Now You See It; Now You Don't

You and the air conditioner you rode in on.The rending of garments and gnashing of teeth filled the airwaves last week as my friends and allies in the political world dealt with ignominious defeat. Yet I remained largely immune from the hysteria (albeit not the carping)--thanks almost entirely to Steven Johnson’s PBS series How We Got to Now. I found the six-part series the perfect antidote to bad times…political or otherwise. Johnson built the series around six topics—cleanliness, time, glass, light, cold, and sound, all of which may seem like so much pablum, but the total effect, I dare say, was exhilarating. Whereas Neil deGrasse Tyson’s PBS series earlier this year, Cosmos, was more about the awesomeness of the stars, the planets and nature, Johnson’s series makes a case that humanity can be pretty awesome too.
Johnson begins each installment by referencing the motley crew of  “hobbyists, garage inventors, and obsessive tinkerers” who have so profoundly changed the way we live for the better…though not without some unintended consequences along the way. When you hear the stories--from the city engineer who came up with the brainstorm of lifting all of Chicago off the ground to properly install sewers that would change city living the world over to the poor orphan boy who would, with a 6th grade education, invent refrigerated trucking and make himself into one of the first few African American millionaires—you ask, why are these not the heroes of our school books rather than that long, tiresome parade of kings, queens, presidents, generals, dictators and con artists.
Moreover, so many of the stories Johnson relates run counter to our current facile narratives about human inclinations and aspirations, no matter what side of the political spectrum you swing from.
Appalled by animal exploitation and child labor? In the story of light we learn about the discovery of the oil from a harpooned whale that would illuminate rooms and thus enlighten society by allowing reading after dark…and after work. And we learn that the whalers harvested the oil by lowering young boys of 13-14 into the heads of the whales!
In the story of cold we learn that it was an ingenious Yankee who, upon visiting South Carolina in summer, came up with the idea of turning abundant New England ice into refreshment and replenishment for the American South…and he went broke and to debtors’ prison over a decade before he finally got his idea to work.
And we learn that ice became so important to the South during the Civil War that the North ran blockades against it…like nuclear secrets to Iran, plans for ice-making machinery had to be smuggled into the Confederacy.
Whether you like your state’s rights or despise corporate collusion, you’ll be shocked to know that it was the railroads that threw their combined weight behind standardizing time, thus taking a precious but problematic power out of local control.

Prefer fresh to frozen food? Well, who doesn’t, but Clarence Birdseye’s plan wasn’t to rob the world of freshness, but to provide the most reasonable facsimile of it to people regardless of geography or season.
As Johnson tells the story of air conditioning, it may be the most paradoxical for those bewitched by contemporary conditions. In 1902 William Carrier was hired by a Buffalo printing plant to try and do something about the heat and humidity that was smearing its print in summer. Carrier delivered air conditioning, which collaterally made the workers happy--because unknown to the bosses they too were suffering with the heat. Flash forward to 1925 when "liberal" Hollywood began installing air conditioners into its movie theaters, thus increasing an income stream while providing city dwellers with refuge from the summer heat. In due time, air conditioners--as with computers later--became smaller in size and the home AC boom was on. Residential AC, Johnson then relates, motivated mass US migrations between 1960 and 1980 to formerly inhospitable climes in the South and Southwest, thus tilting the Electoral College to the Sunbelt, eventuating in the election of Ronald Reagan. Thus the rise of America’s climate-change-denying Conservative movement virtually owes its success to Freon-12 poisoning the atmosphere. As they say, you can’t make this stuff up.
No one can actually…not Wall Street or Main Street. Not the Jihadists, The Tea Party, the Anarchists. Not the Church or Fox News, not The New York Times or the Heritage Foundation. It all happens with a touch of this, a bit of that…and Edison’s 90 percent perspiration. It also happens in spite of whatever the conventional wisdom of the time. Once upon a time no one had much interest in reading glasses until suddenly they were there right in front of their noses. In one of my favorite stories in the series Johnson tells about the glassmakers of Venice. In a pre-Marxist instance of state control of free enterprise, the Venetian Republic virtually imprisoned its glassmakers on the island of Murano. Rather than killing the industry, it would lead in time to one of the most important and far-reaching innovations detailed in How We Got to Now. But that's a story for another Nobby.
This Nobby ends with a sharp pivot to the world of football. In a roundtable last week halfway through the NFL season, one of the jocks on the panel suggested that an early season loss by the New England Patriots to the Kansas City Chiefs was the turning point to the Pats’ season, leading to their current 5-game winning streak. Another jock—another, more astuter jock I’d say--argued that it was too early to be talking about turning points of the season. He said you can’t tell what a turning point in a season is until you reach the end of the season. For all anyone knows, the beating the Patriots administered to the Broncos at the mid-season point could be followed by a 5-game losing streak. In a month everyone might be saying the Pats peaked too soon and the beating they put on the Broncos was a turning point of a different order. How We Got to Now teases out the sublimity of that logic over centuries and across nations and personalities and leaves you with two distinct impressions. The first is that there are things happening right now beneath our collective radar that will profoundly change the way people who come after us will live. The second is that there is a certain momentum to these changes that defies a range of factors—from political to economic to moral.  

In the next few weeks, the media will tell us that the collection of clowns in Washington D.C. who presume to rule our world are in deep debate over the fate of the Keystone Pipeline. It won’t really be a debate of course; it will be a battle of pro-pipeline money vs. anti-pipeline money. Whether it will ultimately be a boon to the nation’s energy needs or a disaster for the environment will be quite beside the point in the long run…as will the new blood we’re about to spill in the Mideast over oil. It will all be made moot by what’s going down in that building Steven Johnson guides us through in the video clip below. Because if we learn anything from How We Got to Now, it’s that later will look nothing like now.