[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] A Deindustrial Reading List

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (February 04 2009)

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


Over the last few months a number of people have asked me what books I
think they ought to read to help them prepare for the slow unraveling of
industrial civilization now getting started around us. This is frankly
the kind of question I try my best to dodge. Premature consensus is
arguably one of the most severe risks we face just now, and any image of
the future - very much including the one I've sketched out here - is at
best a scattershot sampling of the divergent possibilities facing us as
the industrial age comes to its end.

Thus anything that tends to encourage people in the peak oil movement,
or the wider society around it, to think about the future in any
stereotyped way is potentially fatal. Still, several readers have noted
that the ideas in The Long Descent (2008) and these essays presuppose a
worldview and a cultural and intellectual inheritance that aren't
exactly widespread in popular culture these days. They've asked, if I
may paraphrase a bit, what they should read to make better sense of my
ravings. Put that way, it's not an unreasonable request, and since the
view of history that shapes those ravings flies in the face of most of
the common assumptions of the modern world, a little background may not
hurt.

I've thus sketched out a reading list of sorts for those interested in
exploring in more detail the viewpoint I've presented here. It contains
nearly as many broad categories as specific book recommendations; I have
my preferences, and will suggest them, but here again diversity of
opinion and information are essential. If everybody in your neighborhood
reads and uses the techniques in a different gardening book, the
resulting knowledge base will be much larger and more useful than if
everybody relies on a single text, with its inevitable omissions and errors.

For similar reasons, most of the books mentioned below are relatively
old, and some of them are out of print. There are excellent new books on
most of these subjects, and I certainly encourage you to read as many of
those as appeal to you, but books written during any historical period
mirror that period's presuppositions and habits of thought to a much
greater extent than anybody notices at the time. One advantage of older
books is precisely that their unthinking assumptions are easier to
catch, and this in turn helps foster the awkward but essential
realization that thirty years from now, the unquestioned truths and
apparently reasonable assumptions of the present will look as
outlandishly dated as bell bottom pants and disco music.

Very few of the books I've suggested here are practical, in any ordinary
sense of the word, and those that have that distinction are meant to be
read and interpreted in rather impractical ways. The sheer diversity of
potentials and needs that will likely open up in a deindustrializing
future makes any sort of practical booklist an exercise in
overgeneralization; the entire thrust of the deindustrial age heads from
standardized approaches toward the diversity that comes from a renewed
engagement with the local realities of one's own place, time, and
community. A reader whose future career involves raising draft horses in
rural Iowa has completely different practical needs from a reader who,
ten years from now, will be salvaging and repairing appliances in a
small West Coast city; what they need in common is a framework of ideas
that will help them make sense of the wider picture, and the ideas I am
trying to explore here provide one of these.

Finally, I've made some suggestions about how to approach the books
mentioned below. At the risk of sounding like a 19th-century
schoolmaster, I probably need to point out that you won't get much out
of any book if you approach it passively, and let the words dribble
through your mind and out your ears like so many sitcom plots. The books
I've suggested are not there so that you can agree with them
unthinkingly; they are meant to get you to look under the hood of the
ideas I've offered and see how the machinery works.

With those caveats, here goes. The following books should be read, if
you can manage that, in the order I've listed them.

1. A basic textbook of ecology. It really doesn't matter which one; the
two on my bookshelves are Richard Brewer's Principles of Ecology and
Eugene P Odum's Fundamentals of Ecology, but that's simply because these
were the college textbooks I studied back in the day. What's essential
is that the book you read should be a general textbook of scientific
ecology, not a popularization or a polemic. A great many people have
embraced ecology as an ideology or a sentimental pose without ever
getting around to learning how living things and their environments
interact. In the future, I'm convinced, a clear and unsentimental
understanding of the way ecology works will be the most essential branch
of human knowledge, and could spare individuals and communities some
bitter lessons in the years to come. A basic grasp of ecology is also
essential for making sense of the next three books.

2. The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows, David Meadows, Jorgen
Randers, and William W Behrens III. Get the original 1972 edition rather
than either of the two updates, in which the original message has been
partly overlaid with political polemic. The most insightful and thus
inevitably the most vilified of the 1970s collapse literature, The
Limits to Growth was the first book I know of to point out the central
paradox of a perpetual growth economy: if economic growth is pursued far
enough, the costs of further growth begin to rise faster than its
benefits, and eventually force the growth economy to its knees. Joseph
Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies explored the same territory
later on from another angle, and my essay on catabolic collapse did the
same thing from a different angle again; still, the original
presentation remains the most useful. Note whether The Limits to Growth
makes more or less sense in the light of the basic ecological principles
you read in the first book.

3. Overshoot by William R Catton Jr. Still far and away the best book on
the twilight of the age of cheap energy, Overshoot is also one of the
very few explorations of that troubling territory that is fully grounded
in a clear grasp of ecological realities. A good half of the ideas
explored in The Archdruid Report can trace their origins to one page or
another of Catton's book. It is challenging reading and, in many places,
depressing as well; Catton resolutely refuses to offer easy answers for
the predicament into which industrial society has backed itself. Of all
the currently out-of-print books on this list, though, this is the one I
would most like to see reissued by some small publisher. Once again,
assess Catton's claims in the light of the basic ecological principles
you've learned.

4. A practical introduction to intensive organic gardening. John
Jeavons' How To Grow More Vegetables and John Seymour's The
Self-Sufficient Gardener are among the examples on my shelves (along
with a number of more recent books, of course). It's best to choose one
you haven't read before. The goal here is not to learn how to grow food
using intensive organic methods - though that's very likely a good idea
- but rather to think through the practical implications of the
ecological ideas you've just studied. Ask yourself where the system of
gardening presented by the book you're reading works with ecological
cycles, and where it conflicts with them; imagine ways in which the
logic governing organic gardening could be applied to other aspects of
society and economy, and try to get a sense of the costs and benefits of
making a transition from current practices to the ones you've imagined.

5 and 6. The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler and A Study of
History by Arnold Toynbee. Get the abridged edition of each; the
complete two-volume Spengler is hard to get, and only obsessive history
fans like me work their way through all twelve volumes of Toynbee, but
the one-volume Spengler abridgment and either the two-volume or the
later one-volume versions of Toynbee are cheap, readily available, and
no great challenge to read. These are the two great modern presentations
of the case for cyclic history; they cover much the same territory, but
each one does it from a unique perspective. Read them close together,
and notice the places where Toynbee is arguing with Spengler's theories
and conclusions; the Great Conversation is rarely quite so audible as
here. While you read both books, notice whether the ecological
perspectives you've absorbed from the first three books cast any
additional light on the cycles outlined by these two authors.

7. The history of a dead civilization. It doesn't matter which one, and
you have plenty of options to choose from. The only requirements are
that the civilization should be as extinct as a dodo; the book you
choose should focus on history rather than culture - that is, it should
talk about what events happened in what order, rather than simply
wallowing in the cultural high points and quietly neglecting how things
fell to bits thereafter; and it should cover the whole history of the
civilization from its origin to its collapse. As you trace the rise and
fall of the civilization you've chosen, bring the lessons of the first
six books to bear on it. What role did ecological factors in general,
and the specific problems traced by Meadows et al and Catton, play in
your civilization's rise and fall? How well do Spengler's and Toynbee's
accounts of historical change fit the facts in this specific case?

8. Muddling Toward Frugality by Warren Johnson. This one may be a
challenge to find; it appeared right at the end of the 1970s, had a
brief flurry of popularity, and then vanished without a trace in the
wave of reaction that swept Ronald Reagan into the White House and the
lessons of the previous decade into oblivion. Regardless, it's one of
the most thoughtful works to come out of the last energy crisis, an
argument for unplanned, undramatic, and thoroughly non-ideological
change as the best option at the end of the Age of Abundance. Johnson's
analysis is much subtler than it looks; this is another book that needs
to get back in print sooner rather than later. While reading it, bring
your previous reading to bear on it; in particular, ask yourself how
useful its proposals would have been if implemented at various points in
the decline and fall of the civilization you studied.

9. Where The Wasteland Ends by Theodore Roszak. A brilliant, engaging,
frustrating work, this is Roszak's exploration of the narratives and
assumptions about reality that undergird modern industrial civilization.
Some of my readers will find its argument appealing, while others will
find it intolerable; both groups stand to learn a great deal from this
book if they set aside these emotional reactions and pay attention to
the way that Roszak crafts his case, to his choice of examples and
evidence, and also to the things he doesn't address. As you read it, put
it in its historical context: if it had been written in a dead
civilization just before decline set in, what would Spengler and Toynbee
have said about it? Then take it out of its historical context: what
does its argument have to offer us now?

10. A book predicting a dramatic social transformation that didn't
happen. Choose one that you would have rooted for at the time. If you
believe that civilization is the root of all evils, pick up the sturdy
Victorian radical Edward Carpenter's Civilization: Its Cause and Cure;
if you believe that we are on the verge of breakthrough into a new kind
of consciousness, try Charles Reich's The Greening of America; if you're
secretly hoping for social collapse and mass dieoff, read one of the
hundreds of books that have been predicting exactly that for the last
dozen centuries, and so on. Try to put yourself into the mindset of the
readers who believed it when it first saw print; see why it seemed to
make sense at the time - and then step back and explore the reasons why
nothing of the sort actually happened. Bring everything you've learned
from the previous nine books to bear on this one.

There you have it. It would probably be possible to draw up a list of
books in print that would cast the same light on the ideas I'm trying to
explore here. It would also be possible to draw up a list drawn entirely
from Greek and Roman classical authors - though this would take a
tolerance for the sort of thinking modern people mislabel "mysticism"
well beyond what most readers have nowadays. Still, this is my list, and
I'm stickin' with it; those who tackle it, on the off chance that
anybody does, will end up with a much clearer idea of what I'm trying to
say in these essays, and with any luck, will be able to go further with
these curious notions than I have.
_____

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/2009/02/deindustrial-reading-list.html


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/