Among the most curious features of the current predicament of industrial society is that so much of it was set out in great detail so many decades ago. Just at the moment I’m not thinking of the extensive literature on resource depletion that started appearing in the 1950s, which set out in painstaking detail the…
Category: Not the Monthly Post
Before Winter Comes
I didn’t think it would be necessary for me to start talking about energy issues quite so soon. Granted, industrial civilization remains hopelessly dependent for its very survival on dwindling supplies of fossil fuels, which are being used up at breakneck paces to prop up the absurdly extravagant lifestyles of a handful of rich nations. …
The Great Rehash, Part Four: A Hill to Die On
One of the things I’ve had to get used to in writing these weekly blogs is that events sometimes move fast enough that I have to scramble to keep up. The self-inflicted epic fail of mass Covid vaccination seems to be turning into a good example of that phenomenon. Two weeks ago, when I posted…
The Great Rehash, Part Two: The Future’s Cold Eyes
Two weeks ago, as regular readers will recall, we discussed The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, the rest of the really rather dreary literature of planetary preaching in which that volume fills an overfamiliar role, and the usually disastrous consequences that follow when the clueless rich set out to tell the rest…
The End of the Industrial Age
The fourth enduring theme of my blogging over the last sixteen years, the decline and fall of modern industrial civilization, is also the one that most people try hardest to misunderstand. It’s not just that so many people blankly insist that it can’t happen and of course we’re on our way to the stars, just…
The Fire This Time
Over the last sixteen years I’ve spent blogging, one of my most reliable sources of amusement is the experience of being condemned as a hopeless pessimist by some readers and denounced as a clueless optimist by others. What makes this even more interesting is that the two groups of critics are usually incensed by the…
Whispers of the Fall
It’s been sixteen years now since I first started posting these weekly essays to the internet. Though I didn’t originally intend them to focus on the crisis of industrial society, that theme was impossible for me to evade, and I soon gave up trying; there was too much that had to be said about the…
The End of the European Age
All things considered, this is a good time to start talking about the geopolitical big picture. As I type these words, the Russo-Ukrainian war is still under way. The assault on Kyiv seems to have been put on hold so that the Russians could focus on clearing Ukrainian defenders from the Donbass region, while pitched…
The Revolt of the Imagination, Part Three: Co-Creating the Future
As I write these words, the Russo-Ukrainian war has raged for a week. To a great many people, crises like these make the theme of my recent posts here—the potential of the human imagination—seem wholly irrelevant. That’s a common mistake, but it’s still a mistake. To begin with, let’s please remember that wars and the…
The Revolt of the Imagination, Part One: Notes on Belbury Syndrome
Maybe it’s true that life really does imitate literature. Over the last week or so, certainly, a detail from one of my favorite works of imaginative fiction played out at least twice in the real world, with microphones live and cameras rolling. I’m thinking here first of German Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach, who promoted…