"When all the world darkens, looking on the bright side is not a virtue but a sign of irrationality.
In these circumstances, anxiety is rational and anguish is healthy,
signs not of weakness but of courage ... “Revelation” from Latin and
“apocalypse” from Greek both mean a lifting of the veil, a disclosure of
something hidden, a coming to clarity. Speaking apocalyptically, in
this sense, can deepen our understanding of the crises and help us see
through the many illusions that powerful people and institutions create. But there is an ending we have to confront. Once we’ve honestly faced
the crises, then we can deal with what is ending—not all the world, but
the systems that currently structure our lives. Life as we know it is,
indeed, coming to an end ... But toughest to dislodge may be the central illusion of the industrial
world’s extractive economy: that we can maintain indefinitely a
large-scale human presence on the earth at something like current
First-World levels of consumption ... The high-energy/high-technology life of affluent
societies is a dead end. We can’t predict with precision how resource
competition and ecological degradation will play out in the coming
decades, but it is ecocidal to treat the planet as nothing more than a
mine from which we extract and a landfill into which we dump ... Remember also that we live in an oil-based world that is rapidly
depleting the cheap and easily accessible oil, which means we face a
major reconfiguration of the infrastructure that undergirds daily life.
Meanwhile, the desperation to avoid that reconfiguration has brought us
to the era of “extreme energy,” using ever more dangerous and
destructive technologies (hydrofracturing, deep-water drilling,
mountaintop coal removal, tar sands extraction) ... The political/social implications are clear: There are no solutions to
our problems if we insist on maintaining the high-energy/high-technology
existence lived in much of the industrialized world (and desired by
many currently excluded from it) ... We now live in a time of permanent contraction—there will be less, not more, of everything ... [T]here is no guarantee that there are technological fixes to all our
problems; we live in a system that has physical limits, and the evidence
suggests we are close to those limits. Technological fundamentalism—the
quasi-religious belief that the use of advanced technology is always
appropriate, and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences
can be remedied by more technology—is as empty a promise as other
fundamentalisms ... If all this seems like more than one can bear, it’s because it is ... To adopt an apocalyptic worldview is not to abandon hope but to affirm life ... By avoiding the stark reality of our moment in history we don’t make ourselves safe ... It’s time to get apocalyptic."
Zum Artikel von Prof. Robert Jensen, erschienen im YES! Magazine (24. Mai 2013) »
Zum Artikel von Prof. Robert Jensen, erschienen im YES! Magazine (24. Mai 2013) »
