The Bourgeoisie

Read this.  Mr. Stephenson natters on and on, so I will provide you a brief summary before discussing, for those of you who don't want to read the whole (bloated) thing.  Guy starts going on walks.  Guy walks to Walden Pond and back (round trip 12 miles).  Guy thinks about global warming/climate change.  Guy continues walking, and notices that nature is pretty nice.  Guy notices that a bunch of people died in floods in Pakistan, and that bristlecone pines are getting sick.  Guy is apparently equally concerned by both trends.  Guy has spiritual epiphany, walks to Walden Pond again, then joins some group that's fighting climate change (less effectively than Captain Planet, by the sound of it).  


His journey into the land of walking begins like this:

A year or so before, in the spring of 2006, I was emerging from a "personal crisis"—in my case, I was battling burnout and anxiety. And in my effort to regain "balance," I not only decided to quit drinking (something I should have done, no doubt, much earlier), but I started meditating in the mornings before going to work, before the sun was up, and I re-explored the Zen and Taoist classics that I'd first dipped into in my twenties, traveling around Asia.

I don't understand people like this.  By all appearances, Mr. Stephenson is a happily married family man with a house and a good job that has put him in the upper middle class.  Congratulations, good sir, you are one of the wealthiest people in the world, with the fewest problems.  You are not the single mother of three children, working full time, with two baby daddies who don't pay child support.  You didn't have to listen to a squad of soldiers burning alive inside their Bradley fighting vehicles because you weren't allowed to send out a quick reaction force to save them after their convoy got hit by an IED.  You're not one of the 20 million unemployed or 30 million uninsured Americans.  You're not part of the hundreds of millions of people living on less than $2 a day.  Your life is soft and easy.  Shut the fuck up about your personal crises and count your blessings, because you live a life that is the envy of the majority of the people in the world, you pampered, bourgeois turd.   


Mr. Stephenson continues on to vomit quite a bit of purple prose.  I get it.  He has a degree in the humanities.  I can tell that he has a degree in the humanities because he read "Zen and Taoist classics" in his twenties, just like every other humanities major.  If he had been a science major, he might have realized that global warming probably will not destroy a hayfield in Massachusetts, inasmuch as it is projected to actually increase crop yields in the US, although Florida and New Orleans will get hosed in exchange. 


 You can tell that he wasn't a political science major, because if he was, he probably would have qualified his limited lamentations about the loss of life in the Pakistan floods with a statement about the total lack of investment in domestic infrastructure by the Pakistani government, its failure to heed warnings that changes needed to be made in its flood control and irrigation systems, and its continued failure to address the problem.  Instead, I get the impression that he was a comparative literature major, or something similarly useless (if he had been a philosophy major, he would at least have had critical thinking skills).  


Mr. Stephenson describes at length how he started to read Thoreau and had an epiphany about the need to reform our souls regarding global warming, which ends with him "becom[ing] involved in a nascent grassroots initiative in my town to raise awareness and increase discussion of climate change and to begin building local sustainability."  Missing from his spiritual kinship with Thoreau is the part where Thoreau actually took action.  He was an active member of the underground railroad.  He was actually arrested for civil disobedience.  He was not a member of the suburban bouregoisie who walked around the neighborhood a little, compared himself to a famous literary titan, and then increased awareness and discussion.  Thoreau actually did shit.  Mr. Stephenson just wrote about a vague epiphany and alluded to some grassroots organization that most likely has a membership limited to only the well-to-do.  


Normally this (self-identified) navel gazing would be amusing.  Unfortunately, Stephenson's awkward comparison of slavery to global warming, while pompous and self-serving, is probably the only part of his nauseating drivel that's worthwhile.  In terms of lives lost and quality of life decreased to starvation and serfdom, the effects of global warming will make the institution of slavery in the US look like some candy-assed imitation of misery.  We're talking about hundreds of millions of people directly and immediately impacted, not counting second and third order effects.  Global warming is something that legitimately deserves our serious attention.  


Stephenson's self-congratulatory tale of tribulations imagined and epiphanies unimpressive, however, does the topic little justice.  Global warming has to be a collective effort.  It needs to be sold to blue collar workers who don't care that Bangladesh will be submerged.  Where's the discussion of widespread public transportation so they don't have to pay for a car, and insurance, and gas?  Where's the discussion of the damage that brown haze over Southern California does to their lungs?  Where's the employment opportunities building windmills?  Where are the tangible effects that will improve their lives and make them care?  


Nowhere.  Stephenson is too busy sucking himself off to make an argument that will catch the majority's attention.