Pessimism in a way

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The first impact with public life was when, as a 7 years pupil at school I was instructed to pronounce, in an oath, that I was ready to to spill all my blood for the "Duce" (the Chief, Mussolini) if necessary. I found the request extravagant and disturbing, non because I had any idea about politics, but just because I "would prefer not". We were gathered in the courtyard of the school to make this promise in a collective ceremony. I did not pronounce the oath. I think that nobody took notice (after all nobody was fanatic). Still I entertained some worry after.
Much worse, in their impact on Italian society were the racial laws enforced in 1938. Jews were non admitted in public schools, neither as pupils nor as teachers. I was a quarter Jew and I was prudentially hastily "converted" to Catholicism, baptized etc.

The war: that was something else.

Depression ain't much fun, and it doesn't do anybody else any good, so I'll try to avoid that one.

I like the idea of being a hedonist, but I'm not sure I'm qualified. I don't like alcohol that much and these days I can't score no weed. Can you be a hedonist recluse? I'm not sure.

Maybe I could learn how to be a hedonist, like education or something. I've heard about "party schools," maybe they offer online courses.

hmmm. This is obviously true. I'm considering what it might mean...

This is a little bit sigzagging, but it is ok for me.
Having lived in a so called "disfunctional" family, which means in a hell, I have spent all my life wondering: "where can you find a home, communication, affection, protection, community? Community vs. Society (Gemeinshasft vs. Gesellshaft - I apologize, it's the title o a famous book). Society is guided by self interest, community is guided by common values and some sort of altruism. This is the thread of sociological theory, at least in the classic authors: Durkheim, Max Weber, and in some way, before them, Marx.
I skip the learned references, and I only say that's what attracted me to sociology. which I taught, very badly, all my life. I studied all the ramifications of the problem of community: community dissolving in the self-interested merchanics of the market-society. I came to one conclusion, having explored all aspects oif the question. There is no possibility of community, or shared values governing the social fabric in the enhanced division of labor of modern production-for-consumption (destruction) which is increasing with time (the avalanche), no way to turn back the clock. No luddism makes sense. No way to go back to primitive societies. Kaczynski (the unabomber) was largely correct in his diagnosis, the means he chose absolutely wrong, and, if anything, morally totally unacceptable.

Pessimism is unavoidable, and the only paths we can take, individually, is some sort of intimistic haven, perfectionism in the garden. Max Weber said "the pianissimo of intimate relationships". I cannot express myself better here. I hope to have given some hint of what I mean.
The last decades have seen the total failure of utopian projects and the triumph of market. Is it good? No, but it is irreversible.

I haven't followed all this thread, but I'm reminded of something I heard of post-war Germany. In the aftermath of all the destruction, it was said people looked thru the rubble of destroyed buildings until they found a whole brick. Then another. And they stacked the bricks one on another .... because there was nothing else to do.

You still have to live as best you can.

I agree with this. I think this is a useful way to look at things not only with respect to humanity but with respect to our experience as a whole.

It’s the individual parts of our experience that give it a sense of significance and/or importance. Looking too far into the “big picture” to find emotional comfort is a mistake. The grand scheme is an illusion, a modern cultural construct. I think it’s better to try and make a positive difference out of a personal emotional drive rather than out of a sense of duty towards fulfilling some ultimate universal goal.

I wholeheatredly concur.

An example of scientists (?) going completely mad is the vision of the future of this man. Now, my fundamental optimism lays in the quiet and absolute belief that the kind of future envisaged by this genteman will never come true.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentar ... ture.shtml

Why not?

What would you rather have happen in the future?

Been some tremendously valuable ideas tossed around here. Valuable to me, anyway.

Might be worth considering the picture bigger than the big picture. The actual context of what's going on.

Apocalyptic scenarios are disturbing. It looks like we might be watching the US economy collapse, and the way things are structured, the US economy could very well take the rest of the world down with it. No telling what the future will bring, I've been wrong too many times to trust my ability to predict events.

I'll simply note that civilizations have a habit of collapsing and things returning to barbarism. I see no reason to be confident that this civilization will be an exception. I'm not certain that will be entirely bad, barbarians have cultures.

What if people made their own music instead of putting a CD into a machine? What if they told stories instead of watching television? What if they looked up at the stars and at the world around them and formed their own ideas instead of reading books on philosophy? What if people had to actually think about the work they did?

It may be time for a little housecleaning, and it might not be entirely bad.

The idea has cropped up in a lot of traditions, including our contemporary mythology of science. The old must sometimes be swept away to clear a place for the new.

As I understand it, the Hindu tradition saw events personified as Shiva, the destroyer, Brahma, the creator, and Vishnu, the preserver, each a necessary part of all processes. Shiva's role was essential.

As is typical with traditional peoples, the Blackfoot Indians' name for themselves is the real people. They lived in the northern prairies, and "Blackfoot" was a name given to them by their neighbors because of their practice of burning off the prairie grass. They had learned long ago that when the old grass was burned away, the new grass came back richer and greener and attracted more game. Their feet were often black from walking through burned prairie.

You've probably heard about the massacre at Wounded Knee, but you might not be familiar with what was behind it, the Ghost Dance religion. It was started by a guy named Wovoka, a Paiute, a nation often despised by other Indians. Unlike the Hollywood buffalo hunter Indians, the Paiute managed to live in the most inhospitable deserts.

Wovoka worked as a ranch hand, and one day he had a vision. The earth had grown old, and it was time for a cleansing and renewal. There was no need to fight the whites, because the earth would take care of itself. A wave of cleansing would sweep from west to east, the whites and all their works would all be swept away, the buffalo would return, and the earth would once again be young.

Buddha was a Hindu like Jesus was a Jew, and the Buddhists held on to the Hindu concept of Kalpa, that periodically, the entire universe is destroyed and starts again anew.

The same phenomenon is documented in the history of life on earth. Numerous mass extinction events have occurred, and each one turned out to be more of a beginning than an end.

As far as is known, the most violent mass extinction occurred at the end of the Permian. Something like 95 percent of the species on earth became extinct. The end Permian extinction gave rise to the age of the dinosaurs.

The mass extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs gave rise to the age of mammals.

Rocks get destroyed by geological processes as continents float around on earths liquid interior like leaves on a windblown lake. The further back you go, the less clear the geological record becomes, but there's evidence that something happened in earth's past that dwarfed these other events to insignificance and gave rise to life's greatest period of creativity.

Despite the stereotype, scientists sometimes have a fondness for colorful names. They call it "snowball earth." Among the experts, it's considered a controversial theory, but by no means a crackpot theory.

The evolution of life on earth had become pretty stale. The earth is about four and a half billion years old, and even the scanty fossil record of those early times reveals that colonies of advanced bacteria very similar to the ones around today were here three and a half billion years ago. Life got started very early on earth.

The first eukaryotes, complex cells like the ones that make up the tissues of almost all plant and animal life since then appeared, but they did very little in terms of generating new forms of multicellular life for about a billion years. Nobody knows why.

If the snowball earth model is correct, there was a runaway in the earth's climate controlling processes that dropped the world average temperature to minus 50 Celsius. Most of the land was covered with ice and snow and the oceans froze to a depth of about one kilometer. None of the ocean's surface was exposed to the atmosphere, so seawater contained no oxygen. The only thing that kept the oceans from freezing solid were the hot water vents scattered around the seafloor.

The earth stayed frozen for about ten million years. The only life forms that could have survived this were the organisms that live around deep sea thermal vents and some of the algae and bacteria that are found today on the surface of antarctic glaciers.

Then a climate runaway went with incredible speed in the opposite direction and within just a few centuries the world turned into an oven with an average world temperature of 50 degrees Celsius.

Eventually the world's climate stabilized. Then the whole thing happened again. They figure maybe four times. It's obvious that not much of life on earth could have survived this. An all out nuclear war would be peanuts by comparison.

But something happened right after this, life took off in an event called the Cambrian Explosion. After a billion years of evolutionary slumber, all the major groups of modern animal life appear suddenly in the fossil record in only something like fifty million years. Remember that a billion is a thousand million.

Pessimism might not be the appropriate response. Like Loren Eiseley pointed out, there is as much future as there is past.