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The rationale for the new moderate flank strategy
Excerpt from panel discussion with Robin Celikates, Andreas Malm, Eva von Redecker, and Rupert Read on the question “What is to be Done? Climate Crisis and Political Activism”. This was the closing event of the Conference “Politics of Nature: Philosophical Perspectives on the Anthropocene” (Oct 20-21, 2022), organized by Thomas Khurana (Center for Post-Kantian Philosophy, https://cpkp.net/) and the ICI Berlin (https://www.ici-berlin.org/).
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EARTH VS. FUTURISM
From the way stock markets and for-profit firms operate to the way the media news-cycle works, chronic short-termism is landing humanity in desperate straits. We’re hurtling off a cliff, and hardly even preparing to make our landing softer. We’re crossing what scientists call planetary boundaries, which we ought to have stayed on the safe side of. The most well-known boundary is: maintaining a safe climate.
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Is “longtermism” the cure or the sickness?
This article was first published by ABC Religion and Ethics here. Central to my work in recent years has been an anguished concern that our species and our political and economic systems are dangerously short-termist. I contend that we need to become long-termist. We need to practice precaution, looking before we leap. We need to plan for the seventh — and, indeed, the seven-hundred-and-seventy-seventh — generation. And so we need to overcome the tendencies of politicians to look no further than the next election (or even the next news cycle), of companies to look no further than the next quarterly report, and increasingly of Stock Market investors to look no…
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Why I’ll be giving poems as presents this Christmas
I’m no Clement Clarke Moore (“Twas the night before Christmas…”) but I’d like to think when my family and friends read my Christmas offerings to them, they will get the same warm, cosy feeling evoked by that much loved poem. It’s a true gift from the heart, not just because I have spent time thinking about that person and what they mean to me but also because I’ve spent time thinking about the planet and what it means to all of us. Whatever else you can say about 2021, it has opened the eyes of many more people that the Earth (and everything on it) is in big trouble –…
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Parents for a Future: How loving our children can prevent climate collapse
Parents for a Future is a book authored by Rupert Read and published by UEA Publishing Project. That our ecological future appears grave can no longer come as any surprise. And yet we have so far failed, collectively and individually, to begin the kind of action necessary to shift our path away from catastrophic climate collapse. In this stark and startling little book, Rupert Read helps us to understand the direness of our predicament while showing us a metaphor and a method — a way of thinking — by which we might transform it. From the relatively uncontroversial starting point that we love our own children, we are introduced to…
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Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy: Thinking Through His Philosophical Investigations
Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy is a book authored by Rupert Read and published by Routledge. In this book, Rupert Read offers the first outline of a resolute reading, following the highly influential New Wittgenstein ‘school’, of the Philosophical Investigations. He argues that the key to understanding Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is to understand its liberatory purport. Read contends that a resolute reading coincides in its fundaments with what, building on ideas in the later Gordon Baker, he calls a liberatory reading. Liberatory philosophy is philosophy that can liberate the user from compulsive (and destructive) patterns of thought, freeing one for possibilities that were previously obscured. Such liberation is our prime goal in…
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Fully automated luxury barbarism
‘This is not a book about the future but about a present that goes unacknowledged’, Aaron Bastani writes in Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Bastani does not set out to describe what an ideal communist society would look like. Instead, he spends the bulk of his book making the argument that capitalism is unable to cope with a set of problems that will eventually lead to its destruction and implores us instead to create a better economic model built around the creation and distribution of abundance. What makes the book interesting is that the problems its author identifies are primarily found in capitalism’s relationship to technology; and in particular, in technology’s…
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School climate strikes: why adults no longer have the right to object to their children taking radical action
A worldwide wave of school climate strikes, begun by the remarkable Greta Thunberg, has reached the UK. Some critics claim these activist-pupils are simply playing truant, but I disagree. Speaking as both a climate campaigner and an academic philosopher, I believe school walkouts are morally and politically justifiable. Philosophy can help us tackle the question of whether direct action is warranted via the theory of civil disobedience. This states that, in a democratic society, one is justified in disobeying the law only when other alternatives have been exhausted, and the injustice being protested against is grave. In the case of the climate school strikes, it is without question that the…
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This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire – and what lies beyond
This Civilisation is Finished is a book co-authored by Rupert Read and Samuel Alexander. It is published by the Simplicity Institute. Industrial civilisation has no future. It requires limitless economic growth on a finite planet. The reckless combustion of fossil fuels means that Earth’s climate is changing disastrously, in ways that cannot be resolved by piecemeal reform or technological innovation. Sooner rather than later this global capitalist system will come to an end, destroyed by its own ecological contradictions. Unless humanity does something beautiful and unprecedented, the ending of industrial civilisation will take the form of collapse, which could mean a harrowing die-off of billions of people. This book is…
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A dream of now
I’ve just published a book, called A film-philosophy of ecology and enlightenment. (You can read the early part of it for free here … Don’t attempt to buy it unless you are independently wealthy – it’s madly expensive. Wait for the paperback next year – or, much better idea, order it for/through your library, now.) I argue in my book that a number of the films I investigate in the book are about daring to dream again. (Especially the film that I argue is the most significant popular film of recent times: Avatar.) Well, if that’s true, then it’s also true that it is important to dare to dream nightmares too, sometimes. (And in…
