Our water pressure has gone very low. It's not hard to fathom why. Our week of Siberian temperatures has led to frozen pipes, water leaks and a wave of emergency call-outs across the county. The shortage is creeping closer and closer to us. Tonight by 6pm the other side of the street had no water at all. My young daughter thought it would be clever to flush the toilet for no reason and was surprised that the cistern then refused to fill up again (at least at anything other than a senile snail's pace). So, here we are, in one of Britain's largest cities, and across the suburbs the water pressure is going down to a trickle or stopping completely.
The shelves of the local supermarket were already cleared of the cheaper bottled water by the time I arrived after 7pm this evening. Bowed figures could be seen struggling through the doors, laden with lires and litres of water. I'd never realised how heavy the stuff is! In point of fact, without a well-oiled trolley or some other means of portage, you cannot actually carry that much without incurring injury.
Back at home I headed into the garden to find to my dismay that the children's snowmen had already melted with all of today's rain. There goes my water flush supply, I thought! Then I remembered how much was still stockpiled in the front garden and so out I headed with the wheelbarrow to collect it all for flushing purposes!
Over reaction, you say? Well, we want to be careful, especially with three small children in the house. But bobbling about tonight, making my logistical preparations for a small water shortage, made me think how brilliant our water system is and, equally, how patently vulnerable we are when it breaks down. Here we are in our gloriously complicated civilisation but how close in fact to a state of incipient chaos. Miss a beat or two and the structure begins to sag beneath the strain. We only occasionally have flashes of how close we are to social breakdown. The petrol lorry drivers strike a few years ago was one such moment.
Henri Bergson believed that every technological progress required an equally profound spiritual progress in order to counterbalance it. We might say in a different sense that every technological progress comes at the cost of some skill or practice. Most of us are rubbish at letter writing now. Mind you, conversational skills are probably on the wane also. Invent the phonograph/record player/CD player/mp3 file and while you will not kill musical skills altogether, you will encourage above all their vicarious enjoyment: let others play while we sit back and listen. And soon enough there will be hardly any parlour pianos and youths will even privatise their own vicariously performed music with earplugs.
So what did the water system destroy for us? Well, probably quite a bit of death and disease, and that is no bad thing! The problem, however, is our infrastructures are now organised on the basis of water being piped clean and fresh into our own homes. We don't have wells (and their loss was probably another killer of social cohesion). At least we know we have to boil water if it comes from a standing pipe in the street (if things get that bad), but our whole lifestyle supposes this is not the way of things. Before I had a mobile phone, I kept probably a dozen phone numbers in my head. Now, I don't even remember my wife's!
So, you say, in that case, why even learn to write? Well, quite. In Greek mythology Theuth presents Thamus with the gift of writing and the latter complains precisely that it will destroy memory. That's the cost of the technological crutch. Use a tool of some description and you risk losing something else. I make no argument in favour of grass-skirted, native-level, Luddite obscurantism, but I do argue in defence of the ethical gate to technological progress. In the war of all against all, you cannot not pursue a technology when your neighbour has it. Such a decision would leave you tactically, not to say strategically, weaker. In a world under ethical guidance, however, there are other calculations to be made beside that of how to reign supreme. How to be good, for a start.
Our water will probably come back to normal pressure by the morning (I say with trepidation). Other crises no doubt await when different technologies break down. In this context I cannot help ticking off my privileges and admitting to all the advantages that they provide me with.
Nevertheless, just a small flirtation with a breakdown of the system is enough to remind one of how thin civilisation's technological skin is. We look orderly, we might even have reasonably clean streets and normally functioning cities. But beneath it all we bleed with the vulnerability of humans. Were we not to protect ourselves so well with our tools, we might live a more human life without even trying very much.
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