Introduction

Abstract

There are two primary drivers in the force of human culture—one towards a generative order, creativity and pleasure, and the other towards violence, destruction and displeasure. Through the rise of modern humans and their cultures, these dispositions have worked in contingent ways, sometimes in clear opposition, other times in conjunctive and almost indistinguishable convocation. This book reconsiders these dispositions in terms of a contemporary cultural setting, a globalizing world that is dominated by crisis, social complexity and multiplying knowledge systems. These knowledge systems and their respective concordia of meanings are themselves shaped and amplified through a media-dominated culture—a mediasphere which articulates human consciousness and the ways in which the world appears to us as ‘real’.

For he has judged the great prostitute, who corrupted the earth with her sexual immorality, and he has avenged the blood of his servants at her hand.’ A second said, ‘Hallelujah! Her smoke goes up forever and ever.’

‘Revelations ’, The Bible

What’s going to happen is, very soon, we’re going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses. There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world.

Kurt Vonnegut, Rolling Stone, 2006

There apparently is a great deal of interest in celestial bodies, and their locations and trajectories at the end of the calendar year 2012. Now, I for one love a good book or movie as much as the next guy. But the stuff flying around through cyberspace, TV and the movies is not based on science. There is even a fake NASA news release out there….

Don Yeomans, NASA senior research scientist, 2010