[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Preparing For What Future?

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (May 07 2008)

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


Last week's Archdruid Report post {1}, as my regular readers will
recall, tried to point out that the current round of price spikes in
food and petroleum prices does not justify claims that industrial
civilization was on the brink of a rapid and total collapse. Predictably
enough, this suggestion brought down a flurry of criticism.

Some of that was simply another helping of the standard arguments for
the progressive and apocalyptic fantasies that play so large a role in
today's collective consciousness. Fortunately, not all fell into that
reflexive category. My essay cited a recent post by relocalization
blogger Sharon Astyk suggesting that a fast crash was imminent, and she
responded the next day with a thoughtful rebuttal {2}. I won't try to
summarize her arguments here; those interested should certainly read her
response in full.

One point, though, deserves a response in detail. My essay last week
ended with what I thought was a fairly straightforward comment: "...
unless, that is, we allow premature proclamations of triumph or
catastrophe to distract us from the work that must be done". Astyk took
exception to this and suggested, if I follow her correctly, that the
phrase was simply a rhetorical flourish. That it certainly was not. It
could doubtless have been expressed more clearly, but it points to what,
as I see it, is one of the most crucial factors in discussing the future
of industrial society.

The actions we take to prepare for the future, after all, should be
shaped by the future we expect. If we can reasonably expect the future
promised us by the modern myth of progress - a future of constant
improvement toward a destiny among the stars - then it makes sense to
plan on business as usual, to treat each ephemeral new technology as the
wave of the future, and to treat nature as a sort of green decor worth
saving solely for esthetic and sentimental reasons. If, on the other
hand, we can reasonably expect the future promised us by the modern myth
of apocalypse - a future of sudden chaos and mass death that will leave,
at most, a handful of survivors huddled in isolated hideouts - then it
makes sense to abandon any hope of improving the status quo and eschew
any plan for the future that doesn't involve firearms, canned food, and
subsistence skills basic enough to be practiced in the desolate silence
of a mostly empty world.

The problem with either of these decisions is obvious enough. If our
plans rely on the arrival of some particular future, and that future
does not come about, whatever money, effort, resources, and time have
been invested in our imagined future has gone down a rathole. If the
future we get turns out different enough from the one we expect, in
turn, our actions may have closed doors and wasted opportunities that
could have spared us major difficulties. The textbook example in recent
times is the decision taken around 1980, by nations across the
industrial world, to discard the promising steps toward sustainability
made in the previous decade. If those steps had been followed up, the
transition to a postpetroleum world could probably have been made
without massive disruption. At this point, after a quarter century of
wasted opportunities, the chance of doing that is slim at best.

Seeing this catastrophic error as a matter of choosing the wrong future
to prepare for, though, rather begs the question. There's at [sic] some
reason to think that the decisions that turned the industrial world away
from sustainability in the early 1980s were not the result of a
conscious decision that a future of infinite economic growth on a finite
planet was possible and desirable. Rather, it seems all too likely that
people wished to take certain actions - for example, scrapping expensive
and inconvenient conservation programs - and justified those actions by
imagining a future in which those actions seemed to make sense.
Certainly the same thing has happened in a big way in the alternative scene.

Look for proposals for responding to the crisis of industrial society
these days and you'll find that nearly all of them fall into three
groups. First are those who want to organize a political movement to
throw the current rascals out of office and put a new set of rascals in.
Second are those who talk about building ecovillages in the countryside,
to provide a postapocalyptic version of suburban living to today's smart
investors. Third are those who plan on holing up in a cabin in the
mountains with guns and canned beans, and waiting until the rubble stops
bouncing. I've argued elsewhere that none of these is a viable response
to the future we're most likely to face, but there's another point worth
noting: each of them is also something many people in today's American
middle class want to do anyway. Quite a few people nowadays think they
ought to have more political power; an equally large number like to
daydream about moving to a new exurban development far out in the
countryside; and of course, the appeal of firearms collections and
fantasies of self-reliance remains strong in an age that has
problematized traditional images of masculinity. To a great extent, peak
oil has simply become another excuse for the pursuit of activities, real
or imagined, that many people find desirable for other reasons.

Amplifying this is one of the most enduring habits in the American
tradition of public rhetoric - the attempt to scare the bejesus out of
people in the hope that this will motivate them to follow a desirable
course of action. Colonial preacher Jonathan Edwards' famous sermon
"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" set a cultural fashion that
remains alive to this day. Choose any cause you care to think of, and if
it's attracted anything like a mass movement, odds are that its prophets
are announcing the imminent arrival of some variety of doom - closely
modeled on the Book of Revelations, far more often than not - unless
people change their wicked ways. If it's not a mass movement, the odds
are even better that its prophets will be proclaiming some inevitable
doom which will sweep away the unbelieving multitudes and leave the
earth to the righteous remnant - that is, the prophets in question and
those who agree with them. In either case, the catastrophe is simply
rhetorical ammunition meant to back the claim that whatever action
you're supposed to take is the only alternative to doom. Peak oil, of
course, has attracted a sizeable number of would-be prophets of both kinds.

I should hasten to say at this point that I'm not assigning Sharon Astyk
to either camp. Mind you, I suspect she would propose relocalization as
a good idea - as, indeed, many people have been doing, for a variety of
good reasons, since the early decades of the 20th century - even if
nothing like peak oil were in the offing. Still, retooling lifestyles to
rely more on local resources and one's own efforts, and less on a
far-flung and increasingly fragile global economic system, is likely to
prove a very useful strategy during the cascading series of crises
unfolding around us right now. In that, I think, we're very much in
agreement. Going beyond that, however, requires a clearer sense of what
kind of future we are facing - and not just on a global basis.

Local and personal scales also count; everyone shares the same future
only when "the future" has been reduced to an ideological abstraction.
The same problem afflicts current talk about the possibility of a crash,
fast or otherwise: exactly what is crashing, and how far, and how
uniformly? I've done my best to be clear about such issues here and
elsewhere, but it's probably worth repeating myself. My take is that
modern industrial civilization is on the downslope of its history,
headed for the compost heap of fallen empires alongside all the dead
civilizations of the past. Peak oil and the other elements of the crisis
of the contemporary world, in this analysis, are simply the current
manifestations of patterns that shaped the fall of other civilizations,
and our future will most likely follow a similar course - an extended,
uneven decline extending over more than a century, including repeated
periods of crisis followed by partial recoveries, ending in a dark age
in which much of the technology, knowledge base, and cultural heritage
of today will survive in fragments or be completely lost.

Those parts of the world peripheral to today's industrial civilization
will follow trajectories of their own - it's worth remembering that the
Muslim world and T'ang dynasty China reached the zeniths of their own
cultural arcs while the western world was scraping the bottom of the
last round of dark ages - and new cultures will arise from the ruins of
the modern industrial world in time. The global reach of industrial
civilization, though, makes it unlikely that any part of the world will
escape the approaching troubles entirely, and the equally global
drawdown of resources erases the possibility that societies of the
future will be able to duplicate the industrial model; their technics,
while potentially even more sophisticated than ours, will have to work
with much less concentrated and abundant energy sources.

The current round of global troubles - the peak of conventional
petroleum production worldwide, soaring prices and incipient shortages
in other commodities, spiraling breakdowns in the international debt
market, and the fraying of America's global empire - marks, in this
analysis, the onset of one of the periods of crisis mentioned above. If
this is the case, we face several decades of serious social, economic,
and political turmoil, with a high likelihood that many of these
troubles will spill over onto the battlefield. As I've suggested
elsewhere, the period between 1929 and 1945, with its economic crises,
political horrors, and global power struggles ending in a brutal world
war, may make a tolerably good model for the period now dawning around us.

If I'm right - and every discussion of the future needs to start with
those unpopular words - the future for which we have to prepare has two
aspects, one overarching, one immediate. The overarching aspect is the
slow curve of decline I've called the Long Descent, the final trajectory
of industrial civilization toward its death. The immediate aspect is the
need to deal with the particular round of crises breaking over us just
now. Those two aspects are related but they're not the same, and the
resources and skills needed to deal with them are also not the same.

These, ultimately, are the reflections that lie behind my suggestion
that fixating on the short term, and overstating the implications of
short-term trends, may well get in the way of a constructive response to
the broader picture. This is why it's problematic to insist, as a number
of internet bloggers did recently, that the discovery of a new oil
resource in North Dakota means that peak oil is no longer a problem. On
a global scale, with most of the world's oil producing countries and
most of its supergiant fields already in decline, the Bakken shale
simply doesn't make that much difference, and planning for a future that
will allow us to keep up the extravagant energy-wasting lifestyles of
the recent past will likely have disastrous results.

Yet it's just as problematic to insist that the current wave of crises
will inevitably spin out of control into a fast crash that will bring
industrial civilization to its knees. That claim carries its own agenda
of actions for the future, and if the claim turns out to be inaccurate,
many elements of that agenda could all too easily prove to be
dysfunctional. Moving to an isolated rural area and making a go of
subsistence farming is not a viable strategy for everyone, for example,
and even those who are well suited to that life might turn out to have
made a dysfunctional choice if the fast crash fails to arrive on schedule.

If the end of the industrial age turns out to be a longer and more
complex process than fast-crash advocates suggest, in fact, isolated
rural areas may not be the best places to start small farms at all.
Truck gardens and organic food production on the outskirts of small and
mid-sized cities will be much better positioned to thrive in a world
where markets still exist but transport costs are a major limiting
factor. In some areas this is already happening; the explosive growth of
farmers markets, community-supported agriculture schemes, and direct
sales of local produce to local restaurants have put down the
foundations on which local and regional food production networks could
easily grow. Fostering the emergence of such networks could contribute
much to the future. So could the evolution of many other economic
specialties that are irrelevant in the context of a fast crash, but not
in the more complex terrain I suspect the future holds for us.

Of course there's a broader context to all this. My vision of the future
is very much a minority view these days. So many people believe in the
fast crash scenario that there's unlikely to be anything like a shortage
of people preparing for it, but the Long Descent is another matter. It
doesn't echo any of the narratives our culture and media circulate about
the future, and it doesn't feed the widely held and wildly popular sense
of our own uniqueness that underlies so much of today's supposedly
innovative thought, so its mass appeal is pretty minimal.

Thus you won't find many people preparing to make the transition from
today's high-tech economy to the less complex, more impoverished, more
fragmented, but still industrial economies that I expect to emerge from
the Great Recession and global troubles of 2010-2030 or thereabouts. Nor
will you find many people seriously taking on the role of cultural
conserver that will be desperately needed if many things of value are to
get through the deindustrial dark ages of 2200-2600 or thereabouts, and
reach the successor cultures that will emerge beyond it. As I see it,
these are among the crucial tasks before us; they could make the long
road to the deindustrial future more bearable, and pass on important
gifts to the future; but as I tried to suggest last week, they will not
happen if the people who could make them happen get caught up in
premature proclamations of triumph or catastrophe.

Links:

{1} http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/04/not-end-of-world.html

{2}
http://sharonastyk.com/2008/05/01/the-great-big-food-kablooey-why-food-is-complicated/
_____

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/2008/05/preparing-for-what-future.html#links


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