Social structure on top of material culture
# 4120
Climate disruption has produced lots of discussion of CO2 and its material conditions, especially aimed at needed changes in response to climate change. But not much much has been explored about the social conditions. Yes, there is a sense that politics and governance and economy have to change but it remains abstract, Key discussions such as Plato and Aristotle and St. Augustine and characters like Vico, Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, and Polybius, up to the debate between Hobbes and Rousseau, or a modern, Shelden Wolin Politics and Vision or the still active Wendy Brown at Berkeley. are not read nor referred to with much depth.
These cultural structures rise on and to some extent try to limit or guide the physical world, but themselves remain mostly unexplored relative to their importance and relevance to managing change. †Thorston Veblen, who wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), and coined the concept of Conspicuous Consumption. The leisure class. cannot exist except through the use of resources from a successful material science, engineering, and the economy. What Lewis Mumford called the megamachine, because of the dependence of the rich and most of the middle class on the material culture, its members are reluctant to change anything. All of us are implicated by our position within the Social System, a collusion, which we pretty much ignore. Veblen made the distinction between "institutions" and "technology". we know much more about the tech than the institutions but bothe must change if we are to do any cutting of fossil. fuels or other climate-related problems such as ice, drought, flood, or plagues. - and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich. It is kind of off putting to hear a billionaire claim that they earned it when their career looks more like the path of a ball in a pinball machine extracting wealth from the institutions of a society they used without credit. Think of the education of young people to be programmers. High cost for society, payoff by the agency of a few,
Some students at Stanford read the difficult work of Rene Girard who proposed a Veblen-like theory of wealth, through imitation of the rich. at Stanford. where he was on the faculty, by students who went on to entrepreneurial success.
So we have lots of talking about about CO2 without discussing the governing culture.
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If in understanding climate destruction the choice is either
1. The world needs even more energy and the energy companies will support the need by more drilling, pumping, and refining
Using less fossil fuel
Does the full spectrum of your professional activities support 1 or 2?