If you ever drive around downtown… any downtown, if you’re paying attention, you’ll notice something interesting. Did you ever notice that in the old buildings, anything built from the late 1800s to the end of World War II, the buildings had lots of windows that are now bricked or boarded up? Even amid revitalization, when buildings are being reclaimed, rehabbed, and renovated, most of the former windows are still there – bricked or boarded up. Like a wound that has scabbed over.
You may not know it, but there is a very valuable lesson in seeing what used to be.
Society is sick on many levels, not the least of which is our planned and purposeful dependence on unreliable systems for our survival. The results of many generations of dependency have produced a populace almost universally conditioned to believe things that fundamentally are not true. We’ll focus on just one, but it’ll serve to illustrate the greater point.
People lived and thrived here in Central Texas, through the heat of summers, for a very long time before air conditioning became prevalent. There are people still alive and reading this who remember life before air conditioning came into their lives. People lived and thrived and enjoyed life throughout the South and all over the world for thousands of years before electrical air conditioning became a “must”. Most of the world lived in the tropical and sub-tropical regions long before people began to populate the super-cold areas of the world.
“I find your lifestyle very compelling, but I could never live without air-conditioning.”
This is probably the statement I have heard the most from people who cannot believe that we were able to live, and thrive, without most of the modern conveniences that 1st world humans take for granted. I wanted to answer, “That’s not true. If you are even moderately healthy and live anywhere in a temperate zone where humans have lived for millennia, you’d do just fine,” but the truth is I couldn’t say that. Because they won’t do just fine. The mind is a very, very powerful thing, and the crippling effects of dependency on the mind are difficult to understand or quantify. I wrote about this phenomenon extensively in my non-fiction book Surviving Off Off-Grid, and I’m basically piecing this column together and adapting it mostly from bits of comments on the topic of air-conditioning and cooling taken from throughout that book.
A Gift in the Desert
In the summer of 1192, in the stifling desert heat of Palestine, Richard the Lionheart, King of England, was at his headquarters as head of the Crusading armies in Jaffa. While he had won many victories, now he had a sense of foreboding. He saw no way to take Jerusalem from the Muslims. The task was just too daunting, and the Lionheart was, above all, a realist. He was in the midst of negotiations with the Saracen (Muslim) King Saladin over just who would rule in the Holy Land. Circumstances had conspired to bring him to the negotiation table. And things were not well with him. He, the mighty crusader, lay sick in his bed in the sweltering heat, worried about the war, worried about his health, and worried about the evil machinations of his brother John who was, even at that moment, conniving to place himself on the throne as the King of England. Richard needed to return to Europe to defend his title and his claims there, but he did not know if his health would hold out; the infernal desert heat might just kill him first. Just as he pondered these things, and as the sweat continuously rolled off of his body in streams, emissaries from Saladin arrived. The messengers carried gifts and the concerns and best wishes of the Saracen King – his enemy. Saladin had heard reports of Richard’s poor health, and he had sent pears, peaches… and ice, to soothe and comfort the invading King.
Ice! Do these desert barbarians have ice?
I think there were two messages sent by Saladin that day. The first was that he was a chivalrous King and that he respected and honored his enemy. History has recorded it that way. The second, more subtle message was that (and we should take note) an industrious people – a people who can have iced drinks and keep their cool in the desert without power or machines, hundreds of miles from any mountains (the nearest source of ice), are not a people who will be easily defeated or enslaved.
If I had to pick just two statements that I hear the most often when people are tell me why they could not survive if the power went out for very long:
- I don’t think I could live without air conditioning.
- I don’t think I could live without ice.
People certainly can, and have, lived without air conditioning and ice, even in the hottest climates in the world, for thousands of years. Most of those billions of people did so having never once heard of air-conditioning… or even experienced ice. It is not the lack of air-conditioning or ice that could be the downfall of many people in this modern consumer society (if those mainstays of “civilization” are lost by some technological apocalypse), it is the unhealthy dependence on those things, and the utter ignorance of how to live without them, or to provide for them in alternate ways.
One of the first things you need to know is that sometimes we are ignorant of historical realities because of things we cannot see. The facts on the ground have changed. For example, the way we build today makes it almost impossible for people to live comfortably without air-conditioning. Why? Because we build structures based on the expectation that brute force cooling and heating will be used to make the structures livable. This is an admission that without technology, these structures are functionally unlivable.
Those buildings downtown have bricked-up windows because once the air conditioning salesmen came to town, the windows were considered inefficient. They weren’t (people supposed) needed anymore. They could be broken and would need to be replaced. They had to be washed. Before the invention of double-pane and energy-efficient windows, they were considered the major point of heating and cooling loss. You see? They are a message from the past that people could and did survive, but you probably won’t. Houses are built the same way, with the assumption that the power will never go out for long.
Electricity as Enlightenment, and Artificial Environments as Savior
A long time ago, as I began to study these things, I was shocked by many of the things that I learned. I guess had I been paying attention, I should have been asking questions of my teachers back when I was in school. Like, for example, why do you see so many pictures of Southern gentlemen and Southern ladies dressed up in heavy clothes and coats, even in the summer? Isn’t it unmanageably blazing hot in the South in the summer? Without air conditioning and electricity, wouldn’t they all be wearing shorts and T-shirts, standing under some magnolia tree in flip-flops in the shade, cursing the day they were born? Why didn’t they all look like they were standing in line at the KOA Campground for a shower like they do today? Is it possible that those southern plantation houses were designed to remain cool in the hot summer?
And it wasn’t just rich people who stayed cool. Even regular folks and the poor built their structures to help themselves provide some comfort from the extreme elements. Ever heard of a “shotgun house”? That was a design that allowed more buildings to be put on less land, but the long, thin structures were constructed to maximize the cooling and airflow. Have you ever seen Boo Radley’s house in the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird? With its high ceilings and tall windows? Or how Atticus Finch’s house was set up to take advantage of breezes with a big porch for the cool evenings?
And how did those Europeans have so many fine soirees, balls, and dances after dark? Is it possible that people who never knew anything about electricity found brilliant ways to live good and comfortable lives without it? We’ve been taught that people were just sitting around, poor and miserable sweating in the dark for thousands of years until some precious industrial savior like Thomas Edison came along and flipped on the switch and invented comfort. I found out in my studies that nothing could be farther from the truth.
Do this… I promise you will not be disappointed, and you will learn more than you can imagine. Go get some historical novels: Get Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Anna Karenina (plenty of high living, parties, soirees, balls, dancing, etc.); get Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks or Magic Mountain; get Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, or Torrents of Spring; read Thomas Hardy, Dostoyevsky, or even Mark Twain. Read Jane Austen. Or, better yet just go read Gone With The Wind. Just pick an era and read novels written during that era. That’s what I do – and when you read books, think about how those people lived and how they did things. Ask yourselves, were these people ignorant cavemen suffering in climates that made them miserable all the time?
I learned that structures in the Old South were built with natural cooling in mind. If you look at pictures or watch any of the old movies, you’ll notice that most of the larger houses had a similar building design. The bottom floor had very high ceilings, and usually, there were at least one or two underground root cellars or basements built beneath the first floor. The high ceilings allowed the heat to rise and high windows that went nearly to the ceiling would allow this heat to pass out instead of “stacking” into the room. The bottom floors generally included a very open floor plan, with lots of windows that reached to the ceiling and very thick walls. This kept the bottom floor much cooler than the outside air. The second floor of these houses generally started more than 12 feet up in the air. According to my research, there is almost always a minimum wind speed of 5 to 7 miles per hour at 12 feet above ground level even on a “still” day, meaning that there was a near-constant breeze for the second floor. All of the bedrooms were placed upstairs for this reason, and there were large balconies with French doors and large windows that would allow for this constant breeze to pass through. During particularly stifling heat spells Southern folk would sleep out on the balcony so that they could catch the breeze. The beds were on casters so they could be rolled outside, and the “high-poster” design was so that mosquito cloth or netting was draped over the sides. Did you think that was just a cool, old-school design? They also could just take a cot into the always-cool basement. As a bonus, the high second story was also usually above the “bug line”, so most flying bugs (like mosquitoes) wouldn’t find their way up there.
Building for Cool
The truth is, the world was a different place, and people lived and loved and danced and worked in it without any concept of electrical-powered brute-force air-conditioning. The fact is that air conditioning is nice, that’s why it was so easy to sell to the world. And once people had it, they didn’t need to build houses with thick, solid walls, high windows, large attics, and big porches that brought in the cool air. They didn’t have to design the inside so the breezes would blow through the house. They didn’t need large basements or parts of the house that were partially underground. With brute force cooling, houses and businesses were built cheaper and with other issues in mind, like the maximization of interior space. People who owned older buildings boarded up (or bricked up) the windows to keep the air conditioning in. Walls were thinner, windows were decorative, and didn’t reach near the ceiling. Ceilings were significantly lower. Airflow was not considered. New thinking took over for the old, and now we judge our ancestors with bad information because we don’t know any better.
Downtowns are museums of better thinking by smart people. Air conditioning is great, but wouldn’t it be wise to know how to live without it and to build so that we could survive if we didn’t have it?
But modern man cannot conceive of life outside of the 72-degree comfort womb of zero resistance.
Whenever the new thinking, however weak and anemic, becomes the common thinking, the mind becomes quick to lock out the old thinking as “impossible” or “not practical or desirable.” I am old enough to remember when air conditioning was considered an option – either in the house or in the car. Most houses did not have air-conditioning and it was absolutely not considered “standard” to have air conditioning in the car. Today, air-conditioning is not even considered an option for most people (especially in Texas). The new thinking has prevailed, and thousands of years of experience have been thrown into the dustbin. As I said, the single comment I receive the most from people who first come upon my philosophy is this one: “I don’t think I can live without air-conditioning. I just wouldn’t make it,” which is to say, “I’m more unviable and weaker than 99.9% of the billions of souls who lived on this planet before modern air-conditioning was invented!”
This is true. And because of this thinking, when things go bad… and someday almost certainly they will, things are going to get ugly. And even the people who consider themselves “independent” will expect other people to save them and make things right.
I’m not saying people should get rid of their air-conditioning. That’s not reasonable. I’m saying that if you think you cannot survive without it… then you probably won’t, because it is almost certain that one day… maybe soon… the power will go out. It is a maxim that mental strength is required to survive hardship.
And on a practical level, when we’re building or re-building, renovating, rehabbing, or revitalizing… perhaps we should re-discover windows that can open and let the breeze in.
