Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

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50 politics and governance
under conditions of scarcity and otherwise diverted peoples’ energies
to the tasks of getting rich and getting on in the New World,
the effect of which was to make us a more agreeable and more
manageable lot. The ratios of resources to people, however, are
now about what they were prior to the “discovery” of the New
World, and the due bill for the long binge of fossil fuel–powered
modernization is said to be in the mail. In a more crowded and
hotter world, perhaps democracy will be “just a moment in history,”
as Robert Kaplan (1997) once put it, a casualty of the failure
to manage growing complexity and scarcity.
Many other forces also work against democracy. Vice President
Al Gore, for one, argues that decades of television and nonstop
exposure to advertising have eroded our capacity for the reasoned
judgment necessary for democracy and that this is a large factor
in the tide of irrationality that has recently fl ooded our politics.
Susan Jacoby, similarly, believes that we live in a “new age of
unreason,” that America is “ill with a powerful mutant strain of
intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism,”
and that Americans are “living through an overarching crisis of
memory and knowledge involving everything about the way we
learn and think” (2008, pp. xx, 309). The evidence is all around
us. Americans watch an average of more than four hours of television
each day and are well versed in the lives and doings of
celebrities, but many are utterly mystifi ed about politics, history,
world affairs, and geography, among other things. Over a lifetime
they are marinated in several million advertisements (Barnes,
2006, p. 122) aimed to keep them in a perpetual state of infantile
self-gratifi cation as dependable and dependent consumers rather
than as informed, active, engaged, and thoughtful citizens. This is
not just happenstance but the predictable result of a technological
revolution of television, computer games, cell phones, iPods,
and sophisticated methods of marketing. Early pioneers in the
craft of demand creation in order to sell more stuff than anyone
really needed, notably Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays,