Truth and Traditions

Just before the bottom fell out, he’d quit his job, she needed extensive medical care, and their daughter had her ills. They were well-fixed, however, having earned good salaries and socked away lots of $$$ in their 401K’s. Then Wall Street Roulette went bust and he couldn’t get a job, not even call-backs. But they still had bills to pay

They’ve managed, have grown, and are happy:

When something can’t be paid, we go without until it can. We were given a gift certificate for a meal out, and I tell you, that steak tasted better than any other I’ve had in my life. The value of what we purchase is rated by a new metric: what we truly need and will enrich our lives. That’s a lesson I don’t think we would have learned bumping through life with little thought about the cost of milk or gas. And the issues that lay behind those costs — like our dependence on oil and the importance of up-cycling resources to manage our waste — would have remained distant.

Full story at Salon.

A village remains, Redkovka, Ukraine. And handful of families refused to leave, for this is their home, the church its center:

Most of Redkovka’s residents — about 1,000 people — resettled after the disaster. But the five families there today, including Ms. Masanovitz and her husband, Mikhail, 73, refused.

“This was home for them,” Ms. Markosian said. “This was where they grew up.”

“It was something that I had to understand,” she said. “And that came from just being there and seeing the thread that weaves this entire village together.”

The thread, she found, was love: love for one another and love for the place. Together, the villagers endured the Second World War, Chernobyl and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, they rarely leave. Although a bus drives through, Ms. Markosian never saw anyone board.

A photo essay in The New York Times. And another  at The Boston Globe (owned by NYT).

Literary critic and philosopher Tim Morris has a very smart post for the philosophically minded: Fighting Modernity with Modernity? No Thanks. What he’s against:

According to one view, humans emancipate themselves from Nature into a more total freedom over its pure plasticity. Yet this would be to continue in the aesthetic-sadistic thought that Nature is a malleable cartoon character who can be stretched and shaped to our whim. And which sadist gets to decide what to do next?

That is to say, modernity has bequeathed us the view that we have the technological tools to push Nature everywhich way we please. So, for example, we can create all the nuclear power we need, and some day we’ll figure out what to do with all that nuclear waste sitting in pools and casks, and some day we’ll figure out how to build plants that aren’t vulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis. Someday.

He continues:

The question is, now that we know what we know, do we want to continue imagining different kinds of malleability (capitalism, communism) and is that all we want to do? Note that on my view, even if we achieve some kind of physical enactment of our dream—say we have enough political power and enough Earth shaking equipment—we will still be dreaming.

That is, now that we know we’re fouling our own nest with fracking and nuking and deep-sea drilling and all the rest, now that we know that, can we admit that we don’t really know what to do about all those unintended side-effects that keep getting in our face? Can we admit that we are limited, finite beings, and that we should conserve what we’ve got, both for us, and for the other creatures on that share this planet with us?

Do we keep on using tools from modernity’s toolkit to fix a problem created by that toolkit? Or do we see that the toolkit is a rather confusing part of a much wider configuration space?

Maybe we need a new tool kit? One that isn’t so new-fangled modern. One that is both old and newer than new. Let’s look at the truth, conserve what we got, and dance our way into a more sustainable future.