I am grateful to have lived in a time of relative material abundance. But as a father, I am now challenged to help my children-- and all children-- transcend old models and find high purpose in a less materialistic world that requires us to use less, grow less, and perhaps even do and make less--at least with fewer materials.
I look to artists, writers and other thinkers to lead us into the new world. It is they who will ask questions and develop ways of living that may not occur to less imaginative people. The good life of the future is a seedling now-- in the nurturing care of the youngest and least invested among us. How will we have a good life in the new world? --the new world of renewable energy, reduced population, sustainable agriculture, economic equality and healthful racial and religious diversity? It is they who will describe it. How will we cope with the collapsing old world of dwindling and polluting fossil fuels, unchecked population growth, artificially supported and resource degrading agriculture, exploitive economic practices and racial and religious strife? It is they who will chronicle its demise, warn of its lingering effects and complain rightly and righteously about its moral and practical shortcomings.
Views of the future range from the Utopian to the Apocolyptic, sometimes expressed in ways that project ultimate outcomes-- the inevitabilities of behaviors that are imperative, or at least ingrained. Some visions are sweeping, energized by imagined historical events that transform life abruptly and irreversibly. But, I imagine that the most accurate descriptions and projections will be those that show a world changing subtly and pragmatically-- gaining and losing in turn, and governed by the natural physical justice of scarcity and abundance.
I recently read World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler, the author of twelve books, both fiction and nonfiction, that include, The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency, which is about "peak oil" and what to expect from life after fossil fuels are exhausted. World Made by Hand is a novel-- a vision of life in one up-state New York town after the collapse of society in the late first half of the 21st century. The book tells the story of Robert Earle, a former software executive who now makes his living as a carpenter. He knows little of the outside world for communication has broken down. His wife has died and he doesn't know where his son is or if he is still alive. The former town dump has been re-opened as a store. Most of the comforts and diversions of his former life are gone. He, like everyone else, must forge a new life out of what materials are available, grow food that can be grown on the land and in the climate in which he dwells, and rely on himself and a few neighbors to provide his basic needs. But through the changes comes a deepening appreciation for life. The book is not apocalyptic. It doesn't judge or preach. It simply gives a picture of a possible future-- a picture from the mind of a writer who has imagined his way reasonably based on how we live now.
Such imaginings by artists may be similar to dreams. An artist may apprehend intuitively-- as a vision or persistent thought--a sense of another time, such as a vision of the future. He may feel this as a visitation or as something that was received rather than imagined willfully. Dreams seem to come to us, often as confusing images or associations that defy rational interpretation. In a conversation with Rush Rhees in 1943, Ludwig Wittgenstein said, "It is characteristic of dreams that often they seem to the dreamer to call for an interpretation." An artist or writer who is attempting to imagine the future may be searching for an interpretation that makes rational sense of his hunches. Wittgenstein suggests that "When a dream is interpreted we might say that it is fitted into a context in which it ceases to be puzzling. In a sense the dreamer re-dreams his dream in surroundings such that its aspect changes. It is as though we were presented with a bit of canvas on which were painted a hand and part of a face and certain other shapes, arranged in a puzzling and incongruous manner. Suppose this bit is surrounded by considerable stretches of blank canvas, and that we now paint in forms--say an arm, a trunk, etc.-- leading up to and fitting on to the shapes on the original bit; and that the result is that we say: 'Ah, now I see why it is like that, how it all comes to be arranged in that way, and what these various bits are...' and so on."
In thinking about the nature of the world artists imaginatively link such "bits" giving us an interpretation that is rational and comprehensible. Conversely, an artist can reverse the process, taking a conventional thought, established practice or law, and remove the rational linkages, juggle the components and dispel the interpretation. Both seem healthful.
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