How Air Conditioning Created a Monster
And other rage-takes of the Luddite variety
I live in Amelia, a village in Umbria four hundred years older than Rome. Right outside its ancient walls lies a lovely tree-shaded public park, kitted (or should I say “kidded?”) out with play equipment for the youngsters. In the center is a coffee-and-aperitivo bar flanked by tables. And on any night during the summer, hundreds of people gather there to cheer soccer games on the outdoor big screen, enjoy a glass of wine, watch their kids play, but mostly just to talk.
There are no strangers here. Everybody knows everybody. And so it was when John and I got together with some other American friends the other night. The park was crowded, noisy, and vibrantly alive. No one was at home in front of the television. They were outside gossiping with neighbors and watching their kids play.
Mind you, this can go on until two and three in the morning, including the kids. If an American mother did that, someone would call Child Protective Services. It’s an unwritten rule that American children are to be in bed, lights out, no later than 10PM, and that’s on weekends. Here in Italy during the summer, it’s a kiddapalooza of gelato, shrieking, and mayhem until the small hours of the morning.
My wise friend, Catherine, gazing out at the throng, said, “You know why everyone’s here, right? There’s no air conditioning. Apartments are unbearably hot. So, of course they come to the park.”
And just like that, I realized something about that single variable, air conditioning, and the impact it had on the United States. It drove us off our porches and inside our homes. Instead of hanging out in the cool night air and chatting with our neighbors like we used to do, we don’t know them, don’t understand them, and probably view them with a certain degree of suspicion. This modern invention that made our hot, muggy houses somewhat bearable had an ominous side effect: it split us like atoms. It entombed us inside our climate-controlled houses and apartments. It cut us off from one another as effectively as racial segregation, and we never once considered the consequences.
Let’s take this a step further and imagine what a different world we’d be living right now if there was no air conditioning. Would we still be a nation divided against itself? Or would we have extended at least some benefit of the doubt based on the fact that we knew the people we lived next to? Conservatives and liberals aren’t a recent phenomenon. They’ve been around in one form or another since before the Whigs and Tories. And yet only in the past decade or so has the Fox-News-fueled animosity Balkanized us into our separate islands of hate. Family members now loath one another—over politics! And yet how many people would be scrolling through Q-Anon sites if their houses felt like the inside of a blast furnace?
Air conditioning is addictive. Get a little, and you always want more. The temperature inside most U.S. houses during the summer is cold enough to hang meat. Sadly, as climate change becomes less a problem of the future and more a problem of the now, we’ll be cranking down our collective thermostats and hardly ever leaving the comfort of our living rooms.
Even the way we construct houses now makes air conditioning a necessity. Older homes had those lofty high ceilings for a reason. They were effective at trapping heat. Porches, themselves a haven from the heat, protected windows from the sun. Trees were planted on the east and west sides of houses for the shade. Back in the 1920s and '30s, movie theaters were one of the few public buildings that were air conditioned, a feature benefit that was proudly displayed in the box office window. That changed by the '50s, when most buildings were air conditioned, but at home, even when air conditioning units became available domestically in 1939, manufactured air remained cost prohibitive for many families.
Now, as a direct result of air conditioning, we build houses out of Kleenex, spit, and little sheets of Tyvek.
I’m not suggesting we turn off the air conditioning units and suffer through our sweltering 21st-century summers. Even this wild-eyed Luddite would say no to that.
But I would like to remind folks that getting out of our houses, going for walks, speaking with neighbors at a safe distance of one Fauci (or six feet) apart, even neighbors we think we don’t like, will help us find common ground. Yes, those people had a Trump sign in their yard. Yes, if we drilled down, we’d probably find a thousand reasons to dislike them even more than we already do. But if they’re our neighbors, wouldn’t it help to find at least one tiny thing not to hate about them? One? Because we could use a little less animosity in this world right now.
The more effectively we wall ourselves off from people, the easier it is to demonize them. We don’t know them in fact; we know them in theory. After a while, we let Fox News pundits start forming those theories. Next thing you know, we’re storming the Capitol on January 6, beating law enforcement officers with Thin Blue Line flags.
It’s not that hard to figure out. Americans are huddled inside their air conditioned Garage Mahals, ordering Grub Hub, watching Netflix, and praying no one rings the door bell.
Maybe it’s time for us to adopt a few Italian ways, right? Besides, a glass of Montefalco or a Brunello will make even the most intolerable boor a little less boorish.
Just don’t talk politics.
A friend of mine would sometimes comment on his drug dealing, hippie days in Chicago during the '60's and '70's. The surest way of getting laid was telling some woman he had AC in his bedroom.
I never had AC in my places in (greater) Los Angeles. Usually it was enough to have one big fan set up in a window in exhaust mode, and then open the other windows to allow air to flow through. I remember one night when it was too hot for even that, and I spent a few hours hanging out at a bar (I want to say it was the John Barleycorn, but I may be confusing that with Chicago) reading Jean van Heijenoort's "From Frege to Gödel", which was its own kind of conversation starter.
These days, where I live becomes unendurably hot -- hotter inside than out -- once the temps hit the mid '80's, especially if there's any sun out. And all my neighbors are die-hard Trumpista fascists; I don't *want* to talk to them, even if the option was available.
You're not wrong, but I'd submit that air conditioning isn't the only culprit. American car culture has created a society that requires us to drive everywhere for everything. Walk to the corner store? WHAT corner store? It's been put out of business by a GIGANTICO big box (IF YOU CAN'T GET IT HERE, YOU DON'T NEED IT, COMRADE)...but it's five miles away, and so you need a car to get there. The same holds true for virtually every need that must be met. American neighborhoods are designed around cars, not people. Air conditioning merely applied the coup de grace.