Paul Kingsnorth: "the wrong kind of environmentalist: those who offer up a vision of humanity and nature that involves roots, traditions, smallness, simplicity, a return to previous lifeways, or any other kind of challenge to Machine modernity...
paulkingsnorth.substack.com
paulkingsnorth.substack.com
"This in turn is contrasted with the right kind of green: that which is modern, global, progressive and - most importantly of all - friendly to the onward march of the technological society."
It's about machines vs. reality, but climate change rhetoric obscures that.
It's about machines vs. reality, but climate change rhetoric obscures that.
What is quite clear from centralized Machine activists like George Monbiot, who want mathematics and land confiscation, is that the "control" version of the world is seeking to crush the "communion" or "participation" understanding.
The Machine-understanding of Creation, reducing it to interchangeable bits, refuses to know what it does not know:
"Knowing means more than a way to tame reality. To know is to enter into communion with things." (Leonardo Boff)
"Knowing means more than a way to tame reality. To know is to enter into communion with things." (Leonardo Boff)
Kingsnorth on the elimination of all borders & limits: "Progressive leftism and corporate capitalism have not so much merged as been exposed for what they always were: variants of the same modern ideal, built around the pursuit of boundless self-creation in a post-natural world."
"What we can see is that both achieve their goals through the process of datafication: the quantification of everything. The pattern of reality will be transformed into bits and bytes, comparisons and yields, numbers and statistics..."
"The Fourth Revolution, and the Machine Environmentalism which it contains, offer us a profoundly profane vision of the world. Life in this understanding is not a sacred thing - what does βsacredβ mean after all? - but an engineering challenge"
Why climate change and not pollution, soil erosion, biodiversity?
"If you have ever wondered why climate change has so utterly dominated the green debate to the exclusion of so many other problems which stem from industrial society ...
"If you have ever wondered why climate change has so utterly dominated the green debate to the exclusion of so many other problems which stem from industrial society ...
"Climate change is a problem amenable to numerical questions and technocratic answers which go with the grain of a Machine culture. It is, furthermore, a problem which, almost by definition, can only be solved by elites."
As so many have observed, this is the latest iteration of the Tower of Babel: "We are living now through what may be the final triumph of Rational Man. The tower he has made has nearly touched the very roof of the world. Every old story can tell us what will happen next."
There is another way, another call in the human heart. As Boff, as Goethe, as St. Augustine said: "we know in proportion as we love."
The path of listening, of participation with reality, of communion, humility, and love.
The path of listening, of participation with reality, of communion, humility, and love.
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