Prof. Bruno Latour - The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image of the Globe

Professor Bruno Latour delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "Facing Gaia. A new enquiry into Natural Religion".
Lecture 4: The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image of the Globe
The paradox of what is called "globalization" is that there is no "global globe" to hold the multitude of concerns that have to be assembled to replace the "politics of nature" of former periods. What are the instruments -always local and partial- that are sensitive enough to Gaia's components for the limited technical and emotional apparatus of assembled humans?
Recorded on Monday 25 February 2013 at St Cecilia's Hall, the University of Edinburgh.

[@waywardcloud2046]

I rarely leave comments on KZbin (it hardly seems worth it given the normal cesspool of the comment section) but i can't bear the thought that the only responses to the words of one of the most important thinkers of our age should be left by anti-intellectuals and rubes. Its important to change our mental model of the globe (the one that has fueled globalisation since the renaissance), since the real world on which we live (which Latour designates by Gaia, following Lovelock) literally can no longer sustain it. We should be terrified that we are entering an entirely new geological epoch (The Anthropocene) which is defined by the amount of irreparable damage we have done to the Earth. But instead you are hand-waving these facts (you said you wanted facts thorkelson) away and taking solace in denial. Fixing the problems we've landed ourselves in is only partly down to science, we also need a complete and utter sea-change in social and conceptual outlook, and figures like Latour are attempting to bring this about. Its true that this talk is pretty obfuscating (you might say indulgently so), but he is after all giving a lecture to theologians and philosophers, not the general public. A far more accessible summary of some of these ideas can be found here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/bXKqmGClfd-Dqa8 and I recommend you ponder them a little more deeply than you have shown to here, because there is much at stake.

[@axelsprangare2579]

Bruno Latour is one of the most brilliant sociologists I know. His actor network theory is what first got me interested in him because of my own speculations into how our epistemology develops out of (what I think mostly) the sociocultural and how diffrent people conceptualize truth diffrently and how that plays a roll in a persons phenemonology and life altering descision making in particular. So much of what used to be life altering is everyday life nowadays, just take the example with porn. Shared nudity was something you on average maybe experienced about 10 times in your life maximum 70 years ago, compare that with now... I think humans are all born as instrumental pragmatists. We like practical things that inspire our idea making and creativity and expand our mental borders, that's partly why we are so addicted to the internet and yet so dumb and partly why we've been able to spread across the entire globe as a species. Our instrumentalist mentality has come back to bite us in the arse though because for the first time ever as we enter into the anthropocence we are hopelessly influenced by the internet and as a consequence we lack critical thinking and only think shorterm. Rationality is no longer needed to make our pragmatic truth hold up. What every average person thinks is that everything seems to work alright so everything must be fine from the perspective of unrealistic sources stemming from the internet, instagram and facebook for example. The intellectual should be able in my opinion to see multiple epistemologies and think paradoxically in the context of comparing diffrent truth complexes in order to prioritize as correctly as possible because intellectually we are more victim to our epistemology than anything else in my opinion.

[@baggetta]

anthopos = Anonymous?

[@paolomath]

dear... it's mean to say, but this public money wasted, in quire large scale. Latour has got almost nothing to say, besides platitudes, new ungrounded dogmas and plain misleading half-truths. it's an exercise in rhetorics and self indulgence. and the sad thing is a crowd listening