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Continued from here.
Suffice a brief reference to
P021 Anthropocene from 09/15/2013
where, with a view to the relationship of politics and freedom, I examine the implications of humans being ecology converters. Man has evolved a capability unique in the animal kingdom of surviving by changing the environment in which he lives. These changes may be small and local to begin with, but in their rudimentary forms they already enclose the fundamental principle that will prove historically far-reaching: people constantly develop new desires in order to adapt to the environment in which they live. Commensurate to their ability to discover and invent new desires, the changes that humans make to their environment are substantial, not rarely game-changing. Think of the history of forestation, where humans are responsible for the forestation, deforestation and the reforestation of areas as large as the Mediterranean. Or, visible from space nowadays, the lightening up of the planet.
Combining
- the human ability to envision a different environment from the one to which they find themselves particularly well-adapted at a given point in time
with their
- dependence on and condition of being social creatures,
slowly mankind expands and hones social technologies, like living in a state framework, to form an instrument of planetary reform and revolution.
No less than much of the physical environment, the social machinery with which man gives the earth a new face is of his own making, being subject to his unique ability to envision and implement unprecedented needs. Politics is the instrument by which man applies his ability to imagine and implement new needs in the social realm. Politics yields the link between the anthropological uniqueness of man and his ability to change the entire planet.
The science of human sustenance is inherently a social science. Neither
physics nor chemistry nor even biology is adequate to understand how it
has been possible for one species to reshape both its own future and the
destiny of an entire planet. This is the science of the Anthropocene.
The idea that humans must live within the natural environmental limits
of our planet denies the realities of our entire history, and most
likely the future. Humans are niche creators.
We transform ecosystems to
sustain ourselves. This is what we do and have always done. Our
planet’s human-carrying capacity emerges from the capabilities of our
social systems and our technologies more than from any environmental
limits.
Two hundred thousand years ago we started down this path. The planet
will never be the same. It is time for all of us to wake up to the
limits we really face: the social and technological systems that sustain
us need improvement.
There is no environmental reason for people to go hungry now or in the
future. There is no need to use any more land to sustain humanity —
increasing land productivity using existing technologies can boost
global supplies and even leave more land for nature — a goal that is
both more popular and more possible than ever.
The only limits to creating a planet that future generations will be
proud of are our imaginations and our social systems. In moving toward a
better Anthropocene, the environment will be what we make it.
The source.
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P022 Michael Oakeshott (1901 - 1990) - Telocracy versus Nomocracy from 09/25/2013
In contrast to Oakeshott, who tends toward a strict juxtaposition of telocracy (subjecting rule to a goal/goals) and nomocracy (subjecting rule to general laws), I would plead that the telocratic tendencies in man should be constrained by a nomocratic frame, which in turn will gradually undergo alteration owing to new experiences and circumstances brought about by the interplay between telocratic urge and nomocratic constraint. Cutting out the telocratic element as apart of the human ability to genuinely improve the specie's situation is a gross distortion of the human condition and its reflection in the development of forms of human community.
Almost exactly a year after my "Damascus experience" at Bodrum, Turkey, I have been writing the following (below) - toward the end of 12 months in which my blogging output had been sparser than in the years before. Presumably because I had lost my footing for a while, becoming cautiously impassive half from careful reconsideration, half from insecurity and loss of orientation.
In the below sentence (underscored) an error occurs that is fun to detect by applying the proposition to the political order as a whole rather than to the behaviour of individuals. Increasingly the institutions built into the infrastructure of politics serve to civilise us, serve to make us "observe certain conventions of moderation and humility ... to listen to the contributions of others ... [and to make us] ... less concerned with advancing ... own interests than with facilitating the conversation itself."
In my quest for a more realistic understanding of liberty's place in history and the contemporary world, I have come to appreciate Michael Oakeshott as a resourceful, inspiring and like-minded fount of insight.The best conversationalists, Oakeshott maintains in “The Voice of Poetry,” have the elements of self-restraint required by nomocracy: they observe certain conventions of moderation and humility, they listen to the contributions of others, and they are generally less concerned with advancing their own interests than with facilitating the conversation itself. Of course, all we have to do is to reflect on our own conversations to realize how rare such qualities are in actual human beings. They are just as rare, if not more so, in political life, where the attractions of power, honor and wealth are infinitely greater.Read the entire piece in which Elizabeth Corey provides an excellent introduction to one of the great thinkers of liberty, Michael Oakeshott.
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Continued here.
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