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Teetering on the brink of the new Depression
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grufty jim
grufty jim
1978 posts

Edited Sep 24, 2008, 16:34
Re: Teetering on the brink of the new Depression
Sep 24, 2008, 16:31
handofdave wrote:
It could be argued that the original inhabitants of Australia had achieved a 'steady state' of culture, but of course we're talking about a stone age culture. Earth-friendly, indeed, but not an option for us now.

Absolutely!

And this is precisely why I feel that a psychodynamic approach may well be our best chance at understanding why some cultures achieve sustainability -- a steady state system -- and others (particularly, though not exclusively, our own) fail.

Whenever I discuss this issue with economists, for example, I find they almost invariably make the same, specific assumption (i.e. that I'm proposing some kind of neo-primitivism... "a return to the stone age" as it were). Nothing could be further from the truth.

Such a return would be completely impossible even were it desirable (which it's not).

It's usually possible to demonstrate to an intelligent person that western culture -- as it is currently configured -- is inherently unsustainable. A vast amount, perhaps a significant majority, of the systems which fuel and feed our culture are reliant upon non-renewable resources. The question of when these resources will become sufficiently depleted that our support systems begin to fail is of course still open.

I tend to believe it will happen sooner rather than later, but the fact that it will happen some time is almost a given.

Once it's agreed that we need to transition from an unsustainable culture towards sustainability, I would argue that one of the things we should do is examine cultures which have achieved sustainability in the hope of learning something from them.

This, as I said, is almost immediately construed as an argument in favour of turning us all into hunter-gatherers. As though such an absurd plan were even vaguely possible.

Apart from anything else, such an assumption contains within it an extremely western-centric (and very ignorant) view of other cultures. When I reel off a list of sustainable cultures, I might include the Balinese, the Iatmul, the Australian aborigines, the North American Sioux, the Yanomami of South America and the !Kung of the Kalahari (just as for instances).

To respond to that list, as I've heard many people do, by complaining that "we can't live that way" is to assume that they all live the same way in the first place. Nothing could be further from the truth. The logistics of the !Kung lifestyle, for instance, are quite different to that of the Iatmul. In fact, the !Kung are a fascinating case-study, with evidence that they have shifted between pure hunter-gatherer to nomadic herding plus hunter-gatherer, to semi-agriculture plus herding plus hunter-gatherer, and back again, on numerous occasions in their long existence.

This is why Bateson's seminal essay on the subject is called "Bali: The Value System of a Steady State" (my emphasis). To call for an examination of sustainable cultures is not to call for a shift to a particular lifestyle. What is important is to discover the underlying reasons why these cultures have remained sustainable. And it's not as simple as pointing to "industry" or "technology", which many have done... there are numerous examples of pre-industrial unsustainability and there is no inherent reason (leastways, none that I'm aware of) why a technologically advanced culture could not achieve a steady-state; though obviously technology does bring potential pitfalls... the introduction of 'novelty' always brings risks as well as rewards.

Bateson believed -- as do I -- that the vital element common to sustainable cultures was not to do with the logistics of their lifestyle, but was inherent in their values and beliefs; i.e. was essentially a factor of collective psychodynamics. In Freudian terms one might say that the collective psyches of these cultures have each developed a functioning super-ego and/or reality principle.
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Re: Teetering on the brink of the new Depression (handofdave)
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