Sam Keen

Whose Carbon Debt?

samkeenc — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:44:12 +0000

The world over there is justifiable outrage about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. We demonize BP for careless and greedy practices that make a mockery of their claim to be leaders in developing sources of clean energy. But we are unwilling to shoulder our individual responsibility for demanding cheap oil or to take any meaningful steps toward conservation.

We demand the right to consume at any cost to the environment. We hate the pushers but love the drug. With a modicum of discipline we could take individual ownership of our escalating carbon debt and eliminate most or all of the need for deep horizon oil.

The plan. Require every automobile and light-truck to be fitted with a gauge, such is now standard equipment in the Prius, that measures the MPG for the last tank of gas used. This information would be fed into computer in the gas pump that would determine the appropriate cost of a gallon of gas. A light pickup that gets 15 MPG might pay four dollars for a gallon of gas, a Hummer that get seven miles 7 MPG six dollars per gallon, a Prius or other hybrids that gets 48 MPG two dollars a gallon. Those with hardships, low incomes and high needs might be offered a discount. At first, such a plan would, no doubt, be met with outrage, cries of injustice, and tough talk from the petroleum giants and automobile companies. How dare anyone deprive us of our God-given right to life, liberty and an endless flow cheap gasoline! But once the government offered subsidies for the purchase of fuel efficient cars and trucks the ethos would change. Conserving would become sexy and smart and we might be able look our children in the eye knowing we were making an effort to become responsible environmental citizens.

The carbon debt belongs to each one of us. The responsibility and guilt belongs equally to corporations and consumers. In the oil-besmirched face of BP we see the enemy. If we look closely we might also see a reflection of our own petrol-greed. Time to pay our debt. Let’s reward the behaviors we want to encourage and, otherwise, make the punishment fit the crime.

Propositions In Search of an Environmental Policy

samkeenc — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:33:51 +0000

I. Prelude: Diagnosis of the Dis-ease

1. Nothing fails like yesterdays solutions.

2. Most social, psychological, and spiritual dilemmas are solved, or dissolved, by expanding the context within which they are viewed.

3. Change your questions and you will alter your vision.

4. What is “practical” depends on your ideology, myth or vision.

5. Policy is always the application of someone’s vision.

6. Mistaking a symptom for the dis-ease worsens the illness.

7. It is only by considering a chaotic diversity of symptoms that we can make a good diagnosis.

8. Hope for significant change emerges precisely within the condition of disintegration that seems to invite us to despair.

9. The present dark night of social anarchy offers a greater opportunity for systemic change than the superficial optimism of the l950′s,the psychedelic utopianism of the l960′s, the neo-realism of the l970′s or the unbounded greed of the l980′s.

l0. A good environmental policy can only emerge from considering the context of the entire post-modern political agenda—the population explosion, the cancerous growth of megalopolis, urban blight, structural unemployment, the growth of a perpetual underclass, the disintegration of family and community bonds, crime, the climate of violence, the eclipse of a sense of meaning, value and the sacredness of life, and (most importantly for the policy suggestions I want to make), the abandonment of rural and village life.

II. In Search of a Vision of Environmental Health

ll. Changing our vision of our place in nature,our relationship to the environment, our way of organizing our economic life to insure the hope of a sustainable future for our children is the central spiritual and political challenge of our age.

12. As presently conceptualized, a healthy (perpetually expanding) economy is dependent on perpetuating an environmentally sickening style of consumption.

13. Current efforts to save the environment are formulated under the supposedly realistic mandate that they must not have a negative effect on the economy, lead to the loss of jobs, imperil our competitive advantage.

l4. No policy formulated from within the perspectives of the economic myth, the myth of progress, the myth of the free market, or the ideology of urban life, will be adequate to the central spiritual and political challenge of our age.

15. The syllogism that points toward a new vision and policy is:

We can only heal what we love.

We can only love what we touch.

We can only touch what is proximate.

16. Formulating a policy that will implement a healing relationship to the environment requires us to visualize ways in which a majority of citizens can love, touch and remain proximate to the natural world. That 3% of our population produces the food for the remaining 97% is a symptom of our alienation from the environment, an index of our exile from the elemental truth of air, earth, fire, water, plant, and animal life which is the abiding context of human life.

III. Medicines and Means of Healing: Policy Implications.

17. A major aim of environmental policy should be to slow, halt and reverse the worldwide pattern of population migration from rural areas, villages and towns to megalopolis. (This will require us to challenge the ideology that unconsciously assumes that the trend toward urbanization is inevitable and desirable)

l8. We need to reconceptualize and create innovative approaches to the economies of village, small town and rural life. To date, government agencies have been of little help in revitalizing the culture and economics of “depressed” rural areas that are losing their traditional mainstays of farming and logging. With the revolution in telecommunications, rural areas are no longer remote and removed.

19. We need to promote homesteading programs that will make it possible for a generation of young pioneers to create a new type of modern family farm based on the practice of sustainable agriculture.

20. We need programs that will aid retired people on fixed incomes living in cities to relocate in, and revitalize, small towns and villages.

21. We need a department of Urban Agriculture to promote the greening of the cities. (During World War ll a majority of Americans, and Germans grew victory gardens)

22. Federal, state and local departments of education need to be encouraged to experiment with ways of giving children some direct, hands-on, experience of growing, tending and harvesting.

In the same measure that it would be irresponsible to neglect to teach the young to deal with the emerging information technology, it is irresponsible to ignore their environmental education.

Absence of G-D, Q&A

samkeenc — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:16:19 +0000

In The Absence of God: Dwelling in the Presence of the Sacred

Sam Keen. Q and A.

Q. You strike out with a two edged sword against both neo-atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, all of whose books have been on the NY Times best seller list in the past months, and the defenders of religious orthodoxy. Why?

A. To begin with they are both dogmatic. “True Believers” threaten us with damnation if we don’t believe in their particular brand of “revealed Truth.” The neo-Atheists insist that all forms of monotheism, even the most liberal and progressive, are murderous, intolerant and irrational and they argue that we should all become rational atheists. Admittedly, a great deal of religion is unintelligent at best and violent at worst, but that doesn’t mean we should abandon the jewel in the lotus because it floats in polluted water..

Q. You argue that we need to return to the root meaning of religion which involves the experience of elemental emotions. What are these emotions?

A. We might begin with the experience of wonder which is the wellspring of both religion and philosophy. D.H. Lawrence got it exactly right—”There is a sixth sense, the religious sense, the sense of wonder.” Why should there be something rather than nothing? Where did I come from? What is the meaning of my life?

Q. What are the other elemental emotions?

A. To name only a few: gratitude, compassion, joy, humility, reverence, trust and open mindless.

Q. These emotions aren’t the ones we usually associate with the average CEO or NFL quarterback. They don’t mix well with a drive for success.

A. Exactly, that is why they have been repressed in modern societies and must be recovered. Secular culture teaches us to be self-assertive, hard driving, ambitious, aggressive, prideful and patriotic.

Q. Are you saying we must abandon these quintessential American virtues in order to be religious?

A. At the very least, we have to acknowledge that there is a radical difference between a secular and a sacred manner of being in the world. In the 21st century we will have to learn to cherish all creatures in the commonwealth of sentient beings if we are going to preserve our fragile environment,

Q. Among other things, you propose that we declare a moratorium on all religious word and undertake “a verbal fast.” What is the point of this?

A. To transform religion we need to recover its mystical element. Learn to be silent. Refrain from using the tired, old language and explore new metaphors, symbols and poetic ways of expressing what it means to dwell in the presence of the sacred. We need to take religion away from the clergy and the theologian and give it back to the singers and poets. End the pious arrogance of claiming to know the unknowable.

Q. Give me an example of some new metaphors.

A. Instead of God: The Ground of Being. The G-d Beyond God. (Tillich). The Self Surpassing Surpasser of All (Hartshorne) The Cosmic DNA. The Big Bang and Blossoming. The Particle Rancher and Wave Rider. The Lord of Fractals. The Universal Unknown Subject of our Insatiable Longing. Central Casting. Etc

Q. I am not sure I could pray to The Cosmic DNA.

A. Maybe not, but it will stretch our imagination to think about The Ever Evolving One and Many (formerly known as God) in new ways.

Q. You refer to yourself as a reverent agnostic. How does that differ from being an atheist?

A. I don’t know enough to be an atheist. I don’t believe in the kind of God I hear about on Sunday morning television, or the God of Jihad and Country, and I don’t know how to think about the unknowable intention, energy, mind, purpose that unites the myriads atoms and galaxies into a single timeless universe. So I remain, happily, ignorant of the totality. But I do have a sense of being at home in this strange world and dwelling in a sacred place.

Q. Rumor has it your wife is a minister in United Congregational Church. Does your agnostic version of faith bring you into conflict with her more traditional notion of religion?

A. Hers is a progressive type of Christianity that is more concerned with social justice and establishing a caring community than it is with orthodox belief. Neither one of us takes the creeds very seriously. We enjoy frequent disagreements. I am not a member of her church, but I attend from time to time and am warmly welcomed. And, after all is said and done, religion is more about loving dialogue than it is about right ideas.

The Evolution of the D/evil

samkeenc — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:25:48 +0000

The Devil’s Notebook.

I have been thinking recently about the evolution of evil.

How innocently it begins, how invisibly it grows.

The D/evil is in the details

His first trick is to encourage a sense of entitlement.

I deserve it. It is my just due.

Add to this a touch of envy. Memetic desire.

I want it (and deserve it) because you have it.

Why should Bill Gates have so much and I so little.?

When my (impossible) expectations are not fulfilled I become resentful,

My sympathy turns into antipathy.

Resentment morphs into paranoia. I imagine that the other –my neighbor, my mate– is hostile to

me, withholding, cheating, not giving me my just share of cash or care.

I give more than I get.

Paranoia leads to creating a fortress —the self puts on its character armor, the nation builds its defenses

The quest for revenge emerges as a perverted demand for justice. Defeating, humiliating or killing the

enemy sets the world right, balances the scales. Withholding love and punishing the other allows me

to get even. You only got what you deserved, what was coming to you.

Once established the cycle of resentment and revenge becomes autonomous of its origins, a

self-reinforcing feedback loop in which hostile expectation become self-fulfilling prophecies.

To escape the grip of the Devil. I must practice living with a sense of gratitude for what has been

given me. My life is a gift, not an entitlement. You—my mate, my child, my neighbor do not owe me

love (although I am entitled to civility and justice)