A Step Back
There is an entire school of thought which revolves around self-directed learning: learning that is ongoing, in that one never stops doing it and actively seeks it out; inexpensive, in that one does not pay ~$150.00 per credit to do it; relationship building, in that one sometimes chooses to do it in collaboration with a close friend or group of friends who are interested in the same thing. Some people choose this option as an alternative to post-secondary education, figuring that they would rather live in and learn from the real world and use whatever leftover time they have to bolster their knowledge and awareness.
Self-directed learning is something that I’ve been trying to remind myself to do more often. It’s something that takes discipline, or just the absence of pesky friends who want to go and drink over some board games or something like that in the evenings. Giving in to that temptation too often is more likely than not to land one among what’s called the “deadbeat masses.” Giving in on occasion is, I think, a necessity for sanity. Giving in never at all might just saddle you with a frown and a scowl far more often is necessary. Anyway, self-directed learning is a way to create some discussion or banter about topics that schools and universities just don’t really cover, and that is probably a necessity.
So from time to time I’ll make this blog a little on the academic side, when and where I deem appropriate, by sharing what’s emerging from my episodes of self-directed learning, most of which I do while waiting for buses.
About a week ago, I picked up “The Upside of Down” by Thomas Homer Dixon, and unlike most of my schoolbooks, despite me being enrolled in a degree which interests me, have been glued to its pages. In order to function, anybody needs to formulate something of a worldview; a way of thinking about the order or disorder in their lives that answers some of the big questions and explains how things work. My worldview, particularly in the last few months, really has no rhyme nor reason to it. Not much makes sense on a broader scale. I don’t really have much in the way of religion, having survived private high school without acquiring that. Economically, sustainablility is the very last of all the traits we’ve managed to acquire. Politically, a lot of the people in leadership positions are the wrong people to be there. Socially, so many seem stuck in the status quo. I think, thankfully, that I’ve managed to get one leg out.
Many people live their day to day lives smack-dab in the middle of a gigantic economic construct that is explained to them by newspapers, television programs, news hours, their paycheque, and the books they read. In large part, in North American society, this involves a capitalistic economic structure framed around free enterprise, a consumer good oriented society in which many everyday consumables are made overseas and imported into North America, a large middle class that works in various sectors of the economy, many in service sectors, but some also in production or manufacturing, and a large automobile industry that employs much of the work force, from automobile maintenance, to repairs, to sales of new vehicles, to production of domestics, to automobile associations which lobby for space for cars. For pretty much all of this, high resource consumption is integral to the process, and also largely ignored and taken for granted. Now that capitalism appears to be failing, some people are starting to ask the odd question (odd behaviour, I know) and some bigger topics open up.
What Dixon has to say about all this is, I think, crucial. Dixon seems to like our banking system, stating that the Federal Reserve system brings added flexibility. With that out of the way, there’s lots of things that seem to be nagging Dixon. He calls these things Tectonic Stresses. They are:
- population stresses
- peak oil (less energy for more people, eventually maybe no conventional energy)
- environmental stress
- climate change
- economic stress (widening gaps between rich and poor)
If any one of these, or worse, several at once, rear their ugly heads, things would go downhill fast, Dixon says.
He writes, “Most of us in cities are now so specialized in our skills and so utterly dependent on complex technologies that we’re completely dependent on complex technologies that we’re quickly in desperate straits when things go wrong.“
Perhaps more importantly, he writes that, “Most of the five stresses spring from our troubled relationship with nature. Indeed, one of my most important points is that we can’t ignore nature any longer, because it affects every aspect of our well-being and even determines our survival……they (policians, corporate leaders, social scientists) tend to dismiss people who concern themselves with nature as, at best, softheaded do-gooders or, at worst, eco-freak fanatics.”
He goes on to say that, “….opinion leaders conveniently overlook the fact that every great civilization believes itself to be exceptional, right up to the time that it collapses.”
The route to success is either through long-term employment and saving for retirement through investing, or in the ownership of a potential business. A high tax load ensures the punctual payments of interest on the national debts, and as they did in ancient Rome, people complain incessantly that only two things are guaranteed: death and taxes. For some, perhaps only one of those, though some are worried they’ll soon be taxing ghosts too.
Xurbia.ca – they’ve got solutions to this kind of stuff
Dixon describes several scenarios of concern, one of them being the the failure of the power generation system, as happened on the East Coast in 2003 for an extended amount of time. He writes that, “…we can make much greater use of decentralized, local energy generation, and alternative energy sources (like small and medium scale solar, wind, and geothermal power) so that individual users are more independent of the grid.” This is what Dixon terms a resilience enhancing strategy, and it’s my view that not to make use of the technologies that now exist at relatively affordable prices, probably the most affordable they have ever been, is irresponsible from both a personal and societal standpoint. This is one example of both how a breakdown can be minimized in its intensity, and dealt with when and if it does happen.
Suffice it to say that in today’s day and age, we count on the institutions that we’re familiar with to continue functioning as we expect them to. We expect resource extraction and subsequent production to continue to employ people, even as evidence mounts that same pace extraction would be hazardous to ourselves and the planet. We expect universities and corporations and retail outlets to continue to pay our salaries; we expect people in developing nations to continue making the products we ‘need,’ because if they didn’t and we made them ourselves, we couldn’t afford them. We expect food and consumables to continue to be shipped around the world, and then to appear on the shelves of the stores we frequent. It’s in those paradigms that we happily function, remaining completely unprepared for things to change, and unaware of whether our planet could cope with large-scale changes if they were to occur.
Systemic change simply isn’t on our radar screens. I mean, the last time things got really tough was over 60 years ago.
A lot has changed since then. Only time will tell if the next 60 will be as nice as the last 60. And perhaps, it’s only fools who would count on it.
