Is it beyond our ken to maintain a noble purpose as we guide our battered ships of state through the dark shadows of this mild squall of an economic crisis? Whom of us will risk life and limb to keep the ships afloat? Who will cast away possessions for the same purpose? Who will act to subvert these sacrifices? How will the storm weather us, as we weather the storm?
I ask these question because these darkling foreshadows are pallid compared to those that will attend the forthcoming Category Six typhoon of environmental collapse. How will that storm weather us, if we weather the storm? Given the tendency of people to adopt default positions in crisis situations, how we perform now, should give us some indication of how we’ll perform in much more dire circumstances.
Curiously, given the introduction, the point of this post is not to delve into the ugliness which portends. The point of this post is to ask the question, “How should we behave when faced with the absurdity that the cultural virtues that we cherish undermine the existential preconditions of our culture?” In other words, what does a wine-inspired poet do, when he finds that greater amounts of drink are fueling his muse, but not curing his cirrhosis and, in fact, killing him?
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Filed under: culture, Economy, Financial Meltdown of 2008, going forward, government, Health Care Reform, Human Rights, Hurricane Katrina, Justice, Liberalism | Tagged: absurdity, Cap and Trade, carbon emissions, civic virtue, clean air act, climate change, CO2, cultural dynamics, energy, environmental collapse, environmental degradation, environmental responsiblity, EPA, ethics, extinction, food crisis, global warming, gorilla poaching, greenhouse gases, honeybees, intersex fish, mafia, morality, nuclear waste, Politics, sacred cow, sacrifice, starvation, world development report | 103 Comments »
The Confluence 