Today’s post by regular contributor, Richard Jurin, is a follow up to two recent posts about Faustian bargains we have made. Before his retirement, Richard led the Environmental Studies programme at the University of Northern Colorado, where he launched a degree in Sustainability Studies. His academic interests are environmental worldviews and understanding barriers to sustainability. As ever, with our blogs, the views expressed are not necessarily shared by NAEE.
Richard writes:
A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. I might add, that relying on memes and the oral splashings of mainstream narratives merely provide belief confirmation. We can argue about which philosophy is best suited for rational discourse, but an alternative to traditional rationalism might be Pyrrhonism – a philosophy that equal arguments can be offered on both sides of any proposition. Before we rush headlong into acceptance of conditioned beliefs about the world, we might question everything we think we know. This has traditionally been quoted as the purpose of a good liberal education, which now seems driven by sanctioned, data driven curricula.
In handing over our personal sovereignty of thinking to ‘elites’ purporting to know absolute truths and facts, we create a Faustian Bargain that gives them a sense of infallibility. This is a recipe for disaster, as events of the twentieth century especially seems to show – how we hand over total decision-making to authorities with little better understanding of truths and facts than the common people themselves. The authorities do use experts, but these seem mostly chosen according to their acceptance of specific belief systems, with opposing belief systems disregarded, ignored, or downright censored out of the acceptable mainstream narratives. Skepticism of cherished dogmas has always been a dangerous path to follow (e.g., think The Inquisition).
We are at a point in human development in our global society where we face adverse global conditions affecting civilized humanity’s ability to live as it developed, over several millennia. Despite mainstream certainty, the reasons for these coming conditions are far from certain. These conditions are not going away, but how humanity adapts is crucial in determining how all global life deteriorates further or begins adapting. Currently, this process of human adaptation is in the hands of politicians and economists who view things short-term, even if they talk long-term.
Through my decades as an sustainabilitist (a label I call myself), I have gained a new worldview that I know is already shared by many environmental advocates around the world. Yet, there are still many Earth-caring advocates that continue to believe a technocratic path is the way of salvation for the unsustainable materialistic-consumer lifestyle. The earth-centered ecological worldview (for want of a label) is rooted in values of fairness and compassion with a spiritual connection to the planet that transcends the materialistic-consumer worldview currently dominating the planet. I know there are many of us, and in our personal-localization, that demonstrate the path that will eventually solve our myriad global ecological problems. We may live in smaller enclaves (e.g., Findhorn, Scotland) or isolated like myself and a like-minded neighbor, within a set of neighborhoods clinging stubbornly to the consumer mindset. The solution is localization and finding ways to live well together. This seems incomprehensible to hierarchical technocrats and their supporters, incapable of seeing alternate perspectives for ecological issues within their existing worldviews.
One thing that I know unites most environmentalists is the firm belief that the hierarchical control mindset where profit at all costs through destructive competition and inequity as the focus, will never work. Yet, believers of this mindset use catastrophe narratives to scare people into compliance with their beliefs. Collective minds working from the grass-roots level can be truly creative and empowering. We have plenty of examples that show how sustainable living can work. Our job as environmental educators ought not to convince people to follow an ill-thought-out and biased set of technocratic policies to maintain a consumer lifestyle, but to convince them, our elected officials and the economic hierarchy, that demonstrable grass-roots solutions already exist for living more sustainably, and whose principles are transferable to small communities everywhere.
Before we agree to fantasy based global technocratic deals of ‘net-zero,’ and technologies that are little better than current ones, we have to consider the problems of making a deal with the economic devil. We need localized discussions to find solutions that work across the board and not that simply maintain the economic status quo. We cannot become sustainable without healing the human condition. Just imagine that we did reach net zero and have all kinds of incredible sustainable technology. Without healing ourselves we will just keep on killing and traumatizing each other ‘sustainably.’ If we heal human trauma, even with today’s technologies (and they will only get better over time), we will have a planet that is more livable for life in general, and be able to adapt more easily to global changes. The path to sustainable living is the path to peace. All else in nought but current issues masking human trauma further.
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Richard can be contacted at: richard.jurin@risebroadband.net
newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Pyrrho_and_pyrrhonism