Car Culture

Richard Spencer writes:

It’s Primitivism Lite, a more presentable version of the fantasy that one day the modern world will finally collapse and we’ll all be whole again.

1.) There is nothing primitive at all about advocating the end of single use zoning or recognizing the manner in which the culture of the automobile has deformed the entire landscape of North America and turned once thriving towns (and the spaces in between them) into places not worth caring about.

2.) The end of the modern world is not a fantasy. Peak Oil seems to have occurred in 2005. No amount of drilling now will put a dent into soaring crude prices. The sheer inexorable logic of material reality will now force changes in the way Americans have chosen to live for over fifty years.

I understand these sentiments (even if I reject them). I don’t think, however, that any Good Livin’ can be had by making the lives of average people more God awfully expensive and hoping for a bounteous dole from the welfare state.

Americans will adapt to Peak Oil by becoming more communitarian. In hard times, family and extended kin networks will become more important. Neighbors will do more carpooling. The huge gas guzzling SUVS and trucks will die. Local economies will revive as transportation becomes more expensive and acts effectively as a tariff on foreign goods. The suburban living arrangement will become more untenable and the American population will disperse to the dead small towns they were once determined to leave behind.