The future
always seems to happen in Japan first. It was the first, and hopefully last,
country to be struck with nuclear weapons. It was the first to be attacked with
karaoke music. Japan has given the world otaku culture – video games, manga, maid cafes, 48-member female pop bands – the cultural products of and for a newly evolved, more autistic, infantilized
kind of human being, a new species more object-oriented than people-oriented,
more detached from reality, incapable of emotional response to outrages
unfolding in their environment.
The latest
item on this list of firsts is the fact that Japan is now the first
industrialized country to hit the wall in terms of its energy supply. With no
native resources, it decided to go nuclear fifty years ago, and for a while it
worked. The nuclear buildup was an economic boon as it created jobs within its
own sector and supplied the energy needed by industry. Economic growth took
off. Nuclear fuel was believed to be carbon free, and relatively cheap, so it helped the national balance
of payments. But building 54 nuclear reactors on a land of earthquakes and
tsunamis was never a good idea, and now the dream has died. Nuclear is no
longer a viable option. Even if Japan continues running a few plants, other
earthquakes are sure to bring further problems, so the whole industry is in
inevitable decline. Meanwhile, importing fossil fuels will just continue to run
up a trade deficit that adds to the vicious cycle of industrial decline and
contributes to global warming. Alternative energy supplies might be a solution,
but for now they are over the horizon.
Public discourse on this dilemma is reaching new
levels of alarm. The problem is no longer a remote disaster that might start in
a few decades. It is happening all around us, but in a slow motion fashion that
makes it difficult for some people to feel the sense of crisis. Paul
Gilding sees it as a coming war, but a different kind of war than what we
have ever known:
We
can choose this moment of crisis to ask and answer the big questions of
society's evolution -- like, what do we want to be when we grow up, when we
move past this bumbling adolescence where we think there are no limits and
suffer delusions of immortality? Well it's time to grow up, to be wiser, to be
calmer, to be more considered. Like generations before us, we'll be growing up
in war -- not a war between civilizations, but a war for civilization, for the
extraordinary opportunity to build a society which is stronger and happier and
plans on staying around into middle age.
While contemplating such things a few weeks ago on
a hot summer day (35 degrees centigrade and 70% humidity at my home in Narita,
Japan), the phrase “the air-conditioned nightmare” came to mind. It is the
fitting description for what this country faces every day now. We need the cool
air to maintain our lifestyles and do the jobs that put food in our bellies.
Junior high school students, already on the education treadmill on which they
mindlessly join the chase of “good” jobs in air-conditioned factories and
offices, need the cool air in the summer cram schools they attend. Air
conditioning enabled places like Japan, Southern China, Taiwan, Thailand,
Vietnam and the American South to catch up to the industrialized North. And we
are all stuck here, unable to see any way to climb down out of the air-conditioned
nightmare.
But where did this phrase come from? I knew I had
heard it before, but had no idea who coined it. It turned out that it was the
title of a 1945 travelogue by Henry Miller. I must have come across it when I
read Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring
and Tropic of Capricorn in the early 80s, or it may just be a phrase used
elsewhere as it became an effective way to allude to our alienation from nature.
Henry Miller lived as an expatriate American writer
in Paris in the 1930s, and returned to his native New York in 1939. With war
breaking out in Europe, he had returned only reluctantly, and did not have a
nice re-acquaintance with his homeland. Nonetheless, on a trip that must have
inspired Jack Kerouac a few years later, he set out on an automobile trip
across the country, writing of the grim American landscape he found in
Depression-era America on the eve of world war. He found only some hopeful
signs for the future of humanity in a few exceptional individuals whom he
encountered.
There is no trace here of “the greatest generation”
that defeated fascist enemies on two fronts in Europe and Asia, except some
sympathy for the young people who would be called on to do the fighting.
Instead, Miller saw dictators and tyrants on all sides, saying “We have our own dictator, only he is
hydra-headed.” (p. 18) What is striking for
the modern reader is to see how many passages of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare resemble writing from The Occupy
Movement and the environmental movement. The seeds of discontent were really
born in the post-WWI era, when capitalism accelerated in the new age of the
automobile, the airplane and the atom. Lately, it all seems to have been
discovered anew by a generation that had no awareness of the disasters that
befall capitalist economies from time to time.
Of course, Miller wasn’t the first to be
discontented with modernity, but he seems to have had a keen sense of the
arrival of a new kind of global dread that would follow the next war. He seems
to have been scientifically illiterate – he was clueless even about what was
under the hood of his car – and he couldn’t have known about the Manhattan
Project and the coming atomic age as he drove through the New Mexico desert,
but he knew something awful was in store:
A great change had
come over America, no doubt about that. There were greater ones coming, I felt
certain. We were only witnessing the prelude to something unimaginable. Everything
was cock-eyed, and getting more and more so. Maybe we would end up on all
fours, gibbering like baboons. Something disastrous was in store - everybody
felt it. Yes, America had changed. The lack of resilience, the feeling of
hopelessness, the resignation, the skepticism, the defeatism - I could scarcely
believe my ears at first. And over it all that same veneer of fatuous optimism
- only now decidedly cracked. (p.13)
Seventy
years before Gilding produced the quote above about ecological catastrophe,
Miller preferred to talk not about war between dictators and democrats, but man’s
coming war with his own nature – the need to invent a better form of social
organization than the materialism offered by both communism and capitalism:
A new world is not
made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit,
with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but today it is
caricatural. Our world is a world of things. It is made up of comforts and
luxuries, or else the desire for them. What we dread most, in facing the
impending debacle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gew-gaws, our
gadgets, all the little comforts which have made us so uncomfortable. There is
nothing brave, chivalrous, heroic or magnanimous about our attitude. We are not
peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky. (p. 17)
We are accustomed to
think of ourselves as an emancipated people; we say that we are democratic,
liberty-loving, free of prejudices and hatred. This is the melting-pot, the
seat of a great human experiment. Beautiful words, full of noble, idealistic
sentiment. Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily
mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such
like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to
offer the world beside the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from
the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress
and enlightenment? The land of opportunity has become the land of senseless
sweat and struggle. The goal of all our striving has long been forgotten. We no
longer wish to succor the oppressed and homeless; there is no room in this
great, empty land for those who, like our forefathers before us, now seek a
place of refuge. Millions of men and women are, or were until very recently, on
relief, condemned like guinea pigs to a life of forced idleness. The world
meanwhile looks to us with a desperation such as it has never known before.
Where is the democratic spirit? Where are the leaders?
As Democrats,
Republicans, Fascists, Communists, we are all on one level. That is one of the
reasons why we wage war so beautifully. We defend with our lives the petty
principles that divide us. The common principle, which is the establishment of
the empire of man on earth, we never lift a finger to defend. We are frightened
of any urge which would lift us out of the muck. We fight only for the status
quo, our particular status quo. We battle with heads down and eyes closed.
Actually, there never is a status quo, except in the minds of political
imbeciles. All is flux. Those who are on the defensive are fighting
phantoms.... What is the greatest
treason? To question what it is one may be fighting for. (p. 21)
Man in revolt against
his own cloying nature - that is real war. And that is a bloodless war which
goes on forever, under the peaceful name of evolution. (p. 22)
There are experiments
which are made with cunning and precision, because the outcome is divined
beforehand. The scientist, for example, always sets himself soluble problems.
But man’s experiment is not of this order. The answer to the grand experiment
is in the heart. We inhabit a mental world, a labyrinth in whose dark recesses
a monster waits to devour us. Thus far we have been moving in mythological
dream sequence, finding no solutions because we are posing the wrong questions.
We find only what we look for, and we are looking in the wrong place. (p. 22)
… the
toiling masses of humanity look with watery eyes to this Paradise where the
worker rides to work in his own car… they want the lethal comforts,
conveniences, luxuries. And they follow in our footsteps – blindly, heedlessly,
recklessly. (p. 33)
The worst is in the process of
becoming. It is inside us now. Only we haven’t brought it forth. (p. 42)
We tell the story as
though man were an innocent victim, a helpless participant in the erratic and
unpredictable revolutions of Nature. Perhaps in the past he was. But not any
longer. Whatever happens to this earth today is of man’s doing. Man has demonstrated
that he is master of everything – except his own nature. If yesterday he was a
child of nature, today he is a responsible creature. He has reached a point of
consciousness which permits him to lie to himself no longer. Destruction now is
deliberate, voluntary, self-induced. We are at the node: we can go forward or
relapse. We still have the power of choice. Tomorrow we may not. It is because
we refuse to make that choice that we are ridden with guilt, all of us, those
who are making war and those who are not. We are all filled with murder. We
loathe one another. We hate what we look like when we look into one another’s
eyes. (p. 175)
Why is it that in
America the great works of art are all Nature’s doing? There were skyscrapers,
to be sure, and dams and bridges and concrete highways. All utilitarian.
Nowhere in America was there anything comparable to the cathedrals of Europe, the temples of Asia and Egypt - enduring monuments carved out of faith and love
and passion. No exaltation, no fervor, no zeal - except to increase business,
facilitate transportation, enlarge the domain of ruthless exploitation. The
result? A swiftly decaying people, almost a third of them pauperized, the more
intelligent and affluent ones practicing race suicide, the underdogs becoming
more and more unruly, more criminal-minded, more degenerate and degraded in
every way.
The men of the future
will look upon the relics of this age as we now look upon the artifacts of the
Stone Age. We are mental dinosaurs. We lumber along heavy-footed, dull-witted,
unimaginative amidst miracles to which we are impervious. All our inventions
and discoveries lead to annihilation. (p.
228)
Other passages from The Air-Conditioned Nightmare resonate for millions of expatriates
and migrants who have experienced being uprooted and feeling alienated wherever
they find themselves. We want to speak about the world as citizens of it, not
as representatives of governments or stale cultural molds and stereotypes. We
who live in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster want to speak about
it, and want Japanese to speak about it, as a problem of humanity.
Though I became what is called an expatriate, I look upon the world not as a partisan of this country or that but as an inhabitant of the globe. That I happened to be born here is no reason why the American way of life should seem the best. That I chose to live in Paris is no reason why I should pay with my life for the errors of the French politicians. To be a victim of one's own mistakes is bad enough, but to be a victim of the other fellow's mistakes as well is too much. (p. 17)
The only artists who
were not leading a dog's life were the commercial artists; they had the
beautiful homes, beautiful brushes, beautiful models. The others were living
like ex-convicts. The impression was confirmed and deepened as I travelled
along. America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral
leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better
life than a creative writer, painter or musician. (p.
16)
I was frequently
reminded of the fact that I was an expatriate, often in an unpleasant way. The
expatriate had come to be looked upon as an escapist.... Nobody thought of
calling a man an escapist in the old days; it was the natural, proper, fitting
thing to do, go to Europe, I mean. (p. 16)
I had the misfortune
to be nourished by the dreams and visions of great Americans - the poets and
the seers. Some other breed of man has won out. The world which is in the
making fills me with dread.... It is a... false progress, a progress which
stinks. It is a world cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in
order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful. The dreamer
whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. Whatever does not
lend itself to being bought and sold, whether in the realm of things, ideas,
principles, dreams or hopes, is debarred. In this world the poet is anathema,
the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal. (p. 24)
If it takes a calamity
such as war to awaken and transform us, well and good, so be it. Let us see now
if the unemployed will be put to work and the poor properly clothed, housed and
fed; let us see if the rich will be stripped of their booty and made to endure
the privations and sufferings of the ordinary citizen; let us see if all the
workers of America, regardless of class, ability or usefulness, can be
persuaded to accept a common wage; let us see if the people can voice their
wishes in direct fashion, without the intercession, the distortion, and the
bungling of politicians; let us see if we can create a real democracy in place
of the fake one we have been finally roused to defend; let us see if we can be
fair and just to our own kind, to say nothing of the enemy whom we shall
doubtless conquer over. (p. 25)
To end, some comments from an itinerant
man at the Grand Canyon whom Miller affectionately described as a “desert rat.”
This voice from seventy years ago is priceless because it sheds light on a loss
that modern people are no longer aware of, and it speaks volumes about the
beginnings of our reckless endangerment of the planet that sustains us.
The automobile had
done one good thing, he admitted, and that was to break up people’s
clannishness. But on the other hand, it made people rootless. Everything was
too easy - nobody wanted to fight and struggle anymore. Men were getting soft.
Nothing could satisfy them anymore. Looking for thrills all the time. Something
he couldn’t fathom - how they could be soft and cowardly yet not frightened of
death. Long as it gave them a thrill, didn’t care what happened... He had seen
lots of cars turn over in the desert, racing at... a hundred and ten miles an
hour. (p. 222)
All
passages from
The
Air-Conditioned Nightmare
by
Henry
Miller
