James Howard Kunstler, prolific
blogger, novelist, and social commentator, has written a new book titled Living
in the Long Emergency. You should read it. America's economy and
social order are careening toward the abyss, and Kunstler explains why.
Living in the Long Emergency is
an update of The Long Emergency, which Kunstler published in 2005.
In his earlier book, Kunstler predicted the collapse of America's industrial
economy due to the world's rapidly depleting supply of recoverable
petroleum.
In Living in the Long Emergency, Kunstler reiterates his earlier
thesis and explains why the so-called fracking miracle for extracting shale oil
has not altered his predictions. Fracking is far more expensive than
traditional methods of extracting oil, Kunstler writes, and is only viable when
it can be financed through low-interest rates and high oil
prices. Moreover, it is a short-term phenomenon that does not alter the
fundamental reality of dwindling petroleum reserves.
As Kunstler summarized the matter:
The shale oil "miracle," therefore, was a very impressive
financial and technological stunt. In practical terms, it provided a means to
pull forward from the future the last dregs of recoverable oil, so the US could
live large for a few years longer. As [an] independent oil analyst . . . put
it: Shale is a retirement party for the oil industry."
Kunstler's new book also includes a
brutal analysis of contemporary American culture, which our oil-dependent
economy helped foster. His assessment of American life is unrelievedly bleak. A casual survey of American culture, Kunstler writes, "reveals shocking
degrees of neuroticism, delusion, dishonesty, and functional failure in
culture."
Suburbia, made possible by cheap
gasoline, has "produced yawning ugliness on the landscape, an epidemic of
loneliness, family dysfunction, and a dismal cavalcade of mass shootings in
public schools." In America's heartland, what we now call flyover
country, Kunstler sees traditional American values eroded by opiate
addiction, suicide, obesity, and unemployment.
Kunstler is particularly hard on
American higher education. "The thinking class," he writes, squanders its
waking hours on a quixotic campaign to destroy every remnant of American common
culture and, by extension, a reviled Western civilization . . . ."
I've spent a good deal of my life
shuffling around in American universities, including a three-year stretch in
Harvard's re-education camp (cleverly disguised as Harvard's Graduate School of
Education). Kunstler's summation of American higher education is spot on.
Rather than try to summarize Kunstler's cogent analysis, I'll simply quote him:
It case you haven't been paying attention to the hijinks
on campus—the attacks on reason, fairness, and common decency, the kangaroo
courts, diversity tribunals, assaults on public speech and speakers themselves,
the denunciation of science—here is the key takeaway: It is not about ideas or
ideologies anymore. Instead, it's purely about the pleasure of coercion, of
pushing other people around, of telling them what to think and how to act.
Kunstler's book includes a lot more
provocative ideas and social analysis than I have touched on here. My brief review doesn't do it justice.
But I fully endorse his fundamental conclusion, which I think is this: America has
crapped in its own mess kit and doesn't have the money or the moral energy to repair the damage it has inflicted on itself.
A hundred years from now, I believe
people will still be reading James Howard Kunstler's work to
understand how America went so wrong. In my mind, he is one of the very few
people who comprehend what has happened to us.