The origins and development of eek!-o-freakery (Part 2)

While it was relatively easy to see how an already debased US academic community had prostituted itself to secure and to exploit a new revenue stream, the popular appeal of eek!-o-freakery was harder to decipher. In simple terms, how was it that a large swathe of American society had become so susceptible to fear-mongers?

My thinking about US society was strongly conditioned by David Potter's 1958 book People of Plenty, which pointed out that Americans had been the most prosperous people in the world even before gaining their independence in the late 18th century, and had remained so ever since. The eek!-o-freak ethos was, therefore, profoundly at variance with perhaps the most defining feature of US uniqueness, the substance behind the "God's own people" conceit and the reason why the USA was such a magnet for immigrants.

Tugging at that string, I concluded that one of the reasons why an historically unwonted feeling of unease might have grown up in America was that the country had lost its absolute global preeminence. The limits of US military might had been revealed by defeat in Vietnam, energy self-sufficiency was gone, and US manufacturing was proving unable to compete with the output of once-prostrate Japan and Germany.

There was also a relative decline in US prosperity. For the first time Americans were not the wealthiest in the world, and it was no longer a given that each generation would be better off than the one before. In addition the hidden costs of a century of soaring economic development were becoming apparent. The 1978 cause célèbre of Love Canal gave Americans a crash course in corporate indifference to the long-term welfare of the society and led to the setting up of the "Superfund" to pay for the clean-ups of industrial dump sites where, as was usually the case, the polluter could not be held to account.

However, Love Canal came near the end of a decade that had seen a plethora of far-reaching environmental legislation. Intriguingly, the President most responsible for it was the much-reviled Richard Nixon (1969-74), under whom the National Environmental Policy Act was passed. The act set up the President's Council on Environmental Quality, modelled on the Council of Economic Advisors that had been in existence since 1946, and required all federal agencies to prepare Environmental Impact Statements for any proposed policy. Nixon was also personally responsible for creating the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.

Nixon was not a likable man, but he was one of the most "realistic" presidents in US history, enormously experienced and undeniably very intelligent. His rather late conversion to the environmentalist cause coincided precisely with a wave of student activism against the Vietnam war. Nixon had promised to end conscription during the 1968 campaign, which he knew would let the air out of the anti-war bubble. But he could not do it until 1973, and I suspect he promoted environmentalism from a shrewd appreciation that it would give student activists a new cause to embrace while he was disentangling the country from Vietnam.

If so, this was the first appearance of the factor that has done so much to pervert environmentalism from a sensible focus on amelioration to a frantic social engineering crusade. I call it "instrumentality", by which I mean the throwing of political support behind the broad environmental cause to create popular support for other, more practical policies. As well as dealing with the extremely difficult disengagement from Vietnam, Nixon faced the first oil-price shock in 1973, and environmentalism provided a convenient unifying narrative for measures to reduce American dependence on imported oil.       

President Jimmy Carter (1977-81) was as idealistic as Nixon was Machiavellian, and he cast the practical need to reduce US energy profligacy in religious terms. He was deeply shocked by Love Canal, and spoke of a "fundamental threat to American democracy" at the time of the second oil-price shock in 1979:

I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might. The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. . . In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.

Al Gore expatiated on this rather adolescent "search for meaning" in his 1992 book, and Hillary Clinton did the same when her husband was president. Voters rightly resent preachiness in their politicians, but one must presume that all three had reason to believe there was a constituency for their message. It also signalled the advent of at least some degree of self-doubt in a ruling elite not previously given to public introspection.

Finally, one must mention American millenarianism. This is the nation that gave birth to the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Mormons and countless other minor Christian cults formed in the confident expectation of the Second Coming and the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth. Throw in the approaching end of the millennium, and there may have been a toxic undercurrent of subconscious religious dread predisposing a proportion of the American people to believe that mankind's sinful pollution of the planet called for sincere atonement to avert divine retribution.

I cannot claim that I put all these factors together before I left the States in 1999; they had all occurred to me, but I simply did not anticipate that the eek!-o-freak phenomenon would continue to gather momentum as spectacularly as it did. How it burst out of the American hot-house to become a world-wide, multi-billion dollar scam will be the subject of future posts.