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City Journal |
There is
no such thing on the political scene as an “anti-environmentalist,” no cogent
intellectual position by that name. Conservatives rarely challenge Greens on
moral grounds. While environmentalists stake out moral claims, conservatives
grumble about costs, growth, and property rights.
Why? Do environmentalists
self-evidently command the higher moral ground? You might argue to the contrary
that, although loving nature and protecting it are good things in themselves,
environmentalists are guilty of writing prescriptions with no regard for the
patient’s prior state of health. Environmentalism is a spiritual disaster (you
might argue) because as a society we have a penchant for passivity, which the
Greens have turned into a full-blown crisis. Take a country that has achieved
its dearest goals—the “good life” within reach of every man, woman, and child;
American power and ideals ascendant all over the world—but has yet to come up
with any new ones. Superimpose the Environmentalist Credo—careful, hands off, don’t
touch!—and voilà: passivity so monumental that when a major highway
collapses in a big city, the public dithers for 22 years before replacing it.
You might further argue
that environmentalism’s moral underpinnings are questionable. Passionate
environmentalists reject the proposition that love of nature is ennobling
because loving nature is good for human dignity and happiness. They flirt
instead with a worldview in which human beings are a species on a par with
every other, and nature is to be protected not because you damage other
people’s happiness when you destroy it wantonly but because nature itself has
rights to assert against man. The Smithsonian, for example, posted a label in
its Museum of Natural History apologizing for a display in which “humans are
treated as more important than other mammals.” Environmentalists who hold that
opinion ought to be frank about it, and the rest of us ought to tell them that
it is unacceptable and, in fact, morally grotesque.
Former generations were
wrong, some Greens believe, to have seen nature as a battleground where man
fought for survival. They were wrong to see nature as Tennyson did, “red in
tooth and claw.” They ought to have realized that, when you get to know her,
nature is adorable. Love of nature is a deep and honorable vein in the American
character, but some of today’s Greens don’t seem like nature lovers at all.
They seem more like cultivators of foppish sentimentality. The historian Robert
Darnton quotes a fan letter to Rousseau from an admirer of La Nouvelle
Héloïse: “Oh! is not virtue beautiful!” A perfect motto for the Natural
Resources Defense Council. Self-righteousness is no crime, but it is dishonest
to deny that we owe our victory over nature—the victory that allows us to see
the natural world as benign instead of terrifying—to the ingenuity of
scientists and technologists and the wealth created by industrial capitalism.
My goal, however, isn’t to
win any debates for the anti-environmentalist position. I only want to make
clear that there is an anti-environmentalist position, with arguments
and moral claims that are at least as compelling as the other side’s. Today’s unequal
debate over the environment, made out by the Right’s dereliction to be an
argument between money and principle, is important also as one part of a bigger
picture. Conservative politicians consistently, unaccountably, fail to address
moral problems in moral terms. In this respect they have failed the American
people, and the costs are staggering.
On a
ferry to New Jersey early this century, the young Robert Moses laid out for
Frances Perkins (later FDR’s secretary of labor) a vision of Manhattan’s West
Side transformed. Moses saw an ugly patch of city and thought it ought to be
beautiful and useful instead. Those railroad tracks ought to be hidden, the
mudflats turned into parks, a highway laid out beside the river, clubs and
marinas and restaurants put up, along with bicycle paths and tennis courts. In
later years he carried out his big plans: Manhattan’s West Side became the
setting for a dazzling display of activity by an active, driven generation. We
have chosen the same West Side of Manhattan as a setting for our own equally
dazzling display of passivity. In 1974 the West Side Highway collapsed. State
and federal officials approved a plan for the permanent replacement in August
1994. During the intervening 20 years environmental objections stymied all
activity; the rebuilding of the West Side Highway began at last this spring.
The contrast between Moses’
age and our own makes a telling background to a characteristic modern story
about environmentalism and its costs.
The kangaroo rat, a member of
the Endangered Species List (the highest honor to which a rodent can aspire),
is a controversial creature. In 1993 devastating wildfires around Los Angeles
destroyed 29 homes in Riverside County. Homeowners and some journalists
(including John Stossel of ABC) believed that these particular 29 succumbed
because the owners had been forbidden to plow firebreaks around their houses.
“This high-jumping rodent,” the Los Angeles Times explained of the
kangaroo rat, “makes its shallow burrows in sandy soils, rendering it
vulnerable to plowing or disking.” So residents were ordered to create
firebreaks not by plowing or disking but only by mowing.
The fires came and homes
burned, and the General Accounting Office was called in to investigate. The rat
wasn’t to blame, it concluded; these particular firestorms “moved with such
ferocity that clearing hundreds of feet of ground would not have helped.” A few
journalists remained skeptical: the GAO, after all, is “the accounting firm for
the organization that passed the [Endangered Species] law,” Stossel noted. He
stood by his original conclusion, that rat preservation was implicated in the
disaster.
Biologist Michael E. Soule
responded to the likes of Stossel in the Los Angeles Times. Every
species ought to be maintained in its natural habitat, Soule believes, “even if
a few human beings may have to forgo some profits.”
In disasters like the 1993
firestorm, environmentalism is not to blame. “Hubris and greed compel us to
build on steep slopes, in fire-prone habitats and in flood plains.”
What are the basic issues
in this dispute? Maybe the 1993 firestorms were so fierce that proper
firebreaks wouldn’t have stopped them; let’s suppose they were. But common
sense—and (implicitly) the report itself—suggests that dugout firebreaks
prevent some fires. How do we weigh the claims of the kangaroo rat to a
quiet life in its favorite habitat against the claims of people who want to
dig?
Some Americans see it as a
strict moral obligation to maintain every species in its natural habitat, a
moral obligation sufficiently important and unarguable to impose on the whole
population by force. What are their grounds for this sweeping assertion? They
are rarely spelled out, but I think most environmentalists would agree with
Vice President Gore’s claim in his Earth in the Balance that nature has
“inherent” value and that mankind has spiritual duties to nature.
Many other Americans cannot
see this maintenance-of-every-species as a moral obligation of any kind. I
can’t myself. If kangaroo rats are in danger of dying out, I figure, let it be
illegal to kill them needlessly. (Of course, a sensible person might just as
well argue that if rats of any kind are dying out, the faster the better.) For
scientific purposes, suppose we scoop up a bunch of kangaroo rats and establish
a permanent breeding colony at a laboratory someplace.
But suppose now that I own
the last lot on which kangaroo rats are happy, and I am trying to decide
whether I have a moral obligation not to plow a firebreak. If I plow, let’s say
I will inconvenience 500 kangaroo rats and they will wander off and die; and
those 500 are the last 500 in the wild, so I will have eradicated the
species in nature. Why should that be a crime? Why should it even be wrong?
Not because it is wrong to kill
animals. I could have ordered 500 live chickens from a catalog and turned them
into soup the moment they arrived. But those rats were the last of their kind
in the wild; maybe it is wrong to kill them because we tolerate no permanent
changes to the environment. But we do tolerate such changes all the
time—we pump oil out of the ground and burn it, cut canals, blast through
mountains. Perhaps this case is different because it shuts down a particular
gene pool? But it doesn’t; I’m assuming we have taken the trouble to establish
a kangaroo-rat colony in a laboratory, so the genes live on. (Environmentalists
do insist that species must survive in the wild; mere survival is no
good. Thus, an environmental group complained recently, on the occasion of Newt
Gingrich’s visit to the Atlanta Zoo, that zoos are “the only places you’ll see
many of those animals” if the Endangered Species Act is changed.) Maybe it
ought to be a crime to force animals to live under less than ideal
conditions—in a lab, say, instead of someone’s front lawn. But of course, many
farm animals might choose to go free if we put it to a vote, and there are dogs
whose happiness would be considerably improved if they were given the run of
the living room. All civilized people abhor cruelty to animals; but most accept
that animals (like people) might have to put up with imperfect living
arrangements.
Let’s
suppose, however, that we were indeed about to lose the kangaroo-rat gene pool
for all time. It might not always be possible to perpetuate a species in the
lab. Do we have a moral duty to ensure that every gene pool last forever? I
can’t imagine why we should. We have no objection to the human gene pool’s
being diminished when people fail to reproduce. And species die out in nature
all the time—only a tiny fraction of all species remain alive today. You might
argue that “good stewardship” requires that we preserve every species we can:
the kangaroo-rat genome might be a bioengineering gold mine someday. This is a
strange argument coming from environmentalists, but up to a point it is
absolutely valid: we should indeed refrain from killing endangered creatures
needlessly, and make every effort to establish them in a lab; it is a mistake
to sell science short. Yet beyond those reasonable and prudent steps, what
right can a minority have to ordain a policy of “save everything, just in
case!” and pass the costs on to the rest of us? Imposing significant real costs
on real people on account of conceivable social benefits of some
undetermined type at some undetermined time is a piece of arrogance that
environmentalists can manage, but the rest of us mostly can’t.
Perhaps, though, the crime
in doing away with the kangaroo rat is that its disappearance would make
certain people unhappy. After all, most people are willing to forbid
activities that cause widespread, serious unhappiness. But the “widespread” and
“serious” are important; otherwise, we get tangled up in petty tyranny. Today’s
free market in pornography, for example, causes many people serious unhappiness.
But as a nation we no longer see those people’s aggregate unhappiness, however
deep and sincere, as substantial enough to justify prohibition.
Environmentalists might
argue that allowing the kangaroo rat to disappear would cause
widespread, serious unhappiness, but I don’t believe that claim. If the
kangaroo rat were to vanish this afternoon, hardly anyone would know the
difference. I don’t doubt that some environmentalists do get spiritual
nourishment from the kangaroo rat, but some people deriving some
value from a slice of nature has never been sufficient grounds for declaring
that slice off limits to the rightful owners. I may have a maple in my front
yard that all my neighbors admire, but I can chop it down if I want to. It
might be rotten of me, but it’s no crime. And if I chopped it down for cause—to
make my house safer, let’s say—my neighbors are likely to understand.
So here we are at the nub.
It would be criminal for you to plow that firebreak, the environmentalist is
forced to argue in the end, because you have a duty to nature. Because
nature has “intrinsic” value, as Vice President Gore puts it. And here we
stand, the environmentalists and we anti-environmentalists, on opposite sides
of a philosophical Grand Canyon.
Because,
of course, you reject “duties to nature” when you reject paganism. Kindness to
animals, it is true, is a strong moral imperative in the Judeo-Christian
tradition. In Judaism the thread starts in the Bible—the Ten Commandments, for
example, explicitly direct that animals as well as people are to rest on the
Sabbath. It is confirmed in the Talmud; in one instance among many, a famous
passage in Berakhot lays down that a man is not to eat until he has fed
his animals. It continues in the rabbinic literature down to the present day.
But at the same time, the moral universe of Judaism and Christianity centers
unequivocally on man. Human beings have rights and moral duties—kindness to
animals being one. Animals have neither. The duty of kindness to animals is a
duty owed not to nature but to God, a morally crucial distinction.
Judaism and Christianity
have a radical agenda; they may not live up to it in practice, but their goals
are clear. They deem every human life to be sacred. At the same time, they wipe
the slate clean of nature gods, nature spirits, any and all “duties to nature.”
(Paganism has traditionally been stronger in Germany than in any other Western
culture, and perhaps that is why environmentalism is so strong in modern
Germany. In any case, the “pure and holy Rhine” of the German lyric poets is
incompatible with Christianity.) In the Judeo-Christian view man is
emphatically not part of nature. Human life has an entirely different
value from animal life, and protecting and preserving human life is a moral
duty that sweeps away all “duties” to nature whatsoever—that sweeps away the
very idea of “duties to nature.”
If (for example) we can
protect human life or improve it by using animals for medical research, then in
this view we are not simply permitted; we are obligated to do that
research. This man- and God-centered view of the universe has other
implications we may not like to discuss. If we choose to terminate a chicken
for the sole reason that we want to eat chicken and not soy mush, although we
have plenty of soy mush on hand, we are permitted to do it. We are permitted to
kill a cow for no better reason than disinclination to wear plastic shoes. We
are permitted to plow up the kangaroo rat’s habitat merely (merely?) to protect
our homes from fire. If you decide to eat no meat or give up leather or
defer to the kangaroo rat, some people will praise your decision and others
condemn it. In any case it’s your own affair. But in no circumstances can we
permit you to impose that decision on anyone else.
The environmentalists can’t
accept this; how can the imposition of virtue, they want to know, be bad? Isn’t
the state supposed to impose virtue? Or at least to promote it? Maybe
preserving the kangaroo rat overdoes it a tad, but virtue is a good thing, and you
can only praise a nation that goes overboard in that direction. The problem is,
forcing your fellow man to accommodate the interests of every endangered
species on the block is no instance of excessive virtue. It isn’t virtuous at
all. It’s depraved. A rich, idle misanthrope who cares more for his dogs than
the neighbor’s children is a study in moral degradation. So is a rich, idle
nation that forces men to defer to rats.
A morally serious
conservative movement and Republican Party would stand up and argue this
anti-Green position—instead of allowing people to believe that the only grounds
for objecting to the environmentalist agenda is that regulation costs too much.
A person
might object in substance to environmentalist laws like the Endangered Species
Act; he might also object to the process by which we got the law in the first
place.
Maintaining the kangaroo
rat in its natural habitat is no kind of recognized moral obligation in the
Judeo-Christian or American moral traditions on which our laws are based. As a
nation we do take on new moral duties from time to time—normally, though, in
the wake of nationwide discussion and some sort of rough consensus. In this
case there was no serious discussion and there is no consensus.
When the Endangered Species
Act passed the Senate unanimously in 1973, it became illegal to “take”
endangered species—to hunt and kill them. The law was extended later to
prohibit “harming” endangered species also, but it was a 1984 federal court
ruling that classified “habitat modification” as a form of “harming” and
therefore, where protected species were concerned, a federal crime. The court
order itself was a fait accompli, but conservative leaders might have
used it as an occasion for a nationwide debate on our obligations to endangered
species and, for that matter, on the meaning of democracy in an age of
“activist” (what other eras would have called “tyrannical”) judges. But they
didn’t and, so far as one can tell, don’t ever plan to.
The complacency of
conservative leaders is even more alarming when you consider that, if we put
off the debate long enough, the outcome will be a forgone conclusion.
Relentless indoctrination in the schools will have eliminated any chance of a
serious discussion.
My own young boys came home
from school not long ago singing hymns to recycling they had learned from a
“folksinger” at an assembly. That recycling is a policy choice and not a
revelation from God, that it has benefits and also costs and might be a good
idea sometimes and bad others—such ideas are utterly foreign and in some cases
literally incomprehensible to younger teachers. The real battle over
environmentalism is being fought in the classroom, and it’s a rout.
We
anti-environmentalists don’t object only to some important Green laws and to
the process by which they were put in place. We don’t like the Greens’ attitude
either; it tends to be ill-considered and self-righteous. Soule, in his Los
Angeles Times piece, helps explain.
Endangered species must be
protected in their natural habitats, he believes, “even if a few human beings
may have to forgo some profits.” The forgoing of profits is clearly no
big deal to an environmentalist.
Does the American public
agree? Suppose the profits to be forgone amount to a small businessman’s whole
income. Suppose they belong to a wealthy businessman—now in his seventies,
let’s say, who was born poor and struggled his whole life to build a company.
Is it right to zero out his earnings on behalf of the kangaroo rat? Or any
other rat? Or does Soule mean, when he speaks of some profits, that our
businessmen will be allowed to keep a proportion of their earnings no matter
what the Endangered Species Law decrees? How much? Six percent? Two? Who
decides? Might any of the profits to be forgone belong to a businessman who was
born rich and had it easy—but employs a hundred people who make a decent living
from his enterprise and will be out of a job when we tell him that, henceforth,
he will have to forgo his profits? But let’s assume the worst: 100 percent of
those tainted profits go to rich, pampered, greedy, Republican white males who
never crack a smile or feel anyone else’s pain. What business is it of Soule’s?
Many Americans, I suspect, would advise him to forgo his own profits and quit
right there.
If the environmentalist
attack on “profits” seems to be based less on reason than emotional antipathy,
the antipathy seems ill-considered too. Only rich countries can afford “duties
to nature.” Industrially backward communist Russia and Eastern Europe fouled
the environment monumentally. Primitive societies (of the type some
environmentalists admire for their reverence for nature) didn’t toy with rats;
they had sense enough to realize that wolves, given that they kill valuable
animals, are to be got rid of, not fussed over. No society has ever before had
the luxury of indulging a passion as marginal and frivolous as the one
underlying the Endangered Species Act.
Our basic problem,
according to Soule, is that “hubris and greed compel us to build on steep
slopes, in fire-prone habitats and in flood plains.” You might say, by the same
token, that “hubris and greed” compelled the Israelis to plant orange groves in
the desert—a rotten location (ecologically speaking) for orange groves. Los
Angeles itself is in a silly place for a taco shop, let alone a city: too hot,
insufficient water, the avalanche-prone San Gabriel mountains next door.
Manhattan took colossal hubris—a great city on a small island, cut off
from food and water?
Nevertheless, Vice President
Gore agrees that hubris is a big problem: we have “fallen victim,” he writes,
“to a kind of technological hubris.”
Hubris is
important: it is the coupling pin that connects our world to the America of
(let’s say) 1940. What environmentalists see as hubris—the human drive to build
where conditions are bad and the building is tough—1940 tended to see as the
essential human enterprise, inspiring and noble.
Of the many eras of intense
building in New York City, the 1930s and early 1940s were a particularly
dramatic time. The roads and bridges of those years still shape the city. The
Gowanus Expressway, the Belt and Henry Hudson parkways, the West Side Highway,
and East River Drive are products largely of the thirties (spilling over into
the early forties). The city’s first airport, North Beach (later La Guardia),
was begun in 1937. The George Washington Bridge opened in 1931, followed by the
monumental Triborough Bridge in 1936, the Henry Hudson Parkway in 1936, the
Marine Parkway in 1937, and the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge in 1939. The Lincoln
Tunnel opened in 1937 and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel in 1940.
New York was exceptional
because of its nearly unstoppable parks commissioner, Robert Moses. But all
across the country, the 1930s transformed the American landscape. On the
opposite coast, the Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate were finished in
1937. Boulder Dam (called “Hoover” when it was begun, “Boulder” when it opened
under a Democratic administration, and “Hoover” again with the Republicans back
in control of Congress in 1947) was the highest in the world when it opened in
1936. The Grand Coulee Dam, opened in 1941, generated more power than any
other. And so on.
The building boom reflected
a very different national culture from ours, a culture not distinctive to the
thirties—it goes back centuries—but vividly expressed in those years. When we
hear the word “landscape,” we are apt to think first of nature. When Stuart
Davis used the term (Swing Landscape, 1938), he meant a sprawling
collection of chimneys and bridges and oil derricks rendered with electric
sparkle in lovely greens, oranges, reds, and lilacs. In the 1930s (and
earlier), a stretch of waterfront no longer in a state of nature was said to be
“improved.” The American environment we care about is the natural one;
the thirties cared most for the man-made environment. That disagreement speaks
to a profound difference in worldview.
The press
likes to draw a dichotomy between nature-loving environmentalists and their
nature-hating opponents, but that is malicious nonsense; there is no such
dichotomy. A person can love nature and detest a good deal of the
environmentalist agenda at the same time. People in 1940 would never have stood
for an Endangered Species Act, but the era didn’t lack for nature lovers.
Nature shouldered aside by the rude, burgeoning city is a familiar thirties
lament. In the 1920s Georgia O’Keefe scattered floral still lifes among her
urban scenes at the Stieglitz gallery, where she showed her work: “I will make
even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.” In 1940 the
president had a long history of conservationist interests and came from a
notably conservationist family. The Roosevelt administration established new
national parks and forests; the Civilian Conservation Corps tended forests and
built wildlife shelters. At the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the electrical
engineer who designed the spectacular fountain-and-fireworks,
music-and-gas-jets sound-and-light show had to be called out of retirement on
Nantucket, where he had been raising wind-adapted trees for coastal planting. This
crack technician, at least, would have been puttering around his plants had he
not been called upon to design one of the age’s greatest high-tech
extravaganzas.
But of course, our own
attitude toward nature differs radically from what was typical in the 1930s,
regardless of the thirties’ fond regard for flowers and forests. Ironic
distance is our own particular specialty, yet it fails us utterly where nature
is concerned. “How can you disregard the Atlantic Ocean, the Grand Canyon, and
Niagara Falls?” asks Delmore Schwartz on behalf of Randall Jarrell, attempting
to summarize Jarrell’s views. “Poetry,” he answers, “has the overwhelming
reality of these natural phenomena, and it is certainly far more interesting.”
(Nature might be awe-inspiring and all that, but compared to man-made objects
like bridges and poems, it might be a trifle boring also.) The essay dates from
1953 but would have been perfectly at home in the 1930s, when Schwartz first
made his mark. “He who claims that man cannot improve on nature,” writes Gerald
Wendt, science director at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, “. . . forgets that
steel, concrete and glass are all unnatural products.” In 1928 Yeats had
expressed his famous preference, should he die and be re-embodied, for the
enameled gold birds of Byzantium over any mere fluff-headed natural-born
specimen. The 1930s loved nature but approached it with a certain detachment.
There is
an “environment” that obsessed the America of that time, that awakened the same
energy and spirit that nature awakens in us—and that was the man-made
environment. It was a brisk, businesslike era; and yet it had a spiritual,
almost mystical belief in the transcendent beauty and importance of the act of
building.
That belief resounds (the
way medieval Christianity does in a reliquary or altarpiece) in Lewis Hine’s
photograph of an engineer sighting through a theodolite, perched high on an
unfinished skyscraper: in shirtsleeves and a dusty fedora and the barest smile,
he has the presence of a Sforza on horseback. He practically lights up the city
with hubris, no question. It resounds in Margaret Bourke-White’s famous
photograph of Fort Peck Dam under construction in Montana, Life
magazine’s first cover: concrete abutments loom like man-made mountains over
two tiny figures in the foreground. It is there in Hugh Ferriss’s drawing of
the Perisphere under construction at the World’s Fair, thrust forward within
rendered space so the top of the sphere is clipped off, pressed flat as if
viewed through a long telephoto lens, done in charcoal like most of his
drawings but seeming to exude light as if it were silver. It is there in a
Federal Writers’ Project description of Raymond Hood’s RCA Building: of its
“great knife-like prow and cliff-like side.” New York’s tall buildings, says
the New York Times, “are the expression of American daring and American
contempt for limits.” Of American hubris!—how could you say it more clearly?
They are lifted skyward “by a demoniac energy” that is “characteristically
American.” Like any spiritual belief, it is hard to account for rationally, but
it is there, and it is unmistakable.
Our modern obsession with
nature’s landscape and the thirties’ with its own man-made landscape have
radically different implications. The thirties’ passion for building aroused
(and, of course, reflected) large-scale national activity. Our passion for
nature makes us passive. The man-made environment was in their power to create.
As for us, we cannot make the slightest contribution to nature’s achievements;
we are mere fusspot curators. The energy we used to invest in making things
better we have decided to spend, instead, on keeping them the same.
In New York City some
public toilets were installed by a French company on a trial basis in July
1992. The public was duly grateful. Then the toilets were hauled away again,
and the city still hasn’t figured out under what circumstances it would allow
them to be reinstated. The problem has to do with access for people in
wheelchairs: do some toilets have to be accessible, or must all toilets? Again
in New York, a mentally ill man was finally carted off to a psychiatric
hospital after menacing residents in an Upper West Side neighborhood for years.
He escaped, was arrested, and was brought back to the hospital—soon after
which, a state judge ordered the hospital to release him three months after the
original incarceration date, not hold him for six months, as psychiatrists
wished. However you choose to interpret these facts, the facts themselves are
plain. We are a passive society: not a little passive but very, very passive,
unable to take care even of our basic needs for protection from the criminally
insane and for a place to go to the bathroom. The 1930s would have found us, in
this respect, funny and pathetic.
“Action is our slogan,”
writes the World’s Fair’s science director. “Not for us, as for our ancestors,
to bear adversity with fortitude, to await our reward in the next world. If the
world is awry we can change it.” The thirties’ passion not to stand back
passively but to grapple with problems, build solutions, and let that hubris
roll inspired a mural at the World’s Fair. It shows “an electrician, gazing
defiantly at bolts of lightning,” the goal being to depict “man’s desire to
control and direct nature.”
Control and direct
indeed! we say
indignantly.
Only a
fool would choose to put America’s clock back to 1940. But today’s pundit
community lights into “nostalgia merchants” (as the First Lady calls them) with
an intensity that is thought-provoking and revealing. A recent Guggenheim
Museum catalog epitomizes the conventional attitude: the curator apologizes for
an exhibit that might be regarded as “an act of nostalgia.” Horrors. “If
America were such a picture-postcard of familial bliss in 1955,” Frank Rich
announces in the New York Times, “there would have been no reason to
create Disneyland.” Only a darned unhappy society could have dreamed up
such a fancy amusement park!
Why do they protest so much?
Nostalgia is a given of the human condition. Problem is, we “nostalgia
merchants” are hitting too close to the emotional bull’s-eye for comfort,
aren’t we, Mr. Rich? Mrs. Clinton?
Conservative thinkers
increasingly tend to believe that the nation’s problems are moral and
spiritual. “Only a moral reformation,” Irving Kristol wrote last year, “can
counter the demoralization produced jointly by the welfare state and the
counterculture.” Yet conservative politicians rarely speak in clear moral terms
about any issue except abortion. You could argue that this refusal to address
moral problems in moral terms has been more important than any other force in
the shaping of modern America. It goes back to the late 1960s: in one of the
most astonishing, least analyzed, least understood big events of American
history, the “establishment” chose to fold its hands instead of defend itself
against an angry but shallow onslaught. U.S. culture rolled over, turned
upside-down; the moral universe circa 1965 found virtually no defenders. Was it
really indefensible? Are we a happier, better nation today?
There couldn’t be a
clearer sign of upside-down morals than a law favoring rats over humans. But
our morals in this country are so thoroughly upside-down that our unusual posture
no longer even registers. Plain citizens are passionate for racial equality
while the government and the schools and big business demand prejudice and
(insofar as they can) compel it. But Republicans dither over making an issue of
“affirmative action.” Brave souls in the real world plead for Shakespeare,
while the universities (with a few honorable exceptions) snicker and revel in
their position as our main bastions of anti-intellectualism. Republicans rarely
mention the issue. Parents beg for decent schooling in the basics, and the
schools respond with self-esteem exercises, recycling songs, and empty
fun-and-games with computers.
On a
mid-April Sunday I strolled with my family through Corona Park in Queens, where
I had come to give a talk at a museum. It was the first hot day of the year;
the park was full of children on bicycles and Rollerblades, teenagers necking,
adults lounging. A day when the sun is hot but the trees are mostly still bare
doesn’t seem quite real, and people were groggy, faintly suspicious.
Still, it was pleasant,
relaxed, and (for a busy park) almost peaceful. So why did Corona Park feel so
much like a Third-World country? Not because of the Spanish you heard
everywhere. Rather, because of the garbage tumbling over the lawns and collecting
round the rims of the empty pools—plastic forks, milk cartons, soda bottles,
empty bags. Because of street signs askew and bald spots in the unkempt lawns.
Because of boom-box music, not painfully loud (this was a friendly crowd) but
too loud to ignore. Because of children and parents who seemed to dress exactly
the same way and look round with the same casual indifference. Corona Park, in
short, was a slovenly place, and despite the sunshine there was something
awfully sad about it.
Inside the museum I was the
last of three artists on the program; five minutes into the presentation, we
had already heard about McCarthyism’s important role in the first speaker’s
work. How we treasure this minor national humiliation four decades later! In
short, there was no hubris on display this particular Sunday—rather,
self-loathing, outside the museum and inside. Outside, it was casual and
benign, people shrugging off garbage. Inside, it was nasty.
In both places you saw a
country at sea, rich and careless enough to order its citizens to reorganize
their lives, drop their big plans, and spend billions in deference to their
“duties to nature;” lacking the will to sweep up the trash in the park.