{"id":63709,"date":"2022-10-06T11:29:46","date_gmt":"2022-10-06T16:29:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=63709"},"modified":"2022-10-06T11:29:46","modified_gmt":"2022-10-06T16:29:46","slug":"futures-that-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=63709","title":{"rendered":"Futures That Work"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecosophia.net\/futures-that-work\/\">Futures That Work<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>Among the most curious features of the current predicament of industrial society is that so much of it was set out in great detail so many decades ago. Just at the moment I\u2019m not thinking of the extensive literature on resource depletion that started appearing in the 1950s, which set out in painstaking detail the mess we\u2019re in right now. I\u2019m thinking of those writers who explored the decline and fall of past civilizations, in the vain hope that ours might manage to avoid making all the usual mistakes.\u00a0 In particular, I\u2019m thinking of Arnold Toynbee.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_2666\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2666\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-2666\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><\/figcaption>Toynbee\u2019s all but forgotten these days, but three quarters of a century ago his was a name to conjure with. His gargantuan 12-volume work\u00a0<em>A Study of History <\/em>set out to trace the histories of all known civilizations and, from that data set, determine the factors that drove the rise and fall of human societies. One- and two-volume abridgements leaving out most of the supporting data were widely available back in the day\u2014my parents, who were not exactly highbrow East Coast intellectuals, had a copy on a bookshelf in the family room when my age was still in single digits. Plenty of academic historians denounced Toynbee, but a great many people read his work and saw the value in it.<\/figure>\n<p>Those days are of course long past, but there\u2019s an interesting twist to the disappearance of his ideas from the collective dialogue of our time. Those ideas weren\u2019t rejected because they turned out to be wrong. They were rejected because Toynbee was right.<\/p>\n<p>To summarize an immense body of erudite historical analysis far too briefly, Toynbee argued that new human societies emerge when a human society is faced with a challenge it can\u2019t meet using its previous habits of thought and action&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Futures That Work Among the most curious features of the current predicament of industrial society is that so much of it was set out in great detail so many decades ago. Just at the moment I\u2019m not thinking of the extensive literature on resource depletion that started appearing in the 1950s, which set out in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[7513,150,15417,341,5427,1758],"class_list":["post-63709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-arnold-toynbee","tag-collapse","tag-ecosophia","tag-future","tag-industrial-civilisation","tag-john-michael-greer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63709"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63710,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63709\/revisions\/63710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}