By John David Ebert
Failures, either traditional and man-made, are at the upward push. certainly, a disaster of 1 kind or one other turns out constantly to be unfolding someplace on this planet. we have now entered right into a veritable Age of Catastrophes that have grown either higher and extra advanced and now frequently very frequent in scope. The outdated days of the geographically remoted commercial injuries, of the sinking of a huge or the explosion of a Hindenburg, including their remoted factors and restricted results, are over. Now, mess ups at the scale of typhoon Katrina, the BP oil spill or the Japan tsunami and nuclear reactor twist of fate, threaten to engulf huge swaths of civilization. This booklet analyzes the efforts of Westerners to maintain the catastrophes open air, whereas conserving order at the within society. those efforts are breaking down. Nature and Civilization became so intertwined they could now not be separated. average failures, in addition, have gotten an increasing number of tough to tell apart from "man-made."
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Extra info for The Age of Catastrophe: Disaster and Humanity in Modern Times
Example text
The transformation of human consciousness into an extension of machinic consciousness can be carried to such a point that, if the human being remains unaware, he can find himself in a situation in which the system demands that decisions be made in favor of the system, rather than from the viewpoint of properly human considerations. This is one reason why, for instance, courtesy and politeness are so famously scarce inside airports: the all-encompassing dictates of the system shear them clean off the bones of human relations in which everyone inside the system exists only for the sake of running the system efficiently.
This race for Empire inevitably laid down the basis for the coming of the First World War which would provide the crucible within which the nation states of Old Modernity would begin to melt down and disintegrate. Also central to the structure of Old Modernity was the project of replacing the natural order of things with a Human Order. This was the 21 Part I: Disasters of Paleomodernity motivation for the colossal engineering projects which characterize this age from the Crystal Palace in London (1851) and the Eiffel Tower in Paris (1889) to the giant dams, bridges and skyscrapers of the American 1930s.
In atmospheric terms, the friction generated by the meeting of the troposphere with the earth’s outermost geological crust generates weather in the form of static electricity, lightning, tornadoes and such. And it was at precisely this level of friction between the Upper World and the mesocosm of the human world below that the 33 Part I: Disasters of Paleomodernity Hindenburg exploded as it encountered this lower sphere, moving too quickly in relation to it to maneuver successfully without undergoing structural stresses that caused its interior bracing wire to snap.