NON-RENEWABLE MODERNITY: R.I.P. 1873-1973

It was the Age of the Fossils ;  it was the Age of the Moderns.

Non-Renewable Fossil Fuel powered Modernity and when the Fossils ran out the door, so did Modern Man.

Modernity, severely wounded in its own self-inflicted disaster of WWII , finally died during the Energy Crisis of 1973.

Modernity just ran out of steam and just ran out of energy : at least it ran out of endless amounts of nearly free energy - the given that Modernists seemingly took for granted.

Still isn't it a little jarring, maybe even a little ironic , n'est pas ?

This unexpected yoking together of Modern Modernity and Ancient Fossils: oil and water, chalk and cheese.

Well it seems that way to me, but the Modernists (cum Climate Change Deniers) are notorious for having no sense of the ironic.

Maybe they figure that's a job best left for the PO-MO crowd.

Non-Renewal Modernity had a best before due date and 1973 said it was well past due.

This era's energy  will not just be renewable energy, it will also be highly dispersed and highly decentralized - it will be as SMALL as Modernity was characteristically concentrated & BIG.

The r-selected will inherit the K-selected Earth, so to speak.

I hope, soon ,to read some books that place Modernity's (economic) demise with the Fossils' departure in the Fall of 1973.

 That would be a pleasant break from all those authors that simply repeat the old wheeze that Modernity died (morally) in the hellfires of Hiroshima and Auschwitz in 1945....

until 1939-1945, MOdernity hadn't been tried and failed - it hadn't been tried

MOdernity might have lasted forever as a kind of boastful,idle, rhetoric ---- useful as a cover for what ever misdeed you wanted to defend.

If only, if only, if only it hadn't overreached itself - between 1939 and 1945 - by actually trying to do in practice what it had long claimed it could do in theory.

The MOdernist elites of the four leading MOdernist nations-cum-empires  (Germany, Japan, Britain and America) all promised far more to their more ordinary citizens than they proved able to deliver.

As a result, MOdernity took quite a kicking by September 2, 1945 .

Over what seems a very long period of time, that discontent over the methods and results of MOdernity during WWII has led to a widespread loss of faith in its tenets around the world.

All of us alive today have spent the majority of our lives in the era post 1945 ---- like it or not, we are all  'PO folk'....