Saturday Links for the Week: February 3, 2007: The Reflective Edition

Posted on February 3, 2007 by Dave Pollard
Sheldrake by Kev Lewis
Sheldrake landing by gifted UK nature photographer Kev Lewis

What’s Going on Out There?: I’m finding myself increasingly impatient with the so-called ‘news’. What appears in the headlines seems more and more disconnected from what is really going on out there. So what is really going on?

  1. A slow, major mindshift: A year ago, for me to talk about civilizational collapse by the end of this century would merely have raised eyebrows. Now, suddenly, it is gradually becoming a credible worldview to many, and for some, accepted wisdom. There is enormous cynicism that we can do anything about it in time, but across the political spectrum there seems to be a growing sense that ‘this can’t go on’. This has happened despite the mainstream media, despite the politicians, despite the scientific reports (none of which most people pay any attention to). It is as if the bodies of the public have suddenly woken up to what a synthesis of all the conscious and especially the unconscious information they are absorbing is telling them: “There’s something happening here.” I can still hardly believe it. Strange. Important. Anyone else out there on the Edge getting this vibe?
  2. Embracing complexity: Simple, efficient, homogeneous = fragile. Complex, effective, diverse = resilient. In what we grow and what we eat. In what we buy and sell. In how we determine what to do, in organizations and in letting-ourselves-change. In everything. 
  3. The end of coddling obsolete and dangerous religions: First it was Dawkins’ book criticizing organized religion as anachronistic. Now there’s even an acknowledgement that drastic reductions in human population are needed if we’re to have any hope of putting a dint in the major social problems of our time. Organizations that claim we all have a right and/or duty to overpopulate our planet to the point of extinction must be confronted and made as socially loathsome as those that advocate genocide. 
  4. The end of trust of leaders and the demand for transparency: FEMA, Enron, the Bush Administration’s rogues’ gallery, have all started to bring about a growing distrust of leaders, their infallibility, and the need for the ability to oversee and second guess, and even replace egomaniacal decisions with the Wisdom of Crowds. Bush’s ‘signing statements’, which allow him to put himself above the law, are now being recognized as the outrageous abuse of power that they are.
  5. Thinking a little further ahead: A new CDC study on emergency preparedness acknowledges, at last, that it’s the actions of the people, not the political and emergency organizations, that will make all the difference in an emergency like a flu pandemic. That means closing schools, workplaces and shopping malls, and teaching children to be the vanguard by coughing into sleeves and washing their hands faithfully. And it means thinking past the next newsday, election and quarterlyfinancial statement. Aha!
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10 Responses to Saturday Links for the Week: February 3, 2007: The Reflective Edition

  1. David Parkinson says:
    February 3, 2007 at 20:04

    1 and 4 for sure… but then I always wonder whether I’m projecting my hopes outward into the world. I guess these two changes are related, and I hope that they’re both coming from people’s realization that we’ve been swindled and lied to since forever.

  2. Wendy Geise says:
    February 3, 2007 at 20:22

    I think that you would find The Powers of the Universe DVD’s by Brian Swimme http://www.brianswimme.org very interesting. He is a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in the Philosophy, Consciousness and Cosmology Department and an excellent story teller. He helps put the opportunity for human consciousness in the current state of ecological collapse in a cosmological perspective. You can also take a look at his New Story Series online for free at http://www.global-mindshift.org/discover/viewMemeGroup.asp?resourceID=291.

  3. Jon Husband says:
    February 4, 2007 at 11:19

    Anyone else out there on the Edge getting this vibe?Yes .. the suburban between-40-and-55-year-old kitchens and living rooms I have been in over the past couple of months are holding these kinds of conversations.The wisdom of crowds, indeed.People are starting to realize the jig is up, IMO.

  5. MLU says:
    February 4, 2007 at 11:57

    We who are strong grant our leaders authority, not out of silly notions of infallibility, but out of wisdom. Sometimes we need to act quickly and as one. Therefore we pick leaders–who remain our equals but whom we obey. We are strong. We are free. We are safe. We take care of one another.We who are strong have many children and we teach them our ways. Loathe us if you want. You will not matter, with your skinny intellect and your arrogant bigotry. Stronger forces than you have come against us, and they are gone. We are here. We love each other and we see youth around us eager to meet the challenges of life, to create new things and adjust to new realities. Our future is in good hands, and they will love us when we are old.We who are strong do think past election cycles. We think in generations. We live daily with those who have gone before and those who are not yet here, but who are nonetheless united with us through sharing of timeless principles, to which you seem willfully blind.You would understand the present and the future a bit better if you could spend the afternoon among a dozen grandchildren. I hope your gut gets better.

  6. Karen M says:
    February 4, 2007 at 12:37

    Dave: I thought you might appreciate this link that I found via Arts and Letterd Daily.

  7. Brutus says:
    February 4, 2007 at 12:46

    I agree with all your remarks except the wisdom of crowds. I’ve been especially interested in the “slow, major mindshift” now for some 20 years. Darwinians think in terms of biological evolution, but sociologists think in terms of cultural evolution. The engine driving cultural evolution right now is the speed of change in the modern, technological world and the diffusion of information, which are effecting a fundamental reorganization in the way we absorb information and conceptualize our place in the world. It used to be extraordinary to have learned enough to develop a “big picture” view, but it’s possible for many of us now. At the same time many fields are developing so fast that practitioners can’t keep up.The realization slowly dawning on many of us (resounding in some of use who’ve been thinking about it for years already) is that many — even most — of our institutions are failing to serve us effectively anymore. I agree that a huge portion of the problem is simply too many people. We’re like the virus that is so successful it eventually destroys its host, and in the process, itself. That’s an unthinking process, however, and we hope that we’re smarter than that; but of course, we’re not. The other major contributor to this mindshift is, rather counter-intuitively, efficiency. This is related closely to speed of change, the big problem being that we’re not equipped to handle many processes at ever accelerating speeds. We can’t think faster now (though we think we can), we can’t digest faster, we can’t sleep faster, we can’t heal faster, we can’t live faster. And our various individual and culture-wide activities can’t be compressed into shorter intervals of time. Technology is a good example. It changes too rapidly, and our daily computing, learning, studying, and entertainment habits no longer resemble those of a just a few years ago. Another example is economic activity. The boom and bust fluctuations might look like a godsend to those who win the lotteryor are suddenly rich following an IPO, but most of us frankly aren’t prepared for it. Obviously, wiping out large percentages of the population with periodic market corrections doesn’t work, either.All this is beginning to coalesce in our worries over global warming and sustainability. Those are important considerations, but I think they invite us to skew our focus. In a more fundamental way, we’re now both biologically and culturally maladapted to the environment we’ve created for ourselves. We need to address that problem, too.

  8. Evelyn Mitchell says:
    February 5, 2007 at 15:04

    Another shift I’m seeing, related to complexity and lack of trust in leaders, is a resurgence of craft, particularly craft which expresses edgy political views and uses recycled or natural materials. And another one, which I haven’t categorized very well, is the personalization of globalism. A friend comes back from visiting Mumbai and says she ran into a store owner from Cashmere in a coffee shop frequented by western tourists, who turns out to have a brother living in the closest major city to us. She went to his store, and bought quite a few presents to bring home.Two other friends are visiting South American right now, on a tour to meet Open Source developers, to make connections for new projects.Another friend spends his time between Sweden, South Africa and various parts of the US, working on bioinformatics and other Open Source software projects.These deep human connections, easily maintained with little effort, resonate in a new way for me.

  9. Mike says:
    February 10, 2007 at 13:50

    Social networking, by its very nature, empowers people to do good.I don’t mind the presence of web sites about how to do evil (revenge, make nukes etc), because, folks are unlikely to link to them in their del.icio.us. Posting your fave evil websites to a social networking system is likely to get you arrested.I recall some myspace page where the creator had his ‘how evil are you?’ quiz answer posted. By his own admission, he was pretty evil. I clicked to the site with the quiz and took it myself, and my score was in the ‘angelic good’ range. Working on the internet is my business, I’m not likely to post the quiz answer to my business site in any case, but I certainly wouldn’t advertise how evil I am, as long as I value things like friends and clients and just generally a peaceful and prosperous society.We’ve made Web 2.0 into a mirror and like anybody in front of a mirror about to go out and meet new people we’re grooming ourselves.

  10. Wendy Lestina says:
    February 12, 2007 at 11:47

    From far, far northern California: yes. To Jon Husband’s remarks: yes. My crowd is 50-70, mostly, and encompasses a lifetime of friends across the country, and a centralized group here in a very small, isolated farm town. The stirring of the need for change — individual change, beginning with deep spiritual questioning, not of the 1970s version, but of the very nature of purpose and responsibility in faith — and definitely the individualization of the global village, as mentioned above. Suddenly, everyone is going somewhere and reconnecting with a native craft (to sell here, to return proceeds to a woman in a village somewhere, or, more dramatically, buying the property for an orphanage in Malawi, or teaching English in Romania, or working in a hospital in Central America, or teaching on a Navajo reservation, or or or )…. and going to macrobiotic diets, ignoring prescriptions … the list of changes and concerns is endless.We are living in the eye of the storm and some of us may not live long enough to see the consequences of this incredible shift … but your vibes are exactly right, it is happening, and it is happening with incredible speed. Daily, people are falling into “the camp” like autumn leaves in a rainstorm.

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