[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Why Decline Matters

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (May 28 2008)

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


One of the most curious blind spots in the contemporary imagination, as
I have suggested more than once in these essays, can be traced in the
way that the concept of decline has vanished from our collective
discourse about the future. What makes this blindness even more curious
is that it is a very recent thing.

A century ago the possibility that the modern western world might reach
a peak, and then retrace history's familiar path down to the common fate
of civilizations, was on many minds. The art of Aubrey Beardsley and the
novels of Joséphin Péladan, to name only two leading figures of the
Decadent movement, announced, and at times wallowed in, the approaching
decline that Oswald Spengler detailed a few years later in his
magisterial prose. The belief in decline was never universally held, or
even a majority view - those who prophesied the imminence of Utopia
through progress or violent revolution had at least as large an
audience, and apocalyptic fantasies were never hard to find - but the
idea was there, and commanded attention from serious thinkers.

Somewhere between the 1920s and the end of the Second World War,
however, the entire concept of decline dropped out of the modern world's
collective imagination. Except for a brief reprise in the wake of the
converging crises of the 1970s, and a few manifestations on the far
edges of today's fringe culture, it has yet to return. This odd shift in
the shapes of our imagined futures demands attention from those of us
who try to sense the shape of the future in advance, because if the
future we get is one of decline, the results could be far more
challenging than anything the more simplistic notion of sudden collapse
can offer.

Decline, after all, is not a linear process. Trace the decline of the
dead civilizations of the past along the dimension of time, and much
more often than not it follows a complex, stairstep curve that
alternates periods of crisis with respites and partial recoveries.
Compare the process to the sort of sudden apocalyptic collapse that
occupies so much space in the collective imagination today, and a
striking result emerges: the amount of population decline and cultural
loss in any given generation may be much less than would result from a
single sudden catastrophe, but the overall impact of decline is much
greater, and the capacity for swift recovery much less.

This seems counterintuitive, but it can easily be demonstrated by
historical evidence and logic alike. Consider the Black Death in Europe.
As an example of dieoff, it's hard to beat - the first terrible epidemic
of 1346-1351 killed close to a third of the population of Europe, and
recurring outbreaks that followed every decade or so took up to ten
percent of the survivors each time - and, in the form of the peasant
revolts of the late 14th century, it even managed to produce some
semblance of the marauding hordes that play so large a part in
contemporary survivalist fantasies. Despite the horrific death rate, the
widespread social disorder, and the huge cultural impacts of the Black
Death, European civilization did not collapse, or lose cultural
continuity. The survivors simply picked themselves up and went on with
things much as before.

Imagine a similar dieoff, or even a much more extreme one, in America
today and it's not hard to see why. Let's say the most extreme versions
of the peak oil survivalist thesis turnout to be correct; some crisis or
other causes petroleum markets to freeze up completely, and gasoline and
diesel fuel become completely unavailable; panic and looting set in,
governments somehow fail to do anything about the crisis, and society
unravels in a general war of all against all, with marauding hordes
spilling out of the cities into nearby rural regions in a desperate
quest for food. Five horrific years later, the US population has
plummeted by 95%. What happens next?

The single largest resource base available to the survivors, in such a
case, would be the material culture and knowledge base of pre-collapse
society. All over rural America, in areas more than a few hundred miles
from big urban centers, small towns and villages would remain, and those
in agricultural areas with steady water supplies would likely flourish;
lacking gas for their cars, after all, refugees from Chicago or Los
Angeles will not make it to North Dakota, or even Iowa. Libraries,
schools, and local governments would either still exist, or could be
readily rebuilt; abandoned buildings and technology could be dusted off
and put back to use; where renewable energy sources exist, those could
be reactivated if they stopped running in the first place. Almost
everyone alive after the collapse will have grown up in the pre-collapse
world, and a great many of them will have learned some of the skills
needed to operate a modern society. Before very long, something very
like today's rural American culture would have reestablished itself,
just as late medieval cultures across Europe reestablished themselves
after the Black Death.

What makes so swift a recovery possible, though, is the short time span
between collapse and aftermath. Consider the possibility of decline and
a much less promising picture emerges. First, and most obviously,
decline takes much longer. By the time the process is finished, the
people who remember how an advanced civilization used to function are
long in their graves, and anything perishable in the material culture
they knew has long since perished. It's one thing to break into an
abandoned library five years after a sudden collapse, when most of the
books will be dusty but readable; it's another thing to do the same
thing two hundred years after the beginning of decline, when those books
not looted long ago have crumbled into sawdust because they were printed
on high-acid paper, or rotted after the roof collapsed and the rains got in.

The stairstep process found in most historical examples of decline,
though, is a far more potent force. Periods of crisis, in which urgent
needs absorb all available resources, can go on for decades. During that
time, anything not immediately relevant to the needs of the moment will
likely go begging for maintenance and upkeep, if it isn't stripped for
spare parts, burned as heating fuel, or destroyed in war, rioting, or
any of the other common disasters that punctuate the downward arc of a
civilization's lifespan. Periods of respite offer some recovery time,
but then another period of crisis comes and another sorting process hits
the surviving legacy of the civilization. Each period of crisis thus
becomes a bottleneck through which only a fraction of a civilization's
material culture and knowledge base will survive. Repeat the process
often enough and very little remains. Thus, if we admit the possibility
of decline, we face the possibility of a future more difficult and
impoverished than a future of sudden collapse, not less so.

The cultural conserver concept I have proposed in recent weeks on this
blog attempts to address that possibility. Alongside the dismal record
of cultural loss during ages of decline, history also shows that a
motivated minority concerned with the long view can have a
disproportionate impact on the survival of cultural heritage in hard times.

Consider the survival of the Jewish people and their cultural heritage
after the destruction of the Third Temple in 70 CE, and the obliteration
of most of the Jewish presence in Israel over the following century.
Faced with the very real risk of cultural extinction, surviving
religious leaders drew on memories of the Babylonian captivity to launch
one of history's most magnificently successful programs of cultural
conservation. As rabbinic Judaism took shape, a very large percentage of
its traditions focused explicitly on preserving Jewish religious and
cultural continuity. "Why is this night different from all other
nights?" asks the Passover ritual; the answer, freely interpreted, is
that item bodies one of the distinctive historical experiences of the
Jewish people, using potent tools of symbol and ceremony to counter the
pressures toward assimilation and absorption.

Equally, the Catholic church after Rome's fall set in motion a massive
salvage program that kept much of classical culture alive right through
the Dark Ages. Its motives differed from those that drove the founders
of rabbinic Judaism; an expanding church needed clergy literate enough
to know their way around scripture, the church fathers, canon law, and
the philosophical theology the Church had borrowed from Greek
Neoplatonism, and this mandated the survival of the Latin literary
culture that informed so much early Christian literature in the West.
Thus generations of Christian schoolboys learned Latin prosody from
Vergil, and acquired a taste for learning that blossomed in the great
age of Christian monasticism and preserved countless cultural treasures
for the future.

There are plenty of other examples, from the Sanskrit academies of India
to the bardic schools of early modern Scotland, but they share a crucial
feature in common with these. For a cultural tradition to survive in an
age of decline, it needs to find a constituency that values it enough to
put the survival of the tradition ahead of more immediate needs. In
traditional Judaism, keeping the commandments isn't something to file
away for future reference whenever times get hard; it comes first, even
ahead of personal survival. Similarly, the Benedictine monks who spent
their time copying manuscripts by hand in unheated scriptoria through
the worst years of the Dark Ages could have led much easier lives
outside the bare walls of their monasteries, if the glory of God had
not, in their eyes, outshone all the treasures of the world.

Thus the survival of cultural heritage must draw on emotional drives
potent enough to override the tyranny of immediate needs and drive the
modest but unremitting daily efforts needed to keep cultural heritage
intact. This is especially true of the traditions of elite culture,
which typically lack any short term survival value and often require a
sizeable investment of time and resources. It is above all true of
modern elite culture, which has specialized in the mass production of
information to such a degree that the ability to maintain adequate
storage for all the knowledge our culture has amassed is already very
much in doubt.

One of my readers thus responded to last week's post by asking me how
her field, mathematics, might preserve some of its knowledge base for
the future. That's a daunting question, for which I know no easy
answers. Right now mathematicians in the more abstract and less
practical branches of their field can draw a salary to pursue their
researches only because a longstanding social habit encourages
governments and donors to cover the costs. The same thing is true of
many other branches of scholarship, and of those fine arts that haven't
quite finished the process of devolving into the manufacture of high-end
collectibles for the rich. Outside of university mathematics
departments, it's hard to find anyone who has even heard of most of
today's hot topics in math, much less anyone who would be willing to
study and teach them in their off hours, for no pay, out of the sheer
love of the subject.

That sort of constituency will be hard for any part of today's elite
culture to find, and without it, there's a minimal chance that anything
more than fragments of that culture will reach the future. Still, there
is a wild card in the deck, and its name is religion. Nearly all the
classic examples of cultural conservation have drawn their motivating
force from religious beliefs. Is it possible that some of today's
scientific and cultural heritage will find a welcome within the ambit of
a present or future religious movement? Next week's post will explore
these options.
_____

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/why-decline-matters.html#links


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