With growing inequality, the Ukraine War, the heat waves, the energy shortages and raging inflation, we can be forgiven for believing that the world is out of control. Rather ironic for Brits given that Brexit was supposed to be about "taking back control"!
One of the side effects of the thought-system which is unhelpfully known as “neoliberalism” is what the academics equally confusingly call “loss of human agency”. So let’s cut the crap - call a spade a spade – and say simply that many of us have lost our sense of solidarity The Brits have never been fond of that word – it spills more easily from French mouths. But perhaps the UK railwaymen are helping the country to understand what we’ve lost in the last half-century by our hesitancy in using the word? I’ll readily admit that, despite my active membership of the Labour party, I was ambivalent about trade unions. It’s only now that I understand how pathetically middle-class that made me. Trade unions in those days (with the exception of individuals such as Jimmy Reid) may have been a bit traditional and defensive – but they deserved support which never came - with Arthur Scargill having a lot to answer for with the way he chose to revel in his role as National Rogue/scourge. Mick Lynch has set the pace in giving workers a new pride in their capabilities compared with the crass idiots of the preening media and the ruling class.
But let's return to the issue of loss of control. Although Joseph Tainter published “The Collapse of Complex Societies” as far back as 1988, it was Jared Diamond who set the ball rolling with his “Collapse – how societies choose to fail or succeed” in 2005 – although J Michael Greer’s “The Long Descent” made the bigger impact on me in 2008 – the same year as Dmitry Orlov’s “Reinventing Collapse”. Since then the floodgates have opened – with Covid and global warming perhaps being the final nails in the coffin of our smugness.
But it was never supposed to end like this – we were assured by the doomsters that the process would be gradual! Deep Adaptation – navigating the chaos of climate change ed by J Bendell and R. Read (2021) is the book I’m currently trying to read. It’s at the extreme end of the spectrum and has attracted criticism from even sympathetic viewers here and here
I had expected by now to be reading one of these helpful overviews of recent literature on the subject for which the NYRB is famous – but have not been able to find one.
It's a curious omission.
It’s exactly three years since I did an annotated bibliography of the global warming issue. Clearly it’s now time to do one on “collapsology” - with this hot-off-the-press paper on “Exploring catastrophic climate change” as exhibit number one
Update; this blogger has a series of no less than 10 (long) posts on Collapse - starting with https://theeasiestpersontofool.blogspot.com/2020/06/collapse-you-say.html
