Says Sale, retreating from our calamity will take rebalancing our relationship to the environment adopting more human-scale technologies right-sizing our buildings, communities, and cities and bringing our critical services - from energy, food, and garbage collection to transportation, health, and education - back to human scale as well. Against that backdrop, he dissects the bigger-is-better paradigm that has defined modern times and brought civilization to a crisis point. Sale walks readers back through history to a time when buildings were scaled to the human figure (as was the Parthenon), democracies were scaled to the societies they served, and enterprise was scaled to communities. The result is a keenly updated, carefully argued case for bringing human endeavors back to scales we can comprehend and manage - whether in our built environments, our politics, our business endeavors, our energy plans, or our mobility. Summary: Big government, big business, big everything: Kirkpatrick Sale took giantism to task in his 1980 classic, Human Scale, and today takes a new look at how the crises that imperil modern America are the inevitable result of bigness grown out of control - and what can be done about it. 24, 2011).Ĭomments: A new look at the classic case for a decentralist future But where the existence of the other is thus incorporated in the being of the self, neither interest, nor agency or even experience is an individual fact, let alone an egoistic disposition. Kinsmen are members of one another: they live each other's lives and die each other's deaths. Yet these Western notions of nature and culture ignore the one truly universal character of human sociality: namely, symbolically constructed kinship relations. The deep issue here is the ancient Western specter of a presocial and antisocial human nature: a supposedly innate self-interest that is represented in our native folklore as the basis or nemesis of cultural order. He cites Nietzsche to the effect that deep issues are like cold baths one should get into and out of them as quickly as possible. Summary: Reflecting the decline in college courses on Western Civilization, Marshall Sahlins aims to accelerate the trend by reducing "Western Civilization » to about two hours. Elle nous fait, dans cette période sombre, le cadeau inespéré d'un roman qui arrachera aux lecteurs les plus déprimés par quelques événements récents des accès de fou rire.Ĭomments: With reflections on the long history of hierarchy, equality and the sublimation of anarchy in the West, and comparative notes on other conceptions of the human condition Ce que la grande Françoise Sagan, avec ce regard sarcastique et tendre qu'elle porte depuis Bonjour tristesse sur la nature humaine, tire de cette situation, c'est une vraie comédie, irrésistible de verve brillante et de gaieté. Les femmes culbutées dans le foin ou pataugeant dans la gadoue du poulailler ? Les hommes assaillis par le crétin du village ou transpirant aux champs ?. Si les appas de Luce chatouillent son regard, il évalue aussi de l'oeil les biceps de son amant. Le beau paysan qui les ramasse dans sa carriole tirée par deux percherons, pour les ramener dans sa ferme que sa mère régente d'une main de fer, a quelques arrière-pensées dont la nature n'est pas exclusivement salace. Mais voilà que celui-ci a l'inconvenance de se faire étourdiment tuer par un Stuka de passage, laissant ses employeurs hébétés devant leur limousine fumante. Quatre fleurons du Tout-Paris occupés à cancaner et à déguster leur foie gras dans une Chenard et Walcker rutilante qui, l'année dernière encore, remportait le Grand Prix de l'Elégance Sportive à Deauville. Ils sont quatre, tardivement lancés sur la route de l'exode en cette mi-juin 40.
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