So With All These "Progressives" Around, Why Is The Planet Falling Apart? - Guardian

[hatrack]

EDIT

The word “progressive” twists and turns in our political life, constantly shifting its meaning. Tony Blair repurposed the term for those broadly on the left who didn’t want to call themselves socialists. Yet David Cameron was also frequently described that way. Now, however, the term progressive means not Tory. The Progressive Alliance urges tactical voting from Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters, to limit the size of Theresa May’s victory. Being progressive is a big party, and almost everyone is welcome. How about Rick Wakeman, I wonder? After all, he was the poster boy of progressive rock … you remember, interminable keyboard solos by men with long hair and silly silver boots. I know, I’m being slightly facetious. But these days he’s a big donor to the Conservatives. It’s hard to know who progressives would not invite to their party.

And how come the very idea of progress is intuited as something broadly of the left? A hundred years ago in Italy, the so-called futurists were fascists, appropriating the language of technological progress for the far right. “Idealists, workers of thought, unite to show how inspiration and genius walk in step with the progress of the machine, of aircraft, of industry, of trade, of the sciences, of electricity,” gushed the futurist founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Love of progress isn’t just for progressives. Hell, only last week, even Kim Jong-un was lauding his latest missile launch as a “great leap forward”.

EDIT

Kingsnorth doesn’t romanticise the past. He just points out that seeing the future with rose-tinted spectacles is now more “socially acceptable”, and therefore more dangerous: “The kind of people who are disgusted by an idealized past can often barely contain their enthusiasm for an idealized future.”

In economic terms, progress goes by the name of growth. Ever onwards, ever upwards, calls the money-making machine. And we are its servants, poor Homo economicus. Trapped by debt, we are encouraged by our leaders to run ever faster (they call it productivity) to make and buy more useless and invented stuff – even if that means us borrowing more to do it. The possibility of one or two Green MPs aside, all of those we will elect to parliament next month will believe economic growth to be an unquestionably good thing. No party will ever form a government on the basis that we will need to learn to live with less. A collapsing planet is a niche interest, an inconvenient externality that will one day be resolved by technological progress – that contemporary deus ex machina, good for all occasions.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2017/may/18/the-pilgrims-of-progress-who-are-leading-us-to-self-destruction

[Binkie The Clown]

1. This......

“The kind of people who are disgusted by an idealized past can often barely contain their enthusiasm for an idealized future.”

Some as-yet uninvented scientific miracle will save us all from the inexorable laws of physics and allow to go on raping the environment to support our lavish lifestyle. This is fantasy. The reality is, all species go extinct, but no other species has deliberately caused its own extinction.

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. "... no other species has deliberately caused its own extinction ..."

I don't think that's a fair assessment of the situation.

Consider… rationally, smokers may know the damage they are doing to their health, but, somehow, even with that knowledge, they find themselves unable to quit.

They are not deliberately killing themselves, it's not like they're putting guns to their own heads they simply are unable to quit their self-destructive habit.

[Binkie The Clown]

3. I'm reminded of something I read many years ago.

Husband (to wife): I wish you'd quit smoking.
Wife: I've tried and tried. I just can't seem to quit.
Husband: What you really mean is you don't want to quit.
Wife: No, I really do want to. I just haven't been able to.
Husband: You're just kidding yourself. Admit it. You don't really want to quit.
Wife: O.K. Fine. You win. I don't want to quit smoking.
Husband: You're only saying that because you know you can't quit if you wanted to.

I "tried and tried" for years to quit smoking and was never successful. Then, one day, sitting in the doctors office while my wife got the news that she had terminal lung cancer, I chose to quit. Right then and there. I decided I would never smoke again, and I never did. It was a choice all along. The only thing I didn't know before was that rather than make that choice, I was lying to myself and telling myself I really couldn't quit. In fact I could have decided to quit at any time, but instead, I lied to myself to keep from making that choice. Because in the end, I smoked because I wanted to, until one day, I didn't want to anymore.

"Unable to quit" simply means "I don't want to quit." I know. I've been on both sides of that issue, and told myself that I couldn't quit, for all those same "reasons".

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. Still, while you were smoking, were you choosing to kill yourself? Or did you simply like smoking?

In the 50's and 60's, science knew that tobacco was a killer, but people smoked. Was it because they had a death wish? No, they liked smoking, and therefore preferred to believe that the “Science” was wrong, that they could beat the odds. They clung to the “doubt” publicized by the tobacco companies. “Correlation is not causation!” they repeated.

Humanity really likes the benefits we get from burning fossil fuels…

[Binkie The Clown]

5. They liked smoking, and so decided not to quit. We like the products of raping the environment

so we rape the environment. It's a choice. You can choose to take an action, or you can choose to avoid taking an action. Both are choices.

But at this point I think we are probably just arguing semantics.

[OKIsItJustMe]

6. No. It's not "just arguing semantics"

Last edited Fri May 19, 2017, 11:14 PM - Edit history (1)

Your claim was "The reality is, all species go extinct, but no other species has deliberately caused its own extinction."

Humanity does not have a death wish, we will not deliberately cause our own extinction. Humanity may bring about our own demise, in something resembling the Oxygen Catastrophe when species so disrupted the environment that they kicked off an extinction event:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event

[Binkie The Clown]

7. Humanity does not have a death wish. On that we agree.

Humanity suffers from shortsightedness, which in our early prehistory, was an important survival advantage. Now, however, it is a dangerous flaw in human nature.

Humanity does not have a wish to become extinct, but humanity seems to lack a wish to prevent its own extinction.

So I was equating "failing to make a deliberate choice" with "making the deliberate choice not to act". You're right. There is a difference. I glossed over that difference "for dramatic effect." But if you insist on a literal, rather than a metaphorical claim, then you are correct.

And for the record, no species that brought about the great oxygenation event had the capacity to make the choice not to let that happen. (Of course, we, as oxygen breathers, are very glad it did happen.) We, on the other hand, have the choice to avert our own extinction.

[OKIsItJustMe]

8. Why I stress the difference

If humanity has a death wish, then, there is no hope.

On the other hand, if humanity wants to survive, but is jeopardized by our nature, there is still hope.

Just as smokers can change their ways when confronted with the gravity of their situation, so might humanity be persuaded to effective response.

[Binkie The Clown]

9. I believe that convincing enough people to make a difference...

... will happen too late, if it happens at all.

As long as climatologists studying our dire situation go right on flying around the world in jumbo jets to attend their conferences, even knowing the gravity of the problem, then it's clear that even those who really understand what's happening are not willing to change.

[OKIsItJustMe]

10. We need to define what it means to "make a difference"

It is already too late to prevent climate change.

It is never too late to "make a difference."

[Binkie The Clown]

11. :shrug:

It's down to how we live while waiting for extinction. Everything else is verbal masturbation.

[OKIsItJustMe]

12. I don't believe extinction is a given

We make serious proposals to create colonies on the Moon and Mars. Neither is anywhere near as hospitable as Earth, even an Earth with a changed climate.

[Binkie The Clown]

13. Quote rom thew O.P.

“The kind of people who are disgusted by an idealized past can often barely contain their enthusiasm for an idealized future.”


So maybe a few thousand people manage to "colonize" a hostile Earth. Oh goody!

[OKIsItJustMe]

14. Assuming your estimate is correct

That’s 100% more than “extinction.”

OK, so, how do we make life less miserable for those “few thousand?” Would it make any difference whether we burned say 90% of the remaining coal, rather than 100%? What if we didn’t cut down all of the forests? (Would that make a difference?)