The Dark Mountain Project: Secularism Gets Sober

I read an interesting pamphlet...(not so much a book) called The dark Mountain Project.Tangle--you and some others have criticized the fundementalists and charismatic-loons (such as myself) into a category of negative thinking, disaster-hoping miscreants who are depressed about their own lives and who prefer fantasy over reality. I just wanted you to know that there are some serious thinkers out there who have educations rivaling your own and who are most certainly not religious. (Faith, you also may find this interesting. I urge you to give their efforts serious consideration. Fixing the planet is not so simple as abolishing bronze age myths...in fact, should any of this happen, these beliefs will only get stronger. )They too warn of a coming apocalyptic event (or series of events) and present their case here. This is Chapter One, and I won't bother quoting any more of their site...go and examine it for yourself or do as they predict that you will and bury your head in the sand, along with the rest of civilized society.
Walkingf On Lava

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Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.

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The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives.

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What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unraveling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. Meanwhile, beyond the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis of life in many parts of the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which sustain it.

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Precarious as this moment may be, however, an awareness of the fragility of what we call civilization is nothing new.

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‘Few men realise,’ wrote Joseph Conrad in 1896, ‘that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.’ Conrad’s writings exposed the civilisation exported by European imperialists to be little more than a comforting illusion, not only in the dark, unconquerable heart of Africa, but in the whited sepulchres of their capital cities. The inhabitants of that civilisation believed ‘blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion,’ but their confidence could be maintained only by the seeming solidity of the crowd of like-minded believers surrounding them. Outside the walls, the wild remained as close to the surface as blood under skin, though the city-dweller was no longer equipped to face it directly.

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Bertrand Russell caught this vein in Conrad’s worldview, suggesting that the novelist ‘thought of civilized and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.’ What both Russell and Conrad were getting at was a simple fact which any historian could confirm: human civilization is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future.

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Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilization may become unstoppable. That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics. What remains after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning.

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It is, it seems, our civilization’s turn to experience the inrush of the savage and the unseen; our turn to be brought up short by contact with untamed reality. There is a fall coming. We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us. After a quarter-century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall, the end of history, the crude repackaging of the triumphalism of Conrad’s Victorian twilight — Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis. Now a familiar human story is being played out. It is the story of an empire corroding from within. It is the story of a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequences. It is the story of how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth. It is our story.

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This time, the crumbling empire is the unassailable global economy, and the brave new world of consumer democracy being forged worldwide in its name. Upon the indestructibility of this edifice, we have pinned the hopes of this latest phase of our civilization. Now, its failure and fallibility exposed, the world’s elites are scrabbling frantically to buoy up an economic machine which, for decades, they told us needed little restraint, for restraint would be its undoing. Uncountable sums of money are being funnelled upwards in order to prevent an uncontrolled explosion. The machine is stuttering and the engineers are in panic. They are wondering if perhaps they do not understand it as well as they imagined. They are wondering whether they are controlling it at all or whether, perhaps, it is controlling them.

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Increasingly, people are restless. The engineers group themselves into competing teams, but neither side seems to know what to do, and neither seems much different from the other. Around the world, discontent can be heard. The extremists are grinding their knives and moving in as the machine’s coughing and stuttering exposes the inadequacies of the political oligarchies who claimed to have everything in hand. Old gods are rearing their heads, and old answers: revolution, war, ethnic strife. Politics as we have known it totters, like the machine it was built to sustain. In its place could easily arise something more elemental, with a dark heart.

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As the financial wizards lose their powers of levitation, as the politicians and economists struggle to conjure new explanations, it starts to dawn on us that behind the curtain, at the heart of the Emerald City, sits not the benign and omnipotent invisible hand we had been promised, but something else entirely. Something responsible for what Marx, writing not so long before Conrad, cast as the ‘everlasting uncertainty and anguish’ of the ‘bourgeois epoch’; a time in which ‘all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.’ Draw back the curtain, follow the tireless motion of cogs and wheels back to its source, and you will find the engine driving our civilization: the myth of progress.

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The myth of progress is to us what the myth of god-given warrior prowess was to the Romans, or the myth of eternal salvation was to the conquistadors: without it, our efforts cannot be sustained. Onto the rootstock of Western Christianity, the Enlightenment at its most optimistic grafted a vision of an Earthly paradise, towards which human effort guided by calculative reason could take us. Following this guidance, each generation will live a better life than the life of those that went before it. History becomes an escalator, and the only way is up. On the top floor is human perfection. It is important that this should remain just out of reach in order to sustain the sensation of motion.

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Recent history, however, has given this mechanism something of a battering. The past century too often threatened a descent into hell, rather than the promised heaven on Earth. Even within the prosperous and liberal societies of the West progress has, in many ways, failed to deliver the goods. Today’s generation is demonstrably less content, and consequently less optimistic, than those that went before. They work longer hours, with less security, and less chance of leaving behind the social background into which they were born. They fear crime, social breakdown, overdevelopment, environmental collapse. They do not believe that the future will be better than in the past. Individually, they are less constrained by class and convention than their parents or grandparents, but more constrained by law, surveillance, state proscription, and personal debt. Their physical health is better, their mental health more fragile. Nobody knows what is coming. Nobody wants to look.

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Most significantly of all, there is an underlying darkness at the root of everything we have built. Outside the cities, beyond the blurring edges of our civilization, at the mercy of the machine but not under its control, lies something that neither Marx nor Conrad, Caesar nor Hume, Thatcher nor Lenin ever really understood. Something that Western civilization — which has set the terms for global civilizationwas never capable of understanding, because to understand it would be to undermine, fatally, the myth of that civilization. Something upon which that thin crust of lava is balanced; which feeds the machine and all the people who run it, and which they have all trained themselves not to see.

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Now tell m,e that these authors are also nuts! If so, I would accuse you of being overly unrealistic and clinging to your own fragile belief in society.(without God)

Phat, human history is replete with human disasters some of which result in enormous world events like WWI and II. These things will continue to happen because it's in our nature. We're still evolved apes no matter how we subdue our instincts with civilising social mechanisms.Civilisations rise and fall and will continue to do so, natural disasters will still happen, but the world is not about to end. We are making baby steps trying to control ourselves and our environment and have only just started.And, btw, you are not the centre of the universe.

Part of the problem is probably my usual visual struggle but I've read through that more than once now and I don't think I have any clear idea at all of what they think this coming disaster is or what its causes are. Could you break it down to a few clear statements perhaps? Thanks.

I will have to read and research it a bit more, but im almost late for work so it will have to be in tomorrows pile. Here is one sentence that jumped out at me, though.

quote:

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human civilization is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future.

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Edited by Thugpreacha, : No reason given.

Seems to be mostly new age word salad.

From the standpoint of a believer, I can say that if we do have end times events, (which Tangle argues would simply be the natural fall of one civilization in the lineage of many) it would not be directly caused by a supernatural Satan so much as it would be, according to "them" the natural error of the human mind to fully grasp its own demise and thus cause it.They seek to warn society of the path we are blindly heading..../quite similar to the apologists minus the need for Jesus and salvation (and communion with a saner mind)

This is the first time in human history that we have nuclear weapons that can be delivered globally. These weapons are starting to wind up in the hands of despots. The same can be said for biological weapons.This IMHO has nothing to do with any theology. Progress isn't always what it is cracked up to be. I'd suggest if the world as we know it comes to an end it will be done by ourselves and not by the hand of God.

Correct. Progress makes you possible. Without progress you almost certainly would have never existed but if you had you would have probably killed your mother in child birth and died of measles at the age of 5. Certainly correct. Though unlikely.But you are conflating the world coming to an end with H. sapiens becoming extinct. It would be sad for us, but the universe would not even notice.

Questions Phat.Is there even a single example of Jesus or God preventing any disaster or social breakdown?Are there not numerous examples of religious fervor causing disasters and social breakdowns?What does the evidence show?

Sure, but it also has a dark side and maybe some day that dark side is going to overwhelm the positives. I hope and pray it doesn't. I'm not so sure what will happen to the universe if we aren't here to perceive it but I don't have the depth of knowledge to go further with that. (Actually, I'm not at all sure any of us do but me probably least of all. )

The sky is falling. The sky is always falling if not this generation then the next.Today’s prospects for disaster are no different than the past whether from nuclear weapons, waring Nazis, global warming or Mongol hordes.Anyone looking can see the present course cannot be sustained. Problem is those with any power to change the course are looking only at their own bank accounts where the status quo adds to their power.Tragically, the bad is coming and there isn’t much of anything to stop it.Such is and always has been humanity. Nothing new here.

She couldn't care less.

A friend and I have talked some recently about the clash between the environmentalists and the people who want to see the economy prosper, which seem to divide pretty strictly on party lines. it seems like there is a monumental disconnect between the two sides, neither side having any sympathy for the problems as seen by the other side. There is one conservative talk show host, Michael Savage, who talks a lot about saving the environment, saving the animals and so on, and is not happy with Trump's focus on the economy to the detriment of the environment.(He says he wrote a book years ago about the importance of planting trees for the health of the planet. I couldn't find the book but I've often thought of planting trees as something we should be doing with the climate change issues in mind, to put more oxygen in the air and let the plants absorb the carbon dioxide. This should be a huge undertaking, involving research into the best kinds of plantings for different locations and organizations as well as individuals doing their bit, everybody frequently planting trees in designated locations. Green up the deserts, replenish the Amazon rain forest, etc etc etc. I know it probably sounds a bit wacky. )Seems a very good thing to become independent of Saudi oil, but not such a good thing if it takes a heavy toll on Nature. I wish all this were being discussed with sympathy for both sides.I don't see the connection between these things and end times prophecy myself. I think with the right focus we could straighten out a few things. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I don't really know what you're complaining about here. It's human obtained progress that has allowed us to drag ourselves out of our caves and fight the crude animal side of our nature. We've been doing it for a very short period of time but come a very long way. There will be set backs, great societies will decline and new ones will fall but total extinction is unlikely.As humans, we have no sense of perspective. Absolutely nothing would happen to the universe is we were wiped off it totally. In time terms we've only been here for the blink of an eye anyway. It got on perfectly fine before us and will after us.As humans, we have no sense of perspective.

Well, as I said I hope and pray that you are right.