Paradigm Shift/What that may look like

In the piece, Brother Can You Spare a Paradigm, Paul Hawkins asserts that since the industrial revolution, we have been increasing productivity, thereby using more of nature and less of human labor. You can see this personified when comparing construction projects in the U.S. and China. It takes 10 men to do in the U.S. what it would take 100 men to do in China. The difference here is that the U.S. widely focuses more on machines to do the job than human labor. Of course it takes some workforce to build the machine in the form of gathering and transporting the raw materials. This comes at a cost of the environment and fosters unemployment. As we have seen through the reading and discussion's, all of our so called "economic development" in the name of increasing human contentment has not really worked. We have a huge problem with depression and poverty, we are spending less and less time with our families, and have less and less time to spend doing things we love to do. This has all come at an expense of the environment as well, so what we have done to increase happiness has had the opposite result. What i think we have established in the class so far is that we need to have a paradigm shift towards what really matters in this life. Aldous Huxley provides an example of what that paradigm shift may look like in his novel, Island. He tells the story of a people on an island called Pala that live an alternate lifestyle to the overpopulation, militarism, destruction of environment and lack human values that they see the rest of the world around them experiencing. The people of Pala tend to be focused on the relationship between religion and science. They are a Buddhist people. For example, one thing they did was to teach the parrots on the island to continuously squawk "Attention". They say that this is supposed to help remind people to always be mindful of their surroundings and to find happiness in what is going on around them instead of rushing around to the next job with their heads down. They hold to the philosophy of always giving the people on the island a job that suits their own abilities. For example, they send the big strong men out to do physical labor, chopping wood, working in the fields, there-by getting their aggression out while being productive. Everyone on the is equal and all receive a fair share of the food grown, never letting a person gain more than 4 or 5 times the wealth of the poorest person, focus being placed on internal well being. They also do a lot of work with children. To begin with, they teach ecology as soon as the children are old enough to go to school. Here is a passage where they are discussing education and the teaching of ecology to children: "Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very first that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and the country around it. Rub it in."
"And let me add," said the Principal, "that we always teach the science of relationship in conjunction with the ethics of relationship. Balance, give and take, no excesses---it's the rule of nature and, translated out of fact into morality, it ought to be the rule among people" (pg 260). The people of Pala also have an interesting family structure. They have what is called a Mutual Adoption Club. This club is made up of a number of families and they all act as parents for all their children. Here is another excerpt discussing the difference between Pala and the industrialized world: "Take one sexually inept wage slave," she went on, "one dissatisfied female, two or (if preferred) three small television addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity; bottle up tightly in a four-room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own juice. Our recipe is rather different: Take twenty sexually satisfied couples and their offspring; add science, intuition and humor in equal quantities; steep in Tantrik Buddhism and simmer indefinitely in an open pan in the open air over a brisk flame of affection" (pg 107). The novel goes on and on, describing all the facets of this Palanese ideal society, i highly suggest reading Huxley's novel as it shows examples of a possible sustainable society and gives the reader a glimmer of hope.