never to disparage reforms, but never forgetting there is a deeper level
… understanding that the message of a Cornel West is really just about reforms vis-a-vis The System.
What I call “greening” involves a deeper critique and a more radical concept of human liberation.
It flows from:
. recognizing the significance of the fact that there have been two human lifeways
. recognizing that there are deep issues involved with the civilizational lifeway
. a full appreciation of what has happened to us and how profound it is
Early contemplations about civilization’s deviations, aberrations, and alienations came in the wake of the voyages circumnavigating the globe involving encounters with aboriginals. A consideration of the cultural differences. Some (few at first) got a sense of the over-domestication, over-repression in civilization.
Rousseau, then Thoreau, then Darwin, then Nietzsche, then Freud. Edward Carpenter wrote about civilization’s repression, congestion, and noise as dis-ease.
A re-consideration of “wildness” … as: “wild and free” (Jack London: The Call of the The Wild).
And then: part of the Sixties ferment involved a deep critique of It All … deeper than Marxism.
Deep ecology / social ecology / “the greening of society.” Rather than the leftist conception of further development toward a “higher stage” (the chimera of socializing hypermodernity) … a different track of analysis, critique, praxis. Mumford, Diamond, Sahlins, Snyder, Shepard, Goldsmith, Winner, Sale, Goodman, Turner, Glendinning, Bahro, Roszak, Naess, Perlman, Watson, Zerzan, Quinn, Trainer, Ehrenfeld.
Naturally, in the electoral arena you won’t hear even an alternative candidate like Cornel West suggest deep ecological praxis: toward renewal of limits and balances via re-localization and simplification; toward deconstruction of the Technosphere and a much lighter degree of domestication. All of the latter is in the realm of a very long-range cultural shift.
[we ought to be able to hold two different ideas in our head at the same time … political reformism and cultural transformation]
