The Myth of the Machine

The strategy discussed in last week’s post—that of walking away from energy-intensive lifestyles before the waning of the age of abundant energy brings them grinding to a halt—is a viable response to the crisis of our age, but it’s also a great way to poke a stick at some of the most deeply entrenched of the modern world’s dysfunctional habits of thinking. Suggest it in public, for example, and you’ll very quickly learn why all that talk about saving the planet has turned out to be empty air: everyone’s quite willing to watch someone else make sacrifices for the good of the biosphere, but ask them to make sacrifices themselves and you’ll see just how far their love of the planet extends.

In honor of the ongoing failure of global climate talks, let’s call the resulting dance the Copenhagen cha-cha—one step forward, three steps back, run in a circle making squawking noises, and then point the finger of blame at somebody else on the dance floor. Over the years to come, you can expect to see that number done on a scale that would make the ghost of Busby Berkeley turn green with envy. Yet there’s more going on here than simple hypocrisy. To make sense of the reasons why so many people who know perfectly well that their own lifestyles are dragging the world to ruin still can’t bear the thought of living any other way, it’s going to be necessary to explore some of the murkiest crawlspaces of the modern mind. We can start, once again, with the automobile.

I suggested last week that the private auto is simply one way to get people and light cargoes from one place to another. Strictly speaking, that’s true, but it’s true in much the same sense that sex is simply one way to distribute the adult population among the supply of available bedrooms. Especially but not only in America, the car has been loaded down with so much in the way of powerful cultural fantasies and emotional drives that it’s almost impossible to talk about it in purely practical terms. I dislike cars, and not just on principle—chalk it up, maybe, to a family habit of long pointless Sunday drives with the smoke from my father’s cheap cigarettes pooling like a miasma in the back seat—and I’ve never owned one, or had a driver’s license. I’ve still felt, while catching a ride with friends to some Druid gathering or the like, the lure of the open highway that plays so huge a role in America’s collective psyche.

That’s a major theme in our national character that I suspect many people elsewhere in the world simply don’t get. The vast majority of white Americans are descended from people who turned their backs on the static ways of the Old World to chase the dream of a better life on the other side of the ocean, and that pattern of seeking a new life elsewhere has repeated far more often than not with each generation. One of the many factors that make white Americans so clueless about nonwhite Americans, in turn, is that that experience isn’t shared with the other peoples of this nation. For us, that first journey beyond limitations has always defined the American experience, but for African-Americans, their encounter with this continent was a bitter exile into bondage; for the Hispanic population this side of the Rio Grande, the defining experience was dispossession—white Americans like to forget that the southwestern quarter of our country used to be the northern half of Mexico, before we stole it from them at gunpoint—and for the first inhabitants of this continent, it was not merely dispossession but very nearly annihilation. A road leading into the far distance means something very different to the descendants of pioneers on the Oregon Trail than it does to the descendants of those who survived the Trail of Tears.

Still, even among white Americans, the dream of freedom somewhere on the far side of the horizon could at least theoretically have expressed itself in many different ways. It so happens that nowadays, at least, it almost always expresses itself through the automobile. This is why Americans cling to their cars with such frantic intensity, and why Republican politicians—always a better barometer of the American mass psyche than their Democrat rivals—so reflexively treat any alternative to the private car as a threat to America’s freedom. On any rational level, of course, that’s the most vacuous sort of hogwash, but on a nonrational level—on the level of collective passions and mass fantasies where most human motivation takes shape—it’s a potent reality. If freedom consists of being able to turn the key, put the pedal to the metal, and go zooming off to a new life somewhere else, a future of buses and trains lumbering along fixed routes with somebody else driving is a future where freedom no longer exists, and a future in which nothing speeds along on wheels—in which life plods along at a walking pace—doesn’t bear thinking about at all.

The cultural processes that condensed the experience of a people into the dream of a perpetual quest to catch the receding horizon, and then bound that dream into a talisman perched on four rubber tires, are hard to discuss in any meaningful way without using words like "spell" and "enchantment." Part of the magic involved, to be sure, was the work of the sorcerers of Madison Avenue, who flogged the dream into a bloody pulp in order to sell yet another round of otherwise uninteresting products, but there’s more than that to the misplaced concreteness that confuses freedom with a machine.

Glance over at a different technology and the same misplaced concreteness appears in even sharper relief. The technology I have in mind here is television. I don’t own one of those, either; I grew up watching TV, of course, like everyone else in my generation, but got heartily bored with it in my teen years and haven’t had one in the house in my adult life. Mention this to most Americans, though, and the reaction you’ll get is considerably more violent than the one you get if you admit that you don’t use a car. There’s a defensive quality to it, the sort of brittle edge you only get when the mere fact that you don’t share somebody’s habit flicks them on the raw.

If you’ve ever walked past a suburban neighborhood at night when some much-ballyhooed show was on, and seen the blue light flickering in perfect sync in the windows of house after house, you might have caught some sense of the reason why. If the automobile is America’s talisman of freedom, the television is its talisman of community, of participation in a world of shared activities and shared meanings. Notice how often casual talk in a social setting veers at once in the direction of something that was on the television, or how hard it is to find a tavern these days that doesn’t have half a dozen big television screens blaring inanities from all sides. We stare at the screens, because that makes it easier not to notice the world around us, or each other.

For most Americans, television has come to represent the experience of collective participation, and yet the flickering lights in the suburban windows serve as a reminder that few activities are more solitary or more isolating. In precisely the same way, the freedom represented by the car moving down the open road is a pathetic illusion; from the immense government programs that build and maintain those open roads, through the gargantuan corporate systems that produce the cars, to the sprawling global network of oilfields, pipelines, refineries, and the rest of the colossal system that transforms fossil hydrocarbons into the gas that keeps the car going, there are few human activities on Earth that depend more completely on the vast and faceless bureaucracies that most Americans think they despise. Isolation packaged as participation, dependence packaged as freedom: there’s much to be learned here about the power of thaumaturgy to twist the meanings of things—but I want to go one step further here.

Americans by and large accept an extraordinary degree of dependence on a machine—the automobile—in order to invest that machine with the feelings and dreams that cluster around the concept of freedom. We accept an extraordinary degree of dependence on another machine—the television—in order to give that machine the emotional charge that other societies give to participation in collective meanings and activities. Sort through any of the narratives that play a central role in contemporary American culture, and you’ll find a machine at the center of each one. Thus it’s absolutely predictable that when Americans try to think about finding some way out from between the narrowing walls closing in on our future, nearly everything they come up has some kind of machine at its heart. A solar panel, a wind turbine, an electric car, a thorium reactor, a supercomputer, a flying saucer or a nuclear bomb, take your pick, but it’s got to be based on a machine.

A good many years ago, Lewis Mumford wrote two hefty volumes under the joint title The Myth of the Machine. It’s vintage Mumford and thus by definition well worth reading, but it’s also very much a work of its time, a well-aimed blast against the superlative technological efficiency and utter ethical failure of America’s pursuit of the Vietnam war. Since I first read it, I’ve wished that Mumford could have found time to pursue the promise of the title in a good deal more depth. There is indeed a myth of the machine in the strict sense of that much-abused word "myth," and I’ve come to see the extraordinary fixation on that myth as one of the major barriers in the way of a viable response to the crisis of our time.

Let’s start with the basics. What is a machine? There are plenty of ways to answer that deceptively simple question, but I’m going to propose a provocative one. It requires a bit of background, though, and so I’m going to have to approach it in a slightly roundabout way.

As human beings our experiences fall into two broad categories. One of these comprises what we might as well call the outer world—the world we experience in the form of sensations perceived by the five senses. The other comprises what we might correspondingly call the inner world—the world we experience in the form of thoughts and feelings perceived directly by the mind. Those two worlds overlap in the body, which we can explore as a sensory object but which we can also perceive directly as a locus of thoughts and feelings. Outside that overlap, for each of us, those two worlds are distinct; we can’t perceive our own personality, for example, as a sensory object, or experience directly what’s going on in the inner lives of the other beings we encounter.

Developmental psychologists noticed a long time ago that the process of growing up involves a curious double movement in the way each of us experiences these two worlds. It takes the infant a great deal of time and exploration to figure out the difference between the inner and outer worlds and sort out what belongs on which side of the boundary. It then takes the child quite a bit more time and experience to realize that both worlds exist on both sides of the boundary—that he or she is an object in the outer world of others as well as the subject of the inner life of his or her own, and that others have their own inner lives. Arriving at this realization is one of the core things that’s meant by the word "maturity," and entire worlds of human experience are closed to those who refuse it.

Everything we do as mature human beings thus falls along a continuum between what philosopher Martin Buber called "I-It" and "I-Thou" relationships—less obscurely, between those interactions in which the individual can simply deal with other things as objects, and those in which he or she must deal with other beings as subjects with their own inner lives and their own capacities for interpretation and choice. Getting stuck in the sort of useless binary that treats the spectrum as a total opposition and labels its ends "evil" and "good" respectively is as useless a move as it is inevitably popular, since the universe of human experience embraces the whole spectrum, and it’s entirely possible to fall into absurdity in either direction—on the one hand, for example, by treating other human beings as objects, and getting blindsided by their responses to that sort of treatment; on the other, by convincing yourself that you can ignore the laws of nature by applying to the cosmos the sort of means that induce changes in the behavior of a human subject. (The cosmos may well be a subject—there’s a long and by no means unsophisticated philosophical tradition of seeing it in such terms—but the chance that it will respond favorably to your wheedling are no better than your chances of responding to the desires of any one of the dust mites living on your skin at this moment.)

A machine, though, can never be a subject. Machines imitate the actions of persons, but they have no subjectivity, no inner world; they’re always and only objects, and so the only relationship you can have with them is an I-It relationship. That wouldn’t be a problem, except for the torrent of cheap abundant energy that transformed the world of human experience over the last three centuries. The breakthroughs that set that torrent in motion were precisely methods of using fossil carbon of various kinds to power machines. Before then, power consisted almost entirely in the ability to express the will of the individual through I-Thou relationships—the human relationship of monarch to subject, general to soldier, lord to vassal, and the like were quite simply what power meant.

With the coming of the industrial age, that equation changed. Power exerted through a machine is defined purely by I-It relationships, and that’s become the modern definition of power. I suspect that, as much as greatly improved technologies of killing, had a great deal to do with the extraordinary scale of mass murder in the 19th and 20th centuries. Tamerlane may have had his soldiers exterminate the whole population of a city now and then, but the methodical annihilation of entire peoples by national governments as an ordinary element of peacetime policy was, if not new, then at least unusual in the scale and the casualness with which it has been applied.

That’s a very specific effect; there are many broader ones. One of those is the democratization, at least in the industrial world, of the experience of domination. A modern American climbing into the driver’s seat of a large SUV has more sheer physical energy under his direct control than your average Southern plantation owner had before the Civil War. Talk of "energy slaves" isn’t simply a metaphor; the one difference between power exerted by dominating machines and power exerted by dominating human slaves is again that the machines don’t have an inner life; they won’t slack off when the overseer isn’t looking, head north on the Underground Railroad, or join Nat Turner’s rebellion and cut your throat some fine Virginia night.

So the role played by machines in the modern industrial world, in large part, is as the primary focus for the very common human craving for power. The fact that the appearance of power is purchased at the cost of total dependence simply makes the irony that much richer; people nowadays cling to their autos and their televisions all the harder because they know perfectly well that the sensation of power as the engine roars is an illusion, and that a community that goes away when you change the channel doesn’t actually meet their needs for participation. Take a hard look at any other technology that has a central role in contemporary culture, and you’ll find the same nexus between an illusion of power, a reality of dependence—and a large and increasing cost. How that nexus might be unraveled in the twilight of the industrial age will be the subject of next week’s post.

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End of the World of the Week #6

The mere fact that a belief system’s proponents claim that it’s a perfectly rational scientific theory doesn’t prevent that belief system from being yet another example of our old friend, the apocalypse meme. There are plenty of examples that show this in action, but the most colorful of the last century and a half has to be Marxism.

Back before it imploded under the strains of its own internal contradictions, Marxism was among the ideologies that most loudly proclaimed the superiority of science and reason to superstition. Behind the rhetoric, though, the historical structure of Marxist theory is point for point identical to that of evangelical Protestant Christianity There’s a real point, in fact, in suggesting that Marxism was simply the furthest extension of one end of the spectrum of Christian heresy.

Follow out the historical trajectory and the parallels are easy enough to track. Primitive communism is the Garden of Eden; the invention of private property is the Fall; the period between the rise of property and the coming proletarian revolution, divided into various stages, is the period between the Fall and the Second Coming, divided into various dispensations; the peasant revolutionary movements of the feudal and early capitalist periods play the role of the Israelites; the life of Marx fills the same role as the life of Jesus, with the doings of the First International as the Acts of the Apostles; the horrors of late capitalism followed by proletarian revolution are dead ringers for the horrors of the Tribulation followed by the Second Coming; the era of socialism, finally, is the Millennium, the thousand years before the final descent of the New Jerusalem of communism.

Of course this colorful trajectory has something else in common with such offshoots of evangelical prophecy as the career of Harold Camping; its predictions turned out to be completely wrong. Marx insisted that the great proletarian revolution would break out first in the most advanced industrial nations; instead, Marxist revolutions only succeeded in nations just beginning to industrialize, where Marxism played the same role of convenience that Puritanism played in the English Civil War and Enlightenment rationalism in the French Revolution. Furthermore, and far more significantly, the first Marxist revolution wasn’t followed by the gradual overthrow of capitalism around the world; instead, Marxism reached its high-water point in the 1950s and then receded, as the golden promises of Das Kapital gave way to gray bureaucratic inefficiency and, in time, total systemic failure.

—story from Apocalypse Not

Waking Up, Walking Away

Last week’s Archdruid Report post, despite its wry comparison of industrial civilization’s current predicament with the plots and settings of pulp fantasy fiction, had a serious point. Say what you will about the failings of cheap fantasy novels—and there’s plenty to be said on that subject, no question—they consistently have something that most of the allegedly more serious attempts to make sense of our world usually lack: the capacity to envision truly profound change.

That may seem like an odd claim, given the extent to which contemporary industrial society preens itself on its openness to change and novelty. Still, it’s one of the most curious and least discussed features of that very openness that the only kinds of change and novelty to which it applies amount to, basically, more of the same thing we’ve already got. A consumer in a modern industrial society is free to choose any of a dizzying range of variations on a suffocatingly narrow range of basic options—and that’s equally true whether we are talking about products, politics, or lifestyles.

I suppose the automobile is the most obvious example, but it has dimensions not always recognized and these bear a closer look. To begin with, the vast majority of cars for sale these days are simply ringing changes on a suite of technologies that was introduced in the late 19th century and hit maturity close to fifty years ago. That’s as true of electric and hybrid cars, by the way, as it is of the usual kind—the hype surrounding the so-called “hybrid revolution” conveniently fails to mention that the same system has been used for more than sixty years in diesel-electric locomotives, and cars powered by electricity were common on American roads before the Big Three auto firms succeeded in getting a stranglehold on the industry during the last Great Depression. Steam-powered cars were also to be had back then—the Stanley Steamer was a famous brand; try finding one now.

What variations can be found nowadays are almost entirely a matter of style rather than substance, and this becomes even more evident when it’s recognized that the auto is simply one way to get people and light cargoes from one place to another. Are there other ways to do this? You bet, but none of them get the saturation advertising, the huge capital investments in manufacturing and distribution, or the vast government subsidies on local, state, and federal levels that cars receive on an ongoing basis. It’s a continuing source of amusement to listen to the pseudoconservatives who dominate the Republican Party these days denounce the very modest government funding that goes to passenger rail service and public transit. Ask them if they’re willing to give up Federal highway dollars, to name only one of the huge subsidies that autos receive, and you’ll very quickly hear a different tune.

It so happens that I don’t own or drive a car, and indeed I never have. Among its other benefits, that’s a good way to see the limits on the alleged freedom of choice that the consumer economy provides its inmates. In today’s America, you can live without a car, but most other choices you make are going to be sharply curtailed by that decision. When my wife and I decided a few years back to leave the west coast and settle in the Rust Belt, scores of pleasant towns we might otherwise have chosen were ruled out in advance because the only way to go from there to anywhere else was to drive a car, and our options for buying a house were just as tightly constrained by the need to be within walking distance of groceries and other necessary services. All those choices the propagandists of the consumer economy prattle about? They exist, but only if you give up your right to make any of the decisions that matter.

That same logic applies across the board in today’s industrial societies. What products would you like to buy? If it’s not something that a handful of gargantuan corporations want to make and market for you, good luck. Would you like a voice in the political process? Sure, but only if you agree with one of two or three major parties whose positions differ so little you’ll need a micrometer to tell them apart. How about a different lifestyle? Here’s the list of available options, every one of them a slight variation on the common theme of shopping for products and running up debt; if that’s not what you have in mind, sorry, we don’t have anything else in stock.

All this can be seen as simply one material expression of the thaumaturgy we discussed a while back in these posts, the manipulation of basic drives through the endless repetition of emotionally charged symbols that serves to swamp the thinking mind and keep the individual penned in a narrow circle of self-defeating behaviors. From another perspective, though, the torrent of material goodies that comes surging through the channels of the consumer economy is the payoff for cooperating with the existing order of things; so long as you want the things you’re supposed to want, you can have them in fantastic abundance. It’s no exaggeration to point out that average middle class people in the industrial world just now have access to material benefits that emperors couldn’t expect to get five hundred years ago. That’s their share of the payoff for acquiescing in the status quo.

That’s the great strength of the "magician states" Ioan Culianu talked about in Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, those nations—and if you’re reading this, you’re almost certainly living in one—that maintain control over populations by thaumaturgy rather than by brute force. The thaumaturgy is backed up by very real material benefits for those who cooperate. Those who don’t—well, my own experience is a case in point; by the standards of most of humanity, I lead an extremely comfortable life, but most of the people I know are horrified by the thought that if it’s raining and I have errands to run, I put on a coat and open up an umbrella and go for a walk in the rain. They’d be more horrified still to learn that I deal with summer’s heat and humidity without an air conditioner, and respond to cold nights in winter by putting on a sweater rather than turning up the heat, but I don’t go out of my way to bring those details to their attention; my car-free life is enough of a shock for most of them.

Of course there’s more to it than that. The more of the payoff you refuse, the sharper the restrictions you have to live with. Now of course the less privileged classes in the industrial world, and the vast majority of people elsewhere, live with those restrictions every day of their lives, but suggest to those who don’t that they might find it useful to accept those restrictions, and I’m sure you can imagine the response you’re likely to get. Still, this is exactly what I intend to suggest, because there’s another factor in the situation, and it’s the one this blog has been discussing for more than five years now.

The entire operation of the modern magician state, after all, depends utterly on uninterrupted access to gargantuan supplies of cheap, highly concentrated energy. The considerable amount of energy that goes to power the communication technologies that get thaumaturgy to its target audiences is only a drop in the oil barrel of the whole energy cost of the system. A much larger amount goes to supply and maintaining the infrastructure of thaumaturgy, and of course the largest fraction of all goes into produce that torrent of goods and services mentioned above, the collective payoff that keeps those target audiences docile. Now factor in the depletion of concentrated energy sources—above all petroleum, which provides 40% of the world energy supply and close to 100% of energy used in transportation—and the proud towers of the magician state abruptly turn out to rest on foundations of sand.

To understand the consequences of that awkward fact, it’s important to get past the rhetoric of victimization that fills so much space in discussions of social hierarchy these days. Of course the people at or near the upper end of the pyramid get a much larger share of the proceeds of the system than anybody else, and those at or near the bottom get crumbs; that’s not in question. The point that needs making is that a great many people in between those two extremes also benefit handsomely from the system. When those people criticize the system, their criticisms by and large focus on the barriers that keep them from having as large a share as the rich—not the ones that keep them from having as small a share as the poor, or to phrase things a little differently, that keep their privileged share from being distributed more fairly across the population as a whole.

Map the factor of middle class privilege onto the history of protest over the last half century or so and some otherwise puzzling trends are easy to understand. The collapse of the 1960s protest movement here in America, for example, followed prompty on the abolition of the military draft in 1972. The real force behind that movement was the simple fact that the American middle classes were no longer willing to send their sons off to Vietnam, and were willing to use their not inconsiderable political clout to make that change of heart heard. It was indeed heard; the draft ended, the US extricated itself awkwardly from the Vietnam war, and the protest movement popped like a punctured balloon, leaving a minority of radicals who believed they were leading a revolution sitting among the shreds and wondering what happened. Attempts to launch American antiwar movements since that time have foundered on the unmentionable but real fact that middle class Americans by and large have no trouble at all reconciling themselves to war, as long as someone else’s kids are doing the fighting.

It’s in this light that last year’s spasmodic outbursts of protest from within the middle classes need to be understood. Since the peak of conventional petroleum production in 2005, economies around the world—above all the economies of the US and its inner circle of allies, which use more petroleum per capita than anybody else—have been stuck in a worsening spiral of dysfunction, and the middle classes have abruptly found themselves struggling to maintain their lifestyles. Their annoyance at that fact is easy to understand. From their point of view, after all, they’ve kept up their side of the bargain; they’ve bought what they were supposed to buy, borrowed when they were supposed to borrow, lined up obediently behind one or another of the approved political parties, and steered clear of all the hard questions. Now the payoff that was supposed to be their reward for all this, the payoff their parents and grandparents always got on time and that they themselves could rely on until now, is nowhere to be seen.

The payoff is nowhere to be seen, in turn, as a result of processes sketched out more than thirty years ago in a forgotten classic of political economy, Paul Blumberg’s 1980 study Inequality in an Age of Decline. Analyzing the downward spiral of the American economy in the 1970s—the last time, please note, that soaring energy prices clamped down on an industrial society—Blumberg showed that while a rising tide lifts all boats, a falling tide behaves in a much more selective fashion, as those groups with more political influence and economic clout are able to hang onto a disproportionate share of a shrinking pie at the expense of those with less.

The decades since Blumberg’s book appeared have only sharpened his argument. One after another, nearly every economic sector has undergone drastic reorganizations that slashed jobs, pay, and benefits for everyone below the middle class, and a growing number of people in the lower end of the middle class itself. Now that everyone below them has been thrown under the bus, the middle classes are discovering that it’s their turn next, as the classes above them scramble to maintain their own access to the payoffs of privilege. Having nodded and smiled while those further down the pyramid got shafted, the middle classes are in no position to mount an effective resistance now that they’re the ones being made redundant. I can almost hear a former midlevel manager in an unemployment line saying: "First they laid off the factory workers, but I said nothing, because I wasn’t a factory worker..."

Of course that’s not the way most people in today’s middle class like to think of things, and the gap between the reality of middle class privilege and the sort of rhetoric the Occupy movement spread last year—the claim that privilege applies only to the 1% of the population who are much richer than the middle class—opens an immense field of action for zealots and demagogues. Make the claim that you can keep the middle class supplied with its familiar comforts and status symbols and you’ll be able to count on a following in the years to come. The demand for that particular form of comforting nonsense is already booming, and an increase in the supply is already forthcoming; human nature being what it is, it’s probably not safe to assume that all those who provide the supply will be harmless nitwits.

This is where the capacity to envision profound change mentioned at the beginning of this essay becomes essential. In order to make sense of the future bearing down on us, it’s necessary to recognize that the privileged lifestyles of the recent past were the product of the chain of historical accidents that handed over half a billion years of stored sunlight to be burnt at extravagant rates by a handful of the world’s nations. Now that the supply is running short, those lifestyles are going away, and since the decline in petroleum production is gradual rather than sudden, the way it works out is that some people are losing access to them sooner than others. The automatic reaction on the part of most people facing this challenge is to cling to their familiar perks and privileges like grim death; the problem with that reaction, of course, is that the deathgrip in question very quickly becomes mutual.

The alternative is to let go of the perks and privileges before they drag you down. That may be the least popular advice I could offer, but it’s also among the most necessary. Over the years to come, as the real economy of goods and services contracts in lockstep with the depletion of fossil fuels, the fight over what’s left of the benefits of a failing industrial system is likely to become far more brutal than it is today. In the long run, that’s a fight with no winners. The alternative is to walk away, now, while you still have the time and resources to do it at your own pace.

This doesn’t mean, it probably needs to be said, pursuing the sort of green tokenism that’s become the latest form of conspicuous consumption in some circles on the leftward side of American life: the overpriced hybrid car parked ostentatiously in front of the suburban house with a few grid-tied solar panels on the roof, and the rest of it. It means giving things up: for example, doing without a car, getting rid of the suburban house and moving to a smaller, older, more efficient home two blocks from the bus route that will take you to work every day. It means accepting limits, not in some vague and abstract sense (which generally means accepting them for other people), but in the painfully specific sense that applies to your own choices. It means doing without things you want, during the difficult process of unlearning the mental automatisms that make you want them in the first place.

Unpleasant as it seems, this strategy has two massive advantages. The first is that you’ll quickly find yourself saving a great deal of money. Sell your car, and what you now spend on car payments, fuel, maintenance, insurance, and the rest of it, can go to something with a future. Apply the same logic to the other money-wasting habits of the middle class, and the money adds up fast. Since getting or staying out of debt, and providing yourself with the tools and skills you’ll need to get by in an age of decline, ought to be among your core priorities just now, that extra money is a valuable tool. So is the spare time you’ll have—most of those money-wasting habits are also time-wasting habits, remember.

The second advantage is one I’ve mentioned here before. If you’re going to be poor in the future, and you are, you might as well learn how to do it competently. It’s entirely possible to lead a life that’s poor in terms of money, material goods, and energy consumption, and profoundly rich—far richer than most contemporary lifestyles—in human values. If you’re going to do that, though, you’re going to have to learn how it’s done, and the only school where you can study that is that ancient institution, the school of hard knocks. If you start cutting your energy use and your material wants now, before you’re forced to do so, you can get past the hard part of the learning curve while you still have other options.

Thus it’s time, and maybe even past time, to wake up and walk away. Doing that, though, is going to require confronting one of the core superstitions of the modern world; we’ll discuss that next week.

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End of the World of the Week #5

You might think that the habit of predicting the apocalypse would yield a bumper crop of self-fulfilling prophecies. Convince enough people that the end is nigh, and you might just get enough of them to do something crazy enough to make some approximation to the end of the world happen, right? Over the three thousand years or so since the apocalypse meme started on its long and merry way through human history, there have been some examples of that phenomenon—but even then, things generally haven’t turned out the way the prophets thought it would.

One instance worth remembering can be found in the War Scroll, one of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, which were written right around the beginning of the Common Era in what is now part of Jordan, and was then a bleak corner of the Roman province of Judea. The War Scroll deserves its name; it’s a lurid advance account of the final conflict between the forces of light and the powers of darkness, and if you know your way around the Jewish apocalyptic literature of that period you know that by definition the powers of darkness spoke Latin and took their marching orders from the big cheese in Rome.

As apocalyptic literature goes, the War Scroll ranks well up there for sheer verbal color. "On the day that the Romans fall there shall be a battle and horrible carnage before the God of Israel, for it is a day appointed by him since ancient times as a battle of annihilation for the sons of darkness," it bellows. "The sons of light and the forces of darkness shall fight together to show the strength of God with the roar of a great multitude and the shouts of gods and men: a day of disaster."

It was prophetic harangues like this one, historians agree, that set the stage for the three Jewish revolts against Rome in 66, 115, and 132 CE. A great many Jewish people by that time convinced themselves that their Messiah would show up to lead them to triumph against Rome. That’s not how things worked out, though; the Romans won every round, and those on the other side who survived were either sold into slavery or driven into exile. The result was indeed "a day of disaster," but the disaster fell almost entirely on the heads of the Jewish people.

—story from Apocalypse Not

The Blood of the Earth, or Pulp Nonfiction

Some of my readers have wondered aloud why it is that I’ve devoted so much time in recent weeks to the current flurry of 2012 prophecies and their close equivalents. One reason is that there’s good reason to think that we’re going to hear quite a bit more about these prophecies in the months to come; unless I miss my guess, the apocalyptic bubble that’s inflating now, and will pop this coming December 22, is going to be one for the record books. Still, there’s at least one more reason to pay close attention to that bubble just now.

It’s not often remembered these days that the literal meaning of the word "apocalypse" is the revelation of something hidden. The term got its modern meaning because most of the prophecies that have been so labeled claim to reveal one hidden thing in particular, that is, the imminent end of history; but there’s another sense in which the word is even more appropriate, and that sense seems worth exploring just at the moment. The presence and popularity of apocalyptic beliefs, I’ve come to think, reveal something important about any society in which such beliefs occur.

Apocalyptic thinking, after all, doesn’t come out of nowhere. It has an extensive history behind it, a point I tried to make in my recent book Apocalypse Not, but it also has roots in the collective psychology of any society in which it becomes popular. Epochs awash in apocalyptic beliefs are also full of intense social stress, but there are stressful periods in which very few people spend their time feverishly getting ready for the end of the world. What seems to do the trick is a particular kind of stress—specifically, the kind that happens when the narratives a society uses to make sense of the world no longer work.

I’ve talked more than once in these essays about the immense role that narratives play in our mental and social lives. As human beings, we think with stories as inevitably as we eat with mouths and walk with feet; the stories we tell ourselves about the world define the way we make sense of the "blooming, buzzing confusion," in William James’ phrase, that the world out there throws at our sense organs. In what we are pleased to call "primitive societies," a rich body of mythology and legend provides each person with a range of narratives that can be applied to any given situation and make sense of it. Learning the stories, and learning how to apply them to life’s events, is the core of a child’s education in these societies, and a learned person is very often distinguished, more than anything else, by the number of traditional stories he or she knows by heart.

More technologically advanced societies often, though not invariably, move away from this, consigning their inheritance of stories to children—think, for example, of the role of fairy tales in nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial societies—while narrowing down the range of stories adults are supposed to think with, until all that’s left are variations on one narrative. Serious thinking in these societies is by definition thinking that follows the accepted narrative. To be a respectable thinker in the heyday of the Roman Empire, for example, was by definition to filter the world through a narrative that described how original chaos was reduced to order, peace and prosperity under the paternal rule of a benevolent despot. Roman religion applied that narrative to the cosmos, Roman philosophy applied it to the relation between mind and body, and so on. The difficulty, of course, came when the world started throwing things at the Roman world that couldn’t be made to fit the narrative.

We’re in much the same situation today. Our core narrative, the story into which every serious thinker is required to fit his or her thoughts, is the narrative of progress—the story that defines all of human existence as a single great upward trajectory from the caves to the stars, and insists that the present is better than the past and the future will inevitably be better still. The problem with that narrative, of course, is that for most people the present is significantly worse than the past—standards of living for most Americans, for example, have been declining for more than thirty years—and the future promises to be even worse than the present. The narrative of progress has no room for that perception; in public life, the only way in which it’s possible to bring it up at all is to suggest that someone or something is to blame for the temporary lack of progress, and then offer a plan to get the obstacle out of the way so that progress can get under way once more.

Politicians, pundits, and serious thinkers of every kind have been making exactly this argument for a good many decades, though, and it’s started to sink in across a very broad range of the social spectrum that something has gone very wrong. There have been, so far, two main responses to this recognition. The surge in apocalyptic prophecies is one of them; the logical response when one narrative fails to make sense of the world is to look for another narrative that does a better job, after all, and the narrative of apocalypse—more precisely, the religious narrative of paradise, fall, and redemption in which apocalyptic prophecy has its natural habitat—is one of the very few alternatives that most people in industrial societies are willing to take seriously.

The second response to the recognition that the narrative of progress has failed is to rehash it over again in an even more extreme form. The poster child for this second option just now is a video titled Thrive, which is doing the rounds in the alternative scene as I write this. Those of my readers who are connoisseurs of meretricious nonsense may find it of interest, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else; we will all be hearing far too much like it over the years to come.

The basic message of Thrive is that we all ought to be living in a wonderful Utopian world, and would be doing so if evil corporate conspiracies weren’t suppressing the inventions that would have given us limitless free energy, cures for cancer and, well, pretty much anything else your heart desires. Evidence? We don’t need no steenking evidence—and of course, in an entirely pragmatic sense, Thrive doesn’t; all it has to do is hammer over and over again on a set of emotional hot buttons until the viewer’s ability to reason is overwhelmed, and if the video fails at this, it’s certainly not for want of trying. It’s a pity, in a way, that Thrive wasn’t yet in circulation when I wrote last year’s posts on thaumaturgy; it would have been educational to go through it scene by scene and talk about the crassly manipulative tactics it uses to get its effect.

Anyone interested in a thorough critique of Thrive should read Rob Hopkins’ cogent essay on the subject. For our present purposes, the point I want to make is that Thrive is an all-out effort to uphold the narrative of progress in the teeth of the facts. The narrative of progress says that we ought to have cheaper, more abundant energy with every passing year; in fact, the industrial world’s supplies of cheap abundant energy are running out fast, with predictable effects on price and supply, but those effects and their causes simply can’t be squared with the narrative of progress. Enter a flurry of accusations of conspiracy, which make it possible to insist that progress is still continuing but its fruits are being withheld from the people. The claims that cures for cancer are being suppressed has the same role with regard to the ongoing collapse of public health in America and elsewhere: we ought to be getting healthier, but we’re not, so a scapegoat has to be found to justify the widening gap between the narrative we prefer and the reality we get.

For all the problems with apocalyptic thinking, then, the prophets of apocalypse have at least gotten the first step right; having noticed that the narrative of progress doesn’t work any more, they’ve gone looking for an alternative, and it’s simply their bad luck that the alternative they’ve chosen doesn’t work either. Of course that raises a challenging question: if the narratives of progress and apocalypse don’t fit the world in which we’re living or the future that’s looming ahead of us, what narratives do?

Mulling over this question a few days ago, I started making a list of the more obvious features of the story in which we find ourselves at this point in the turning of history’s wheel. I encourage my readers to follow along, and see whether or not the answer that struck me occurs to them as well.

• We live in a world dominated by a vast, slowly decaying empire that gets quite literally superhuman powers by feeding on what we may as well call the blood of the Earth;

• That empire is ruled by a decadent aristocracy that holds court in soaring towers and bolsters its crumbling authority by conjuring vast amounts of wealth out of thin air;

• Backing the aristocracy is a caste of corrupt sorcerers whose incantations, projected into every home through the power of the blood of the Earth, keep the populace disorganized, deluded and passive;

• Entire provinces of the empire are ravaged by droughts, storms, and other disasters caused by the misuse of the Earth’s blood, while prophecies from the past warn of much worse to come;

• Meanwhile, far from the centers of power, the members of a scattered fellowship struggle to find and learn the forgotten lore of an earlier time, which might just hold the secret of survival...

It was more or less at this point that the realization hit: we have somehow gotten stuck, all seven billion of us, inside the pages of a pulp fantasy novel.

Those of my readers who are significantly younger than I am, and missed the vast outpouring of cheap fantasy novels that played so large and disreputable a role in shaping my youthful imagination, may benefit from a bit of history here. The runaway success of J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings in the late 1960s inspired publishers, who are after all in business to make money, to look for ways to cash in on the same market. One obvious gambit was to dredge up older fantasy fiction, and much of what was readily available was the pulp fantasy of the 1920s and 1930s, when H.P. Lovecraft’s overheated prose and Robert Howard’s overheated gonads filled the pages of Weird Tales magazine and the imagination of teenage America with musclebound barbarian heroes, tentacled horrors from three weeks before the beginning of time, and most of the other modern conveniences that have furnished fantasy fiction ever since.

Lovecraft and Howard were, alas, both dead when the late-Sixties fantasy explosion arrived, and so their ability to produce new works was somewhat limited. For a while, accordingly, it was possible for almost anybody who could write a literate English sentence to get into print as a fantasy novelist. Most of what flooded onto bookstore shelves in the years that followed was remarkably atrocious, with two-dimensional characters, engagingly bad prose, and utterly unconvincing plots duking it out in a loser-take-all contest. At the time, I wasn’t a stickler about quality—I was in the market for anything more colorful than the two-dimensional blandness of an American suburban childhood—but I did prefer those who could write well; Tolkien’s trilogy was one of those favorites, and so were the products of the busy pen of Michael Moorcock.

These days Moorcock counts as a serious novelist, having clambered up out of the mosh pit of pulp fantasy fiction into the rarefied balconies of literature. Back in the day, though, he was among the leading figures in the pulp fantasy revival. Better than any of his rivals, perhaps, Moorcock recaptured the flavor of the gloriously trashy Weird Tales era, penning sprawling sagas about a succession of heroes who were all iterations of one Eternal Champion, destined to hack his way forever through an infinity of parallel worlds. And the backgrounds against which Elric of Melniboné and Corum Jhaelen Irsei and Dorian Hawkmoon and the rest of them suffered, swaggered and fought? More often than not, they were vast and crumbling empires propped up by supernatural powers, ruled by decadent aristocrats who conjured various things out of thin air, full of corrupt sorcerers, whole provinces ravaged by disasters, and—well, I suspect you get the point by now.

Aside from the colorful details just mentioned, though, there was something else woven into the pulp fantasy of that era, Moorcock’s and otherwise. The worlds of pulp fantasy are by and large worlds in decline, strewn with immense ruins and scattered with artifacts no one can duplicate any more. The heroes of pulp fantasy are caught up in the undertow of decline, and their battles and quests are generally defined by legacies of the pre-decline past that have to be preserved or destroyed before the future can begin to take shape. Interestingly, that was as often true in the Weird Tales era; Conan the Barbarian, who was placed by his creator Robert Howard somewhere in the conveniently undocumented past between the fall of Atlantis and the beginning of recorded history, spent much of his time dealing with the half-remembered legacies of the assorted drowned continents that Howard borrowed from Theosophical literature.

J.R.R. Tolkien, whose name I’ve invoked a couple of times already in this essay, worked with the same theme. There’s been a great deal of literary criticism of Tolkien’s work down through the years, but I don’t recall seeing any that’s talked about the extent to which Middle-Earth was influenced by the pulp fantasy of the 1920s and 1930s, which Tolkien (like his friend C.S. Lewis) read eagerly. One of the things that makes Tolkien’s work so inventive is the way that he plopped a bunch of hopelessly middle-class Englishmen dressed as hobbits into a world full of pulp fantasy clichés, complete with heroic survivors of drowned Atlantis—excuse me, Númenor—and an evil wizard-king who rides a tame pterodactyl into battle. Framing this arguably satiric dimension and the story as a whole there is, once again, the theme of decline: the twilight of the elves, the last hurrah of the heirs of Númenor, and the end of a sad and tangled story that had been winding down since the Elder Days. Middle-Earth is not a place where progress happens, any more than Conan’s Hyborian Age or age of the Young Kingdoms in which Elric wielded the black sword Stormbringer.

A brand of fiction commonly dismissed as sheer escapism, in other words, provides narratives more useful to the current state of the industrial world than the supposedly serious narrative of progress that still shapes every detail of contemporary public discourse. I’m not sure how far to take that point, though I have to admit that if Mabelrode the Faceless, Demon Lord of Chaos, were to be named as CEO of Citibank, I’m not sure I would be surprised. (On the other hand, maybe he already has been; it would explain a few things.) It would arguably have been better for us all if, when Edwin Drake and his men went to drill the first commercial oil well at Titusville, Pennsylvania back in 1859, they had found an ominous standing stone there carved with glowing runes:

THE BLACK GOLD IS THE BLOOD OF THE EARTH
THE FORCE IN THE BLOOD IS THE FLAME OF THE SUN
TO DRINK OF THE BLOOD IS TO MASTER THE WORLD
BUT THE FATE OF THE EARTH AND ITS BLOOD ARE ONE

Still, we missed that warning, and so have never quite gotten around to noticing that the world around us has much more in common with pulp fantasy fiction than it does with what passes for serious thought these days.

By this point, though, I suspect that you, dear reader, are wondering about one detail. If we’re actually stuck inside the pages of a trashy fantasy novel, as I’ve suggested, and all the details of the setting and the plot are in place, where is the protagonist? Who is the hero or the heroine who will turn the pages of the long-lost Gaianomicon, use its forgotten lore to forge a wand of power out of the rays of the Sun, shatter the deceptive spells of the lords of High Finance, and rise up amidst the wreckage of a dying empire to become one of the seedbearers of an age that is not yet born?

Why, you are, of course.

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End of the World of the Week #4

Some apocalyptic prophecies have a more embarrassing outcome than others, but for sheer anticlimax it’s hard to beat the end of Thomas Müntzer’s prophetic career in 1525. Müntzer was a defrocked Catholic priest who converted to Martin Luther’s newborn movement in the heady early days of the Reformation, then went right on past Luther into that peculiar region of thought where it seems as though divine omnipotence needs a helping hand.

In 1520, Müntzer became convinced that the Kingdom of Heaven would appear promptly just as soon as the righteous, whom he identified with the peasants, rose up and slaughtered the wicked, whom he identified with everybody else higher up the social ladder. He spent five years wandering through Germany preaching his bloodthirsty gospel and publishing a series of pamphlets—the 16th-century equivalent of conspiracy websites—in which he denounced everyone who disagreed with him as slaves of the Antichrist. Most people dismissed him as a mental case, but he built up a small following.

In 1525, though, peasants in much of southern Germany rose up in revolt against the local barons, and Müntzer suddenly found himself in command of an army. After some preliminary skirmishes, his army and that of the nobility came face to face on May 15. In his speech to his troops before the battle, Müntzer insisted that he would catch the barons’ cannonballs in the sleeves of his coat. Moments afterwards, a rainbow appeared in the sky, and the peasant army cheered wildly, convinced that this omen proved that God was on their side.

The other side chose that moment to open up with all their artillery. In a matter of moments, those of the rebels who weren’t killed or wounded took to their heels and ran. Müntzer himself was caught hiding in somebody’s basement a few days later, and died an unpleasant death.

--story from Apocalypse Not

Waiting for the Great Pumpkin

With the coming of the new year, predictions of what’s in store during the next twelve months are showing up here and there in the peak oil blogosphere: a feature of the season, really, as reliable as the icicles that hang from the roof’s edge outside the window of my study. Like the icicles, they’re enticing to look at; like the icicles, equally, a great many of them are guaranteed to drop to the ground and shatter at some point in the months to come.

That’s all the more remarkable in that, by and large, the peak oil community has been pretty much spot on when it comes to the general shape of the future. Five or ten years ago, it bears remembering, nobody else was predicting the sustained oil prices on the far side of $100 a barrel and the global economic gridlock that have become fixtures of the contemporary scene; the peak oil scene had that one nailed. A healthy skepticism toward whatever the current speculative bubble happens to be—tech stocks back in the days when the peak oil blogosphere was first getting under way, real estate in the runup to the 2008 crash, shale gas and shale oil now—has also been a common feature in the peak oil scene throughout its history, even when almost everyone else was cheering along the bubble du jour as the wave of the future.

Why, then, all the annual predictions that misfire—and in particular, why the same annual predictions that have misfired for years in a row? Why, for example, the relentless annual round of claims that the coming year will finally see a sudden and total economic collapse? That one’s been made time and again, often by the same bloggers, and the fact that each year goes by without anything of the kind happening somehow never manages to affect the next year’s confident insistence that this time around the wolves really, truly are about to eat all the sheep. It would be funny, really, except that pointing out the long string of failed predictions has become a standard rhetorical trick in the arsenal of those—either madmen or economists, to use Kenneth Boulding’s useful taxonomy—who want to insist on the possibility of limitless growth on a finite planet.

Now of course it’s only fair to point out that there are at least as many predictions on the other side of the picture that are still being recycled this year after an equivalent track record of failures. Hope springs eternal—or rather, as I suggested in last week’s post, the facile optimism of the privileged that masquerades as hope in too much of contemporary culture springs infernal—in the minds of the many bloggers who expect some shiny new technological gimmick to overturn the laws of thermodynamics and give us a glossy new future straight out of The Jetsons. The technological savior du jour, to be sure, changes even faster than the bubble du jour; we’ve seen ethanol, big wind turbines, and now shale gas touted as game-changing developments; neither ethanol nor wind turbines changed much of anything, of course, but when shale gas lands in the same category—as it will—there will be another candidate for the role

For that matter, those who insist that petroleum can’t run out because we want it so badly have had just as dubious a record, if not more so. I’ve reminded my readers several times already about Daniel Yergin’s 2004 prediction that new petroleum discoveries would keep the price of crude oil at a plateau of $38 a barrel, and he’s far from the only pundit who’s made claims that absurd and still had the media fawning at his feet. More generally, have you noticed that every couple of years, we get to hear some new claim that a vast new oil discovery somewhere is about to solve the world’s energy troubles? They’re as regular as clockwork or, these days, as speculative bubbles; the actual results, once the hype gives way to the business end of a drilling bit, range from modest to none at all; still, none of that slows down the missionaries of the religion of limitless petroleum.

It’s all uncomfortably reminiscent of the Peanuts character Linus, with his enduring faith that this year, despite all previous disconfirmations, the Great Pumpkin really will show up with candy for all on Halloween. Still, as I look back over the last dozen years or so, I notice a feature common to the predictions I’m discussing that Linus’ lonely vigil in the pumpkin patch doesn’t share. Is it just me, or do my readers also catch the note of increasing desperation in a good many of the latest round of familiar predictions?

On the cornucopian side of the picture, certainly, that note is hard to miss. One measure of this is the extent to which the most remarkable evasions of fact have been finding their way into the media of late when the subject of US energy production comes up. The example I’m thinking of just now is the claim, recycled by any number of supposedly serious pundits in the last few months, that the United States has become a net exporter of petroleum. As it happens this is—well, let’s be polite and call it an inaccuracy; a less courteous though arguably more accurate phrase would be "bald-faced lie." The US last year imported around two-thirds of the crude oil it used, just as it did the year before, and exported very little crude oil. Follow the footnotes, though, and they lead in interesting directions.

What has happened over the last few years, in fact, is that the US has become a net exporter of refined petroleum products. For many years before then, along with the vast floods of crude oil shipped in from abroad to feed domestic refineries, the United States imported a modest amount of petroleum products that had been refined overseas, and shipped a smaller amount of its own refineries’ products to other countries. As the current depression has tightened its grip on the country, though, consumption of gasoline and other petroleum products has dropped by more than ten per cent, and US refineries have found it profitable to sell more of their products overseas as the domestic market contracted. The total shift is not that large, and since what’s driving it is the ongoing contraction of the US economy, it might be better treated as a warning sign than a reason for fatuous misstatements.

Still, beyond the misinformation and disinformation, fatuous and otherwise, there’s a common thread running through all the various predictions I’m discussing here, and it’s a thread worth tracing. All of them—the claims that a crash is imminent, or that a technological breakthrough is imminent, or that an abundant new source of fossil fuels is imminent, or what have you—are at bottom claims that the troubled situation in which the industrial world currently finds itself can’t continue in anything like its present form. I’d like to offer instead the counterintuitive suggestion that it can, and most likely will.

What that would mean in practice can best be judged by thinking back a year or two, to the early days of 2011. The year that had just ended was a troubled time, with political turmoil, economic crises, a larger than usual number of natural disasters, and a pervasive (and in many cases quite accurate) sense on the part of many people that life was getting tougher and the solutions being offered by politicians weren’t solving much of anything. Once we got past the annual flurry of predictions about game-changing events of one kind or another, what actually happened? The game didn’t change at all. Instead, each of the difficulties I’ve just noted got a little worse. There was more political turmoil; the economic crises became somewhat more frequent and more severe; the number of natural disasters went up again—there were, as I recall, 32 weather-related disasters causing more than US$1 billion each in damages, which is a new record—and across the industrial world, people’s faith in their government’s capacity to do much of anything declined further.

That’s what happened in 2011. I’d like to suggest that when we take a backwards look in the early days of 2013, we will most likely see that that’s what happened in 2012, too: a slow worsening across a wide range of trends, punctuated by localized crises and regional disasters. I’d like to predict, in fact, that when we take that backward look, the US dollar and the Euro will both still exist and be accepted as legal tender, though the Eurozone may have shed a couple of countries who probably shouldn’t have joined it in the first place; that stock markets around the world will have had another volatile year, but will still be trading. Here in the US, whoever is unlucky enough to win the 2012 presidential election will be in the middle of an ordinary transition to a new term of office; the new Congress will be gearing up for another two years of partisan gridlock; gas stations will still have gas for sale and grocery stores will be stocked with groceries; and most Americans will be making the annual transition between coping with their New Year’s hangovers and failing to live up to their New Year’s resolutions, just as though it was any other year.

That is to say, nothing much will have changed, if by the word "change" you mean exclusively the kind of dramatic break with the existing pattern of things that so many people are predicting just now. From any other perspective, plenty will have changed. Official US statistics will no doubt insist that the unemployment rate has gone down—do you ever get the feeling that when the Soviet Union collapsed, the people who used to churn out all those preposterous propaganda claims for their government got hired by ours? I do—but the number of people out of work in the United States will likely set another all-time record; the number of people in severe economic trouble will have gone up another good-sized notch, and public health clinics will probably be seeing the first wave of malnutrition-caused illness in children. If you happen to have spent the year in one of the areas unfortunate enough to get hit by the hard edge of the increasingly unstable weather, you may have had to spend a week or two in an emergency shelter while the flood waters receded or the wreckage got hauled away, and you might even notice that less and less gets rebuilt every year.

Unless that happens, though, or unless you happen to pay close attention to the things that don’t usually make the evening news, you may well look back in the first days of 2013 and think that business as usual is still ongoing. You’d be right, too, so long as you recognize that there’s been a stealthy change in what business as usual now means. Until the peak of world conventional petroleum production arrived in 2005, by and large, business as usual meant the continuation of economic growth. Since then, by and large, it has meant the continuation of economic decline.

And the repeated predictions that the situation can’t go on? I’ve come to think that what motivates such predictions, and gives them their present popularity, is the growing sense of apprehension that it can go on—that the troubles currently pressing in on the industrial world could just keep on getting worse, day after day, year after year, for decades to come, following the same gradual curve that the industrial world followed in the days of its growth, but in reverse: descending into impoverishment and relocalization along some broad equivalent of the same bumpy course that brought the ascent to prosperity and global integration back in the day.

When you think about it—and in the back of their minds, I suspect, most people have thought about it—that’s really a terrifying prospect. What makes it most unnerving is that it’s not simply a matter of, say, having your standard of living ratchet down by five per cent every year, though there will be a fair amount of that. It’s far more a matter of never knowing when your number’s going to come up and land you out of work, out of money and out on the street, next to the others who landed there before you. How much of the popular sport of blaming the poor for their poverty, I wonder, and how much of the current pseudoconservative fad of insisting that the poor aren’t actually poor, comes from people who are desperately trying to convince themselves that their jobs are irreplaceable, their retirement funds secure, and the sudden dizzying fall into the ranks of the impoverished can’t possibly happen to them?

If the downward arc of business as usual in an age of decline is what we’re facing, though, that sort of tortured logic is a pretty fair guarantee of final failure. The only way out of the trap, as I’ve argued here rather more than once, is to accept a steep cut in your standard of living before it becomes necessary, as a deliberate choice, and to use the resources freed up by that choice to get rid of any debts you have, get settled in a location that has a fair chance of keeping a viable degree of community life going, and get the tools and learn the skills that you will need to manage a decent life in an age of spiraling decline. To those who cling to the idea that they can maintain their present lifestyles, admittedly, it’s hard to think of any advice less welcome, but the universe is in no way obligated to give us the future we want—even if what we want is a sudden blow that will spare us the harder experience of the Long Descent.

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End of the World of the Week #3

When it comes to comedy, timing is supposed to be everything. The same could be said about apocalyptic prophecy, except that nobody seems to be able to get it right. The example I have in mind just now is Sulpicius Severus, who was a close friend of St. Martin of Tours. In his biography of the saint, written not long after Martin’s death, Sulpicius mentioned that seven years previously the holy bishop had told him privately that the Antichrist had already been born, and would begin his unstoppable rise to world power as soon as he reached adulthood. "Ponder," wrote Sulpicius, "how close these coming fearful events are!"

You might think that a saint of Martin’s caliber—he was a major figure in the church of his time, and has been credited with an impressive roster of miracles both while he was alive and since his death—must have had a sufficiently clear hotline to the Almighty to get such an important detail right. Still, that’s not the way it turned out. St. Martin died around 400 CE, and Sulpicius’ biography seems to have been written not long thereafter. The Antichrist would have been able to buy his first beer, in other words, around 414 CE at the latest; some 1600 years later, the faithful are still waiting for him to man up and put in an appearance.

—story from Apocalypse Not

Hope in a Cold Season

Last week’s post on the empty promise of December 21, 2012 and other apocalyptic fantasies fielded me a fair number of denunciations. That was predictable enough; the parallels I mentioned in that post between apocalyptic beliefs and bubble economics include the awkward fact that in both cases, those with the most to lose by buying into the delusion du jour are pretty consistently also the ones least willing to hear any questioning of their misplaced dreams.

Under other circumstances I’d simply have shrugged and filed the resulting tirades with the ones I get on a more routine basis from those who can’t stand some other aspect of this blog’s project. Still, one of this latest batch made an accusation that I found baffling at first glance, and then indicative of something worth attention just now. The commenter in question, to be precise, insisted that by criticizing the industry that has sprouted around the fake-Mayan prophecies of 2012, I was treating "love, joy, hope, and inner well-being" as so many delusions.

It probably needs to be said first off that this assertion involves a very odd definition of the concepts just named. Let’s imagine, to put the same logic in a different context, the plight of an unemployed single mother in today’s America during the holidays. She has, we’ll assume, barely enough money to pay the most basic expenses for herself and her children, and the clock is ticking on her unemployment benefits, which will run out after 99 weeks. Her desperate efforts to land any job at all have gone nowhere—that’s common enough these days—and it’s become plain, as the holidays draw near, that if she’s going to be able to afford to keep her children fed and clothed and housed into the new year, there aren’t going to be any Christmas presents.

What does she say to the children? According to the logic offered by my commenter, she presumably ought to insist to them that Santa Claus will show up on Christmas Eve with a big sack full of presents for all. It’s certainly true that this will fill the children with love, joy, hope, and a sense of inner well-being, for the moment. It might even seem like a good idea, as long as you don’t think about what’s going to happen on Christmas morning, when eyes that had been sparkling with delight the night before look up tearfully from the bare floor to their mother’s face.

I think most people recognize that the right thing to do instead in a situation of that kind is to tell the truth, or as much of it as the children are old enough to grasp, and do it early enough in the season that they can get past the inevitable misery and go to work making the best of things. Talk to people who grew up during the last Great Depression and you’ll hear stories of this kind over and over again—the holiday decorations pieced together from wrappers and scraps, the depressingly plain meal livened up with a few little touches or sheer make-believe, the little doll handmade from rags and burlap sacking that’s still treasured three quarters of a century later, and so on. If love, joy, hope, and authentic inner well-being are to be had in such a difficult situation, they’re going to come that way, not by way of making gaudy promises that are never going to be fulfilled.

Still, that sort of ethical clarity—so obvious to most Americans in the 1930s—is apparently far from obvious to a great many Americans today. The speculative bubbles of the last decade, again, offer an uncomfortably clear look at the popularity of delusion in American public life just now. When John Kenneth Galbraith wrote his brilliant and very funny history The Great Crash 1929 back in 1954, he noted that the best preventive for the miserable economic aftermath of a speculative bubble was a clear memory of just how miserable that aftermath had turned out to be. In 1954, he was quite correct; a generation raised in the Depression years kept Wall Street on a very tight leash back then, and indeed Galbraith’s own testimony before a Senate subcommittee in 1955 on the implications of the 1929 experience was enough all by itself to pop a stock market boomlet—a circumstance Galbraith recounted in wry terms in the foreword to the second edition. The memory of 1929 had an immunizing effect so potent that it took until the 1960s for the US stock market to blow its first very tentative bubbles, and it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that a really classic stock market boom and bust followed the traditional path, up with the rocket and down with the stick.

Consider today’s economic scene and the contrast is hard to miss. The tech-stock bubble inflated all through the second half of the 1990s and crashed to earth between 2000 and 2002. No sooner had the rubble stopped bouncing than an even more gargantuan bubble in real estate took off. That crashed in 2008, and even though the rubble’s still bouncing, it’s doing so right alongside a bouncing baby bubble in shale gas. If some clever promoter comes up with a way for ordinary investors to speculate in shale gas leases or something of the kind—and I’ll be surprised indeed if that fails to happen in the coming year—it’s a safe bet that millions of people will take all the money they’ve got left and plunge into the shale market, driving another economically devastating cycle of boom and bust.

Part of the difference between then and now is that the 1929 crash came on the heels of a spectacular bubble in Florida real estate, which crashed in 1925, and that followed another nasty little bubble and crash in the stock market in 1921; thus we’re only just now at the point where the idiocy of trying to get rich off bubbles should be sinking in. Another part of the difference is that the financial authorities in 1929 responded to the implosion of the bubble by letting investors crash and burn, where today’s basically wet themselves trying to make sure that investors don’t lose money, even if keeping them solvent means that the economy goes down in flames. Still, I think there’s more to it than that.

In 1929, America was still an expanding society, with an economy that was still producing something other than fiscal hallucinations, and a standard of living that had been moving raggedly upward for a good long time. The delusion that drives bubbles—the notion that it’s reasonable to expect to get rich on unearned wealth—could seize the population now and then, as it’s done since market economies got abstract enough that speculative bubbles became possible in the first place. Still, most Americans could reasonably expect that with hard work and prudence, they could expect to have a better standard of living in the future than they had in the past, and their children could expect to do better still.

Those days are long past. For the great majority of Americans, living standards have been declining since the early 1970s, upward mobility is increasingly a nostalgic dream, and it’s becoming harder even for government flacks to keep pretending that training prople for jobs that don’t exist will make those jobs miraculously appear. Ours is a contracting society, and outside of the narrowing circle of privilege—itself facing, a little further down the road, a far more drastic form of downward mobility—most people realize that hard work and prudence, the road to a better future in past generations, are merely a slightly slower road to impoverishment than the one everyone else seems to be taking.

Combine that with the modern cult of celebrity that showers randomly chosen individuals with brief but spectacular bursts of wealth for the most absurd of reasons—would anybody care to explain to me just what the Kardashians did in 2010 that was worth an income of $65 million?—and the frantic marketing of consumer gewgaws that pervades American culture, and you’ve got a perfect recipe for a society in which an increasingly desperate populace will gamble all they have at increasingly long odds for a shot at unearned wealth. That’s what drove the speculative bubbles of the recent past, and will drive those of the near future. It’s also what drives the fixation on apocalyptic events that will supposedly dump history’s ultimate jackpot into the laps of those lucky enough to draw the winning ticket, whether that ticket is marked "Rapture," or "Singularity," or "December 21, 2012."

Now it’s fair to say there are those—and the commenter mentioned above may be among them—for whom a fixation of that sort is readily confused with hope. It may even be that it’s the closest thing to hope that some of them have left. Still, it’s not actually hope in any meaningful sense of the word. To understand why, we’re going to have to take a hard look at just what hope is.

That’s a vexed question just now, and not only because the current US president used the word to get into office via one of the most monumentally cynical political campaigns of modern times. Even before it got stripped of its remaining content by Obama’s marketing team, the old virtue of hope had gotten tangled up in America’s culture of entitlement, and twisted completely out of shape in the service of cynical marketing disguised as cheap sentimentality. "When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are, anything your heart desires will come to you..." Readers of a certain generation will remember hearing that bit of doggerel out of the mouth of an animated insect. I knew a small boy who, after seeing the movie in question, took to singing, "When you wish upon a star, you don’t see things as they are." Like most children, he knew better, and hated being on the receiving end of lies. I sympathized, having had exactly the same reaction a quarter of a century earlier.

We have, to be more precise, confused hope with the facile optimism of the privileged, the sort of thinking that insists that nothing really unpleasant can ever actually happen, not to us. A great many Americans, for example, think that being hopeful in the face of the depletion of fossil fuels means assuming against all the evidence that some ample replacement will be found in time to allow us to keep our energy-intensive lifestyles running. A great many of us more generally think that being hopeful in the face of the limits to growth means trying to convince ourselves that those limits don’t apply to us, or that there will turn out to be some way around them, or that somebody or other will bail us out before our refusal to deal with those limits lands us in consequences harsher than we want to think about.

It’s interesting by contrast to consider the historical conditions that surrounded the evolution of the concept of hope in the ethical thought of the Western world. Like so much of postclassical Western culture, it emerged out of the creative collision between Greek philosophy and Christian religious ideas in the late Roman world. That was not an age of economic expansion and rising standards of living. Quite the contrary; as the Roman Empire ran up against its own limits to growth, and then drove itself into bankruptcy and collapse trying to defend borders defined in a more expansive age, economic crises and a soaring tax burden sent standards of living steadily downwards while the Empire lasted. Its fall in turn brought an age of chaos in which whole regions that had once known widespread literacy, busy market economies, and such amenities as central heating devolved into fragmented, impoverished and drastically underpopulated successor states in which eking out a bare subsistence was an achievement not everyone managed.

The current American concept of hope would not have lasted long in the protracted downward spiral of the Roman world. The concept of hope as an ethical virtue, by contrast, became universally accepted during that same downward spiral. Why? Because hope, to translate its definition out of the ornate moral philosophy of the day, isn’t a sense of entitlement that insists that good things will inevitably come one’s way. Rather, it’s the recognition that some good can be achieved no matter what the circumstances might be, combined with a sustained willingness to try.

Compare hope to any of the other ethical virtues celebrated in that harsh time and the distinction is even clearer. Courage, for example, isn’t a facile assurance that one is destined to win. It’s the quality of character and the act of will that does the right thing in the face of danger and fear. This is, among other things, the opposite of the conviction that victory is inevitable. That’s a logical point—if someone recognizes no danger and feels no fear, he’s not courageous no matter how many risks he unknowingly runs—but it’s also a practical one. One of the commonplaces of military history, for example, is the army that believes it can’t lose, and then collapses in panic when the battle turns against it because it has never had to grapple with the possibility of defeat.

In the same way, hope doesn’t depend on a sense of entitlement that insists the universe is obligated to provide us with whatever happy ending we think we want, and in any real sense, it’s incompatible with notions of that kind. Hope is the quality of character and the act of will that finds some good that can be achieved, no matter what the circumstances, and then strives to achieve it. The sense of entitlement, in turn, is precisely equivalent to the belief that victory is inevitable, and it produces the same sort of brittleness; it’s for that reason that it tends to collapse into despair, and it’s despair, ultimately, that feeds fantasies of the apocalyptic event that will make everything different.

It’s for this reason that apocalyptic fantasies always flourish in the aftermath of grandiose movements for social and spiritual transformation. Behind the current flurry of 2012 prophecies lies the New Age movement’s conclusive failure to create its own reality, just as the parallel flurry of Rapture prophecies mark the bitter endpoint of a trajectory that began with the buoyant optimism of the "Jesus freaks" and the Good News Bible, when enthusiastic young Christians believed they could remake the world in Christ’s image. Hubris disguised as one kind of hope always ends up giving way to despair disguised as another kind of hope. In the process, the concept of hope itself risks being discredited.

That’s profoundly unfortunate, because it’s when overblown ambitions crash to the ground that hope in the true sense of the word is most needed. Behind the rise and fall of the New Age and the Evangelical movements stands the vaster rise and fall of another attempt to build Utopia here on Earth, the attempt we call industrial civilization. Right now, as the limits to growth tighten around us like a noose and an economy geared to perpetual expansion shudders and cracks in the throes of decline, one of the things that’s needed most is the willingness, in a time of gathering darkness, to locate what lamps can still be found, and light them. To return to the metaphor I offered earlier, we need to listen to the voice that tells us, "Honey, I’m really sorry, but Santa Claus isn’t coming this year"—and having heard that, and done whatever grieving we need to do, we need to draw in a deep breath, accept the hard fact, and get to work to spread at least a little light and warmth in a cold season.

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End of the World of the Week #2

Say what you will about the paired prophetic hysterias surrounding 2012 and the Rapture, not even their most extreme forms get quite as dotty as the apocalyptic beliefs retailed in the early 19th century by French philosopher Charles Fourier. One of those people for whom the word "crackpot" might as well have been invented, Fourier spent his working life as a traveling salesman and his off hours elaborating the Harmonial Philosophy, a dizzyingly complex theory of everything that included a set of colorful predictions about the impending total transformation of the Earth and everything on it.

There were many other thinkers in Fourier’s time who were convinced that their ideas marked a vast turning point in the history of the world. Nobody else, as far as I know, took it to the extent of thinking that the general acceptance of his philosophy would turn the oceans into lemonade. That was just one of the great transformations that, according to Fourier, would happen once a significant minority of the Earth’s human population embraced the Harmonial Philosophy and ushered in the era of Harmony, the fulfillment of Earth’s history. Torrents of "cosmic citric acid," he claimed, would then descend from heaven to turn the seas tart and tasty. Meanwhile four additional moons that ran away from Earth orbit—they were embarrassed to be seen with a planet whose inhabitants hadn’t accepted Fourier’s ideas—would come swinging gaily back to their places; lions would turn into cuddlesome, vegetarian antilions; and human beings, freed from drudgery by Fourier’s discovery that economic problems could be solved by "passional attraction," would devote their time to gourmet dining and orgiastic sex.

Odd as these ideas sound today, they were hugely popular in Europe and America, and something like a hundred Harmonial communes—"Phalansteries," as they were called—were organized by enthusiasts hoping to make the dream real. Alas, neither the cosmic citric acid nor the antilions showed up, and the communes folded promptly once it became clear that passional attraction wasn’t up to the task of producing enough food, clothing, and other necessities for even the most devoted believers. At its peak in the 1820s, the movement unraveled thereafter, feeding erstwhile followers still eager for Utopia into other radical movements of the time. There was a brief attempt to revive Fourier’s ideas in the 1960s—something about his ideas, not to mention his prose style, seems to mesh well with the popular drugs of the time—but outside of that, he remains one of the forgotten ancestors of today’s Utopian beliefs.

—story from Apocalypse Not

Tweedledoom and Tweedledee

It occurred to me a few days ago that this week’s Archdruid Report essay will be posted on a date that future generations may remember, at least in passing. One year from now is December 21, 2012, a date onto which quite a few people have piled extravagant labels and grand expectations, but which will get a different moniker after the fact; the one I have in mind is Nothing Happened Day.

No doubt the confidence expressed in that latter phrase will rankle with some of my readers. It’s a safe bet, in fact, that somebody’s going to post an indignant comment here insisting with some heat that the future isn’t predetermined, and a giant comet or the space brothers or something might show up on that day and make me look like an idiot. That’s a very common way of looking at things, and there are contexts in which it’s also more accurate than not; it’s just that this doesn’t happen to be one of them.

Not all predictions, after all, fall within the wiggle room that the laws of nature and the innate cussedness of things give to the future. When somebody announces that a working perpetual motion machine is about to hit the market, for example, they’re quite simply wrong—as wrong as if they announced that tomorrow the Sun will rise in the west and rocks will fall straight up into the sky. There are plenty of uncertainties in physics—more than most people outside the physics profession realize, or so I’m told—but the workings of basic conservation laws on the human scale aren’t among them. If somebody makes a prediction that contradicts those, especially if it relies on some tried-and-untrue gimmick that’s been responsible for an abundance of failed predictions before, you can safely bet your bottom dollar that it will fail again.

The same argument is just as valid, interestingly enough, for predictions that fall afoul of the limits of the cosmos in subtler ways. The example I have in mind here is the logic that drives bubbles and busts in a market economy. Behind every speculative bubble, to be a bit more specific, is the conviction that some class of assets which is rising in price will keep on doing so indefinitely. That conviction is always false, and it’s always disproven within a couple of years, but you can’t have a speculative bubble without it—it’s the delusion that the price of the asset class du jour is just going to keep on zooming upwards that leads otherwise sensible people to sink their net worth into Pets.com stock or subprime mortgages, and lose it all—and so, with weary predictability, that delusion gets trotted out every time an asset class starts blowing bubbles.

What this means is that once you learn to recognize the signs of a speculative bubble, it’s possible to make exact predictions of future events with perfect confidence. A fair number of people—I was one of them, as longtime readers of this blog will recall—did that with the real estate bubble that popped so catastrophically in 2008. Few bubbles in economic history showed the signs of imminent trouble more clearly than this one, and while all but a tiny fraction of economists missed those signs, they were not lost on less blinkered observers. As Keith Brand over at the HousingPanic blog—a voice of sanity all the way through the bubble—used to say, “Dear God, this is going to end so badly.” He was right; his more specific predictions, and those of a lot of other bubble bloggers, were by and large square on targer; and those who derided them—and there were a lot of them, some with impressive credentials—have spent the last three years doing their best to pretend that they didn’t make fools of themselves.

None of this is irrelevant to our present situation, as it happens, because we’ve got another speculative bubble going at full roar in America just now. It’s considerably more focused than the real estate bubble—well, to be fair, the real estate bubble was by most measures the most gargantuan speculative bubble in the history of markets, so just about anything’s going to be more focused—but it may yet wreak comparable damage on what’s left of the American economy. The asset at its heart? Shale gas.

The shale gas bubble is the big economic story you haven’t heard about, though that will likely change in the near future. Behind all the hype about limitless shale gas are two simpler and noticeably less impressive realities. The first is that fracking technology applied to shale deposits can free up modest amounts of natural gas. The second and more important is that for the last half dozen years or so, at least, fracking technology applied to Wall Street has been able to free up immodest amounts of credit, providing the funding for an explosive growth in the natural gas drilling industry.

The intersection between those two facts has produced a classic bubble, with wildly inflated reserve estimates bringing a torrent of cheap credit to bear on an asset that can’t support the grandiose claims made for it. Because US mineral rights laws and Wall Street’s expectations both require firms that buy shale gas rights to produce right away, irrespective of the state of the market, natural gas is now selling for a price—wobbling around $3.50 per thousand cubic feet, last I checked—that covers much less than the cost of drilling and extraction. My readers will no doubt recall real estate speculators in the midst of the bubble feverishly buying rental properties even when the rent covered only a small fraction of the mortgage payments; the logic here is exactly the same.

Thus it’s as certain as anything can be that at some point in the fairly near future, probably though not certainly within a year or two, the shale gas bubble is going to pop, major names in the industry are going to go the way of Countrywide Mortgage and Washington Mutual, and gas drilling is going to slump until rising gas prices and declining budgets for exploration and drilling come back into a relationship that makes sense. Mind you, it’s equally certain that the closer we get to the bubble’s end, the more extravagant will be the claims made for the permanence and game-changing nature of the so-called “shale gas revolution,” and the more abusive will be the responses of those whose jobs depend on the bubble to any suggestion that a bubble is in fact what’s going on.

All this brings us back to December 21, 2012, and the prophecies of cataclysm or mass enlightenment that have clustered around the end of the Mayan calendar. To start with, of course, the Mayan calendar doesn’t end in 2012. In point of fact, it doesn’t end at all—like most ancient peoples, the Mayans saw time as a circle, not a straight line—and the Mayans themselves didn’t predict anything out of the ordinary for that day; it’s just the rollover date for one of the many cycles of time they tracked. The whole shebang was quite simply invented by the late José Arguelles out of a free mix of New Age philosophy, scraps of misunderstood Mayan lore, and the drug trips of Terence McKenna, and it’s thus not surprising that no two people agree on what 2012 is supposed to bring. In many ways it’s become the ultimate inkblot onto which any imaginable fantasy can be projected; since the only thing anybody seems to agree on is that whatever happens that year will be very, very big news.

Look closely, though, and the belief in a 2012 apocalypse has a great deal in common with the belief that asset prices can have an infinite upside. Both beliefs offer grand narratives that replace the ordinary patterns of human existence with a something-for-nothing fantasy. The bubble believers insist that they can have limitless wealth without having to work for it; the 2012 believers insist that they can have the new and improved world they think they want—whether that amounts to a new age of enlightenment, on the one hand, or a Hollywood movie world of heroic survivors blazing away against hordes of roving zombies, on the other—without having to work for it. In either case, what drives the fantasy is the conviction that it makes sense to sit on your backside and wait for the market, or the space brothers, or something else to give you the future you think you deserve.

That’s a very appealing notion for many people in America these days, and it’s worth glancing at the reasons why that should be so. To begin with, of course, a great many people in America do sit on their backsides and get rich. Most of them sit in the corner offices of large corporations, where they spend their time making decisions that, to judge by the results, would be better off made with one of those Magic 8-Balls: “reply hazy, ask again later.” John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out with a commendable lack of restraint in his book The Culture of Contentment that in America, as a rule, the more money you make, the less work you have to do—and, one might add, the less value you have to produce. Consider the upper reaches of the American banking industry, with their multimillion-dollar annual bonuses: what, other than misery for millions of ordinary people, do they actually produce?

For that matter, the vast majority of those who insist they’re part of the 99% these days benefit hugely from the systematic imbalances that give the 5% of humanity that live in the United States around a quarter of the world’s energy resources and around a third of its raw materials and industrial output. If Americans suddenly had to live on their fair share of the world’s resources and economic output, as I’ve pointed out more than once in the past, we’d have to take the equivalent of an 80% pay cut. This implies that, if you’re near the average, only around twenty per cent of your lifestyle is paid for by your own labor. The rest? Most Americans don’t want to know, and will insist at the top of their lungs that wealth can pop into being out of thin air or, well, almost any other absurdity you care to imagine; it beats thinking about just who is paying the costs of their comfortable lives.

Still, I’ve come to think that the most important force driving all these something-for-nothing fantasies is a subtler and more pervasive thing: the faith in progress that is the established but unmentionable religion of the modern industrial world. The belief in perpetual progress embodies exactly the same kind of grand narrative as speculative bubbles and apocalyptic prophecies: such everyday realities as diminishing returns and limits to growth are brushed aside by the conviction that the future must, by some irrevocable law of existence, always be shinier than the past. That’s what motivates the people who pop up on this and every other peak oil-related blog to insist that we can keep on powering our SUVs and Blackberries forever by building thorium reactors or harnessing zero point energy or turning the state of Nevada into one vast algae farm. It’s not incidental, either, that the vast majority of these people aren’t actually doing anything to make these dayreams happen; as with the rest of the something-for-nothing fantasies, reasons to do nothing have an important role in the payoff.

It’s the popularity of faith in progress, in turn, that makes believing apocalyptic fantasies so easy for so many people. If you’ve already bought into the idea that history is a grand narrative that assigns you a privileged place in the overall scheme of things, it’s easy to shift from one grand narrative to another—say, from the one that identifies people in today’s industrial societies as destiny’s darlings to the one that identifies them as wicked environmental sinners in the hands of an angry Gaia, or urges them to wait for salvation from outer space with all the fervor and most of the rhetoric of a Melanesian cargo cult, or claims that the Creator of the cosmos is about to unleash His genocidal fury on every human being who doesn’t buy into some particular religious ideology, or—well, you can fill in the blanks yourself, because at heart, they’re all pretty much the same. In the face of a cosmos that generally fails to cater to our sense of entitlement, they all offer narratives that make believers feel special, promise them some variation on pie in the sky, and offer them a good hearty helping of excuses for not taking action at a time in which action desperately needs to be taken.

These days, the old time faith in progress is becoming increasingly hard to sustain. It’s symptomatic that Gordon Moore himself has stated that Moore’s Law, long central to the rhetoric of technological triumphalism, no longer applies. The vagaries of the collective imagination are not one of the things that can be reliably predicted about the future, but the giddy claims about December 21, 2012 have me worried. There’s good reason to think that in the year to come we’ll be facing very hard times—not, please note, the imaginary cataclysms of apocalyptic rhetoric, but the sort of slow, plodding, frustratingly mundane hard times our grandparents or great-grandparents faced during the Great Depression before this one—and in such times the glittering promises of apocalyptic fantasy can be hard to resist.

It’s important, though, that at least some of us resist those promises. The grand narratives we’re discussing have another thing in common—they always fail sooner or later—but the narratives of apocalypse by and large fail sooner, more completely, and with more drastic consequences, than most others. The research for my most recent book, Apocalypse Not: Everything You Know About 2012, Nostradamus, And The Rapture Is Wrong was among other things a first-class education in the pointlessness of apocalyptic prophecy. There’s nothing in today’s advance press for December 21, 2012 that doesn’t have precise equivalents in a thousand similar prophecies for a thousand similar dates when nothing happened. One thing this implies, of course, is that there’s precisely no reason to take this prophecy any more seriously.

As I’ve tried to suggest here more than once, on the other hand, there’s a lot that can be done and indeed has to be done to help individuals, families, and communities deal with the prosaic but potent mix of difficulties our society’s misguided choices have brewed up for us. Sitting on our backsides waiting for the space brothers or the Rapture to solve our problems is no more helpful than sitting our our backsides waiting for progress or the free market or algal biodiesel farms to solve our problems. These two ends of the spectrum are twins—think of them as the Tweedledoom and Tweedledee of the imaginary Wonderland that dominates so much collective thinking these days—and getting past them, it seems to me, is an essential step on the way to less futile responses to a challenging future.

Over the next year, as a result, I plan on celebrating Nothing Happened Day in advance with a new weekly feature: the End of the World of the Week Club. Every week, after the usual (or unusual) essay, I’ll be posting a brief discussion of one of the many apocalypses that slipped past its pull date. It should be entertaining and, just possibly, enlightening. If it manages to help at least a few people step outside the hall of mirrors constructed by all those grand narratives that celebrate our supposedly special status, and begin to notice what the world is like when we stop treating ourselves as the center of attention for the entire cosmos, it may even do some good.

Two notes before we get there. First, I’m pleased to report that I was able to talk Viva Editions, the publisher of Apocalypse Not, into offering a winter solstice present to readers of The Archdruid Report. (Yes, one of the benefits of Druidry is that you get your holiday presents a few days early.) From now until January 1, if you go to the Viva Editions website, buy a copy of Apocalypse Not, and type the code APOCNOT25 on the order form where it asks for coupon codes and the like, you’ll get a 25% discount off the cover price. A happy solstice, or whatever else you celebrate at this time of year, to all!

Second, I’m equally pleased to report that Valerie Green and DanceEntropy will be performing Rise and Fall, a work inspired by my book The Long Descent, as part of their show Eternal Return at the Baruch Performing Arts Center in New York City, January 20, 21, and 22—details and tickets are here. If you’re located anywhere near New York, or will be there in late January, check it out.

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End of the World of the Week #1

Chicago, December 20, 1954. A circle of typical American suburbanites gathers in a typical backyard on a typical Midwestern winter evening. As evening deepens, they frantically get rid of every scrap of metal on them, down to the eyelets on their shoes. For the last few months they’ve gathered around a housewife turned channeler, Dorothy Martin, who believes she is in contact with intelligent beings from a distant planet, and has been told that a cataclysmic flood will sweep over North America the next day and destroy everything in its path. Martin and her followers have been promised that they will be lifted to safety aboard a flying saucer that night; the prohibition against metal has something, though no one knows quite what, to do with the alien technologies that they believe will save their lives.

The saucer didn’t show, of course, and neither did the flood. The group scattered over the weeks that followed; Martin left Chicago in time to miss a psych evaluation that probably would have landed her in an institution, took the new name of Sister Thedra, and spent the rest of her life preaching the alien gospel to a mostly uninterested world. The entire affair would have passed all but unnoticed, except that a handful of the group’s members were ringers—graduate students from the University of Minnesota who joined the little cult as part of a study. When Prophecy Fails, the book that came out of that study, has become a classic of American sociological literature, and remains well worth reading today—not least because a great deal of the belief system that’s clustered around the supposed end of the Mayan calendar in 2012 comes from sources not noticeably different from the ones that sent Dorothy Martin on her long strange trip.

—story from Apocalypse Not