11 February

Every year engineers release a report card on the health of US infrastructure. (They do the same in Australia.) D+, not pretty. It’d be the same in many countries, we tend to build things and then just assume they never need maintaining. Isn’t this one of the clearest ways of showing the myth that we live in a ‘materialistic’ society? Materialism would require us to love and respect material things. We don’t, not only do we not look after material things, we also throw vast quantities of them away every day, as any trip to a tip will show. We’re idealistic societies, our real passion is disembodied ideals.