Episode 1 (Australia, Part 1 of 4)

The transcript of this episode is available at Buzzsprout.com/1970784.
For photos of the places discussed, see greatmirror.com

Transcript

In 2018, and after teaching geography for 50 years, I retired.  I was 75.  One student in my last year or so was surprised to learn that I often rode a bicycle to school.  I was surprised by her surprise, because I didn’t feel old.  Speaking to a younger colleague, I mentioned how this student’s eyebrows had gone up.  He laughed and said, “Bret, you are old.”  I don’t think that’s a good reason to quit, or a very nice thing to say, but I did often find myself getting angry in class, and that probably is a sign.

A few months later and tidily transitioned from salary to pension, I bought an Economy-class ticket from Oklahoma to Australia.  The routing included a nonstop from LAX to Sydney.  A few years earlier I had gotten a free double upgrade on a nonstop from Delhi to Chicago.  (Yes, American Airlines flew that route for a while.)  Would lightning strike again?  Would I fly first class to Sydney?  It did not, and I did not.  Walking down the jet bridge, I thought of Venice and the Bridge of Sighs.

It wasn’t my first time in Australia, and on that first visit I had skipped Sydney and gone straight to Alice Springs.  Most Australians have heard of Alice but never seen it.  It’s in the dead center of the country, far from the coasts where nearly everyone lives, so my going there was like an Australian skipping Los Angeles and Yosemite and going straight to Wichita.  Not many people would do that—most people would think it was weird or, if they were being polite, unusual—but I think it would be a good way to meet the United States.  After a few days in Alice, I drove north a thousand miles, and the grim towns along the highway to Darwin were a better introduction to Australia than any tour of Sydney’s famously famous opera house.  

On this more recent visit, I checked into a high-rise hotel close to a stop on the airport subway line and even closer to surprisingly good coffee.   I decided to skip the nearby business district.  It has some fine old government buildings with facades celebrating Australia’s conquistadors–the White ones, I mean–but I had no wish to see them again. I didn’t want to go to my favorite place in Sydney, either.  That’s Gap Bluff, where on sunny days translucent waves surge and break against the cliffs on both sides of Sydney Harbor’s narrow mouth.  I stand there and feel attached to the earth, but getting to Gap Bluff meant riding a bus for maybe half an hour, and I didn’t want to spend even 10 minutes in another tin can. 

Sydney Harbor is shaped like a tree ten miles tall that fell inland, toward the west, and on this day I decided to walk to Darling Harbor, one of Sydney Harbor’s many branches.   I already knew Miller’s Point, where Darling Harbor, the branch, meets Sydney Harbor, the trunk.  Victorian townhouses on a high bluff here overlook what once were busy docks.  The city’s elite lived in those townhouses until an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1900 proved that the leisure class can run, if it has to.  The townhouses were taken over by a public agency and leased to working stiffs.  A century later, the docks were obsolete, and shipping had moved to Botany Bay, about ten miles to the south.  Yes, it’s the same Botany Bay where Captain Cook landed in 1770.  

The government of New South Wales woke up and  realized that there was money to be made here because the old townhouses are almost in the shadow of the city’s famous harbor bridge.  The renters didn’t go quietly.  One window had a sign reading “Resist!”  Another had a poster of a skull with a top hat and a lit cigar.   A third had a sign that said, “My home, 1976-2016.”   I hate to say it, but bet on the money.  It’s almost as irresistible as the sea.

On this more recent visit, I left my hotel and threaded a path through a thicket of high rises down to a point on Darling Harbor about as far as you can get from Sydney Harbor.  Call it the tip of the branch.  I found myself remembering Alfred P. Sloan, the long-dead boss of General Motors.  Tight-collared Sloan (and he was very tight-collared) had built the company’s lineup—Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac—and I assume he liked his company’s slogan: “A car for every purse and purpose.” 

I was thinking of Sloan because I was looking across the water to a Sofitel.  It was flanked on one side by a Novotel and on the other by an Ibis.  All three flags—luxury, midscale, economy—belong to Accor, France’s version of Marriott and Hilton.  Rooms for every purse and purpose. 

The hotels flanked a conference center, an exhibition hall, and Australia’s national maritime museum.  On my side of the water, the Sydney Aquarium stood next to a Madame Tussauds wax museum.  It’s the only one in Oceania.  New Zealand has to get by without one.

Darling Harbor had evidently made the transition from derelict industrial district to thriving entertainment venue.   How many cities dream of this?  All of them, I suppose, at least in rich countries, and it seems that Sydney has managed the transition exceptionally well.  

Set back a block from my side of the water was the thirty-two-story tower of the Commonwealth Bank, Australia’s largest.  Next to it were towers occupied by Dutch-owned Rabobank, Germany’s insurance giant Allianz, and the British accountancy giant PwC.  The four of them looked over the harbor like a gang of  thieves checking out their next heist.  Unlike most gangs, this one didn’t lie low.  Thieves don’t have to do that if they can buy all the justice they need.

On this weekend morning lots of people were strolling along the waterfront promenades.  Nobody paid the towers much attention.  That’s normal, but it’s also odd.  I mean that if a visitor was about to cross a raging river somewhere in the lonely Himalaya, and if the deserted bridge spanning the river was made of rough wooden planks lashed to cables braided from vines, the visitor would be sure to check the cables and stamp on a plank or two.  

Yet here, spanning Darling Harbor, was the Pyrmont Bridge.  About 1,200 feet long, the bridge opened in 1902.  Ninety years later, it was downgraded to pedestrian-only use, like an elephant demoted from teak logs to cotton candy.  The bridge’s central section weighs a thousand tons and, on command, rotates on a central pier.  I waited a bit, hoping to see it swing, but it never did.  

Now, if I had worn a sandwich board and tried to hand out leaflets warning of the bridge’s imminent collapse, people would have looked at me for a moment, sized me up as a crank, and walked on.   It’s the same with the money towers.  If my leaflets warned of financial disaster, only a few people would have bothered to take one, and almost none of them would have bothered to read the thing.  And this is true even though the people I was trying to educate not only knew very little about these companies but might well be financially ruined if those companies collapsed.  

Now most people with determination can learn enough metallurgy and engineering to judge the condition of a bridge, but nobody outside the world’s money companies will ever learn their secrets.  Instead, we trust that somebody, somewhere,will make sure that the money companies don’t collapse or that we’ll be protected if they do.  

I’m no different.  I have bank accounts with companies I know almost nothing about.   I have doctors, too.  Are they the best doctors available to me?  I have no idea, which is why I joke that there’s a reason we’re called patients.  

Still, failing to exercise our powers of judgment brings us to the mother of all problems, which I take to be the relationship between technology and freedom.  

For most of the last 5,000 years, the history of that relationship has been the history of big people fitting little people into the hierarchies needed to build things like the Egyptian pyramids.  It’s the story of the thing Lewis Mumford half a century ago called the megamachine, his name for what anthropologists rather foolishly call complex societies.  (I call the phrase “foolish” because it implies that some societies are simple.) 

It’s a story usually told as a triumph, as in the phrase “the rise of civilization,” but Mumford’s point was that the benefits provided by these societies come at a terrific cost in regimentation, which is to say in freedom.  It’s hardly a revolutionary insight.  At least some malcontents thousands of years ago must have wondered why they were building a mountain for somebody they would never see.  

The word “megamachine” never caught on.  Still, I like it because it captures the terror lurking, usually ignored, in the idea of progress.

I should probably say terrors plural, because until the 19th century or a bit earlier, these machines were composed almost entirely of human beings.  That changed with steam and internal-combustion engines, electric motors and, most recently, with what we are pleased to call “high tech.”  It’s an amazingly arrogant phrase, echoing high culture of course and implying that billionaires in black deserve to stand next to Michelangelo and Mozart–and, if we’re honest, probably in front of them.  

Until about 1800, in other words, freedom had been what people wanted when they found themselves abused by landlords and money lenders, bandits and thugs, bosses and tyrants, owners and quite a few husbands—a plethora of pharoahs.  Freedom is still that, but alongside that kind of freedom, which I call social freedom, we now have—or more often don’t have—environmental freedom, by which I mean life in an environment suited to human beings.  I assert that environmental freedom does not exist at Darling Harbor or in any place built with modern technologies.   

Many smart and successful people will object vehemently and say that they have no problem working in a building where they rarely or never see the sky.  They will say they are happy to own a condo whose windows do not open or which provide a view only of other windows.  I get it.   Right now I’m in an office on the sixth floor of a building with sealed windows and a fine view of a parking lot.  I don’t bitch about it.   I do think of Dostoyevsky returning from a Siberian prison camp and writing that human beings can adapt to almost anything.  

I have heard people say that they would jump at the chance for a one-way ticket to Mars.  I’d run the other way, but I do welcome the advance of medical science.   I’d be ungrateful if I didn’t, because without it I’d be dead.  I am also very grateful for central heat and air conditioning.  I sometimes wonder how Michelangelo and Mozart managed to live their whole lives without it.  

Yet we’re watching a movie.  The hero is a cop whose only phone is a rotary-dial joke.  He sees people living on their latest and greatest, and he shrugs as if they’re crazy.  He lives in a broken-down trailer by the beach, flouts rules, infuriates his superiors, and of course always catches the bad guys.  He wants social freedom (no bosses) and environmental freedom (fresh air and the sea), and the movie invites us to admire him.  

Sometimes we even imitate him a bit.  We call it our vacation, and it’s when we try to make our escape.  I say “try” after reading that some national parks in 2021 were so crowded that visitors had to get timed-admission tickets.  Or we listen to country and western music, which by definition is almost oblivious of the modern world.  

That’s not the worst of it.  Millions of people vote for candidates who act as though the world is as simple as the lyrics in those songs.  Most of these voters know--and so do the politicians they vote for--that the world isn’t big enough for eight billion people to live on fish from the creek and peaches from the backyard.  These voters don’t seriously want to live that way, but still they vote for what the historian Jacob Burckhardt long ago called terrible simplifiers.   I think they vote this way, at least in part, because they feel cheated by a society that promises something called the Good Life but which, if we’re lucky, delivers a safe, soft, and occasionally entertaining prison without bars.

Most of these voters feel so cheated that they vote for candidates who just might bring the whole thing down.  It isn’t the finest hour for Homo sapiens, but there’s a Samsonesque logic to it.  Watching the mighty pyramid crumble—the global edifice, the whole freedom-crushing shebang—would be satisfying until it became terrifying.

So there’s nothing out of the ordinary if I condemn the megamachine while enjoying coffee from a machine so complicated that, if it breaks, the barista has to call a technician.  Don’t call me a hypocrite.  Hypocrisy rests on pretense, and I don’t pretend.  You could say I’m confused, though I prefer ambivalent.  In any case I’ve got lots of company.  I’ll even bet that astronauts returning to Planet Earth look forward to a fishing trip. 

The obvious question at this point is what’s wrong with the world we’ve built.  The short answer is that, given the chance, birds and mammals will, if captured in the wild, escape if they can.  We, on the other hand, though conceding that we are animals in some primeval sense, believe we are no longer like animals.  

I hesitate to say that we prefer living in cages, but we certainly pride ourselves on being smart enough to have replaced the natural world with one that’s more comfortable and secure.  For most of the people who live in what we cheerily call advanced economies, we have succeeded in making life less nasty, brutish, and short.  It’s a great accomplishment, and I’m not being sarcastic.  Like most people I don’t want to return to country music’s homespun simplicity, even if that was logistically possible, which–let’s be clear about this–it isn’t for more than a very few oddballs, misfits.

At the same time, denying our animal selves tends to reduce us to a combination of consumer and working stiff, the first implying that we exist to consume and the second implying that we’re already dead.  People don’t want to think of themselves like that, but many years ago a colleague told me that our bosses see us the way plumbers look at pipe. He acted it out with his hands: measure, cut, solder.  I thought he was exaggerating, but now I would go him one better and say that, treated like pipe, we become pipe.

Think of an impala running for its life and feinting brilliantly.  The cat in pursuit is equally quick-witted, adapting instantly to the impala’s every maneuver.  Both animals are amazingly clever, though no more so than an owl on the hunt or the mouse I’ve been trying to catch.   Then think of a driver stuck in traffic and reduced to an irritated drudge.  Another working stiff heading home, another piece of pipe.

Of course we do what we can to escape being pipe, which is why, if I’m stuck in traffic, I listen to something.  The sound system in my car is very good.  If I can afford it, I live in an amazing house on the beach, and of course I have a hideaway in the mountains.  Maybe a Swiss chalet or some place in the south of France.  (It’s always the south.)  If I can’t afford those things, then on the weekend I’ll head to the beach or maybe the mountains.  I’ll engage in what, without thinking about the word too much, we call recreation.  

Minimally, I might turn on the TV and watch athletes as gifted as impalas and cats and owls and mice, but there’s a problem here, because spectator sports teach us that only a few people are physically gifted.  

I disagree.  As Exhibit One, I declare that I can stand up.  I don’t know how.  Yes, I can approximately work out the major muscles and bones involved, but I know nothing about what I suppose are hundreds if not thousands of nerve impulses running up and down my spine before I’m up, usually on two feet but sometimes just on one.   It’s kind of amazing.  In the same way, I can ride a bicycle.  I’ve never known a mathematician who could calculate those tiny right and left turns as quickly as I make them intuitively.  Nobody’s impressed, of course, because we can all do it.   

Once, human beings could live their entire lives with just their native abilities and a bit of help from parents and a few other people.  Once, I said; not now.  If my television fails, I certainly can’t fix it.  The technician who might be able to fix it is almost certainly unable to do anything with my air conditioner, and the technician who’s brilliant with air conditioners won’t touch my dishwasher, which insists on running for several hours.  I once knew a potato farmer in Maine who prided himself on being able to fix his own machinery.  He was one of the happiest people I’ve ever known—I mean genuinely, deeply happy—but he died of old age, and farmers today use equipment stuffed with electronics that nobody can repair. 

We celebrate and reward the people who invent this stuff, though the stuff they invent makes us profoundly helpless and separates us from the world where we once survived with our natural or, if  you like, our animal gifts.  Separated from that world, we begin to ignore those gifts, and at that point we begin to forget what we are.  This is probably not the best recipe for happiness.  

Some smart people will tell me to hang on a minute.  Sure, they will say, we are profoundly ignorant of the world we have created.  Few people know that plate glass is made by floating it on molten metal—usually tin—and even fewer know the recipe for the coating that is sometimes applied to reduce the penetration of sunlight through that glass.  But these same people will say few people have ever understood how water defies gravity and rises from a tree’s roots to its leaves.  Of the few who do, even fewer understand the physics of the mid-latitude cyclone that brought yesterday’s rain to those roots.  In other words, we’re no more detached or separated from the engineered world than we are from the natural one. 

My reply is that environmental freedom doesn’t require knowledge: it only requires an environment in which we can survive with our natural or animal skills.  I say “only,” but it’s not a modest requirement, not when modern life requires radically different skills.  

I think of a dermatologist’s office where I was studying a poster in splendid color.  I was drawn to the Pacinian corpuscles, which tell us when we touch or bump into things.  You might think I understand how these obviously important parts of my body work, but I don’t.  How many Pacinian corpuscles do I have?  I have no idea.  I assume they can be traced back, evolutionary branch by evolutionary branch, to the beginnings of life on Earth.   No wonder I’m comfortable with them.   I trust them the way a cat trusts its whiskers.  

I can stretch a bit and behave naturally with the hammer I hold as my fist’s extension.  Because I have hands, I’m at ease with pliers and wrenches.  Because I have teeth, I’m comfortable with saws and axes.  I can stretch a bit and be comfortable with screwdrivers, though the helical curve of a screw is a subtle devil. 

Nearly everything invented in the last hundred years, however, exceeds intuitive understanding.  Strictly, the trouble began a million years ago when some brave soul captured fire.  Greek mythology reminds us that the gods were not amused, but I’m glad that Prometheus acted as he or she did.  Since then, we’ve had the entire span of our existence as a species to get used to this first and perhaps greatest non-intuitive technology.  

That’s why I have a vague understanding of an incandescent light bulb.  Not so with fluorescent tubes and LEDs, both of which are an utter mystery to me.  Call me stupid.  I won’t disagree, but I have tons of company.  Not one person in a thousand understands, let alone appreciates the elegance, of Maxwell’s Equations, which underlie most everything electronic in our lives.  So the exhaust fan in my ceiling makes an unusual noise.  Maybe it’s a bad bearing, but I’m not really sure if the motor has bearings.  I bought the fan.  It’s mine, but the fan is a stranger.

I don’t want to begin to count all the strangers I live with, from my phones, my laptop, my desktop, my printer, my modem, my range extenders, my televisions—plural—to the raft of appliances that have turned my kitchen into a machine room.  Yes, these strangers make life wonderfully comfortable, but they demand that I accept their terms and conditions. 

So it is that I mutter at the seat-belt warning buzzer or chime or whatever it is.  I curse the tangles of wires sprouting from my electronic stuff.  I consciously try not to notice the LEDs blinking at my bedside.  On calm mornings I often step out on my front porch and through the darkness hear what sounds like a newspaper printing press roaring maybe two doors down the street. It’s not a printing press.  It’s a six-lane freeway.  A visitor might guess that the road was five hundred feet away, but it’s actually well over a mile away.  It’s astonishing how far that sound carries and how thoroughly it spoils my enjoyment of the morning, but my choice is dead simple: tolerate the noise or go back inside.  I sympathize with whales and dolphins who can’t do that.

I tell myself that these terms and conditions are a fair price to pay for comforts unknown to Michelangelo and Mozart, but I also worry.  I have almost come to believe that I am the thing, the object, the mass, the corpus, that steps on my bathroom scale.  No more and no less.  I occasionally remember those moments when I have felt or recognized that I am part of something bigger.  I understand now that those were the moments when, like standing at Gap Bluff, I possessed environmental freedom.  They were the moments I was somewhere I belonged.

So here I am at Darling Harbor.  I’m walking around, a little disappointed that nobody is applauding my pedestrian skill.  (We even make that word a synonym for something dull and tedious.)  If a toddler looks at me, I smile, and if the toddler stumbles, I purse my lips in sympathy.  With that, I’m about done with my natural gifts and am ready for learned behavior.  My mother taught me not to urinate in public.  Childhood friends taught me to be careful about who I pick a fight with.  More recently, and more than once, I’ve almost been killed learning that Australians drive on the left.   

I’m also running mindful of all the things I don’t know.  We’re back to the condition of the Pyrmont Bridge and the money companies in those towers.  I neglected to say earlier that I’m a member of Accor’s loyalty program.  I’m happy to chat about other hotel brands, too.  These companies usually prefer managing hotels to owning them.  I grow uneasy if I think about this, because the owners are almost always unidentified.  If I knew that a certain hotel owner was wicked, I’d try to sleep somewhere else.  Instead, I delegate my judgment to the management company, which regularly thanks me for my loyalty.  As to whether the management company is wicked, you might as well ask me how a cell phone works. 

All in all, here at Darling Harbor, and at almost any settled and prosperous spot on the planet, I’m walking around not in the world for which I am naturally gifted but in a space mostly shaped by people trying to make money by providing something that somebody was willing to buy.  I could say I’m alienated, but that’s a prestige word.  Alternatively, I like the phrase “deprived of my birthright,” but it belongs to an old, old book.  I’m left with words I used before:  “detached” and “separated.” They are embarrassingly ordinary words, but if I think about them a bit I realize that what I really want is their opposites.