James Howard Kunstler's Reactionary Futurology

The December 2008 issue of Newsmax magazine includes an article, "10 Ways to Prepare for a Post-oil Society," that offers some astonishing predictions. Written by James Howard Kunstler, a misanthropic novelist, it (wrongly) assumes that the age of inexpensive energy is over and draws the conclusions in the areas of transportation, nutrition, demography commerce, manufacturing, entertainment, education, medicine, and institutions. Here's one example of his preposterous thinking, here with a focus on entertainment:

The age of canned entertainment is coming to an end. It was fun for a while. We liked Citizen Kane and The Beatles. But we're going to have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo players, playwrights and scenery makers, and singers. We'll need theater managers and stagehands. The Internet is not going to save canned entertainment. The Internet will not work so well if the electricity is on the fritz half the time.

James Howard Kunstler happily predicts a return to the 19th century.

And so it is with all the other aspects of life – a return to a time before the combustion engine, air travel, electricity, radio and television, pharmaceuticals, computers, and just about everything else that's happened in the past roughly 150 years. Kunstler's predictions appear to be a Luddite's dream to early-industrial society where the railroad and vaudeville make a comeback, and where "Farming soon will return closer to the center of American economic life."

Comment: Interesting how economic upheavals so predictably bring out the apocalyptic; but strange when reactionaries relish the prospect of impoverishment. (December 1, 2008)

May 31, 2011 update: For an opposite analysis, foreseeing cheap energy for centuries, if not millennia, see Michael Lind, "Everything you've heard about fossil fuels may be wrong."

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