Many years ago, at the peak of the Cold War standoff, I read “Alas, Babylon” which begins with World War III and ends as a Fenimore Cooper tale of frontier survival in a small river town in Florida. It is, in effect, an apocalyptic pastoral.
At the end of the first day of the war, which is effectively the last day as well, a thermonuclear weapon obliterates the nearest large city, Orlando, which is the source of the town’s power. I have never forgotten this sentence. “Thus, the lights went out, and in that moment civilization in Fort Repose retreated a hundred years.
We all imagine we are self-sufficient and relatively safe day by day, but in fact we survive due to an elaborate web of connections and systems that have to keep working and may not be as robust as we imagine.
Every once in a while we are awaked to the gossamer nature of the web we depend on and the fragility of our reality. When a bridge collapses, when a hurricane turns ot the lights, the refrigeration, the heat and air conditioning, the communications we rely on.
On a personal scale, when the water doesn’t come out of the tap, the sewage doesn’t disappear down the pipe, the computers are down at the bank, the lights go out, the fuel trucks don’t arrive or the shipments of produce, we find we are not self-sufficient, but dependent from one moment to the next — if not on the kindness of strangers, then surely on their competency.
The supply chain that brings us food, clothing, fuel, medicine, soap, toilet paper is global. We communicate thanks to cables, cell towers, satellites. We survive thanks to roads, ports, bridges, engineers, technicians, utility and public service employees.
The government that survivalists and libertarians love to hate keeps us from being invaded by foreign enemies, comes when we call to stop a thief, put out a fire, or rush a child or grandmother to the hospital, provides water and sewer service and protects us from being poisoned by our food, medicines, water and air.
None of he overlapping systems we rely on are infallible or foolproof. The lights do go out, as in Puerto Rico. The water can be made toxic as in Flint, Michigan. Insufficiently vetted foods and medicines can kill us. Rules governing markets and banking can be too weak to prevent the rapacious from crashing the economy. Insufficient attention may allow elections to be hacked or terrorists to attack. And when that happens we don’t say “C’est la vie, I guess we aren’t as safe as we suppose.” Instead, we feel betrayed.
Free market economists argue that individual self-interest makes the world go ‘round, but even Adam Smith knew there had to be rules of the road and that the good enlightenment virtues of caution, care, probity, cooperation, law and order were needed to curb the worst excesses of the selfish, the vicious and the unscrupulous.
The vast majestic clockwork that makes modern life possible can be disrupted by sand in the gears. Around the world can be seen the results of insufficient appreciation of the virtues embodied in the old-fashioned but not out of fashion idea of the commonweal. In places where the few exploit the many and the machine of civilization no longer functions — failed states, kleptocracies, tyrannies, banana republics — life is poor, nasty, brutish short, and man is a wolf to man.
It can happen here. It is happening here, Detention camps. Public and private debt out of control. Government services financed by borrowing rather than taxing. Great corporations profiting from stealing our identify or corrupting our elections, Congressmen and cabinet offices casually engaging in insider trading, instead of making economic crimes harder to pull off. Billionaires who imperil their own freedom, the country’s security and the stability of the system that enriched them only to pile their loot a little higher.
An international system of trade, treaties, defense and environmental protection is blithely abandoned. Regulations to protect the citizenry scuttled in favor of self-aggrandizement for campaign donors. Life-saving medical care and pharmaceuticals priced out of reach for many. Education dumbed down or made unaffordable. Guardrails to prevent another market catastrophe dismantled. Norms violated. The Constitution gamed. The courts subverted. The government sold to the highest bidder.
None of this is done as a result of careful analysis, cautious long-range planning, a calculation of the consequences, or a regard for the public interest. It is done out of self-interest, to curry favor, to pick winners, to cash in, to get even, to satisfy a whim, to engineer a self-fulfilling prophecy, to conform with an ideological doctrine, or to win the next election.
Increasingly, it appears that those in positions of power are not statesmen, patriots, or public servants. They are con artists, cranks, and egomaniacs. Some are akin to the barbarians who let Rome descend into ruin because they couldn’t be bothered to learn how to maintain the aqueducts, the roads, the intellectual and physical infrastructure on which the empire depended. This institutional knowledge is what the mockers now scorn as the deep state or the bureaucracy.
Closer to home than Rome, those in charge also recall Tom and Daisy from the Roaring Twenties that ended in a crash not a whimper, “careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness…and let other people clean up the mess they made.”
But some things took so long to build, are so intricately made, and run in part on expertise and trust, that once broken they can not easily be mended. And when our civilization is broken, will our heirs stand amid the ruins and lament our letting it happen in words like these from two millennia ago? “Alas, alas, that great city of Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.”