Art Bell was the host of the late-night radio show Coast-to-Coast AM. A strange show, that often dabbled in what we today would call “conspiracy theories”. I’ve written about it before. It was many things, but the key to its popularity was the personality of Bell himself: non-judgmental, willing to accept people as they were, even though many of them were either crazy or lying.

(It’s worth noting that Bell did do more typical programming as well as his X-Files-esque stuff–see for example his interview with singer Gordon Lightfoot.)

As you can tell, I’ve long been a fan of the late Mr. Bell, and many times I heard him promoting his book The Quickening. But only now, nearly 30 years after its publication, did I finally get around to reading it.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would Bell show his cards, and reveal himself to be as, shall we say, “eccentric” as many of his guests and callers? Or, perhaps even worse, would he show contempt for his own audience? Or something else?

Bell’s thesis, briefly put, is that events, information, and just general activity in the world are increasing at an alarming rate. As the world becomes better connected by technology, people become swamped with more choices, more stuff, more content, than ever before.

Moreover, natural disasters, diseases, extraterrestrial activity, terrorism, crime, social decay, and so on have all been exploding as well. As has the human population itself, with more people being born every day. And with each human being comes the potential for more chaos.

It’s all a bit overwhelming, Bell argues, and indeed his book itself seems to be intent on illustrating how overwhelming it is, as it bombards the reader with facts and figures to support his points about every political, economic, social, biological, environmental, technological and astronomical trend you can think of. It’s a bit like a literary version of “We Didn’t Start The Fire.”

All of it builds slowly to… something. Bell appears to have been so busy documenting his evidence that he forgot to include the conclusion.

And yet, for all that, you can’t help but see his point. It feels like the pace of everything is increasing. Indeed, modern life seems to have a disturbingly fast-pace that invites an analogy with heat in thermodynamics: heat is the process of particles in a system moving faster, often accelerating said system’s collapse. (This will be familiar to those of you who remember the CCRU Writings.)

This does seem to be the implicit message of Bell’s book: that everything is accelerating towards some final, momentous event. It certainly feels that way, doesn’t it? Surely some revelation is at hand!

Or… perhaps some revelation isn’t at hand. And don’t call me Shirley.

As John J. Reilly noted in his book Perennial Apocalypse, people have always felt that the world was about to end. And in a way, they’re not wrong, because the world as they knew it has ended. Many times. And afterwards everyone feels fine. They don’t even remember anything unusual happened after a generation or so.

This is where it becomes hard to judge the book, because it’s hard to know whether Bell’s identification of trends that dominate the world today is prophetic, or if things are always like this. Has he correctly observed the seeds of our destruction being sown, or is he just making eternal problems of human society out to be more pervasive and sensational than they actually are? Is there, in short, anything new under the sun?

Well, I hate to disappoint you, but I don’t know the answer. Perhaps it’s best to simply view this book in the same neutral, polite way that Bell would react to a typical caller on his show. It’s just what somebody wanted to say for some reason.