disengagement

since this past summer i've been reading a number of viewpoints on culture, economics, social structures, slums, refugees, architecture, design, food economics, food production ( if you get the chance to see the film King Corn take a look at it)and trying to digest how it all fits together( i need to take some more anthropology classes)...there's a broad spectrum of thought, from thomas friedman's globalization sycophancy, through willam volman's rejection of "citizens", and out the other side to wendell berry and derrick jensen. wendell and derrick both want to see humans return to a pre-industrial existence via the demise of urban living.( babylon is the mother of harlots for them both) in "The Unsettling of Anerica: Culture and Agriculture" wendell advocates a retun to a jeffersonian "republic of townships" based on labor intensive, non-industrial organic farming. cities would be depopulated to provide the labor for these farms and we'd all lead happier, healthier lives closer to nature and god. like all utopians wendell is blind to the fact that not everyone shares his vision. there may be people who like to live in cities as opposed to rooting around in the dirt ( for the record, i would much prefer to rusticate...but not on wendell's terms) these would become the "other" for wendell...heretics..wreckers...dissent has no place in utopia and anything you do to reach the final end is permissable ( not that i can see wendell actually advocating force...he seems a bit kinder than that...but there are a lot of zealots out there waiting for a message, and it's a short step from the rejection of urban living to the khymer rouge)...if wendell is content to adopt a system based on a form of social hierarchy ( someone's the farmer, someone's the help)derrick is not. (let me say here that i have not completely read derrick's book, so there may be sone refinement[or retraction] of this) in "Endgane, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization" he seems to be advocating a return to a hunter/gatherer society with nothing more technologically advanced than stone tools. a bit extreme. what's the hunter/gatherer carrying capacity of the planet at the moment? will it support the nine billion people projected to be here by mid century? if you completely abandon industrial civilization how many will die? who is it that gets to decide? derrick? or those with the most guns? (civilization may vanish but guns aren't going anywhere) when derrick says we need to build a new morality based on a glass of clean drinking water i am with him...you can't hope to survive by destroying what sustains you...when he proposes the death of civilization and its inherent convulsions i am not...wendell and derrick are right about the depredations of industrial manufacturing and its denial of its destructive (and self-destructive) use of resources, and the way it uses and degrades humans...but the alternative they are proposing are as stultifying and destructive of humans as what they propose to replace. they will, of course, counter that the way we're going now is equally self-destructive, and i have ro say they would be correct...my issue is not with their starting premise, but with their utopian conclusions...utopia is unattainable ( there's a reason for the garden of eden story) all the attempts at it so far have degenerated into authoritarian horrors...i doubt that will change.