286-95: Goal: Post-Industrial Society

286 / 365: An odd connection -the University of Albany cancels most of its modern language programs, breaking tenure, and I think about climate change. Surely neurosis is reaching skyward. But: the failing state of a university with the motto "the world within reach" (!) is symptomatic. Of a shattered economy, a state legislature that has become so uneducated it simply does not see the point, and of economism that has driven universities to model themselves increasingly on corporations, hiring top-down managers, leaders who don't understand scholarship, or who don't honor academic process. And climate change? But everywhere we squeeze the durable, long-range and intrinsically valuable things --squeeze them right out of existence. We run the world down.

287 / 365: Could we speak of a virtue of adaptability? This question matters in the context of, not just climate change but, our society's entire movement to a post-industrial age. I would agree with Peter Senge this much, that the material architecture of the industrial world -and the behaviors grown around it- are unsustainable. We simply cannot go on much longer polluting the world and letting our abundance explode as if the Earth is unlimited. A generation, maybe, but not much more -that would be my guess looking at figures for pollution, food production, population, economic expectations --though I am no expert. And if/when -to be logically precise- our fundamental economy changes, the reorganization will be likewise profound, even as it happens piecemeal. And so will behavior that accompanies it. To take an example, people had to adjust to urbanization following the early phases of the Industrial Revolution, and the knock-on effects of growing, massive cities permeated the 19th century to this very day under globalization's massive (truly massive!) centripetal urbanization. What will we have to adjust to in a post-industrial age? In any event, I see no reason to believe the adaptation will be minor or easy. Hence, the idea of the virtue of adaptability. And my question is -can there be such a thing? Or is it a vague place holder for a set of related virtues, such as patience, creativity, ingenuity, Ron Sandler's "reconciliation", and the like?

288 / 365: As our limits arrive, on a quick-speeding plume, rolling over the land, enveloping trees, houses, fields, fences, cars, roads, mailboxes, ditches, porches... I see it in slow motion, this metaphor for our industrial civilization meeting our Earth's limits. ... As our limits arrive, my sense of bedrock personal time has liquefied. Oh yes, my impersonal time is now geological, but my core personal time is no-longer eternal. The core has vaporized. I used to think that to do things well, really well, had on its side a background stability: "this, too, shall pass". But no longer: "the form of the world is passing away". Literally, and with it, my deep personal time is now urgent, a tremor on its liquid face, an eddy of wind blowing away the vapor. To do things right, I no longer have all the time in the world; nor do we. Our limits fast approach, the seasons change, change their *form* -not just their rotation- and I no longer count on the re-assuring, re-appearing Same.

289 / 365: I came of age in academia hearing of this thing, "post-modernism". A strange, amorphous jest, indeed, and -to my mind even after many years- simply without a referent, because the expression is either vague or equivocal. Nonetheless, it dominated academic discourse -as much in reaction to it as in exploration of it. It was a publishing industry. ... However, I think there is a "post" that's worth pursuing, whose referent is clear enough: post-industrial society. And I think we should aim for it, as a normative goal. And I think we will be dealing with it, sooner or later; my descriptive speculation. Our industrial society is kaput. Give it fifty years at most. We'll have to come up with something different -where the biosphere is mimicked, not devoured. And post-industrial society is something all areas of the university can cut teeth on -the applied sciences and the general ones supporting them, the social sciences, humanities... . One thing, however, is not "post" about the post-industrial. It's not post-modern. It's modern. To achieve a post-industrial society will require more self-consciousness and innovation than the human species has ever shown, because we will have to achieve harmony with the biosphere, and we have never been able to do that in all our time as a species. We have always been short-sighted. Post-industrial society, depending on a view of the whole, on integrated knowledge, and on novel forms of social, political, economic, technological and cultural innovation will be full square in the modern, Enlightenment tradition.

290 / 365: I looked for a time yesterday at kids playing in a playground -really looked. Their glee, optimism, life-force. It seemed to me that ethics isn't about argument, then, but about really looking. The abstract numbers tossed around by environmentalists dissipated on the spot, including the dire and cynical world.

291 / 365: Goal: post-industrial society.

292 / 365: And 'post-industrial society' aligns my materialism, too. Marx's materialism always appeared profound to me in its critique of Hegel. Self-consciousness depends so much on the patterns of behavior in which we are locked by incentives and disincentives and in which the objects that build our world are lodged, even trapped -the objects themselves trapping, or at least guiding, the behavior reciprocally. That's economy for you -an unconscious all too often; usually no better than a semi-conscious. Robert Jackall alone has shown this well. ... In such a thicket of heteronomy, where do self-consciousness and autonomy grow? Not just in the idealist groups -the artists and thinkers, the therapists and dreamers- but in the un-construction of an industrial economy, in its energy patterns, patterns of production, guiding metaphors, legal and accountability schemes, in its externalities and internalization (failed) -and in their reconstruction. Their reconstruction, now post-industrial, in bio-mimicry of Earth's biosphere, a low-to-ground, materialist self-awareness serving as a condition on all future autonomy.

293 / 365: I frequently feel the need to gather my time together, my disparate interests, the meanings of the places I've lived, the jobs I've done, and -more importantly, urgently, frequently- the meaning of the relationships I've formed. Each lost friend -most from drift- poses a question in my heart. ... It is not easy to exist within the currency of meaning, where things are eddies that only slow their dissipation. ... And when I feel this or that kind of longing, I often feel split, shaved off, and vulnerable. ... But last night, I began articulating something that's come to mind recently as life has rushed into the breach of its own newness again, and that is to cling faithfully to the fragmentation, to the widening split, until I am as much a witness to my life's meaning as anyone else. This anti-religious faithfulness (anti-religious, because it relinquishes the binding and gathering together of the lost whole) is underneath my sense of being in history now, where, like it or not, I and many of my contemporaries feel charged to produce a post-industrial society for the sake of the next generation.

294/365: As John Ruhl commented, "post-industrial" could connote at least two bad things, (1) a world beyond civilization -think "Mad Max"- or (2) a mind-set that thinks we can develop while eschewing the benefits of industry: "but don't we need industry to make our solar panels, wind-farms, and light rail?" There's a reification here as well as an understandable misunderstanding. The latter is that we think of the word "industry" along with its word family -"industrious", for instance. And industriousness connotes hard work. So "post-industrial" sounds off. But it refers to the Industrial Revolution, which is a very specific form of production. It does not refer to all hard work and invention. That, in turn, leads us to the reification. Our world has equated industrialism with civilization to such an extent that industry has come to be seen as the *only* form of developed production that can sustain civilization. But that is false. There could be other forms of production that would not only sustain civilization but make us *more* civilized. Take cradle to cradle production, for instance, or waste equals food, or non-extractive, renewable energy. Those are not industrial, technically speaking. Then, think of the virtues of industrialism seen as vices and overthrown: think of maximal efficiency without regard to waste as the vice it is and the new virtue as maximal sustainability. Now isn't that more civilized? It's the Industrial Revolution that starts to look like "Mad Max", not its dissolution. After all, both industrialism and Mad Max rely on this principle: if it doesn't work, hit it harder (pour more energy in). Post-industrial society is a society produced non-extractively, sustainably and with a new set of productive virtues and vices. The scales and sources will be different.

295 / 365: There's a deeper point about consciousness here. We need to learn to hear words like "industry" and think straight to the backlife and frontlife they involve. We need to scope them out instantly as forms of production, not as quasi-natural, vague entities that are taken as essential lifeforces. We don't do this with "breathing" (air), for instance. We have biological focus. We breathe; fish don't. We know breathing is just one mode of respiration. So, too, with "industry". It's just one mode of production. And its backlife is: extraction. It's frontlife: waste (that is not designed for re-use; that is not food). There are alternatives to "industry" conceptually, but our industry-dependent culture has yet to imagine them, including their names.