Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation

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Overview

James Howard Kunstler’s critically acclaimed and best-selling The Long Emergency, originally published in 2005, quickly became a grassroots hit, going into nine printings in hardcover. Kunstler’s shocking vision of our post-oil future caught the attention of environmentalists and business leaders alike, and stimulated widespread discussion about our dependence on fossil fuels and our dysfunctional financial and government institutions. Kunstler has since been profiled in The New Yorker and invited to speak at ...

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Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation

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More About This Book

Overview

James Howard Kunstler’s critically acclaimed and best-selling The Long Emergency, originally published in 2005, quickly became a grassroots hit, going into nine printings in hardcover. Kunstler’s shocking vision of our post-oil future caught the attention of environmentalists and business leaders alike, and stimulated widespread discussion about our dependence on fossil fuels and our dysfunctional financial and government institutions. Kunstler has since been profiled in The New Yorker and invited to speak at TED. In Too Much Magic, Kunstler evaluates what has changed in the last seven years and shows us that, in a post-financial-crisis world, his ideas are more relevant than ever.

“Too Much Magic” is what Kunstler sees in the bright visions of a future world dreamed up by optimistic souls who believe technology will solve all our problems. Their visions remind him of the flying cars and robot maids that were the dominant images of the future in the 1950s. Kunstler’s image of the future is much more sober. With vision, clarity of thought, and a pragmatic worldview, Kunstler argues that the time for magical thinking and hoping for miracles is over, and the time to begin preparing for the long emergency has begun.

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Editorial Reviews

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In 2009, The New Yorker profiled the James Howard Kunstler and kindred spirits in an article entitled, "The Dystopians." What earned him that distinction was his 2005 book The Long Emergency which, in its own words, described "the end of oil, climate change, and other converging catastrophes of the twenty-first century." In his latest book, Kunstler returns to the scene of these festering crimes to explain how magical thinkers are hoodwinking us with false illusions that technology will save us from these looming disasters. Under his watchful gaze, governments, corporations, scientists, and futurists all come in for criticism, much of it scathing. Must-reading for resolute realists. Editor's recommendation.

Publishers Weekly
With characteristic curmudgeonly enthusiasm, Kunstler brilliantly if belligerently shows us what a pickle we’re in and how inept we are at dealing with it. As Kunstler writes: “Our lust for ever more comfort, pleasure, and distraction, our refusals to engage with the mandates of reality, our fidelity to the cults of technology and limitless growth, our narcissistic national exceptionalism—all propel us toward the realm where souls abandon all hope.” He offers astute critical histories of both political parties, narrating the Democrats’ decline into “the party of nothing in particular,” and how the fundamentalism of Southern “poor agricultural peasants” combined with car culture to create the right-wing “official party of stupidity.” Equally disturbing, he proposes that our financial system may already be in permanent collapse, that the promise of natural gas abundance is based more on desperation for fossil fuel than reality, and that Mother Nature may be exacting revenge. Not surprisingly, his best-case vision for the future mirrors his unsettling 2008 novel World Made by Hand, complete with the end of feminism. Surprisingly, Kunstler concludes with homely advice worthy of a graduation speech: “Demonstrate to yourself that you are a competent person who can understand the signals that reality is sending to you... and act intelligently in response.” Agent: Adam Chromy, Moveable Type Management. (July)
Library Journal
Back in 2005, Kunstler's The Long Emergency highlighted the imminence of an oil-dry future as it moved through 150,000 copies and sold to nine territories. Since then, Kunstler has been asked to speak at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conferences and annually welcomes 700,000 unique visitors to his website. Here, he looks at the drawbacks of various alternate technologies, arguing that, pie-in-the-sky optimists to the contrary, technology doesn't have easy solutions to the energy crisis. A big book for the publisher that's poised to make waves.
Kirkus Reviews
With the era of cheap energy and easy credit now over, novelist and social critic Kunstler (The Witch of Hebron, 2010, etc.) delivers a cold slap to the fantasists who believe technology will save us. Seven years after his much-discussed jeremiad The Long Emergency, the author returns to recount the evidence supporting his predictions about our radically altered future. The still-unfolding financial crisis kicked off in 2008, exploding populations, climate change (anthropocentric or not), peak oil, and the inadequacy of alternative methods to power societies are all cited as signs we've entered the zone where our customs and habits must change so as to avoid a complete breakdown. The dangerously stressed systems that underpin the society we've known since World War II--"agriculture, commerce, manufacturing, transport, finance, the oil-gas-coal industry, the electric grid"--are too large, too complex and too expensive to sustain any longer. Followers of Kunstler's writings and attendees of his many lecture appearances will recognize the take-no-prisoners style, the harsh invective directed at familiar targets--cars, planes, skyscrapers, Wall Street, suburbia--and the pleas on behalf of walkable cities, trains and farms built to human scale. The added feature here is the scorn he directs at those who refuse to recognize the severity and dimensions of the crisis he describes. He trashes the "delusional groupthink" of Google executives who confuse energy with technology; he abuses industry leaders who promote so-called "clean" coal, shale oil and gas to extend our fossil fuel addiction; he chides self-described "greens" for wildly overestimating the readiness of alternatives or renewables to fill the breach; he lambastes both political parties for their irrelevance; and he berates futurists like Ray Kurzweil for their "techno-grandiosity," for magical thinking, and for their steadfast refusal to accept that something that can't go on forever won't. A sharp demand to disenthrall ourselves, to instead face the future with "practical skill and something like common sense."
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780802120304
  • Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
  • Publication date: 6/19/2012
  • Pages: 336
  • Sales rank: 273,824
  • Product dimensions: 6.00 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Meet the Author


James Howard Kunstler was born in New York City in 1948. He is the author of eleven novels, including World Made By Hand and The Witch of Hebron, and four nonfiction books, including The Long Emergency. He is a frequent lecturer at colleges and professional organizations across the country. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.
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Table of Contents

1 Where We're At 1

2 Farewell to the Drive-in Utopia 23

3 Cities of the Future: Yesterday's Tomorrow or Tomorrow's Yesterday? 43

4 The Dangers of Techno Narcissism, or: Frankenstein Release 2.0, How Ray Kurzweil's Singularity Aims to Replace the Old God with a New and Improved Version 65

5 The Futility of Party Politics in the Long Emergency 85

6 Going Broke the Hard Way: The End of Wall Street 111

7 The Energy Specter: Oil and Gas, Alternative Energy, and Waiting for Santa Claus 155

8 Insults to the Planet and the Planet's Reply 197

9 Social Relations and the Dilemmas of Difference 216

Coda: A Systematic Misunderstanding of Reality 241

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Customer Reviews

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Sort by: Showing all of 2 Customer Reviews

  • Posted February 19, 2013

    I found this book riveting. Sardonic, at limes deeply funny in s

    I found this book riveting. Sardonic, at limes deeply funny in spite of the subject matter, it struck a chord with me. I have well-educated friends who believe that airplane contrails are really deadly chemtrails; last week I had a conversation with a very smart, well-educated woman who seemed to have her feet on the ground until in a discussion of global warming, said, "My god would never let global warming happen." Talk about wishful thinking!

    Many people will dismiss this book as the pessimism of a crank. I thought it was hard to refute most of his conclusions. It's hard to avoid thinking that what he's describing is another bubble -- maybe more long-lasting than the housing bubble, the tulip bubble (the Dutch some centuries ago), the South Seas bubble, and every other ponzi scheme the gullible humans have fallen for. -- but a bubble doomed to burst sooner or later.

    I recently spent time in Turkey and was struck by the realization that this land area has lived through the rise and fall of at least 5 empires. Other ciultures have an innate understanding of the rise -- and fall -- of empires. We in America can only think about the rise. Any talk of the fall, which will happen at some point, creates something close to hysteria. This book was a good corrective to that sort of thinking.

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  • Posted July 18, 2012

    Worth Reading

    Worth reading if you enjoy an eloquent curmudgeon. More opinion than research, unlike TLE, but it also puts together a coherent argument.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
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