It
is all too tempting to dismiss James Howard Kunstler as a
doom-and-gloom pessimist but the nagging questions he leaves us in
his books and blog, are pretty insistent in their demand that we
prove him wrong (Too Much Magic, Atlantic Monthly Presss,
2012). This exercise, to have any meaning, would have to be done by
what Kunstler calls, “reality-based adults”. Good luck finding
such individuals and pray to the god (small cap) of your choice that
they are successful. You might be such a person. Kunstler's
conclusions are too dark for my sunny disposition so I beg, someone,
please demonstrate the flaws in his argument.
In
my world view, previous to reading this book, the life system operant
on the only planet we have has been under serious threat from several
quarters: pollution, over-population and nuclear nightmare. These are
interrelated and probably share a common source rooted in human
disfunction. To these three perils must be added, so says Kunstler, a
fourth at least as potent, made more so by being pretty much off the
radar.
It
is a sad and bitter prophesy that, if Kunstler is on the mark, all
the great books, music movies and other products of the imagination,
advances in science, technology, medicine... are about to slide into
the inaccessible area called the past, of no further use, at least
that portion of them dependent on oil and electricity. What will be
useful, life-sustaining, is the ability to walk where you're going
and grow food. Accompanying a wholesale die-off of complex
civilization will be a die-off of that portion of humanity without
those skills. Even the guns will one day rust and bullets will peter
out so the NRA-schooled bully boys will be reduced, once again, to
clubs. A small club is good for turning a hollow log into a musical
instrument but, given the rate of success we've had instituting
non-violent conflict resolution when we've had the leisure to develop
it, we're going to need big clubs too. Those of us not in the
die-off.
Afraid
perhaps of losing his audience Kunstler is not quite so blunt. Rather
he couches his view in a persuasive objectivity and scientific
grounding, citing interesting tid-bits across many disciplines to
bolster his credibility, such as the number of barrels of oil used
daily in the U.S., economic assumptions about infinite growth and
investment, fusion, alternative energy strategies (fantasies), the
savings & loan bail-out under Bush I., the “leveraged buyout of
the U.S. government by big banks”, the abandonment of downtown
Johannesburg's business district, climate change, the petroleum
industry con called fracking, the coal industry con called
“clean coal”, Nixon's downfall, Carter's anomie, and the blissful
ignorance or denial of the implications of peak oil.
Kunstler
doesn't do much to persuade the reader of his assertion that peak oil
was reached in 2006, apparently feeling his previous book, The
Long Emergency, had already established that “fact”. He does
define peak oil as when the amount of oil produced daily peaks, and
from then on less is increasingly available to a growing consumer
base. So something, increasingly, has to give. Living in a capitalist
society tends to instill a reluctance to share and this value,
combined with a dominator's willful ignorance of non-violent conflict
resolution skills, should produce a lively if brutish existence for
the survivors of Kunstler's long emergency – should he be
right.
Desperate
to find something to oppose in this book I have to point out that the
author or his editor must have found all their ideas for titles
already taken. A line from the sub-title would have been snappier and
clearer – Wishful Thinking. As it is, Too Much Magic: Wishful
Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation is as awkward and
cumbersome a title as you could come up with. Would that this
criticism negated the book's thesis. The nation, as Kunstler sees
it, wishes to maintain it's consumerist and wasteful life style
unimpeded by a reality-based adult consideration of facts. With
little sign of a fessing up to what Kunstler calls a “hallucinatory
globe of falsehood”, neither by public officials nor citizens, we
drift, as Einstein said in a slightly different context, toward
unparalleled catastrophe.
