Hi James,
What it leads to is environmentally
friendly ways to continue raping the earth. Total war.
Again, I prefer to reserve the term 'total war' to mean actual warfare, as in missiles and bombs raining down on you and your family, a military draft, the suspension of economic activity as industry is taken over for military purposes and women are drafted into land armies to replace lost labour. On the home front this usually leads to the limitation of civil liberties, an economic recession, food shortages and other 'temporary' inconveniences. At the moment the nations implicated in the criminal Coalition of the Willing are not engaged in 'total war' but in a limited yet apparently global war for oil. Nonetheless this 'limited war' has already slaughtered upwards of 100 000 Iraqi civilians according to the latest estimates ( http://www.jhsph.edu/Press_Room/Press_Releases/PR_2004/ Burnham_Iraq.html ). It is a sign of the gigantism of our times that this incredible mass murder is only a limited precursor to what is possible when industrial powers resort to industrial warfare to secure the energy supplies that maintain their profligate ways of life.
The environmental 'total war' you refer to leads to our own rather luxurious and relatively peaceful western lifestyles at the expense of the rest of the world's population and our own future generations. It is only metaphorically a 'total war' but of course I do understand what you mean by it and I also agree.
Do you want reform (alternative energy sources) to secure your future?
I think reform is necessary and will be forced on us anyway sooner rather than later especially if the more pessimistic peak oil estimates prove correct. Within the next 5 years we may see some rather radical changes taking place in our everyday world, most probably these will not be due to political reform but to the inescapable reforms forced on us by mother nature.
You're saying that there is a Heideggerian critique of Nazism
within "Nietzsche"? "His critique" = ?
Heidegger named the Nietzsche lectures his 'confrontation' with National Socialism. In these he offers a critique of Nazism from the perspective of a philosophical insider disappointed by the limitations of an ideology he had extravagantly high hopes for. According to Heidegger Nazism 'came close' to an authentic philosophical revolution in the history of being yet fell back into the technicism of the 'will to will' which is an amoral will to order for the sake of the constant expansion of order. This ordering is part of the essence of technology as the unthought planetary ordering of modernity and its subjectivity. Its logical outcome was the disaster of WW2 and the globalisation of the post war technological world order. He saw Nazism, Communism and Democracy as all part of the same ontological ground with no hope of humanity as a whole ever gaining an insight into its own metaphysical nature. You can troll the archives for an extended discussion of this problem on this email list since at least March 2003 ( http://lists.village.virginia.edu/cgi-bin/spoons/ archive1.pl?list=heidegger.archive ).
the worst thing that could happen, Malcolm (assuming our
predictions are true), is that it turns out to be a bump for us in the West
(compare to the Great Depression centered in North America).
You should perhaps read more about climate change, resource depletion, global economics and geopolitical history before making general statements about 'worst case scenarios'. The worst 'worst case scenario' for imminent peak oil is a terminal economic depression accompanied by an extremely dangerous global energy war spiraling out of control and leading to a massive human die off as energy supply constricts our way of life and war, famine and pestilence takes its toll. In this context biosphere destruction and runaway global warming could cause the collapse of modern civilisation and even the extinction of our species within this century.
If you're interested I can give you a summary of a 'worst case scenario' that is more of a cliff than your little bump.
The global disaster 50-100 years in the future is already here.
The illusion is that *it will happen*, that it *will be noticeable via
direct impact to our infrastructure circa 2050*, is the "necessary lie".
As you say, this planetary disaster is already upon us, the energy war has started, peak oil may already be here, runaway global warming may already be starting and the green revolution in agriculture may have reached its peak production while population growth is still uncontrolled and a global water crisis looms. I don't think it is an illusion that this worst case scenario *may happen* and if it does it most certainly *will be noticeable via direct impact to our infrastructure circa 2050* and probably very much earlier. In fact the world of 2015 may be radically different to the energy rich lifestyle you now enjoy and take so much for granted. Our current way of life is based on the 'illusion' of constant exponential growth in all human spheres, and while our illusions are infinite they have a very finite planetary limit.
I'm personally not interested in predictions of the future but rather in present possibilities. To suggest a possibility for our future is not to predict that it 'will happen' but that the present predicament is perhaps cause for some rational concern and thought. Future history is an open question and there are increasing numbers of scientists around the world growing increasingly alarmed at what our future might possibly hold if we continue on the current path. One of the difficulties involved in communicating this problem is in getting people such as your good self to appreciate the scale of the problem, it is gigantic and its mathematics follow a simple exponential curve. It's called modernity.
Regards,
Malcolm Riddoch
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