What a Way to Go

I watched What a Way to Go a while back. It is a documentary about our culture and change, and an interesting independent film.

I'm starting to notice an undercurrent of books and media that start to talk about a common "end of times" theme. Books like Ishamel and The Story of B, The Culture of Make Believe and A Language Older than Words (haven't read Endgame yet), Collapse, The World Without Us, and Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization. Any one book, article, or film is interesting on its own; taken together, I start to wonder if the stories we tell ourselves about our global culture in all its magnificance, if perhaps a conversation about the darker side of civilization and progress and technology and culture isn't starting to bubble to the surface. Even the Left Behind rapture texts, in their own way, address an "end of times" theme.

Is catastrophe inevitable?