Evokit Notes & Rebogs

My other pages RSS Archive

8 months ago

#A Short History of Progress
#Ronald Wright
#progess
#progress trap
#war
#weapons
#arms race

"Progress has an internal logic that can lead beyond reason to catastrophe. A seductive trail of success may end in a trap.
Take weapons, for example. Ever since the Chinese invented gunpowder, there has been great progress in the making of bangs: from the firecracker to the cannon, from the petard to the high explosive shell. And just when high explosives were reaching a state of perfection, progress found the infinitely bigger band in the atom. But when the bang we can make blow up our world, we have made rather too much progress.
….. President Kennedy [on nuclear weapons] said, “If mankind does not put an end to war, war will put an end to mankind"

A Short History of Progress | Ronald Wright | p5

9 months ago (5 notes)

#Aldous Huxley
#progess
#technology

"Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards."

Aldous Huxley

1 year ago

#John Michael Greer
#The Long Decent
#myth
#nature
#religion
#science
#progess

"To the founders and the early propagandists of modern science, human beings didn’t need to wait for God to bring on the New Jerusalem; it could be built here and now by harnessing the power of human reason to dominate the world of nature. As a new found faith in progress redefined the past as a tale of the slow triumph of reason over nature …. [A]s a result, the perfect society remains firmly parked in the near future, accessible once the right set of political, social, or spiritual policies are put into place."

The Long Decent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age | John Michael Greer | p44

1 year ago

#John Michael Greer
#The Long Decent
#peak energy
#progess
#energy
#fossil fuel

"The faith in progress, for example, rests on the unstated assumption that limits don’t apply to us because the forward momentum of human progress automatically trumps everything else. If we want limitless supplies of energy badly enough, the logic seems to be, the world will give it to us. Of course the world did give it too us—in the form of unimaginably huge deposits of fossil fuels storing hundreds of millions of years’ worth of photosynthesis—and we wasted it in a few centuries of fantastic extravagance. The lifestyles we’ve grown up treating as normal are entirely the products of that extravagance. This puts us in the positions of a lottery winner who’s spent millions of dollars in a few short years and is running out of money. The odds of hitting another million-dollar jackpot are minute, and no amount of wishful thinking will enable us to keep up our current lifestyle by getting a job at the local hamburger stand."

The Long Decent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age | John Michael Greer | p38

1 year ago

#Pip Pip
#challenge
#fame
#jay griffiths
#progess
#change

"Progress has the irresistible, heady draw of fire. You can deny the positive effects of progress. You can deny the good of technology. You can deny all its results but you cannot deny its appeal. Fame. Incandescence. ….
Part of the appeal of progress is simply the attraction of change, that vibrant principle."

Jay Griffiths | Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time | p 203

1 year ago

#jay griffiths
#Pip Pip
#nature
#progess
#Herbert Girardet
#nature
#resorces
#pollution
#oil
#coal
#Environment

"Instead of muscles, we deploy motors; instead of legs we have acquired wheels; our hands are the shovels of bulldozers … Thus we have become both man and machine …. Every year, each of us swallows many tons of coal and oil. Our breath is no longer just what we exhale from our mouths, but also the exhaust fumes spewed out by our cars, factories and households. We excrete the wastes of our own bodies as well as the poisonous discharges of the machines with which we have become fused."

Herbert Girardet | Earthrise
(Jay Griffiths | Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time | p 188)

1 year ago

#Lila
#Robert Pirsig
#social cohesiveness
#social conhesion
#dharma
#progess
#rituals
#freedom

"Phaedrus thought that Oriental social cohesiveness and ability to work long hours without complaint was not a genetic characteristic but a cultural one. It resulted from the working out, centuries ago, of the problem of dharma and the way in which it combines freedom and ritual. In the West progress seems to proceed by a series of spasms of alternating freedom and ritual. A revolution of freedom against old rituals produces a new order, which soon becomes another old ritual for the next generation to revolt against, on and on. In the Orient there are plenty of conflicts but historically this particular kin of conflict has not been as dominant."

Lila | Robert M. Pirsig | p440

Theme: Linear by Peter Vidani