Poirot,

The independent is one of those silly fringe blogs that produce articles that deliberately misrepresent things to get attention. Headlines such as "Goldman bankers get rich betting on food prices as millions starve" are pure rubbish.

Farmers, Miners etc, in order to raise cash sell future production of food/minerals at close to expected future prices to purchase seed, equipment etc to produce the food/minerals. If the food price goes up, the financiers make more money, if it goes down they lose it, abd the farmer/miner makes a guaranteed profit. Without this financing, there would be less food produced, higher food prices and more people starving. The article could also be expanded to Nasty insurance companies betting on us dying, or our houses burning down.

This is apparent to those with an education. These articles appeal to the ignorant and narrow minded who appear to be in abundance in this thread.

Thanks for that, SM : )

Btw...your latest elucidation on the merits of your fellow posters is fascinating.....as in:

"This is apparent to those with an education. These articles appeal to the ignorant and narrow minded who appear to be in abundance on this thread."

Strangely enough, your hypocrisy is shining like a beacon.

Remember this from you a few pages back to DG?

"...your propensity to dish out insults whenever someone disagrees with you is crass and vulgar."

Still, I suppose you make an exception when the poster being "crass and vulgar" is yourself : )

(P.S. regarding seed purchases...yup, you need money these days in places like India to purchase your seed or your fertilizer - in fact, debt is the name of the game these days. No more seed saving and sharing since Cargills and Monsanto got in on the act)

Banjo Paterson,
I'm not sure I'd call it my "flight to faith". I have good reason to suspect there is more to our unfolding reality than meets the eye. That is all. My suspicions are more in the nature of a curiosity to me--which might even be relevant to our collective situation, but I suspect equally I'm never going to have my curiosity satisfied and I'm content to think about the here and now in my own way--and not according to the rubric we are all conditioned in. If my "faith" is more "hi-tech" than yours, then I hope that's merely my recognition of complexity--a complexity denied by materialists. I would question your "simple" idea of "faith"; a chick breaking the shell is not an act of faith, for instance. Or at least consciousness, idealism, anxiety etc. bespeak an infinitely more intentional state than a rudimentary instinct.
Perhaps you don't realise that my use of Arnold's philistinism etc. was firmly tongue-in-cheek, as his own world view is today dismissed as elitism. If it were not for my well-founded suspicions I'd perhaps be the world's foremost materialist. I have no fear of nihilism and have not retreated to "spiritual, intellectual, and cultural values", which I find highly dubious and generally corrupt.
You call it a "recognition" that "the physical world [universe] is all that exists". But in what sense is this a "recognition"? As if we "knew".
Quite apart from my well-founded "suspicions", I've also been researching consciousness, and increasingly the consensus has it that it "cannot" be accounted for in reductive materialist terms--indeed that materialism is itself based on "faith"!
I agree with your final play on words, however that the problem is how to convert mind/spirit into action..

And on that, Nick, I have little to add, except to say that the world has evolved by means of collapse hitherto. All our lives are precarious and what of it if we die en masse, rather than by happenstance? I suspect it will take such an event to inspire the survivors, rather than a spontaneous change of consciousness.

Can you believe it? 135 comments and we have reached no conclusion about anything and we have not adopted any course of action.

Many of the comments were well-crafted, took a lot of time, but all that human endeavor has achieved nothing.

Eisenstein put some ideas forth as a basis of discussion but futile jawboning was the only result.

The flat-earthers won the day, them and the brain-dead.

Makes you wonder whether or not a dash of comment moderation by the author of the post should be employed in order to keep a serious and important thread moving in a positive direction.

.

Dear Squeers,

.

Many thanks for your explanations and clarifications.

Though I see no justification, based on current available evidence, to support the idea that there exists anything other than the material world, I see no reason why you or I or anybody else, including the so-called materialists, should not admit the possibility that there may be "more to our unfolding reality than meets the eye", as you suggest.

Of course, admitting that possibility is not a belief. Nor does it require faith, confidence or trust in order to be admitted. It simply requires a lack of prejudice and an open mind. But under no pretext should possibility be confused with probability.

I have the impression that there are numerous scientists in a multitude of disciplines tracking the origins and development of life in all its aspects and I expect they will come up with all sorts of surprising discoveries and revolutionary theories as time goes by.

Unfortunately, in the meantime, materialists, like atheists, are all too often unjustly stigmatised by those who place their faith in the occult despite lack of evidence of the existence of any such thing.

To answer your question, I consider we all know that "the physical world [universe] is all that exists" but most of us repress the obvious under the influence of powerful psychological and social pressures suffered from birth. Some individuals manage to resist these forces as they gain in maturity, seeking and obtaining confirmation of what they had previously been obliged to repress.

In this sense they acquire "recognition" of what they always new but had been obliged to repress, deny or ignore.

For want of a better explanation I see faith as an instinct of survival of all living creatures, strong at birth and diminishing as the individual gains in autonomy which, in my vocabulary, is another word for free will.

Perhaps a few words on conscience and consciousness in my next post ...

.

Not sure who you're having a go at, David G, everyone it seems.
The sad conclusion of my contributions is that Eisenstein's ideas amount to "futile jawboning". Idealism cuts no mustard in this world unless it achieves hegemony. Hegemony is subject to manipulation, as maintainance, and change tends to be a glacially slow process that's only idealistic in any case--nothing changes materially. That's why Marx and Engels insisted capitalism had to be overthrown. Even then it had to be ripe for revolution; a mode of production increasingly at odds with the social relations of production, so that hegemony fell by common consent and the capitalists were removed as readily as a tyrant king. Marx's fatal mistake was thinking that that point was imminent; he thus proselytised future generations of Marxists in the perennially sterile hope that the time was nigh. The time may well remain nigh, but we'll have used up planet Earth long before we get there. As Nick's youtube flick shows, the Earth is self-regulating and it will act to counter humanity as the latest geological imbalance.

For once I can take pride in the fact that my every comment here has been to the point.
What are your recommendations? How do we turn Eisenstein's idealistic vision into action?
It's a lot of useless jawboning that will achieve nothing bar allow a few naive optimists to feel good about themselves. They're the obverse of the (neoliberal) rational optimists.
If you can explain the error in my reasoning I'd love to hear it.