J.G. Ballard - the Prophet of Modernity's long slouch to Gomorrah.

Here is an interesting essay on the intersection of the novels of sometime science fiction writer J.G. Ballard and reality.

Readers familiar with Ballard’s final quartet of novels, all of which feature middle class professionals either diving into or being pulled into revolutionary, nihilistic violence due to ennui, boredom, or a cancerlike consumerism which has replaced religion and patriotism at the center of their psyches, will certainly nod with recognition at this article from The Daily Mail, which reveals that arrested looters and rioters included a law student, a social worker, a ballerina in training, and the school-age daughter of a millionnaire.


Coincidence or karma? Ballard’s penultimate novel, Millennium People, published in the U.K. in 2003, was finally released in a U.S. edition just last month. It features middle class professionals in suburban London instigating terrorism and revolution in an effort to shock a sense of meaning back into their lives. Several reviews appeared in major U.S. newspapers, including The Washington Post and The Seattle Times, just a day or two before the London riots broke out. I’m sure the reviewers whacked their foreheads with their palms and wished their deadlines had been just a couple of days later so that they could have infused their articles with the weightiness of current world events. Here’s Ballard himself talking about what he was up to with Millennium People, plus a lengthy, insightful, but unfortunately undated review from Open Letters Monthly called, presciently, “On the Barricades with the Bourgeoisie.”

And:

Theodore Dalrymple, author of Our Culture, What’s Left of It: the Mandarins and the Masses, has been writing about the slow decline of the English peoples for as long as there’s been an Internet. In 2008 he wrote an impassioned article for City Journal on the connections between Ballard’s visions and the state of English society. He focused on a key element to understanding Ballard’s take on social psychopathology: Ballard’s experiences as a boy prisoner in the Lunghua concentration camp in Japanese-occupied China, a micro-society where feral children exercised much more autonomy and power than their authority-stripped parents could. This week, he wrote another article for City Journal, this time commenting on the English riots. Anyone who enjoys a strong dose of “I-told-you-so, damn-it!” owes it to himself to read this piece. It tracks fairly closely with my own observations and musings, posted yesterday.

Of course, Rudyard Kipling explained it first in his poem, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings."