This is a must read for anyone interested in humanity's future. In Homeland Earth French visionary Edgar Morin lays out a thoroughly considered and truly needed manifesto for our times—crucial to our survival—but beyond that, for our quality of life experience on individual and collective scales. He calls for the emergence of a planetary cosmopolitanism: meaning that humanity evolves to form an Earth civilization capable of embracing both unity and complexity, resisting the temptation to rationalize what he calls “barbarism” which tends to loom in some way whenever a civilization is born. Our particular civilizational barbarism is born of oppositional thinking and technocratic rule. He calls for multidimensional and anthropological history, science, and politics to replace our current technocratic and econo-cratic systems that attempt to reduce the complexity of humanity, and cannot adequately deal with the preturbations and complex processes of living, self-organizing systems. Our current paradigm, lacking the ability to deal with complexity, has brought us to a major planetary crisis of many layers.
Morin describes the ominous indicators that we are in planetary crisis, or “polycrisis:”
1. Mounting uncertainties in all domains, the impossibility of any assured futurology, the extreme diversity of possible future scenarios.
2. The rupture of regulating factors (including the ruptue of the balance of terror); the development of rising positive feedback, as in population growth; the uncontrolled developments of industrial growth and technoscience.
3. Deadly perils facing the whole of humanity (nuclear arms, threat to biosphere) and the opportunity to save humanity from these perils, starting witht the consciousness of these perils.
Other indicators are the acceleration of change (runaway positive feedback), deadly global threats (what he calls the “Damoclean spectre”), Alliance of barbarisms, serious life and death struggles, and deadly global threats.
Our world undeniably fits his description of a polycrisis. So in the face of this seemingly insurmountable, multilayered crisis, how can we possibly be thinking about our future? It seems that our once-promised utopia through the benefits of science and capitalism was a mirage. Morin points toward our ambivalence toward technocracy as one of the key reasons we lost our future-orientation. All of our visions of the future were aligned with progress, and human salvation by technology and economics. However, in the mid twentieth century, we realized that technology had not only the power to ameliorate but annihilate. We realized our technocracy could not provide a certain utopia. We also realized that economics has its inevitable shadow side, that it fails to consider humanity. Morin calls this a “crisis of the future.” He proposes that our future should be connected to the past and present, and founded upon the ability to think critically, become self-aware, and contextualize our actions in the larger planetary picture, rather than weighted toward linear progress and the false rationality of technocracy, economics, and our current politics. He considers it crucial that we begin to think in terms of metatechnology; meaning that we put our well-being and development of consciousness before blindly innovating into the abyss. In other words, he suggests that human development come before technological development, but that human development hinges upon planetary health. “Two apparently antagonistic goals should henceforth be inseparably linked: first, the survival of humanity, and second, ongoing hominization.” (p. 79) The Homeland Earth must sustain human life if humanity is to evolve and become responsible citizens that recognize unity and embrace diversity.
This book makes crucial points about where our paradigm has failed, and how we must revise our approach to development toward “metadevelopment.” Our politics and technology must become humane and oriented towards our unified fundamental need to share our home in the cosmos. He points out that we have a rare opportunity now, to combine our cosmological stories, to contextualize our human story, and to imagine our uncertain future through complex thought and strategy. Homeland Earth provides a conceptual place from which to dream, to inquire, and to evolve into a better future.
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- Angus JenkinsonReviewed in the United Kingdom on September 24, 2016
A slim, rich, brilliant and passionate account of education and ecological thinking for the planet
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