Tuesday, March 18, 2008

From here to there

I don't want to turn this blog into a weekly tribute to James Howard Kunstler, he speaks well for himself. His most recent Monday post, an impassioned expression of concern about shaky suburban life, unhelpful financial bailouts, and possible gas shortages, is worth reading, but I want to pick up on something he writes early on:
One thing I've noticed is that in any given public meeting (or lecture hall) you can divide participants into two groups: those who believe we will 'high-tech' our way out of this predicament; and those who believe we'll organize our way out.
I don't subscribe to either point of view, strictly speaking. Both POV's assume that there will be an orderly transition between where we're at now and where we're headed. They're tainted by the kindergarten ethos of entitled happy endings and outcomes, which has been the chief operating system for the Baby Boomers, a therapeutic bias for placing 'good feelings' ahead of reality
I think this is an important point, and it's a misconception that has been perpetuated by our education system. When we learn history in school, it's presented as a sequence of peoples and ideas where the next inexorably follows from the last. The Greeks declined, the Romans rose. The British Empire stumbled, the American Empire came along to pick up the pieces.

Worse yet is the idea that things happen as they're supposed to, that this inevitable chain of events came about in perfect order. Many people discount counterfactual stories, those that propose an alternative line of history (what if the Nazis won WWII?), because they think such consideration is ridiculous. Of course America won, that's what we do.

And these ideas are applied to our current challenges. All we have to do is throw money at, say, the problem of oil dependence (I'm sorry, I forgot, government is inherently bad - I meant, provide proper free market-esque incentives) and in five years (OK, it may take six), we'll have a non-polluting inexpensive source of energy that will allow us to drive our current cars and is available at least as conveniently. Problem solved, let's move on.

Which is why we have to read history more closely. There are dark periods where humanity has made very little progress, where there has been no major power to pick up the responsibility of world leadership, where chaos was more the rule.

And technology does not always come along when we need it (ask Napoleon if he could have used tanks). Nothing is inevitable. We may not just find a new source of energy that is superior to petroleum-based products, we may have to go through a lengthy Kunstlerian period first. Or we may not be the ones to develop it, so we may have to go, hat in hand, and beg the Chinese or Indians to share it with us. (Again, it is ignorance of history that allows us to believe that the automobile was invented, and the next day we all took a vacation to the Grand Canyon - it took decades to put the infrastructure in place that allowed those easy family trips.)

I have the feeling that no issue provides any sense of urgency, not global warming (that's so yesterday), not peak oil, nothing. Yes, we developed the atomic bomb in a few years, we got to the moon in less than a decade, but it requires near-bovine complacency to believe that every problem will yield so simply, especially when we're dithering over trivia instead of working for solutions. It's pretty frightening.

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