Towards the Creation of a Ecological and Humane Alternative Culture
- Book: TOWARDS A NEW CULTURE. FROM REFUSAL TO RE-CREATION. OUTLINE OF AN ECOLOGICAL AND HUMANE ALTERNATIVE. By Dieter Duhm. Meiga,
URL = http://www.towards-a-new-culture.org/ pdf
Contents
1 INTRODUCTION
Established Insanity 9
The Timeliness of the Concrete Utopia 10
Cultural Centres for New Basic Experiences 13
A New Consciousness of the Living 14
Overcoming Fear 17
Humaneness 18
The Bankruptcy and Rediscovery of Geist 21
2 THE EXISTENTIAL QUESTION
Behind the Ideological Façades 25
Wanderers in the Desert 26
A Different View of Suffering and Its Consequences 32
3 THE TRUTH OF THE LIVING
Fear as A Biological Disease of Culture 40
Life Research as the Science of the Future 41
Contact and Truth 43
The Technological Wonderland of the Living 44
The human in the Entire Organism of Nature 46
Functional Principles of the Living 48
A New Mental-Spiritual Attitude 53
4 BIOLOGICAL HUMANISM AS THE FRAMEWORK FOR A NEW CULTURE
The Concept of Biological Humanism 55
Three Steps towards a Realistic Humanism 58
An Ecological Relationship to all Living Beings 63
The Idea of Science 66
Evolution and Growing Freedom 68
A Culture without Sexual Repression 71
The Meaning of Sexuality 75
A New Social Organisation of Sexuality 80
The Question of Non-Violence 86
The Question of Democracy 90
Building a Humanely Functioning Community 95
Emotional Cleansing and Dissolving the Character Armour 98
5 POSTSCRIPT
Concerning Tradition 102
That All This Does Not Remain Mere Words
Summary
PUBLISHER’S FOREWORD
Monica Berghoff:
"How will life go on after the collapse of the globalised political and economic systems? How will it survive the large-scale disruption of our planet’s ecological and climatic systems? And what will become of the immense systems of belief, love and thinking as they start to shake within?
The answer to these questions has to persist in the face of so many failed attempts in the past. The world stands on the brink of an abyss.
The youth from Cairo to London, from Greece to Chile, from Rothschild Avenue, Tel Aviv to Wall Street, New York are looking for new ways out of the crisis. If the mass protest and revolt movements rising up all over the world today intend to combine their revolutionary power and take off together, if life is to win over violence and war, we need a direction, an image, an idea of what might be our common goal.
This book offers an idea of how a future worth living could be. It was written and published more than thirty years ago in Germany and we believe that its time has now come. We left it in the political context in which it was written. Through this we want to show that names change, yet the underlying problems remain the same … until we discover how to solve them. How this can be achieved is what this book is all about. It is more relevant today than ever.
The author, Dieter Duhm, has given a voice to life itself here. He has tracked it behind false morals and dogma, and has opened up ways for it through the walls and armour surrounding heart and mind that we all needed in order to survive an epoch hostile to life under patriarchal rule. But all this could be over now.
The system change that is taking place today, is the most profound and fundamental that has happened in thousands of years. It is a change from the power to destroy life to the power to care for and protect life. This is the only way for this planet Earth and all its inhabitants, including the human being, to have a chance for a future.
We wish for this book to meet open ears and hearts, and that its seeds of humaneness and compassion will bear fruits worldwide.
This is more than a book. It is an idea of how a future worth living could be. The author has taken himself at his word and set out together with comrades and friends to put this idea for the future into practice. The new edition – published for the first time in English – includes an appendix section that shows in brief, what now has resulted after thirty years of pioneering work. A dream is becoming reality …
May this undertaking succeed, because “if life wins, there will be no losers”