Hurricane Sandy is yesterday’s news, but its effects promise
to be with us, at least in these parts, for a very long time. I shall not bore you with another post
about the fine old trees blasted, splintered, and strewn about the back end of
my property. The real damage was
done along the shoreline—we are fifty miles from it—between Cape May and New
York harbor. There buildings with
combined values in the billions have been washed away, destroyed, or damaged
beyond repair. In the press,
somber accounts of continuing misery vie with upbeat stories about our national
resilience, pluck, and frontier spirit.
Dozens of strangers, all volunteers, descended from the higher and drier
parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan upon my son’s neighborhood in ravaged Red Hook
to help out with the inglorious labor of bailing out sewage water. And who would have guessed that the
indefatigable drivers of huge garbage trucks of the New York Sanitation
Department would emerge as the heroes of an updated Dunkirk flotilla?
My
personal injuries are modest in the extreme. I was stranded for several pleasant days in Tennessee when
no planes were flying toward New York, and my garden is a mess. But I still find myself strangely
disquieted. The hurricane unquestionably
demonstrated the potential dangers of living along the edge of shoreline of the
Mid-Atlantic States; but in a larger sense, perhaps, it dramatized the degree
to which we are all living on the edge.
Georges Lefebvre
In
this regard I’ve been thinking about two European intellectuals of the middle
of the last century, authors of books that have made a big impact on me. The first of them is Georges Lefebvre (1874–1959), the great expert on the French Revolution and one of the
founders of “people’s history” or “history from the bottom.” The second is José Ortega y
Gasset (1883-1955), the Spanish philosopher and literary critic. Between them they seem to me to have
made a more probing analysis of the crisis of Hurricane Sandy than anything I have
read in the contemporary press.
When people tax me for spending too much times with old books—as
opposed, perhaps, to the current offerings of the New York Review—I must answer
with Milton. “Many a man lives a
burden to the earth, but a good book is the precious lifeblood of a master
spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”
José Ortega y Gasset
Lefebvre
was interested in the French peasantry, and in one his books he makes the
following comparison. On the eve
of the Revolution, he writes, the French peasant was like a man standing in a
body of water that just reached the crest of his lower lip. So long as absolutely nothing troubled
the waters of his subsistence economy, he could survive, if barely; the slightest ripple would swamp
him. The book of Ortega y Gasset
that most impressed me in my youth was his Revolt
of the Masses (1930). It is
justly famous for its prescient apprehension of the twin pathologies of its
age, Fascism and Bolshevism. But
what struck me at the time was what he said about automobiles, just about that
time becoming something like a mass commodity. Modern Europeans, he said, are becoming entirely dependent
upon the automobile. Yet not one
driver in ten really understood the operation of the internal combustion
engine. Modernity’s contract with
convenience had rendered it subject in perpetuity to a technological indenture
that only a small priestcraft could claim to understand.
While
the relevance of the maxims of Lefevbre and Ortega are merely suggestive in
their application to Hurricane Sandy, the suggestion ought to be enough to
alarm. The world’s population has
now become so large, its urban population centers so dense, our systems of
communication and transportation so heavily used and so interdependent as to
render us all, like the French peasant of 1789, permanent brinksmen. A single pebble dropped into the water
may not prove fatal, but it doesn’t take a great deal to swamp us. Close one tunnel under the Hudson River
for a single day, and chaos will ensue.
A blizzard in Chicago can mean disruption of a quarter of the flights
coming out of Atlanta.
As
for Ortega's automobile and its internal combustion engine, it was, comparatively
speaking, a piece of cake. Even I understood
it, sort of, up until about 1960 when its electronic augmentations began to
transform auto mechanics into priestcraft. About the same time, I think, I heard for the first time the
strange phrase “fossil fuel”—with or without the word “crisis” attached I cannot
remember. What Hurricane Sandy
demonstrated to millions—to the “masses” of old 1930s-speak—was our utter
dependence upon a vast web of technology, some of it very high tech indeed, which few understand and fewer still can do much
about. There are large areas of my
vital daily “infrastructure” that I didn’t even know were there until they
weren’t. We have some very large
potential problems for which the suggested panacea—purchasing a gasoline-powered
generator from Lowe’s—may prove inadequate. The questions, my friend, are blowin’ in the wind.
