Cicero and the Summer of 45
The easy path is to downsize expectations and simplify your lifestyle. This path requires giving up certain ways of looking at the world in order to embrace other, more survival-oriented ways.
Society featured
Commoning: A Different Way of Living and Acting Together
Commons are products and resources that are created, cared for and used in a shared way in a great variety of forms. The term has increasingly come into use again over the past decades – “again“ because commons as concept and praxis are ancient and exist worldwide.
The Magic Lantern Show
Is there a way out of the magic lantern show? Schopenhauer and Jung both argued that yes, there is—not, to be sure, a way to turn off the magic lantern, but a way to stop mistaking the projections for realities.
Thoughts on Pope Francis’ Laudato Si
Laudato Si is already receiving both strong support and resistance. The resistance testifies to the radical nature of Francis’ renewal of the basic doctrine of the Earth and cosmos as God’s Creation.
There is Really Only One Way to Come to Grips with the Climate Crisis
Our purpose should be to force governments and corporations to do what must be done. There is no other way that this is going to happen.
A Rather Different Mafia: The Budapest Bike Maffia
The word “mafia” immediately calls to mind menacing figures engaging in shady business. The Budapest Bike Maffia has something completely different in mind.
A Muddle of Mind and Matter
The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, which we’ve been discussing for the last two weeks, has a feature that reliably irritates most people when they encounter it for the first time: it doesn’t divide up the world the way people in modern western societies habitually do.
Digitalization, Efficiency and the Rebound Effect
Debates about the so-called rebound effect go back to William Stanley Jevons’ work in the 19th century, although they had been forgotten for too long. Rebound effects occur if a reduction of inputs per unit of output (efficiency) generates an absolute increase in output (growth).
Reason, Creativity and Freedom: The Communalist Model
As a solution to the present situation, a growing number of people in the world are proposing “communalism”: the usurpation of capitalism, the state, and social hierarchy by the way of town, village, and neighborhood assemblies and federations. Communalism is a living idea, one that builds upon a rich legacy of political history and social movements.
Sanctuary Restaurants Provide Support to Individuals Facing Hostility
Numerous restaurants across the country have joined a Sanctuary Restaurants Movement to offer safe and tolerant spaces to restaurant workers, employers, and consumers that face hate and harassment in the restaurant industry.
“Our Freedom is Based on Something Finite’
Hilary Jennings of Transition Town Tooting and Transition Network recently saw Ella Hickson’s explosive play Oil and was fascinated by it. It follows the lives of one woman and her daughter in an epic, hurtling collision of empire, history and family, and drills deep into the world’s relationship with this finite resource.
A Hotbed of Social Invention
Ashland has an abundance of “social inventors” — people who see a need in the community and are able to rally others to take part in it, all to make life better, more fun and more hopeful. In a new book called “Better Ways to Live,” Ashlander Craig K. Comstock profiles a raft of social inventions, many which influence the Ashland community…
