[lbo-talk] Why am I so annoyed by James Kunstler's The Long Emergency?

Dwayne Monroe dwayne.monroe at gmail.com
Tue Jan 15 12:49:25 PST 2008


Two years ago, Doug interviewed journalist James Howard Kunstler for a segment on "Behind the News". Kunstler had a new book out - The Long Emergency - and was making the rounds promoting it. I was slightly annoyed by what I heard but also intrigued. After some false starts, I recently got around to reading the book.

Kunstler's premise is straightforward: we're running out of easily extractable petrol and yet, simultaneously, demand is rising. Peak oil theorists and their followers are familiar with this notion. Soon enough, oil will be scarce and none of the celebrated alternatives (solar, wind, hydrogen, etc) are likely to fill the gap. Bereft of cheap energy and rocked by the consequences of climate change, industrial civilization will disappear in a cataclysm of war, famine, mass death and chaos. After the big die-off, survivors will gather in small towns and live as people did in say, the 18th century (at best) with a few advanced industrial age touches preserved here and there (perhaps the odd hydroelectric plant).

The raw material Kunstler uses to create his counter-futurism seems reasonable enough - there probably will be an oil-availability related crisis at some point, though when is far from certain. And, climate change definitely presents a serious challenge to life as we've known it for generations.

Still, there's something about his rock solid belief we'll undergo a violent de-complexification which will bring about a reborn past which rubs me the wrong way.

At first, I thought it was his barely restrained dislike of modernity, as it is, that bothered me. In books such as The Geography of Nowhere (1993) Kunstler makes the case against suburban development. He doesn't like it, and he's not shy about telling everybody how deep the hatred goes. But on second thought, I found that unremarkable and actually, I'm in agreement with many of his ideas about sprawl. That wasn't it.

Next, I considered the possibility that my technophilia was causing an allergic reaction to Kunstler's small New England town circa 1776 vision of utopia (which read to me like a post-apocalyptic version of "Brigadoon", that Technicolor musical from ancient Hollywood about a magical village which happily stays frozen in a "simpler time").

Here's Kunstler on how things will unfold:

Some regions of the country will do better than others in the Long Emergency. The Southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that it prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late twentieth century. I predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as well as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air conditioning.

I'm not optimistic about the Southeast, either, for different reasons. I think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent encoded behavior of Southern culture includes an outsized notion of individualism and the belief that firearms ought to be used in the defense of it. This is a poor recipe for civic cohesion.

The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of problems, from poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss. The Pacific Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy or despotism and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best social traditions and keep them in operation at some level.

[...]

<http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/7203633/the_long_emergency>

On the face of it, if you accept Kunstler's premise of little or no oil this sounds plausible. I'm sure more than a few list members are nodding their heads in at least partial agreement. Who can argue with his insistence that cities such as Las Vegas will wither and die if deprived of cheap and abundant water and power?

Still, in the midst of this logical linearity, there's a hint of what I find irksome. These two sentences bring it out:

New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy or despotism and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best social traditions and keep them in operation at some level.

[...]

Hmmm. "Our best social traditions."

One of the major threads of the book is the blockheadedness of the American lifestyle. Kunstler describes it as a series of bad choices which seemed sensible at the time (for ex. building lots of highways in the 1950s) but you get the impression he doesn't really believe that. In fact, his disdain for SUVs, McManisions and all the rest of it is so strong, and shapes his opinions so profoundly at times I suspected a nicotine stained Wojtek ghost wrote the book from his wintry fortress of discontent.

Why is the New England area likely to (even marginally) do better? Well, they're apparently nicer people, more sensible in a good old fashioned Yankee sort of way - think Kate Hepburn and Thoreau - than the folks down south who're apparently all a bunch of NASCAR loving gun nuts itching to kill everyone the moment oil gets scarce.

Mind you, if oil gets hard to come by things will surely get nasty before they settle down - if they ever do - but this regional breakdown seems based upon Kunstler's biases and not anything remotely objective.

So yes, the regionally based prejudice annoys me - and there's a lot to say about that. At times, Kunstler's fondness for an idealized Yankee work ethic and aw shucks mam approach to life causes him to steer awfully close to racist and anti-immigrant stereotyping - Describing one of the measures he suggests America take to prepare for his "long emergency" Kunstler writes: Take a time-out from legal immigration and get serious about enforcing the laws about illegal immigration. Stop lying to ourselves and stop using semantic ruses like calling illegal immigrants "undocumented." (kunstler.com).

Kunstler isn't very clear on what extra problems immigrants - legal or otherwise - will cause during the "long emergency" but if his description of the US south and southwest are any guide we can guess it has something to do with immigrants not having the Yankee know-how, can-do spirit and small town values which will preserve "the best of our social traditions" once the oil stops freely flowing.

And I haven't even mentioned the "Asian pirates" who will cross the Pacific to raid the Californian coast.

...

But beyond all this, what truly annoys me is Kunstler's belief that large scale civilization was an invention of the oil age. Reading and listening to him, you'd never know that the ancient Chinese, Romans, Greeks, Assyrians and, for Horus' sake Egyptians (among others) all managed to create truly massive civilizations without the benefit of petrol. Gigantism, bureaucracy and large-scale agriculture were invented long before the industrial age. Oil bestowed new and expanded powers but did not bring these things into the world. For Kunstler, it's as if oil is the source of all human ingenuity.

Kunstler is so certain that we've entered, as Susan Sontag put it (describing alarmism about AIDS) "apocalypse from now on" that he's completely blind to the possibility of new forms of civilization which aren't built upon his idyllic New England village. He's also certain that the disappearance of oil will mean the complete disappearance of advanced technology even though it's likely that people surrounded by tools and machinery will create new things instead of merely re-doing what their great-great grandparents achieved.

The book has some value - the linkage between peak oil and climate change (i.e., the double impact of facing a changed world just as we lose our most powerful and versatile fuel) is interesting and worth some thought. Overall however, it seems like the work of a disgruntled smart ass who wants the suburbia he loathes to be wiped away by the gods.

Doug's interview with Kunstler -

<http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#060706>

.d.



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