[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Why Dissensus Matters

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (December 17 2008)

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


During the last month or so, these essays have tried to present an
extended critique of the very common notion that we can collectively
plan for, and achieve, the future that we decide we want. By now,
though, that point has been pushed about as far as it will go. Those of
my readers who are going to get my point have gotten it, and are likely
more than ready to go on to something else, while those who continue to
believe they can order up a future to go will continue to believe that
no matter what gets said here.

Still, that discussion leads on to a further question, one that can't
reasonably be avoided here. Given that I don't think much of the
prospects of planning a desirable future and then making it happen, what
am I suggesting instead? That's a harder question to answer than to ask,
because the only answer I have to offer presupposes certain things about
what we can know about the future, and those have to be clarified first.
The same thing is true, to be sure, about the attempts to plan the
future I've critiqued. If we could know where history is headed and what
influence our actions could have on it, making firm plans for the future
would be a safe bet. Equally, if it's impossible for us to know anything
at all about the future, then all bets are off, no course of action is
more likely to succeed than any other, and the only option left would be
moment-by-moment improvisation.

Still, it seems to me that neither of these extremes fits our situation.
There are certainly things ahead that we will never expect until they
show up on the doorstep, but not everything about the future falls into
this category. An interesting distinction also lies between many of the
things we can know about and many of the things we can't: very often, we
have no way of knowing what will happen, but we can predict very
accurately that certain things won't happen, and we can also accurately
predict the kinds of things that will happen.

A specific example may help show how this works. Some years ago, when
the late housing bubble was shifting into overdrive, quite a number of
people - I was among them, though I didn't have a public platform for my
predictions in those days - noted the acceleration in housing prices and
drew two conclusions. The first was that those who insisted real estate
could increase in value forever were wrong: not just a little bit wrong,
but utterly, catastrophically wrong. The second was that if real estate
kept zooming up, there was going to be a massive crash. (Those who see
this as 20/20 hindsight may visit the Housing Panic blog {1}, one place
where these predictions appeared.)

Both predictions, it's worth noting, were based on the evidence of
history. Ever since market economies evolved the capacity to support
speculative bubbles, people have lost their senses at intervals over
some investment or other: tulips, stock, real estate, precious metals,
commodities, you name it. The infallible sign that this has happened is
the claim that the investment in question is exempt from supply and
demand and will just keep increasing in value. I think most of us
remember when exactly these things were said about tech stocks, and it's
been rather less than a year since many people insisted that the same
things were true about petroleum: wrong in both cases, and in every
other case in human history. Thus we can know something about the
future: we can accurately predict that no speculative investment will
rise in value indefinitely.

The second prediction followed on the heels of the first. Because
millions of people were climbing aboard the real estate bandwagon, and
prices were zooming upwards, it was a safe bet that eventually prices
would slump, people would sell off their investments, and the result
would be a crash; that's the way every speculative bubble in history has
ended. Thus the bloggers on Housing Panic knew the kind of thing the
future would hold: a collapse in real estate prices in which a great
many people would lose a huge amount of money. Those who noticed that
banks were loaning money recklessly to speculators also knew that many
banks would go under; again, that's the kind of thing that happens when
greed trumps caution and banks forget that money should only be loaned
to people who can pay it back.

What nobody knew was when the crash would come, what would trigger it,
and how it would play out. This is the difference between knowing what
kind of thing will happen and knowing what will happen. Nothing is more
difficult than timing a bubble. Isaac Newton, arguably one of the
brightest human beings who ever lived, tried to time the market during
the South Sea Bubble and lost most of his money. (Any of my readers who
consider themselves smarter than Newton are invited to try to predict
the turning point of the current bubble in US treasury bills. Since the
bursting of that bubble will probably put what's left of the global
economy into cardiac arrest, this is by no means a purely academic
exercise.)

These same considerations apply to any attempt to predict the future,
and in particular to the central theme of this blog, the twilight of
industrial civilization and the long descent into a new dark age.
Civilizations, like speculative bubbles, have promoters who insist they
can keep on going forever; just as with bubbles, announcements of that
sort have historically been a clear sign that serious trouble is not too
far off. It's a safe bet, in any case, that every bubble will pop and
every civilization will decline and fall. Those who are heavily invested
in a particular bubble or civilization will of course insist that it's
different this time, just as their predecessors did; those claims have
been wrong so far, and the evidence isn't favoring them this time, either.

It's quite possible, in turn, to predict the kind of things that will
happen as industrial civilization lurches down the uneven slope of
decline. Plenty of civilizations have done that before, and the common
features stand out clearly from history; some of these features are
already visible in the present case - it's educational to page through
Spengler or Toynbee and note how many features of a declining
civilization had not yet appeared in their time, but have shown up on
schedule in ours. What nobody can know in advance is just how these
trends will work out in detail.

This is the perspective on the future that frames the proposals I've
made here and elsewhere for coping with the long descent ahead of us.
It's certainly possible to know in advance some of the things that won't
happen. For example, declining civilizations always seem to get prophets
who insist that some vast and improbable transformation will suddenly
replace their civilization with the kind of society they would rather
inhabit. They are always wrong, and such prophecies should be seen as
signs of the times rather than knowledge about what will actually happen.

Set such fantasies aside, and it's not that difficult to predict the
kind of things that will happen as our civilization runs down. Mass
migrations, for example, usually take place when civilizations collapse;
the tidal force of migrant workers and refugees streaming across today's
borders is already making headlines, so it's a safe bet this process
will shift into high gear in the future. On the other hand, it's
anyone's guess how those migrations will affect individuals and
communities in any given corner of the world. I've suggested in these
essays, for instance, that the western shores of North America may end
up receiving some millions of refugees by sea from Japan. The Japanese
islands can only support a small fraction of their current population on
local resources; the northern Pacific currents go the right direction,
and Japan has a huge and capable merchant marine and fishing fleet, so
means, motive, and opportunity are present.

None of this makes the arrival of the first rusting container ship full
of refugees on an Oregon beach a certainty. For all we know, Japan might
purchase eastern Siberia from a disintegrating Russia thirty years from
now, and settle its extra population there; it might go to war with
China and suffer losses so drastic that the point becomes moot; or some
other unexpected turn of events might set history in motion down a
different path. What we do know is that as fossil fuels run short and
importing food becomes a strategy without a future, a large fraction of
the population of Japan will either relocate or die; what they do about
that bitter choice is less predictable.

Thus the knowledge we can get provides no basis for making a future to
order, but potentially allows room for something beyond improvisation.
Since a miracle is not going to bail us out from the results of our
collective mistakes, we need not waste time waiting for one, and can get
to work in more practical ways. Since the kind of things that happen
early in a civilization's decline are tolerably well documented, we can
assess trends already at work in the areas where we live, and guess at
the near-term challenges we are likely to face. Since the endpoint of
the process of decline is also fairly well documented, we can try to
anticipate what things, readily available now, will be scarce and useful
to our descendants, and do what we can to see that those things get
passed down the chain of years to the waiting hands of the future.

Now it's true, of course, that none of these options are foolproof. Even
with the guidance of history, it's possible to misjudge the shape of the
future disastrously, and even those who guess the future in advance may
not be able to avoid its dangers. This is why the concept of dissensus,
introduced last week, is vital just now: as any ecologist can tell you,
in the face of unpredictable change, the wider the range of variation in
a species, the more likely that some of them will have what it takes to
adapt. A monoculture of ideas, organizational styles, or paradigms is
just as vulnerable as a monoculture of living things, and so our best
option just now is to encourage disagreement, so as to foster as many
different approaches to the future as possible.

The need for dissensus, it should be stressed, does not simply cover the
technologies different individuals and groups might decide to pursue,
the organizations they might choose to make or support, or the survival
strategies that might seem most promising to them. It also reaches into
the realm of ends. I have said this several times in recent posts, but
it bears repeating: we have no idea what kind of society is best suited
to a world after industrialism. It's far more likely than not, in fact,
that such a society will have little in common with the notions that
middle-class intellectuals in the industrial world today might have of
it. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to imagine such a society;
it does mean that attempts to push diverse visions into a single
consensus are as unproductive as they are futile.

Diversity in the realm of ends, finally, also applies to the most basic
decisions about the way the predicament of our time is framed. For some
people, the most meaningful challenge focuses on rebuilding communities
to help them and their residents get through the end of the age of
abundance. For others, it focuses on building new societies they hope
will replace the one we have now. For still others, it focuses on
developing new technologies, or rescuing old ones, to replace those that
will stop working when today's lavish energy supplies run out. There are
those for whom raw survival is the most important thing, and there are
those who have come to terms with the inevitability of death and are
pursuing other goals.

Which of these choices is the best? Wrong question. All of them, and
more, are necessary parts of a dissensus-based approach to the crisis of
industrial civilization. As you read these words, members of a city
council in a Midwestern college town may be mulling over a project that
will pull their community through hard times, while activists one town
over, with the best intentions in the world, devise a similar program
that will fail and take their town's future with it. One ecovillage in
Ohio may be inventing social forms that will evolve into the neotribal
societies of the 22nd century, while another attempt on similar lines
sparks quarrels that tear a community to shreds. One hobbyist in
Montana, staring at pictures of a 19th century solar steam engine, may
start making the prototype of a machine that will become the prime
energy source of the ecotechnic age, while others miss the necessary
insight and waste their lives on dead ends.

What adds spice to the irony is that we have no way of knowing in
advance which is which. All any of us can do is pursue the work that
calls to us individually, cooperate with others who share the same
commitment, take the measures to weather the crisis that seem to make
sense from where we are, and remember that those who disagree with us
most heartily may be assembling their own piece of a puzzle that is,
ultimately, bigger than any of us.

Link {1} http://housingpanic.blogspot.com/
_____

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 (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He
lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/12/why-dissensus-matters.html


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