Most excellent, sir! As the son of Southern soldiers I salute and thank you for your honest account of the June holiday. I think that there should be a day to remember the slaves. Just as there should be a day to remember the Confederate soldier. One does not exclude the other.
Thanks my friend. I haven't read Life and Fate. I looked it up and now will have to read it.
As regards the future primitive - I didn't really express it in the piece but to me it represents something like a post-apocalyptic future. Either a post-nuclear war future or one, not so extreme, but where things fall apart and our civilization breaks apart, technology gets lost because no one has maintained the knowledge and complex society breaks down into smaller local and regional communities - like the city-states of Italy or Germany in the middle ages.
History is filled with eras where knowledge grew and then was lost. The Roman Empire represented a height - they had plumbing and sewage systems, aqueducts, and then when it collapsed so much was lost that wasn't regained for over a thousand years. So we've lived through future primitive eras before this.
It does feel like we might be headed for another such era. It could happen so easily. Even without a nuclear war, imagine a massive sunspot that generated a powerful EMF wave that burned out most of the transformers on earth and how quickly societies would break down after that. Or just simple cultural exhaustion and the competency crisis we are seeing build around us.
Most excellent, sir! As the son of Southern soldiers I salute and thank you for your honest account of the June holiday. I think that there should be a day to remember the slaves. Just as there should be a day to remember the Confederate soldier. One does not exclude the other.
Holy crap brother this was great. I would have thought Kunstler wrote that.
Thanks my friend. I haven't read Life and Fate. I looked it up and now will have to read it.
As regards the future primitive - I didn't really express it in the piece but to me it represents something like a post-apocalyptic future. Either a post-nuclear war future or one, not so extreme, but where things fall apart and our civilization breaks apart, technology gets lost because no one has maintained the knowledge and complex society breaks down into smaller local and regional communities - like the city-states of Italy or Germany in the middle ages.
History is filled with eras where knowledge grew and then was lost. The Roman Empire represented a height - they had plumbing and sewage systems, aqueducts, and then when it collapsed so much was lost that wasn't regained for over a thousand years. So we've lived through future primitive eras before this.
It does feel like we might be headed for another such era. It could happen so easily. Even without a nuclear war, imagine a massive sunspot that generated a powerful EMF wave that burned out most of the transformers on earth and how quickly societies would break down after that. Or just simple cultural exhaustion and the competency crisis we are seeing build around us.