[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Arguments from Ignorance

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (October 29 2008)

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


For some time now I've been wondering how to bring up a certain habit of 
thought that, as I see it, forms one of the taproots feeding the 
contemporary crisis of industrial civilization. That it had to be 
discussed here on The Archdruid Report I never doubted, but in the midst 
of a cascade of dramatic current events, that discussion can seem very 
nearly beside the point. When the system of hallucinatory finance that 
propped up the illusion of American prosperity for a quarter century may 
be going to pieces around us, panic selling in commodity markets by 
speculators hit with margin calls is sending fossil fuel prices to lows 
just as unsustainable as their recent highs, and the wheels are coming 
off America's global empire, I find myself wondering, is it really a 
good time to go wandering off in pursuit of intangibles?

Then perspective returns, and I remember that it's precisely the 
intangibles, the states of mind and attitudes toward the world that form 
a culture's collective discourse, that define what it can and cannot 
accomplish as the age of oil comes to an end. As I've commented before, 
it's not technical issues that make our present predicament so 
difficult; it's the failure of collective will that keeps even the most 
grudging acknowledgment of our predicament, and even the most modest 
response to it, completely off the radar screens of mainstream politics 
in every nation in the industrial world. Until the "mind-forg'd 
manacles" of dysfunctional thinking are unlocked and tossed aside, 
constructive plans for the world after peak oil on anything past an 
individual level are wasted effort, since they will not be implemented 
by societies that cannot grasp the need for them.

I had a cogent reminder of this over the past week, when three efforts 
of mine to spark collective discussion about these issues - my book The 
Long Descent (2008), a reading and booksigning at a local bookstore here 
in southern Oregon, and the most recent post here - fielded three 
responses that used very different arguments to make a common claim. A 
reader of my book emailed me to tell me he thought I was refusing to 
give proper weight to the possibility that new technology would save our 
civilization from the impact of peak oil; a serious young man who 
attended the reading came up afterwards to ask me what I thought about 
the possibility that the current crisis would drive humanity to achieve 
a new stage of spiritual evolution, after which we will easily replace 
fossil fuels with currently unimaginable resources; a new reader of this 
blog sent in a comment insisting that peak oil was an illusion 
manufactured by sinister elites who were suppressing inventions that 
would allow everyone to have all the energy they wanted.

Mind you, I'd encountered every one of these assertions before. Ever 
since this blog first started suggesting that the end of the age of 
cheap abundant energy was the natural and inevitable result of a human 
ecology hopelessly out of step with the realities of life on a finite 
planet, I've fielded a great many emails and comments insisting, 
basically, that it just ain't so - that one way or another, for one 
reason or another, humanity could have its abundant energy resources and 
burn them too, and can reasonably expect more of the same forever. The 
three responses I've just cited by no means exhaust the full spectrum of 
arguments advanced to back this curious claim, but they're good 
representative samples of the type.

Now it's possible to dispute each of these claims on their own terms, 
and I've done that more than once on this blog and elsewhere, but 
there's a very real extent to which this is a waste of breath. Each of 
them is what the old logicians used to call argumentia ad ignorantem, 
arguments from ignorance. They insist on the presence of a factor that 
isn't actually present for examination and can't be proved or disproved 
- a technological advance that hasn't happened yet, an imminent 
spiritual transformation that has to be taken on blind faith, or a 
conspiracy so secret and pervasive that it can manipulate everything we 
think we know about the world - to insist that we don't actually have to 
do anything about peak oil.

Such arguments prove nothing, of course; they're the precise equivalent 
of using the phrase "then a miracle happens" to get from one step of a 
cookbook recipe or a mathematical equation to the next. Their only 
virtue is that they're impossible to disprove. I've come to think that 
this last detail is why they're so popular. It's a very charming social 
habit, dating back to the 18th century Enlightenment, to profess the 
belief that people come to decisions about the world by sitting down 
with the relevant facts, assessing them calmly, and then making a 
decision on that basis. I think most of us are aware, though, that few 
decisions are actually made this way; much more often, people start from 
the conclusion that appeals to their emotions and intuition, and then go 
looking for logical reasons to support the belief they've already chosen.

Most of the time, this is actually a good thing. Left to itself, the 
reasoning mind tends to run to extremes; it's because most human 
decisions obey the nonrational promptings of emotional patterns laid 
down in childhood that our lives have any continuity at all. This same 
process, averaged out over the millions who inhabit a nation, provides a 
sense of stability and identity essential to our collective life. Still, 
the emotions' habit of projecting the past onto the blank screen of the 
future can become a ghastly liability when the future no longer 
resembles the past in some crucial sense.

That's the situation we're facing now. Between 1980 and 2005, political 
gimmickry and the reckless overproduction of the North Slope and North 
Sea oil fields crashed the price of oil to right around US$10 a barrel - 
corrected for inflation, the cheapest price in history. During that 
quarter century of unsustainable excess, energy was so cheap that the 
cost no longer mattered; it seemed to make perfect sense to live in 
rural Oregon and commute daily by jet to San Francisco or Seattle, or to 
arbitrage wage costs by manufacturing consumer goods for the American 
market in Third World sweatshops and shipping them halfway around the 
world to their customers, or to build internet server farms, thousands 
of them, each one drawing as much electricity from the grid as a 
medium-sized town.

That world of unlimited free energy is the world in which nearly all of 
us in the industrial world lived until very recently, and it's the only 
world people who are under the age of 35 or so can remember at all. Thus 
it's not surprising that when people are faced with the claim that the 
future will be very, very different, they tend to reject the notion out 
of hand, and if the only reasons they can find to justify that rejection 
are arguments from ignorance like the ones I cited above, then arguments 
from ignorance are what they'll cite.

The problem is that at this point we don't have time to wait for 
hypothetical solutions to show up and save us. The Hirsch Report pointed 
out in 2005 that, to avoid severe economic disruption, any effective 
response to peak oil had to get started at least twenty years before the 
beginning of petroleum production declines. Any less than that, and the 
result is damage to the economy; the shorter the lead time, the worse 
the damage, and waiting until production declines actually begin is a 
recipe for crippling economic impacts that could make it impossible to 
respond to the crisis effectively at all.

This is dire news, because we no longer have the twenty years Hirsch 
specified; we most likely have only two years left. By most 
calculations, in fact, conventional petroleum production actually peaked 
the same year the Hirsch Report was published; apparent increases since 
then have happened because biofuels, tar sand extractives, and other 
alternative fuels that require high energy inputs have been lumped 
together with conventional oil; and the best estimates suggest that even 
with the alternatives factored in, production will face serious declines 
beginning around 2010. That gives us desperately little time to respond, 
and no time to spare for arguments that insist some unknown phenomenon 
will pop out of the woodwork just in time.

There are times late at night when I find myself wondering if similar 
reasonings could have been heard in the Yucatan lowlands as the Terminal 
Classic period of Mayan history arrived and the paired jaws of declining 
soil fertility and catastrophic drought clamped around the throat of 
Lowland Maya civilization. There were plenty of potential responses as 
the corn harvests began to fail, centering on a transition from corn 
culture to less valued foods such as ramon nuts, but ideological factors 
made such a transition difficult for the ahauob, "divine lords" of the 
Maya city-states, to contemplate; abundant corn harvests filled the same 
role in their culture as abundant fossil fuel supplies have in ours.

Thus, instead of facing the crisis, the ahauob responded by hoping that 
something would provide them with a way out of it. Some of them, 
anticipating America's recent neoconservative movement, went to war with 
other city-states to seize their corn supplies, while others offered up 
human sacrifices and built ever more grandiose temples in the hopes that 
the gods would take the crisis away. None of this helped, and much of it 
probably made the situation worse; one way or another, the result was a 
"rolling collapse" that, over a century and a half, turned the thriving 
Maya cities of the lowlands to crumbling, overgrown ruins inhabited by a 
scattering of survivors.

The idea that the cities of contemporary North America could meet the 
same fate is quite literally unthinkable to most people today, but then 
the Maya, the Romans, and the people of other collapsed civilizations 
all probably found their historical destiny just as unthinkable before 
it happened. There may be little reason to hope that anything like a 
majority can be helped to think the unthinkable in time to make a 
difference, but the effort seems worth making, and challenging the sort 
of arguments from ignorance I've described above might be a good first 
step.
_____

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/2008/10/arguments-from-ignorance.html


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