After America

great feat of mankind.¹²

But the bigger government gets, the less it actually does. You think a guy like Obama is going to put up a new Hoover Dam (built during the Depression and opened two years ahead of schedule)? No chance. Today’s Big Government crowd is more likely to put up a new regulatory agency to tell the Hoover Dam it’s non-wheelchair accessible and has to close. As Deanna Archuleta, Obama’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior, assured an audience in Nevada: “You will never see another federal dam.”¹³ “Great feats of mankind” are an environmental hazard, for mankind has great feats of clay. But hang on, isn’t hydropower “renewable” energy? It doesn’t use coal or oil, it generates electricity from the natural water cycle. If that’s not renewable, what is? Ah, but, according to environmental “dam-busters,” reservoirs are responsible for some 4 percent of the earth’s carbon dioxide emissions. Environmental devastation-wise, the Hoover Dam is the patio pool to Al Gore’s mansion. Out, out, dammed spot!

So, just as the late Roman Empire was no longer an aqueduct-building culture, we are no longer a dam- building one. It’s not just that we no longer invent, but that we are determined to disinvent everything our great- grandparents created to enable the self-indulgent lives we take for granted and that leave us free to chip away at the foundations of our own society.

So-called “progressives” actively wage war on progress. They’re opposed to dams, which spurred the growth of California. They’re opposed to air-conditioning, which led to the development of the Southwest. They’re opposed to light bulbs, which expanded man’s day, and they’re opposed to automobiles, which expanded man’s reach. They’re still nominally in favor of mass transit, so maybe we can go back to wood-fired steam trains?

No, sorry, no can do. The progressives are opposed to logging; they want a ban on forestry work in environmentally sensitive areas such as forests.

Ultimately, progressives are at war with mass prosperity.

In the old days, we didn’t have these kinds of problems. But then Mr. and Mrs. Peasant start remodeling the hovel, adding a rec room and indoor plumbing, replacing the emaciated old nag with a Honda Civic and driving to the mall in it, and next thing you know, instead of just having an extra yard of mead every Boxing Day at the local tavern and adding a couple more pustules to the escutcheon with the local trollop, they begin taking vacations in Florida. When it was just medieval dukes swanking about like that, the planet worked fine: that was “sustainable” consumerism.

But now the masses want in. And, once you do that, there goes the global neighborhood.

Human capital is the most important element in any society. The first requirement of the American Dream is Americans. Today we have American sclerosis, to which too many Americans are contributing. Capitalism is liberating: you’re born a peasant but you don’t have to die one. You can work hard and get a nice place in the suburbs. If you’re a nineteenth-century Russian serf and you get to Ellis Island, you’ll be living in a tenement on the Lower East Side, but your kids will get an education and move uptown, and your grandkids will be doctors and accountants in Westchester County.

And your great-grandchild will be a Harvard-educated dam-busting environmental activist demanding an end to all this electricity and indoor toilets.

To go back to 1950, once our friend from 1890 had got his bearings in mid-century, he’d be struck by how our entire conception of time had changed in a mere sixty years. If you live in my part of New Hampshire and you need to pick something up from a guy in the next town, you hop in the truck and you’re back in little more than an hour. In a horse and buggy, that would have been most of your day gone. The first half of the twentieth century overhauled the pattern of our lives: the light bulb abolished night; the internal combustion engine tamed distance. They fundamentally reconceived the rhythms of life. That’s why our young man propelled from 1890 to 1950 would be flummoxed at every turn. A young fellow catapulted from 1950 to today would, on the surface, feel instantly at home—and then notice a few cool electronic toys. And, after that, he might wonder about the defining down of “accomplishment”: Wow, you’ve invented a more compact and portable delivery system for Justin Bieber!

Long before they slump into poverty, great powers succumb to a poverty of ambition. It could be that the Internet is a lone clipper of advancement on a sea of stasis because, as its proponents might argue, we’re on the brink of a reconceptualization of space similar to the reconceptualization of time that our great-grandparents lived through with the development of electricity and automobiles. But you could as easily argue that for most of the citizenry the computer is, in the Roman context, a cyber-circus. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, written shortly after Hollywood introduced us to “the talkies,” the masses are hooked on “the feelies”:

“Take hold of those metal knobs on the arms of your chair,” Lenina whispers to her date. “Otherwise you won’t get any of the feely effects.” He does so. The “scent organ” breathes musk; when the on-screen couple kiss with “stereoscopic lips,” the audience tingles. When they make out on the rug, every moviegoer can feel every hair of the bearskin.

In our time, we don’t even need to go to the theater. We can “feel” what it’s like to drive a car on a thrilling chase through a desert or lead a commando raid on a jungle compound without leaving our own bedrooms.

We can photoshop ourselves into pictures with celebrities. We can have any permutation of men, women, and pre-operative transsexuals engaging in every sexual practice known to man or beast just three inches from our eyes: a customized 24-hour virtual circus of diverting games, showbiz gossip, and downloadable porn, a refuge from reality, and a gaudy “feely” playground for the plebs at a time when the regulators have made non-virtual reality a playground for regulators and no one else.

In the end, the computer age may presage not a reconceptualization of space but an abandonment of the very concept of time. According to Mushtaq Yufzai, the Taliban have a saying:

Americans have all the watches, but we’ve got all the time.¹⁴

Cute. If it’s not a Taliban proverb, it would make an excellent country song.

It certainly distills the essence of the “clash of civilizations”: Islam is playing for tomorrow, whereas much of the West has, by any traditional indicator, given up on the future. We do not save, we do not produce, we do not reproduce, not in Europe, Canada, Vermont, or San Francisco. Instead, we seek new, faster ways to live in an eternal present, in an unending whirl of sensory distraction. Tocqueville’s prediction of the final stage of democracy prefigures the age of “social media”:

It hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back for ever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

THE HOLE IS GREATER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS

Almost anyone who’s been exposed to western pop culture over the last half-century is familiar with the brutal image that closes Planet of the Apes: a loinclothed Charlton Heston falling to his knees as he comes face to face with a shattered Statue of Liberty poking out of the sand and realizes that the “planet of the apes” is, in fact, his own—or was. What more instantly recognizable shorthand for civilizational ruin? In the film Independence Day, Lady Liberty gets zapped by aliens. In Cloverfield, she’s decapitated by a giant monster. If you’re in the apocalyptic fantasy business, clobbering the statue in the harbor is de rigueur.

As far as I can ascertain, the earliest example of Liberty-toppling dates back to an edition of Life, and a story called “The Next Morning,” illustrated by a pen-and-ink drawing of a headless statue with the smoldering rubble of the city behind her. That was in 1887. The poor old girl had barely got off the boat from France and they couldn’t wait to blow her to kingdom come. Two years later, on the cover of