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Why Gap culture will not dominate Some columnists, myself among them, have spent the past few weeks feeling as if our brains have been smashed against the wall over and over again, till there's nothing left that can sort information that hasn't been killed dead by the constant escalation of improbable events. Nevertheless, once an adrenalin junkie, always so, and since nothing else seems to be happening, the moon still being in her sphere, W's boys quashing the recession, er slowdown, er pause, I'm in need of a good worry. And I know exactly where to find it. Of all the apocalyptic, paranoid fancies presented by the left, I generally find environmentalists best at inducing psychotic dread, often to the point that I have to spend a bracing half hour on the Web site of the Fraser Institute, calming myself down. But this new jeremiad just fell out of the mailbox. I am a lucky lucky girl. Hollow City is a book published late last year elucidating the experience of inner-city San Francisco. This city has, in the past 24 months, been overrun by dot-com money that is forcing out bohemia, the working class and recent immigrants in the process killing dead the great American cultural incubator that is San Francisco. Hollow City's author, Rebecca Solnit, announces and attempts to prove that the plight of San Francisco is the future of all cities: "in which many of us will be poorer, a few will be far richer and everything will be faster, more homogeneous and more closely controlled." Armageddon beckons. Well, yum yum, another prophet of doom for me. Better than an action thriller, that's for sure. Solnit goes on to proclaim that a decade ago Los Angeles looked like the future of urban life: decay, segregation, open warfare. But in the future, flooded with venture capital pooling into information technology, we'll bask in a frenzy of financial speculation, covert coercions, overt erasures, a barrage of novelty-item restaurants, the despair of unemployment replaced by the numbness of incessant work hours and the anxiety of destabilized jobs, homes and neighbourhoods. How divine. Plus, lucky me, trouble looms everywhere. William Saunders in the Boston Globe, reports that Harvard Square is now, with the advent of new architecture and shiny shops, "more impersonal, more exclusionary, more predictable, more uniform and along with the square's greater polish comes new subtle pressures to be rich and beautiful, constrained and role bound." Gap monoculture is our future. OK, stop. Let's be realistic. What writer can still afford to live in London unless he or she pitches up in some deep gimcrack suburb in the southeast or lives in her mother's basement? What artist can afford to live in Soho or even Alphabet City any more? No one lives in inner-city Paris but bankers and frock designers, and the lofts of Lower Manhattan have been mostly filled with analysts and brokers for 15 years. The decaying aristocracy of the Southern states and the islands have been forced on to ever more tiny handkerchiefs of property so they can eke out their stylish existence, while in their former balustraded plantation houses, vulgar developers chase the nanny around the Poggenpohl island in the kitchen, while mum's upstairs chewing the carpet or seeing just how many sleeping pills she can take and not die. Normal. Is this not the case and has it not been like this forever? What Solnit and all Cassandras on the left moan about is the so- called immutable fact that the strong will oppress the weak, and the weak will be coerced, erased and rubbed out. This is the theory of evolution and it underpins our thinking so utterly that we do not ever question it. Darwinian logic is fact, right? Completely wrong and Canada, as the home of the most important and vital fossil bed in the world, can disprove it. The 550-million- year-old Burgess Shale, which lies on the border between Alberta and British Columbia, demonstrates that the theory of evolution, as described by Darwin and his countless followers, is deeply flawed. In fact, what these ancient soft-bodied fossils prove is that life is a cone of decreasing diversity, and that what inevitably survives the onrush of events, always, is the weird, the odd, the accidental and the seemingly weak. Of the four species that survived the Precambrian explosion, one, Pikaia Gracilens, an insignificant worm, the only one with a single backbone, evolved over 550 million years into vertebrates, and eventually therefore us. Most of the more warlike, defended, powerful species, some 16 or more of them, died in the mudslide that pre-dated the Cambrian explosion. There is no possible way that we will turn into a soulless monoculture. Life will not have it that way. There will be too many shocks, too many accidents, too much flat-out weirdness. Gap culture will not dominate, because it knocks off the odd and marginal. Life everywhere and at every time is a staggeringly improbable series of events, sensible enough in retrospect and subject to rigorous explanation, but utterly unpredictable and quite unrepeatable. Lucky for me, since how else will I spike my morning adrenalin rush?

© 2004 Elizabeth Nickson The material at this website is available only for personal non-commercial purposes, and it may not be reproduced without permission.