“People Cannot Stand Too Much Reality”


[ The Long Emergency back cover photo ]

James Howard Kunstler put that Carl Jung quote in the opening sentence of The Long Emergency, a copy of which I just bought on this first day of 2009. The book has gotten wide exposure since it was published in 2005, but in most “serious” intellectual circles, the post-petroleum scenarios Kunstler predicts tend to be dismissed as way over the top.

That has also been my inclination, but as the years pass, I’m getting the sinking feeling that he may be more on target than most of us would like to believe. And so I’ll read the damn book. Probably.

One corollary to “people cannot stand too much reality” is this: “people are drama queens.” Everyone loves a good doomsday scenario. The potential for imminent radical change brings passion to otherwise mundane lives.

Hence the Kunstler conundrum: is he just a talented drama queen appealing to lots of other drama queens, or are those who dismiss him simply in deep, self-destructive denial about the troublesome reality he describes?

And if you’re jonesin’ for the latest dose of reality according to Kunstler, read his relentlessly bleak Forecast for 2009. Right up front, he alludes to the source of resistance to his views:

“Since the change [The Long Emergency] proposes is so severe, it naturally generates exactly the kind of cognitive dissonance that paradoxically reinforces the Status Quo view, especially the deep wishes associated with saving all the familiar, comfortable trappings of life as we have known it.”

So on this New Year’s Day, that day of the year when we’re most inclined to stretch our minds both backward and forward in time, I ask: What next?

A painful long emergency, or a relatively smooth adaptation? Climate catastrophe or minor disruption? The worst economic crisis of the country’s history, or just a more-severe-than-average downturn in the typical business cycle? Collapse of a culture, or a door opening to a more highly evolved way of life?

It’s hard to imagine how anyone who’s paying attention couldn’t be imbued with the intuition that massive change is in the air. But we are handicapped by our temporal blinders — it’s nigh impossible to put the current situation in accurate historical perspective when you’re living in it.

And here comes 2009…

UPDATE:  Check out the eminently amiable Roger Ebert going off like he just drank a pitcher or two of Long Emergency Kool-Aid (via SLOG).