Of course the Polywell can’t work. The US Navy has just commissioned version version WB-7.1 to do further research. The head researcher, Rick Nebel, says no show stoppers so far. Which is not to say it is a slam dunk. It all depends on the Wiffle Ball effect. Do the circulating currents choke off the loss channels? Can the electron losses be kept below 1E-5 per pass through the system? Another year or two of experiments should give us the answer.

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And yes – reading lights are good. But you don’t get civilization from reading lights. You get it by replacing human and animal energy slaves with inanimate energy slaves. That requires kilowatts per person not milliwatts. About a million times more power.

If you think of microhydro as a starter system you are on the right track. It is not enough to run a full up advanced technological civilization at this time.

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BTW one thing many people don’t seem to get is that well functioning technological systems are organic. They cannot properly be designed top down. Because a well functioning system is always looking for new ecological niches to fill. It is similar to the idea that the most interesting cities aren’t planned. People just react to their local environment. The same way organs grow in the human body. A lot of sprawl is caused by zoning. Of course zoning separates production, sales, and living so a car becomes almost essential in colder climates. But in exchange for the rigidity of zoning we get a plan.

Some how we got the idea that passing laws can fix things. Forgetting the fact that unintended consequences are the result of emergent qualities of a system that are very hard to predict.

Who predicted that zoning commissions would lead to (or at least abet) urban sprawl? And you know planning/zoning was at one time the progressive position. Get people into cleaner environments away from commerce.

The vulgar version of the embryonic stem cell debate, where it’s reduced to a choice between curing Granny’s Alzheimer’s or saving a few embryos, works as a sort of morality play for this dilemma. In the real world, of course, embryonic stem cells are no magic bullet. But something like monoculture seems to have been. When, as a society, we made the decision to grow our food through industrial agriculture, we liberated most of our people from the grueling lifestyle (and generally low education level) of the private farmer.

We’re living in the aftermath of that now; but who of us would have been willing to stop the process? The dream of perpetual progress may be illusory, but when there was real progress to be had, what arguments could we have raised to stop it?

Your combining of Education, Agriculture and Finance into a discussion of the hazards of monoculture is sharp. Checks, balances and the Geneva Conventions were “quaint” anachronisms last year and would appear to still be considered quaint today. Big disasters resulting from Big Successes demand Big Solutions.
Meanwhile, any fundamental assessment of the underlying issues remain unexamined lest someone insult the Great Moloch Efficiency. Best to hand out pitchforks to the rabble to let off a little steam and keep the great fires of monodistraction burning.

Exactly why do we still laugh at the Lemmings?

You should supplement your reading of Plato with more Tocqueville. Tocqueville does not fear localisms; he encourages them, in the form of the cultivation of the “arts of association.” His is a commendation of intermediate institutions of a wide variety, places where our voices matter, where we can find people with whom to speak and to whom to listen – where “the heart is enlarged.”

Of course, as you point out, the question then becomes, what constitutes “local.” I think that’s a more productive and interesting question than the current one, which is how do we accommodate ourselves to globalization. It’s a question without an easy answer, except that it involves a set of stable and longstanding relationships that exist over time and in a place. Its number will vary, and it will include things so local as family, neighborhood, community, town, region, and nation, ultimately humanity – but that in order of relative importance. It will involve prudence and negotiation, the hard work of politics and living together. It’s a question and problem that, in our age, we largely prefer to avoid, precisely because it’s difficult.

Wellsy asks perhaps THE question – what is to be done? I’m not sure any of us here have THE answer, because there can be no single answer to so vast a challenge – anything that would be that comprehensive would be as bad as the challenge we face. That said, a good number of people have been asking me just this – particularly in the wake of the launch of this site, which seems to have prompted the hope among some that there is sufficient critical mass in the nation to begin to advance some change on these issues – and so I hope, in coming weeks, to offer some suggestions, and will invite my fellow denizens of the Front Porch to do the same.

Yet you claim that one of the issues with modernity is the opposite tendency toward monoculture. As I understand what you have written elsewhere, democracy leads to a variety of practices and perspectives, yet this variety focuses primarily on individuals in ways that separate them from those around them, as well as from past traditions and future generations. At the same time, modernity imposes a monoculture that leads individuals to much more conformity than this description of variety may imply. The cure for these tendencies, if I understand you correctly, is the building up of local culture.

If my interpretation is not completely off base, I wonder exactly how “local” a culture must be if it is to be a corrective for these tendencies. If too localized, it may end up reinforcing the separation from others that concerns Tocqueville. If it becomes too large, then it threatens, to use your agricultural analogy, the creation of a culture vulnerable to the pests and pathogens that could wipe it out.

Wouldn’t another concern also be that localized cultures can be “mini-monocultures?” I am limited in my understanding of agriculture, but I believe that the point of crop rotation is that you plant different crops in the same field. Local cultures may have the tendency to be just as monolithic in their locality as the global monoculture you describe.

As usual, your posting has provoked much thinking on my part; I appreciate it.

The question arises: how do we turn this thing around? How do we convince multi-billion dollar industries to rein it in, lower their sights, till up those corn fields, restructure their educational programs, and do whatever else that needs to be done, all for the sake of the greater good? History tells us nothing ever works like that.