Recognized When Once Lost
It is snowing outside, a gentle snow, the advance scout of approaching winter. It’s no longer possible to assume that winter will fall within the range of past norms. Will it be a siege of ice, an assault by serial snow storms? Or will the next few months bring warmth, and little precipitation? Either extreme will strain our resources with long lasting effect. Who could have imagined the consequence of scarcity of precipitation such as the conflagration of wildfire which still burn in California?
Under the reign of Trump with the climate-change-denial explicit within his policies, without question more of the same is to come.
I finished my reading of Ernst Jünger’s writing, On Pain. This statement in the concluding paragraphs of this analysis of the late 20th, and early 21st century remind me that the weather and the politics are both symptoms of persistent, deeply rooted, global trends. Jünger wrote in 1934:
One grasps how an enormous organizational capacity
can exist alongside a complete blindness
vis-à-vis value,
belief without meaning,
discipline without legitimacy—in short,
the surrogate nature of ideas, institutions,
and individuals altogether.
…the state in such an instrumental age
[is} not the most universal instrument
but a cultic entity,
and why technology and ethos
have become synonymous
in such a particular way.
excerpt, On Pain
by Ernst Jünger p. 46
