the parable of scubation (1994)

8/3/2019 The Parable of Scubation (1994)

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Perelman 1 Scubation

THE PARABLE OF SCUBATION*

Lewis J. Perelman

To grasp the inevitable link between technology and politics, consider this

parable: Suppose that long ago humans had so effectively pioneered working and

living at the bottom of the ocean that, over a long time, they had forgotten that

they had ever lived differently. In this deep-sea society, scuba gear obviously was

of such over-arching importance that the provision and regulation of scuba gear

was uncritically accepted as one of the essential functions of government.

The ministry of scubation incorporated a vast bureaucracy of credentialed

experts to administer and carry out every facet of scuba provision: mining air from

seawater, filtering and compressing it into bottles differentiated to match thebreathing capacity and requirements of each age group and vocation, and

compulsory scubation of the young to guard against the possibility of parents

providing inadequate air for their children. Local scubation districts were

chartered and funded with taxes to pump air into the captive youth in specially

constructed neighborhood buildingscalled schools, perhaps because of the

way children were herded into them like bunches of fish. An elaborate testing

bureaucracy also was formed to accredit the scubation schools and to

continually measure the breathing ability of the young against sea-world

standards.

Naturally, scubation was such a vital function for social well-being that it could

not be left to the whims of private commerce; so the government owned, operated,

and regulated virtually the entire scubation enterprise. And all this was accepted

as normal and reasonable by a general public that could neither remember nor

imagine that air could be supplied any other way, and that simply took it for

granted that breathing and scubation were just different words for the same thing.

Then, somewhere along the line in this undersea societys march of

technological progress, scientists and engineers came up with a wondrous

invention they might have called a balloon or dirigible or even airshipa

vessel filled with gas cells that allowed it to rise upward to explore the higher

reaches of their liquid world. In due course, these explorations led to a

revolutionary breakthrough: The scientists discovered an altitude at which theatmosphere suddenly was transformed from all-water to all-air. Moreover, the

earth in many places rose above this boundary, providing islands and continents

where people could go work and live free of the encumbrance of gas tanks and

hoses and face masks.

* 1994, Lewis J. Perelman. A version of this essay was published inEducation Week(1994).


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At this point, of course, the technological revolution spawned a political crisis.

The bloated, rich, and powerful scubation ministry faced a lethal threat to its

hegemony. Once enough pioneers came back from the frontier to tell of the new

all-air environment, the public would eventually figure out that scubationwhich,

for as long as most people could remember was accepted as utterly vitalhadsuddenly become not only unnecessary but actually an obstacle to human

progress. For those who moved to the new world of universal, free air, breathing

could simply be taken for granted as a normal activity of everyday life, and the

very word scubation would fall into such general disuse that it would be

remembered at all only as an historical oddity.

There being no heaven on earth, the pioneers of the air-world recognized that

their new society would need new technologies to keep the air clean, and even

some new government roles and agencies to guard against dangerous pollution of

the atmosphere. But the archaic empire of scubation had no role, experience, or

knowledge relevant to these new challengesit was simply obsolete. Worse, the

huge scubation bureaucracy, with its vast demands on the public treasure, its

sprawling waste of human resources and time, and its kelp forest of regulatory

snares, worked only to undermine the pioneering of the new world of free

breathing. The scubacracy thus threatened to squander the rich opportunities for

freedom and prosperity the air-world offered.

The crisis eventually compelled cities and states in the ocean-bottom society to

confront inescapable political choices. In most places, the scubacrats fought back

to prevent the liberation of the lung from dependency on the bureaucratic air hose.

They used their political clout to get local governments to outlaw the commercial

development of airships; or, failing that, they imposed regulations requiring that

all airships be owned or at least effectively controlled by the scubationbureaucracy itself.

The scubacracy used its prodigious finances to counter the threat to its survival

with self-serving propaganda. First they tried to deny the existence of the air-

world altogether. As the scientific proof of the air-filled environment eventually

became public knowledge, scubacrat propaganda claimed that airships were an

unproven technology that required years of further research; that travel to the

oceans surface would cause crippling, even lethal attacks of the bends; that

people never could learn to breathe on their own without the careful regulation of

a respirator; and that children left to run wild in the open air would hyperventilate

and die of oxygen poisoning. People who advocate replacing schools with

airship transport to a new world of free air, the scubacrats proclaimed, are greedy

capitalists out to destroy our sacred institutions of public respiration.

In a few visionary communities, political alliances of business leaders and grass

roots organizations overwhelmed the scubation establishments resistance, and

redirected the communitys resources to construct the airship fleets needed to

transport everyone to the new environment of open air. In these communities and


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some others, a large number of more farsighted scubacrats realized that their

ultimate mission was the provision of air not scuba gearthey helped the effort to

phase out the obsolete scubation bureaucracy and to make the pilgrimage to a

world of universal free breathing. These vanguard communities eventually

became the stars of a new civilization.

But other communities of the undersea society fared not as well. In many,

business and other civic leaders were diverted into partnerships aimed at

saving the schools by raising taxes to build new expensive pipelines to the

surface of the ocean in a costly and vain attempt to pump more air into the

traditional public respiration structures. In these cities and states, and others where

the scubacracys clout simply stymied even the semblance of progress, better-off

families bought their way onto airships, or acquired their own, abandoning the

bottled-air schools to the poorest and most disadvantaged citizens, who were

deprived of the technology needed to escape from the bureaucratic iron lung by

the same self-serving bureaucracy that owned the iron lung. In some places, the

squeeze between sinking economies and rising fiscal demands of a self-protecting

scubation bureaucracy, whose product grew ever more stale and toxic, ultimately

set off furious rebellions of people demanding their equal opportunity to breathe

free. But some provinces of the sea-bottom society simply imploded, and sank

into the mud.

XXX

the parable of scubation (1994)

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