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Promise Ahead: A Vision of Hope and Action for Humanity's Future
When Duane Elgin's classic bestseller, Voluntary Simplicity , was published in 1981, it transformed the lives of thousands and was hailed as the "bible" of the simplicity movement by the Wall Street Journal. Now, for anyone seeking to navigate today's profoundly changing world, Promise Ahead is the powerful sequel to a road map for securing a promising future.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
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June 25, 2013
Full disclosure: I read this book soon after reading other, more substantial and, in my opinion, more well written books about the constellation of issues entailed in Elgin's notion of an evolutionary wall/evolutionary bounce:
The Great Work
by Thomas Berry,
The Wealth of Nature
by John Michael Greer, and
Small is Beautiful
by E.F. Schumacher. Although the present book pales in comparison with those sobering works, it is better than nothing as an introduction to the challenges our species faces in the current century and beyond.
In this lukewarm helping of weak tea, Duane Elgin, author of Voluntary Simplicity , describes the "evolutionary wall" our species is meeting headlong and at ever greater speed. Here he is in good company, addressing many of the same challenges—human-induced catastrophic climate change, resource depletion, population pressures, mass extinctions, increasing economic inquality, etc.—as authors like James Howard Kunstler, the aforementioned John Michael Greer, Derrick Jensen, Michael Ruppert, Dmitry Orlov, and Guy McPherson, to name only a few.
He recognizes these as crises, but insists that we as a species may use them as a wake-up call which he calls an "evolutionary bounce" (instead of grappling with them as the potentially insoluble predicaments that they seem to me to be). With this evolutionary bounce, humanity would realize a utopian society whose virtues read like a wishlist from a protest rally in Golden Gate Park. Apparently, all we have to do to avert total catastrophe is undergo a radical cultural transition. (Whew! I thought it would be something difficult. Thankfully it only requires changing the habits, hearts, and minds of 7 billion people.)
"Simplicity is not about a life of poverty, but about a life of purpose." (p. 75) Initially cute, until you realize, along with John Michael Greer, that poverty probably plays a larger role in our collective future than those of us in the middle-class want to consider, and so ultimately a simpler future will also be a poorer future, if only materially. Not surprisingly, Mr. Voluntary Simplicity lives in Marin County, CA, one of the wealthiest counties in the U.S. I have in-laws in Marin, and I absolutely love the place for its natural beauty, but the folks there rarely connect the dots between the bottom-line of their robust financial portfolios and their airy-fairy quests for "spirituality," self-actualization, and change without pain. Volunteering for simplicity is a snap when you've got a trust fund to fall back on after the commune falls apart, and it is painfully ironic to see all of the involuntary simplicity of the homeless just across the Golden Gate Bridge.
In sum, this book is short on details, about either the converging predicaments or the proffered solutions, and long on vague hopes involving cultural transformations and evolutionary leaps.
In this lukewarm helping of weak tea, Duane Elgin, author of Voluntary Simplicity , describes the "evolutionary wall" our species is meeting headlong and at ever greater speed. Here he is in good company, addressing many of the same challenges—human-induced catastrophic climate change, resource depletion, population pressures, mass extinctions, increasing economic inquality, etc.—as authors like James Howard Kunstler, the aforementioned John Michael Greer, Derrick Jensen, Michael Ruppert, Dmitry Orlov, and Guy McPherson, to name only a few.
He recognizes these as crises, but insists that we as a species may use them as a wake-up call which he calls an "evolutionary bounce" (instead of grappling with them as the potentially insoluble predicaments that they seem to me to be). With this evolutionary bounce, humanity would realize a utopian society whose virtues read like a wishlist from a protest rally in Golden Gate Park. Apparently, all we have to do to avert total catastrophe is undergo a radical cultural transition. (Whew! I thought it would be something difficult. Thankfully it only requires changing the habits, hearts, and minds of 7 billion people.)
"Simplicity is not about a life of poverty, but about a life of purpose." (p. 75) Initially cute, until you realize, along with John Michael Greer, that poverty probably plays a larger role in our collective future than those of us in the middle-class want to consider, and so ultimately a simpler future will also be a poorer future, if only materially. Not surprisingly, Mr. Voluntary Simplicity lives in Marin County, CA, one of the wealthiest counties in the U.S. I have in-laws in Marin, and I absolutely love the place for its natural beauty, but the folks there rarely connect the dots between the bottom-line of their robust financial portfolios and their airy-fairy quests for "spirituality," self-actualization, and change without pain. Volunteering for simplicity is a snap when you've got a trust fund to fall back on after the commune falls apart, and it is painfully ironic to see all of the involuntary simplicity of the homeless just across the Golden Gate Bridge.
In sum, this book is short on details, about either the converging predicaments or the proffered solutions, and long on vague hopes involving cultural transformations and evolutionary leaps.
Displaying 1 of 1 review