#3048
I am thinking through how civilization is a more powerful lever than the state, with its laws and regulations, to cope with Climate and its source in a culture of extraction from land and people. From now on, it’s all about civilization - and poetry.
We are stuck. No path yet proposed for climate can reset us back to say 1995. Worse, no path proposed carries us into an actionable future. There is no plan but lots of “we have to act. “ If a plan says replace fossil fuels with clean energy and that means biomass, then we haven’t done our homework. Biomass? Burning it makes co2. A plan is not a policy. It goes further. A plan includes a timetable and the specifics of resources, people, material, energy, etc., for each phase. That kind of thinking is just not forthcoming. Probably because it is too hard and there will be too much resistance.
Civilization, wrapped around belief and feeling is more powerful and more comprehensive than the state. (I strongly suggest reading Toynbee’s The Study of History. Abridged version at Amazon) Think of the transition from Rome to feudalism. Everything changed. The scary fact is, that the collapse of energy, supply chains, crops, and governments will force emergent changes. Some of which, if we are lucky, will be seized on.
A sample of Toynbee
’’The Hellenic Society was stimulated, by the Persian attack at the beginning of the fifth century B.C., to its highest manifestations of genius. The Western Society was stimulated by the Norse and Magyar attacks of the ninth century of the Christian Era into performing those feats of valour and statesmanship which resulted in the foundation of the kingdoms of England.”
Big things happen. We need big things and an active imagination to get there.
Poetry is a major route into the civilizational world, past mechanics.
“To make the frozen circumstances dance
you have to sing to them their own melody.”
(Marx, German Ideology)
“Midway in this life I found myself lost in a dark wood”
(Opening line of Dante’s Divine Comedy)
“We are the hollow men,
Headpieces stuffed with straw,
Leaning together.”
And
“This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a whimper”
T.S. Eliot
You could write such lines, but you would reject them as trivial.
Poems are two way windows into the soul, we see in, you see out.
Try
I see my two cars in the driveway, silent
I know, I know. I will never use them again.
We used the last gas
To use the car’s air-conditioning.
(Me just goofing around. Try it.)
The future, if we have one, is in civilization.
And to repeat this excerpt from Jacqueline Rose (The Plague): ‘The evolution of civilization’, Freud wrote in Civilization and its Discontents, ‘is the struggle for life of the human species.’
I liked your “... used the last gas ....” poem. And this epigraph to Timothy Morton’s “Dark Ecology” from Theodor Adorno: “Progress means: humanity emerges from its spellbound state no longer under the spell of progress as well, itself nature, by becoming aware of its own indigenousness to nature and by halting the mastery over nature through which nature continues its mastery.”