kulturkampf

"an authentic culture roots into the collective experience of a community's past and from this sources draws meaning for the present and tools for the future."---john greer_________________________________________________________________________it's probably a bit more complex than that...i have been reading greer's book " the ecotechinic future" which is another book about the need to move away from a consumerist society based on the use of petrochemicals in just about everything and "relocalize" most facets of life as the fossil fuel based society winds down...he at least has the sense ( unlike some of his contemporaries )to maintain that it will be a gradual evolution that will take some time and he claims to have no real idea of what a future society will look like beyond some vague outlines...this, in a world crammed full of pundits ( listening friedman? ) who know what to do and could save us all if only we'd do what they say, is refreshing...he also misses the point ( i think ) that culture isn't completely dead despite the very best efforts of a capital driven consumerist utopia to kill it...regionalism has been a much maligned concept in the post-eisenhower age of interstate freeways and ungodly commutes...television and the exurbs with standardized existences was supposed to make us homogenous...but they still do things differently in northern alabama than they do in northwest indiana...some ( but obviously not all ) of that has to do with the environmental differences...we also have only a partially shared history...the community past in huntsville is divergent form the community past in lake station...we share human origins and universals ( sorry coach ) but not experience or local conditions...so the point is that every book about the need for a "transition" that i have read ( and that spate of reading is quickly drawing to a close...once you decide what is what it is time to stop reading and do something...if you don't you just become part of some intellectual salon taking about what needs to be done ) is about rebuilding culture...adjusting the community to local conditions...turning what's available into a viable way of life...growing some roots and re-establishing community connections...nothing particularly earth shattering in that...it's what humans did for centuries before the industrial revolution and its drive to develop the ultimate consumerism short circuited it... luddite, neo-luddite, pessimist, cynic...all adjectives i have heard recently...the cost of at least attempting to take a pragmatic and realistic viewpoint about the limits capital refuses to countenance because their alchemists in economist guise say they don't exist...the dog philosophers and i are old friends and the social constructs that capital creates to convince itself and the rest of us that those limits are non-existent are as abstract and phony as any that crates of thebes railed against...as much as it would like to capital can't kill culture...the distortions consumerism have placed on it would seem to have their limits.