Something About The Glow
Maybe the gas stove and incandescent lightbulb lovers have a point
Back in 2023, an effective ban on incandescent lightbulbs that has been proposed and rolled back and in other ways semi-implemented since the mid-2000s finally took effect; the manufacture and sale of essentially all ordinary incandescent lightbulbs is now banned.
I don’t care much about this, personally; I’ve long since been using LED bulbs in my home, and the only incandescents I still have live in a box of spare lightbulbs in the basement; I picked them up in dollar stores or found them on move-out days back when I was a student. I may very well never use them. (It’s a little like how cassette tapes went from ubiquitous to quirky, popping up in random stores and slowly disappearing from regular circulation.)
LEDs really are much more efficient, they’re cooler to touch and probably better for the sockets, and they’re 90 or 95 percent as natural and “right” looking as an incandescent. (Like all good people, I detest those curly CFL bulbs that contain mercury and take at least 30 seconds to come up to full brightness. What is this, vacuum tubes?)
But, I do sort of like incandescent bulbs. I like them in the same way I like tube televisions. There’s a crispness, a brightness, a glow to these technologies that’s really almost imperceptible, but real. The light of an incandescent bulb, the heat it throws off, the amber flash of the filament as you turn it off, is contained fire. The dancing glow of a tube television just looks “right” to me, even all these years later, compared to the uncanny-valley clarity or the soupy muddiness of an LCD.
You could say the same thing of gas stoves. I also used to love my gas stove, mostly because the only electric stoves I’d ever used were cheap models with awful temperature control and heat retention. The electric stove we have now is much better and cooks almost like a gas stove. But again, I can’t say that I don’t miss the click-click-click-whoosh of the clacky dial and ignition and flame. It’s just…cool.
Sometimes, with regard to gas stoves, you’ll hear about the primal instinct to grill meat over an open flame, which often reduces to “We really want to keep selling gas stoves and natural gas lines.” But the fact that industry might coopt the appeal of the open flame doesn’t, in and of itself, mean that there isn’t something deeply appealing to us about cooking over a flame.
The discourse around these things raises this question of why—or whether—the cleaner/more efficient/safer/more environmentally friendly product is worse; whether environmentalism necessarily entails denying ourselves. Water-efficient dishwashers, showerheads, low-flow toilets, electric versions of lawn appliances, etc. You’ve heard these debates for years, probably. Right-wing think tanks are always publishing cranky articles about these things. I don’t really go for this—who the hell cares about dishwashers and low-flow toilets?—but I do occasionally get this feeling that there might be something to the crankery. Especially when fire and light are involved.
And somehow, this gets tied to the discourse around cities, urbanism, walkability, etc.—the same people who want us to eat bugs and take away all our stuff that actually works also want us to live in cities; case closed. For some people, that passes for an argument. It isn’t an argument. But it’s difficult for me to argue that there’s nothing to it.
I was discussing this all with my wife awhile ago, and she asked me, “Well, did these guys in Germany actually say ‘you’ll own nothing and be happy’?” And I had to say, “Well, yeah, kind of.” (Not quite, but close enough—here.)
I guess I’d put it this way: I can see how the fear of left-wing busybody technocratic overreach is more real for a lot of people than the fact that it hasn’t happened. And I can see how the disappearance of technologies and products you remember, that felt right and worked, ties into that amorphous resentment. You develop a mental fetal position, taking every new idea as a potential blow to defend against. Maybe that’s just the conservative in me—standing athwart history and yelling stop, and all that—but I think something like this is explanatory.
I guess I would also say this: If you view fire and fossil fuel as a kind of pure expression of energy and of mankind’s achievement, environmentalism looks not like a defense of the earth but like an attack on the human spirit.
And again—there’s just a near-imperceptible but—I think—real comfort to the warm flicker of a picture tube or the soft glow of an incandescent lightbulb. Maybe there really is something primal about cooking food over an open flame, some ancient biological memory. Maybe fluorescent backlit screens and digital-everything just aren’t quite compatible with the evolved, embodied hardware of our brains.
That’s all a lot, I know. It might be a bit of crankery itself. Perhaps I’m just mistaking my own experience and nostalgia for some kind of revelation. Maybe an incandescent bulb or a tube TV is no more objectively superior than pastina is objectively comfort food. We perceive our deepest feelings as facts. But for a child who grows up today, other things will fill those spaces, other things will spark nostalgia and dim memories. Those new things will be the same thing, in their way.
Or maybe, you know, they won’t be.
Related Reading: