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Anthropologists turn the favorite idiom of economists on its head and argue that the environmental destruction of modern society is not viable, inevitable or even particularly enviable. They produce evidence that hunter-gatherers needed little, wanted little, for the most part had all the means to s
True progress toward an ecologically sound environment and a socially just culture will be initially expensive in money and effort. The longer we wait, however, the more disastrous the environmental condition will become, the more disputes will arise as a result of our declining quality of life, and the more expensive and difficult the necessary so
This handbook offers a unique and original collection of analytical studies in Islamic economics and finance, and constitutes a humble addition to the literature on new economic thinking and global finance. The growing risks stemming from higher debt, slower growth, and limited room for policy maneuver raise concerns about the ability and propensity of modern economies to find effective solutions to chronic problems. It is important to understand the structural roots of inherent imbalance, persistence-in-error patterns, policy and governance failures, as well as moral and ethical failures. Admittedly, finance and economics have their own failures, with abstract theory bearing little relation with the real economy, uncertainties and vicissitudes of economic life. Economic research has certainly become more empirical despite, or perhaps because of, the lack of guidance from theory. The analytics of Islamic economics and finance may not differ from standard frameworks, methods, and techniques used in conventional economics, but may offer new perspectives on the making of financial crises, nature of credit cycles, roots of financial system instability, and determinants of income disparities. The focus is placed on the logical coherence of Islamic economics and finance, properties of Islamic capital markets, workings of Islamic banking, pricing of Islamic financial instruments, and limits of debt financing, fiscal stimulus and conventional monetary policies, inter alia. Readers with investment, regulatory, and academic interests will find the body of analytical evidence to span many areas of economic inquiry, refuting thereby the false argument that given its religious tenets, Islamic economics is intrinsically narrative, descriptive and not amenable to testable implications. Thus, the handbook may contribute toward a redefinition of a dismal science in search for an elusive balance between rationality, ethics and morality, and toward a remodeling of economies based on risk sharing and prosperity for all humanity
Nature in Modernity: Servant, Citizen, Queen or Comrade explores the origins and implications of the mastery of nature agenda within Western culture and argues that there is a long-standing parallel «shadow» tradition grounded instead in mutuality, respect and reciprocity. This is explored in a series of chapters that focus on our hunter-gatherer heritage, the shift to a more sedentary and agricultural life and the subsequent emergence of mastery of self and nature as the dominant cultural objective. The impact of this mastery agenda on the natural environment is explored and a case made that our current ecological crisis has its origins in this tradition of mastery. A counter tradition is examined, identifying a range of cultural tools grounded in alternative traditions, tools that can be used to create a culture of care, mutuality and reciprocity in which it will be logical to welcome nature in all its complexity as a fellow citizen.
Economies and the Transformation of Landscape explores both the general and specific ways in which local economic ventures around the world, such as mining, ranching, and farming, affect the environment.
This book takes its motive force from our contemporary climate crisis. It seeks to reorient human (and especially Christian) understanding, towards a more ecologically-focused, indigenously-informed way-of-living. James W. Perkinson argues that our current eco-climatic and socio-political emergency is the culmination of a 5,000-year history of supremacist "settlement," in which city-states first emergent in Mesopotamia and Egypt not only begin coercively organizing labor into surplus production and ecosystems into inordinate and destructive yields of "goods," but in the process, also simultaneously "deform" the Spirit-World "haloing" of natural phenomenon into outsized service of imperial reach. Perkinson recognizes globalized humanity as an emerging monstrosity destroying both human culture and the world. How we re-envision and revalue, at our critical juncture, our inescapable interdependence with the more-than-human world as peer and teacher and even "elder," is the central theme that throbs below the surface of the very disparate topics commanding attention in each chapter. James W. Perkinson is a long-time activist/educator/poet living more than 35 years as a settler on Three Fires land in inner-city Detroit, teaching social ethics and spirituality at Ecumenical Theological Seminary. He holds a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Chicago and is the author of eight books.
Society is an ultrasocial superorganism whose requirements take precedence over individuals. What does this mean for humanity's future?
The Realness of Things Past proposes a new paradigm of historical practice. It questions the way we conventionally historicize the experiences of non-modern peoples, western and non-western, and makes the case for an alternative. It shows how our standard analytical devices impose modern, dualist metaphysical conditions upon all non-modern realities, thereby authorizing us to align those realities with our own modern ontological commitments, fundamentally altering their contents in the process. The net result is a practice that homogenizes the past's many different ways of being human. To produce histories that are more ethically defensible, more philosophically robust, and more historically meaningful, we need to take an ontological turn in our practice. The book works to formulate a non-dualist historicism that will allow readers to analyse each past reality on its own ontological terms, as a more or less autonomous world unto itself. To make the case for this alternative paradigm, the book engages with currents of thought in many different intellectual provinces, from anthropology and postcolonial studies to the sociology of science and quantum physics. And to demonstrate how the new paradigm might work in practice, it uses classical Athens as its primary case study. The Realness of Things Past is divided into three parts. To highlight the limitations of conventional historicist analysis and the need for an alternative, Part I critically scrutinizes our standard modern accounts of "democratic Athens." Part II draws on a wide range of historical, ethnographic, and theoretical literatures to frame ethical and philosophical mandates for the proposed ontological turn. To illustrate the historical benefits of this alternative paradigm, Part III then shows how it allows us to produce an entirely new and more meaningful account of the Athenian politeia or "way of life." The book is expressly written to be accessible to a non-specialist, cross-disciplinary readership.
Winner of the William James Book Award Winner of the inaugural Expanded Reason Award A wide-ranging exploration of the role of childhood experiences in adult morality. Moral development has traditionally been considered a matter of reasoning—of learning and acting in accordance with abstract rules. On this model, largely taken for granted in modern societies, acts of selfishness, aggression, and ecological mindlessness are failures of will, moral problems that can be solved by acting in accordance with a higher rationality. But both ancient philosophy and recent scientific scholarship emphasize implicit systems, such as action schemas and perceptual filters that guide behavior and shape human development. In this integrative book, Darcia Narvaez argues that morality goes “all the way down” into our neurobiological and emotional development, and that a person’s moral architecture is largely established early on in life. Moral rationality and virtue emerge “bottom up” from lived experience, so it matters what that experience is. Bringing together deep anthropological history, ethical philosophy, and contemporary neurobiological science, she demonstrates where modern industrialized societies have fallen away from the cultural practices that made us human in the first place. Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality advances the field of developmental moral psychology in three key ways. First, it provides an evolutionary framework for early childhood experience grounded in developmental systems theory, encompassing not only genes but a wide array of environmental and epigenetic factors. Second, it proposes a neurobiological basis for the development of moral sensibilities and cognition, describing ethical functioning at multiple levels of complexity and context before turning to a theory of the emergence of wisdom. Finally, it embraces the sociocultural orientations of our ancestors and cousins in small-band hunter-gatherer societies—the norm for 99% of human history—for a re-envisioning of moral life, from the way we value and organize child raising to how we might frame a response to human-made global ecological collapse. Integrating the latest scholarship in clinical sciences and positive psychology, Narvaez proposes a developmentally informed ecological and ethical sensibility as a way to self-author and revise the ways we think about parenting and sociality. The techniques she describes point towards an alternative vision of moral development and flourishing, one that synthesizes traditional models of executive, top-down wisdom with “primal” wisdom built by multiple systems of biological and cultural influence from the ground up.