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This is why there is so much denial about it being necessary to give up the car and all the current talk about resorting to biofuels to continue feeding the car addiction. Biofuels amount to burning one’s food and destroying what is left of the topsoil in order to continue driving. This is also why so many Americans would forgo a healthy diet, a reasonable work schedule, education for their children, needed medical treatment and even give up their house, rather than give up their car. Not having a car makes one, within the American suburban landscape, a non-person.
The universal right to drive a car is the linchpin of the American communal myth. Once a significant portion of the population finds that cars have become inaccessible to them, the effect on the national psyche may be so profound as to make the country ungovernable. Solving the underlying transportation problem, through the reintroduction of public transportation or other means, is beside the point: the image of the automobile is indelibly imprinted on the national psyche and it will not be easily dislodged. For many, their car is a public extension of their persona, a status symbol and even a symbol of sexual potency, and this makes the automobile, along with the gun, a sacred national fetish. Like the gun, the car is also a potent weapon that can be used for murder or for suicide. It is propelling the American communal myth toward a flaming crash with the reality of permanent fuel shortage, compared to which the gradual fading away of the Soviet communal myth will have been gentle and benign.
Better Living through Science
Both the United States and the Soviet Union aspired to achieving better living through science, staking their very existence on the ability to deliver technological fixes to all manner of existing problems, as well as to all the unforeseen new problems that were created in the course of applying technological fixes to existing problems. The inability to either prevent or successfully mitigate catastrophes, which, in a technology-based civilization, shows up as the inability to deal with a set of technical challenges, eventually destroys the population’s faith in the system. In a society where every kind of prestige and status emanates from the exercise of technical prowess, such failure destroys trust and undermines respect for every kind of authority.
Each of the two superpowers strove to position itself at the forefront of science and technology. It is no surprise, therefore, that science and technology were arenas of serious competition and relentless copying between the superpowers. Americans led in product design; many Soviet research institutes were busy secretly reverse-engineering American-designed products. The Soviets held an advantage in basic science; numerous American PhD candidates laboriously deciphered the Cyrillic of obscure Soviet scientific articles, then scurried back to the lab to reproduce their results. Both superpowers produced impressive results in areas such as energy, power generation, weaponry, shipbuilding and aerospace. Soviet-built capital equipment has proven to be extremely hardwearing and relatively easy to maintain, and Soviet-built motor vehicles, aircraft and plenty of other machinery are still in use throughout Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. In an ironic twist, Soviet-built planes have been pressed into service to resupply American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan because they are uniquely able to handle rutted and cratered runways.
One area of superpower technology competition that was particularly bound up with national prestige was the space race. The two early Russian wins — the first unmanned success of the Sputnik, and Yuri Gagarin’s first manned orbital flight — struck fear into the hearts of Americans, causing them to get slightly more serious about learning math and Russian and in due course to counter with the Apollo missions to the moon and other impressive exploits. The Soviet manned space program is alive and well under Russian management and now offers first-ever space charters. (As I write this, a former Microsoft executive is on his way to the International Space Station, accompanied by two Russian cosmonauts, having paid $20 million for the privilege. Once there, he will try making some of Dr. Martha Stewart’s cookie recipes in zero gravity — important scientific work, to be sure!) Americans from the official space program have been hitching rides on the Soyuz as well, while most of their remaining spaceships sat in the shop, plagued by loose heat tiles and cracks in the foam insulation, before finally being retired with nothing to replace them. To be fair, the Americans have been quite successful with their unmanned missions to Mars, fly-by missions to the outer planets and other robotic spacecraft.
The Soviet Union failed to remain technologically competitive in three important technological categories: food production, consumer goods and information technology. None of these factors was lethal on its own, but the combination was quite damaging, to the prestige as well as the pocketbook. It is uncanny that the United States now appears poised to fail in these same categories as well — which is why I chose to include them here.
Industrial Food Production
There is no reason why food production should be relegated to the area of technology; after all, people grew and gathered food with little or no technology for many thousands of years. But the introduction of collectivized, mechanized agriculture broke the back of pre-revolutionary Russian agrarian society, and no amount of technical supervision from Moscow was able to restore the prolific productivity of the backward old village.
In most parts of Russia, agriculture has always been a somewhat dubious proposition. The growing season is short. The soils are thin outside of a single belt of fertile black soil called chernozëm that runs through Ukraine and some of Russia’s southern regions. There are frequent spring droughts and early cold snaps. These factors make very marginal yields and outright failed harvests quite common, and there have been several episodes of outright starvation. Because agriculture is so unreliable, throughout their long history Russians have augmented it with other types of traditional economic activity (so-called promysly) such as fur trapping, hunting, fishing and logging. Nevertheless, before the havoc wreaked by World War I and the ensuing revolution, Russia was by all accounts a well-fed country, known for its blini-eating contests, that supplied wheat to Western Europe. In Soviet times, it had to import wheat from the United States and Canada on credit, and many people were forced to supplement what was available in the state-run shops with what they could buy at the farmers’ markets, gather in the woods and produce from their own small kitchen garden plots.
Corporate, mechanized agriculture in the United States is often viewed as a success story, able to supply its people with a high-fat, high-protein diet, which also contains plenty of salt and sugar, along with many mystery chemicals. Never mind that it spans the entire spectrum of flavors — from sawdust all the way to cardboard — cleverly disguised by the fat, salt, sugar and mystery chemicals. Never mind that this questionable food is often ingested in a hurry, from a piece of paper or plastic. Never mind that it makes the people fat, crazy and sick. The portions are nothing if not generous, even for the poorest people, many of whom sport cathedral-like domes and buttresses of fat.
The US also produces many agricultural commodities for export. However, this agricultural system depends on the availability of fossil fuel-based energy, mainly in the form of diesel for agricultural machinery and transportation and natural gas for fertilizer and other chemical manufacturing. In effect, the industrialized agricultural system transforms fossil fuels into food calories with the help of soil (which it gradually destroys in the process) and sunlight. The ratio of fossil fuel energy to derived food energy has been calculated to be about ten calories from fossil fuels for each calorie of consumed food. The combination of depleted domestic oil and gas resources and demand outstripping foreign supplies, coupled with increasing demand for biofuels and the predicted onset of dust-bowl conditions due to global warming, represents a less than rosy scenario for American food security in the coming years.
Consumer Goods
The Soviets’ inability to compete in the area of mass-produced consumer goods stemmed mainly from an administrative preference for financing capital goods expenditures while ignoring light industry. Also, consumer goods production requires a flexible economic model that is difficult to accommodate within a centrally planned economy. Consumer goods were regarded not as an important segment of the Soviet economic system but as a