Farewell to the Twentieth Century
by James Howard Kunstler
When some awful necessity sends me out onto the highway in a car -- a task I view increasingly with dread, as the roadscape grows evermore horrible with added vehicles, new strip malls, "housing starts," fry pits, car washes, "power centers," and all the other revolting accessories of the American Dream -- there is a little mental game I like to play to divert myself from the gruesome scenery: I visually subtract the newer buildings and try to imagine what a given place might have looked like fifty or a hundred years ago. Most of what is there now gets erased in the process, of course. Say I am driving down Route 9 just west of Northhampton, Massachusetts, as was the case a few days after Christmas, when we left my in-laws’ house in Amherst to return home. Of course, there are thousands of highways in our country worse than this particular highway. By general US standards, this stretch is not so bad. It might even be described in the dumb jargon of our times, as "semi-rural." But there is still an immense amount of sub-architectural crap everywhere in view.
I scrunch my eyebrows together and concentrate.
Suddenly, the ghastly split-level bunkers that line the highway vanish. The auto parts store transforms itself back into the original 1852 farmhouse it once was. I edit out all the vinyl siding. Chain-link fencing disappears. The parking lots vaporize. Sometimes, the forest shrinks back from the road and I see the fields and pastures as they existed when farming still mattered in New England.
This game is especially absorbing when the highway takes us through an old town. The idiot patina of modernity disappears and -- in my mind -- the buildings suddenly present handsome, dignified facades. The paint seems fresh, as though the owners cared how their buildings looked. None are mint-green. Their windows are properly vertical. The shutters actually close. There are no plastic tot toys strewn across the front yards. There are no garage doors facing the road. Not one. The power lines vanish. The street trees have returned from the dead (or, rather, from the 1964 Department of Transportation road-widening chain-saw massacre). The storefronts along the two block stretch of Main Street are occupied and their display windows contain normal merchandise. The names of the stores aren’t lame puns -- The Hair-port, Uncommon Grounds -- but rather plainly describe the business within: groceries, butcher, men’s clothing, etc. There actually are sidewalks and more people walk along the sidewalks than there are vehicles in the street.
Lately I find myself trying to imagine the future in the same way, by visually editing the landscape as I travel through it. I am sure that it will change, just as America changed beyond recognition in the Twentieth century. I cannot imagine any plausible scenario that would permit the present American way of life to continue much longer into the future. It is too much at odds with nature, particularly human nature. Life in the national automobile slum has become so logistically, socially, economically, ecologically and spiritually untenable that we must either find a better way or the whole national gang of us may soon be issued a one-way ticket to the Palookaville of defunct civilizations.
Imagining the future is more demanding than mentally reconstructing the past because one is tempted to rely on stock images out of the movies. Stupid as they might have been in terms of story or human behavior, it is hard not to default to those visually compelling scenes from Mad Max and The Road Warrior series from the 1980s -- a windswept, desertified future world of mechanical odds-and-ends, inhabited by quasi-mutant brutes in motorcycle drag. (The cycle gangs of my lifetime seem to have been rehearsing for precisely just such a post-industrial apocalypse.) I can squint at any strip mall and imagine tumbleweeds blowing through an empty parking lot, and comic-book savages with pierced noses skulking in the shadows of the ruined, looted Rite Aid store. There’s another version of the future out of A Clockwork Orange: a physically more recognizable landscape (there are still trees and cities), but one infested with roving gangs of psychopathic thugs with nothing to do but inflict pain on hapless strangers. There is also the grimmer view of things out of Blade Runner, an urban disaster area shrouded in acid fog, populated by broken puppet people.
It is marvelous to reflect how bleak our collective popular vision of the future has been in recent decades, at least as depicted in literature and cinema. Pick a few more narratives from the library bin: Alas, Babylon, On the Beach, A Canticle for Liebowitz, all horror stories of a dismal, hopeless future. In fact, it has been virtually impossible lately for us to collectively imagine a bright future, certainly not the way our great-grandfathers did in 1900. They thought that the Twentieth century was going to bloom into a golden age, and this optimism saturated their culture in everything from the philosophy of Logical Positivism that replaced a wrathful and mysterious God with reliable, predictable, and beneficent Science, to the cult of Modernism in the arts and humanities, which proposed a bright, rational, sanitary, personally liberated, psychologically salubrious, politically just, socially equitable future. The 1899 version of The City of the Future was a gleaming vision of skyscrapers with richly-figured towers, the spaces between plied by wondrous "airships" shaped like cigars. In Jules Vernes’ Trip to the Moon, the spacecraft ( really a giant artillery shell) was decked out like a London club room in velvet and leather, and the gaberdine-clad astronauts drank champagne en route. Politics of the period were called "Progressive" because they looked forward to the continued and inevitable improvement of human life. Even popular manners and morals, as embodied for instance by Horatio Alger’s stories for young men, glowed with sunshine and promise. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a sci-fi glimpse of the year 1950 written in the 1890s, got a number of things wrong, but quaintly so. For instance, Bellamy proposed that by 1950 all the houses in Boston would be connected by an elaborate network of speaking tubes to a central symphony orchestra, whose music would be piped into every room of every building (curiously, the phonograph had already been invented when he wrote, and he still got it wrong!).
These cultural museum pieces seem laughably naive today. The broad consensus among us Americans now is that the future can only be worse than the past or the present. This anxiety about the future is certainly expressed in virtually every local political scene in America: any new building proposal can be certain to rouse an opposing army of naysayers (called NIMBYs, derived from the war-cry "Not In My Back Yard"). We have lost faith in the ability of our culture to deliver the future, and that is a tragic thing. For many people, including quite a few of the educated elite, the term contemporary architecture will summon up only dread -- blank walls, warped planes, the exploded tectonics, the obliterated sense of scale -- as though the productions of Eisenman, Gehry, Koolhaas and the gang amounted to a concerted attack on the human psyche. It takes a special kind of sensibility to celebrate the chaos of life at the end of the 20th century -- it takes someone who is either a sociopath or else someone sufficiently insulated by wealth and fame from the unpleasant consequences of chaos, and in neither case are we talking about normal sensibility. (And I would admit a very broad range of sensibility within the limits of normality). It takes, in short, a sadist, and indeed there is something unmistakably sadistic in the establishmentarian avant garde. Clearly Peter Eisenman wants us to suffer from his buildings. In Berlin, I was informed, Eisenman’s apartment building on the Freidrichstrasse is the only one that has a waiting list to get out of. Nobody believes these occult mystic bullshit artists anymore (except perhaps Herbert Muschamp of the New York Times postmodernism’s last cheerleader).
I’m glad that the Twentieth Century is coming to an end. (And since there seems to be disagreement as to whether it should have been officially declared over on 1/1/00, or put off until 1/1/01, I figure for my own purposes that the year 2000 should be considered all-of-a-piece transitional -- a big fat twelve month hunk of turn-around time, kind of an epochal end-zone.) The Twentieth century was a bummer. It produced so much horror, misery, bad ideas, unreckoned consequences, even terrible costumes (can you imagine anything worse than women’s wear of the 1930s, when every female looked like her own grandmother. Christ, what was going through their minds. . . ?)
I will be the first to admit that a lot of good things came out of the Twentieth century -- from arthoscopic surgery to Errol Garner recordings. Much of the world entered the Twentieth century in darkness and filth -- that is, without electricity or running water. While even many Chinese peasants can stay up late reading now, there are probably even more people living in darkness and filth today in sheer numbers than there were in the year 1900. Of course, this raises the specter of human over-population, an idea which seem to have utterly lost its ability to frighten the advanced societies -- judging from its absence anywhere in the public discussion of social issues. Personally, it troubles me. There would seem to be no question that nature historically treats population binges very cruelly (and very creatively!), and in the event I don’t see how we are going escape the usual menu of war, pestilence, economic collapse, in some combo. I don’t believe you have to be a cynic or a "pessimist" to perceive this. It would appear self-evident.
I confess I was among the nervous minority who feared that the Y2K computer problem would trigger a chain of economic catastrophes. My view was based on the belief that our economic relations had become so abstract anyway, that sooner or later the collective hallucination that propped our economy up would necessarily dissolve. It only seemed to me that the Y2K "bug" was liable to shove the system into criticality all at once and sooner rather than later. But Y2K turned out to be such a stunning non-event that even serious commentators with the most impressive credentials were left looking foolish. The speed with which Y2K vanished from the public radar screen was also pretty impressive. To a large extent, the Y2K computer crisis was an enormous mystery, even to people with a lot of experience in computing and systems theory. And it’s pretty obvious that the issue vanished so fast because so many of these admirable people proved to be embarrassingly wrong.
Yet there is plenty of opportunity in this year-long transition out of the Twentieth century for the global economic system to find itself in very deep trouble, and I will be very surprised if we manage to escape it in the three quarters of the year remaining. While the underlying problem may be the ever-increasing abstract nature of our economic relations -- the dark gulf between wealth and value, between money and real assets, between producers and consumers, between home and everywhere that is not home, between the fake and the authentic -- I believe we can see the gathering economic catastrophe right out on the ground in plain sight.
I travel around the United States a lot and everywhere I go I see on the ground classic mis-investments of a debt-drunk economy -- the Mall of Georgia, and scores of its clones; the vast tracts of commodity housing made of vinyl and chipboard; the thousands of redundant discount warehouses, office parks, and car dealerships, and so on. These things don't represent the creation of "wealth." They are short-term physical manifestations of speculation in debt instruments made tangible in steel, glass, plastic, and cement -- with the moral hazard of speculation hidden or repressed by their putative conversion to the "hard assets" of "real estate." These malls and things represent a physical residue of debt, and the rearrangement of hallucinated "money" undergoing steady corrosion through friction and entropy as the debt behind it is leveraged, traded, collateralized, commodified, abstracted, fucked around with, and finally defaulted upon. The result of all this trafficking in abstract financial instruments is a particular culture, and an economic system, that has lost the ability to receive feedback and make necessary self-corrections, in other words, a system which has been busy producing evermore mistakes. Because the mistakes have not been punished with financial failure, people are induced to make more and more of them. It would seem that such a system is doomed to eventually reach a tipping point of criticality from which it cannot recover, and soon after, necessarily, tip. That is, crash. And that is exactly what I believe we are in for in the very near future. Within the daisy-chain of interrelated economic hazards -- from arbitraged currencies to over-valued stocks to bankrupt households -- it’s impossible (for me, anyway) to say what might bring on the final tipping, but it will tip into criticality.
This seems to me, by the way, a pretty natural and organic process. Systems in nature frequently behave this way. They appear to be "out of control" because the process of tipping and crashing is what naturally occurs in states of dynamic disequilibrium -- where things never achieve absolute balance but are always in the process of going too far in one direction or the other, back and forth, with extended sojourns somewhere within the middle range -- but never absolutely balanced. Weather systems are like this: from clear skies, to devastating tornadoes, back to clear skies. The reproductive cycles of rodents, the course of epidemic diseases, and tectonic forces that cause earthquakes possess similar qualities.
The idea that human aspiration can rise above all this -- what makes us Godlike (or at least angelic) -- derives from our potential, or at least our hope, for managing the forces of dynamic disequalibrium. We surely wouldn’t want to manage it into stasis, which is quite literally death, but we would like to think we can optimize the dynamic disequilibrium of our world in order to secure our happiness. And to some extent surely we have, and can. That is what civilization has been about: staying warm, growing crops, turning on the lights at night, keeping clean, inventing diversions for the idle consciousness. It seems that we have done it all more or less improvisationally, making it up as we go along, utilizing experience and acquired culture along the way. Or perhaps that is an illusion, too. Perhaps we are mere subjects of a teleological experiment and we are unable to see out of the figurative petri dish. But I wish to avoid metaphysics.
All of this is to say that I feel a certain inevitability about where we are headed, and that is into an economic storm. We will go through heavy weather and some of our stuff will be damaged and people will be injured, and we will go on to the next thing, to a newer culture, revised forms, different politics, new idioms, discoveries, innovations, crazes, fashions, and a certain amount of the usual crap.
I have some notions about what the next phase will bring, but they are rather inexact. Anway, predicting the future can be an express ticket to the Hall of Fools, but here’s what I see coming down the pike.
First, it ought to be obvious that I view the current economy as a hopeless accident waiting to happen. So assume a crash, a tremendous evaporation of assumed wealth. I have written elsewhere and often (perhaps to nausea) that I expect a major feature of this crash to be a severe loss of value in suburban real estate of all types -- and by value I mean both monetary and utilitarian, because at some point not too many years hence it will be more difficult or more expensive or possibly less democratic (or some combination) for mass motoring to continue as we have known it within the ridiculous armature of our soon-to-be-obsolete national automobile slum. I don’t believe cars will disappear, but I do believe that we will not be using them the way we have been. Anyway, since so much of our perceived national wealth is tied up in the fiasco of suburbia and its furnishings, a great deal of our wealth will simply vanish.
Economic down-cycles of this kind are usually accompanied by deflation. The distortions of global finance today, however, are so egregious that we could easily go through a whipsawing of hyper-inflation leading to a much longer deflation, as currencies based on nothing more than a collective hallucination of value destabilize in an economic world where there are few fixed points of reference and less gravity. I simply don’t know how to call it except to say: prepare for austerity. We will all be poorer for a while.
These economic disruptions are almost certain to be accompanied (and aggravated) by political mischief both at home and internationally. When the broad American middle class is deprived of its entitlements -- in the form of suburban houses, cars, cheap gas, and a steady supply of "consumer" novelties, they are sure to freak out. They will surely act out scripts of vengeance and grievance against the supposed "elites" who "conspired" to deprive them of all their goodies. Americans became an ugly people during the economic run-up of the late Twentieth century, a nation of gleeful sadists, passively luxuriating in cinematic revenge fantasies (while stuffing themselves with snacks). The more powerless they became under the juggernaut of an insane consumer culture that failed to furnish any real purpose in life, the more Americans fantasized about gaining and using personal power -- from gun ownership to the vicarious slaughter of video games. When the time comes for them to redirect this energy from fantasies into political action, it is liable to make for extremely ugly politics. Quite a few seemingly-mainstream Americans, I have no doubt, will someday become domestic terrorists of one kind or another -- right wing, left wing, evangelical, deep-ecology, you name it. Even more mainstreamers are apt vote for political maniacs who promise to restore their lost goodies. The very strength of our democratic institutions may prove a liability when lunatics are sworn into office.
Racial violence must be considered a grim possibility. It seems to me that blacks and whites have been rehearsing for a showdown for decades. While many whites tend to repress their racial animosity out of shame, overt hostility is today much more visible among Afro-Americans, who have been accredited grievance-bearers of long-standing and, in effect, have been granted cultural permission to display as much belligerence as they care to -- what are the gangsta rap videos but war chants of a longed-for racial Armageddon? Anyway, it has gotten to the point in America where black culture and white culture have become so mutually unrecognizable at some levels that the natural tendency will be for each group to consider the other group less than human, with predictable political results.
I don’t even want to talk about the potential for nuclear conflict or bio-terrorism. Some things are too depressing even for me.
The picture I am painting is one of economic hardship, political strife, and a great deal of misery. Without beating it into the ground, let it suffice for me to say that the world has been through travails and catastrophes of unimaginable severity before. I doubt that the educated minority of Henry James generation would have ever been able to conceive of the horror of the 1930s and 40s. (For the Nineteenth century men and woman who lived long enough -- oh, say a Sigmund Freud or a John Singer Sargent --World War One was bad enough, bringing on a kind of culture-wide nervous breakdown later to be called Modernism). Who knows what extravaganzas of gore and despostism may await us?
So how does one manage to stay sane facing such scary prospects? It’s not easy. Sometimes one must resort to strong beverages or pharmaceuticals. About me, personally, this much you may be told: I’ve done what I can to put myself in a position where I hope to remain relatively safe. I live in a small main street town in upstate new York, a place with the kind of traditional characteristics that serve as an armature for civilization no matter how regimes change or how rough times get. I wouldn’t want to stick around a Sunbelt city, a place like Atlanta, Houston, or Phoenix, because these places will not adapt well to such possible events as unstable oil markets or mass unemployment. But I don’t flatter myself to think I will be immune to sweeping political and economic forces where I happen to be. If nothing else, I’ve mouthed off in print so much about what a stupid-ass culture we are, that I may have made too many enemies, and under the wrong circumstances who knows how I might be treated. It’s happened before elsewhere to people who are critical of their societies. But, neither am I excessively paranoid. I’m not sitting around waiting for knocks on the door. . . yet.
What keeps me going is simply this: the Aristotelian notion of eudaemonia, which is the idea that a life of purposeful activity in accordance with reason tends to produce human happiness. I would add that the activity ought to be honorable -- with the caveat that what is "purposeful" and "honorable" must be left open to interpretation. What this leads to is the belief that there is such a thing a good life. Certainly my idea of this will differ from yours, and this is what makes life interesting. In an ideal world, history and experience will sort out who had the better idea over the long haul. I wish to steadfastly resist the thought that we learn nothing over the ages -- and manifestly we do learn, if, perhaps, blunderingly, or else there would have been no Michelangelo or Grand Central Station, or Robert Altman movies, or Valium.
Anyway, I’m glad that the Twentieth century is over. It’s possible that the 21st will be an improvement -- just as I believe (perhaps foolishly), that the Nineteenth was generally a good one, a real corker (and don’t let’s get started about the Battle of Cold Harbor, etc.). Let’s just bid the Twentieth a gingerly farewell, as we would say goodbye to a vexing and malicious parent at the cemetery as the casket slides into the receiving vault of eternity. Rest in peace, come no more, let us carry on better than before, and may God bless himself back into existence.
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