Flavors of Doom

We're screwed.And I'm part of the problem. While Americans gleefully bash each other over the head in the Mommy wars, endless parsings of the status of fetuses, and other artifacts of the culture wars that won't die (even though they have already been won definitely by the Left--more on that in another post), Apocalypse is right around the corner!Thus sayeth a number of fairly non-dumb people. Not all of them whinging Lefties gunning for Bush either. We've already had Jared Diamond's popular downer, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century takes, according to some (I haven't read it yet), an almost pornographic pleausure in recounting the ways in which we are well and truly $*&%ed. And now we have right winger Kevin Phillips whistling the happy tune in his new book, American Theocracy : The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury. Salon has a brilliant review of the book with some historical grounding, including juicy references to Barbara Tuchman's prescient The March Of Folly: From Troy to VietNam.Phillips book discusses three big scary uh-oh's:1)The rise of religious fundamentalism in the US2)Peak oil3) An economy that no longer produces things, but rather moves money aroundThe irony of Phillips' dire predictions is that, as a campaign analyst for Richard Nixon, he was one of the key players who set the Republican party on its current course by encouraging them to go after social conservatives in the South. He has since disavowed his allegiance to that peculiarly pungent aroma of Republicanism, but it remains, in part at least, his monster.The really interesting idea that Phillips and others seize upon in all this apocalyptic prophesying is the idea that the closer a society gets to its own demise the more its leadership harnesses the lure of faith over reason to cement its power. This, of course, only hastens the demise.We will not pray our way out of the looming energy crisis, for example. And if you want some perspective on it, generally speaking, even the most optimistic estimates put the date of peak oil only two or three decades hence. What does a sprawling, consumption happy, obese, gas guzzling society do when it can no longer afford the oil that lubricates its way of life?Collapse, I guess.Of course, we could reason our way out of it. We could, for example, turn our attention toward the admittedly unpleasant fact that we might have to reign in consumption just a tad, especially consumption of oil. We might want to consider, just as a hypothetical, the idea of a kind of Manhattan Project for Renewable Energy. We still have the best post-graduate educational system and the most talented graduate students in the world (though that will surely change as immigration policy and educational experiments in pseudoscience converge). We could re-consider the real estate development patterns that have left us scattered ever farther away from each other in meaninglessly palatial neo-faux-grotesque McMansions that we constantly fill up with stuff because, let's face it, there's nothing else to do in Exurbia.Or we could pray.I know I'm always harping on religion. It's my schtick. And yeah, yeah, I get that you can be spiritual and not a total moron, whatever. I also get that there are certain things religion delivers that reason can not. All very nice indeed. But when religion itself is enabling an agressively irresponsible trend in American politics, shouldn't we all stand up in defense of reason, which, after all, is the only thing that will save us?