Radical Social Ecology as Deep Pragmatism: A Call to the Abolition of Systemic Dissonance and the Minimization of Entropic Chaos (original) (raw)

Reimagining the Way to an Ecological Civilisation

2011

The political uprisings and social upheavals ‘happening’ throughout the world, highlighted by the Arab Spring and Occupy movements, represent ‘an explosion of political and social creativity’, and reveal a revolution within the socio-political and economic world order (Žižek, 2011). Emerging from deep within these social and political conflicts is a transcultural field of discontent that transcends national borders and is driven by a strong determination for dignity, human rights and economic justice. A transformation is taking place articulated through the ‘spatial realities of globalization’ (Robinson, 2009). Identified by the collective struggle for autonomy right across the world, this transcultural field – the 99% – embodies society’s reaction to modernity’s betrayal of humanity. The global capitalist system, it is argued, is both in a stage of fatal decline and incapable of effectively addressing the convergent crises that confront humanity today – the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself, and the growth of social divisions and inequality. Coinciding with this transformation in society is a second revolution in science, which promises to do more than advance the natural sciences but inform the development of social organizing systems as well, such as complexity. In the present day, revolutions in society and science combine to provide the basis for humanity to redress her metaphysical, epistemological, and ontological foundations. It is proposed that by reconceiving the enlightenment narrative cast in the tradition of the Radical Enlightenment, processes of emergence, configuration, and reconfiguration can be found that inspire the quest for liberty, and that accord with an ecological view of the world – in cultivating a ‘new global ethic’ to form the basis for an ecological civilization.