Silly Malthusian post I will doubtless regret…

I just put this on Twitter, managing – of course – to muck up the numbering on a two-Tweet thread.

This will come as a shock to regular readers of this account, but upon wide reading, some (second-hand?) thinking and reflection, I think that, well, our species’ “civilisation” is completely FUBARRED. We are delusional maniacal chimpanzees with opposable thumbs, a few millimetres of pre-frontal neurons and a proper death wish. Warned by scientists to stop accelerating off various cliffs, “we” (yes, I know, loaded pronoun) instead put the pedal to the metal. Here comes trouble.

Yes, I KNOW the word “we” hides class relations, is racialised and gendered around a rich white Europeanised world view etc etc. I have read my Haraway, my June Jordan and some of those other very smart women.

Yes I KNOW that there are pleasures – and political dangers – in apocalyptic rhetoric. I am not – perhaps – a totally cretin.

Yes, I KNOW that there will always be truth and justice and the enlightenment and all those things worth having to fight for, that the apocalypse (which often means the end of an order that was all Omelas, at best) will be a process rather than an event.

Yes, I KNOW that defeatism and disasturbation are signs of immense privilege and coddling, that they amount to narcissistic howling into the void, and are really often just bids for edge-lordism and all that..

I know these truths and shibboleths.

And yet, and yet…

And perhaps it is just middle-aged angst, and convenient on several levels, but oh my does it not feel like everything is sliding away from “us” (that pronoun again), and that we’re living in the last days of Weimar, before the tomorrow that belongs to a very rough beast, to mix my references…

I should probably stop reading about the grim history of technofixes, tickle the cat under the duvet, the cat on the mattress and the cat on the clothes, and then go to the gym and get on the stepper and watch the tennis. Because, what else is there to do? It’s not like we’re strong enough.