At 01:39 18/06/2011, Arthur wrote:
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I originally posted this last Fall, 2010. It
was in the thread why the revolution will not
be tweeted (thanks to Barry Randall for
resuscitating it). I think it is relevant to the current thread.
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The growth of social movements requires a
positive image of the future. Something that is
lacking today. There is much finger pointing at
what can be done here and there but there is no
over arching image of what is worth working for.
The past was about growth is good. When the
economy stalled the positive image was to get
the economy growing. It was about getting a
job and staying with one company. It was about
settling down, having a family etc. etc. Now
we realize that growth uses resources, pollutes,
leads to global warming, etc. Now working for
one firm is long gone, as are pensions, as is
the stability that comes from family
formation. There is nostalgia for some aspects
of the past but dread for most aspects of the
future. We seem to be stuck between a past that
brought us here but may not bring us further and
a future which is wrought with uncertainty and, at times, images of danger.
Society is in a hyper self conscious state and
while there is much criticism there is (aside
from some fundamentalists on the right and the
left) little in the way of a positive image of
the future about which coalitions can be built.
arthur
Yes, all this is very true. But the real;
revolution that has been occurring in the last
two or three decades is that science is now
digging deeply into one of the most complex areas
of them all -- human nature and the interplay of
largely unchangeable genes with the environment.
We are beginning to see very clearly what we are
really like. Among those, what is probably the
main fact of human life is that we are, and will
always be, a small group animal. If we are to
have any future at all, it has to be realized
that our present nation-states and over-large
governments are byproducts of weapons of war and
mass armies. But there's no future any longer in
this direction. The weapons have already become
too dangerous to use and, in any case,
governments can no longer afford to make the
latest ones. We are already seeing the next
growth area -- small groups of people in
scientific research, small groups of
entrepreneurs, small groups of concerned
environmentalists, etc, communicating and working
in a lateral way is the way that things actually
get done -- and have always been done throughout
history. The full development of all this for the
ordinary man and for government may take
centuries to achieve, and there'll be many
catastrophes and mistakes along the way, but our
genes are the deep ballast which will gradually
bring stability. If we are to survive at all.
Keith
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick
Sent: Friday, June 17, 2011 2:17 PM
To: [email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: [Futurework] Musing on the Vancouver Stanley Cup riot
The area in which the rioting took place is
still vaguely familiar. It was 1949 or 50. I
had a small, cheap downtown room on Homer
Street. I was going to become the worlds
greatest artist. Seventeen or eighteen at the
time, Id dropped out of high school, spent
fourteen months working in a sawmill to put some
money together, and registered at the Vancouver
School of Art (now the Emily Carr School). I
stayed for a year, long enough to learn that
there were plenty of other kids more equipped to
become the worlds greatest artist than I
was. When I now look back, my greatest
accomplishment was having a ten minute
conversation with Lauren Harris, who came to visit us at the school.
If there had been a Stanley Cup riot at the
time, would I have joined in? Well, there was
no riot. There couldnt have been. I and all
of the kids I knew felt a part of Vancouver. It
was our city; ours to live in; ours to enjoy and
keep in good shape. I think that young people
generally felt that way at the time.
Move on to 1957. I had just graduated from the
Faculty of Commerce at UBC with an economics
degree. I had several firm job offers; even the
dumbest kid in the class had a job offer or
two. The world was ours to make the best
of. Would we have taken part in a riot? No,
why would we? There was no point.
Fast forward to the present. Jobs are much
harder to get now than they were back in the
1950s. Many young and not so young people are
out on the street no longer looking for jobs
because they just arent there. Universities
are packed with young people because they have
nowhere else to go and because they hope a
degree will help them get a job when they
graduate if they can afford to graduate and if
the jobs are there. The world that I felt so
good about back in the 1950s because it was my
world and so full of promise has now become, as
Barbara Ehrenreich puts it, their world a
world which young people feel they have no real
part in and no control over. It doesnt belong
to them, it belongs to government or the
corporate world or to someone you cant reach,
touch or control. Whoever is in charge can put
a fence around themselves and keep you out, as
was done in Toronto at the G20 summit. And if
you try to do something about it, you can be sure the cops will be there.
This doesnt excuse the kind of behavior we saw
in Vancouver, but it may in part explain it. If
I were a young person in Vancouver in the world
of now would I not jump up and down when I saw a
cop car in flames? Might I not want to break a
window? I simply dont know, but I do know that
Im not going to be too hardheaded about what
happened in Vancouver on Wednesday night.
Ed
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/06/
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