Tag: Utopianism

Climate ChangeEconomics

Rent, Profit, and Degrowth โ€“ A Postscript to โ€œCapitalism and Climate Collapseโ€

In Capitalism and Climate Collapse, I argued that catastrophic climate collapse cannot be avoided under capitalism because capitalism requires economic growth, economic growth requires energy growth, energy growth requires extensive burning of fossil fuels, and extensive burning of fossil fuels causes catastrophic climate collapse. To avoid collapse, we need to shrink the economy โ€“ that is, degrowth โ€“ to a sustainable level with respect to energy requirements, and then switch to a steady state economy to stay at that level. What exactly that sustainable level is is debatable, but regardless of whether itโ€™s closer to one third of current closer...
BuddhismPhilosophy

A Buddha Land in This World (New Book)

My new book, A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism, has just been published. Here is the abstract/back cover blurb: In the early twentieth century, Uchiyama Gudล, Senoโ€™o Girล, Lin Qiuwu, and others advocated a Buddhism that was radical in two respects. Firstly, they adopted a more or less naturalist stance with respect to Buddhist doctrine and related matters, rejecting karma or other supernatural beliefs. And secondly, they held political and economic views that were radically anti-hegemonic, anti-capitalist, and revolutionary. Taking the idea of such a โ€œradical Buddhismโ€ seriously, A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy,...
Climate Change

The Lesser Dystopia

(This is part 3 in the No Time for Utopia series.) In On the Fragility of Civilization, I argued that due to the slowly compounding effects of an increasing number of relatively localized โ€œnaturalโ€ disasters caused (directly or indirectly) by climate change, a vicious circle of failing disaster management, economic decline, civil unrest, and hunger will trigger a cascade of collapsing societies, eventually leading to global societal collapse in roughly 25 to 30 years from now (give or take a half decade). The world during and after collapse will be very different from what most of us have ever experienced,...
Climate ChangePhilosophySocial Issues

No Time for Utopia

Most political thought is โ€œideal theoryโ€: its arguments are based on an idealized world in which important aspects of reality are abstracted away. Abstraction isnโ€™t necessarily a bad thing โ€“ in the contrary, it is often necessary in science โ€“ but it isnโ€™t self-evident that the results of abstractions and idealizations are (always) applicable to the real world, and if theory doesnโ€™t descend from the ideal world to reality it turns into an intellectual game without practical relevance; or worse, as the case of neoclassical economics illustrates. In that case abstraction and idealization resulted in a โ€œtheoryโ€ that explains nothing,...