Despite the fact that its unflinching honesty takes away denial as a choice, Sacred Demise leaves us better off than before. And what more can one say about a book?
March 26, 2009 (Truth To Power) -- In some senses, "Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse" covers familiar territory. Like all books in the genre of peak oil literature, it must cover the basic ground of our situation. But at no time does this look like just another peak oil or end of the world book. Instead, Baker asks her readers to think seriously about defining the end of the society they know in new terms -- thus far, most books have no asked us to imagine collapse both as inevitable and as contextualized as a moral journey.The stories we tell ourselves about the future will, in the end, define it more than our technologies or our practices. In the end, practices are vulnerable to shift in meaning -- one can see poverty or wealth in a simple, subsistence life, for example. Fixing meaning is the only way to sustain ethical practice -- modern society at its root transforms things that are good and sustainable into things that are backwards and impoverished. Few other books that I know of on our coming triple crisis -- the end of economic growth, peak oil and climate change -- has begun to answer the deeply important question "how shall we view this, how shall we speak of it."
I often joke "I'm not spiritual, I'm religious." That is, I am something of a skeptic about spiritual approaches that pick and choose appealing bits from faiths, without addressing or fully dealing with the whole structure of religious belief that underlies them. I worry about the lack of rigor of such an approach, and so when Baker sent me a copy of her book, I was afraid I'd struggle to find something good to say. I was, thus, favorably impressed by the way Baker uses her raw material to speak about spiritual life in ways that are not pallid or empty, but are deep, rigorous and complex.
Baker is unflinching in her diagnosis of our situation, and never pulls her punches. She does not offer false hope or false reassurance. What she offers is a deeply complex and valuable narrative in which to contextualize our experience, a great deal of personal wisdom, and a long historical view of our present state. It might seem that these things are small in comparison to what we lose when we look honestly at our situation, but they turn out not to be.
Perhaps the best and most useful thing I can say about Carolyn Baker's book is this -- it manages to leave you consoled, sustained and in new ways prepared to face the future. Despite the fact that its unflinching honesty takes away denial as a choice, it leaves us better off than before. And what more can one say about a book?
Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse is now available! CLICK HERE to order
Sharon Astyk is the author of DEPLETION AND ABUNDANCE: Life On The New Home Front and A NATION OF FARMERS: Defeating The Food Crisis on American Soil. By all means, check out her BLOG
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Carolyn Baker
Speaking Truth To Power is a website owned and managed by Carolyn Baker. Carolyn is an adjunct professor of history, a former psychotherapist, an author, and a student of mythology and ritual. This website offers up-to-the-moment alternative reporting of U.S. and international news, articles containing information and opinion, and a venue of support and connection for awake individuals who want not only to be informed, but to organize their lives and communities in ways that most effectively assist them in navigating what current events are manifesting.
Carolyn’s Mission: “The Chinese proverb and curse says, ‘May you live in interesting times’.” In the first decade of the twenty-first century, we live in profound uncertainty, faced with issues unprecedented in the history of the human race. Truth To Power seeks to provide readers with a ‘fixed point in a changing universe’ that both informs and supports humanity’s efforts to remake the world—both our personal worlds and our planet. My intention is to offer a beacon of light in the smothering darkness with which we seem to be engulfed, making available information and specific ideas and strategies which we all might utilize as we experience the life/death/rebirth process inherent in the inner and outer realms of our current reality.”
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