The Iron Age and the Plastic Age

If you have an MP3 player, or preferably an Ipod, and you like history, you should check out Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. Carlin is a self-proclaimed "history fan" rather than a history scholar and his aim is to take the events of history and make them real to us as actual events lived by people like ourselves. Carlin's take on the human experience of the Apache wars is incredibly insightful and does justice to the experience of all sides. Similarly, Carlin's episode on "History under the Influence" legitimately raises the question of whether history is not so much written by the winners as by those who were somewhat less under the influence of drugs and alcohol so that they were able to win.

Carlin's most recent episode is an interview with Victor Davis Hanson. It's well-worth listening to because Carlin asks intelligent questions and Hanson isn't afraid to inform his views by the deep wellsprings of the Western Canon.

One comment by Hanson resonates with one of the "10 politically incorrect" things he mentioned in the article I linked to in the previous post. In that article he wrote:

5. California is now a valuable touchstone to the country, a warning of what not to do. Rarely has a single generation inherited so much natural wealth and bounty from the investment and hard work of those more noble now resting in our cemeteries--and squandered that gift within a generation. Compare the vast gulf from old Governor Pat Brown to Gray Davis or Arnold Schwarzenegger. We did not invest in many dams, canals, rails, and airports (though we use them all to excess); we sued each other rather than planned; wrote impact statements rather than left behind infrastructure; we redistributed, indulged, blamed, and so managed all at once to create a state with about the highest income and sales taxes and the worst schools, roads, hospitals, and airports. A walk through downtown San Francisco, a stroll up the Fresno downtown mall, a drive along highway 101 (yes, in many places it is still a four-lane, pot-holed highway), an afternoon at LAX, a glance at the catalogue of Cal State Monterey, a visit to the park in Parlier--all that would make our forefathers weep. We can't build a new nuclear plant; can't drill a new offshore oil well; can't build an all-weather road across the Sierra; can't build a few tracts of new affordable houses in the Bay Area; can't build a dam for a water-short state; and can't create even a mediocre passenger rail system. Everything else--well, we do that well.

In the Carlin interview, Hanson observes that there are many who decry the achievements that our ancestors left us, but use them every day and refuse to do without them. San Franciscans, for example, will decry the destruction of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, but would never dream of doing without the water that makes San Francisco possible.

Grace on the cheap and hypocrisy abound.

It seems that in the past, people would point to some human construction - a dam or a highway - and proudly point out that they were part of building this impresive and useful thing. Today, to the contrary, people proudly point out the absence of something that could be useful to the population and so how they were part of not building it.

Obviously, there is a lot to be said about conservation, but the negative orientation carries a lot of anti-human implications that have never existed in any prior successful civilization.