A Plague of Angels

I finished reading A Plague of Angels while I was on the plane to Dallas. As with The Gate to Women's Country, the only other Sheri S. Tepper book I've read, this one is about a post-apocalyptic society that appears to function in one way, but is actually controlled by a secret group who ensure that humanity doesn't end up destroying itself all over again. They exercise their control very indirectly, by making sure that certain human tendencies (e.g. a predisposition towards warefare, or a disregard for the environment) can no longer influence the course of society.

A theme common to both the books is the idea that humans should live in ways that are locally sustainable. For example, all food should be grown within two days travel by horse. The idea reassures me very deeply.

When contemplating sustainable development, I get the same kind of feeling that I got when the internet bubble collapsed -- a concrete knowledge that the rules of society actually do persist longer than a single generation. A knowledge, gained from experience, that next time when the pundits claim that the New Economy means we will never have a bear market again, that they're deluding themselves.

I don't know whether western civilization itself is currently riding a bubble. And if so, I don't know how big the bubble is -- is it the last ten years? twenty? a hundred? a thousand? If the bubble popped, how far would we fall?

What I do know is that after I finished the book, I looked out the airplane window, and watched as mile after mile, city after city, state after state passed by, and nearly all the land was developed. A somewhat depressing view, given the mood I was in.

I would have a lot more confidence in our current course if capitalism truly reflected the costs of everything. But it doesn't. For one thing, we don't put any price on things like using up oil reserves or polluting the oceans. Those are costs that we will eventually have to pay, but for now we pretend that they're free.

And even more than that, we allow ourselves to get massively in debt. The US is $6.4 trillion in debt. That means we've bought an unimaginable number things without paying for them. Yet.

And these two things are multiplicative. Not only have we bought things without paying for them, our current idea of how much we owe for them doesn't include externalities like the cost of using up the environment.

This type of behavior is dangerous. It's like selling your car on the weekend so that you can afford to go to a movie, and then realizing on Monday that you can't get to work. But you know what? It doesn't matter whether you, a consumer, do anything about this. Because what really matters is that people that control millions and billions of times more money than you ever will are acting like this. The CEOs and the politicians.

I don't know, maybe voting for the Green party would help?

Posted on April 16, 2003 08:22 PM
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