Hard to imagine 2024

Considering the passage of Time and the differing perspectives it lends to us. Contemplating the year 2024, in which this author may be around to celebrate a seventieth birthday.

Viewed from this point in history, early May 2008 looking forward, to the year 2024 there seems a way yet to go; and a Way, the way things are shaping up, that will surely be one of much economic, environmental, military and social tragedy.

Looking back over the last century, however, for one who's growing up was 1960s rural England, the first three decades of the century appear very far away, beyond a kind of mental as well as cultural veil that has been formed by the world-changing outcomes of World War II. If 2008 were 1908, we would still find ourselves part of the flourishing for some and world-dominating European Bourgeois order that is known in the UK as Edwardian, the surfeited stage of the European ascendency and the British Empire, with the US still pending as an economic power and the age of oil in its infancy.

There were many even then, like now, who were aware of looming difficulties and contradictory conditions, not least of which were expressed in the movements for unionism, syndicalism, socialism and anarchist 'bottom-up' overturnings of the existing social order; but The Great War and Russian Revolution must have seemed hard to imagine, as it must also have been hard to imagine the likes of the Great Depression on both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere that would lead to WWII and the cultural (as well as the technological and all the rest) changes that have followed, that bring us to the present era in which, Cold War and the panoply of US adventures notwithstanding, and with the accompanying resurgence of Asian and other world cultures, the West has yet to see anything like open war or even much by way of guerrilla activity let alone serious social unrest anywhere near its heartlands (I refer to UK-Europe, US-Canada, Australia-NZ, Japan as the West).

Much is shaping up that can come to pass between now and May 2024, of which climate change or destabilisation at least is for sure. Methane outgassing in Canadian and Siberian tundra is not just a sign but an accelerator of this tipping-point-prone inevitability.