Fragility

An audio essay by Jeff Goodell, author of “The Heat Will Kill You First,” argues that air-conditioning has lulled us into a false sense of security as we hurtle toward a warmer future and more blackouts (click: Air-Conditioning Gives A False Sense Of Security). The referenced sword of Damocles that hangs over us is more than some hyperbolic metaphor as he cites a five-day Phoenix blackout model that demonstrates 800,000 emergency room visits and 13,000 deaths.

Our discussion, however, is not about air conditioning or global warming per se, but about something larger i.e. the extent to which the realities of our interdependencies have laid waste to the myths of Self-Reliance that we studied way back in the eighth grade English class that featured those transcendental moonbeams, Emerson and Thoreau. You remember: build a small cabin in the woods, strip away superfluous luxuries, live a simple life and explore the sublime lightness of being.

Oh, grow up, you're not that kid in the treehouse anymore, and the culture has long been seduced by that Faustian pact with the devil: grant the unlimited knowledge, power, and efficiency afforded by technology and, in return, take our collective natural-born spirit. How far we have strayed from those formative myths of Self-Reliance in this hyper-connected world. Emerson might have labeled it a fragmented perspective, this material world featuring long supply chains.

But it is in our relationship with Nature where he most likely would have given up on what he’d termed the Oversoul. He might have regarded the Phoenix blackout model to be fitting existential payback. Indeed, the fragility of those hermetically sealed living units in the desert might serve as an apt metaphor for so much of our entire interconnected world becoming little more than one giant unnatural act. And, with that, comes a sense of estrangement from life itself.

Maybe start with man’s hubris in building McMansions on the perimeter of a forest and then whining when it’s taken out by a naturally-occurring wildfire. Or maybe that obsession with exotic travel, often reduced to little more than an ego-fueled stunt, bringing to mind Blaise Pascal’s, the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

And all that on a good day. Just wait for an EMP experience to take us to the land of Lincoln for a lesson in fragility. Pass the candle.