Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As civilization faces an existential crisis, our leaders demonstrate their inability to respond. Theory of change shows that now is the time for radically new ideas to transform society before it’s too late.
I insist – the search for the true and the search for the good is but a single quest. If we are to move forward to a world that is substantively rational, in Max Weber’s usage of this term, we cannot neglect either the intellectual or the political challenge. And we cannot segment them into two hermetically‑sealed containers. We can only struggle uneasily with pushing forward simultaneously to coming closer to each of them.
Perhaps we need to embrace a different kind of power on all levels to provide a timely, effective transformation. Maybe we need a compendium of strategies and practices on all levels to guide an organic and multifaceted cultural shift.
We need a form of civilization that co-exists with the nine million other species of life on this planet. We need a form of civilization that is socially just and does not equate human happiness and well-being with the endless consumption of material goods. The modern university, as it is currently configured, stands in the way of creating this form of civilization. Rethinking civilization requires rethinking higher education.
Posing a defiant alternative to the Abe government and corporate sustainability, these protesters point to the only possible path forward: Japan must take responsibility for its historical emissions, and use its enormous wealth to help pull the planet back from the brink.
The stakes of course are very, very high, here, because the climate crisis and the broader ecological emergency of which it is only the most urgent part puts the whole of what we know as civilisation at risk. By ‘this civilisation’ I mean the hegemonic civilisation of globalised industrial growth capitalism— sometimes called ‘Empire’—which today governs the vast majority of human life on Earth.
Democratic socialism is, I think, at least potentially compatible with, and perhaps even capable of drawing strength from, the small towns and churches of U.S. society.
We don’t view mindfulness as a panacea that will cure the world’s ills. But socially-engaged mindfulness and mindful social action can contribute to addressing our individual and collective challenges.
We have a plan: a movement of movements. We want contingents of new rebels from movements ‘allied’ to XR. The peace movement. The animals movement. The social justice movement. And several more. Call it the rebel alliance…
Remember in the midst of your neurosis and discouragement as you consider the huge problems we face:Â training ourselves and the upcoming generations to face life on earth with a cheerful frugality is advancing the revolution in its own slow way.
Alcott puts America under a microscope and pulls us close to see all its refracted contradictions — the staggering beauty and the rapacious violence. Her characters, her Americas, are all lost and damaged and so alive you can hear them breath and seethe between her pages.
As a society, we have not made the status quo strange and the negative aspects of fossil fuel dominance visible in our language and labels: dirty, gas-powered cars; polluting, coal-fired electricity; unsustainable, oil-dependent agriculture. And we need to.
