[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Same New Ideas

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (May 14 2008)

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


As I write these words, a week before their publication, The Archdruid
Report is starting its third year. It's been a long strange trip, to
borrow a phrase from the Grateful Dead. Perhaps the strangest thing
about it, and certainly the most interesting, has been the chance to
watch the way that ideas rise and sink through the collective
imagination of the modern world.

This isn't simply entertainment, though it certainly has its
entertaining aspects. Behind the obvious challenges posed by peak oil
lies a struggle among basic assumptions about the nature of reality.
Underlying the cornucopian position, for example, is a worldview in
which all meaning and value center on humanity's upward climb to a
modern society, and nature is merely a source of raw materials and a
place to dump waste. Go to the apocalyptic true believers at the other
end of the spectrum and you enter a worldview in which humanity has
fallen from grace by usurping nature's power, and only the purifying
force of total catastrophe can admit a righteous remnant back into its
proper subservience.

These worldviews, like others in the peak oil debate, have ancient
roots, and the belief systems that cluster around them faithfully copy
equivalents from past centuries. One of the interesting things about the
play of ideas around peak oil is the way that an unfamiliar predicament
has been redefined in such familiar terms. What adds irony to the
interest, though, is the consistency with which those who present these
common notions insist on describing them as new and innovative ideas
unlike anything anyone has thought before.

Circumstances give me something of a front row seat to this odd
spectacle. It happens that, as a function of my training and temperament
alike, my ideas about the future of industrial society differ sharply
from many of the popular views on the subject. I hasten to say that my
ideas are no more original than those of the other sides in the debate.
Everything I've said about the future here and elsewhere comes out of
one thread of what Mortimer Adler used to call the Great Conversation,
the play of ideas down the years that traces the cultural history of our
world, and they root down into a worldview at least as archaic as those
I mentioned a moment ago. What interests me is the number of people who
are just as dependent on secondhand ideas as I am, but have apparently
never noticed that fact.

Consider the widely circulated theories that the end of industrial
society will be sudden, total, and imminent. There's nothing
particularly new about this claim, which has been being made regularly
since the mid-19th century. There's rarely anything new in the arguments
supporting modern versions of the claim, either; most of them were well
aged before such durable classics as Roberto Vacca's The Coming Dark Age
dusted them off for a new audience in the 1970s. For that matter, the
shark-fin theory of history, in which societies rise over time to a peak
of wealth, power, and corruption, and then suffer total destruction, can
be found in the Old Testament, and underlies the religious rhetoric of
apocalypse that coined most of the ideas now being retailed by today's
prophets of fast collapse.

The persistence of the shark-fin theory in apocalyptic rhetoric, it has
to be said, is not matched by a similar presence in actual history. It's
vanishingly rare for a society to collapse at the peak of its wealth and
power, for the simple reason that wealth and power are two of the most
effective means for staving off collapse. As a rhetorical reality,
however, the sudden collapse of unjust power has immense cultural
resonance throughout the western world, and people are duly lining up
for the chance to say "How art the mighty fallen!" over the corpse of
industrialism. What fascinates me most, though, is that each of them
seems to think they thought of those words by themselves, and for the
very first time.

For amother example, take the confident announcements that the current
troubles of industrial society are the harbingers of an evolutionary
breakthrough to a higher mode of being, where the problems that beset us
today will have lost their relevance. Few claims about the future are so
insistently described by their proponents as new and innovative
thinking; even fewer have less right to that title. Glance through the
pages of such classics of Victorian thought as Joseph Le Conte's
Evolution, published in 1888, and you'll find the same claims of
imminent evolutionary transformation that fill so many popular books today.

The idea of an evolutionary breakthrough was necessarily a bit of a
latecomer on the cultural scene, since a theory of evolution had to be
invented first. Once Charles Darwin took care of this detail, each
subsequent generation has duly identified whatever crisis made the
headlines as the birth-pangs of the new humanity. Their equivalents
today insist that this time, it's for real, since the current crisis is
so much more dire than those of the past. In making that argument,
they're on familiar ground, since the same thing has been claimed about
many crises in the past, and doubtless it will be claimed just as
fervently about many crises in the future. The most intriguing detail
about all this, again, is the way in which an idea that's been rehashed
more often than the average sitcom plot has been trotted out again under
the label of new and innovative thinking.

A third example is the profusion of claims that everything will be all
right if only the right people are given political power. David Korten's
widely touted The Great Turning is a case in point. Korten argues that
certain people, who have reached a higher "developmental stage" than the
rest of us, are uniquely qualified to hold positions of leadership as
the ideology of Earth Community vanquishes Empire, the Satan-surrogate
of his intensely dualistic secular mythology. His arguments differ only
in details from those Plato uses to justify elite rule in his
totalitarian Utopia The Republic or, for that matter, the equivalent
arguments used by defenders of aristocratic privilege in 18th and 19th
century Europe. Since few of Korten's readers are apparently familiar
with these latter, though, his profoundly antidemocratic and illiberal
treatise has been hailed as a breakthrough work full of new and
innovative thinking.

As these examples suggest, the reappearance of the same new ideas over
and over again has a troubling side. Many of those ideas have been tried
repeatedly in the past, and have worked very, very poorly. Despite their
appeal, there's no good reason to think that they'll work any better in
their latest incarnations. Thus it may be worth looking into the immense
failure of cultural memory that stands in the way of tracing the
histories of our own ideas.

In his scathing 1986 study of the ideologies of gender in late 19th
century art, Idols of Perversity, Bram Dijkstra commented:

In a world which stresses the value of individualism above all else, it
is a primary requirement for the 'self-confident' mind, to remain blind
to the logical conjunction of personal ideas and the assumptions held by
the 'mass' of one's contemporaries. The ideas of 'individual' thinkers,
more often than not, are largely constructed from contemporary clichés.
These clichés have merely been stripped of their baser trappings, of
their rhetorical conventionality, in accordance with whatever happen to
be the prevailing guidelines for the 'individualistic' ego. (page 146)


Step past Dijkstra's irritable prose and the point he makes is worth
following up. The mythology of progress that provides modern industrial
culture with its unacknowledged established religion devalues the
cultural legacy of older epochs and the experience of the past; it's
symptomatic that one of the more crushing phrases of devaluation in
modern teen slang is "Oh, that's all history". Without the depth
perception that only an awareness of the past can bring, though, all we
have to work with are the two-dimensional surfaces of contemporary
popular culture, with all its baggage of unacknowledged borrowings from
the past. Santayana's famous dictum, it turns out, needs revision; those
who do not remember their history are condemned to rehash it, under the
delusion that they are being original.

There's a way out of the paradox of unoriginal originality that besets
so much of modern thought, though it's at least as paradoxical: the way
to get genuinely new ideas is to learn and value old ones. Partially
that's a matter of avoiding old mistakes, as suggested above, but it has
other dimensions. Creativity, as Arthur Koestler pointed out many years
ago, comes from the collision of incommensurable realities; to put that
in less lapidary prose, it's when the mind encounters two or more
sharply different ways of making sense of the same thing that it can
leap to a new level of understanding and come up with something
authentically new.

Just as the 19th century collision between Western painting and the
visual arts of other cultures enabled the Impressionists to break
through to a new way of seeing light and color, and the cultural
flowering of Heian Japan unfolded from the collision between the
traditional forms of Japanese society and the arrival of cultural
imports from China, our chance of finding the new ideas we so
desperately need will go up sharply if the unstated assumptions and easy
beliefs of contemporary culture are highlighted by contrast with
radically different ways of looking at the world - and the past provides
plenty of those.

Put this in the context of industrial civilization's decline and fall,
and an unexpected significance emerges. One of the great challenges
faced by every dying civilization is the need to pass on as much as
possible of its cultural, intellectual, and technical heritage to the
future. Most readers of this blog are probably familiar with the role
that Christian monks played in safeguarding the heritage of the
Classical world during and after the collapse of Rome. The same thing
has happened at other times, and in other ways - and there have also
been times when it did not happen, and bare enigmatic ruins became the
sole legacy of a civilization.

The extraordinary collection and transmission of information made
possible by modern industrial society's energy-intensive technological
infrastructure raises the prospect that our civilization could leave a
far richer legacy to the future than any before it. Still, the
vulnerability of that technological infrastructure to the impacts of
decline means that we can't count on such a positive outcome. Whatever
is to be saved has to be valued highly enough to be preserved, copied,
and passed on from generation to generation. In a society that
habitually devalues its past, it's by no means guaranteed that anything
of the sort will happen.

For this reason among others. I've come to think that a crucial role in
shaping the future will be played by cultural conservers – individuals
who choose to take on the task of learning and preserving some part of
the cultural legacy of the past, and passing it on to the future. That's
not a highly valued role these days; our society glorifies the innovator
and derides the conserver of tradition. Still, it's a role that can
contribute hugely to a better future. Over the weeks to come, I plan on
discussing how cultural conservers might practice their craft, what
resources might be useful to them, and how the gifts they preserve might
benefit the world on the downside of Hubbert's peak.
_____

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/same-new-ideas.html#links

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