Hi, On 29/09/2021 14:14, Tom Abeles wrote:
I would be concerned, living in such a world, if I needed life-saving medical services from vaccines to heart surgery. Similarly, I would be concerned without universities, research and technology which has given us solar panels, broadband internet and similar which is imbedded in much of what we use on a daily basis. The Buddhist Gross Happiness Index ponders these issues.
You hit the nail right on the head here. Paradigms. It can be difficult to imagine an alternative reality (though sci-fi writers have been pushing the boundaries on that for a century or more) when you are living in a (highly) captive one. Additionally, if you can imagine different paradigms, think in systems terms, and hold multiple versions of reality in mind at once, for the purposes of analysis/evaluation, then you'd still have to choose which one you'd want to move towards... Each paradigm has its own pathways and -dependencies, of course. As Elizabeth Kolbert says in her critical review of climate market hi-tech - in "Under a White Sky" - this is "a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems” - or about a "vicious circle created by its own skewed logic and techno-dependency". The progress myth is one of the phenomena or memes at the heart of our trouble - and by trouble, in brief, I mean: / climate chaos; medical state of exception; and the collapse - in tandem - of global civilisation and the human immune system. Hence, vaccines and robotic heart surgery, for instance, are not simply _advances_, but also well understood as short-term plasters on festering wounds that result from the separation of nature/culture, elite/the rest, centres of control/disposable margins and so on. Plasters, that is, which trap dirt and obscure stratification and thus make the wounds deeper, while those swimming in the puss - that'd be us - systematically drown. Rupa and Patel's recent book is essential reading for movements/activists on these matters it seems to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXvIkj7grN8 So, I would be concerned if I were living in a world dependent on industrial hospitals, where the value of plant-based medicine and folk knowledge was abandoned entirely and buried alongside common sense. On these issues see also: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/02/how-sustainable-is-high-tech-healt... Finally, on the progress myth - so fundamentally tied up with European/White Man philosophy, racist politics, and colonial extraction - it is worth paying attention to new currents in archaeology: “A profound consideration is underway of the nature of long-term human history. The major turning points we once identified – the invention of farming, the growth of cities, and technological change – were not events, but long term processes, the effects of which were unpredictable. At the heart of the older stories was the idea of progress from small, egalitarian human groups moving in pursuit of wild resources to large, sedentary, hierarchical polities based on mass production and consumption of food and artefacts. Many popular accounts still tell a story of progress. These stories ultimately derive from the 19th century, when the inventors of prehistory assumed progress as a central trait of human history, ranging societies from the primitive to the civilized. A tale told by the so-called civilized about the rise of civilization allowed a calm presumption that history had been creating their personalities and their lifestyle all along. (Gosden 2018: 1)” https://global.oup.com/academic/product/prehistory-a-very-short-introduction... Take your health into your own hand? Or as Cicero said, quoted without reference by Kierkegaard: Any person who reaches their 30th year of living should know themself well enough to be their own physician.... cheers/mp