Kane's command of the demographic and technological realities of our time is brilliant; even readers steeped in data about our world will learn a lot from it. Kane comes out of the sober Worldwatch Institute tradition of carefully footnoted analyses of looming or present disasters, so the tone of his book is sometimes almost eerily temperate. This is not a poetic evocation of dark times, nor a thundering polemic against folly.
Nonetheless, "Triumph of the Mundane: The Unseen Trends That Shape Our Lives and Environment" hits on plenty of troubling personal matters. We're reminded in trenchant detail that we inhabit a society where we're virtually forced to drive too much and too fast, to eat terrible food on the run, to ignore our children (and/or our parents), to live isolated in one-person households and to incessantly listen to or watch lying commercials and ads. Thus it's easy to see why we develop a nihilistic cynicism about our political leaders, who steadfastly ignore these actual conditions of our lives.
Throughout, Kane is willing to put us on the spot. For instance, after surveying our tendency to shift residences constantly (often to social-desert suburbs with huge commute times), Kane muses:
"Personality springs from a person's beliefs and commitments. In part, it is about what the person will stand by and defend if the need arises. Do people who move often and who let their friends drift away have less personality? Are Americans losing responsibility as they find that they do not have to stand by their employers, their homes, or even the friends of their early years? . . . If we focus on possessions, then will we tend to look at nature as a collection of objects for us to use rather than as a rich, integrated ecology that is most valuable when it remains intact?"
Kane's documentation of the sad conditions of American life (he is mainly talking about middle- and upper-middle-class life) is quiet but relentless. If you feel a vague unease about not living as happily as you used to, you will get plenty of clues from Kane as to why. He's particularly good about our consumerist immersion in goods, as well as pointing out the huge environmental and social impacts of their production, use and disposal.
Fairmindedly, he includes appropriate caveats: Some Americans actually like long commutes. Driving gets them away from their stressful families; their car time may be the closest they come to meditation. And a quarter of Americans end up living alone, with a full range of appliances and at least one car, evidently satisfied though they tend to ignore until it's too late the consequences in lost social and psychological support. Kane is not at all a moralist, preaching unwelcome sermons. He just quietly keeps asking that terrible American question, "Are we having fun yet?" and leaves us to supply the unwelcome answer.
In his last chapter, Kane offers hopes for new beginnings, possible ways out of the mess that we have made of our shared lives. There is a lively voluntary simplicity movement afoot; millions are questioning whether they have passed the point of "enough" goods and are into diminishing returns of real satisfaction. Sprawl, which even has deleterious effects on our schools, has surprisingly become a hot political issue to the distress of politicians, whose local electoral campaign funding comes in large part from developers. Many planners and some officials now understand that there's simply no way to build enough highways to reduce congestion, though the reverse (closing down highways) actually does reduce traffic and encourage civilized urban in-fill. Omnipresent tax and other subsidies to the auto transportation system, fossil fuel and nuclear industries, water interests and many others are beginning to be criticized here and displaced in Europe by "green taxes" on pollution and energy use.
The real issues of how we live now are not discussed in the media, Kane notes, so environmental groups (and churches, too, because basic values are ultimately spiritual or religious) must get a new dialogue going, which will force these essential questions onto the national agenda. Through this process,
Kane thinks, we might even become "a new people," who would work less and buy less, let the GDP decline and find our quality of life rising.
As a start, anybody trying to live a more thoughtful and conscious life amid the difficult conditions of our times will find "Triumph of the Mundane" a comfort and an inspiration to personal and social change.
Ernest Callenbach is the author of the novels "Ecotopia" and "Ecotopia Emerging" and the founder of Film Quarterly.
From the Critics
From Library Journal
Politicians, particularly, talk about trends, progress, growth, and expansion
as important indicators of the condition of our country and the direction in
which it is moving. Kane, a senior fellow at the nonprofit organization Redefining
Progress, argues that other significant trends--the acceleration of new technologies,
the increased speed of information communication, the growth of single-person
households, the obsession with the accumulation of material goods, and an increasingly
mobile society--are at least as important in contributing to the shape of our
future. He argues that it is critical that we try to identify, measure, and
analyze all of the indicators that tell us who we are and what we are really
doing and, most importantly, that we discuss where we want to go. This thoughtful,
clearly written discussion is highly recommended for both public and academic
libraries.
--Suzanne W. Wood, SUNY Coll. of Technology, Alfred Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
[Click here to purchase this book.]
Copyright (c) 2001, Hal Kane