|
The idea that techno-industrial society is
headed toward a collapse has become very unpopular the last couple of years. Thoughts
(and fears) about it have been replaced by a kind of grand redemption fantasy
that bears the same relation to economics that masturbation has to
pornography. One way to sum up the current psychological state of the nation
is that an awful lot of people who ought to know better don’t know
their ass from a hole in the ground anymore. We’re witnessing the
implosion of the American hive mind.
This is what comes of
divorcing truth from reality, and that process is exactly what you get in the
effort to replace authentic economic activity with accounting fraud and
propaganda. For five years, the Federal Reserve has been trying to offset a
permanent and necessary contraction of techno-industrialism by lobbing mortar
rounds of so-called “money” into its crony “primary
dealer” banks in order to fuel interest rate carry trades that produce
an echo in the stock markets. An echo, let us be clear, is the ghost of
something, not the thing itself — in this case: value.
The permanent contraction
of techno-industrialism is necessary because the main fuel for running it has
become scarcer and rather expensive, too expensive really to run the
infrastructure of the United States. That infrastructure cannot be replaced
now without a great deal of capital sacrifice. Paul Krugman
— whom other observers unironically call Dr.
Paul Krugman, conferring shamanic powers on him
— wrote a supremely stupid op-ed in The New York Times today (“Stranded by Sprawl”), as though he had only noticed over the past week
that the favored development pattern of our country has had adverse economic
consequences. Gosh, ya think?
Meanwhile, the public has
been sold a story by nervous and wishful upholders of the status quo that we
have no problem with our primary resource due to the shale oil and shale gas
bonanzas that would make us “energy independent” and “the
world’s leading oil exporter — Saudi America!” A related
story along these lines is the imminent “American industrial
renaissance.” What they leave out is that, if actually true, it would
be a renaissance of robots, leaving the former (and long ago) well-paid
American working class to stew in its patrimony of methadrine,
incest, and tattoo “art.”
To put it as simply as possible,
the main task before this society is to change the way we live. The necessary
changes are so severe and represent so much loss of previous investment that
we can’t bring ourselves to think about it. For instance, both the
suburbs and the big cities are toast. The destiny of the suburbs is to become
slums, salvage yards, and ruins. The destiny of the big cities is to become
Detroit — though most of America’s big cities (Atlanta, Houston)
are hybrid monstrosities of suburbs and cities, and they will suffer the
most. It is not recognized by economic poobahs such
as Dr. Krugman and Thomas Friedman that the
principal economic activity of Dixieland the past half century was the
manufacture of suburban sprawl and now that the endeavor is over, the result
can be seen in the millions of unemployed Ford F-110 owners drinking themselves into an incipient political fury.
Then where will the people live?
They will live in smaller cities and cities that succeed in downsizing
sharply and in America’s currently neglected and desolate small towns
and upon a landscape drastically refitted for a post-techo-industrial
life that is as far removed from a Ray Kurzweil “Singularity”
fantasy as the idea of civic virtue is removed from Lawrence Summers. The
people will live in places with a meaningful relationship to food production.
Many of those
aforementioned swindled, misled, and debauched lumpen
folk (having finally sold off their Ford-F110s) will eventually see their
prospects migrate back into the realm of agriculture, or at least their
surviving progeny will, as the sugar-tit of federal benefits melts away to
zero, and by then the population will be much lower. These days, surely, the
idea of physical labor in the sorghum rows is abhorrent to a 325-pound
food-stamp recipient lounging in an air-conditioned trailer engrossed in the
televised adventures of Kim Kardashian and her
celebrated vagina while feasting on a KFC 10-piece bundle and a 32 oz Mountain Dew. But the hypothetical grand-kids might
have to adopt a different view after the last air-conditioner sputters to
extinction, and fire-ants have eaten through the particle-board floor of the
trailer, and all the magical KFC products recede into the misty past where
Jenny Lind rubs elbows with the Knights of the Round Table
. Perhaps I wax a little hyperbolic, but you
get the idea: subsistence is the real deal-to-come, and it will be literally
a harder row to hoe than the current conception of “poverty.”
Somewhere beyond this
mannerist picture of the current cultural depravity is the glimmer of an idea
of people behaving better and spending their waking lives at things worth
doing (and worthy of their human-ness), but that re-enchantment of daily life
awaits a rather harsh work-out of the reigning deformations. I will go so far
to predict that the recent national mood of wishful fantasy is running out of
gas and that a more fatalistic view of our manifold predicaments will take
its place in a few months. It would at least signal a rapprochment
of truth with reality.
|
