"A Postmodern Fable" is an essay by French post-modernist Jean-Francois Lyotard, where he tells a story detailing the evolution of life on the Planet Earth from the first begininnings of The Sun through the development of life and civilization, to the final exit of human life, or something resembling human life, from the earth at the time of the sun's final death.
My path to a eutopia rests first on philisophical undergirdings gleaned from the philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard and his thin tome "Post Modern Fables"Ī blogger named Glowing Fish sums up the work very nicely here: Recognizing this and getting into coherence with the patterns these puppet strings form and trying to understand the various and often competing imperatives of the ecology of minds operating on us is my first priority for charting out a path to some kind of satisfactory eutopia. I believe that as much as we think we serve ourselves and purposes that are quite obviously human constructs, and as much as we serve our "selfish genes" and behave in accordance with ancient encodings operating statistically over evolutionary time periods honed by natural selection, we are also behaving as the "extended phenotypes" of other beings, the sum total of whose pushings and pullings of our humors and tuggings on our heart strings and passions and bendings of our faculties for reason and logic lead to us following a much larger and more complex set of teleological puppet strings. I just don't think we are the sole keepers of wisdom and enlightenment, and I don't believe that the satisfaction of our needs and desires is our purpose or the reason for our seemingly contradictory, often counterintuitive and sometimes suicidal behaviors. I don't believe the universe is devoid of meaning. It is predicated on the assumption that we human beings are, ourselves, a transitional species, built to serve higher purposes and play our role in the establishment and functioning of evolving ecologies whose sole purpose is to live, to be fruitful, to multiply. But it also involves harnessing AND BEING HARNESSED BY the natural ecology of our living planet.Īnd it involves an understanding (or belief) that human beings are not the apogee of creation, the be all end all purpose of a teleological narrative in the universe.
These industrial ecology solutions are key to our vision of a clean, just and sustainble society. The plan, you may or may not be surprised to learn, doesn't just involve recommendations for the rapid integration of technologies based on solar energy in its various manifestations (active solar thermal and photovoltaic transformations of light and heat, passive solar architecture and thermal masses to harness the benefits of absorbtion, convection and radiance, the energy of wind and falling water and stored solar energy in the chemical bonds of food wastes, human and other animal wastes and agricultural residuals). That is to say, it should stimulate further questioning along lines that might one day be useful.Īs the professor of the classes, and as co-director of Solar CITIES, I have my own vision of eutopia, of course (a world of solar cities "connecting community catalysts integrating technologies for industrial ecology solutions"!), and a plan to get there. It can be to some degree a flight of fancy (what eutopian scheme isn't?) but it must also be grounded in science so as to lend at least enough plausibility to the effort to make each student's contribution have at least heuristic value to others. The ultimate goal of my courses each year is to have students come up with their own personalized vision of "Eutopia" - the good place - based on references and ideas they accumulate during the semester. Teaching Human Behavioral Psychology and Environmental Psychology this semester at Mercy College in New York I challenge my students to face the task of chipping away at the conundrum "why do we humans behave the way we do?"
0 kommentar(er)
