Category Archives: Modernity

Relating to the way we live today, its origins, its philosophies

Evidence, Please?

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I spend a fair bit of time asking myself the question: Am I crazy?

I mean, without really wanting to do so, I seem to have landed on a fringe view within our culture, which is not a comfortable place for me in a social sense. I don’t love it. The easiest—seemingly most likely—explanation for the glaring mismatch is that I’m the one off kilter.

My statement: Modernity (even if defining starting 10,000 years ago) is a short-lived phase that will self-terminate—likely starting this century.

Common response: That’s crazy. Just look around you! We’ve created a new normal. Humans have transcended the bounds of nature—no longer mere animals. Ingenuity has unlimited potential, and we’re really on our way now. This changes everything, and we will never lose our technological mastery, now that we have found it. Modernity is our destiny—and kind-of the whole point of it all.  It’s what makes us truly human.

But let’s look at evidence: like evidence that modernity is a new normal that can go on at least as long as our species is around (relevant timescales are 106±1 years, or a million years plus-or-minus an order of magnitude).

What’s that? Zero evidence? Of course we can’t know. The future is not kind enough to present evidence to the present. Hmmm—maybe that’s because we’re so mean to the future, frantically robbing its lives of Earth’s bounty and biodiversity.

The basic observation that we can receive no evidence from the future cuts both ways, of course. I have no future evidence that modernity will begin shutting down within a century.

However, we are not completely in the dark, here. We know some things (see my previous post on things about which I can be relatively certain).  As obvious illustrations, we can be super-confident that day will follow night in a consistent cycle throughout our lives, that we will each die someday, and that the sun will render Earth uninhabitable on its way to spending its fuel.  In a similar fashion, we can lay claim to a host of other near-certainties even without evidence from the future.

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Certainty

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Image by Victoria from Pixabay

I struggle to strike a balance between certainty and circumspection. Our culture has a tendency to favor certainty, while one of my favorite and frequent fall-backs—seldom wrong—is: “we don’t know.” Certainty is often the hobgoblin of decontextualized, rigid, (only) logical thinking: an artificial by-product of incomplete mental models. That said, I feel that I can do more than throw up my hands on every issue. I can be fairly certain that I will never perform a standing jump to the moon or breathe underwater (without apparatus) like I often do in dreams.

Thus, I write this post in full appreciation of the red flag around certainty. Yet, in full consideration, I can indeed identify some elements of reality about which I can be fairly certain—to a reasonable degree. At the very least, these things would appear to be consistent with a robust account of how the world appears to work.

I’ll skip an exhaustive list of certainties, and stick with points that have some bearing on the meta-crisis of modernity.  But for illustration that certainty is not misplaced, I think most would agree that we can function under certainty that in the next billion years, say, gravity won’t turn off; the sun will continue to shine; Earth will keep rotating to produce the familiar day/night pattern; if I pound my fist on the table my hand won’t sail through it, etc.  We are justified in “taking these to the bank.”  The items below are not all as completely iron-clad, but are helpful in forming a basis.  I have asked myself for each one: “could I be convinced otherwise?”  Generally the answer is “yes, I suppose,” to varying degrees, but some would be a tough pull, requiring solid evidence.  Most of the content is a repackaging of points I have expressed before, but I hope in a useful, consolidated form.

So let’s get to it: here are things I am reasonably (functionally) certain about:

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MM #18: What Can I Do?

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This is the final installment in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. We have arrived at the part where people say: “yeah, but what can I do?” I hope that I can offer solid suggestions that are more satisfying than frustrating. But I’m just winging it, here. Shutting down modernity is not something any of us have experience doing, so we’ll all have to wing it.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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Views: 3968

MM #17: Being Human

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This is the seventeenth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. Here, I attempt to paint a picture of how we might think of ourselves as humans on this planet, as integral members of the community of life. If we’re good, evolution might keep us for a while—along with lots of friends currently in deep trouble.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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Views: 1647

MM #16: Recap and Mythology

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This is the sixteenth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This installment tries to round up perspectives developed so far, and throws in a bit of mythology at the end.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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Views: 1596

MM #15: What Now?

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This is the fifteenth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. Having received a metastatic cancer diagnosis, how do we react to the news? What emotions and responses are appropriate or productive?

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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Views: 2345

MM #14: Cancer Diagnosis

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This is the fourteenth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. We have arrived at the episode whose concept inspired the name of the series. Though no metaphor can perfectly capture a complex reality, by comparing modernity to metastatic cancer I hope to provide a useful framework that counters the usual modernity-boosting narratives we swim within.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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Views: 2395

MM #13: A Species out of Context

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This is the thirteenth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode unpacks the great Wes Jackson aphorism that modern humans are a species out of context. Well, what’s the right context, and how are we out of it?

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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Views: 1668

MM #12: Human Supremacy

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This is the twelfth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode confronts the thorny topic of human supremacy. My intention is not to rile folks up, but some of that may be unavoidable. It’s something we must face to understand modernity.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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Views: 2653

MM #11: Renewable Salvation?

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This is the eleventh of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode looks at various reasons why renewable energy and recycling are not our way out of the predicament modernity has set out for us. It’s just a doubling-down that can’t really work anyway.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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Views: 5533