The Flight to Abstraction (John Michael Greer)

Created by : Francis Goodwin View profile

Oct. 15, 2008 (Archdruid Report) -- My decision some two and a half years ago to launch a weekly blog on the future of industrial society has had its share, or more than its share, of unexpected results. The original plan was to start a conversation about the future within the contemporary Druid community, which is not precisely one of the largest religious movements in America these days, and I would have considered the project a success if the blog’s total readership topped fifty. That The Archdruid Report somehow failed to stop there still astonishes me.

Just as unexpected has been the impact on my own writing process. Some writers, like the hero of Edward Gorey’s wry tale The Unstrung Harp, have orderly habits: on Nov. 18th of alternate years, with the creaking predictability of an old orrery, you can be sure that Gorey’s protagonist Mr. Earbrass will start a new novel. By inclination, at least, I fall on the other end of the spectrum, and it happens as often as not that I sit down at the keyboard Tuesday evening with no notion what my next post ought to be about. What astonishes me is that the muse has always come through, though there are times I can almost see her distractedly pulling down random volumes from the bookshelves of Parnassus, looking for scraps to toss me.

Very often, though, it’s her more improbable tidbits that bring the most unexpected insights. I can think of no other excuse for this week’s post, for the idea at its core came out of a moment of mental collision hard to describe in any other way. That moment arrived on the weekend just past, when I looked up from a paperback copy of Giambattista Vico’s New Science to the surreal skyline of Las Vegas at night.

Now it’s probably worth saying up front that of all the cities I’ve ever visited, Las Vegas is my least favorite: a garish urban cancer that apparently exists for the sole purpose of proving that it’s possible to take a barren, scorpion-infested wasteland and make something even worse out of it. I was there for a conference that took advantage of the cheap rates offered by a third-rate casino hotel, and would not have gone there otherwise. What made Vegas an unlikely source of inspiration that evening, I think, is that it takes modern industrial society’s least laudable features to their furthest extreme; its utter disconnection from nature, its insatiable appetite for resources, and its promotion of distraction and greed as the highest goals of human life mirror the worst features of the world three centuries of industrialism have built.