I so don’t want to turn Geek Philosophy into the Global Warming Blog, but it could be rather interesting to devote at least some space to trying to guess what the coming crisis might be... the coming crisis as predicted by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their books about a generational theory of history, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069; The Fourth Turning; and Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation. (Just to be clear, for those who haven’t read their work, they don’t suggest that horrifying shit isn’t happening all the time, just that the particular personalities of the four generational types they posit, as well as at what stage of their lives each generation is at, at the time particular bad shit happens greatly determines how society reacts to the shit, whether it just shrugs and absorbs it and moves on, or whether it freaks out and goes crazy. As you may suspect, we are, if Strauss and Howe are to be believed, and I suspect they are, at the latter stage of the cycle.)
This crisis, according to Strauss and Howe, will be on a par with the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression/World War II in its dramatic impact upon society, in its level of threat to our society as a whole, and in how its resolution will shape the entire next generational cycle, say, the next 75 or 80 years of so. Global warming certainly is looking like an excellent candidate -- see my long essay on Al Gore from a few days ago for some evidence of how people are sensing the urgency and import of that issue -- and with that in mind, I’m creating a new category for postings here -- “coming crisis” -- and starting my “neighborhood BP gas price watch.”
See, there’s a BP gas station around the corner from where I live that I pass by almost every day, and it has been, um, interesting, in the Chinese sense of the word, to see how dramatically the posted gas prices have fluctuated over the past year of so, often within a matter of hours. There have been days when I’ve walked by the BP in the morning on my way downtown and noted with alarm what the price is... only to walk by again 12 hours later on my way home to see the prices had gone up 3 cents a gallon during the day... only to walk by again the next morning and see price up another 3 cents overnight. It’s horrifying... and I don’t even drive anymore.
Here’s how prices stand today. How I wish I’d started this last summer -- last August I thought these prices were outrageous.
But it’s possible that the crisis won’t be oil or climate related, that we might somehow check those problems without too tremendous a social revolution. That doesn’t seem likely at this point, but it’s within the realm of possibility. Maybe the crisis will be health-related, like a scary mutation of mad-cow disease or the rapid rise in the number diabetics worldwide. Maybe the crisis will be more purely economic as America’s addiction to debt comes to its inevitable crash. Maybe it really will be alien invasion.
Of course, all those things -- global warming, peak oil, diabetes, mad cow, debt addiction; okay, not alien invasion -- are interrelated and come as a result of overconsumption of various kinds. Maybe the crisis will be so freakin’ huge and all-encompassing that it’ll make the Great Depression and World War II look like a picnic. Whatever. Chances are excellent that the hints of what’s to come are buried -- or not so buried -- in the news we’re looking at today. I’ll start pointing to some of those things as I come across them. We should start getting used to the shape of the future -- hopefully, we’re gonna live the rest of our lives there.
Unless the Doctor comes for me in the TARDIS. When he does, I’m so outta here.
(Technorati tags: coming crisis, climate crisis, global warming, debt addiction, peak oil, mad cow, diabetes, alien invasion)
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