End of days diary #05 – collapse is what?

I had the entirely sensible suggestion that I should be doing Twitter threads as well as blogging. I agree. I’m not sure that I can be bothered or perhaps I am thinking that my work should “speak for itself” and folks should come to me that kind of arrogant presumption and egomania is not unheard of. I can’t be bothered to do Twitter threads every day. And not all of my posts deserve it anyway. But then if they don’t deserve it, maybe they should be staying in my drafts folder?? 

Anywhere we have the el Nino as accelerant to more accelerated global warming. Pretty picture. But all it says is is that we’re doomed  (article here).

We have Jordan Peterson being Jordan Peterson in London later this year

And we have more mice writing about how other mice might make plans for other mice to bell the cat, Yawn. 

Collapse

And so on to this question of collapse and what it would look like and what it would mean and so forth. And of course, other cultures. Other societies have already collapsed. Once they met (usually) white people with guns and diseases … and these culture and have changed, but endured and abided (the Earth abides etc). 

So we’ve been trained, by watching Hollywood films and reading books to think of collapse as an event. You wake up one morning and as in Day of the Triffids, everyone’s blind and hurling themselves out of windows, or there’s a nuclear war. “I’ll look for you when the war is over an hour and a half from now.” 

Collapse is surely preceded, often by intimations of mortality, signs of problems with the machine before the machine stops and doesn’t involve the looting of supermarkets and roving gangs with machetes, I assume. So, collapse is more of that bourgeois mentality of “us center stage,” cozy catastrophe or morality play

Having said that, it will have felt like collapse in 1347 has the Black Death cut across Europe doing far more than decimating towns and cities 

What I’m trying to say is collapse won’t be that instant, necessarily. So if our food systems break down, if the crops don’t germinate, then who knows? But before it gets here, we’ll have driven people mad. There’s that story somewhere about the guy who’s told the date of his death by the usual Greek Gods,  either trying to be helpful or yanking his chain. What would it help if we did? No? That’s a good question. And I’m now going to pause while I feed some moorhens. 

There’s also that point I think by Frank Kermode that we’re addicted to endings, that the narrative has to have an ending. If we shuffled off this mortal coil and the world went on without us … How could the world possibly continue once we the best and brightest people who ever lived and gone? 

So maybe that’s a factor, in feeling like this.

And that’s what it feels like to live in the summer, early summer of 2023 in the northern hemisphere. There are are Signs of the Times, signs of the end times – or are they signs of nothing in particular…

And in retrospect it will be achingly obvious that either this was indeed the beginning of the acceleration of the “collapse” and that food prices rocketed and that infrastructure melted and civil unrest became the norm. All of that 2023 was merely a blip in the relatively linear upward runs of temperatures and that human systems bumbled along and that we came up with new drought resistant crops and the eco-modernists with that faith in technology. 

We see through a glass darkly, we see the future and that is definitely the human condition.

Short one today. Other things need doing…