[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Specialization Trap

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (April 15 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


Few ideas are quite as unpopular nowadays as the suggestion that the
fate of past civilizations has something to teach us about the likely
destiny of our own. This lack of enthusiasm for the lessons of history
pervades contemporary culture; what makes this interesting is that it is
also among the most fruitful sources of disaster in the modern world.
The ongoing implosion of real estate prices around the industrial world
is simply one example out of many.

Long before the phrase "condo flipper" entered common usage, one thing
should have been obvious: anybody who claims that an asset class can
keep on increasing in value forever is shoveling smoke. From the 17th
century Dutch tulip mania to the internet bubble of the late 1990s,
financial history is littered with the blackened ruins of speculative
booms that crashed and burned while in hot pursuit of the fantasy of
endless appreciation. None of this kept investors in the last few years
from betting the future on the belief that this time was different, and
real estate prices would keep rising forever - or from lambasting those
few spoilsports who suggested that what went up would inevitably, in due
time, come down.

Those of us who insist on reading today's headlines about peak oil in
the light of history risk a similar reaction. Still, it's a risk worth
taking. The logic that insists that while all other civilizations have
risen and fallen, ours will just keep rising forever, differs not a whit
from the logic underlying the late real estate bubble; the only
difference is one of scale. It's for this reason among others that I try
to keep up with scholarship on the decline and fall of past
civilizations, and that was what brought me to Bryan Ward-Perkins'
valuable book The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2005).

Those of my readers who don't keep track of current fashions in
historiography may not know that for several decades now, such phrases
as "the Dark Ages" and "the fall of Rome" have been nomina non grata in
scholarly circles. The transition that turned western Europe from the
crowded, cosmopolitan Roman world into the depopulated, impoverished
patchwork of barbarian chiefdoms that succeeded it has been recast by
several influential writers as a process of positive cultural evolution
that just happened to feature such awkward incidents as, say, the sack
of Rome by the Visigoths.

Now it's only fair to say that, like most revisionist histories, this
one made a necessary point. An older generation of historians had gone
so far in the other direction - demonizing the barbarians, ignoring the
real cultural achievements of the centuries following Rome's fall, and
paying too little attention to the survival of the eastern Roman Empire
during the years when its western twin imploded - that a reaction was
overdue. Like most revisionist histories, however, the reaction pushed
itself to the point of absurdity, and Ward-Perkins' book is a useful
corrective.

One of the tools he uses to document the real scale and impact of the
western empire's collapse is the humble but eloquent voice of pottery.
The Roman pottery industry was huge, capable, and highly centralized,
churning out fine tableware, storage vessels, roof tiles, and many other
goods in such vast quantities that archeologists across Roman Europe
struggle to cope with the fragments today. The pottery works at La
Graufesenque in what is now southern France and was then the province of
Gallia Narbonense, for instance, shipped exquisite products throughout
the western empire, and beyond it - goods bearing the La Graufesenque
stamp have been found in Denmark and eastern Germany. Good pottery was
so cheap and widely available that even rural farm families could afford
elegant tableware, sturdy cooking pots, and watertight roof tiles.

Rome's fall changed all this. When archeologists uncovered the grave of
a sixth-century Saxon king at Sutton Hoo in eastern Britain, for
example, the pottery found among the grave goods told an astonishing
tale of technical collapse. Had it been made in fourth century Britain,
the Sutton Hoo pottery would have been unusually crude for a peasant
farmhouse; two centuries later, it sat on the table of a king. What's
more, much of it had to be imported, because so simple a tool as a
potter's wheel dropped entirely out of use in post-Roman Britain, as
part of a cascading collapse that took Britain down to levels of
economic and social complexity not seen there since the subsistence
crises of the middle Bronze Age more than a thousand years before.

Ward-Perkins' book contains many other illustrations of the human cost
of the Roman collapse - the demographic traces of massive depopulation,
the way that trends in graffiti track the end of widespread literacy,
the decline in the size of post-Roman cattle as a marker of agricultural
contraction, and much more - but I want to focus on the pottery here,
because it tells a tale with more than a little relevance to our own
time. Cooking vessels, food containers, and roofing that keeps the rain
out, after all, are basic to any form of settled life. An agricultural
society that cannot produce them is impoverished by any definition; an
agricultural society that had the ability to produce them, and loses it,
has clearly undergone an appalling decline.

What happened to put such obviously useful items out of the reach of the
survivors of Rome's collapse? As Ward-Perkins shows, the post-Roman
economic collapse had its roots in the very sophistication and
specialization that made the Roman economy so efficient. Pottery, again,
makes an excellent example of the wider process. Huge pottery factories
like the one at La Graufesenque, which used specialist labor to turn out
quality goods in immense volume, could make a profit only by marketing
their wares on a nearly continental scale, using sophisticated networks
of transport and exchange to reach consumers all over the western empire
who wanted pottery and had denarii to spend on it. The Roman world was
rich, complex, and stable enough to support such networks - but the
post-Roman world was not.

The implosion of the western empire thus turned what had been a massive
economic advantage into a fatal vulnerability. As the networks of
transport and exchange came apart, the Roman economy went down with it,
and that economy had relied on centralized production and specialized
labor for so long that there was nothing in place to take up the slack.
During the Roman Empire's heyday, people in the towns and villas near
Sutton Hoo could buy their pottery from local merchants, who shipped
them in from southern Britain, Gaul, and points further off. They didn't
need local pottery factories, and so didn't have them, and that meant
their descendants very nearly ended up with no pottery at all.

Even where Roman pottery factories existed, they were geared toward mass
production of specialized types, not to small-scale manufacture of the
whole range of pottery products needed by local communities. Worse, as
population levels declined and the economy contracted, the pottery on
hand would have been more than adequate for immediate needs, removing
any market for new production. A single generation of social chaos and
demographic contraction thus could easily have been enough to break the
transmission of the complex craft traditions of Roman pottery-making,
leaving the survivors with only the dimmest idea of how to make good
pottery.

Trace any other economic specialty through the trajectory of the
post-Roman world and the same pattern appears. Economic specialization
and centralized production, the core strategies of Roman economic
success, left Rome's successor states with few choices and fewer
resources in a world where local needs had to be met by local
production. Caught in the trap of their own specialization, most parts
of the western empire came out the other end of the process of decline
far more impoverished and fragmented than they had been before the
centralized Roman economy evolved in the first place.

Map this same process onto the most likely future of industrial society,
in turn, and the parallels have daunting implications. In modern
industrial nations, the production and distribution of goods are far
more centralized than anything Rome ever achieved. Nearly all workers at
every level of the economy perform highly specialized niche jobs, most
of which only function within the structure of a highly centralized,
mechanized, and energy-intensive global economy, and many of which have
no meaning or value at all outside that structure. If the structure
falters, access to even the most basic goods and services could become a
challenge very quickly.

Food is the obvious example - a very small number of people in any
industrial nation have the skills necessary to grow their own food, and
even fewer could count on access to the land, tools, and seed stock to
give it a try - but the same principle holds for every other necessity
of life, not to mention countless other things that would be good to
have in the deindustrial dark age that looms up ahead of us in most of
our possible futures. Consider the suite of skills needed, for example,
to locate and process suitable fibers, spin and weave them into cloth,
and make the cloth into clothing. Not many people these days have any of
those skills, much less all of them; the tools needed to do most of them
are not exactly household items in most homes these days, and the
ability to build and repair those tools are even more specialized.

Our situation is thus far more precarious than Rome's was. On the other
hand, we have an advantage that the Roman world apparently lacked - if
we choose to use it. The possibility of a future dark age apparently
never entered the cultural dialogue in Roman times, but it has been
raised repeatedly in ours. Preventive action - the deliberate revival of
nonindustrial ways of providing necessary goods and services - is well
within the reach of individuals and local communities, and indeed some
of this work has already been done by hobbyists and people involved in
historical reenactment societies of various kinds.

A great deal more of the same thing will be needed, though, to keep the
decline of industrial society from leaving the same sort of economic
vacuum in its wake that Rome's fall left behind. I am coming to think
that one of the most useful things anyone concerned about the future can
do is to adopt some practical craft that produces goods or services
useful in a deindustrializing world, and get skilled at it. If we are to
get much of anything out from between the jaws of the specialization
trap, projects such as this are a crucial step.
_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/04/specialization-trap.html#links



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