Modernity Bites
There is
surely a correspondence between an exhausted culture and a populace
devolved so far into mental dullness that it can't recognize its
predicament. We don't seem to get how much the industrial production
spree of the past 200 years has just plumb worn us out, not to mention
the ecosystem we were designed to dwell in. My general sense of things
for at least a decade is that we are closing this chapter of history and
heading into something smaller, slower, and simpler, and that we could
either go there willingly or get dragged there kicking and screaming by
circumstances.
It interests me to reflect that the way
things are temporarily is the way people define normality, and think
things will always be, so that if you are living in a big city like New
York where so much remaining wealth is concentrated, and you are dazzled
by the whirr and flash of things, including all the pretty young people
drilling into their iPhones, you might expect a longer arc to the
moment at hand.
Out here in the provinces it's a
different story. The exhaustion is palpable. I dropped into the mall at
mid-day on Sunday to take the pulse on the ballyhooed post-Thanksgiving
ritual shopping frenzy and the place was like a ghost town. The sparse
stream of supposed "consumers" had the dazed, beaten-down look of people
pushed beyond the edge of some dark threshold, like displaced persons
in a low-grade war zone.
Their behavior seemed
ceremonial, though, mere acting-out as opposed to acting. They were not
carrying bags with purchases. I saw almost nobody actually shopping,
that is, fingering the merchandise, in either the two department stores I
passed through or the smaller shops lining the corridors. There were
strikingly few clerks in either the big or little retail operations and
you got the feeling that these stores were now expected to run on
automatic pilot, with a skeleton crew of employees because the margins
just aren't there anymore. They are going through the motions of being
in business, and when Christmas is over some will not be there anymore.
America has had enough, notwithstanding the latest YouTube videos
showing crazed mobs fighting over worthless plastic crap at the "Black
Friday" WalMart openings elsewhere around the country.
The physical condition of our so-called towns (many of them just
"facilities" smeared carelessly over the landscape) is something else.
We are not taking care of our property in part because we don't have the
money, but also because so much of it is obviously not worth caring
about, was not designed and built to be cared for - and anyway, there is
the lure of the narcotic flat-screen television within to distract
anyone with a fugitive thought of opposing the pervasive entropy of
these times. The disgrace of this nation - I mean it quite literally -
is now total, from our bodies to everything around us. We are entropy
made visible.
Variations on this exhaustion are playing
out in other parts of the "advanced" world, Europe and Japan, where all
the money-related parts of the modernity machine have gravel in their
gears and are grinding into self-destruction. China will get to the same
event horizon soon, too, despite the fact that so much of their stuff
is brand-new - after all, what use is a set of new super-highways if
Brent crude prices remain above $110?
What if we just
accept the reality that the industrial spree was a self-limiting
adventure and now we have to move on? What do we give up? What do we
actually do with our time and effort?
There's a clear
trend to give up on the gigantic nation-state, at least in its current
corporatist configuration, most recently in Spain with separatists
winning this week's election in the northern province of Catalonia.
Perhaps greater Spain will now join the defunct entities of Yugoslavia,
Czechoslovakia, and the USSR. There are rumblings of "secession" here in
North America now, where a certain moron-inflected cohort favors a
replay of the Civil War, largely for sentimental reasons instilled by
TV. What Dixieland doesn't seem to grok is the unraveling of its own
Sunbelt miracle economy which was, in effect, a suburban development
bubble, and which will land them back in a ditch with a sack of turnips
like Jeeter Lester's family in Tobacco Road.
Here are some trends we would benefit from getting comfortable with:
Globalism is withering and will end with a whimper (sorry, Tom
Friedman). The economy of North America will become much more internally
focused in the decades ahead. If you are young, think about getting
into the boat business on the continent's magnificent inland waterway
system. There will be no more trucking to move stuff around, and at the
rate we're going the railroads will never be fixed.
National chain retail will be dying as its economies-of-scale vanish.
WalMart and everything like it will be gone. No more Black Friday toy
riots. Sorry. If you are young, think about getting into some kind of
local business that will play a role in your rebuilt local economic
network. There will be plenty of work for you, but not so much new cheap
plastic crap to hassle with. Lots of opportunities for the
business-minded!
Farming comes back to the center of
economic life. Hard to believe, I'm sure, if you live in an iPhone
fantasy-land of apps and tweets. Forget all that stupid shit. The
electric grid will certainly fail, or at least fail to be reliable
enough to matter, in the next couple decades, and the real value in
human existence will be using the land to produce a living. Lots of
opportunities for young people who like to work outside. Also, some
chance of political revolution to expedite changes in land tenure.
Farewell to the auto age and hello again to real communities. Hard
to believe, I'm sure, as you read this in traffic on your iPad, but your
commuting days are numbered. Indeed the whole car thing comes to a
rather stunningly abrupt halt - though we are certainly doing everything
possible now to prop it up. The old Herb Stein formulation will apply
here: people do what they can until they can't, and then they don't. The
implications in this for how we inhabit the landscape going forward are
rather huge. Find a nice small town on a waterway surrounded by
farmland and get ready to have a life.
In the meantime,
as these circumstances roil in the background, you can be sure that the
people running things will campaign strenuously to keep the current set
of rackets running. The results will be sad and possibly terrifying. Be
brave and seek opportunity in these epochal changes. Modernity has
nearly put us out of business. Leave the exhausted enterprise behind and
be human for while. Enjoy the time-out from techno-progress that is at
hand. It will be something to be grateful for.
