The upside of economic apocalypse

Writing in the new Chronicles, Srdja Trifkovic sees the coming economic crash as the only thing that might save us decadents. Strong stuff, this:

If reasonable men agree that our civilization is spiritually diseased, morally rotten, and demographically moribund, then a colossal, rapidly spreading global economic crisis should be neither feared nor wished away. It may yet be our last best hope for survival.

The meltdown has to be rapid and brutal, however. Only the collapse of the hoi polloi confidence in the ability of the all-pervasive State to manage relief would force blighted billions to re-examine their lives and their assumptions. By getting no relief from the collapsing State (including the European Union, the World Bank, the IMF, and Oxfam), they would rediscover self-reliance -- or die. Being disillusioned by progress, they would rediscover the value and force of tradition. The ensuing struggle for diminishing resources may make them drop the neurotic becoming in favor of just being -- that is, surviving. The Hobbesian mayhem in New Orleans after Katrina offered a glimpse of what is to come.

A predictable benefit for the survivors would be the return of fertility to historically normal levels. Even in darkest Tuscany or the Upper East Side, children would no longer be seen as a burden, an obstacle to self-fulfillment, and a financial liability. In the aftermath of the burst bubble, they would regain their traditional value as economic assets and the long-term substitute for collapsed welfare programs, entitlements, and pension systems. The family would reemerge as the essential social unit. Amid collapsing political structures, all ideological "propositions" would be recognized as empty abstractions. Communities linked to their native soil and bonded by kinship, memory, language, faith and myth would be revived. And in adversity, the eyes of men would be lifted, once again, to Heaven.

We do not know when this will happen, just as we don't know when San Francisco will turn into rubble [from the inevitable San Andreas Fault earthquake], but when it happens -- and it will happen -- the American interest demands that it takes the form of a short, sharp shock, utterly unmanageable by the ruling political and economic elite that is destroying us.

Well, I guess that'll teach us. But there had better be beer. And butter.

Seriously, I understand what Trifkovic is getting at, and I see his point, and endorse much of it. Still, we're working on taxes around our place, and we're realizing that we spent thousands and thousands last year on medical stuff for our kids. If we didn't have good health insurance, and I didn't have a good job, our kids would have gone untreated, or insufficiently treated. This is a great benefit of civilization. My father should be dead now, because heart disease killed his mother and his brother early. But he's been kept alive by drugs and procedures that didn't exist 25 years ago. His sister died a day or two after she was born in their rural cottage during the Depression; if she were born to poor country people today, she'd live.

Trifkovic is right to point out that material comfort has despoiled us spiritually and morally in many ways. But there's not a lot to be said for poor, nasty, brutish and short, if you ask me, and we who despair of modernity must be careful not to overly romanticize the past, nor long for another Depression, however much our profligate, spendthrift living has set us up for a painful fall. When I was growing up, old people who'd come through it would say people who weren't there couldn't imagine how hard it was, and how frightening. We may have to endure it again, but let's not wish for it.

Though if Jim Kunstler is right, this time around may be a lot worse than the first, because we lack the resources to endure:

There has been too much [financial] misbehavior and it can no longer be mitigated. We're not heading into a recession but a major depression, worse than the fabled trauma of the 1930s. That one occurred against the background of a society that had plenty of everything except money. Back then, we had plenty of mineral resources, lots of trained-and-regimented manpower, millions of productive family farms, factories that were practically new, and more than 90 percent left of the greatest petroleum reserve anywhere in the world. It took a world war to get all that stuff humming cooperatively again, and once it did, we devoted its productive capacity to building an empire of happy motoring leisure. (Tragic choice there.)

This new depression, which I call The Long Emergency, will play out against the background of a society that has pissed away its oil endowment, bulldozed its factories, arbitraged its productive labor, destroyed both family farms and the commercial infrastructure of main street, and trained its population to become overfed diabetic TV zombie "consumers" of other peoples' productivity, paid for by "money" they haven't earned.