The Climate for International Solidarity

From the United Nations:

Impacts of Climate Change Coming Faster and Sooner: New Science Report Underlines Urgency for Governments to Seal the Deal in Copenhagen

September 24, 2009 -The pace and scale of climate change may now be outstripping even the most sobering predictions of the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC).

An analysis of the very latest, peer-reviewed science indicates that many predictions at the upper end of the IPCC's forecasts are becoming ever more likely.

Meanwhile, the newly emerging science points to some events thought likely to occur in longer-term time horizons, as already happening or set to happen far sooner than had previously been thought.

Researchers have become increasingly concerned about ocean acidification linked with the absorption of carbon dioxide in seawater and the impact on shellfish and coral reefs.

Water that can corrode a shell-making substance called aragonite is already welling up along the California coast?decades earlier than existing models predict. Losses from glaciers, ice-sheets and the Polar Regions appear to be happening faster than anticipated, with the Greenland ice sheet, for example, recently seeing melting some 60 percent higher than the previous record of 1998.

Some scientists are now warning that sea levels could rise by up to two metres by 2100 and five to ten times that over following centuries.

There is also growing concern among some scientists that thresholds or tipping points may now be reached in a matter of years or a few decades including dramatic changes to the Indian sub-continent's monsoon, the Sahara and West Africa monsoons, and climate systems affecting a critical ecosystem like the Amazon rainforest.

The report also underlines concern by scientists that the planet is now committed to some damaging and irreversible impacts as a result of the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere.

Read More: Here

God, Approximately

God, Approximately

By Brian Cantwell Smith

Consider the rise of the religious right: Muslim and Hindu fundamentalism, right-wing Zionism, the Christian moral majority. These movements are responding to—and exploiting—a widespread social hunger: a sense that reigning secular, scientific, and capitalist world views don’t supply what matters: ways to tell right from wrong, guidance to anchor individual lives and give them meaning, the wherewithal to resolve ethical dilemmas.

I find many of the fundamentalists’ answers appalling: bigoted, meanspirited, scary. But what are those of us on the left—we scientists, we intellectuals, we in the academy—doing about this heartfelt lack? If we don’t recognize (and respond to) the yearning—if, willfully or unwittingly, we remain blind to the hunger—then we have no leg to stand on, in criticising others' replies.

What we need are better answers: frameworks to stir compassion, give meaning to lives, combat prejudice, secure a modicum of economic wellbeing, preserve the planet. These frameworks must be global; it is too late for parochial sectarianism. And they must build on the best in science. We need to move forwards, not back.

Read More (PDF): Here

From Pre-rational to Meta-rational?

Cognitive Levels of Evolution: From Pre-rational to Meta-rational

By Francis Heylighen

The principle of natural selection is taken as a starting point for an analysis of evolutionary levels. Knowledge and values are conceived as vicarious selectors of actions from a repertoire. The concept of metasystem transition is derived from the law of requisite variety and the principle of hierarchy. It is defined as the increase of variety at the object level, accompanied by the emergence of a situation-dependent control at a metalevel. It produces a new level of evolution, with a much higher capacity for adaptation.

The most important levels are discussed, with an emphasis on the level characterizing man as distinct from the animals. An analysis of the shortcomings of this "rational" system of cognition leads to a first sketch of how the next higher "meta-rational" level would look like.

Read More: Here

New Theses on Integral Micropolitics

Daniel Gustav Anderson is a cultural critic and integral theorist currently teaching literature and cultural history in Washington D.C.

Anderson has called for the development of a "critical Integral theory," which he conceives as a theory capable of doing Integral work while holding up to a rigorous ideological analysis. He has mapped this position in his essay, "Of Syntheses and Surprises: Toward a Critical Integral Theory".

His work is heavily influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Zizek, Ziporyn, and Tarthang Tulku among others. He has expressed the view that the aim of a critical integral theory must be radical democracy, on the hypothesis that enlightenment experiences and social revolution share a similar organizational pattern.

Below, in an outstanding new essay, Daniel further develops his project and provides resources towards a more critical and integrative social theory. Enjoy:

“Such a Body We Must Create”: New Theses on Integral Micropolitics

By Daniel Gustav Anderson

This essay proposes a rigorously postmetaphysical integral praxis, defines what this means and how such an intervention may be premised, and demonstrates throughout some methodological and practical advantages this approach may have over extant metaphysically-oriented integral theories.

Beginning with an interpretation of post-Hegelian historical and dialectical materialisms informed by the Buddhist dialectical tradition of Madhyamika, a series of coordinated and interrelated theses address problems proper to fields such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, semiotics, historiography, and subaltern studies.

The claimed purpose of this project is to coordinate subjective (psychological, spiritual) and objective (social, political, economic) transformational imperatives into a coherent, non-ontological “counterproject.” It takes as its aim the production of a radically democratized, responsible, and sane subjective and objective space, where responsibility is characterized as critical clarity, competence, creative consciousness, and compassion.

Read More (PDF): Here

See Also: An Interview with Daniel Gustav Anderson