Sorry I didn't notice earlier, JCH, that your comment was trapped in moderation, on account of the number of links it contains. If it ever happens again, please let me know.
I'm also sorry that you found the post so dismayingly substandard. For my own part, I'm grateful for your comment both because I find it informative and interesting on its own, and also because I find that it supports my abstract description - esp in 3rd paragraph, after "goes without saying" - of how climate change prevention proponents view themselves, their proposals, their opponents, and the unpersuaded.
More later, I hope, and I apologize again for letting your comment languish in the "pending" tar pit.
You or Morton or both put the problem well. Another way of saying the same thing, as I think at one point or another I have previously argued, and that I think John Gray's anti-humanist thought (following Heidegger explicitly, resembling Polanyi formally) and some deep-ecological anti-humanism (Curtis White, for example) also embody, is that ecological catastrophe is a kind of "natural" destination for instrumentalist reason, the realization of its intrinsic nullity as annihilation. It would be the essence of our civilization as a global civilization, denuded of the last pre-modern vestments, no longer even "Western," possibly to be brought to term in the East or former East (thus the roles of China and India). The slightly more optimistic view would be that the evolution or education of the human race could not come about by any other process than the production of a global interest internalized, made perceivable as real, through terror. To be real terror, the possibility of failure to defeat it must be acknowledged as real. We are therefore somehow compelled to put our collective survival in real jeopardy, if not through global warming, then by some other means. It would be similar to the realization of the global interest forced by total war and nuclear weapons, but, in the case of the war threat (which has not completely abated), we needed only to refrain from a particular discrete action: Don't push the button. Ecological catastrophe as a spontaneous and inevitable product of our way of life seems to require us to change our way of life, to become different from what we are, which is by definition unimaginable - thus the despondency.
Tho actually, come to think of it, that's kinda serendipitous - that the comment was trapped in "moderation."
Sorry I didn't notice earlier, JCH, that your comment was trapped in moderation, on account of the number of links it contains. If it ever happens again, please let me know.
I'm also sorry that you found the post so dismayingly substandard. For my own part, I'm grateful for your comment both because I find it informative and interesting on its own, and also because I find that it supports my abstract description - esp in 3rd paragraph, after "goes without saying" - of how climate change prevention proponents view themselves, their proposals, their opponents, and the unpersuaded.
More later, I hope, and I apologize again for letting your comment languish in the "pending" tar pit.
You or Morton or both put the problem well. Another way of saying the same thing, as I think at one point or another I have previously argued, and that I think John Gray's anti-humanist thought (following Heidegger explicitly, resembling Polanyi formally) and some deep-ecological anti-humanism (Curtis White, for example) also embody, is that ecological catastrophe is a kind of "natural" destination for instrumentalist reason, the realization of its intrinsic nullity as annihilation. It would be the essence of our civilization as a global civilization, denuded of the last pre-modern vestments, no longer even "Western," possibly to be brought to term in the East or former East (thus the roles of China and India). The slightly more optimistic view would be that the evolution or education of the human race could not come about by any other process than the production of a global interest internalized, made perceivable as real, through terror. To be real terror, the possibility of failure to defeat it must be acknowledged as real. We are therefore somehow compelled to put our collective survival in real jeopardy, if not through global warming, then by some other means. It would be similar to the realization of the global interest forced by total war and nuclear weapons, but, in the case of the war threat (which has not completely abated), we needed only to refrain from a particular discrete action: Don't push the button. Ecological catastrophe as a spontaneous and inevitable product of our way of life seems to require us to change our way of life, to become different from what we are, which is by definition unimaginable - thus the despondency.