Civilization Critical

Civilization Critical PDF Author: Darrin Qualman
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
ISBN: 1773630873
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
The modern world is wondrous. Its factories produce ten thousand cars every hour and ten trillion transistors every second. We carry supercomputers in our pockets, and nearly a million people are in the air at any time. In Civilization Critical, Darrin Qualman takes readers on a tour of the wonders of the 21st century. But the great strength of our modern word is also its great weakness. Our immense powers to turn resources and nature into products and waste imperil our future. And plans to double and redouble the size of the global economy veto sustainability. So, is our civilization doomed? No. Doom is a choice. We can make different choices. Qualman demonstrates that a 19th- and 20th-century transition to linear systems and away from the circular patterns of nature (and of all previous civilizations) is the foundational error—the underlying problem, the root cause of climate change, resource depletion, ocean’s full of plastics, and a host of mega-problems now intensifying and merging, with potentially civilization-cracking results. In this sweeping work, Qualman reinterprets and re-explains the problems we face today, and charts a clear, hopeful path into the future.

Civilization Critical

Civilization Critical PDF Author: Darrin Qualman
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
ISBN: 1773630873
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
The modern world is wondrous. Its factories produce ten thousand cars every hour and ten trillion transistors every second. We carry supercomputers in our pockets, and nearly a million people are in the air at any time. In Civilization Critical, Darrin Qualman takes readers on a tour of the wonders of the 21st century. But the great strength of our modern word is also its great weakness. Our immense powers to turn resources and nature into products and waste imperil our future. And plans to double and redouble the size of the global economy veto sustainability. So, is our civilization doomed? No. Doom is a choice. We can make different choices. Qualman demonstrates that a 19th- and 20th-century transition to linear systems and away from the circular patterns of nature (and of all previous civilizations) is the foundational error—the underlying problem, the root cause of climate change, resource depletion, ocean’s full of plastics, and a host of mega-problems now intensifying and merging, with potentially civilization-cracking results. In this sweeping work, Qualman reinterprets and re-explains the problems we face today, and charts a clear, hopeful path into the future.

The Story of B

The Story of B PDF Author: Daniel Quinn
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0307575233
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning bestseller Ishmael and its sequel, My Ishmael, comes a powerful novel with one of the most profound spiritual testaments of our time “A compelling ‘humantale’ that will unglue, stun, shock, and rearrange everything you’ve learned and assume about Western civilization and our future.”—Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce Father Jared Osborne has received an extraordinary assignment from his superiors: Investigate an itinerant preacher stirring up deep trouble in central Europe. His followers call him B, but his enemies say he’s something else: the Antichrist. However, the man Osborne tracks across a landscape of bars, cabarets, and seedy meeting halls is no blasphemous monster—though an earlier era would undoubtedly have rushed him to the burning stake. For B claims to be enunciating a gospel written not on any stone or parchment but in our very genes, opening up a spiritual direction for humanity that would have been unimaginable to any of the prophets or saviors of traditional religion. Pressed by his superiors for a judgement, Osborne is driven to penetrate B’s inner circle, where he soon finds himself an anguished collaborator in the dismantling of his own religious foundations. More than a masterful novel of adventure and suspense, The Story of B is a rich source of compelling ideas from an author who challenges us to rethink our most cherished beliefs. Explore Daniel Quinn’s spiritual Ishmael trilogy: ISHMAEL • MY ISHMAEL • THE STORY OF B

Freedom and Domination

Freedom and Domination PDF Author: Dankwart A. Rustow
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400856744
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 748

Get Book Here

Book Description
Presented here is a condensed translation of Alexander Rustow's three-volume Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart. This monumental work was widely acclaimed by critics throughout Europe as a major contribution to both historical and sociological scholarship. Recognized as one of the foremost exponents of neoliberal thought, and thus as one of the intellectual authors of West Germany's economic miracle," Rustow--in his magnum opus--tried to determine what social patterns and trends of thought enhance the human condition and what other patterns and trends lead to repression and barbarism. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Civilization

Civilization PDF Author: Niall Ferguson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101548029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the bestselling author of The Ascent of Money and The Square and the Tower “A dazzling history of Western ideas.” —The Economist “Mr. Ferguson tells his story with characteristic verve and an eye for the felicitous phrase.” —Wall Street Journal “[W]ritten with vitality and verve . . . a tour de force.” —Boston Globe Western civilization’s rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five centuries. How did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? Acclaimed historian Niall Ferguson argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts, or “killer applications”—competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic—that the Rest lacked, allowing it to surge past all other competitors. Yet now, Ferguson shows how the Rest have downloaded the killer apps the West once monopolized, while the West has literally lost faith in itself. Chronicling the rise and fall of empires alongside clashes (and fusions) of civilizations, Civilization: The West and the Rest recasts world history with force and wit. Boldly argued and teeming with memorable characters, this is Ferguson at his very best.

Barbaric Civilization

Barbaric Civilization PDF Author: Christopher Powell
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773585567
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 365

Get Book Here

Book Description
From its beginnings in the early twelfth century, the Western civilizing process has involved two interconnected transformations: the monopolization of military force by sovereign states and the cultivation in individuals of habits and dispositions of the kind that we call "civilized." The combined forward movement of these processes channels violent struggles for social dominance into symbolic performances. But even as the civilizing process frees many subjects from the threat of direct physical force, violence accumulates behind the scenes and at the margins of the social order, kept there by a deeply habituated performance of dominance and subordination called deferentiation. When deferentiation fails, difference becomes dangerous and genocide becomes possible. Connecting historical developments with everyday life occurrences, and discussing examples ranging from thirteenth-century Languedoc to 1994 Rwanda, Powell offers an original framework for analyzing, comparing, and discussing genocides as variable outcomes of a common underlying social system, raising unsettling questions about the contradictions of Western civilization and the possibility of a world without genocide.

Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization

Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization PDF Author: Samuel Gregg
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1621579069
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Gregg's book is the closet thing I've encountered in a long time to a one-volume user's manual for operating Western Civilization." —The Stream "Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization offers a concise intellectual history of the West through the prism of the relationship between faith and reason." —Free Beacon The genius of Western civilization is its unique synthesis of reason and faith. But today that synthesis is under attack—from the East by radical Islam (faith without reason) and from within the West itself by aggressive secularism (reason without faith). The stakes are incalculably high. The naïve and increasingly common assumption that reason and faith are incompatible is simply at odds with the facts of history. The revelation in the Hebrew Scriptures of a reasonable Creator imbued Judaism and Christianity with a conviction that the world is intelligible, leading to the flowering of reason and the invention of science in the West. It was no accident that the Enlightenment took place in the culture formed by the Jewish and Christian faiths. We can all see that faith without reason is benighted at best, fanatical and violent at worst. But too many forget that reason, stripped of faith, is subject to its own pathologies. A supposedly autonomous reason easily sinks into fanaticism, stifling dissent as bigoted and irrational and devouring the humane civilization fostered by the integration of reason and faith. The blood-soaked history of the twentieth century attests to the totalitarian forces unleashed by corrupted reason. But Samuel Gregg does more than lament the intellectual and spiritual ruin caused by the divorce of reason and faith. He shows that each of these foundational principles corrects the other’s excesses and enhances our comprehension of the truth in a continuous renewal of civilization. By recovering this balance, we can avoid a suicidal winner-take-all conflict between reason and faith and a future that will respect neither.

In Search of the Primitive

In Search of the Primitive PDF Author: Stanley Diamond
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351615459
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
Anthropology is a kind of debate between human possibilities—a dialectical movement between the anthropologist as a modern man and the primitive peoples he studies. In Search of the Primitive is a tough-minded book containing chapters ranging from encounters in the field to essays on the nature of law, schizophrenia and civilization, and the evolution of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Above all it is reflective and self-critical, critical of the discipline of anthropology and of the civilization that produced that discipline. Diamond views the anthropologist who refuses to become a searching critic of his own civilizations as not merely irresponsible, but a tool of Western civilization. He rejects the associations which have been made in the ideology of our civilization, consciously or unconsciously, between Western dominance and progress, imperialism and evolution, evolution and progress.

Discontent and Its Civilizations

Discontent and Its Civilizations PDF Author: Mohsin Hamid
Publisher: Riverhead Books
ISBN: 1594634033
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book Here

Book Description
Originally published in hardccover in 2015 by Riverhead Books.

Religion as Critique

Religion as Critique PDF Author: Irfan Ahmad
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469635100
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
Irfan Ahmad makes the far-reaching argument that potent systems and modes for self-critique as well as critique of others are inherent in Islam--indeed, critique is integral to its fundamental tenets and practices. Challenging common views of Islam as hostile to critical thinking, Ahmad delineates thriving traditions of critique in Islamic culture, focusing in large part on South Asian traditions. Ahmad interrogates Greek and Enlightenment notions of reason and critique, and he notes how they are invoked in relation to "others," including Muslims. Drafting an alternative genealogy of critique in Islam, Ahmad reads religious teachings and texts, drawing on sources in Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, and English, and demonstrates how they serve as expressions of critique. Throughout, he depicts Islam as an agent, not an object, of critique. On a broader level, Ahmad expands the idea of critique itself. Drawing on his fieldwork among marketplace hawkers in Delhi and Aligarh, he construes critique anthropologically as a sociocultural activity in the everyday lives of ordinary Muslims, beyond the world of intellectuals. Religion as Critique allows space for new theoretical considerations of modernity and change, taking on such salient issues as nationhood, women's equality, the state, culture, democracy, and secularism.

Civilisations

Civilisations PDF Author: Laurent Binet
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 9781529112818
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
It's world history. But not as we know it. c.1000AD- Erik the Red's daughter heads south from Greenland 1492- Columbus does not discover America 1531- the Incas invade Europe Freydis is the leader of a band of Viking warriors who get as far as Panama. Nobody knows what became of them. Five hundred years later, Christopher Columbus is sailing for the Americas, dreaming of gold and conquest. Even when captured, his faith in his mission is unshaken. Thirty years after that, Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, arrives in a Europe ready for revolution. Fortunately, he has a recent guidebook to acquiring power - Machiavelli's The Prince. So, the stage is set for a Europe ruled by Incas and, when the Aztecs arrive on the scene, for a great war that will change history forever. 'Binet's best book yet- the work of a major writer just hitting his stride. A delightful counterfactual novel' ***** - Daily Telegraph