| TOO MUCH MAGIC Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation James Howard Kunstler New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, March 2012 |
Rating: 4.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-8021-2030-4 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-8021-2030-X | 245pp. | HC | $25.00 | |
James Howard Kunstler is concerned about changes he thinks are imminent: the collapse of energy and financial systems, leading to all sorts of unpleasantness as the world's various societies readjust. More than that, he's concerned, even despairing, about the apparent epidemic of cluelessness in America today: how the ability to reason has fallen into abeyance, not only for a large fraction of ordinary citizens, but among political leaders by and large as well, replaced by scapegoating, tribalism, and a wishful reliance on the prospects for magical future technological fixes.
"The most conspicuous feature of these times is our inability to construct a coherent consensus about what is happening to us and what we're going to do about it. Extremes in thinking and a vacuum in the middle where fact and reason used to dwell lately characterize the national state of mind. Conspiracy theories have gone mainstream—the New World Order, the Bilderbergs, the global elite, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, Freemasonry!" *
* * "Note, too, that this childlike delusion [about flying cars] among the elites of technology, business, politics, and media is just as remarkable as anything you'd find among any World Federation of Wrestling audience. And it raises the question: how does the USA happen to find itself at a moment in history when it seems absolutely unable to think straight, let alone address its most pressing problems? This is the essential mystery of contemporary life that I'd like to plumb in this book." – Pages 2 & 19 |
Despite appearances, however, he is not mad as hell about the arrival of the long emergency he predicted in 2005.1 Rather, I read him as immensely irked and decidedly disappointed at the general refusal to admit the nature of the problem. He deplores the stubborn technological hubris that has politicians pushing for more oil drilling. He is equally disgusted by attempts to promote electric vehicles; he thinks the whole idea of private motor vehicles is untenable in the coming age of profound energy shortages. He thinks airlines are doomed as well by the inevitable disappearance of hydrocarbon fuels, and he doubts hydrogen will be an alternative. He hopes America will restore its passenger rail system, but denigrates current plans for high-speed rail because he sees an alternative rail network as unaffordable. However, if gasoline and diesel fuel go away, and (as he expects) neither alternative energy nor nukes can supply abundant baseload electric power, it's hard to see how to power those trains. (In fairness, he does mention running trains on coal at one point. But since he also believes climate change is a threat, I think this can be discounted.)
Another thing James Howard Kunstler doesn't like is cities. He thinks they will become obsolete in the coming age of energy scarcity that is now beginning with the arrival of "peak oil." He approves of their high population density, but notes that while those people live close together, they still depend on large quantities of cheap fossil fuels to get around, whether they use personal autos or mass transit powered by electricity. Cities also are hugely complex aggregates of power-hungry, hard-to-maintain systems and are heavily dependent on resources from outside, which will become harder to transport. And skyscrapers, he thinks, are already obsolete.
"It's because these buildings will never be renovated. They have one generation of life in them and then they are done. Buildings take a beating day after day and eventually all of them need to be thoroughly renovated. Note that the duration of time from completion of a building to first renovation has lessened significantly over the past hundred years due to added complexity and the use of 'innovative' materials whose properties over time—response to stress, weather, ultraviolet light, and more, are unknown and untried." – Page 52 |
He doesn't like suburbia either, for much the same reasons. He regards both cities and suburbs as misuse of resources: modes of living that depend on the automobile and gasoline, trucks and diesel fuel, and abundant electrical energy. Peak oil, he feels, will stifle not only these things, but financial liquidity as well. Without expanding use of energy, financial growth is ended. There are, he says, ways to respond to this long emergency, changes in behaviors and in support systems, less automation and more stoop labor. But he feels the political system will never get us there. He's a registered Democrat, but Barack Obama and the Democratic Party were a big disappointment to him.
"Democratic Party ideology under Obama slumped into a spineless propping up of every racket currently running both in and out of government. It wasn't exactly fascism, as it lacked the theatrical savoir faire of colorful costumes, parades, and overt jingoism, but it was the next best thing: a complete merging of corporate rapine with government assistance." – Page 93 |
The gist of Ray Kurzweil's idea of the Singularity is that we will learn how to transfer human minds into computers, thereby achieving a sort of immortality. He thinks this transition will commence in 2045. I know Kurzweil to be a gifted innovator at technology (just read his Wikipedia entry), but I haven't read his work on the Singularity. So I will defer judgment on which man is more nearly right. But Kunstler has his disparager turned up high in this chapter, and I get the strong impression that he makes Kurzweil's ideas sound wackier than they are.
"Those of us who manage to keep going for around three more decades will make the cut, so to speak, for eternal life, because by that time, he says, technology will exist to keep us going forever. The regenerative nanobots will be sent forth into our collapsing veins and go to work rebuilding all our tissues. We will choose to be whatever optimum age we prefer. Do you want the body of an eighteen-year-old? Fine. Want to be a more mature thirty? You pick. It gets better, or at least more complicated. Given the exponential explosion of knowledge and technology we will shortly be off on a kind of permanent LSD trip that grants us mind-blowing consciousness expansion, sensory satisfactions, and transformational experiences." "The boundaries between the virtual and the authentic will dissolve. We will be able to enjoy virtual sex with any incarnation of any god or goddess entity imaginable (porn star, supermodel, movie star, cartoon character) or trade places with our sex partners—becoming the other—or become anyone, or anything, beyond any CGI dreamed up by James Cameron. This would seem to raise the question right away: under such a proposed regime why would anyone do anything else but live in an endless orgasm?" – Pages 68-69 |
Why? Because when extreme pleasure becomes a constant, it's no longer pleasurable. Or, to put it more pithily: Man does not live by head alone.2
Some of his ideas make a great deal of sense; and his attitude of irascible skepticism makes even more. One thing we can count on as the crunch begins to bite deep is that a profusion of hare-brained schemes will be bruited about. But Kunstler is too skeptical about alternative energy and biofuels, too adamantly certain that the only viable approach to organizing the kinds of communities that will be needed is that promoted by the New Urbanists.
"There are no viable alternatives [to the New Urbanism] for the design and assembly of places for people to live. There is no other body of coherent principle[s] that can produce human habitats that have a plausible future. Still, sheer human perversity manages to generate opposition from predictable interest groups. Harvard has been battling the New Urbanists for two decades on the grounds that traditional urban design is insufficiently avant-garde, intellectually unadventurous, politically retrograde, nostalgic, technically naive, and lacking in sex appeal." – Page 60 |
Kunstler dismisses nuclear fusion with one three-line paragraph (page 196). I wouldn't; but in the context of this book there is no other choice. If we can't repair our cities, research on fusion will stop. However, I do fault his pessimism about fission. The Integral Fast Reactor has the potential to eliminate many of the vexing problems with current designs. The Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR or "Lifter") also shows promise, based on extended operation of a prototype at Oak Ridge back in the 1960s. He writes, "The U.S. government experimented exhaustively with thorium in the 1960s and eventually closed down experimentation as unpromising." This oversimplifies the story; it was chiefly personality conflicts and politics that led to the abandonment of ORNL's prototype. The LFTR is no panacea; it produces high-level waste. But it also avoids the problems of conventional reactors.
Kunstler is too gloomily certain that humankind as a whole will not get its act together in time. His tendency to denigrate every aspect of modern architecture, from skyscrapers to suburbs, surges forth in the first three chapters, to a degree that began to sour me on his entire premise. He then takes a prolonged swipe at Ray Kurzweil's vision of the Singularity, demonstrating that he (Kunstler) does not understand Kurzweil's ideas or technology in general all that well.
But Chapters 5 and 6 substantially redeem the book. They are, respectively, superb concise reviews of America's recent political and economic history. I would go so far as to say that anyone reading the book should start with Chapter 5, proceed through the rest of the book, and only then pick up the first four chapters (with Chapter 4 being optional.) Chapter 7 is great on unconventional oil (except that Kunstler includes biodiesel in that category), but shortsighted on alternative energy and completely unreliable on the prospects for nuclear (fission) power. Neither is a panacea, and fission has major downsides as currently implemented; but it's wrong to dismiss them out of hand as he does. And, despite his declared intention, he does little to plumb the mystery of contemporary America's reason shortfall (as, for example, Chris Mooney has done.)
In addition, the book has no endnotes and no index. I have to give this book a rating of 4.0 therefore. It is important for Kunstler's insights into American sociopolitics, his analysis of the financial crisis of 2008, and his warnings about the future; I judge it a must-read but not a keeper.
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