The Nowness of Things
Thoughts from the Alaskan Highway, part three
Before I begin the final part of this essay series (part one can be read here, and part two here) I have two pieces of book news for British readers:
Against the Machine will be launched with an event at the UnHerd Club in London on 23rd September. Tickets are on sale now, and will probably go quickly.
I will also be speaking about the book in November at Blackwell’s, Oxford. Tickets are on sale for that too.
The good things happen on the margins. At the edges. This is hardly an original observation, but originality is overrated. These days I’m more interested in timeless things, and especially timeless observations. If something has survived a long time, there’s likely to be something in it. A religion, a culture, a story, a species, a technology: the longer it lasts, the more tried and tested it has been, and thus the more useful or true it has a chance of being. Our neophiliac culture, on the other hand, loves new things; but new things may not last. A machine, an idea, a political system, a novel vaccine: you’re not going to know what the long term impacts of any of them are until they’ve been around a while.
My own personal motto here is that you should never trust any technology that is less than a hundred years old, and the same goes for political theories. Your grand intellectual system designed to create a fair and just world might look lovely in your pamphlet, but what happens when you roll it out on the ground? Do you get heaven or gulags? The same goes for machinery: take the motor car, for example. What a great idea the car looks! On paper, at least. Faster than a horse and cart, with no livestock involved. Runs on oil, of which there is apparently a limitless supply, gets you anywhere fast, accelerates economic growth and thus ‘living standards’. What’s not to like?
Well, a century on we can see a few other things about the car that may not have been apparent when it began life in the early twentieth century. We can see that it has completely remodelled our landscapes, transforming both countryside and urban places, often for the worst. We can see vast traffic jams growing each year. We can see air pollution on an unprecedented scale, causing massive health problems. We can see a changing climate, of which vehicle emissions are a major component. And we can see an astonishing 100 million deaths as a result of road traffic accidents since the car’s invention: that’s more deaths than in both World Wars combined.
Like I say: it’s good to move slowly sometimes.
Anyway, I was talking about the margins, and how the best things happen there. Car culture, in which I am participating by taking this road trip, has both created and destroyed entire worlds along the highways of America, Canada and everywhere else. Here on the Alaskan Highway, as Paul explains to me as we drive, the road used to be much rougher and the cars much slower. As a result, the journey took longer, and plenty of resorts, motels, cafes and bars sprang up along the road to cater for the need to stop for rest and refreshment. Now though, the journey is shorter, thanks to faster cars and a smoother road. Good news for drivers in a hurry, but bad news for those people who ran the resorts and cafes. As we continue to head north through British Columbia, we see the consequences: shuttered shops, silent restaurants and entirely empty holiday resorts, like this one:
Ashes to ashes, forest to forest. The Machine giveth, and the Machine taketh away. Everything returns to the Earth in the end.
We’re properly on the back roads now, which is why I keep trying to talk about the margins and then getting distracted by my monkey mind and its tiresome slew of opinions. We had the chance, a while back, to head in one direction and join the official Alaskan Highway, or head this way, which is less visited by RVs and more by logging trucks. It’s more potholed too, I think.
Pirsig chose to ride the back roads as well, and for a good reason:
These roads are truly different from the main ones. The whole pace of life and personality of the people who live along them are different. They’re not going anywhere. They’re not too busy to be courteous. The hereness and nowness of things is something they know all about. It’s the others, the ones who moved to the cities years ago and their lost offspring, who have all but forgotten it.
