[lbo-talk] more Americans deny reality

Charles Turner vze26m98 at optonline.net
Thu Mar 12 07:54:27 PDT 2009


On Mar 11, 2009, at 9:21 PM, Dwayne Monroe wrote:


> Well, those are some of the problems. But what is to be done?

Well, Gregory Bateson had some thoughts about this:

<http://www.library.utoronto.ca/see/SEED/Vol4-1/Harries-Jones.htm>

"Bateson knew about the potential for runaway in climate change, having investigated this issue in the mid 1960s and had come to the conclusion that its effects were likely to be much more grave that the ecologists of the time suggested. Industrial organization had such little conception of what non-linear eco-dynamics might be. One argument current during the 1960s which he spent some time examining was that an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be beneficial because it will aid growth of forests! However, much better modelling of non-linear eco-dynamics was no resolution for Bateson. Instead of calling for an improvement to quantitative analysis of ecological patterns, he argued that what is required is to study holism and not part-ism. Only the generation of standards of reference about unity and integration in a holistic order would enable rigorous statements to be made about unity such as the biosphere. Needless to say, these standards of reference would be quite different from the ‘registers’ of sentience of Hume, Locke and other empiricists. Nor would they be ‘ registers’ of the sublime as perceived through the artist’s depictions of nature, the Kantian path to the beautiful; nor ‘registers’ of taste - cultural capital on display - as in the case of Bourdieu.. They were to be aesthetic in the widest sense. Wherever we begin to have intimate appreciation of form, shape, pattern in nature, there we should also affirm aesthetic notions of how parts fit in relation to wholes. Bateson’s path to the discussion of unity would take in those regions of experience where holism and its configurations already existed and examine them for clues. Christian religion, ‘fate,’ ideas about ecosystemic integration are all patterns of holism. So, too, any investigation of the realm of the sacred would yield indicators of how there had been a search for larger more inclusive pattern. Evidently, aesthetics belonged to that side of mind that dealt with metaphor, poetry, imagery and imagination and was a sort of meta-level aspect of that ordering process. Yet the abstraction that yields an aesthetic judgement, the meta-level aspect, was different in kind from any abstraction in science, or any other prose-type description."



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