29 min
12. Opposing Scale: Spiritual Practices and Small Communities AfterThought
-
- Philosophy
In this episode, our deep dive into the Axial Age meets the podcast theme of the importance of scale. The themes of thinking at different time scales, our effort of following a "thoughtline" through changing historical scales, is provided its psychological underpinning: scaling up is an identity-project undertaken by the human ego. To shift away from operating at global industrial scale, which operates above all through a consumptive appeal to the ego, towards instead thinking, living, and investing in our local communities, requires massive political reorienting premised on a deep economic transformation away from consumption. Beneath these massive changes, is a correspondingly powerful spiritual and psychological challenge to deny ourselves – a challenge which makes the inward turn of spiritual practice and its transformative potential indispensable.
References:
Alternative economic models were mentioned, Schumacher’s “Small is beautiful” explicitly:
Schumacher, E. F. (1973) Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if people mattered. http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/
A contemporary proposal is Kate Raworth’s “doughnut economics”:
https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/
Samuel Alexander has done a great amount of work on “degrowth” and “sufficiency economy”:
http://samuelalexander.info/
Helena Norbert-Hodge has articulated a powerful defense of “local futures” and a focus on the “economics of happiness” (along with a 2011 film of that name)
https://www.localfutures.org/
“Voluntary simplicity” is a theme that interweaves all of the above; see http://simplicitycollective.com/or the 1981 book of the same name by Duane Elgin.
In this episode, our deep dive into the Axial Age meets the podcast theme of the importance of scale. The themes of thinking at different time scales, our effort of following a "thoughtline" through changing historical scales, is provided its psychological underpinning: scaling up is an identity-project undertaken by the human ego. To shift away from operating at global industrial scale, which operates above all through a consumptive appeal to the ego, towards instead thinking, living, and investing in our local communities, requires massive political reorienting premised on a deep economic transformation away from consumption. Beneath these massive changes, is a correspondingly powerful spiritual and psychological challenge to deny ourselves – a challenge which makes the inward turn of spiritual practice and its transformative potential indispensable.
References:
Alternative economic models were mentioned, Schumacher’s “Small is beautiful” explicitly:
Schumacher, E. F. (1973) Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if people mattered. http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/
A contemporary proposal is Kate Raworth’s “doughnut economics”:
https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/
Samuel Alexander has done a great amount of work on “degrowth” and “sufficiency economy”:
http://samuelalexander.info/
Helena Norbert-Hodge has articulated a powerful defense of “local futures” and a focus on the “economics of happiness” (along with a 2011 film of that name)
https://www.localfutures.org/
“Voluntary simplicity” is a theme that interweaves all of the above; see http://simplicitycollective.com/or the 1981 book of the same name by Duane Elgin.
29 min