Whether your comfort beverage of choice is herbal tea or single malt Scotch, you'd be well advised to lay in a large store before settling down with James Howard Kunstler's disturbing portrait of the U.S.'s impending decline, Too Much Magic.
In this sequel to his 2005 The Long Emergency (and a pair of post-apocalyptic novels), Kunstler takes Americans to task for a "techno grandiosity" that feeds "ongoing fantasies about a technological rescue from the very predicaments already spawned by the misuse of technology." Whether it's turning to shale oil and gas as solutions to the problem of peak oil or shooting particles into the atmosphere to combat global warming, Kunstler methodically skewers what he asserts is the misguided thinking of people like Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Near) who reassure us we can somehow craft benign, inexpensive fixes that will permit us to continue in a lifestyle roughly resembling the one we enjoy today.
One of Kunstler's chief villains is suburban sprawl, built on cheap gasoline and (in the case of the Sun Belt) cheap air conditioning. When those common features of modern life disappear, he predicts, whole swaths of the country will revert to a pastoral past. The skyscrapers at the core of our major cities aren't likely to fare much better; he even envisions the end of commercial aviation as we know it.
Apart from his conviction that broad scale technological solutions simply are not feasible--many require ample supplies of fossil fuels to sustain them, for one thing--Kunstler colorfully expresses his lack of confidence in the nation's failed political and business leadership. Describing the two-party system as giving off an "odor of necrosis," he's equally critical of Democratic policies ("a complete merging of corporate rapine with government assistance") and Republican ideology's "persistent ethnocentrism, xenophobia, institutionalized ignorance, paranoia and parochialism." The rise of an economy built on manipulating financial instruments instead of making things offers yet further evidence of our societal breakdown.
Kunstler maintains that we're currently engaged in a "futile campaign to sustain the unsustainable," and he doesn't paint an especially clear picture of how we might face the looming deprivations beyond inevitable conflict over dwindling resources and the struggle to develop small-scale, locally oriented ways of coping with our diminished circumstances. Unlike many futurists, however, he doesn't lodge his predictions in some far-off time. According to Too Much Magic, we're already living in the midst of the collapse he so confidently predicts, and if it plays out as quickly and dramatically as he describes, it will not be a pleasant spectacle to watch. --Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: Futurist James Howard Kunstler offers a disturbing picture of the decline of American society, as our current lifestyle collapses in upon itself.