Joe,
The letter "Mysticism does not run treatment plants" and your reply set me to thinking. I kinda think you and your reader are approaching the same question from different points of view and kinda talking at cross purposes, in my opinion. If I could, allow me to see if I can lend a little possible clarification.
From everything I've read that you've written, what I think you're complaining about is not really human rationality but rather human hubris. That horrible idea that we thinking apes seem to have adopted that we can out-think Mother Nature or Gaia or millennial evolution or however you want to define it. Human rationality is, I think, all well and good, however, it is when we hubristic humans believe we have discovered "a better way" of doing things without actually considering all the various and, oftentimes, unforeseen consequences that we go astray.
As I understand your letter writer's argument, he is correct, as far as he goes. However, I believe that he is complaining that you want to go back to Stone Age technology, which I don't really think you do. However, undue reliance and dependence upon mere human technology without benefit of any concern about the social implications of that technology leads to disaster. Just as there is nothing wrong with free trade, when it becomes a situation where the few most ruthless accumulate the lion's share of resources to the point where they can manipulate society and government solely to their own ends to the exclusion of the bulk of society, therein lies disaster.
So, I suppose it comes down to this: with the number of bodies society has to deal with, a reliance on best practices and best technology is necessary. However, by the same token, to make society merely a support and adjunct for the technology and the "elites" who run that society is a prescription for ultimate breakdown.
I'd love to get your feedback and see if I've kinda got it right or if I'm all wet.
Regards,
Cossack
------
Cossack,
I think you are right.
However, my threshold for hubris is quite a bit lower than for most people. I think we crossed into hubris shortly after the first practice of agriculture, when the extra calories provided by grains were used to launch armies to capture other people's granaries and early breweries (which concentrated and preserved the grains), slaves and and women. It's quite rational to like beer, slaves to serve and expand one's wealth, and especially women.
In the not too distant future we will return back across that threshold to some version of from whence we came, when the die-off of about five billion people achieves momentum. When the former princes of globalism -- which was also quite rational to its adherents -- are paddling kayaks from the last livable places in northern Canada, across the melted poles to trade seeds with the Danes, who will have curiously retro-morphed back into the Vikings and and set sail to steal the granaries on the other side of the "Great Melt," also known to the French as la grande soupe froide.
Best to start hiding our women and beer now.
In art and labor,
Joe
