I’m pleased to say that my post here two weeks ago, on the way that belief in progress depends on a certain kind of historical amnesia, got a lively and mostly thoughtful response. Oh, I fielded and deleted some saliva-flecked denunciations, to be sure, but that always happens when I try to pose hard questions…
Category: Not the Monthly Post
Progress and Amnesia
I’d meant to launch straight into a discussion of peak oil this week, and talk about how the ongoing attempt to extract a limitless supply of highly concentrated fossil fuel energy from a finite planet will run us face first into the same brick wall we hit in 1972 and 2008, with similar consequences. We’ll…
The Long View
For more than three years now, the themes of these online essays of mine—here, and in my previous blog The Archdruid Report—have had a relatively tight focus on the events of the present day. That hasn’t been accidental by any means. In 2016, strains that had been building for years within Western industrial civilization burst…
The Path Between the Pillars
The issue we’ve been discussing for the last several months—the conviction on the part of well-to-do Americans, and people of the industrial world’s privileged classes more generally, that the world really is obliged to do whatever they think they want it to do and be whatever they tell it to be—has another common reflection out…
Present at the Death
Well, the penny finally dropped. I’m not sure why it took me this long to realize that the collective tantrum that’s seized America’s mass media, intelligentsia, and privileged classes generally for the last two and a half years, since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, was described right down to the small details…
Adrift In An Airship
The collective confusions we’ve been exploring since I returned from January’s break form a tangled web, and no one loose end leads straight to the heart of it. It so happens that in recent months I’ve had the chance to explore it from yet another angle, by way of the research I’ve been doing for…
The Worlds We Live In
I’m sure many of my readers noticed that last month’s posts were talking about the same thing from two different angles. The first of those posts looked at the weird conviction on the part of America’s well-to-do classes that the people below them have no right to their own reasons for, say, voting for a…
A Wilderness of Mirrors
Bloggers may take a month off now and then, but the world has a less flexible work schedule, and keeps on churning out days and weeks at the same unremitting pace. The last month was no exception to that rule, and it so happens that the days and weeks in question were unusually well supplied…
The Dark Places of the Future
Over most of the last decade now, I’ve watched celebrations of the New Year become more and more muted, and I think it’s far more likely than not that this trend will continue when 2018 gets hauled off to the glue factory a little less than a week from now. No doubt plenty of people…
What Is Art For?
The discussion of the foibles and failures of modern art that appeared here two weeks ago was of course not the last word on that vast and intricate subject. This week I want to take the discussion further, starting from a deceptively simple question: what is art for? What’s the point or purpose of all…