These next few entries will be my farewell to general blogging. I will be helping out my cousin, Jim Newberry, in his run for congress. But it is otherwise time for me to move on to other things.
The future is the only place which should concern us. The past is gone, and the present is owned by others, who have scant regard for truth. But this same disregard for truth has, and will, lead to ever greater consequences.
Prometheus was the hero of another age, who stole fire and paid in pain. It was the metaphor of that century - as Faust had been the metaphor for the century before it. But now it is time to set ghosts, and their stories, to rest. Odysseus was the post-modern hero - the man of lies and turns. But living only on the presidium of the television eye, he has tied himself into knots. We cannot govern in the headline and sound bite America, because they are too different from the America that is.
Instead it is underlying realities that must guide us.
The first of these is that the Arab world and China and India and the economies of South Asia, are due to join the affluent economy within this generation. They will demand, as others have demanded, their share of every scarce resource. The long half century where America could consime most of the world's energy, because it produced most of the world's security, is over. With the ending of the need for the American shield, will come the end of the willingness to feed it the ocean of oil that it requires.
As with the world, so with America itself. The need to "protect" the public from the truths of the cold war - which built a maze of deception over every subject, from nuclear power used to make the fissiles for nuclear missiles, to the organization of our transportation system, to our banking and taxation systems meant to prop up our wealthy against the risign tide of petrodollars - must also collapse. We no longer need to be protected from the realities behind and underneath our economy and society. With the ending of the Cold War comes the necessary end of the system of secrecy which it created.
With the ending of these pillars of the world - foreign and domestic - comes a new reality. No longer will America hold a privileged place as the guarantor of safety. America will have to compete directly and openly in all forms of economic, political and social interchange. To do so successfully means a great restructuring of America. The USSR could not accomplish this, and broke into fragments. America threw all on one last toss of the dice, and sought to parlay Pax Americana into Imperium Texicum. It has failed, as failed it must. The damage is great, but not so great as cannot be paid for.
The reality first is that energy moves all, and that our society is built as a jet engine for a fighter is, without regard to the energy cost. We have chosen, on both left and right, to have various luxuries of ideology which we can no longer afford. We have chosen, on both left and right, to place our faith in misty words which do not reflect the realities of energy.
The first is of the limits of the combustion age: greenhouse effect, Hubert Peak, and energy density are these realities. The simple truth is that the affluent life of the West cannot be scaled to the whole world, even should it have been attempted - there is not enough oil, nor enough air to soak up the Carbon Dioxide, nor can oil production be increased indefinitely.
The second is the limits of control. With each passing year, the cost of making goes down, but the cost of accounting for winning and losing goes up. Half of all Americans are employed, for all intents and purposes, to count money. Just as the USSR could not survive with a quarter of the population spying on the other three quarters, so too can America not survive with half the population counting the results of the other half.
The third limit is the limit of time itself. A society which becomes technological sudden produces far smaller families, and starts them later. The society ages. There is not enough young labor on the planet to both support the old, and earn enough to compete with younger societies not so encumbered with age. Nor will those younger societies be risk adverse, having nothing to lose in a war compared to those that they threaten.
The last limit is the limit of the bonds of the earth itself. Aged and with generations of conflicts, there must, and will, come a moment where only by seeking the limitless expansion which a society with free play of technology applied to the necessity of human growth will overwhelm all other considerations. The world is rich beyond our imaginations, should we learn to use that richness, rather than treat most of it as nothing more than a vast dust bin for our pollution.
These limits conspire for this coming generation to dare greatly, and, in truth, to fall far. We do not yet know enough, nor do we have the knowledge to accomplish in full what must be done. But, as Iraq shows, risk death we must - either in wars over the past, or in risks for the future. It is only ours to chose how we should risk our lives, and for what results.
And to whom should go the benefits.
To a small core of the wealthy, who do nothing but place a toll booth on land, information, energy and power - or to our own future and to those of our children, who are now just being born?