[A-List] A Failure of Mimesis

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

Archdruid Report (July 25 2007)


Though I disagree with him as often as not, James Howard Kunstler is one
of my favorite authors in the peak oil field today. For all the
intemperance of his style - and it's hard not to admire somebody who can
turn the spit-slinging vitriolic diatribe into an art form - he's one of
the few thinkers in circulation these days who has found his way to the
elusive middle ground between those current incarnations of Pollyanna
and Chicken Little, the believers in perpetual progress and the
believers in imminent apocalypse. Reading his book The Long Emergency,
more than anything else, convinced me that it was worth trying to get my
own distinctly unpopular views on the future of industrial society into
circulation, and his blog is one of the few I read regularly.

Thus I took it as a bit of synchronicity a few weeks back when he posted
an essay titled "Thuggo and Sluggo" on his blog Clusterfuck Nation,
waxing irate about the way the younger generation has embraced the urban
gang esthetic. Now of course jeremiads about the younger generation have
likely been in fashion since Cro-Magnon times; there's a great passage
in one of the classical Roman moralists (unfortunately I've misplaced
the reference) about how kids these days don't listen to their parents,
stay out all night drinking, drive their chariots too fast, think about
nothing but sports and sex, and so on. But there's a subtle difference
between this timeless plaint of parents everywhere and the phenomenon
Kunstler discussed, and the difference ties into the theme of last
week's post - the theme of culture death.

Ironically, some of the best insights into the phenomenon Kunstler
denounces can be found in the urbane academic prose of Arnold Toynbee's
ten-volume A Study of History. As a young man, Toynbee watched Europe
tear itself to shreds in the fratricidal frenzy of the First World War,
and the experience left him with a passionate desire to understand why
civilizations rise and fall. Economic explanations of the sort central
to my theory of catabolic collapse held little appeal for him, and he
had even less interest in environmental issues; his focus was on the
social transformations that move societies along the trajectory of
growth and decline.

His argument, insofar as it's possible to sum up hundreds of pages of
subtle reasoning in a paragraph or so, is that civilizations emerge when
a creative minority inspires the rest of their society with a vision of
human possibility powerful and appealing enough to break through what he
calls the "cake of custom", the rigid body of tradition that shapes the
behavior of traditional cultures. The key to their success is the
universal human habit of mimesis - our incurable habit of trying to
imitate what impresses us. When you were five years old and played at
being a superhero - look, I'm Spiderman! - you were practicing mimesis;
today, whenever you think about what you want to become, or what you
want society to become, you still are. In traditional societies, the
models for mimesis are tribal elders and tribal traditions, which
accounts for the immense stability of tribal custom. Civilizations rise
when a creative minority with an openness to new visions becomes the
focus of mimesis instead.

The downside arrives when the creative minority loses the ability to
inspire, and settles for the power to coerce. As its role as a source of
inspiration dwindles, so does its role as the focus of mimesis. People
stop wanting to become like the members of the dominant minority, and
start aiming their hopes and dreams elsewhere. This splits their society
into two unequal halves, a dominant minority clinging to power by ever
more coercive means, and an internal proletariat that goes through the
motions of participation but no longer shares its society's values and
goals. Finally the internal proletariat makes common cause with the
external proletariat - the people of surrounding societies who are
exploited by the civilization, and never had any stake in its survival
to begin with - and everything comes crashing down.

It's an intriguing analysis, and Toynbee was by no means averse to
applying its lessons to his own society. In his view the formerly
creative minority of Western civilization was well on its way to
becoming a dominant minority, maintaining its position solely by
economic and political force, and the rest of Western society was
equally far along the road to becoming an internal proletariat with no
stake in the civilization of its rulers. He argued that the fault for
this "schism in the body politic" lay squarely with the elite classes,
who were increasingly unfit to lead, unable to follow, and unwilling to
get out of the way.

This criticism is all the more interesting because Toynbee was himself a
member of the elite he excoriated. For most of his life he was the
leading intellectual light of the Royal Institute of International
Affairs (RIIA), the British equivalent and ally of the much-denounced
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York. It doesn't speak well of
the current crop of conspiracy theorists that so few of them have
noticed Toynbee's role as the source of the ideas that guide these two
organizations, but then the fact that the CFR also publishes a quarterly
journal of foreign affairs to which anyone can subscribe has escaped
most of them, too.

Set Toynbee's theory next to Kunstler's diatribe and it's clear at once
that the two of them are talking about the same thing. Kunstler's
"Thuggo and Sluggo", his white suburban teens borrowing their dress,
speech, music, and manners from inner city nonwhite gang members, are
poster children for the failure of mimesis in contemporary America. It's
easy to denouce Thuggo for his taste in clothes and his fondness for rap
music, but there's something very important and deeply troubling
underlying these things.

What, after all, does our society offer this young person we're calling
Thuggo? Suppose he plays the game; what prizes can he expect to win?
Downward mobility has become one of the most pervasive and least
discussed facts of life in America today, and nowhere so much as in the
options we offer young people from the lower middle class on down. It's
still popular to invoke the ghost of David Ricardo and insist that
globalization is a rising tide that lifts all boats, but the hard
reality is that the last thirty years have seen America's once proud and
prosperous working class thrown to the wolves, so corporations could
keep boosting their quarterly profits and the middle class could
maintain a filmy illusion of wealth through access to cheap consumer
goods. Every $25 an hour factory job offshored to the Third World and
replaced with an $8 an hour job flipping burgers is one less reason for
the children of working class families to embrace the values that the
middle class thinks they ought to have.

This situation bears on the end of the industrial age in many ways, but
I'll focus on only one of them here. One thing you'll hear if you read
any amount of peak oil literature is the complaint that so few people
are willing to do anything about the approaching end of the age of cheap
abundant energy. Even within the peak oil community, a surprisingly
small number of people have taken the sort of simple practical steps
that will make their own lives much easier as energy starts becoming
scarce and expensive - growing a vegetable garden, learning to get by on
less energy, and so on. Outside the peak oil community, almost nobody is
listening at all.

>From Toynbee's useful perspective, this is simply another failure of
mimesis. Those of us who write and speak publicly about peak oil and
other aspects of the predicament of the industrial world are trying to
break through a "cake of custom" every bit as firmly entrenched as the
traditions of any tribal society could be, but we've arguably been
trying to do it with the wrong tools and in the wrong way. Denunciation
won't do the job, and neither will carefully reasoned proofs backed with
an infinity of footnotes; both those, entertaining as they are, fairly
quickly become exercises in preaching to the choir. It might be worth
suggesting that a change in approach is in order. If the peak oil
movement can present a vision of the future that inspires and energizes
people outside the peak oil scene - including those rap-listening,
wide-wearing kids whose energy has gone unharnessed by any other
movement for change for so long - the possibilities for constructive
change may be greater than many people now suspect.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/


http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com
http://www.ashisuto.co.jp