World Made By Hand (3)
Aug. 23rd, 2008 01:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
libertangoAnother aspect of the poor world-building in James Howard Kunstler's cautionary science fiction novel, World Made By Hand: Its all-or-nothing-at-all nature.
To remind: World is a novel set approx. 15 years from today, in a world where oil has virtually disappeared.
One of the things Kunstler posits is that a) the United States' government as we know it will mostly disappear, since it won't be able to exert power over distance, and b) nothing will take its place except in the extreme local sense -- local large landowners who will be proto-aristocrats with proto-serfs, local anarchy, etc.
This shows (as does his thoughts about tech that I've discussed earlier) a profound ignorance of history.
One of the things that governments do, in living memory no less, is ration things. Whether one is talking about the various rationing measures in the US during WWII, or "austerity Britain" after the war, or even as far back as Mesopotamian city-states -- governments ration scarce commodities, and keep the share needed to maintain power for themselves.
In this way, Walter Tevis' The Steps of the Sun is far more realistic than Kunstler. It too shows a world of dwindling resources, but it also shows a US government that manages to maintain supersonic fighters -- at the end of the barrel of a gun.
There's also just human nature at work. I've said before that Leopold Kohr's The Breakdown of Nations continues to be one of the most prophetic works of the 20th Century. Even if you grant Kunstler that the federal government would "wither away," to serve his polemic point, the likelihood is quite strong that the US would split up into a series of regional nations. (Which is what the states nominally are, but hey.) It's not as if US Grant and the Army of the Potomac will come along to force them back together. (Or, if they did, it would prove how wrong the idea of diminished Federal power is.)
But that splintering shows another problem -- Kunstler portrays a US which is uniformly on the skids, "powerless" in the literal black-out sense.
Given his background as an amateur urban critic, you'd think Kunstler had read Jane Jacobs. And, if so, you'd think he'd know about her idea that any given national economy is really the sum of individual urban economies (see her The Economy of Cities)
Assuming that the larger regional cities would become primate capital cities of new splinter nations, I suggest that they would have a wide variety of outcomes. Seattle, where I live, gets 90% of its electricity from hydro, and another 8% from other non-fossil sources. In our region, I imagine Vancouver and Portland have similar non-petroleum sourcing.
I don't know the strengths and weaknesses of other cities. But this region's cities in particular are fairly well off compared to others if it comes to the great darkness Kunstler foresees.
And that's the problem. In the same way JMS used to make fun of some science fiction series for portraying the species of any given planet as being uniform, without ethnic, sectarian, or other divisions, Kunstler's attempts to make the entire world one vast homogeneous passive pity party are absolutely laughable. Even in the nightmare scenario he gives to himself, there will be winners, losers, and imbalances of outcome.
To remind: World is a novel set approx. 15 years from today, in a world where oil has virtually disappeared.
One of the things Kunstler posits is that a) the United States' government as we know it will mostly disappear, since it won't be able to exert power over distance, and b) nothing will take its place except in the extreme local sense -- local large landowners who will be proto-aristocrats with proto-serfs, local anarchy, etc.
This shows (as does his thoughts about tech that I've discussed earlier) a profound ignorance of history.
One of the things that governments do, in living memory no less, is ration things. Whether one is talking about the various rationing measures in the US during WWII, or "austerity Britain" after the war, or even as far back as Mesopotamian city-states -- governments ration scarce commodities, and keep the share needed to maintain power for themselves.
In this way, Walter Tevis' The Steps of the Sun is far more realistic than Kunstler. It too shows a world of dwindling resources, but it also shows a US government that manages to maintain supersonic fighters -- at the end of the barrel of a gun.
There's also just human nature at work. I've said before that Leopold Kohr's The Breakdown of Nations continues to be one of the most prophetic works of the 20th Century. Even if you grant Kunstler that the federal government would "wither away," to serve his polemic point, the likelihood is quite strong that the US would split up into a series of regional nations. (Which is what the states nominally are, but hey.) It's not as if US Grant and the Army of the Potomac will come along to force them back together. (Or, if they did, it would prove how wrong the idea of diminished Federal power is.)
But that splintering shows another problem -- Kunstler portrays a US which is uniformly on the skids, "powerless" in the literal black-out sense.
Given his background as an amateur urban critic, you'd think Kunstler had read Jane Jacobs. And, if so, you'd think he'd know about her idea that any given national economy is really the sum of individual urban economies (see her The Economy of Cities)
Assuming that the larger regional cities would become primate capital cities of new splinter nations, I suggest that they would have a wide variety of outcomes. Seattle, where I live, gets 90% of its electricity from hydro, and another 8% from other non-fossil sources. In our region, I imagine Vancouver and Portland have similar non-petroleum sourcing.
I don't know the strengths and weaknesses of other cities. But this region's cities in particular are fairly well off compared to others if it comes to the great darkness Kunstler foresees.
And that's the problem. In the same way JMS used to make fun of some science fiction series for portraying the species of any given planet as being uniform, without ethnic, sectarian, or other divisions, Kunstler's attempts to make the entire world one vast homogeneous passive pity party are absolutely laughable. Even in the nightmare scenario he gives to himself, there will be winners, losers, and imbalances of outcome.
