The Department of Air Conditioning

A friend shared this piece by Noah Rothman about the anti-air-conditioner movement. This particular wing of the environmental left urges, reports Rothman, that "among the corrupting tastes to which we’ve succumbed is the affinity for modern conveniences like air-conditioning." The pursuit of happiness took a wrong turn some way back, the movement believes. Like, way back, as in, with the advent of agriculture and writing. Rothman notes that journalist and novelist John Lanchester, writing for the New Yorker in 2017, wrote that even the development of writing loosed on the world a tool of “control” from which “war, slavery,” and “rule by elites” flow, imprisoning mankind in an unnatural state of affairs. “It turns out that hunting and gathering," Lanchester said, "is a good way to live." 

My friend shared the piece with me because we have shared criticism of the political left's simultaneous revulsion and insistence on progress, often with the upshot that one cannot know when these types are in earnest. But I do not raise my objections too strongly, because I also harbor misgivings about the mechanistic ideology on which most promises of utopia depend. 

Anyway, here is my response to my friend about the Rothman piece: 

Thanks for sending along the Rothman piece in opposition to the war on air conditioners. It is certainly on theme of our recent discussions. At our last lunch, we broached briefly the "Walden Pond" question whether there is such a thing as too much civilization: Might there be such a thing as too much equality, if we go to the extent of Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron"? Or too many comforts and conveniences? Louis CK's famous bit on this, "Everything's Amazing, and Nobody's Happy," is on point. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBLkX2VaQs4.) 

And while looking for the source of one of the Rousseau quotes (“it was iron and corn which first civilized men and ruined humanity"), I stumbled on another thread of that theme of the pursuit of happiness having taken perhaps a wrong turn. In my desultory search I was led to the CafeHayek.com site. Briefly browsing there, I read Jonah Goldberg's recent short piece supporting the Jack Smith prosecution of Trump, calling it a "necessity" because America elected such an "unfit" person as Trump (what makes him less "fit" than an unaccomplished Obama or a corrupt Clinton was not explained), and because America then twice failed to cashier him after two impeachment opportunities (because stupid Americans fell prey to populism, unlike us super smarts who only want to defend democracy!).

Dwelling on Goldberg's "unfit" remark, I concluded he was making another form of defense of air-conditioning, but in Goldberg's version (I am conjecturing), it is the defense of technocratic managerialism. Yes, true, Goldberg would concede, the technocratic state does belch noxious plumes of black smoke into the air of liberty, and it does discharge poisonous oily chemical waste into the rivers of ideas, so that we choke and splutter and become dizzy if we do not stay within its comfortable if labyrinthine interior  But, yet, and although, the technocratic managerial state alone supplies us with the miracle of democracy! It is the height of ingratitude to toss it aside without a thought to what would replace it!

There is a truth to this position I am attributing to Goldberg. The man who doesn't think things can get any worse has no imagination. The greens talk romantically about ending air conditioning—but with no earnest intention of giving it up themselves. Trump supporters talk romantically about toppling their technocrat managers—and no one, surely, has any idea what this would look like. So Goldberg is, at least, consistent—at least ostensibly—in the sense he is not willing to give up either his air conditioning or his technocrats.

But Goldberg also does not understand his Trump-supporting countrymen who, while perhaps not knowing what they are getting into, at least are willing to give up the benefits of the technocratic state, for they sense at their core that there may be things more important that have been lost along the way, and that it might not yet be too late to double back and recover them.

Tocqueville said something about this in his observations about the left and right banks of the Ohio River, with industriousness being the lifeblood of the American spirit  that Tocqueville admired (slavery being the bane of the spirit of industry).

My point is, while I have some concerns that we have entered into an age of hyperabundance of comforts and conveniences, those concerns arise, not from ingratitude, but from a spirit of industry. I have nothing against air conditioning, precisely because air conditioning tends to facilitate the spirit of industry. But I am concerned that we seem to be replacing the spirit of industry with a department of industry. Goldberg and the supporters of the technocratic state stand for air conditioning only ostensibly: in fact, they only further the cause of the department of air conditioning.

Cheers, 

Tim