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Back to The Theory of Anyway
I'm trying to trace how I got to where I am right now. Part of that has been books, where I've encountered... I wanted to say "ideas," but I think it's more like "worldviews" that have progressively opened up or changed or whatever my own understanding of the world. Here are some of them, read over the past 20 years, in no particular order.
Books
This is so far from being an exhaustive list. But each of these books presented a different way of seeing the world, and each of these books made me feel hopeful.
There was that big Prepper push in the mid/late 00s, when we were worried about Peak Oil and before fracking took off; those of us in the privileged realm were suddenly confronted with the notion that business-as-usual wasn't going to work for us anymore, and we'd have to actually pay attention and look beyond our own selves. It was a good wake-up call, even if it did remain in the realm of subculture. Reading that literature now, it sounds alarmist, but also still relevant. "The Theory of Anyway" sticks out to me, which holds that the stuff we'd do to overcome or live in a crisis is largely the stuff we should be doing anyway. The Internet tells me that this was Pat Meadows' phrase, popularized by a blog post from Sharon Astyk (which is still very much worth reading).
It feels like it's time for this question to come back for me. What should we be doing anyway? What should I and my household be doing anyway? And why?
Books
- The Craftsman, by Richard Sennet
- Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, by Matthew Crawford
- The Anarchist's Tool Chest, by Christopher Schwartz
- The Case for God and A Short History of Myth, by Karen Armstrong
- The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
- The Cloister Walk, by Kathleen Norris
- In This House of Brede, by Rummer Godden
- Independence Days, by Sharon Astyk
- Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living, by Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn
This is so far from being an exhaustive list. But each of these books presented a different way of seeing the world, and each of these books made me feel hopeful.
There was that big Prepper push in the mid/late 00s, when we were worried about Peak Oil and before fracking took off; those of us in the privileged realm were suddenly confronted with the notion that business-as-usual wasn't going to work for us anymore, and we'd have to actually pay attention and look beyond our own selves. It was a good wake-up call, even if it did remain in the realm of subculture. Reading that literature now, it sounds alarmist, but also still relevant. "The Theory of Anyway" sticks out to me, which holds that the stuff we'd do to overcome or live in a crisis is largely the stuff we should be doing anyway. The Internet tells me that this was Pat Meadows' phrase, popularized by a blog post from Sharon Astyk (which is still very much worth reading).
It feels like it's time for this question to come back for me. What should we be doing anyway? What should I and my household be doing anyway? And why?