What this is and why it's important

From 1833 to 1836, the painter Thomas Cole worked on a set of paintings titled "The Course of Empire." It consisted of five paintings, each one showing a stage in the life cycle of an ancient city, starting from a primal wilderness to the ruins of the city after it has been sacked and abandoned. It is both a lush and stark set of paintings, with rich American romanticism contrasted with a view of civilization that is pessimistic at best. While Cole himself explicitly stated the nature of each painting, culminating with the ultimate destruction of the empire, contemporaries basking in Manifest Destiny did not see it that way. They believed that it represented an upward cycle to newer and greater progress. How anyone could possibly see that in these painting is a mystery.

However, the people who saw Cole's work as being something other than what he described and intended to show are not unlike the people we have in the modern day, who place unlimited faith in social media, electric cars, unlimited growth, and so on. These are not signs of progress, but grave markers for a civilization that really has nothing left to offer. If the modern world were healthy, new ideas would be born and adopted, not looking for more and more ways to maintain an old and broken model. Electric cars are a symbol of "green virtue," but the process of refining the minerals to build the batteries turns landscapes into toxic sludge. And, by the way, where does the power come from the charge the cars, where do the materials for the roadways come from, and how many of these things have to be built to satisfy a public that wants to have the freedom to get up and go wherever and whenever they want?

I guess it's not that people don't want to make things better, but there is a real lack of imagination where it counts. No one asks why we need cars in the first place to get what we need to get done. The pat answer is that people live a distance from their jobs, groceries, and so on. Maybe, I don't know, how about we develop areas in such a way that it doesn't a person two hours of their lives to get from one place to another? Or stop the "advertising porn" that drives the naked materialism that sees people fill their houses with junk? It's not to pick on consumerism, exactly, but the mindset that promotes such a dead-end existence.

No one ever really questions this on any sort of a national stage. Growth is the yardstick for those in power, the thing that elections are won and lost on. Low unemployment, consumer confidence, home sales, and so on, are the only things that matter. But really, stop and think how stupid that is. We literally celebrate bumping up the speed at which we consume our limited natural resources and the living space of the planet. If you were talking about a trust fund kid, it would be "living off the principal." WE LITERALLY MEASURE SUCCESS AS A CIVILIZATION BY HOW QUICKLY WE USE UP OUR RESOURCES. Analogies about, but the problem still remains.

Back to the blog. The point here is to look at how our modern civilization is dying a day at a time, even though people don't want to or can't recognize it. It looks at the folly of those who are supposed to be "our leaders," and all the social movements which do nothing but distract from the cold reality of being on the downslope. It looks at ways to build a lifeboat from this sinking ship. And maybe just figure out a path forward once it all inevitably falls apart.