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Peter D. Kramer and Andrew Solomon

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from: Peter Kramer

The Convenience Culture

Posted Monday, July 9, 2001, at 11:47 AM ET

Andrew, I'm sure you're going to want to talk about the fascinating piece about the use of footnotes in legal citations ... but what grabbed my attention in Sunday's New York Times was the front-page article about a new consensus in California, the one that will allow the building of dams to supply water, starting in the Lake Shasta region. Not only hasn't California built dams in years, dams haven't been part of the public discussion--until recently, "they didn't pass the laugh test," the piece says. But now Californians need water.

The article caught my eye because I've just written a novel (Spectacular Happiness) about a small band of anarchists who succeed in capturing the public imagination. Now, there is a great tradition of anarchist novels--Henry James and Dostoyevsky each wrote one. Joseph Conrad wrote two, as did Zola. But the most prominent anarchist novel in which the merry band gets away with it--the novel cited as inspiration by today's eco-terrorists--is The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey. And that book is about the blowing up of a Western dam to return the land to its natural state.

The article reminded me of a little-noticed piece the Times ran in May. That one reported that in the midst of their energy crisis, 59 percent of Californians supported building nuclear power plants. The last prior poll (1984) showed that 61 percent of Californians opposed nuclear power. That's quite a shift. To favor nuclear power you need to believe different things than you believed when you opposed nuclear power. Same way for dams in the wilderness.

I don't mean to single out California. I think the culture is this way. We believe what's convenient.

That's why it was easy to empathize with anarchists. I mean, denial's fun, but if a person were not in denial, he would say enough. I'm told that Rhode Island (where I live) is more energy-efficient than California, and I can tell you we drive our SUVs with the air conditioning turned on full blast.

That's how the world sees America--the great consumers and deniers. Cut taxes now and worry about Medicare later? Not sign Kyoto because the evidence isn't in yet on global warming? We're the "I'm all right, Jack" culture.

Sorry to wake you up so something so heavy. Maybe we ought to stick to talking about depression.

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415161718
from: Peter Kramer

The Convenience Culture

Posted Monday, July 9, 2001, at 11:47 AM ET
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Peter D. Kramer is a professor of psychiatry at Brown University and author of Listening to Prozac and the new novel Spectacular Happiness. Andrew Solomon is the author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (read a "Book Club" discussion of it here) and also of the recently reissued novel A Stone Boat.
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Reader Comments From The Fray

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[Notes from the Fray Editor... or perhaps we should call them footnotes. There was a recommendation for David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest here, and a splendid line from Tim Button here: "Footnotes are justifiable in philosophy, but philosophy as a whole is very hard to justify." KC is expecting footnotes to these exchanges. The Fray team would like to recommend Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as having the best footnotes ever. We were glad to see that the poster Shark agreed with us: he is looking like the new star of the "Breakfast Table" (eat your hearts out Neill Hamilton and Amber) with his cutting-edge offer of a Kaus-like Star Poster skipping service. Find it here, on the WillV post below, and here.]


You wrote about anarchists who capture the popular imagination? Obviously, you didn't know about the merry band here in the Fray, a group that perfected popular anarchy long ago. Come join us as those from the left, center, and right are terrorized for intellectual pretensions, grammar and punctuation, and bourgeois status symbols. Your sequel could write itself.

--WillV

(To reply, click here.)


It has been suggested that liberals backing down on their opposition to nuclear power is equivalent to conservatives backing down on the rights of children who cannot yet defend themselves against abortions. I'm not going to bother with the actual debates, but I would like to say that liberals and conservatives alike view the nuclear power question as a balance of risk vs savings. Nuclear power is cheap, plentiful, and the electricity is the same either way. The only questions are these: can the plants be run safely, can the waste be disposed of safely. These are practical concerns, and as the need for power increases, the risks seem less ominous. If we were to suddenly find unlimited sources of sulfer free oil, or a way to cheaply produce reliable solar energy, conservatives would find the risk of nuclear power unpalatable. Nobody opposes nuclear power on moral grounds, everybody has practical concerns.

Abortion, infanticide, pornography, etc: These are moral issues, not practical issues. No conservative would say that he opposes abortion because there are too few babies being produced. Moral issues are fundamentally different from practical concerns.

In any case, conservatives and liberals frequently change their positions on practical issues, as things become palatable or circumstances change. When they start giving up moral positions, there had better have been a revelation, because abandonment of a moral position out of expediency is ... immoral

--Ben Kirkup

(To reply, click here.)

 (7/9)

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