Re: Little Details from Your Day
Posted: Sun Apr 14, 2024 7:02 am
Yeah. Even if we imagine the extinction of humanity, rather than everything disappearing in a ball of fire it might be more of a long, drawn-out suffering. Or, no extinction occurs at all, just continuing sickness, poisoning, mutation.losthighway wrote: Sat Apr 13, 2024 11:09 pmThe end might not be near at all, this shit might carry on for two more centuries and just keep getting weirder and awful in ways we haven't imagined.
Not that I would attach myself to these views either. Point is our spontaneous ways of imagining catastrophe may not have much at all to do with the reality of such catastrophe.
With the climate situation we're in an odd circumstance in that we know we're at some kind of end-point, and therefore anticipation of catastrophe seems intuitive and rational, but our ways of conceiving such catastrophe take forms which far precede any historical awareness of ecological collapse. I'm assuming this holds especially for those raised in Christian cultures, although in this day and age with the speed and flexibility at which mythical motifs can transplant themselves and meld with others, this distinction might be less important.
In a similar way when we think of history, apart from the obvious difference between imagined or narrated history and actual or material history, there is the fact that we can clearly recognize qualitative changes over time, whether we judge them good or bad or neutral, while on another level it looks like the same thing repeating over and over, nothing new under the sun.
And if we judge certain historical changes to be good, there is nevertheless often a kind of disappointment in them, a kind of anticlimax, like it never really arrived where it was supposed to go. All these good things, and yet... this is it? Like nothing has happened despite so much having happened. All this change in the right direction, and still and endless way to go, still being thwarted by the same evils.
So that kind of "disappointment" might hold too for whatever horrific scenarios are imagined. While at the same time, there are all kinds of horrific things that are with us right now, and have been with us all throughout, and are so common to us that we can look at them with indifference. There are places from which catastrophe can be imagined and anticipated, and other simultaneous places that are in catastrophe, from which an inhabitant might turn to someone imagining the great future catastrophe and ask "compared to what?".