The salient reality, to my mind, is that Western thought has failed to
provide our most intelligent and most educated with a functioning
meaning system. Life must contain some pain, but we have been taught
the contrary: that somehow through social engineering we can end the
difficulties of life. This clearly has not worked. Pain remains. What
a meaning system does is justify pain, and what this brand of
anti-humanism does is rationalize self abnegation.
But the
massive and ineluctable defect in this worldview is that it depends
entirely on a manufactured reality. Global warming is not real. We are
not running out of resources. Capitalism works, and uses the price
signal to ration scarce resources. The mass starvation that Ehrlich and
others predicted has only materialized in nations which were
unfortunate enough to become subject to utopians: Ethiopia, as one
obvious example.
From within my own reality, your piece is
eminently reasonable, but I suspect required some courage within the
world where you exist, and I commend you for writing it. I particularly
liked this phrase: “To sound the alarm is to re-enchant the routine
under the sign of danger.”
Reenchantment: is this not what people
really want? Their war is purely abstract, unemotional (outside of
primal emotions like self righteousness and panic), but waged in the
name of what we are all called on to value by our Romantic heritage. In
theory, they can value a vision of the ocean or the moon, even if their
daily dose of hatred biases them against it.
What I would submit
the world ACTUALLY needs is better ideas, and better praxis. I offer
many ideas of the sort I (of course) believe helpful here:
http://www.goodnessmovement.com
With regard to praxis, in my own
experience, the daily practice of actually feeling emotions, touching
them, expanding them, and liberating very pleasant experiences is quite
useful. The system which has worked best for me is Kum Nye. Dharma
Publishing has something called e-Kum Nye I recommend every chance I
get.
I also think anyone who is trying to get in touch with
wildness ought to look into Stan Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork, at
holotropic.com .
I have watched people twist and turn, stuck like
impaled bugs on the needles of bad ideas, for many years now. I try
daily to develop alternatives. Our very real, very pressing problem is
that many have abandoned the hope of finding a good reason for
existence. That is the true secret of anti-Humanism, aka in its current
iteration Ecologism.