Comments on: Time’s Up, by Keith Farnish

By: Books of the year, 2009 « MAKE WEALTH HISTORY

Books of the year, 2009 « MAKE WEALTH HISTORY — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 08:57:08 +0000

[...] to round out the list, here’s the rest: Time’s Up, The MoneyMaker, One Planet Living, Rekindling Community, The Hungry Spirit, How the Rich are [...]

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:23:48 +0000

Absolutely. I don’t argue for a return to the past in that sense, and I think certain technologies are positive. The internet is one of them, although we haven’t quite learned to live with it yet. That’s got a place in the future, and so has much of our current industry. It’s the waste, the consumer elements, that need to be restrained. And I think that can be done without returning to a medieval culture. I certainly hope so, or we’re jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.

By: Stefan

Stefan — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 12:30:16 +0000

Returning to pre-industrial ages also means returning to pre-industrial culture. My CO2 footprint is small, and I have no children nor want to, and I’m happy with that. I’m more interested in spirituality than in consumerism. But pre-industrial culture is where you find slavery, sexism, and even greater power abuses. It is where you find men who believe that to cure AIDS you have to rape a virgin. I’m sorry guys, the way out of this mess is forward, not backwards. If you want to improve human culture, make lives more meaningful, then improve technology, make it lighter, more efficient, less damaging. It is like a marriage. When things start to go wrong, you can split up and find someone else, but that is merely starting again, and in 10 years you’ll be right back to the same problem with the new partner. Even if we went back to pre-industrial, in a thousand years we would have re-industrialized again. Instead, stick with your partner and figure out how to solve the problems, which will mean change for both of you, but change in a forward direction. Remember, we would only re-industrialise again, except the next time it would be even more damaging, as out numbers rapidly exploded in an even more resource scarce world.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:56:33 +0000

Thanks for dropping by Keith – as you say, slim hopes of everyone agreeing with the whole lot, especially in a book as broad ranging as yours. No doubt there are many ways out of industrialization, for us as individuals and as communities. The important thing is that we’re looking for them, and looking for ways to reconnect.

By: Keith Farnish

Keith Farnish — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:55:03 +0000

Thanks for the review, Jeremy. Very detailed and you make some excellent points; I’m not going to defend the criticisms, after all it’s for the reader to decide what they agree with, and I would be very surprised if anyone agreed with everything. All I would say is that my view of the “end” is that it’s merely a set of options into a multitude of different ways of living – Transition perhaps falls down here because it is quite prescriptive; I prefer to let people find their own ways.

Best

Keith