The August of Our Discontent: Eternal lessons from a hot and hairy month

National Review, Sept 15, 2003 by Victor Davis Hanson

Relatively simple breakdowns in power transmission, and accordant human lapses, plunged millions on the East Coast into darkness. The lifestyle of postmodern man in sophisticated New York was reduced -- in seconds - - to that of his 18th- or 19th-century forebears. Stylish executives, with alligator briefcases and cell phones, on their way home to the suburbs in Connecticut, were felled -- forced to nap, for the night, on dirty sidewalks astride the homeless. The age-old banes of nature -- darkness, heat, distance -- cared little for our professionals' hard- earned entitlements, and gave them no class preference or exemption from the elements when the aegis of the modern power grid vanished. Without civilization's veneer of civility and technology, we really can be reduced to mere animals in constant search for food, shelter, and security.

In France, meanwhile, Mother Nature this summer has killed some 10,000 people by primeval heat: three times the toll of September 11. The French chattering classes will claim the culprit for the heat wave is global warming caused by the energy-guzzling Americans. Or maybe they will plead that they are paying penance for their selfless prior rejection of wasteful air conditioners -- proof not of their stinginess, but of their ecological sensitivity and resistance to American-style technology.

No matter. The recent scorcher is still a reminder that tens of thousands survive hour-by-hour thanks solely to the lifeblood of electricity, and can die without cooling machines that can artificially lower the temperature by 30 degrees. In contrast, impoverished Yemenis or Congolese, by their very poverty and daily ordeal, are better equipped to deal with nature's heat waves in their airy ramshackle homes than are Parisians in apartments and shops.

French socialism's key boast, that at the end of history the benevolent state can do what selfish individuals cannot, was belied by the mundane forces of the weather. While medical workers, the young, and the middle-aged flocked to the beach to seek relief, thousands of their elderly and immobile relatives left behind were dehydrated alone in their homes -- out of sight, out of mind, as far as their vacationing progeny were concerned: L'Etat, not moi, was supposed to handle the crisis. But nature warns us again that even the most sophisticated Europeans cannot always escape such age-old precepts as: Children are born precisely to ensure that parents do not die, like these French, in their dotage, alone and in misery. And, as the no-nonsense wisdom of the Greeks had it: We change the diapers of our toddlers with care so that they will do the same for us when we are enfeebled a half-century later.

There is a similar denial of reality where I live, in California. Despite our great ports, tourism, beautiful weather, massive industries -- and the nation's highest income and sales taxes -- the citizenry finds its collective credit worse than that of the average errant suburbanite who has maxed out his credit cards. All the fancy suits in Sacramento really cannot convince tight-fisted Wall Street bankers to give their money to those who may well not pay it back -- an elemental law of commerce as old as the trapezoidal money-changing tables in ancient Piraeus.

Over the past five years, it seems, our state government operated on the assumption that we could create utopia by fiat, simply by writing checks for more and more health care, education, police, and prisons. After all, we are Californians, the inheritors of a grand and sophisticated state, and thus by birthright deserving of special compensation. In our infinite arrogance we presupposed, first, that the money would appear ex nihilo, and second, that cash in and of itself could solve our very human problems. That Californians simply have not paid for the services they have charged -- and, worse, fooled themselves into thinking they either should not or will not have to -- is left unsaid. That the crisis involves core values and social assumptions about human nature, and thus may be deeper than the ability of government per se to fix it, is not even contemplated.

The same paradoxes of civilization are seen in a more sinister context in the Middle East, where a sophisticated and modern society like Israel's is racked by suicide killers right out of the Dark Ages. That such murderers cannot manufacture the SUVs they so habitually drive on their errands of death, the cell phones that facilitate their awful plans, or the videos that capture the last testaments of mass murderers matters little. After all, for such leeches of civilization it only takes a modicum of cunning and little skill, rather than real education or intellectual accomplishment, to strap on imported explosives and blow up women and children. Dismembering a child is easier and quicker than nurturing and educating him; exploding a bus involves less work and training than building it. The prevention of such barbarism -- sophisticated policing, electronic security, preservation of human rights and civil liberties while hunting down stealthy killers -- is the fruition of centuries of civilization, but can disappear in moments when confronted with elemental nihilism. In contrast, the parasitic arts of Hamas are pre-civilized. Indeed, its killers accept that asymmetry and see it as a great asset in their struggle to destroy the Jewish state.