The tone of debate by Pragmatists is always in the name of comfort. How much are we prepared to sacrifice to make our short human lives a little more comfortable than our ancestors? The entire industrial machine that many attribute the adverse effects of climate change to has delivered a relatively more comfortable world.
Are we happier today? — that is for deeper philosophical inquiry but we are definitely more comfortable. Now the task for us is to learn nature’s age-old art of balance in the face of all these technological opportunities we seem so bent on grabbing whenever we can.
We have known the Climate Problem for decades now but the questions pertaining to “How to do what we need to do?” seem to require radical transformation which in many ways requires us to look way beyond our short lives. I personally think we are subconsciously starved of hope. And it is never wise to grant certain levels of comfort for a creature that is starved of hope. The evident end of any such endeavour only grants graver yearning for more selfish comfort. A creature with hope when granted a little comfort will seek to spread the comfort thereby reaching beyond the self.
Well, there are many pessimists who will spit on any such talk of Altruistic-Posterity-Centered thinking as gibberish from the naive, but what other options do we have? We were granted natural abilities which seem anchored to our engagement in preparation for the generations to come. We are slaves of Nature herself, born to perpetuate her cause in living, reproducing and moving on — a reality we never seem to make peace with to the very end. We even engage in all measures to tame Nature to our whims as though we could somehow fit her within the scope of our limited existence — a petty fruitless effort. As a result we secretly despise all posterity. We subconsciously hate reproduction and the continuity of humanity. We reject that the latter is a core element of our existence.
Our collective subconscious as a species is heavily reinforced against loving nature, that is why I think the journey to answer the climate questions has always been terrifyingly futile.
- But we can always choose to act with Hope.
Bbumba,
Some time in early 2024