The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Futurus Interruptus John Michael Greer Most of the time, in writing these essays, I try to treat the decline of industrial society with the seriousness that it deserves. Sometimes, though, the plain raw absurdity of our current situation rises to a point that only raucous laughter can address. I ran into another of those points a few days back, while reading an article on Yahoo News sent to me by a longtime reader and commenter—tip of the hat to David By The Lake. The article is by Hasan Chowdhury, and its title is “Humanity is on the brink of major scientific breakthroughs, but nobody seems to care.” You can read it  here . Chowdhury’s article points out that recent news stories about the latest heavily promoted claims of a breakthrough in nuclear fusion research, and the much-hyped announcement by two South Korean researchers that a room-temperature superconductor had been discovered, didn’t get the response the media expected.  By and large, people yawned. To Chowdhury, this is ap

The Sun is Alive, and Why that Matters Charles Eisenstein When the modern mind attempts to grapple with animistic concepts like “the sun is alive,” the first impulse is to dismiss them as a superstitious fancy. Thankfully, many of us recognize the culturally imperialistic tone of that dismissal. We may also be in touch with our own fundamental indigenous knowledge, however deeply buried it may be under layers of scientific education, that the sun is indeed alive. We want somehow to accept that without denying what science has taught us: that the sun is a burning ball of gas, a nuclear furnace, and couldn’t possibly be alive. One way to accommodate both is to make aliveness into an extra-material property, a spirit that infuses all things. The sun is alive because everything is alive. But to do so is to subtly capitulate to the worldview that holds everything dead, by making aliveness an added property, independent of anything material. It is a version of Cartesian dualism. Here I will