David MacLeod
Thank you Rolla for your nice comment. I wish I had time to more fully participate in all of the rich discussions on this forum!
Well put Charles, thank you for sharing!
Stein’s law: “Things that can’t go on forever don’t.” As Daly convincingly argues, the 2nd law of thermodynamics applies to those of us who live on a finite planet. I’ve read Rifkin’s book, and he has some good points, but I don’t think he fully groks the situation.
Economist Peter Pogany, who argues for a “New Historical Materialism” puts it this way:
“The general stream of economic thinking is thoroughly a-physical and a-historic. This direction is becoming increasingly absurd as the nexus between the human biomass and its ecological constraints ripens. Economics will eventually have to absorb apodictically that regardless of scientific-technical development and the intensity of entrepreneurial drive, the aggregate, long-run supply of telluric substance-borne free energy is on a path of declining elasticity. To hasten recognition, it would be helpful to consider the Earth an isolated, rather than a closed thermodynamic system. From the perspective of its evolutionary potential, the world is indeed Under the Dome. This paper argues that (a) the emergence of classical capitalism in the 19th century answered the need for global-scale self-organization; (b) this scheme, interrupted by World War I, was replaced after World War II; (c) the implied transformation has been accompanied by a nonarbitrary, causally determined, irreversible socialization of intranational and international economic relations; (d) contemporary civilization is moving toward a new form of self-organization that would recognize limits to demographic-economic expansion. What will it take to go from the current hostile disgust with the dystopia of tightened modes of multilateral governance to people around the world on their knees begging for a planetary guild? It will take nothing less than a mutation in consciousness, as outlined in the oeuvre of Jean Gebser (1905-1973).”
http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/49924/Thank you Charles. Are you familiar with Alfred McCoy’s “To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change”?
https://www.amazon.com/Govern-Globe-Orders-Catastrophic-Change/dp/B09V71ZGKMAlso – attached is a recently published article by my friend and fellow process thinker Kevin Clark (who also signed up for this class). Title: “Can China and Russia Create a Pan-Eurasian Community?” Can this be what is happening right now before our eyes? If China is able to dominate the world stage as the U.S. falters, McCoy’s book argues they won’t be able to sustain it long term, due largely to climate change.
Thank you Nicholas! Apologies that I haven’t found more time to participate more fully on this forum.
Very interesting that you were involved with the development of Integral Life Practice! I have the book!
Does “Integral Economics” really exist? Not really, unfortunately. It should be robustly considered in what Wilberian Integralists call “the lower right quadrant,” the external collective, or what’s commonly referred to as as “the techno-economic base.” However, most Integralists that I’ve encountered don’t think much about challenging the current economic structures, and they don’t realize that technology is only made possible by our extraction of limited material resources. In my 2015 presentation at the Integral Theory Conferennce I had a slide that asked, “Where is Energy in AQAL”?
Fortunately there is one integral economist named Peter Pogany who’s ideas align quite nicely with those of Herman Daly. He was a Jean Gebser integralist, not a Ken Wilber Integralist, if you know the distinction. I have a lot of info on him on my Integral Permaculture blog.
Thank you Rolla for this post. The 4 phases of your Action research is exemplary of a process approach.
I’m not sure if any of you are familiar with the “Quality Gurus” of the manufacturing world. Walter Shewhart gave us the PDCA cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act), which was later modified by his disciple W. Edwards Deming as PDSA (Plan, Do, Study, Act). A process approach very similar to the 4 phases. Both of these men were strongly influenced by the pragmatic philosopher C.I. Lewis (author of Mind and the World Order – any relation?), but also to some degree by Whitehead’s process-relational philosophy.