The
process of understanding & action
Actual situation (Conventional paradigm)
Fundamental questions: What is elemental society?
Vision
Alternatives
Challenges
Commitment
The actual situation: Understanding industrial society
What are the organizing principles of contemporary society?
Ethics of the modern world
Institutions of industrial society
Advantages and disadvantages
Fundamental questions: What is elemental society?
“As we free ourselves from the collective trace of blind acquiescence to a culture of violence, injustice, materialism, and domination so destructive of life that it threatens our very survival, we are able to direct our life energy toward the task of consciously, intentionally living into being a new culture of peace, justice, compassion, and partnership grounded in the principles set forth in the Earth Charter.” David Korten, Love of Money
Alternatives: Community
How does industrial society destroy community?
What is spiritual community?
Wendell Berry's view of traditional community: Locality, understanding,
and care.
Alternatives: The Commons
The creative, political, physical, natural and moral commons
What is the ‘common good?’
What invades the commons?
Challenges
Overcome the power of technology and confront the mystery of
existence.
This is the central challenge of industrial society because the seduction
of our power is overwhelming.
“Dazzled by the brilliant achievements of the intellect in science
and technique, we have been deluded into believing that we are the masters
of the earth and our will the ultimate criterion of what is right and
wrong….We must not be deceived by the limited splendor of theories
that answer none of our most vital problems and only ridicule the inborn
urge to ask the most crying, urgent question: What is the secret of
existence? Wherefore and for whose sake do we live? Only those who have
not tasted the terror of life, only those who claim that it is a pleasure
to live and that more and only pleasure is in store for the generations
to come, can deny the essential necessity of asking: Wherefore? For
whose sake?” Man is Not Alone, Heschel, 39-40
Break the techno-bureaucratic infrastructure
“Lutz believed that our major challenge now is to break the techno-bureaucratic
infrastructure set up by corporations. Technology ensnares us in ever
more complex structures. We have a techno-dictatorial world governing
system, controlled by corporations in all areas of human life.”
Resurgence Sept 2004
How to restore life?
"Life belongs to the free-living and mobile creatures, not to the
encrusted ones; and to restore the initiative to life and participate
in its renewal, we must counterbalance every fresh complexity, every
mechanical refinement, every increase in quantitative goods or quantitative
knowledge, every advance in manipulative technique, every threat of
superabundance or surfeit, with stricter habits of evaluation, rejection,
choice. To achieve that capacity we must consciously resist every kind
of automatism." The Conduct of Life, 270