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177 C H A P T E R S I X T E E N E n e rg y a n d t h e M y s t e r y o f I n i q u i t y Jean Robert I n 1973 the industrial world was shocked by the OPEC decision to drastically reduce oil exports until they could obtain better prices. Societies that had made themselves oil-dependent responded by taking provisional conservation measures . A few even proscribed the weekend use of private cars. This restriction was the occasion for another surprise. An official prohibition against which the public was expected to protest, for many became a long-sought liberation . How agreeable strolling in the streets again! City dwellers rediscovered that they could walk, and even hard-bitten car drivers began to remember that their condition as bucket-seat asses was not irremediable. Two days a week, the word equity recovered its immediate , concrete meaning of “endowed with equal gifts,” from the Latin aequitas, an equality in basic abilities that is a foundation of law. Meditating on the word, it became clear to me why its Latin antonym is not inaequitas, but iniquitas, which for St. Paul meant evil, and whose presence in creation believers faced as a mystery. In light of the recovered weekend equity on streets and squares, the confused jam of vehicles competing with each other for scarce space, encroaching on pedestrians’ freedom and crippling them, appeared as a human-engineered evil. But was this intuition not an exaggeration? The capacity to go walking where one wants is indeed the most equitably distributed ability. It is innate, a natural right by birth. Some seem to have forgotten this truth; for others, it has been suppressed; their feet, as well as their imaginations, have been disabled ; they come to feel they perpetually need to be carried along at high energy costs. But they can hardly ignore that mobility based on mechanical energy can only be classificatory , that is, discriminatory: “Tell me at what speed you are carried, and I will tell you who you are” becomes a slogan of the epoch of energy-intensive transportation. Society is inevitably layered in a worldwide class structure of speed capitalists. Equity and mechanical energy have become conflicting categories: the second can only grow with the decay of the first. However, the recovered freedom to walk during those long-ago car-free weekends revealed that, if a society would reduce per capita mechanical power, equity would again become a practical possibility. Further, recovery of the immediate equity of near equals on foot might serve as incentive to other recoveries. This is why OPEC’s decision was, for many citizens, a reason for hope— “ the Arabs’ gift.” Experts think otherwise. They want nothing to do with an option that would make them jobless. Instead of responding to the emerging hope, they foisted a new ghost on the world: the energy crisis. This was based on the fallacy that humans are inherently dependent on machine energy. The energy crisis shamelessly exposed the Western manqué for a drug Arab oil kings longed to sell at higher prices. Any Eastern carpet merchant could have explained that it was a bad bargain: the oil-producing countries were free to more than double their prices. Eventually, energy-intensive traffic, that is, industrial normality, was reestablished on Sabbaths and Sundays, without a single protest from Jewish or Christian authorities. Mechanical traffic has a blinding effect on the public imagination; it cancels out other options. The louder it roars, the more it seems necessary, for why would people otherwise tolerate such a racket if it were not some imperious necessity? The noisy claim of the transportation industry to legitimacy makes it appear the only form of locomotion compatible with modernity. Further, and importantly, it contributes heavily to the economy. By contrast, walking disturbs little and, since it costs almost nothing, does not add significantly to the gross domestic product. The energy crisis was the experts’ sham to make people forget that their feet could contribute to their locomotion in more genuine ways than by filling vehicles and pushing accelerators. In the twenty years between the energy crisis and Desert Storm, the Great Persuaders shaped the rich countries ’ public opinion to believe that, if they wanted to secure energy supplies, they had to face harsh decisions: “Si vis petroleum, para bellum,” (If you want gas and oil, prepare for war). President George Bush could...

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