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A Few More Collected Greer Quotes
Its been a few months since I've shared a few new favorite tidbits from our favorite Archdruid, John Michael Greer.
From November 13th, 2013:
“As for the call to adventure, that's almost always very quiet — grand as the outcome may be, the process usually starts in some silent place where somebody thinks long and hard, and finally sighs, stands up, and starts walking somewhere.”
I've always felt the same way. =^)
Next, someone was talking about NTE or “Near-Term Extinction” for the human race due to greatly accelerated global warming brought about by methane releases at the poles and from the oceans. They asked how could they go on when it really looked so hopeless? Greer's response:
“As for whether the future is hopeless or not, since we can't know what the future holds, we're in a Pascal's “wager position.” We have two choices: decide to take action to make the future better than it would otherwise be, or decide we're all doomed and might as well just lay down and die.
If we make the first choice and the world's doomed, we may be wasting our time, but since it doesn't really matter how we spend our final hours, we haven't lost anything: final score 0. If we take the first choice and the world isn't doomed, then we have the chance to make the future better than it otherwise would be: final score +1.
If we make the second choice and the world's doomed, well, once again it doesn't really matter how we spend our final hours: final score 0. If we make the second choice and we're wrong about the world being doomed, though, we've thrown away our chance to make the future better than it would otherwise be: final score -1. Logically speaking, therefore, unless you know for a fact that there will be no future — and human beings lack the omniscience to make that call — it's always best to assume that there will be a future that your actions can influence, and act accordingly. “
On November 20th, at one point in his post, Greer said:
“Treated purely as a heuristic, a mental tool that fosters exploration, the concept of natural law has proven to be very valuable. The difficulty creeps in when natural laws are treated, not as useful summaries of regularities in the world of experience, but as the realities of which the world of experience is a confused and imprecise reflection.It’s this latter sort of thinking that drives the insistence, very common in some branches of science, that a repeatedly observed and documented phenomenon can’t possibly have taken place, because the existing body of theory provides no known mechanism capable of causing it.
That’s the kind of difficulty that lands rationalists in the trap discussed in last week’s post, and turns ages of reason into ages of unreason: eras in which all collective action is based on some set of universally accepted, mutually supporting, logically arranged beliefs about the cosmos that somehow fail to make room for the most crucial issues of the time. “
This is basically addressing those paranormal and spiritual experiences that people have that science insists must be either lies or self-delusion, hallucination or misinterpretation. He's pointing out a massive disconnect in our massive culture– the 'proper and sanctioned' worldview that insists that reality is this certain thing that scientists have already collectively agreed upon, including a cemented set of dogmas that are not to be gainsaid. Meanwhile, the REST of the population is into ghost hunting, and angel visitations, and near-death experiences, Mother Mary sightings, alternate history, time slips, and UFOs and alien abductions…. Not everyone makes room for all or even most of these alternate realities to be REAL, but most people in the population, from over half to over 2 thirds, believe in at least ONE of these things due to personal experience. One could also include belief in God or gods, heaven and hell, a human soul that survives bodily death and may even reincarnate. Add all that up and you have a great majority of people in the world, even the western world, who disagree with the proper and prevailing reality that disallows for such anomalies — “Scientism.” (Not the scientific method itself, which actually would be investigating all these oddities since they are reported over and over and over and point to SOMETHING worthy of more investigation. Instead, scientism, or materialism as it is also called– actually refuse to even look at any subject that simply doesn't fit their prevailing dogma.)
Greer's point is that scientific tools are useful, but scientism is not– and in fact it is this religious-like adherence to a set of beliefs that flies in the face of most human beings that forecasts the downfall of Science as the prevailing view much further into the future. Right now, cheap oil means that most people are comfortable enough to pretend to go along with things, even when privately they disagree. However, when peak oil hits hard enough that the economy crashes and people realize that science and technology not only didn't save us, but actually helped to get us into this mess–? Chances are that a wholesale society-wide rejection and repudiation of that 'proper worldview' are now in the works.
Finally, in the comments section to a guy who talks about nuclear power being suggested as our only hope to keep the party going, Greer answered very sarcastically and brilliantly:
“KL, sure, we ought to sink billions of dollars into a technology that has never been economically viable without gargantuan government subsidies, build up tons of waste that will remain lethal for a quarter million years with no thought about what to do with it, so that we can keep on living a set of wretchedly one-dimensional lifestyles that make us so miserable that drugs to treat anxiety and depression are among the most commonly prescribed medicines in America today. What a brilliant idea!“
Source: http://lucretiasheart.livejournal.com/1009675.html
