Archive | Great Revaluing RSS feed for this section

Why the Expressive Arts are Essential to the Transition

16 Apr

The expressive arts: music and dance, drawing and painting, calligraphy, sculpture, acting, needlecraft, architecture, and so on. Why they are essential: Because they bind us to one another and to the earth, they transform a place, a locus, into a home.

Before continuing down that path, however, let’s take a look back to the Romantics. It’s important to see how, for all their love of nature and of the expressive arts, they contributed to the ideologies that have ended up alienating us from Nature, and from the expressive arts.

It’s really quite simple. Back at the turn of the 18th into the 19th century, as the industrial revolution took hold, the Romantics venerated Nature, and opposed it to the City and to Industry. Industry was dirty, degrading, and alienating, keeping us from our True Home, nature. The trouble is, by so arguing, the Romantics placed Nature on a Pedestal, and put the Pedestal Over There Somewhere. The Romantics preserved nature by separating it from us. As more and more people moved into the cities, more and more people moved away from Nature. Nature became more and more alien, even as the Romantic Ideal became more and more alluring.

At the same time, the Romantics invested artistic expression in a class of rustics that lived Other There, in Nature, but also in an elite class of Geniuses who, while living among us, were not of us. Music and painting and poetry and dance became the provinces of those august geniuses, on the one hand, and women and children on the other. They were no longer capacities that each and everyone of us had and exercised. And those geniuses, they became the playthings of the industrial rich, perhaps railing against them, but ultimately tied to them as patrons.

Continue reading →

Tags: , ,

Big Coal Kills a Town

13 Apr

Which is what Big Coal does. Kills mountains and towns and poisons the rivers and the skies.

Dan Barry of The New York Times tells the story of Lindytown West Virginia:

But the coal that helped to create Lindytown also destroyed it. Here was the church; here was its steeple; now it’s all gone, along with its people. Gone, too, are the surrounding mountaintops. To mine the soft rock that we burn to help power our light bulbs, our laptops, our way of life, heavy equipment has stripped away the trees, the soil, the rock — what coal companies call the “overburden.”

Now, the faint, mechanical beeps and grinds from above are all that disturb the Lindytown quiet, save for the occasional, seam-splintering blast.

Wouldn’t you know it, Massy Energy’s been at work.

 

 

Tags:

Severity of Fukushima on Par with Chernobyl

12 Apr

Will it break the scale? The New York Times reports:

But at a separate news conference, an official from the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, said that the radiation release from Fukushima could, in time, surpass levels seen in 1986.

“The radiation leak has not stopped completely, and our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl,” said Junichi Matsumoto, a nuclear executive for the company.

Tags: ,

Corporate Schools, FAIL

7 Apr

In Salon, testing scandals are rife:

Although the national media appear determined not to notice, similar testing scandals have taken place in New York, Texas, Georgia, California — basically anywhere school funding and/or jobs have been linked directly to multiple-choice testing. Private charter schools as well as public schools, incidentally.

“This is like an education Ponzi scam,” a teacher’s union official told USA Today. “If your test scores improve, you make more money. If not, you get fired. That’s incredibly dangerous.”

We aren’t going to make it to a new world by sending our kids to schools that constantly fail them. Where’s the alternative schooling going to come from?

Tags: ,

Conundrums on the Left

6 Apr

John Quiggin has an interesting post at Crooked Timber about problems in formulating a leftist politics that makes sense. It’s mostly about Australia (where Quiggin lives and teaches), but it opens with a statement about things here in the USofA. He observes that “the fact that the base has nowhere to go, and can’t even justify abstention means that Obama and the rest of the Democratic leadership can and do kick them (or, thinking more globally, us) with impunity.” He further observes:

The frustration felt on the left at present is (at least at my case) associated with a feeling that we should be doing a lot better. The case for market liberalism is in ruins after the Global Financial Crisis and it’s obvious that the reconstruction of the system has changed nothing, leaving the bankers unscathed and putting all the burden onto ordinary people. Left positions on lots of specific issues have much more public support than is evident from their political representation. The right screwed up massively over Iraq, is delusional on climate change and so on. And Obama won office easily running hard against Bush’s abuses on civil liberties and for a decent health care plan.

Maybe it’s time we make the move to Truth and Tradition. Instead of progressing into a nuclear disaster financed by fat cat bankers we need to conserve the land and our local communities.

Tags: ,

We Need a Gift Ecology

3 Apr

“Eternal abundance as the capitalist myth. Peel open a Puritan work ethicist and you’ll find a drifty opium head.”

So says eco-critic Tim Morton. More at his blog, including a TED talk. And the best things in life a free, fellowship, music, poems, paintings, and so forth.

Tags:

The Wholeness of Life: Beyond Three Eras of Techno-Scrambling

18 Mar

In 1976 the economist Fritz Schumacher spoke at Findhorn in Northern Scotland in an address as relevant today as it was then for everyone [1]. It shapes the foundations of Transition Party USA.

Historically he noted that we are at the end of three distinct but overlapped eras:

  • 300 years of a Descartian worldview which valued mind over matter, established mind/body dualism (mind good/body bad) and advocated humans controlling Nature;
  • 200 years of a socio-economic-political system shaped by the industrial revolution’s division of labor which led to the devaluation of the whole human being; and
  • 100 years of technocratic and money idolatry, driven by a belief in infinite resources and quick technological fixes — resulting in a ravaged eco-system. [2]

As these old eras draw to a close, bankrupt, we need to regain a traditional understanding of what is good, true, and beautiful and so inform our actions to build a new era that acknowledges the wholeness of life. It is not a single-issue crisis that we face — not just an energy crisis, not just a nuclear crisis, not just an ecological crisis or sociological or political or cultural or economic crisis — our whole “way of life” has become a death-trip: species diversity and cultural diversity are both disappearing faster and faster. Solutions must be nurtured and implemented simultaneously at many levels. Schumacher calls on the audience to first work to foster a new world view in themselves, diagnose what can be done, see if others are already engaged in that rebuilding work and support them, and then act themselves, if even in a small way.

doing a few minutes or an hour each day

communicating for Transition Party USA

circulating insights that show the Path or a Local Way

encourage each child to play, play! PLAY!!!

Continue reading →

Tags: ,

Over the Rainbow and Thru the Woods to Safe Nukes, NOT

15 Mar

Over at the NYTimes Peter Wynn Kirby has kicked off a nice discussion of nuclear disaster in Japanese pop culture, which is what put me in mind of Gojira. The staff here at TPUSA has been reading through the discussion and found one comment to be particularly potent. It’s by Bert from Philadelphia:

Nuclear power is perfectly safe if it is place in a location that we know in advance will be unmolested by earthquake, terrorism, uprising, tornado for the next half century. And that it is made of pure unobtainium* so that the parts never break or wear out unexpectedly. And the software that runs it is bug free. And the operators will never be inattentive, sick, drunk or drugged up, or having sex instead of watching the gauges.

*Jeez, I hope James “Avatar” Cameron hasn’t trade-marked that term.

Tags: ,

Mauritius in Transition?

7 Mar

Mauritius is a small island nation off the east coast of Africa with a population of 1.3 million. With no exploitable natural resources, the smart money would have bet against Maritius when it became independent of Britain in 1968. The smart money would have been wrong. At the time of independence it had a per capita income of $400; now it’s $6,700 and the country has 87% home owndership, compared to 79% in the USA, home of the meltdown. According to economist Joseph Stiglitz, who recently visited, Mauritius provides “free education through university for all of its citizens, transportation for school children, and free health care – including heart surgery – for all.”

They must know something the USofA doesn’t.

& maybe they’re not as deeply mired in the ways of a world that’s gone forever.

Tags: ,

Peach Si! Bomb NO!

1 Mar

Some observations by Charlie Keil on a text by Ruskin.

Peach Tree
Peach Tree by punkin3.14 at Flickr.

From John Ruskin’s Ad Valorem

“Ad Valorem” is the third essay from the work ‘Unto This Last’: Four essays on the first principles of Political Economy.

. . . it matters, so far as the labourer’s immediate profit is concerned, not an iron filing whether I employ him in growing a peach, or forging a bombshell; but my probable mode of consumption of those articles matters seriously. Admit that it is to be in both cases “unselfish,” and the difference, to him, is final, whether when his child is ill, I walk into his cottage and give it the peach, or drop the shell down his chimney, and blow his roof off.

The Aim Of Consumption

The worst of it, for the peasant, is, that the capitalist’s consumption of the peach is apt to be selfish, and of the shell, distributive; but, in all cases, this is the broad and general fact, that on due catallactic commercial principles, somebody’s roof must go off in fulfillment of the bomb’s destiny. You may grow for your neighbour, at your liking, grapes or grapeshot; he will also, catallactically, grow grapes or grapeshot for you, and you will each reap what you have sown. It is, therefore, the manner and issue of consumption which are the real tests of production. Production does not consist in things laboriously made, but in things serviceably consumable; and the question for the nation is not how much labour it employs, but how much life it produces. For as consumption is the end and aim of production, so life is the end and aim of consumption.

Continue reading →

Tags: , ,

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →