Re-reading J. Jacobs' book. The first chapter is the best, setting out a general discussion of crises and how they might be linked (do they re-inforce one another?; is the seed of hope and a possible future already contained in a crisis?). Things can fall apart, spiral downwards; there's no law that states that an equilibrium will be reached. Or if it is, then it's a low-level one of survival: a tired and low-key civilization which is closer to barbarism. K. Clark: 'by the skin of our teeth' western civilisation came through the darkness. One wonders, though, how much of our character, mode of thinking and temperament is formed by a crisis?
Do we become cruder, lazier, more indifferent? Does our language splinter and coarsen so that we lose our finer sensibilities? What do we care about in the end days? Will we, as Milosz asks in his great poem, 'bind the tomatoes' in the Great Scattering? Why tend to crops, to other people's concerns, to our dress or way of being in the world when the order of the world is barely discernible?
Scheffler's question: how much of what we value depends on its value and the activities that bear value, continuing over time? Without that sense of continuity, succession and transmission is culture even possible? If we live only in the 'now' isn't that a very impoverished kind of existence?
J. Bridle's New Dark Age is really fascinating (will write about it later).
J.J.'s choice of imminent signs of a multi-level crisis are really intriguing (and perhaps a little surprising).
The dissolution of the family. The distortion of education. She's trying to get at the roots here. Climate change is an effect. I'd add technology as a potentially disastrous disruption of the time-worn ways of thinking about what it is to be human.
Part of you doesn't even want to talk about this. Actually, that's probably (in part) what has stopped us from doing anything about it. The problem is too big, too complex and it almost seems inevitable; against that what kind of language is left to us to talk about these things? We have gladly living with contingency for ages, without a sense of final ends or first things, without myth or tradition or religion or a sense of the cosmos (Tarkovsky). Living for the moment or, alternatively, fantasies of linear progress and endless time, infinite desires. As if we could go on forever. Well, all that is over now but a mindset that was structured by such notions now finds it difficult to cope with the hard realities.
Our little self-interested perspectives have led to the destruction of the environment. Well, damn those brute animals and damn the future generations (what have they ever done for us anyway?).
What words, then, if not Greek, Biblical, Qur'anic?
~~~
Rachel Cusk: the end of character. Hmm.
Yes, in the Dark Age ahead there will be no books (or there'll be books but no reading. The time of the Eloi).
There probably won't be much play or games either. Life itself would have become a meaningless game. We might look back on the old pictures of the circus, football matches, religious ceremonies and rituals and wonder to ourselves: who were those strange people?
They'll look back at all those pornographic images in the dying days of their ancestors and wonder: what strange creatures our ancestors were. Or maybe not, because the sense of the past will have disappeared with the future.
Do we become cruder, lazier, more indifferent? Does our language splinter and coarsen so that we lose our finer sensibilities? What do we care about in the end days? Will we, as Milosz asks in his great poem, 'bind the tomatoes' in the Great Scattering? Why tend to crops, to other people's concerns, to our dress or way of being in the world when the order of the world is barely discernible?
Scheffler's question: how much of what we value depends on its value and the activities that bear value, continuing over time? Without that sense of continuity, succession and transmission is culture even possible? If we live only in the 'now' isn't that a very impoverished kind of existence?
J. Bridle's New Dark Age is really fascinating (will write about it later).
J.J.'s choice of imminent signs of a multi-level crisis are really intriguing (and perhaps a little surprising).
The dissolution of the family. The distortion of education. She's trying to get at the roots here. Climate change is an effect. I'd add technology as a potentially disastrous disruption of the time-worn ways of thinking about what it is to be human.
Part of you doesn't even want to talk about this. Actually, that's probably (in part) what has stopped us from doing anything about it. The problem is too big, too complex and it almost seems inevitable; against that what kind of language is left to us to talk about these things? We have gladly living with contingency for ages, without a sense of final ends or first things, without myth or tradition or religion or a sense of the cosmos (Tarkovsky). Living for the moment or, alternatively, fantasies of linear progress and endless time, infinite desires. As if we could go on forever. Well, all that is over now but a mindset that was structured by such notions now finds it difficult to cope with the hard realities.
Our little self-interested perspectives have led to the destruction of the environment. Well, damn those brute animals and damn the future generations (what have they ever done for us anyway?).
What words, then, if not Greek, Biblical, Qur'anic?
~~~
Rachel Cusk: the end of character. Hmm.
Yes, in the Dark Age ahead there will be no books (or there'll be books but no reading. The time of the Eloi).
There probably won't be much play or games either. Life itself would have become a meaningless game. We might look back on the old pictures of the circus, football matches, religious ceremonies and rituals and wonder to ourselves: who were those strange people?
They'll look back at all those pornographic images in the dying days of their ancestors and wonder: what strange creatures our ancestors were. Or maybe not, because the sense of the past will have disappeared with the future.
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