Category: Not the Monthly Post

Adrift In An Airship

John Michael Greer243 Comments

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

John Michael Greer173 Comments

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

John Michael Greer400 Comments

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

John Michael Greer509 Comments

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?

John Michael Greer348 Comments

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…

The Twilight of the Intelligentsia

John Michael Greer320 Comments

I promise, I didn’t time this sequence of posts so that this one would come out the morning after one of the most bitterly fought midterm elections in memory.  Nor, of course, did I have advance notice of the outcome, though it wasn’t a surprise to me that the much-ballyhooed “blue wave” would flop as…

America and Russia: Tamanous and Sobornost

John Michael Greer277 Comments

In the first two essays in this sequence, I sketched out the framework of Oswald Spengler’s vision of the process by which great cultures rise, work through their possibilities, and fossilize once those possibilities have been pushed as far as they can go. That vision of history pretty reliably generates a profound unease among people…

America and Russia, Part One: Stirrings in the Borderlands

John Michael Greer303 Comments

To my mind, one of the main sources of collective stupidity in modern American society is our pervasive bad habit of short-term thinking. It’s embarrassingly rare for anyone in American public life to stop and say aloud, “Hold it. What’s going to happen if we keep on doing this for more than a few more…

A Few Notes on American Magic

John Michael Greer233 Comments

Over the last week or so I’ve been spending a certain amount of time reviewing some of the things I studied and practiced and wrote about in years long gone. Partly that’s something I do from time to time, but I also had another excuse. Next year Aeon Books will be bringing out two volumes…

An Astrological Interlude: Brexit

John Michael Greer223 Comments

The noise and bustle generated by the ongoing three-ring circus of US politics in the era of Trump can make it hard sometimes to notice that performances just as colorful, and sometimes as absurd, are under way in other countries as well. One example that’s been on my mind of late is Brexit: the impending…