3 Matching Annotations
- Jul 2024
-
-
Culturally, we in the West, at least, have inherited a tradition of human exceptionalism rooted in the idea that human beings, uniquely, are made in God’s image and, as the Bible says, are meant to ‘have dominion … over all the earth’.
for - human exceptionalism - example - the bible
-
- Jul 2023
-
docdrop.org docdrop.org
-
- for: ecological civilization, degrowth, futures, deep ecology, emptiness, polycrisis, human exceptionalism, planned descent
- source
- The Great Simplifcation
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE39xfNRRyw
-
Description
- Nate hosts this discussion on what constitutes an ecological civilization with guests
- William Rees
- Rex Weyler
- Nora Bateson
- Nate hosts this discussion on what constitutes an ecological civilization with guests
-
Reflections Overall,
- an insightful discussion on the polycrisis and
- reflections on what is in store for civilization.
- There is consensus that
- what we are experiencing has been decades in the making and
- the solutions-oriented approach to solving problems has only treated the symptoms and indeed has made things worse.
- There is a strong undercurrent of the emptiness in nature
-
Rex
- emphasized the folly of human exceptionalism that has been socially normalized and which
- continues to create the major separation that fuels the polycrisis.
- Not recognizing that we are nature, not recognizing our animal nature
- we look upon nature with an attitude of controlling nature, rather than flowing with her.
- advocated Taoism as a more consistent way to frame nature rather than the reductionist, control methodology that separates us from nature.
-
Nora's perspective is the folly of abstraction that generates fixed preconceptions of aspects of nature that we then reify.
- The fixed preconceptions are solidified but they are an oversimplified version of reality,
- and that oversimplification leads to actualizing the cliche"a little knowledge is dangerous" into civilization
- in other words, the continuous manufacture of progress traps.
-
William sees our impending crash as not only inevitable, but natural.
- In this, he concurs with Rex's perspective.
- Human beings are simply another species and like them,
- we are susceptible to population explosions when negative feedbacks are removed,
- which can lead to nature self-correcting with mass dieoff when resources are overconsumed.
-
accepting our animal nature, and end this human exceptionalism, which blinds us to our animal nature, just for starters. If we have a meeting about climate or biodiversity, in our minds we need to invite all other creatures to those meetings. And I'm not just trying to be foolish or silly here. I'm serious, I'm dead serious about it. We 01:24:09 need to be sitting at the table with the elephants and the jaguars and the wolves and the algae and the apple trees and the bees and allowing those voices somehow into our conversation.
- for: symbiocene, human exceptionalism
- question
- how do we invite them in? if they cannot represent themselves, how do we represent them?
- does anyone know what' it's like to be a bat?
- how do we invite them in? if they cannot represent themselves, how do we represent them?
- remind ourselves of our animal nature
- mortality salience counters human exceptionalism
-