how to be afraid

Visionary futurists have a remarkable quirk. They tend to enforce the gravity of their prophecies by asserting that they will come true – or else… It’s Utopia or Oblivion – my way to futurity, or the handbasket to hell! I frankly care nothing for “Utopia” or “Oblivion”. If my long romance with futurism has taught me anything, it’s that neither of these terms has any meaning. They are mere verbal gasps of intellectual exhaustion. They mean only that the futurist has exhausted his personal ability to confront the passage of time.

That’s from the conclusion of Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things. This “intellectual exhaustion” seems to be everwhere right now. In his new book Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock declares that we must embrace nuclear power, or else we’re doomed. In the new documentary The End of Suburbia, we are told that we must end sprawl and embrace the New Urbanism, or else we’re doomed. The message of Jane Jacobs’ last book Dark Age Ahead is essentially: adopt my views of economics and urban planning, or else we’re doomed. Like Sterling, I don’t find this terribly helpful. While most of the Utopia/Oblivion crowd is on the left, you find it on the right as well. Mark Steyn has been arguing lately that unless the West, or at least Europe, starts having more babies, we’re doomed to an Islamic takeover. Are we doomed? Bird flu is now in France and India. It has been a particularly balmy winter in Canada, notwithstanding the deep freeze of the past few days here in central Canada. Oil prices are down a bit, but the $20 a barrel age seems to be over. Fifteen people were killed in Nigeria yesterday during rioting over the Mohammed cartoons. Yet I’m not particularly concerned about plague, global warming, the end of oil, or terrorism. Not that any of them couldn’t or won’t happen, just that I don’t think their effects will be as bad as everyone seems to think. I have faith in our ability to cope, even thrive. Perhaps I’m naïve, or just happen to live in a comfortable part of the world. I know I’m supposed to be afraid of a great many things, but I’m not. Perhaps the big problem is that I don’t know how to be afraid. Because I am worried about the demographic crisis of the west. Not because I’m afraid that Islamic fundamentalism will take over, but because I think it is going to have terrible economic and social effects. The National Post has a series on it this weekend, as does the Guardian. Philip Longman’s The Empty Cradle is the most worrisome thing I have read in years.