… where politics & culture meet
One theme connecting the essays is “enchantment” and its flight from societies such as our own. Modernity has given us countless things we would not want to be without, but its instrumental approach to nature and contempt for more established cultures has left us in many ways spiritually naked.
The Bloody Crossroads is now on Instagram: find me at bloody_x_crossroads
Searching for a phrase that will encapsulate his philosophy, and channelling the ideas of Oswald Spengler and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Kingsnorth plumps for “reactionary radicalism”. Suffice it to say that by the end of his book the noun is firmly in the adjective’s shadow.
THERE WAS A popular gotcha back in the day for which tech utopians showed a special fondness. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, with conservative critics still noisily alarmed at the internet and social media, proselytisers for the new technology would dip back into history and unearth some comparable commentator whose own example was comically self-defeating.
The Doomsday Clock was effective Cold War theatre, but does it fail to convey the threat of today’s slowly unfolding existential crises?
The tendency to think of climate change as something in humanity’s future, as opposed to something that is unfolding now, in real time and with lethal consequences, has retreated a little in recent months.
Superficially, at least, David Rieff seems well placed to write a book about woke culture. For one thing, cultural criticism runs in the family: his parents were Susan Sontag and Philip Rieff – both intellectuals with a keen understanding of how subjectivities are shaped by social change. For another, his own work has often displayed an astute grasp of the fraught relationship between the historical, the political and the psychological.
My sense is that political cartoonists are finding it pretty difficult to encapsulate the events of the last two weeks in our sunburnt country girt by sea. Not because they are so depressing: a good cartoonist can always wring dark humour from a tragedy. But because they are so clearly self-satirising.
I thank Alessandra Panizza for taking the time to review Brave New Wild (Jan-Feb), and for her forthright defence of an alternative model of social and scientific development, but her review contains a number of claims (or implications) that misconstrue my argument.
Unassuming as he is, in person and in prose, Carl Benedikt Frey will forever be associated with the great efflorescence of ‘crisis writing’ that emerged in the mid-2010s, in the long wake of the GFC. Though no proselytiser for radical change in the mould of Wolfgang Streeck or David Harvey, his 2013 paper ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?’, authored with his Oxford colleague Michael Osborne, became part of the mood music of ‘the long interregnum’ – the sense that capitalism was either breaking down completely or approaching an inflection point whose navigation would mean untold disruption.
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