these terms refer to processes that we would call mental; they have moved from internal stimuli supposedly causing actions to internal spaces where metaphored actions may occur. Phase I V : Synthetic: W h e n the various hypostases unite into one conscious self capable of introspection. The reason I am setting these out, perhaps pretentiously, as four separate phases is to call your attention to the important psychological differences of transition between these phases. The transition from Phase I to Phase II occurred at the beginning of the breakdown period. It comes from the absence or the inappropriateness of gods and their hallucinated directions. The buildup of stress for want of adequate divine decisions increases the psychological concomitants of such stress until they are labeled with terms that previously applied to only external perception. The transition from Phase II to Phase III is a much more 2 Professor A. D. H. Adkins has made this drawing-together of the various mind-words into one the theme of his book From the Many to the One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970). I N T E L L E C T U A L C O N S C I O U S N E S S O F G R E E C E 261 complicated matter. And much more interesting. It is due to the paraphrand generator of metaphor described in 1.2. In that chapter, I outlined the four-part process of metaphor, how we begin with a less-known term called a metaphrand which is to be described, and then describe it by applying to it a better-known metaphier which is similar to it in some way. Usually there are simple associations of the metaphier which I have called paraphiers, which then project back as associates of the original metaphrand, these new associates being called paraphrands. Such paraphrands are generative in a sense that they are new in their association with the metaphrand. And this is how we are able to generate the kind of 'space' which we introspect upon and which is the necessary substrate of consciousness. This is really quite simple as we shall see shortly. And, finally, the synthesis of the separate hypostases into the unitary consciousness of Phase IV is a different process also. I suggest that as the subjective Phase III meanings of thumos, phrenes, et al. become established, their original anatomical bases in different internal sensations wither away, leaving them to become confused and to join together on the basis of their shared metaphiers, e.g., as 'containers' or 'persons.' But this synthetic unity of consciousness may also have been helped by what can be called the laicization of attention and its consequent recognition of individual differences in the seventh century B.C., a process which resulted in a new concept of self.

The Origins and History of Consciousness

Author: Erich Neumann

Publisher: Princeton University Press (1954)

The Portable Nietzsche

Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

Publisher: Portable Library (1977)