Certain DailyKos diaries please me enormously, and one such not long ago discussed manipulative Republican fear-mongering: "The ter'ists hate freedom and democracy and they want to destroy our way of life." The diarist said something ingenious: citizens can best stand up to the current administration and all it represents, and regain their power by shunning fear, refusing to let it guide their actions.
Speaking of fear, many popular current predictions about the collapse of civilization as we know it do not strike prudent people as far-fetched--even "the ter'ist threat," shamelessly hawked by the Republicans to preserve their political dominance, doesn't seem empty to most of us. We should damn well be afraid. Frightful tidings of rampant future plagues, awful climate change, and impending fossil fuel depletion surface again and again among thoughtful, conscientious, informed people in "the reality-based community." Contemporary promoters of fearful scenarios often aren't getting rich off them, and most lack obviously manipulative or selfish agendas.
The problem is that the stories about the end of civilization always change. No matter how compelling they seem when they're first told, now matter how well-based in fact they may be, stories about the end of time are just that. The political and technological realities that shape them transform, or for other reasons the stories don't play out as expected. They have to be revised or scrapped. I think of the man who quit his job and moved to a bunker in the wilderness in the late 1990s, during the Y2K panic, I think of the corporations and businesses that spent millions of dollars on "Y2K fixes" during the same period--all for a problem that turned out not to exist. The frightening stories about the "Y2K bug" turned out to be false.
A story of imminent nuclear annihilation turned out to be equally false for an elderly acquaintance of mine whom I'll call Rhonda. Rhonda settled in Greenwich Village after graduating from college, back in the waning days of World War II. In common with other young bohemians of her generation, Rhonda foreswore "bringing children into this dangerous world, because of the threat of the A-bomb." Yet, in her mid-twenties, Rhonda got pregnant by accident. As she describes it, her pregnancy triggered maternal longing she did not know she had. She married the father and had the baby, then she had three more. Those children are all alive today, well more than 50 years after Rhonda gave birth to the first. Rhonda once saw imminent mortal danger all around her, it colored her every thought about the future. She was once a twenty-three-year-old beatnik, somber at the prospect of not living to see her next birthday. But the story about the A-bomb dropping never did come true, her life didn't end. Today, Rhonda is a great-grandmother.
Would we say, because Rhonda is still alive at 80, where she thought in her early 20s that a bomb would drop any day, that the nuclear threat "isn't real"? Of course not. For one thing, nuclear weapons themselves are more destructive than they were in Rhonda's youth; for another, the political contexts in which those bombs are cultivated for use have only grown more complex and less transparent since the Cold War ended in 1989. Stories, like the Y2K one, and the late-40s one about the A-bomb, make people hysterical. Yet fear, regarding current world events, seems well-justified. At what point does fear become irrational?
In James H. Kunstler's 2005 book The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, he projects known trends into the future, sternly describing the imminent global depletion of petrochemical fuel. He foresees looming shortages that lead to mass strife and famine, with soaring casualties, as well as major disruptions in basic services that people in affluent countries have come to take for granted. I love the book. It's beautifully written and an awe-inspiring read. But I do not doubt that in 10 years' time, if not less, "The Long Emergency," engrossing as it is today, will be just as laughably dated as any magazine article. You see, the book is speculation, born of current historical circumstance, as far as Kunstler is able to synthesize it. It's a story.
I ended up in a conversation with a man I'll call Peter at the neighborhood pizza parlor the other evening. Peter makes a career, not only of sounding the alarm about impending "petro-collapse," but out of shunning "petrochemical dependency," having long-since given up his own car. According to Peter, "'The Long Emergency ' is interesting, but Kunstler is not particularly well-informed about the oil industry." Peter also says electric and hybrid cars are "no solution. They're really even more wasteful than cars that run on gasoline." Peter speaks in different venues and writes online. I've reviewed his web site since we met. I think it's interesting, its content is certainly thoughtful and worth discussing. But Peter did not charm me in person. Sitting there with him, I couldn't put my finger on the reason for my distaste.
It was only later I realized that I had found Peter smug, as if he considered himself to be in sole possession of some gospel truth I would be lost without. Somehow, there was no possibility for discussion with him. He had "the final word." If Peter himself knew of my reaction, he would say I was "slaying the messenger who brings bad news."
With all due respect, I don't think that's it. To change gears slightly (bicycle gears, of couse :-), my feelings about Peter get at the heart of what's wrong with stories about our future as a civilization, no matter how sophisticated and plausible-seeming they are. Stories inspire certainty, whereas the future is never certain. Based on information we have, we can project trends. We can take the trends seriously, and work to shape them. But certainty about something we can never actually know is folly, it leads only to hysteria.
Anne Lamott's short personal essay, "Hunger," from her collection Traveling Mercies, is many things. It's probably the greatest nonfiction she's ever written. It's certainly trenchant political commentary, besides being a personal account of what happened when Lamott quit drinking, after decades of alcoholism and bulimia. Lamott describes teaching herself to eat, as an adult, heeding her body's own signals. She makes a rigorous practice, for the first time in her life, of eating only when physically hungry. As a newly dry alcoholic, at first she's hungry only for cake frosting and M&M's, so that's all she eats for a while. Slowly her tastes broaden, and her diet begins to look normal.
The reason this essay is so relevant to current discussions about the dangers we face as a society, about the future of civilization, is its description of the way Anne Lamott addresses a high-stakes personal challenge, without either hysteria or denial, with only a matter-of-fact calm. Giving up alcohol allows Anne Lamott to sever the link between eating and her addictive process, and then she's free, for the first time, to work on serious issues at hand.
What needs to be done, in American society, about not only "the ter'ist threat," but about the threats of petrochemical depletion, global conflict, and climate change? Well, addictions have to be broken, and a calm dialog has to begin, as maybe it already has. Calm, exacting work has to begin, with the calm process of dialog. Predictions, or stories, about the future, have to be consciously understood as more- or less-sophisticated fiction; hysteria is to be avoided. The Kossack whose diary I referred to at the beginning got that part absolutely right: Hysteria makes people buy into demagoguery. At the very least, it sure does get in the way.