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Psycho-analytic criticism is a genre of literature discredited by scientists who prefer to interpret chemical reactivity as expressing particular autonomic dysfunctions. Certain inferences are then extrapolated to "humanity", as is the custom of many a totalizing regime.
The authors pass over deconstruction methods in the DIY tool kit.
The judgment of their scientific informant, Australian marine biologist Jon Brodie, is "we've failed" to remedy or even prepare for climate change. But "Would I want to live like someone in Papua New Guinea to avoid climate change?" Brodie wonders. "Probably not."
Accordingly, the authors retreat from the brooding "we" to a peculiar image repertoire symbolizing anxiety or trauma --the causes being manifold and irreversible-- which the neurotic alone cannot repair.
In January of this year, a young Gambian man drowned in Venice's Grand Canal, while tourists in their gondolas laughed and filmed him on their phones. This was inhuman, and it suggests that the most immediate collapse of humanity might come from those places that will feel the physical brunt of climate change least directly. In the UK, which is more likely than most countries to escape desertification and mass famine, official and unofficial plans for the future are informed by the idea of a "Lifeboat Britain."
The author's conclusion attempts to reinforce the subliminal message, I need help. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
eschatology and milleniarism is a genre of religious literature peculiar to jewish tradition in prophecy.
literature
I already linked rationalwiki eschatology, of which millenialism, subsection secular iterations.
Chistine Hayes here, in particular lectures 15 - 19.
She and Dale Martin are quite the pairing for those who'd rather not get into the weeds of ecumenical "faith" or prefer to climb out of them. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
Now that I think of it, Norse mythology and the 'Twilight of the Gods' Is a similar eschatology, perhaps again not millenerian. According to The Viking Answer Lady Norse speakers did use a base 10 counting system. http://vikinganswerlady.com/numeric-reckoning.shtml "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
Besides calling out the psychiatrists to which the authors refer, I took on the subject to assign that prophetic role to the authors in this eschatological, calamitous, era which they identify with climate change and inhumanity, degradation, incontinence, alienation, &tc. Were you able to listen to the Hayes and Martin lectures (You may find transcript @ Yale; some do along with syllabus), you would apprehend the relevance of that function in that tradition is not predictive power.
What happened to prophet Isiah, prophet Jesus, prophet Luther (HAPPY BIRTHDAY!), prophet Miller? Nevermind.
Consider the relevance of pagan or gentile prophetic traditions to the authors' despair amid "human futilitarianism".
I visited VikingLady years ago, looked around, and haven't been back. It was difficult to avoid as there are few more authoritative references on "humanity" (and wiccan ritual and recipes) beside Smedley Butler and Robert Altmeyer.
And The Bible.
Little Known Fact: an UID, also a film buff, responded to a comment I posted about The 13th Warrior --much in the way I recommended Last Kingdom to you. You know that story: Muslim ambassador meets crude Vikings in thrall of superstition, dispels mystery. walp, VikingLady keeps an excerpt of ibn whathefu's memoir. That encounter with Rus was reported to be the literary basis of the film plot. Of course, I went in search of the translator and complete text, because that's what I do. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
Not using symbols for numbers, I don't think there was millennialism as such as in the magic of big, round numbers. Or at least I haven't heard of it.
The Twilight of the Gods on Norse mythology is interesting because it becomes less clear the more one studies it. Has it happened? Is it going to happen? An interpretation I have come across is that what we see is a mix of a cyclic myth with death and re-birth of the world colored by the three year winter 536-539 AD as Fimbulwinter and interpreted through and adopted to a Christian world by Snorre. That could explain the variations and unclear time frame.
The world's Holy Books - the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, religious literature from the Middle Ages to this day - echo this voice of rebellion, combining contempt for the corrupt urban life, suspicion of the merchant, and often, intense misogyny.
Vagaries of Fashion: Abrahamic Faiths and Law
Bernal laid out as never before the historicizing, totalizing authority of european scholarship --especially among "classicists" who rejected "Ancient Model" historiography in order to define "Aryan" models of world history, humanity, civilization, and valid scientific, or empirical, "positivism" serving concomitant polemic serving divine and darwinian hierarchy of "races". Bernal does this by cross-examining three centuries of canonical literature and tuition sponsored by "gatekeepers" anchored to "Greek civilization". The other two volumes employ historical linguistic technique to translate archaeological materials and critique ethnographic syllabaries, cognates, and 'industry' persisting to this day. Now, note: Bernal's investigation does not reject out of hand all prior art. That's not his purpose; It is to restore "multicultural" material and authority to the body of knowledge of "humanity" which should be available to students.
Panic The authors of this curiously titled essay "Tropical Depression" posit the ethical crisis, Who is disturbed by all manner of crises which "climate change" represents? That depends, I suppose, on who has the time to investigate the "special case" --the parable-- of Pateh Sabally Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
One group will be traveling from the fruit-orchards in Bologna, Italy, to a business innovation hub in Munich, Germany, and finally to Helsinki, Finland, where they will pitch the project they have developed during the course of their journey to a jury of entrepreneurs and businessmen. The six other groups that are being guided through Europe undergo a similar process, travelling from city to city and cultivating an out-of-the-box idea into a concrete business-plan.
The six other groups that are being guided through Europe undergo a similar process, travelling from city to city and cultivating an out-of-the-box idea into a concrete business-plan.
where cultivating tropical biodiversity has been quite successful. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
The ancient Greece and Rome were organic progenies of the civilization centers round Asia Minor. They were the New Worlds across a sea or two, somewhat deviant in their intellectualism or organized militarism.
Apart from them, Europe was a backwater of the most active trade routes and cultural exchange up until the 16th century. With Portugal and Spain the most desperate back ends. But the military experiences in the Mediterranean provided Europe with a huge naval edge.
Read Bernal's book, vol 1 - III, especially II-II, because those examine semitic languages' documentary and archeological artifacts relating Near East (a/k/a ocident, asia-minor/anatolia) and Egyptian "traditions" (myth cycles, cults, migration patterns) 3rd - 1st centuries BCE. Historical linguistic analysis gets quite technical with phonological and orthographic notations. For readers like me who are untutored in the "discipline" of translating dead languages, it's been a de-mystifying wonder puzzle. You simply have to acquire copies of the books. Totl bibliograhy ~ 600pp. I'm sorry.
I linked Hayes' intro to old testament youtube lectures (espec. 15-19, classic and literary prophets)here. You'll have to listen to them actually, hear the word and application of "eschatology" for yourself. Dale Martin's intro to NT, too. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
30 years ago I had was Bernal.
:: incidentally I quite like the radically concise "syllabary" for reading classical T/Dao philosophy: yin, yang, not only because I've been cultivating my daughter's instruction in Mandarin for a decade. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
Taoism underscores the complementary harmony of yin and yang, while their particular duality is emphasized by Confusianism.
I categorically reject this response and embrace optimism as a choice. I belived the current climate challenge can be substantially met, even as I acknowledge the improbability of so doing. I cannot and will not reject my own mortality, the mortality of the civilization into which I was born or the possibility of the extinction of the human species. I have long maintained that one cannot live life while denying death and extending that position to include the death of my culture and species seems natural and logical to me.
The psychoanalyst turned historian Ele Sagan in 'The Honey and the Hemlock - Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Greece and Modern America' notes that the real miracle is that, given the many psychological debilities of human beings, we have managed to survive this long in societies this complex. If we cannot save ourselves when it is quite possible to do so we do not deserve to survive - IMO. "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
If we have a chance to survive, and we don't try it, we won't survive. Or at least it's likely to depress the chance.
Embracing optimism, it's the logical choice.
...One of the first things that struck me about Cuba was that they take seriously the task Davis dismisses: how to know what it means to be human. When I mentioned this in academic presentations, I got jeered. In retrospect, I don't think I was understood. How could I be? ...
What sprang immediately to my mind upon reading this article in the context of our ongoing conversation was Ernst Becker's The Denial of Death. (Full length PDF) Following is an excerpt from the foreword by Sam Keen:
In the years since his death, Becker has been widely recognized as one of the great spiritual cartographers of our age and a wise physician of the soul. Gradually, reluctantly, we are beginning to acknowledge that the bitter medicine he prescribes -- contemplation of the horror of our inevitable death -- is, paradoxically, the tincture that adds sweetness to mortality. Becker's philosophy as it emerges in Denial of Death and Escape from Evil is a braid woven from four strands. The first strand. The world is terrifying. To say the least, Becker's account of nature has little in common with Walt Disney. Mother Nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates. We live, he says, in a creation in which the routine activity for organisms is "tearing others apart with teeth of all types -- biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue." The second strand. The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death. Human beings are naturally anxious because we are ultimately helpless and abandoned in a world where we are fated to die. "This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression -- and with all this yet to die." Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Ernest Becker were strange allies in fomenting the cultural revolution that brought death and dying out of the closet. At the same time that Kubler-Ross gave us permission to practice the art of dying gracefully, Becker taught us that awe, fear, and ontological anxiety were natural accompaniments to our contemplation of the fact of death. The third strand. Since the terror of death is so overwhelming we conspire to keep it unconscious. "The vital lie of character" is the first line of defense that protects us from the painful awareness of our helplessness. Every child borrows power from adults and creates a personality by introjecting the qualities of the godlike being. If I am like my all-powerful father I will not die. So long as we stay obediently within the defense mechanisms of our personality, what Wilhelm Reich called "character armor" we feel safe and are able to pretend that the world is manageable. But the price we pay is high. We repress our bodies to purchase a soul that time cannot destroy; we sacrifice pleasure to buy immortality; we encapsulate ourselves to avoid death. And life escapes us while we huddle within the defended fortress of character. Society provides the second line of defense against our natural impotence by creating a hero system that allows us to believe that we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth. We achieve ersatz immortality by sacrificing ourselves to conquer an empire, to build a temple, to write a book, to establish a family, to accumulate a fortune, to further progress and prosperity, to create an information-society and global free market. Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars. One of Becker's lasting contributions to social psychology has been to help us understand that corporations and nations may be driven by unconscious motives that have little to do with their stated goals. Making a killing in business or on the battlefield frequently has less to do with economic need or political reality than with the need for assuring ourselves that we have achieved something of lasting worth.
Becker's philosophy as it emerges in Denial of Death and Escape from Evil is a braid woven from four strands.
The first strand. The world is terrifying. To say the least, Becker's account of nature has little in common with Walt Disney. Mother Nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates. We live, he says, in a creation in which the routine activity for organisms is "tearing others apart with teeth of all types -- biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue."
The second strand. The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death. Human beings are naturally anxious because we are ultimately helpless and abandoned in a world where we are fated to die. "This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression -- and with all this yet to die."
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Ernest Becker were strange allies in fomenting the cultural revolution that brought death and dying out of the closet. At the same time that Kubler-Ross gave us permission to practice the art of dying gracefully, Becker taught us that awe, fear, and ontological anxiety were natural accompaniments to our contemplation of the fact of death.
The third strand. Since the terror of death is so overwhelming we conspire to keep it unconscious. "The vital lie of character" is the first line of defense that protects us from the painful awareness of our helplessness. Every child borrows power from adults and creates a personality by introjecting the qualities of the godlike being. If I am like my all-powerful father I will not die. So long as we stay obediently within the defense mechanisms of our personality, what Wilhelm Reich called "character armor" we feel safe and are able to pretend that the world is manageable. But the price we pay is high. We repress our bodies to purchase a soul that time cannot destroy; we sacrifice pleasure to buy immortality; we encapsulate ourselves to avoid death. And life escapes us while we huddle within the defended fortress of character.
Society provides the second line of defense against our natural impotence by creating a hero system that allows us to believe that we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth. We achieve ersatz immortality by sacrificing ourselves to conquer an empire, to build a temple, to write a book, to establish a family, to accumulate a fortune, to further progress and prosperity, to create an information-society and global free market. Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars.
One of Becker's lasting contributions to social psychology has been to help us understand that corporations and nations may be driven by unconscious motives that have little to do with their stated goals. Making a killing in business or on the battlefield frequently has less to do with economic need or political reality than with the need for assuring ourselves that we have achieved something of lasting worth.
I've been rereading books in my stacks for decades. One's perspective or attitude toward the world, "the context," changes -- in my case anyway. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
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