I have lots to be thankful for. I am thankful that I was born when I was (1936) because any later would have made me live through even more of what is happening now. I am very afraid for those who will be alive when the collapse comes. I don't think I will.
I am glad that I was born in the US because Europe went through hell at that time. I am glad that my parents were FDR democrats because they gave me a good view of our country even though they were racists (isn't everyone?). It took years to unlearn those myths and to understand the real America. Genocide, slavery, oppression of women and workers all had to be learned about. I also had to unlearn the racism. I am especially glad to have grown up in Chicago under the Daley machine. How else could I learn to accept corruption as the norm in politics?
There's lots more if you care to read on.
I am glad I decided to follow my parents' nominal Catholicism at age six. I took it seriously and did it on my own. I'm thankful that my first wife led me to be "born again" at age 21. It was a liberation from the Catholicism that was becoming harder and harder to swallow as I grew up. Fundamentalism showed me that religion was a farce and that what it really did was give people a cover for their hate and dishonesty.
I'm thankful that we lived with my immigrant grandparents in South Side Chicago from first grade until first year high school. They were peasants and illiterate. My mom's father worked in the Chicago stockyards and years later I readThe Jungle and understood how lucky we were that he lived to 55.
I'm glad my dad chose the suburb of Stickney to buy his first house ,when I was in high school. It was a working class ghetto among a number of middle class suburbs which meant that I was isolated in my precollege classes in high school. It took years to understand that the reason I was never even told about scholarships and had to go NROTC to go to college was that the likes of us were not supposed to go to college.
I'm glad I chose the Marine Corps option because the Marines taught me a lot. I am now a pacifist who can kill with his bare hands.
I am especially thankful for Sputnik because the paranoia it induced made fellowship money available from grad school to the end of post doctoral training. I received a superb education at the one time in our history when such opportunities were available to the likes of me.
I am thankful that I never was able to afford medical school and ended up teaching doctors instead. I was able to see the root cause of our troubles with health care from that perspective and why my stays in Europe on sabbatical made it clear that our system is based on greed at many points.
I am also thankful that I was able to spend my life as a scholar and that I learned that the artificial divisions between disciplines are the root of why we have gone so far astray with the evolution of the human mind. Knowledge can not be put in boxes and breaking down complex wholes into parts destroys the reality we think we are learning about.
That brings me to now and my thankfulness that I was able to sum all this up in my book with Jim Coffman. Jim read my last published paper and asked if we could do the book together. We never met until after it was published. Here is what it is about:
The Global Economy that sustains the civilized world is destroying the biosphere. As a result, civilization, like the Titanic, is on a collision course with disaster. But changing course via the body politic appears to be well nigh impossible, given that much of the populace lives in denial. Why is that? And how did we get into such a fix? In this essay, biologists James Coffman and Donald Mikulecky argue that the reductionist model of the world developed by Western civilization misrepresents life, undermining our ability to regulate and adapt to the accelerating anthropogenic transformation of the world entrained by that very model. An alternative worldview is presented that better accounts for both the relational nature of living systems and the developmental phenomenology that constrains their evolution. Development of any complex system reinforces specific dependencies while eliminating alternatives, reducing the diversity that affords adaptive degrees of freedom: the more developed a system is, the less potential it has to change its way of being. Hence, in the evolution of life most species become extinct. This perspective reveals the limits that complexity places on knowledge and technology, bringing to light our hubristically dysfunctional relationship with the natural world and increasingly tenuous connection to reality. The inescapable conclusion is that, barring a cultural metamorphosis that breaks free of deeply entrenched mental frames that made us what we are, continued development of the Global Economy will lead inexorably to the collapse of civilization.
Knowledge often brings pain and I am glad that I learned that the pain is worth the knowing. I also hurt to see the widespread denial even among those who self righteously call others deniers. I write to try to help these folk see what they are doing and some have understood. I am very grateful for that.
It takes a certain arrogance to write as I do and I am glad there are so many who understand that and forgive. I don't know how other writers feel about this but I was always a kind of loner so the situation is very tolerable for me. So if you have read this far you know me a little better. I hope you will read our book. We have not made any money from it and that never has been the point. We have a message that we believe is very important and needs to be heard. It can not be condensed to a series of diaries. I am thankful for the opportunity to try to get this message out. I have spent my life getting to this level of understanding and I refuse to become part of the system I am warning about. When I talk about the impending collapse of civilization, as more and more others are, it is because I have asked and answered some hard questions. Thank you.