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Emily - London

There are theoretical nuggets here

Beoordeeld in het Verenigd Koninkrijk 🇬🇧 op 30 mei 2016

This book opens with drama - the author collapses dead in front of his partner, and his colleague and partner complete what had only been a first draft.

Beck is someone who naturally takes a European theoretical and rhetorical approach in his writing rather than the traditional English empirical and factual style - so it is pretty heavy going. As one reviewer put it, Beck is 'having a debate with himself'. Nevertheless there are nuggets here - striking visual and conceptual metaphors that help you think about the world.

Focusing on his discussion of climate change as one example of metamorphosis, he sees our changing perception of the world as a 'Copernican Turn 2' - the world picture which claimed that the sun was turning round the world always was false, but our perceptions are completely transformed when this becomes our new reality. The realisation of the extent of climate change and what is causing it, completely alters our perception of what is driving history and what is happening around us. "The world is not circulating round the nation, but the nations are circulating around the new fixed stars: 'world' and 'humanity'." The world view growing out of the imperialist Victorian era - that we are masters of the world is reversed, and international action becomes a matter of survival in the world.

He also usefully distinguishes between 'doctrines' and 'spaces of action' - what people think and what they actually do. "Doctrines can be particular and minority-oriented eg anti-cosmopolitan, anti-European, religiously fundamental, ethnic, racist; paces of action on the contrary, are inevitably constituted in a cosmopolitan way. The anti-Europeans actually sit in the European Parliament (otherwise they don't matter at all). The religious anti-modernist fundamentalists celebrate the beheadings of their western hostages on .... digital media platforms ..." Even immobile people are cosmopolitanised because increasingly they have access to knowledge through their mobile phones. result - some of them migrate.

"In sum, metamorphosis is not social change, not transformation, not evolution, not revolution and not crisis. It is a mode of changing the nature of human existence. It signifies the age of side effects. "It shifts us from 'methodological nationalism' to 'methodological cosmopolitanism' because of our interconnectedness and changed awareness of our interconnected dependency on nature.

But after this good start, on climate change the author lapses into a disguised optimism - that the metamorphosis of the world will in the end force international action or catastrophe.

He sees rising sea levels and shifting climate patterns as creating "new world maps whose key lines are not traditional boundaries between nation states and social classes but elevations above sea or river. This is a totally different way of conceptualising the world and our chances of survival within it."

He says "climate change produces a basis sense of ethical and existential violation that creates new norms". It is as dramatic as the catastrophe of the second world war and of Nazism - which produced a never-again reaction and the human rights movement.

"The insight that no nation state can cope alone with the global risk of climate change has become common sense." But he underplays the extent to which the climate inequalities mirror the old inequalities - that drought will affect sub Saharan Africa more than it will affect Europe, that richer nations have greater ability to protect themselves against flooding.

"Climate change could be made into an antidote to war" but economic collapse and mass migration could also precipitate war.

Een iemand vond dit nuttig

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Sierra Gentleheart

Metamorphosis is the easy part

Beoordeeld in de Verenigde Staten 🇺🇸 op 27 juli 2016

This difficult book was written for a specialized audience. It is not for a general reader, no matter how motivated that reader is to understand Ulrich Beck's ideas. The language is opaque and convoluted. While Beck was a highly regarded German sociologist, it seems that the editors who prepared the volume for publication could have done much more to make the ideas comprehensible. And about those ideas. They are creative, innovative, and wildly forward-looking. But they are not easy to grasp. I felt from start to end that I had entered a society that knew the secret handshake whereas I not only did not know it, but could not grasp it. Oddly labeled concepts like "risk society," "second modernity," and "reflexive modernization" are just the beginning. I got those. I grasped the central idea of metamorphosis. But I'm still wrestling with the challenge of the murkiness of the communication. I will read it again as soon as I get time, but at this point this general reader cannot award it more than three stars.

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Fallen

Interesting but questionable focus

Beoordeeld in het Verenigd Koninkrijk 🇬🇧 op 17 juni 2016

Very interesting no doubt but I'm just not wholly covinced by a lot of the 'Brave new world' type assertions. By the time some of the more apocolyptic effects of irrerversable climate change are felt there wont be, I suspect,much rational space left for adapting to change, geographical and cultural redrawing of boundaries etc.
It's an argument that somehow climate change is an inevitable and predictable consequence of human existance and therefore one that should be accepted and worked with. However another school of thought revolves around preventing and minimising this occurrence and that it is and should not be an inevitability. This book raises many interesting questions around this debate but it is also heavily Western centric and to those ends doesn't examine enough the differing problems in a global sense; problems which will impact on all of us.

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Graeme J. Simpson

Metamorphosis

Beoordeeld in het Verenigd Koninkrijk 🇬🇧 op 19 juni 2016

To begin with, this book is possibly not what you imagine it to be. Beck was a sociologist before his sudden death, so any 'metamorphosis' discussed is in relation to sociological change.

Let's start at the beginning, the book existed as a series of notes, and loose jottings, and the work was then finished by his partner and a former colleague.

Beck's particular talent was in seeing things in a different way to others. There are therefore things that will delight the sociologists, but it will also be of interest to non-sociologists if they can ignore the sometimes convoluted language.

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The Metamorphosis of the World: How Climate Change is Transforming Our Concept of the World

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