Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
What, if anything, is sacred? ‘Nothing should be sacred!’ comes the impatient answer from the enthusiasts for gene-splicing and geoengineering, the singularitarians eager to upload their consciousness into a disembodied digital eternity. To call anything sacred is to set it off-limits to improvement by the application of human ingenuity – to stand in the way of progress.
It’s been five years since Superstorm Sandy devastated the Northeast. The monster storm — which killed more than 100 people, destroyed entire communities, and inflicted more than $70 billion in damages — should have completely changed the way we approach climate impacts, resilience, and global warming policy. But it didn’t.
Perhaps the saddest accolade of our modern faith is this: “Our world is more interconnected than ever before.” It’s a statement as bold on the first read as it is meaningless on the second, and one that is not only sad but also somewhat horrifying upon further examination. So, exactly what is “more” interconnected, and why are we celebrating?
My point in writing this article wasn’t that I don’t use appliances or am against technology, but rather, that we need to use our hands more. Or as another person wrote “Many of us have one foot in the modern world and another in the world we think is likely to come”. Exactly!
How do you envision yourself at age eighty? Do you want to be active, mobile, and of sound mind and body? Or do you think you’ll be lucky just to be alive? Good health is not luck.
The devolution of political power is once again front and center in the news as the citizens of Catalonia vote for independence from Spain. This development is just the latest in a series of devolution tremors that point to the limits of complexity as a strategy for organizing our societies.
If such an effort is truly needed, why hasn’t it taken form yet? Why hasn’t the field of culture design already been born? The answers are many and I will only focus on a few of them here to give a feel for what the process may look like as intentional efforts bring it into being (or not) in the next decade.
Life on this planet, as we know it, is a result of fragile environmental conditions that the contemporary predominant neoliberal system has already began to alter. Capitalism and its doctrine of unlimited economic growth seems to completely neglect this dependency and continues to violently exploit nature for the benefit of tiny elites, thus increasing their already enormous power.
I have studied various disasters’ effects on health, from the Sept. 11 terrorist attack to Hurricane Sandy. Based on my studies of hurricanes and power outages, we can expect to see a number of lasting effects on Puerto Rico in the months ahead, including mental health issues.
In this country there is a common sentiment that a person should go forth and set the trend, then others join it. In a culture where Warren Buffett, Donald Trump, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson are elevated as role models, we are trained to think big or not at all. No one in fourth grade says they want to be a social worker or a farmer or a good cooperator—that’s not sexy enough. I become a bold leader and they join me.
Too much of our time in our hectic consumer society seems like “not life”—phony and artificial. We want, instead, to “live deep and suck out all the marrow,” as Thoreau puts it. And being involved with “real” things—things you can touch or taste or manipulate is attracting people.
Only a few generations ago we made many things by hand. Over the last 50 years store bought products have replaced handmade goods. Few people still work with their hands, and I often wonder what we have lost in this process? What have we lost when we no longer enjoy or even know how to make things with our hands?
