A Different Narrative
We've spent some time looking at the both the conservative and liberal stories for what's going on in America. We saw that the basic question that each narrative has to answer is, "What the hell happened to our country?" How have we fallen so far from our post-WWII position? Conservatives blame liberalism: liberals turned their back on the traditional values that made America great, resulting in an erosion of our national character. Liberals blame conservatism: fearful, backward-looking conservatives have held America back from fulfilling its destiny, resulting in a country that is unready to face the challenges of a changed world. Once again, there is obviously much more to each camp than just these little blurbs, and many great thinkers have explored these issues. Conservatives and liberals can have different cultural tastes, different religious styles, different moral philosophies, different views on the natural world, and a host of other fascinating variables. But what really interests me is these core narratives that each side uses to explain the public's general sense of American decay in the last half of the 20th century.
These explanations for current troubles, what we can call "American Theodicies," are so pervasive that most people may not even notice them. After all, not everyone sees our present situation as troublesome. We've got a lot more stuff to buy now than we did in the mid-70s: better TVs, more erectile dysfunction drugs, a million-and-one blogs, etc. The economy is certainly much larger than it was a few decades ago, and there are a lot more millionaires around as a result. One of my favorite things to look for in the nation's op-ed pages is the occasional article reminding us how good we have it. You can usually count on these a couple times a year, and the author will remind us all how much better we live than medieval serfs or oppressed ethnic minorities in despotic countries, or how much longer we live than our pioneer forefathers; you get the idea. We should shut our traps and be happy for what we do have. But these optimistic pieces can't quell the general sense of regular people in the street that the world is out of control and headed in the wrong direction. Our two main political branches thus have to answer that nagging uneasiness, which is why every Presidential campaign has so many phrases that begin with, "we need to." We need to return to this, or we need to recapture that. We need to recommit ourselves to X-Y-Z. I guess you could call this the "Need-re" style of politics, since we're always "re-ing" to something or other that has been lost. So our political narratives, both conservative and liberal, are really very ancient. They express the desire to return to a Golden Age of something, a recapturing of lost virtue; and this is a very old theme.
In any case, how we answer this question of the American Fall is crucial. Neither the conservative nor the liberal story really captures what has happened. And worse still, since they are both predominantly blame-based, they choke off any constructive discussion between people of differing political persuasions. How can you talk to someone about the future when you inherently blame them for the nation's downfall? There's no way to move forward in a unified way when you see the other side as fundamentally flawed and in need of redemption or enlightenment. When we're facing huge challenges like the collapse of ecosystems or the meltdown of the housing market, no comprehensive solution can be crafted by people who view each other as freeloading traitors or superstitious fascists. Our current narratives are straitjackets, and we'll need non-blame-based stories if we're going to get anywhere.
So here's a stab at a different way of looking at the post-WWII decline of America. I won't claim that it's either new or particularly unique. (In fact, it's absolutely dependent on the seminal work of James Howard Kunstler, who gives it a much fuller treatment in his great book The Long Emergency). In the nesting doll model, this is that little guy at the center, a device for looking at a short time period. Hopefully, future posts will add broader outer layers, to interpret longer periods and larger concepts. But this is a good place to start.
The US was in fairly good position after WWII. War, necessity, and government activism had jump-started the economy, and America was ready to take off. As soldiers returned home, a perfect storm of factors led to the explosion of suburbia: housing shortages, the GI Bill, the ramping up of automotive industrial capacity, new developments in home fabrication, etc. America thus embarked on a grand project of filling up the landscape with roads, suburban housing, and the endless retail strips to service this new mode of living. We built, and are still building, what James Howard Kunstler calls the "Easy Motoring Utopia."
Unfortunately, as Kunstler notes, this will come to be seen as the worst allocation of resources in history. We hitched our wagons to a way of life with no future. A huge proportion of the American economy goes into simply building and maintaining suburbia itself. The building, retail, and personal finance sectors of the economy ballooned, while the more directly productive sectors of agriculture and manufacture atrophied. And since we only had a few decades to fill up the country with our suburban social form, most of it is shoddy, ugly, and spiritually stultifying. We are thus stuck with a physical, economic, and social disaster. As Kunstler notes, we must start "making other arrangements" to confront the realities of the future.
Why are the current arrangements so untenable? First of all, the entire American infrastructure is predicated on cheap fossil fuels. As the emerging literature on Peak Oil makes clear, the age of cheap petroleum products is over. It's not that we're about to run out. That's not what Peak Oil means. It simply means that all the easy stuff is gone; and what's left will prove more expensive and difficult to get at. And all this just at the time when the large populations of China and India come online with surging demand. So everything in America will be more expensive to run, resulting in economic contraction and the accompanying social unrest. Secondly, the One Family-One Residence living arrangement is absolutely unsustainable on an ecological level. One would be hard-pressed to find a more wasteful way of utilizing space and resources than what we have now. Roughly half of our spaces sit empty for half the time as we shuttle back and forth to other spaces which also sit empty for huge stretches. And many of these spaces have to be heated, cooled, and lighted when empty. All of this is necessary to support full-employment system, which is in turn needed for maximizing the consumption economy. As ecologists have shown for years, this heavily consumptive way of life cannot be universalized, or the planet would quickly collapse. Thirdly, our current arrangements are not economically successful. Even though the economy has grown seven-fold since WWII, most of the rewards have been funneled upwards, resulting in the worst economic inequality since the Gilded Age. When adjusted for inflation, regular household income has actually stayed the same or gone down for most Americans since the mid-70s, and that is with many households having two breadwinners instead of one. Just think about that for a second. Families increasingly have to have both parents working, but with no net gain economically. And we should all know the drill here: manufacturing jobs go overseas for cheaper labor, wages get ratcheted down in the US, people take lower-paid service jobs with no benefits, etc. Finally, our current way of life is psychologically numbing. Human beings are gregarious social primates, evolved to live in intense groups of several dozen. There is a reason why tribal life existed for hundreds of thousands of years without alteration. Our brains and psyches are geared for extensive social intercourse and close living conditions. The suburban arrangement is simply not satisfying to us. We spend too much time alone, and our relationships are too anonymous to prove fulfilling. We thus turn to drugs and other stimulants to distract us from how lonely and unhappy we are. People cling to their pseudo-tribes on TV or the internet, but these are also ultimately unsatisfying, with resulting anxiety and depression.
So we have a way of life that doesn't work physically, economically, ecologically or psychologically. We have simply been building the wrong kind of society since the end of WWII. This is not anyone's fault. How could people in the 40s and 50s predict that fossil fuels would become the basis of our entire infrastructure and then soon afterwards go into decline? Ecological thinking was not particularly developed when we embarked on the suburban experiment, so how could we have foreseen that a highly-consumptive, full employment society was not sustainable? And who could have looked ahead to see that financial and information technologies would emerge to allow smaller numbers of people to consolidate their control over larger swaths of a growing economy, proving lie to the rising tide, all boats myth? In short, we have to step out of the blame-game. Our situation is much more complex and much more serious than the standard conservative and liberal stories would have us believe. It's not that America has lost its values and traditions, or become too permissive, or remained too religious, or fears change, or any of that other culture-war claptrap. Our predicament is more mundane but infinitely more ominous. We have physically built the wrong kind of social form, and that is at the core of almost all of our other problems. No amount of job training, education, or moral uprightness will suddenly make our current way of life sustainable, equitable, or spiritually fulfilling. Unless we change the center cog of the one-family, one-dwelling, full-employment system, nothing else we do will alter our path.
This is the kind of story we need to start telling, if we're ever going to create workable solutions for the upcoming years. This narrative obviously doesn't lend itself too easily to mainstream media coverage, since it is overtly "pessimistic" about future consumption. And it's not a particularly campaign-friendly story for candidates to use in their fundraising and electoral efforts. And this tale certainly doesn't give self-righteous people of any political leanings the easy way out via demonizing the other. But this is really the way things are, and finding a way forward will require some uncomfortable honesty, a lot of sacrifice, and a willingness to work together with people of all political stripes.
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