Carl Jung and his physicist friend Wolfgang Pauli suggested
in a too rarely read 1952 book that synchronicity—an "acausal connecting
principle," to use Jung’s carefully phrased description—brought events
that occur at the same time into a relationship of unexpected meaning. Whether
or not they were right in general, there are times when synchronicities arrive
with all the subtlety of a cold wet mackerel across the face, and last Friday
was one of those.
That afternoon, after a busy couple of weeks centered on the
hundredth anniversary of the Druid order I head, I finally had the spare time
to put my feet up and do some reading, and the book at the top of the stack was
James Howard Kunstler’s latest, Too
Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the
Nation. Anyone who’s read
Kunstler’s previous work will no doubt already be guessing that Too
Much Magic is lively, curmudgeonly, and highly readable, as indeed it
is. It’s best described as a seven-year
update to his bestseller The Long Emergency, and its message
is stark: the storm is upon us.
Then, not long after I finished the book, the storm really
was upon us.
Meterorologists can tell you exactly what it was that sent a
wall of powerful thunderstorms a couple of hundred miles wide sweeping
eastwards across the Rust Belt from Wisconsin straight to the Atlantic coast,
leaving chaos in its wake. Here in Cumberland, we noticed the haze thickening in
the west toward late afternoon, taking on that drowned murky look that
everybody locally recognizes as a warning of bad weather on the way. By nightfall, lightning was going off like
flashbulbs at a 1950s press conference, and about a quarter to nine, hurricane
winds and sheets of rain struck as suddenly as though somebody had flipped a
switch. The winds and the rain pounded us for an hour or so, and then gradually
faded out; the lightning kept flashing for another hour or so after that.
Like the smartest of the three little pigs, Sara and I had
provided ourselves with a brick house, one that was built well before the
post-Second World War vogue for cheapjack building methods that Kunstler has
rightfully excoriated in several of his other books. We got by without any real
damage—granted, the big mulberry tree out back dropped a half ton or so of limb
onto our driveway, but since we don’t own a car, all it did was scare the
bejesus out of the local woodchucks. We lost power, but since we don’t use a
lot of electricity anyway, that wasn’t a huge problem; we had a late dinner by
candlelight, and then broke out the hand-cranked LED lamps and spent the rest
of the evening by their light. By morning we had power again, but if we hadn’t,
it would not have been a great inconvenience.
Yes, I’m including the lack of air conditioning in that.
Cumberland gets hot and humid in the summer, but Sara and I don’t use air
conditioning; that was a deliberate decision of ours, when we moved here three
years ago. Human beings evolved in an equatorial zone, without air
conditioners, and billions of us get by in very hot climates without them
today; given the opportunity to adapt, the human body can handle hot and humid
conditions easily. Of course the opportunity to adapt is precisely the issue
here. I have immense sympathy for the people who found themselves suddenly
evicted from air-conditioned comfort into the subtropical heat of a
mid-Atlantic summer; if I hadn’t spent three years getting used to an
unfamiliar climate, researching and relearning the skills that people here once
used to get through summers in relative comfort, and making use of features
built into a house that dates from long before air conditioning and was
designed to be livable without it, I’d be miserable too.
It’s arguably high time that more people began acclimatizing
themselves to a world in which they can’t simply turn on the air conditioning
any time it gets hot and muggy. In a
broader sense, that’s the core message of Kunstler’s book. Since the end of the
Second World War, most Americans—and, to be sure, a fair number of people in
other countries—got used to being able to call upon practically unlimited
amounts of cheap energy to do, well, just about anything they happened to want,
so long as somebody else could make money off it. Strawberries in winter? No problem; we’ll
just fly them in from the other side of the planet. Rocks from the Moon? Easily done, since all it takes is nearly
unimaginable amounts of energy. Cold dry
air indoors in August? Sure thing; we
can just throw some gigawatts at it. In
the phrase Kunstler uses, we’ve all gotten far too used to getting things done
by magic.
Regular readers of this blog will be expecting me to quibble
about his use of that last word, and indeed I will. Let’s save that for a bit, though, because
what Kunstler is saying here deserves attention. The sort of magic he’s talking
about is the kind you find in fairy tales and The Thousand and One
Nights, not to mention an endless stream of shoddy fantasy novels and
Hollywood extravaganzas churned out more recently, and the factor that defines
it is that the people who use it never have to worry themselves about how it
works.
Consider the old story of Jack and the Beanstalk. All Jack has to do is plant the magic beans;
he doesn’t have to figure out how they’re going to produce all that plant
tissue overnight, so he can climb into the sky the next morning. For that
matter, he doesn’t have to figure out how the giant’s castle stays up there in
the sky, violating the laws of medieval and modern physics alike. He doesn’t
have to do much or understand anything; it all just happens. That’s the sort of
thing you get when the elegant symbolic narratives of an earlier age get dumbed
down, stripped of their interpretive context, and relegated to the
nursery.
To be fair, many of them had been there all along, for good
reason. Most societies that haven’t
gotten around to writing, and a good many that have, teach their children by
telling them colorful stories, and then teach their adolescents a good deal
more by explaining to them what the stories they learned and loved as children
actually mean. Since the end of the
Renaissance and the abandonment of the lively sense of the symbolic that
permeated medieval and Renaissance culture, only the first half of the equation
remained in the Western world; the stories themselves were retained for a few
more centuries out of a vague sense of nostalgia, until they were finally
pushed aside in our era by shoddy
mass-marketed consumables whose only meaning or lesson is that somebody wanted
to make a fast buck.
I’ve come to think, though, that the rise of modern
technology over the three centuries since the dawn of the industrial revolution
was guided, in no small part, by the lingering echoes of these old stories. No
law of nature or of human nature required us to use the gargantuan treasure of
nearly free energy we took from the Earth’s carbon stash in precisely the ways
that we did, after all. Some of the things we did with all that energy packed
enough of an economic or military advantage that it was a safe bet that they’d
be tried, no matter what stories were rattling around the crawlspaces of the
western world’s collective psyche, but that’s hardly true of all. Visit a large
department store sometime, go up and down the aisles, and ask yourself: how
many of the things for sale there imitate some detail in a fairy tale?
The magic garments and ointments and jewels that turn
serving girls into beautiful princesses, the magic boxes that bring summer in
winter and winter in summer, the magic boats that sail under the waves and the
magic birds that carry people through the skies, even the beanstalks of smoke
and flame that took a modest number of space-suited Jacks (and a very few
Jills) up through the clouds to look, unsuccessfully, for a giant’s
palace—we’ve got them, or more precisely, we think we’ve got them. In point of
fact, what we’ve got are simulacra of these things, the nearest approach to
them that you can get by throwing terawatts of energy and the raw materials of
an entire planet at them, which in most cases is not actually that close.
In a brilliant passage in Where the Wasteland
Ends, a book that has lost none of its relevance or power forty years
after its publication, Theodore Roszak compared the dream of flying to the
tawdry, tedious experience of air travel. He was writing at a time when
airlines still boasted about the quality of their in-flight meals and the leg
room their passengers could enjoy on the flight, and when airports were not yet
quite so reminiscent of medium-security prisons, complete with armed guards
herding inmates toward the confinement that awaits them. Nowadays? A ride in a New York subway is more
inspiring, not to mention more comfortable. The same is true, by and large, of
the other simulacra of fairy-tale magic that surround us these days: we may be
able to get strawberries in winter, like the little girl in the Brothers Grimm
story, but they’ve been picked green, artificially ripened with ethylene, and
squirted with imitation strawberry fragrance, and they taste like mildly
sugared sawdust.
That is to say, the fake magic that clutters up our lives
today doesn’t satisfy the needs it claims to fulfill. We all know this. We’ve all had our faces rubbed in it as long
as we’ve been alive, starting with those childhood Christmas presents that
looked so enticing in the store and turned out to be so bleakly vapid once the
artificial glow of emotionally manipulative marketing wore off them, and
extending straight through the upcoming election, which will inevitably be
packed with rhetorical bluster about hope, change, and other vacant buzzwords
destined to be discarded in favor of four more years of business as usual the
moment the polls close. We all know this, and yet so many of us keep chasing
after the latest shiny simulacrum, like greyhounds on a racing track in hot
pursuit of a mechanical rabbit they’ll never catch and couldn’t eat if they
did.
That futile pursuit of fake magic is a central theme of
Kunstler’s book. It’s on display most memorably, perhaps, in his encounters
with Google employees who insist that the Long Emergency can’t happen because,
like, we’ve got technology, or with the TED conference attendees who flocked to
hear the latest rehash of that weary 1950s fantasy, the flying automobile. (I’m
asked now and then whether I’ve been invited to give a talk at one of the TED
conferences. I haven’t, and I don’t expect ever to get such an invitation; any
audience that can be entranced by jabber about flying cars will pretty much by
definition not be interested in anything I have to say.) From vertical farming
aficionados whose skyscraper-centric vision ignores the rising spiral of
factors that are turning skyscrapers into an obsolete architectural form, to
green energy wonks who can’t imagine why a society in freefall might not be
able to scrape together the resources required for their favorite gargantuan
construction program, right up to Ray Kurzweil, the computer geek’s Harold
Camping with high-tech Rapture prophecy to match, Kunstler spends much of the book exploring
the ways in which wishful thinking founded on a debased, fairy-tale image of
magic has come to replace reasoned thought in contemporary American culture, to
our immense peril.
Last Friday’s storm, again, was a useful lesson in the
nature of that peril. Behind the magic boxes that keep the heat of summer away
stands a huge and hypercomplex system of power plants, transmission lines,
transformers, and the whole suite of services and social structures that go
into keeping the system running. None of it can be dispensed with, and none of
it comes cheap, but it’s only when something pops up on the far end of the
probability curve and knocks the system silly that most people are forced to
notice that the whole thing doesn’t work by fairy tale magic—and even then a
great many of them spend their time complaining because the relevant
authorities can’t make the magic pop back into being overnight, like Jack’s
beanstalk from those magic beans. The slow shredding of the infrastructure that
makes the magic possible rarely enters into the collective conversation of our
time, and the logical consequence of that process—the statistically inevitable
point at which, for each of us in turn, the magic goes away once and for
all—goes not merely unmentioned but unimagined.
Still, that’s where we’re headed. We haven’t yet reached the
point at which people in outlying areas whose homes lose electrical power in a
storm are quietly informed that they will have to pay the full cost themselves
if they want power back, or told that they’ve been put on a list and it may
take weeks or months or years before their turn comes up. Still, given the
increasingly long delays in restoring power after increasingly frequent
weather-related disasters—well, the Bob Dylan line is inescapable: you don’t
need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The same wind from a different quarter is
blowing through the lives of all those jobless Americans who are losing their
unemployment benefits and dropping off the far end of the nation’s joblessness
statistics; nonpersons in very nearly an Orwellian sense, they’ve been tossed
out of our imaginary happy land of fake magic into a harsher world. That world is waiting for the rest of us,
too, and we’ll each arrive there sooner or later.
Getting ready for that harsh transition, it seems to me, is
one of the crucial tasks facing any thoughtful person in our time. It’s not
going to be easy, quick or cheap, and a great many of those people who are busy
finding reasons why they should cling to their fake magic just that little bit
longer are, I’m afraid, going to find it very awkward to discover that the time
they spent doing that would have been better spent acclimatizing themselves to
the post-fairy tale world.
One of the more useful tools for that task, as I’ve
suggested more than once in these essays, is magic—the old art and science of
causing change in consciousness in accordance with will, the stuff that I wrote
about in my recent book The
Blood of the Earth, the stuff that the fake magic of wand-waving
movie stars is meant to imitate. It’s
not the only important tool that will be needed, to be sure, but it has
something significant in common with every one of the other things that belong
on that list: they all require hard
work. You can’t just plant some magic beans in the garden and expect someone or
something else to make things happen. You can’t wait for the authorities to take
care of it, because they won’t; you can’t wait for some inventor somewhere to
solve the problem for you, because it’s not a problem that can be solved, and
the inventors are too busy daydreaming about flying cars to get around to it
anyway; you can’t wait for the Rapture or the Singularity or the space brothers
or something to make it all go away, because it’s only modern culture’s
monumental sense of entitlement that makes people think that some supernatural
agency is going to come at a run to bail them out of the consequences of their
own actions.
That is to say, if you’re waiting for any of these things,
you’re relying on the wrong kind of magic.
Now there are plenty of things that individuals can do right
now to make it easier for themselves, their families, and their communities to
make the shift to what I’ve called the post-fairy tale world. I wish Kunstler
had put a little more of his book into talking about those options; it’s
important to try to shake people out of the delusion that everything’s going to
be just fine if we just have faith in progress or what have you, but it seems
to me that it’s at least as important to give those who do wake up some
alternative to the paralyzing despair that comes so easily to those who have
been taught all their lives that the only alternative to business as usual is
misery and mass death. Even so, Too Much Magic is a useful
glance across the topography of the postpeak world in which we now live.
****************
Speaking of books, I mentioned a while back—it was in a
discussion of After Oil: SF Visions of a Post-Petroleum
World, the forthcoming anthology of peak oil science fiction written
by readers of this blog—that if anybody ever decided to create a magazine for
post-peak SF, there would be no shortage of talented writers to fill its pages.
I’m delighted to say that the challenge has been taken up. Post Peak
Fiction, edited by Arwen Hubbard, is a new quarterly magazine with
exactly that focus. Hubbard is currently offering subscriptions and soliciting
donations via this
link on Kickstarter.com, and is also inviting story submissions via
the magazine’s
website. I’d encourage readers who enjoyed the story contest, and
want to see more of the same, to help get this project under way.
****************
End of the World of the Week #29
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the
1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash
programs embarked upon now." Those two sentences opened Paul R. Ehrlich’s
1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, a book that proclaimed
in strident terms that with three billion human beings on the planet,
overpopulation had gone too far, and mass death in the very near future was the
inevitable result.
It was a popular belief at the time, and fed into a great
many then-current predictions of imminent doom, not to mention such dystopian
films as 1973, Soylent Green. For that matter, it’s all but
certain that in the long run population levels on the far side of three billion
will prove to be hopelessly unsustainable, though the exact mechanisms by which
the excess will be reduced may be rather more complicated and prolonged than
Ehrlich proposed. Still, the point that a great many of Ehrlich’s fans have
tried to evade since the 1970s is simple enough: his prediction was wrong. The
global death toll from starvation during the 1970s was not that much greater
than it had been during the 1960s, and world population continued to climb past
three billion to its present seven billion without triggering any of the
catastrophic scenarios Ehrlich detailed.
—for more failed end time prophecies, see my book Apocalypse
Not
