As COP ends the landscape is confusing because two major strands conflict: cut fossil fuels and grow a green economy. My thinking has been clear that growing a greener economy means more building, more tech, and, as a consequence, more co2 produced.
I concluded in recent weeks that the state, controlled by interests and regulations, is too fractured to cope with a climate that requires a more consensual access to power in order to mandate unpopular opinions. At this point, if there does not emerge significant effective leverage to make significant climate changes most people will conclude that the wisest course is to pursue their own career/life trajectory till collapse enters their local scene. Pitirim Sirokin's analysis of civilizations describes a source of power potentially larger and less bonded than that of the states, closer to values and personal relationships than states structured by laws and regulations.
Sorokin takes an even wider view than Toynbee's “challenge and response" analysis. and sees the world as oscillating between a materialist and an idea-based phase broader even than civilizations. If Toynbee is looking closely at the fate of civilizations and their interactions with each other, Sookin looks at the whole world, almost like the coming and going of the sun, Sorokin sees shifting waves like a giant tsunami from an asteroid flooding the whole earth as it shifts from a relatively materialistic approach to life and relatively mentalist. How do people navigate this shift in these? War mostly, the changes are so deep. I am not too concerned as to whether Sorokin is correct, or not, but rather weather is looking as evocative of interesting lines of thought. Certainly, most of us agree that there is a reliance on materialism with the results of my paying attention to history, psychology, philosophy, and other soft lines. We fail to see it, so locked into local understanding. Remember the reason for my approach here is to see if we can locate leverage points for pushing off planet destruction by climate. We are recognizing that states, nations and maybe even civilizations are too weak to counter the huge forces guiding our fate to destruction.
The suggestion so far is to see in the sensate culture capitalism, and in Greek civilization, Christianity Confucius as idea idea-based society. This might allow us to participate in a shift from a sensate to an idea-based culture and sweep materialist capitalism out of human society.
I am fascinated by Sorokin's thinking, but I am much more interested in what we can get from him, suggested by his thinking, even if it's wrong. some fresh sense of how societies change. Think of Rome to Christianity or from the Waring States Period to Confucian stress on civility and ritual. We need changes of this potency and universalism (larger than bounded states). if we are to counter the extractive capitalism desiccating our societies.
the present crisis is not ordinary. It is not merely an economic or political maladjustment, but involves simultaneously almost the whole of Western culture and society, in all their main sectors. It is a crisis in their art and science, philosophy and religion, law and morals, manners and mores; in the form of social, political, and economic organization, including the nature of the family and marriage—in brief, it is a crisis involving almost the whole way of life, thought, and conduct of Western society. More precisely, it consists of a disintegration of a fundamental form of Western culture and society dominant for the last four centuries (Sorokin , Social and Cultural Dynamics).
I appreciate how provocative and lucid this is, Doug, and the sweep of your imagination here. But your evocation of "shifting waves like a giant tsunami from an asteroid flooding the whole earth" seems to put the mess, and and possibility of agency to shift it, beyond the reach of mere mortals. Or even if we get less celestial and "[t]hink of Rome to Christianity or from the Waring States Period to Confucian stress on civility and ritual," these are not exactly things that people band together to choose to cause to happen. But perhaps you're seeing something that I"m not yet seeing.
BTW, if you're quoting Sorokin directly for some of this, it would be helpful if you'd "mark the quotes.")