I read Jim Kunstler's commentary in which he says:
...My sense of things is that we are nearing the end of the hyper-turbo industrial cycle. We're going to look back on all the wonders and horrors of the last century and shake our heads in amazement. I was born right in the middle of it: 1948. My generation has lived under conditions of fantastic luxury and ease our whole lives. We have no capacity to imagine things being any other way. An era of tremendous discontinuity lies ahead in which all ideas of normality have to be redefined. The 20th century in retrospect will seem like an epic magic show. Or more properly (as one correspondent reminds me) a movie.
Jim's post prompts me to respond to Brian Micklethwait's polemic on something I had said. At first I was taken aback by Brian's interpretation of my words. Here he is:
Second, doesn't Sucher's argument boil down to saying that might is right? "People get the kind of government they ask for." David Sucher says he believes this. Does he really believe it? I was going to put: Only in America. But the truth is more like: Not even in America. The fact that something hasn't yet happened maybe opens up the possibility that it is impossible, but it doesn't prove it.
We now live in the Age of Democracy, as surely as people in earlier times lived in the Age of Kings, and earlier than that in the Age of Caesars. And democratic assemblies and electorates all of them seize control of "infrastructure", and by the ubiquity of their thieving they suggest that such theft is necessary, and impossible not to have. And their apologists certainly say so, endlessly. (They say similar things about education and healthcare.) I daresay in earlier times people felt much the same about military conscription, capital punishment, interrogating prisoners with torture, and the upper classes raping the women of the lower classes with impunity, all of which are things which still happen a lot but which are not any longer considered inevitable or necessary if civilisation is to keep advancing.
But we shouldn't be diverted from the outrageousness of the claim that, in general, governmentally speaking, people get what they ask for to divert us from the particular debate about whether linear and connected infrastructure of all kinds can or cannot be supplied in a purely free market.
Suppose a democratic assembly existed which had been persuaded that, although it could steal all the infrastructure it wanted to, it nevertheless ought not to. And suppose it further defcided that nothing infrastructural could be done without the consent (purchased freely) of all the property owners in the path of such plans. How would matters then develop? Would the assembly really be obliged to intervene, in order for us to have any running water at all, or any roads or footpaths? Would the concept of "right of way" lead necessarily and inexorably to the democratic equivalent of the King's Highway, which the King (democracy, with taxation money) would then be obliged to look after, because if he didn't no one would.
Well Brian writes so well that by the end of it I was thinking "Yes! What is that guy Sucher talking about!? What nonsense! A free people who --- in the long-run over the course of decades if not centuries --- get the kind of government and society which they themselves create? No way! We are all prisoners of fate, tossed about by a great ocean."
Well yes, that may be true. Who knows? There is no way to know. So to my mind the only question is "What is the most effective stance?" Is it best to assume that we have no power? That there are forces so large and encompassing that we are but pawns? Or --- fiction or not --- is it more useful to assume that within some large parameters we have significant power to form our lives. Fiction or not, which is more useful?
So I come full circle and suggest that Brian has totally misinterpreted my post as a fatalistic acceptance of "what is" as "what must be." No I don't say that at all. Why else would I be blogging if I thought it impossible to sway even a few minds?
But I do say that it is essential and wise, if painful, to accept present and past societies as a fairly accurate reflection --- write large --- of the people who lived inside them. But if you turn it around, that's a very empowering thought. Yes, for example, American slavery reflected the consciousness of the people; it was not forced upon the majority white population; but people did change and did change their society.
So to Jim Kunstler, I would say something similar: if we don't have enough oil, we'll figure it out. And maybe thanks to the rants of guys like him.
Whether it is true or not, it is a useful fiction to believe that we can move the world, if only a few millimeters.
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