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Page added on November 30, 2013
Kunstler: (Un)Paving Our Way To The Future
You can’t overstate the baleful effects for Americans of living in the tortured landscapes and townscapes we created for ourselves in the past century. This fiasco of cartoon suburbia, overgrown metroplexes, trashed small cities and abandoned small towns, and the gruesome connective tissue of roadways, commercial smarm, and free parking is the toxic medium of everyday life in this country. Its corrosive omnipresence induces a general failure of conscious awareness that it works implacably at every moment to diminish our lives. It is both the expression of our collapsed values and a self-reinforcing malady collapsing our values further. The worse it gets, the worse we become.
The citizens who do recognize their own discomfort in this geography of nowhere generally articulate it as a response to “ugliness.” This is only part of the story. The effects actually run much deeper. The aggressive and immersive ugliness of the built landscape is entropy made visible. It is composed of elements that move us in the direction of death, and the apprehension of this dynamic is what really makes people uncomfortable. It spreads a vacuum of lost meaning and purpose wherever it reaches. It is worse than nothing, worse than if it had never existed. As such, it qualifies under St. Augustine’s conception of “evil” in the sense that it represents antagonism to the forces of life.
We find ourselves now in a strange slough of history. Circumstances gathering in the home economics of mankind ought to inform us that we can’t keep living this way and need to make plans for living differently. But our sunk costs in this infrastructure for daily life with no future prevent us from making better choices. At least for the moment. In large part this is because the “development” of all this ghastly crap — the vinyl-and-strandboard housing subdivisions, the highway strips, malls, and “lifestyle centers,” the “Darth Vader” office parks, the infinity of asphalt pavements — became, for a while, our replacement for an economy of ecological sanity. The housing bubble was all about building more stuff with no future, and that is why the attempt to re-start it is evil.
Sooner rather than later we’ll have to make better choices. We’ll have to redesign the human habitat in America because our current environs will become uninhabitable. The means and modes for doing this are already understood. They do not require heroic “innovation” or great leaps of “new technology.” Mostly they require a decent respect for easily referenced history and a readjustment of our values in the general direction of promoting life over death. This means for accomplishing this will be the subject of Part II of this essay, but it is necessary to review a pathology report of the damage done.
Launching Nirvana
I have a new theory of history: things happen in human affairs because they seem like a good idea at the time. This helps explain events that otherwise defy understanding, for example the causes of the First World War. England, France, Russia, Germany, and Italy joined that war because it seemed like a good idea at the time, namely August of 1914. There hadn’t been a real good dust-up on the continent since Waterloo in 1814. Old grievances were stewing. Empires were both rising and falling, contracting and reaching out. The “players” seemed to go into the war thinking it would be a short, redemptive, and rather glorious adventure, complete with cavalry charges and evenings in ballrooms. The “deciders” failed to take into account the effects of newly mechanized warfare. The result was the staggering industrial slaughter of the trenches. Poison gas attacks did not inspire picturesque heroism. And what started the whole thing? Ostensibly the assassination of an unpopular Hapsburg prince in Serbia. Was Franz Ferdinand an important figure? Not really. Was Austria a threat to France and England? It was in steep decline, a sclerotic empire held together with whipped cream and waltz music. Did Russia really care about little Serbia? Was Germany insane to attack on two fronts? Starting the fight seemed like a good idea at the time — and then, of course, the unintended consequences bit back like a mad dog from hell.
Likewise America’s war against its own landscape, which got underway in earnest just as the First World War ended (1918). The preceding years had seen Henry Ford perfect, first, the Model T (1908), and then the assembly line method of production (1915), and when WW I was out of the way, America embarked on its romance with democratic motoring. First, the cities were retrofitted for cars. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but the streets were soon overwhelmed by them. By the mid-1920s the temptation to motorize the countryside beyond the cities was irresistible, as were the potential profits to be reaped. What’s more, automobilizing the cities made them more unpleasant places to live, and reinforced the established American animus against city life in general, while supporting and enabling the fantasy that everyone ought to live in some approximation to a country squire, preferably in some kind of frontier.
The urban hinterlands presented just such a simulacrum of a frontier. It wasn’t a true frontier anymore in the sense of civilization meeting wilderness, but it was a real estate frontier and that was good enough for the moment. Developing it with houses seemed like a good idea. Indeed, it proved to be an excellent way to make money. The first iteration of 1920s car suburbs bloomed in the rural ring around every city in the land. An expanding middle class could “move to the country” but still have easy access to the city, with all its business and cultural amenities. What a wonderful thing! And so suburban real estate development became embedded in the national economic psychology as a pillar of “progress” and “growth.”
This activity contributed hugely to the fabled boom of the 1920s. Alas, the financial shenanigans arising out of all this new wealth, along with other disorders of capital, such as the saturation of markets, blew up the banking system and the Great Depression was on. The construction industry was hardest it. Very little private real estate development happened in the 1930s. And as that decade segued right into the Second World War, the dearth continued.
When the soldiers came home, the economic climate had shifted. America was the only industrial economy left standing, with all the advantages implied by that, plus military control over the loser lands. We already possessed the world’s biggest oil industry. But after two decades of depression, war, and neglect, American cities were less appealing than ever. The dominant image of city life in 1952 was Ralph Kramden’s apartment in The Honeymooners TV show. Yccchhh. America was a large nation, with a lot of agricultural land just beyond the city limits. Hence, the mushrooming middle class, including now well-paid factory workers, could easily be sold on “country living.” The suburban project, languishing since 1930, resumed with a vengeance. The interstate highway program accelerated it.
The Broken Promises of Suburbia
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Country life for everybody in the world’s savior democracy! Fresh air! Light! Play space for the little ones! Nothing in world history had been easier to sell. Interestingly, in a nation newly-addicted to television viewing, the suburban expansion of the 1950s took on a cartoon flavor. It was soon apparent that the emergent “product” was not “country living” but rather a cartoon of a country house in a cartoon of the country. Yet it still sold. Americans were quite satisfied to live in a cartoon environment. It was uncomplicated. It could be purchased on installment loans. We had plenty of cheap energy to run it.
It took decades of accreting suburbia for its more insidious deficiencies to become apparent. Most noticeable was the disappearance of the rural edge as the subdivisions quickly fanned outward, dissolving the adjacent pastures, cornfields, and forests that served as reminder of the original promise of “country living.” Next was the parallel problem of accreting car traffic. Soon, that negated the promise of spacious country living in other ways. The hated urban “congestion” of living among too many people became an even more obnoxious congestion of cars. That problem was aggravated by the idiocies of single-use zoning, which mandated the strictest possible separation of activities and forced every denizen of the suburbs into driving for every little task. Under those codes (no mixed use!), the corner store was outlawed, as well as the café, the bistro, indeed any sort of gathering place within a short walk that is normal in one form or another in virtually every other culture.
This lack of public amenity drove the movement to make every household a self-contained, hermetically-sealed social unit. Instead of mixing with other people outside the family on a regular basis, Americans had TV and developed more meaningful relations with the characters on it than with the real people around them. Television was also the perfect medium for selling redundant “consumer” products: every house had to have its own lawnmower, washing machine, and pretty soon a separate TV for each family member. The result of all that was the corrosion of civic life (a.k.a “community”) until just about every civic association except for school oversight (the fabled PTA) dwindled and faded. And the net effect of all that was the stupendous loneliness, monotony, atomization, superficiality, and boredom of suburbia’s social vacuum. It was especially hard on the supposed greatest beneficiaries, children, who, having outgrown the play space of the yard by age eight, could not easily navigate the matrix of freeways and highways outside the subdivision without the aid of the “family chauffeur,” (i.e. Mom).
Cutting Our Losses & Moving On
A couple of points about the current situation in suburbia ought to be self-evident. One is that our predicament vis-à-vis oil, along with cratering middle class incomes, suggests that we won’t be able to run this arrangement of things on the landscape a whole lot longer. The circulatory system of suburbia depends on cars which run on liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Despite the current propaganda (“drill, baby drill”), we have poor prospects of continuing an affordable supply of those things, and poorer prospects of running the US motor vehicle fleet by other means, despite the share price of Tesla, Inc. The second point is how poorly all suburbia’s components are aging — the vinyl-clad houses, the tilt-up strip malls, the countless chicken shacks, burger stands, and muffler shops, all the generic accessories and furnishings that litter the terrain from sea to shining sea. There are a lot of reasons these things now look bad (and lose value) but the chief one is that most of them are things nobody really cares about.
In Part II: A Better Human Habitat for the Next Economy, we explore the necessary behaviors we’ll need to adopt if we hope to have any prosperity in the years ahead. What seemed like a good idea at the time — through the 20th century and a little beyond — is looking more like an experiment that failed. Our sunk costs in it promote a tendency to agonize over it. I propose that we just give up the hand-wringing and prepare to cut our losses and move on. The reality of the situation is that the response to all this will arise emergently as circumstances compel us to change our behavior and make different (and we should hope) better choices. That is to say, don’t expect programmatic political action to change this, especially from remote authorities like federal or state governments. We will reorganize life on the ground because we will have to.
18 Comments on "Kunstler: (Un)Paving Our Way To The Future"
Plantagenet on Sat, 30th Nov 2013 1:56 am
Kunstler made the mistake of buying his home in an ugly blighted rural area, and now he decries the ugliness of blighted rural areas. Duh!
Norm on Sat, 30th Nov 2013 3:24 am
No picking on Kunstler. He is a sharp and clever critic of society
Kunstler really knows how to write it down. ‘nation of tattooed overfed clowns in paramilitary drag’….. ‘cheez doodles’ Perhaps a bit more negative in sum total than whats necessary. Anyway, Kunstler is good stuff !
DC on Sat, 30th Nov 2013 7:08 am
Another great article. Though I am no amerikan, my people bought into US corporate controlled suburban trash-can living to the letter. The area I live in, no exception. There have been lots of new ‘development’ here of late. Houses people dont need or can afford, strip malls, new and shiney, but over 1/2 vacant.
The ‘new’ businesses that have shown up, are revealing. Let me a list(a few).
-Quick oil change.
-Automated Car Wash.
-Tire Shops
-An Indian-land mall, with..Banks, a DQ, Dollar Store, a movie theatre,some other nameless shops, a shell station. All of these INDENTICAL ‘services’ already exist a few mere miles up the road. Over 40 million dollars of road work alone to subsidize traffic flow to this indian mall.
-A furniture store. No they dont MAKE furniture, they sell crappy furniture and the same Asian made electronics you can get anywhere.They moved into an old big box store.
-Several Medium sized auto-parts stores and assorted repair shops.
-A few of those tacky gated ‘retirement’ obscenities are going up at various speeds.
See any pattern?
All located along a busy highway, with no provision for access for anything other than cars. But the real kicker is almost all these ‘new’ places, are places designed to directly serve the needs of cars themselves. I cant help notice, not *one* thing that opened up recently has anything to do with producing anything at all. Its all about serveing cars, or selling the same garbage made by ‘our’ western corps in China and shipped back here over in container ships and diesel powered ‘rigs’.
Thats it. Full stop-no other form of economic ‘development’ in my local space. Just cars, and more over-priced shacks for which there is little demand. The houses are being built on erosive hill-sides far from any water or power source. All the land below has been built over with the blight I mentioned above. The ‘older’s quasi-industrial areas are a collection of shabby businesses, that are being slowly supplanted by all the ‘new’,but mostly empty crap further down the road.
Its the same story, old decrepit stuff wears out, build new, further down road, rinse repeat. Till you run out of consumers or land, whichever comes first. Then it just all slumifies more or less together. Then everyone moves to a ‘new’ place so they can start it all over again.
duke on Sat, 30th Nov 2013 7:49 am
Franz Ferdinand was not assassinated in Serbia. It was Austro Hungary and today it’s part of Bosnia. Kunstler is showing us the geography of nowhere.
BillT on Sat, 30th Nov 2013 11:35 am
As we wind down into the next phase of humanity, Kunstler has his head on straight.
BTW: There is over two billion barrels of oil in the asphalt of America alone. Most of it placed when oil was less than $10 per barrel. I understand why it will not be replaced or even maintained soon. If you check the facts, most states are bankrupt, and roads are sliding down the list of priorities for what taxes they still get from a deteriorating citizenship.
Davy on Sat, 30th Nov 2013 12:29 pm
Kunstler is on the right track except I tend to side with David Korowics in that there is no “managed de-growth”. Like George W said during the 2008 crisis “this thing is gonna blow!!! Now, Kunstler has some great ideas for picking the pieces up. I also hope after a severe contraction comes we can stabilize in something like the “long emergency” that Kunstler also describes. A population suffers two kinds of stress types one duration and the other severity. Let us hope neither is too severe that would prevent a reboot of a functioning civilization.
Paulo on Sat, 30th Nov 2013 3:27 pm
@DC
What you wrote rang a bell of truth. Add to that ‘smart phones’ whose use promotes constant communication and entertainment and you have a population shoving its head further and further up its a#%. I taught high school off and on for 17 years and soon realized kids were dumbing down at an alarming rate. What happened to youth idealism? Questioning? The clothes and shoes cost hundreds of dollars and the phones, themselves, are status tickets that proclaim the worth of the user (even if mommy and daddy bought the damn thing). I see parents downtown with tatoos and piercings supposedly to make them unique and special and realize they don’t have an original thought in their being. On tv the commercials are all about buying cars…bigger, faster, zoom zoom zoom; buy and you will be special.
This is a society doomed and deserving a comeuppance. I am looking forward to a poorer existence and realistic aspirations for us all, myself, included.
regards…Paulo
Pops on Sat, 30th Nov 2013 4:05 pm
As people move to town and concern themselves with status updates, tweets and cat videos, they rely more and more on FF-based transportation to feed, water and shelter them.
This frees vast areas of the countryside for resettling by the next generation of folks who desire to live in the meat world rather than Wally world.
One man’s abandoned small town is another’s pre-made infrastructure.
Not sure how to gauge the timeline but I’m sure the move to town reverses with the lack of fuel
rollin on Sat, 30th Nov 2013 5:03 pm
Pops has it right, as energy systems collapse the cities and large towns will become death traps, totally unsustainable with the current population.
Problem is that the rural areas will be inundated with the mass migration outward to areas where food and water are grown. This may overwhelm the rural areas and cause further disaster.
Arthur on Sat, 30th Nov 2013 5:52 pm
Don’t know enough about America’s interior to judge Kunstler’s article, only was 10 days in NYC, end nineties. So forgive me for riding my history hobby horse again by criticizing Kunstler’s shabby understanding of the WW1 drama:
And what started the whole thing? Ostensibly the assassination of an unpopular Hapsburg prince in Serbia.
That was indeed the point of initiation, but not the real reason why London masterminded a anti-German coalition together with France and Russia.
Was Franz Ferdinand an important figure? Not really.
Of course he was, he was the heir to the Austrian throne. He was the glue that held the multicultural empire of Austrians, Hungarians, Croats and a few more, together. He was attacked by a Serb because Serbia wanted to destroy Austria and start South-Slavie (=Yugo-Slavia), with Serbs in the lead. In the end Serbia succeeded.
Was Austria a threat to France and England?
WW1 was never about Austria but about Germany. Germany was no (military) threat to Britain and Franc either, but was created out of the blue by Bismarck in 1871 and had the size of Britain and France combined. And within 20 years the former European bullies Britain and France were sidelined and not amused because of it. So they decided to form a coalition with Russia in order to destroy and downsize Germany. Incentives agreed upon in advance: Russia would become access to the Mediterranean, France would get the German provinces of Alsace and Lorraine (Elsass-Lotharingen) and Britain, well Britain and it’s empire of 25% of the planet’s landmass would become #1 again in Europe.
Did Russia really care about little Serbia?
No, see above. They wanted expansion south-west.
Was Germany insane to attack on two fronts?
I beg your pardon? Germany was essentially attacked on two fronts. Russia mobilized first, which could only mean war preparation against Germany. Then Germany sought assurances from France that France would not mobilize, which France refused. Germany understood it was trapped and decided that the only way out was trying to quickly defeat France first and then address Russia. Part of the deal to f*ck Germany was that Britain would show it’s true intentions only in the last minute, a total miscalculation of the Germans, who had fought that Britain would remain neutral. While Germany was advancing through Belgium to circumvent French fortifications at the Franco-German border, all of a sudden the British declared the breach of Belgian neutrality an issue of national concern, as if they cared a hoot about Belgium. It was just a pretext to join a war long planned in advanced. There was nothing accidental about WW1, but a vile pre-planned attack by British, French and Russian thugs.
On the night of 30-31st of July, feeling entrapped by a seemingly inevitable march of events, Kaiser Wilhelm mused to himself doomily:
Frivolity and weakness are going to plunge the world into the most frightful war of which the ultimate object is the overthrow of Germany. For I no longer have any doubt that England, Russia and France have agreed among themselves – knowing that our treaty obligations compel us to support Austria – to use the Austro-Serb conflict as a pretext for waging a war of annihilation against us… In this way the stupidity and clumsiness of our ally [Austria] is turned into a noose. So the celebrated encirclement of Germany has finally become an accepted fact… The net has suddenly been closed over our heads, and the purely anti-German policy which England has been scornfully pursuing all over the world has won the most spectacular victory which we have proved ourselves powerless to prevent while they, having got us despite our struggles all alone into the net through our loyalty to Austria, proceed to throttle our political and economic existence. A magnificent achievement, which even those for whom it means disaster are bound to admire.’
The good Kaiser was entirely correct. Normally Germany would have won WW1… Russia was defeated, the British and French were about to… when the Americans entered the scene, because of a secret deal between the British and the Jews: Jews bring their American serfs in the battle in exchange for Palestine from Britain. And even that was not enough to bring the Germans to their knees. What really broke the Germans was that they trusted the Americans (in casu Wilson) to keep their word and agreed in an armistice on terms proposed by the Americans. But the British and French ignored these terms and the Americans let the two rapist get away with it and Germany became the victim of the most cruel ‘peace treaty’ in world’s history. They got blamed for a war that was started by their opponents.
Bor on Sat, 30th Nov 2013 8:24 pm
Waterloo was on 18 June 1815.
Frank Kling on Sat, 30th Nov 2013 9:03 pm
Well done, Arthur!!!!!!!!!!!!
DC on Sat, 30th Nov 2013 11:54 pm
You know Arthur, I have mentioned this before that JHK as a critic and observer of the suburbia, hes second to none. However, when it comes to world history,he is well, an amerikan. He makes many of the same mistakes and mis-characterizations that typify even ‘educated’ amerikans. I try not to hold his history mistakes against him too much, like i say, when it comes to suburban critiques, hes hard to beat.
He does to his credit, understand amerikan history far better than most of his countrymen, but world history, be it the last 100 years, or more, not his forte`.
rollin on Sun, 1st Dec 2013 1:04 am
I remember telling a friend of my about a decade back or so that the McMansions would make great multi-unit conversions when the economy went bust and the loans came due.
Problem is property taxes, which did not go down in my region even when values fell quite a bit. Once the government gets it’s fangs into something, they keep sucking the life out of it.
BillT on Sun, 1st Dec 2013 1:26 am
DC, you are correct. I’m not sure if they teach history these days or what version, but I know that in the late 50s and early 60s, we got one year of American history, called Civics, and one year of world history, in high school.
I am finding out, now that I have internet access, that most of what I learned was so slanted toward the West, and the US in particular, as to be almost fiction. That is even more true in today’s propaganda world, I am sure. But I will not go into details here.
Ghung on Sun, 1st Dec 2013 5:37 pm
“That is to say, don’t expect programmatic political action to change this, especially from remote authorities like federal or state governments. We will reorganize life on the ground because we will have to.”
“Life on the ground” will reorganise itself. Humans have never collectively ‘managed growth’ in any real sense. Humans are reactionary and societies adapt how they will. To expect any sort of managed contraction, except on a very local scale, is unrealistic.
Snoopy on Mon, 2nd Dec 2013 1:09 am
Interesting slant on the topic Arthur. For a more rounded, accurate and thorough discussion I’d read this article. http://www.firstworldwar.com/origins/causes.htm
Arthur on Mon, 2nd Dec 2013 12:06 pm
Yes Snoopy, that is the official history writing. If you really want to understand history you need to trace the shady backroom deals, not intended for public consumption. The official history books are carefully crafted by state commissions and never will be anything else… that is before the internet arrived.lol
Here a quote from one of the heroes of the internet underground, William Engdahl and his book “A Century of War”:
1914-04 – Engdahl: [p38] George, King of England, and his Foreign Minister Edward Grey, made an extraordinary visit to meet French President Poincare in Paris… Russia’s Ambassador to France, Iswolski, joined, and the three powers firmed up a secret military alliance against the German-Austro-Hungarian powers. Grey deliberately did not warn Germany beforehand of its secret alliance policy, whereby England would enter a war which engaged any one of the carefully-constructed web of alliance partners England had built up against Germany. The British establishment had determined well before 1914 that war was the only course suitable to bring the European situation “under control.” British interests dictated, according to their balance-of-power logic, a shift from her traditional “pro-Ottoman and anti-Russian” alliance strategy of the 19th century, to a “pro-Russian and anti-German” alliance strategy as early as the late 1890’s. Rarely discussed, however, is the fact that the strategic geo-political objectives of England, well before 1914, included not merely the crushing of its greatest industrial rival, Germany, but, through the conquest of war, the securing of unchallenged British control over the precious resource which by 1919 had proven itself as the strategic raw material of future economic development—petroleum. This was part of what some English establishment strategists then termed the Great Game, creation of a new global British Empire, whose hegemony would be unchallenged for the rest of the century, a British-led New World Order.
Pat Buchanan in his fairly recent Hitler-Churchill book also identified sir Grey as the mastermind behind the British alliance policy.
Around 1890, when it was clear that British industry was starting to lose the competition on world markets against ‘made in Germany’, political magazines openly started to call for “Germania est delenda”, copied from a similar call from Romans to destroy Carthago (“Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam”).
en . wikipedia . org/wiki/Saturday_Review_(London)
The real turning point in British politics was 1998 and the Fashoda incident, the last time British and French interests clashed and both decided that they should become partners against a rising Germany. Next was the ‘Entente Cordiale’ of 1904 between Britain and France, implicitly adding Russia.
en . wikipedia . org/wiki/Entente_cordiale
And the guns were in place and pointed at Germany. All that was needed was a suitable occasion and that occasion came in 1914.
War aims:
Britain: destruction of Germany
France: destruction of Germany + Alsace-Lorraine
Russia: Bosporus
Germany: none
Or to launch comparison: Europe-street was dominated by a French and British restaurant, until in 1871 a German restaurant opened doors. Soon all the customers flocked to this new restaurant and the French and British resented this development, which is perfectly understandable, but openly burning the German restaurant down was not considered an acceptable reaction. So the allies had to make it look like an accident (Sarajewo). But if you want to understand real history you always have to look at intentions first. 1918 Versailles was nothing else than ‘mission accomplished’, poisoning European politics until today. But with a little luck, the internet + Wladimir Putin could cause a total reset of European politics, starting with hardcore historic revisionism.