The Killer Normal
"All that is solid melts into air."
-- Marx
A quick campaign note:
In the last debate, several commentators, Chris Matthews being the first one I heard, noted that John McCain was off-base in repeatedly describing the American people as angry. In fact, this chorus chirped, Americans are afraid, uncertain, and depressed -- not angry. Some suggested that McCain was simply projecting his own anger onto the public as a whole. But more to the point, anger is actually intrinsic to the general themes of the McCain campaign: stories of greed, excess, and purposeful waste. Things are bad because bad people have been doing objectionable things, not because there are any systemic flaws in the American project as a whole. And on the uglier side of American conservatism, anger fuels the decades-old culture war, which has burst to life in the fiery rallies of Sarah Palin. "Real Americans" are indeed still angry at the condescending, atheist, baby-killing liberals who stalk the coasts in their Volvos and Saabs. So sure, most Americans are afraid and depressed, but a good swath are also angry, due to the scorched earth tactics of conservative planners and right-wing echo chamber media outlets.
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In the panic now swirling around our nation, where the new terrifying question-du-jour is "what did the DOW do today?," everyone wants to know when things will be returning to normal. There is an almost pathological obsession with predicting when we'll be coming out of the current swoon. Some economists are saying that the worst is over. Others are warning of a long global recession, if not outright depression. Regular people on the street are desperate to apply their folk wisdom to the bottomed out markets. The most common, fantastical claim I hear from casual acquaintances is that the housing market is bound to surge back up someday. It always does. If we can just hold on for a couple years, property values will come storming back to old levels. So even if there is uncertainty in the short run, there is still a general, free-floating notion that the good times will eventually return. Americans are too good, too resilient, too proud, and too full of gumption to allow for a long-term decline. Things will eventually get back to "normal."
There's just one problem: before this recent semi-collapse, the normal was already killing us. Further, the normal was actually the seedbed for the current crisis. The normal was crushing our spirit, tearing our communities asunder, and snuffing out the natural systems that sustain life on this planet. Why would we want to return to a "normal" that was an utter, abject failure?
What exactly would we go back to? Let's remember, even before this year's meltdown, these were the wonderfully normal traits of our economy:
- The top 1% control more wealth than the bottom 90% (some put it at 95%)
- A fifth of all households have a negative net worth
- Family incomes are now the same or less than they were in the early 70s, and that's with a second breadwinner in many cases
- Debt as a percentage of household income has surged to almost 90%
And so on.... These are just numbers as of last year. Who knows what these stats actually look like now, or what they will look like a year from now, if current trends continue?
These horrible economic arrangements were not bringing us much personal fulfillment and health either, if we consider macro-trends like surging drug use, epidemic obesity, and pathological levels of escapist entertainment consumption. Between computers, television, cell phones, video games, and iPods, Americans have been retreating into a parallel fantasy reality, a stimulant-soaked simulacrum. The hyper-consumptive lifestyle we have created in America lays waste to real knowledge of history and locality, leaving us adrift in rootless dreams for fame and fortune that will never come.
Certainly worst of all, our old "normal" way of life was decimating the natural world. We're talking about every major natural system on the planet in decline, some steeply. Climate, fisheries, fresh water, coral reefs, species extinction. You name it, it's not going well. Our presence on the earth is too large, both in sheer numbers and in industrial activity. The planet might be able to handle a few hundred million of us living full-out industrial lifestyles. Or we could have a few billion of us living in low-tech, low-footprint societies. But we just cannot have both: many billions of humans and large swaths of those billions living in high-consumption industrial patterns. If we do come out of this current economic morass, a return to normal will simply get this planet-shredding treadmill ramped back up to full speed in America. Not a pleasant possibility.
Clearly, the new "normal" will have to be more local, much lower-tech, and highly collective. I know it's hard to give up the American Dream for a rosy-cheeked family playing in the back yard of a beautiful 5-bedroom cape-style house in the leafy burbs. I know it's hard to think of a life path that doesn't involve mass schooling, career training, leaving the nest, and settling into a long family-centered story that culminates in porch rocking chair retirement. That's just normal. How could family and job and home be on the way out? It doesn't make sense.
But we should not lose sight of the fact that the current nuclear-family normality is really very young. The vast majority of our tenure on this planet has been spent in collective tribal structures. We are literally built to live in tribal groups with intense interpersonal interactions. Collective living is "normal" for human beings, in the longest sense of time. And it needs to become our new, old normality, if we are to have any hope of turning the current situation around.
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