[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Back Up The Rabbit Hole

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (February 06 2008)

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


One of this blog's central purposes, the attempt to glimpse the future's
patterns in the Rohrshach inkblots of the present, poses a notoriously
difficult challenge. Perhaps the worst of the difficulties involved in
that attempt, as I've suggested here more than once, is the pervasive
influence of mythic narratives so deeply ingrained in our culture that
few people even notice them. In a retrospective essay on his own work,
historian Arnold Toynbee offered a useful warning in this regard: "If
one cannot think without mental patterns - and, in my belief, one cannot
- it is better to know what they are; for a pattern of which one is
unconscious is a pattern that holds one at its mercy".

Toynbee was critiquing historians of his own period who treated the idea
of progress as a simple fact, rather than the richly imaginative secular
mythology it actually is. Still, his caution can be applied far outside
the limits of the academic study of history. Nearly every dimension of
contemporary culture, today just as in Toynbee's time, embraces the
unthinking assumption that the wave of history inevitably leads onward
and upward through the present to a future that will look pretty much
like the present, but more so.

This very widespread article of faith begs any number of questions. It
seems to me, however, that one of them deserves special attention. The
notion of history implicit in the modern mythology of progress is a
straight line without branches or swerves, much less dead ends from
which we might have to be retrace our steps. That idea of history, if
it's embraced unthinkingly, leaves us with desperately few options if
adaptations to some temporary set of conditions turn out to be
counterproductive when those conditions go away.

This is anything but an abstract concern just now. As the world closes
in on the end of the 21st century's first decade, its industrial
societies are leaving behind a period in which just such a temporary set
of conditions held sway. Until we recognize the blind alley down which
those conditions led the developed world, we will be hard put to respond
to a future that has begun to move in a very different direction.

A glance back three decades or so offers a necessary perspective. In the
last years of the 1970s, conventional wisdom had it that the energy
crises of that decade were the first waves of an "Age of Scarcity" that
would demand either a massive conversion to nuclear power or an equally
daunting and costly transition to a conserver economy in which
relatively modest renewable energy inputs would be used with maximum
efficiency. Both possibilities involved serious challenges and huge
price tags, but in the face of the inevitable depletion of finite fossil
fuel resources, those were the only rational options.

Unfortunately human affairs are not always governed by rational options.
At the beginning of the 1980s, the political leadership of most Western
countries - with the United States well in the lead under Ronald
Reagan's myopic guidance - rejected both these possibilities in favor of
short-term gimmicks that papered over the symptoms of the energy crisis
while doing nothing to address its causes. The improved energy
efficiencies bought so dearly during the Seventies made it possible for
reckless overproduction in the North Slope and North Sea oil fields to
send the price of oil plunging lower, in constant dollars, than ever
before in human history. All through the Eighties and Nineties,
political manipulation of the oil markets kept petroleum not too far
from $10 a barrel: around 24 cents a gallon, in other words, for the
industrial world's most precious natural resource.

The results of this disastrous collective choice have not, I think, been
adequately measured even by most thinkers in the peak oil community. For
a quarter of a century, from 1980 to 2005, petroleum could be had
throughout the industrial world at prices so low it might as well have
been free. Other energy costs dropped accordingly, as cheap oil competed
with other resources for market share while simultaneously cutting the
production and distribution costs of its competitors. The economic,
infrastructural, and cultural initiatives that emerged during those
years all embodied the assumption that "can we afford the energy cost?"
was not a question anybody in the industrial world ever needed to ask.

One result was the movement toward economic globalization that spawned
so much media chatter and devastated so many communities during those
years. Propagandists for the private-sector socialism that passes for
capitalism these days have insisted that this reflects the natural
emergence of a global free market from which everybody would allegedly
prosper someday, while their opponents have argued that it reflects a
deliberate plot to force down wages and working conditions worldwide for
the benefit of the rich. What has rarely been recognized is that perhaps
the most important of all the forces driving globalization in those
years was artificially low energy prices.

During the quarter century of ultracheap energy, transportation costs
were so low that they became a negligible fraction of the cost of goods.
This allowed manufacturers to arbitrage the difference in labor costs
between industrial and nonindustrial countries without having to take
shipping costs into account. The sort of predatory trade relationships
pursued by European colonial empires in the 19th century could be
replicated without the ferocious trade barriers and imperial
misadventures of that earlier time; local industries could be flattened
by overseas production without any need for naval bombardments or
colonial administrations, because distance had no economic meaning.

Another result, at least as dramatic as globalization though less
ballyhooed then or now, was the rise of a throwaway economy all through
the industrial world. Not all that long ago, one business you could
readily find in most American towns and urban neighborhoods was the
small appliance repair shop, where toasters, clocks, radios, hair
dryers, and a hundred other consumer goods could be taken for repair
when they stopped working. An entire industry of small-scale
entrepreneurs, and the support businesses that kept them stocked with
spare parts, tools, and materials, survived on the economic realities
that made it worthwhile to pay a repairman to fix small appliances
instead of throwing them out and buying new ones.

That industry was already faltering by 1980 as the economic consequences
of American empire distorted currency exchange rates and allowed other
countries to export goods to the United States at a fraction of the cost
of domestic production. The plunge in energy costs after 1980, though,
finished the job. Once the cost of energy no longer mattered, consumer
goods could be manufactured and shipped for a fraction of what they had
previously cost, and repairing them made no economic sense when the
repair might cost twice as much as a new model.

The explosive spread of the internet, finally, was also a product of the
era of ultracheap energy. The hardware of the internet, with its
worldwide connections, its vast server farms, and its billions of
interlinked home and business computers, probably counts as the largest
infrastructure project ever created and deployed in a two-decade period
in human history. The sheer amount of energy that has had to be invested
to create and sustain today's internet, along with its economic and
cultural support systems, beggars the imagination.

Could it have been done at all if energy stayed as expensive as it was
in the 1970s? It's hard to see how such a question could be answered,
but the growth of the internet certainly would have been a much slower
process; it might have moved in directions involving much less energy
use; and some of the more energy-intensive aspects of the internet might
never have emerged at all. It remains to be seen whether a system
adapted to a hothouse climate of nearly free energy can cope with the
harsher weather of rising energy costs in a postpeak world.

These examples could be multiplied almost endlessly, from our
extravagant and dysfunctional health care system right up to the
delusional economics that helped millions of Americans convince
themselves that it made sense to buy poorly insulated, shoddily built
new houses a three-hour drive from jobs and shopping. For a quarter
century, people throughout the industrial world have become accustomed
to economic, social, and personal arrangements that only work if energy
is basically free. Just as with every previous economic shift in modern
history, too, proponents of these arrangements wrapped them in the
rhetoric of progress. Globalization was progress, we were told, and
therefore as inevitable as it was irreversible; so was the internet; so,
when it was noticed at all, was the throwaway economy.

Yet describing these changes as progress, in the sense given that word
by our contemporary mythic narratives, dramatically misstates the
situation. For a 25-year interval, by reckless overproduction of rapidly
depleting resources and purblind manipulations pursued for short term
political gain, the cost of energy was driven down to artificially low
levels that had never been seen before - and, barring a whole
concatenation of miracles, will never be seen again. The resulting glut
of energy fostered ways of doing things that make no sense at all under
any other conditions.

In hindsight, I suspect, the entire period from 1980 to 2005 will be
seen as one of history's supreme blind alleys. A great many of the
economic arrangements, infrastructure, and personal and collective
habits that grew up in response to that age of distorted priorities will
have to be reworked in a hurry, no matter what the cost, as energy
prices rise to more realistic levels. At the same time, the grip of the
myth of progress on the industrial world's imagination remains unshaken.

The possibility that the only way forward out of the present blind alley
may require going back to less convenient and more costly ways of doing
things is nowhere on our collective radar screens just now. It's easy to
understand why. After all, most people living in the industrial world
today have spent a majority of their lives in settings in which cheap
abundant energy was the unquestioned birthright of anyone outside the
poverty class, and those less than thirty years old never had the chance
to experience anything else.

Those who borrow Lewis Carroll's metaphor and talk about the need to go
down the rabbit hole have thus, I think, missed an important point. For
the last quarter century, that's exactly where we've been. The challenge
before us now - a challenge many upcoming Archdruid Report posts will
grapple with in different ways - is to climb back out of the rabbit hole
and deal with the world we will have to face when the extravagant
Wonderland of the brief era of ultracheap energy dissolves into
windblown leaves and the shreds of a departed dream.
_____

The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA),
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/2008/02/back-up-rabbit-hole.html#links

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