We Learn Nothing by Tim Kreider

Author:Tim Kreider
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

None of this actually has any bearing on the facts of peak oil. Some matters of empirical fact are independent of our ideology or biases, one of them being how much petroleum is left on the planet. Ken may indeed have some personal stake in the phenomenon of peak oil, but peak oil has no reciprocal relationship to Ken. The facts are just out there being placidly factual, unconcerned with Ken’s or my or anyone else’s feelings about them. Some people blamed the Black Death on witches, some on physicians for meddling with the will of God. In fact it was caused by the bacillus Yersinia pestis, a bacterium transmitted by fleas, and it killed a third of Europe.

So what you probably want to know is: what’s the verdict on peak oil? Can we just call Ken and his cohort a bunch of crackpots and go back to thinking about social media and the Tea Party and the sexy teen vampire craze (all subjects, as of this writing, widely considered interesting and significant by the U.S. media)? Or should we be pricing cheap land in the country, buying up canned goods and tools, and learning to, like, till the soil? Is it really possible that the coming century—maybe even the next decade—will see the collapse of the global economy, world wars, and the deaths of billions? Is this idiot glittering din that we call our culture just a last frantic saturnalia on the lip of an abyss?

A better question might be: why are you asking me? As I may have mentioned, I never got around to reading up on the subject. There is a reason you’re reading my essay on this topic and not one of Ken’s articles: who wouldn’t rather read—or write—an essay about rhetoric and belief systems and a friendship’s end than an article informing you that you and your children are probably going to die of starvation or cold unless you abandon the life you’re living right now and take radically inconvenient action? But there’s also a reason you really ought to be listening to Ken instead of me: I don’t know what I’m talking about, and Ken does. I’m trying to hold your interest and amuse you; Ken wants to save your life.

He was always trying to find some way to bring his political message more directly to a bigger audience—hence his giving up academia for filmmaking, and filmmaking for direct activism. He was indisputably a great teacher, but he tried to turn life into school. The problem is that most of us hated school. His fallacy was much the same as progressivism’s: the assumption that if he could just explain the facts clearly, build a convincing enough argument, eventually everyone would come around to his conclusion. But people aren’t interested in lectures; they want to hear stories. Which is why the right holds the demagogic advantage over the left in America; they tell a simpler, more satisfying story. And it’s one reason I’ve told Ken’s story here.

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