{"id":31270,"date":"2018-02-20T08:02:36","date_gmt":"2018-02-20T13:02:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31270"},"modified":"2018-02-20T08:02:36","modified_gmt":"2018-02-20T13:02:36","slug":"history-crash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31270","title":{"rendered":"History crash"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/?p=1359\">History crash<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>My previous post offered a retrospective take on my \u2018Peasant\u2019s Republic of Wessex\u2019 post cycle that I completed a while back. I thought I might now turn to another such retrospective, this time on my recently-completed \u2018History of the world\u2019 cycle. So I\u2019d like to offer a few thoughts on the way we think about history, with the help of a couple of books from my recent reading.<\/p>\n<p>JG Ballard\u2019s <em>Crash <\/em>is one of the weirdest books I\u2019ve ever read \u2013 a novel about people who are sexually aroused by cars, and in particular by deaths and injuries in car crashes, deliberately orchestrated or otherwise<sup>1<\/sup>. It\u2019s a disturbing, semi-pornographic and some might say depraved book, to which a publisher\u2019s reader of the draft manuscript famously wrote \u201cThis author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish\u201d. It\u2019s also, in my opinion, completely brilliant. I can\u2019t imagine what the hell was going through Ballard\u2019s mind in writing it, but for me it touches on two themes relevant to this blog.<\/p>\n<p>The first is that we tend to talk about technology nowadays as if it\u2019s something that\u2019s radically separable from what it is to be a person. So with cars, for example, we might draw up some kind of balance sheet where we say that the advent of the automobile has been positive, because it\u2019s allowed us to get to places quicker and more freely, while acknowledging the downsides \u2013 road injuries, air pollution etc. I take Ballard to be saying that this way of thinking is flawed. Cars have changed who we are, and bled into the very fabric of what it means to be a person in the 20<sup>th<\/sup> or 21<sup>st<\/sup> centuries.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>History crash My previous post offered a retrospective take on my \u2018Peasant\u2019s Republic of Wessex\u2019 post cycle that I completed a while back. I thought I might now turn to another such retrospective, this time on my recently-completed \u2018History of the world\u2019 cycle. So I\u2019d like to offer a few thoughts on the way we [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[15683,328,588,9738,786],"class_list":["post-31270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-chris-smaje","tag-fossil-fuels","tag-oil","tag-small-farm-future","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31270"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31271,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31270\/revisions\/31271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}