Air conditioning, frat sex, and self reliance

These days the world thinks, mistakenly I believe, that it is high class to have air conditioning. Not always true, as an old Boston lawyer friend writes me:

My first experience with A/C was when I was employed during Law School as a clerk at a major Boston law firm, in the early 1960’s. The firm had no A/C generally although many of the Partners had individual units in their offices which then had windows that could be raised or opened in the Office Tower on State St  Boston. There was an obvious moral tone exhibited by several of the more Senior Partners who eschewed the individual units. On the opposite side having an  A/C unit was all but a necessity for the more Junior Partners to mark their newly acquired status in the firm. The library which served as my Office was a veritable oven, nevertheless I concluded that  the older lawyers  were basically right. Mick Jagger  (attendee – London School of Economics ) confirmed this essential truth to me 20 years later - “ You can’t always get what you want, but you may find out you have what you need “.

Old law partners learned
 to keep cool the hard way

The idea that it was once classier and a source of pride to not have air conditioning, as with these senior partners, is mostly forgotten and even unimaginable to the world, all the more so in upwardly striving Bangkok with its ethic of conspicuous consumption. It's a bit like boats without engines or wood coffee tables with ancient dents, burns, and saw marks which were once seen as far more distinguished than motorized yachts and that crappy plastic Euro furniture that people want in Asia now. 

But I'll bet those old Boston partners shrewdly figured out the offices that didn't get late August afternoon sun. This intelligent planning never occurs to anyone now and few apartment or condo buyers here in this part of the world ever think of sun exposure when they buy a unit. Just go ahead and pay a 300 dollar a month electric bill later. Hardly a sustainable way of life.

This reminds me of Camille Paglia's comments on the current date-rape campus hysteria. She says that girls once knew that it was not smart to walk around mostly undressed and drunk at 2 am frat parties. So now instead when they think the day after that maybe after the party they may have had sex with a frat boy while in a drunken stupor they are demanding a new layer of rape investigation and disciplinary adjudication to be dispensed by campus committees of students and professors as naive as they are themselves. The police and the courts, of course, wouldn't understand their pain.

Surely the decline of the traditionally powerful societies in the face of leaner and tougher people is in large part a loss of individual foresight and self reliance, an aggregation of expectations that the company or the employer or the state or the college will take responsibility for everyone's lack of foresight and mistakes in the face of reality.