If a stream of recent books are correct (I’ve reviewed several here, by David Orr, Bill McKibben and Paul Gilding), much of this century is going to be significantly and catastrophically different from today, due primarily to energy and ecological limits amplified by the climate crisis. The authors all made strong cases for what is likely to change, but less impressive suggestions on how to think constructively in the coming context.
Now there’s another generation of books that take a deeper and more comprehensive look, however preliminary, at what might constitute a way forward in the inevitable cultural shift. Two very impressive ones have been published almost simultaneously by MIT Press. This is a brief review of the first, by political scientist and veteran author William Ophuls.
He starts with the stark if now familiar premise: “Modern civilization lives on depleting energy and borrowed time. Its day of reckoning approaches.” So we need a new ideal that “makes a virtue out of the necessity of living within our ecological means.” In this very blunt book-length essay, Ophuls puts the emphasis on the word “virtue.” Our failures can’t be remedied by “smarter management, better technology and stricter regulation” because they are supported by “a catastrophic moral failure that demands a radical shift in consciousness.”
Ophuls does not develop a new futuristic system replete with its own jargon. He critiques the failures of our simplistic cultural context. And he returns to forgotten sources in the currently ignored classics of western civilization for conceptual tools that might equip us to deal with the onslaught of rigorous change. Yet this isn’t a scholarly rehash either: It uses these ideas together with current ecological understanding to inform decisions on how we should live and organize ourselves and cope with a future of immense challenge.
His chapters examine “law and virtue,” ecology, physics, individual and cultural psychology, and politics in the larger sense of how societies are organized. Plato, Thoreau, Thomas Jefferson, Rousseau, Jung and other ancient, modern and contemporary thinkers are consulted.
But he proposes neither an intellectual new order nor a return to some bookish Golden Age. He argues for adherence to better interpretations of natural law, and for a balance found in Thoreau: “The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage” who forgoes superfluities for “a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.”
To me there is something very encouraging about his general approach. It says that even in the intensity of the coming confusion, we have the tools to think and feel our way out of it. Ophuls bravely and succinctly offers his synthesis, which at the very least is a well-constructed springboard to fruitful debate and further thought.
This article appears in Concrete Activists.
Thanks for this review. Ophuls book was the best that I’ve read in a long time. I loved his “synthesis,” as you say, of previous philosophers and thinkers. As a person normally bored by politics, he put into words what I feel is truth my root level.
Simplify. Instead, we are going the opposite direction.
Nice review. Drop me a line, please, to discuss taking some of these to the airwaves on KHSU’s EcoNews Report.
Ophul’s book “Plato’s Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology” should be understood as the third book in his trilogy that began with the publication of “Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity” (1977) and updated in 1992. The second book was “Requiem for Modern Politics: The Tragedy of the Enlightenment and the Challenge of the New Millennium”. His first book was written in the same decade that saw the publication of “The Limits to Growth” by Dennis Meadows, et al. and “Environment Power and Society” by H.T. Odum and “The Entropy Law and the Economic Process” by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. Twenty years latter “Requiem for Modern Politics” expounds on the moral bankruptcy of Enlightenment thinking and the failure economic liberalism. I think this book was his best effort and is worth reading more than once. It is a masterful work of scholarship. Fourteen years later “Plato’s Revenge” picks up where “Requiem for Modern Politics” left off. Our survival on Earth will require a politics based on ecology and by understanding limits and exercising self-restraint. Unfortunately, it seems that we are pre-disposed to running into the “wall” of ecological limits at full speed, which will necessitate a significant die-off of human beings in this century. Perhaps after the collapse of industrial civilization the surviving humans will understand the importance of limits and embrace the principles of “small is beautiful” and live more appropriately on the Earth.