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…
Category: Not the Monthly Post
Tomorrowland Has Fallen!
Has anyone else noticed just how odd it is that so many people on the progressive end of our cultural landscape are frantically trying to convince everyone that the Omicron variant, the latest mutation of the Covid-19 cold virus, really is the end of the world? I freely grant that a lot of people are…
An Empire of Dreams
There’s a fond belief among the comfortable classes of our time, and for that matter every other time, that the future can be arranged in advance through reasonable discussions among reasonable people. Popular though this notion is, it’s quite mistaken. What history shows, rather, is that the future is always born on the irrational fringes…
The Next European War
The notion that history has nothing to teach us is one of the most pervasive beliefs in modern industrial society. It’s also one of the most misguided. Sure, we’ve got all these shiny new technological trinkets, and we love to insist to ourselves that this means we’re constantly breaking new ground and going where no…
That Untraversed Land
It’s been just over a month since I started talking about how the predictions set out in 1972 by The Limits to Growth were coming true in our time. Since then the situation has become steadily worse. As I write this, rolling blackouts are leaving millions of people in China to huddle in the dark…
A Prayer for Nonbelievers
I was ten years old when The Limits to Growth first saw print. I have a dim memory of seeing a newspaper article or two about it, but I had other things on my mind in 1972—my parents got divorced that year, and an already difficult childhood promptly got much worse—and several years passed before…
The Future is a Landscape
I’ve been reflecting of late about the way that our habitual expectations about change blind us to the way that change actually happens. One of the most important of these is the frankly weird but pervasive notion that the future is a single place, where only one kind of thing happens. It’s always “The Future,”…
What We Can Still Accomplish
One of the unexpected benefits of posting my reflections on the future of industrial society in public is that quite often I get advance warning of events on the horizon that others haven’t anticipated yet. Sometimes, I’m glad to say, it’s because someone in my commentariat happens to have noticed an obscure news story or…
Toward the Breaking Point
The great changes, the changes that matter, don’t always announce themselves with the blare of amplified voices or the distant thunder of cannons and bombs. As often as not they take place quietly, moving unnoticed through the crawlspaces of society, and it takes an attentive ear to subtle cues and whispers in the night to…
Conversation as Commons
A little while back I fielded yet another attempt to bully me into censoring my comments pages. It was the same schtick as always. One of my commenters had expressed a point of view to which the would-be censor objected, and rather than being satisfied with presenting an opposing point of view on the forum…