I've been reading these blogs by thinkers who have updated us as to the state of affairs in our declining civilization. Simplicius is the best example: most of his stuff is updates on the situation in Ukraine. Here's the most recent one. Occasionally, though, Simplicius gets into some really heady topics: for instance, he did a recent post on people's brains. You can't get much more big-picture than that.

At any rate, I'm sure there's plenty of big-picture reflection in my usual blog posts, but of recent they haven't been of the caliber of Aurelien's blog posts over at Substack which, even though they might feature current events, often mix in profundity.

I guess I'm thinking here of the sort of perspective in which the big picture seems fresh and new. So I thought I would offer such a perspective some basic big-picture concepts. I suppose I could add to the list later. Here are three:

The most important event -- or cluster of events, more specifically -- in history was the "Great Acceleration." There is a book by J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke with that name. It's not a particularly insightful book, but it does have the name and it does discuss the topic. The Great Acceleration is the exponential rise in statistics of production and consumption since 1945, or better yet since 1882, the year of the invention of the large-scale power plant. What happened was that the planet was coated with infrastructure, driven by a system built for endless expansion on a finite planet. Eventually the infrastructure will run out of room. When the Serengeti Plain is replaced by a maze of strip malls you'll know your civilization is doomed.

It stands to reason, then, that there will at some point be a "Great Withdrawal," in which a portion of the infrastructure will go back to being wilderness or -- at the very least -- what those in the know call a "food forest." The odds are that this "Great Withdrawal" will not be managed because none of our politicians or business magnates appears up to the task and because, for some reason, nobody wants to discuss why our civilization pays so little heed to ecological realities.

Instead, what we do is we discuss "sustainability" as if being "sustainable" was something we've already partly achieved, whereas in real life nothing of the sort is true and "sustainability" is an imagined hope in need of a great deal of clarification.

This is the title of a book by Mark Fisher, and upon reading it one might wonder if Fisher killed himself in 2017 because his most famous concept was so depressing. At any rate, capitalist realism is the inability to imagine alternatives to capitalism.

We should think of our inability to imagine alternatives to capitalism as a drawback. Capitalism appears as a system responsible for the world's most prominent ills: climate change, endless warfare, pollution, cynical depravity, kleptocratic oligarchy. It's useful to oppose capitalism, but one must suspect that the point of anti-capitalism today is to ward off people who might pretend to be nice but who are in fact assholes. What comes immediately to mind is Ellen DeGeneres, but Ellen is a tiny tip of a great big iceberg.

In the Nineties the sociologist Anthony Giddens imagined that there was nothing left for the "Left" to do but to defend the welfare state. This notion of Giddens was itself a triumph of capitalist realism. Eventually the same notion would be used in the US to insure the triumph of Joe Biden, whose long career has promoted the success of the "Right." In Europe the "Left" achieved power in the Nineties, and used that power to institute neoliberal austerity planning. This was de facto political suicide, and it is why in Europe the buzz is all about the triumph of the "Right."

Our present-day notions of "Left" and "Right" are descended from the seating-chart of the National Assembly in revolutionary France. The Wikipedia article suggests that "In France, where the terms originated, the left has been called "the party of movement" or liberal, and the right "the party of order" or conservative." Today the "Left" stands for the status quo, its crystallization being Bernie Sanders' and AOC's endorsement of Joe Biden's re-election bid, whereas the "Right" spreads disorder through legislation banning abortion, gun "laws" increasing the likelihood of mass shootings, and so on.

To be a member of the "Left," one babbles a good deal of vague, idealistic nonsense to elites who pretend to like the "Left" while in fact hating it. The "Left," you see, trusts in the process, and the process responds by taking no interest in the "Left." The "Left" responds by doubling down and by claiming sole responsibility for the fact that there is still an Earth at all. One might be tempted to include anarchists in the notion of the "Left," but this doesn't work because the anarchists actually do things, whereas the "Left" simply postures.

After that 2022 escalation of the war in Ukraine, one of the first sales-pitches for retaliation against the Russian occupiers was to the "Left." I was watching this pitch online as it was being made to British "socialists." Today, the continuance of the war in Ukraine appears as a particular species of pointlessness, as Alex Christoforou suggests:

But the "Left," you see, is caught up in having bought the initial sales-pitch.

One looks at the "Left" today and imagines that its philosophical savior was Cornelius Castoriadis, who once said:

I think we are at a crossroads in history, in History with a capital H. One path is now clearly marked, at least as for its general direction. That path leads to the loss of meaning, the repetition of empty forms, conformism, apathy, irresponsibility, and cynicism, along with the growing takeover of the capitalist imaginary of unlimited explosion of rational mastery” – pseudo-rational pseudo-mastery – of the unlimited expansion of consumption for consumption’s sake, which is to say for nothing, and of technoscience racing ahead on its own, and obviously a party to domination by that capitalist imaginary.

The other path would have to be opened up: it has not been marked out at all. Only a social and political awakening, a renaissance, a fresh opening up of the project of individual and collective autonomy – that is, of the will to be free – can cut that path. This would require an awakening of imagination and of the creative imaginary.

Okay, now it's your turn. How do you see the big picture?