• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I took a deep breath. The answer was right there. I could see it, taste it. I almost had it. I opened my mouth to say it. But then it was gone. I lost it, almost had it again, then lost it entirely. My mind was fried from all the thinking and talking.

“It’s late,” she said. “We’ll talk again soon.”

“Soon,” I said.35

CATASTROPHE

Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, per- haps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed.

Octavio Paz 36

IT IS CUSTOMARY WHEN WRITING TO HIDE ONE’S PRESUMPTIONS. The hope is that readers will flow along with the narrative and get swept up by the language until by the end they’ve reached roughly the same conclusions as the author, never realizing that oftentimes the unstated starting point was far more important to the conclusion than the arguments themselves. For example, you hear some talking head on television ask, “How are we going to best make the U.S. economy grow?” Premise one: We want the U.S. economy to grow. Premise two: We want the U.S. economy to exist. Premise three: Who the hell is we?

I’m going to try to not slide premises by you. I want to lay them out as clearly as I can, for you to accept or reject. Part of the reason I want to do this is that the questions I’m exploring regarding civilization are the most important questions we as a culture and as individuals have ever been forced to face. I don’t want to cheat. I want to convince neither you nor me unfairly (nor, for that matter, do I want to convince either of us at all), but instead to help us both better understand what to do (or not do) and how to do it (or why not). This goal will be best served by as much transparency—and honesty—as I can muster.

Some of the assertions undergirding this book are self-evident, some I’ve shown elsewhere, some I will support here. Of course I cannot list every one of my premises, since many of them are hidden even from me, or far more fundamentally are inherent in English, or the written word (books, for example, presume a beginning, middle, and end). Nonetheless, I’ll try my best.

The first premise I want to mention is so obvious I’m embarrassed to have to write it down, as silly in its way as having to state that clean air or clean water are good and necessary, and as self-evident as the polluted air we breathe and water we drink. But our capacity and propensity for self-delusion—indeed the necessity of self-delusion if we’re to continue to propagate this culture—means I need to be explicit. The first premise is: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.

Years ago I was riding in a car with friend and fellow activist George Draffan. He has influenced my thinking as much as any other one person. It was a hot day in Spokane. Traffic was slow. A long line waited at a stoplight. I asked, “If you could live at any level of technology, what would it be?”

As well as being a friend and an activist, George can be a curmudgeon. He was in one of those moods. He said, “That’s a stupid question. We can fantasize about living however we want, but the only sustainable level of technology is the Stone Age. What we have now is the merest blip—we’re one of only six or seven generations who ever have to hear the awful sound of internal combustion engines (especially two-cycle)—and in time we’ll return to the way humans have lived for most of their existence. Within a few hundred years at most. The only question will be what’s left of the world when we get there.”

He’s right, of course. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that any social system based on the use of nonrenewable resources is by definition unsustainable: in fact it probably takes