One of the things that reliably irritates a certain fraction
of this blog’s readers, as I’ve had occasion to comment before, is my habit of
using history as a touchstone that can be used to test claims about the future.
No matter what the context, no matter how wearily familiar the process under
discussion might be, it’s a safe bet that the moment I start talking about
historical parallels, somebody or other is going to pop up and insist that it
really is different this time.
In a trivial sense, of course, that claim is correct. The
tech stock bubble that popped in 2000, the real estate bubble that popped in
2008, and the fracking bubble that’s showing every sign of popping in the
uncomfortably near future are all different from each other, and from every
other bubble and bust in the history of speculative markets, all the way back
to the Dutch tulip mania of 1637. It’s quite true that tech stocks aren’t
tulips, and bundled loans backed up by dubious no-doc mortgages aren’t the same
as bundled loans backed up by dubious shale leases—well, not
exactly the same—but in practice, the many differences of
detail are irrelevant compared to the one crucial identity. Tulips, tech stocks, and bundled loans, along
with South Sea Company shares in 1730, investment trusts in 1929, and all the
other speculative vehicles in all the other speculative bubbles of the last
five centuries, different as they are, all follow the identical trajectory: up with the rocket, down with the stick.
That is to say, those who insist that it’s different this
time are right where it doesn’t matter and wrong where it counts. I’ve come to
think of the words “it’s different this time,” in fact, as the nearest thing
history has to the warning siren and flashing red light that tells you that
something is about to go very, very wrong. When people start saying it,
especially when plenty of people with plenty of access to the media start
saying it, it’s time to dive for the floor, cover your head with your arms, and
wait for the blast to hit.
With that in mind, I’d like to talk a bit about the recent
media flurry around the phrase “American exceptionalism,” which has become
something of a shibboleth among pseudoconservative talking heads in recent
months. Pseudoconservatives? Well, yes; actual conservatives, motivated by the
long and by no means undistinguished tradition of conservative thinking
launched by Edmund Burke in the late 18th century, are interested in, ahem,
conserving things, and conservatives who actually conserve are about as rare
these days as liberals who actually liberate. Certainly you won’t find many of
either among the strident voices insisting just now that the last scraps of
America’s democracy at home and reputation abroad ought to be sacrificed in the
service of their squeaky-voiced machismo.
As far as I know, the phrase “American exceptionalism” was
originally coined by none other than Josef Stalin—evidence, if any more were
needed, that American pseudoconservatives these days, having no ideas of their
own, have simply borrowed those of their erstwhile Communist bogeyman and stood
them on their heads with a Miltonic “Evil, be thou my good.” Stalin meant by it the opinion of many Communists
in his time that the United States, unlike the industrial nations of Europe,
wasn’t yet ripe for the triumphant proletarian revolution predicted
(inaccurately) by Marx’s secular theology. Devout Marxist that he was, Stalin
rejected this claim with some heat, denouncing it in so many words as “this
heresy of American exceptionalism,” and insisting (also inaccurately) that
America would get its proletarian revolution on schedule.
While Stalin may have invented the phrase, the perception
that he thus labeled had considerably older roots. In a previous time, though,
that perception took a rather different tone than it does today. A great many
of the early leaders and thinkers of the United States in its early years, and
no small number of the foreign observers who watched the American experiment in
those days, thought and hoped that the newly founded republic might be able to
avoid making the familiar mistakes that had brought so much misery onto the
empires of the Old World. Later on, during and immediately after the great
debates over American empire at the end of the 19th century, a great many
Americans and foreign observers still thought and hoped that the republic might
come to its senses in time and back away from the same mistakes that doomed
those Old World empires to the misery just mentioned. These days, by contrast,
the phrase “American exceptionalism” seems to stand for the conviction that
America can and should make every one of those same mistakes, right down to the
fine details, and will still somehow be spared the logically inevitable
consequences.
The current blind faith in American exceptionalism, in other
words, is simply another way of saying “it’s different this time.” Those who insist that God is on America’s
side when America isn’t exactly returning the favor, like those who have less
blatantly theological reasons for their belief that this nation’s excrement
emits no noticeable odor, are for all practical purposes demanding that America
must not, under any circumstances, draw any benefit from the painfully learnt lessons
of history. I suggest that a better name
for the belief in question might be "American delusionalism;" it’s
hard to see how this bizarre act of faith can do anything other than help drive
the American experiment toward a miserable end, but then that’s just one more
irony in the fire.
The same conviction that the past has nothing to teach the
present is just as common elsewhere in contemporary culture. I’m thinking here,
among other things, of the ongoing drumbeat of claims that our species will inevitably
be extinct by 2030. As I noted in a previous post here, this is yet another
expression of the
same dubious logic that generated the 2012 delusion, but much of the
rhetoric that surrounds it starts from the insistence that nothing like the
current round of greenhouse gas-driven climate change has ever happened before.
That insistence bespeaks an embarrassing lack of knowledge
about paleoclimatology. Vast quantities of greenhouse gases being dumped into
the atmosphere over a century or two? Check; the usual culprit is vulcanism,
specifically the kind of flood-basalt eruption that opens a crack in the earth
many miles in length and turns an area the size of a European nation into a
lake of lava. The most recent of those, a smallish one, happened about 6
million years ago in the Columbia River basin of eastern Washington and Oregon
states. Further back, in the Aptian,
Toarcian, and Turonian-Cenomanian epochs of the late Mesozoic, that same
process on a much larger scale boosted atmospheric CO2 levels to three times
the present figure and triggered what paleoclimatologists call
"super-greenhouse events." Did those cause the extinction of all life
on earth? Not hardly; as far as the paleontological evidence shows, it didn’t
even slow the brontosaurs down.
Oceanic acidification leading to the collapse of
calcium-shelled plankton populations? Check; those three super-greenhouse
events, along with a great many less drastic climate spikes, did that. The
ocean also contains very large numbers of single-celled organisms that don’t
have calcium shells, such as blue-green algae, which aren’t particularly
sensitive to shifts in the pH level of seawater; when such shifts happen, these
other organisms expand to fill the empty niches, and everybody further up the
food chain gets used to a change in diet. When the acidification goes away,
whatever species of calcium-shelled plankton have managed to survive elbow
their way back into their former niches and undergo a burst of evolutionary
radiation; this makes life easy for geologists today, who can figure out the
age of any rock laid down in an ancient ocean by checking the remains of
foraminifers and other calcium-loving plankton against a chart of what existed
when.
Sudden climate change recently enough to be experienced by
human beings? Check; most people have heard of the end of the last ice age,
though you have to read the technical literature or one of a very few popular
treatments to get some idea of just how drastically the climate changed, or how
fast. The old saw about a slow, gradual
warming over millennia got chucked into the dumpster decades ago, when ice
cores from Greenland upset that particular theory. The ratio between different
isotopes of oxygen in the ice laid down in different years provides a sensitive
measure of the average global temperature at sea level during those same years.
According to that measure, at the end of the Younger Dryas period about 11,800
years ago, global temperatures shot up by 20° F. in less than a
decade.
Now of course that didn’t mean that temperatures shot up
that far evenly, all over the world.
What seems to have happened is that the tropics barely warmed at all,
the southern end of the planet warmed mildly, and the northern end experienced
a drastic heat wave that tipped the great continental ice sheets of the era
into rapid collapse and sent sea levels soaring upwards. Those of my readers
who have been paying attention to recent scientific publications about
Greenland and the Arctic Ocean now have very good reason to worry, because the
current round of climate change has most strongly affected the northern end of
the planet, too, and scientists have begun to notice historically unprecedented
changes in the Greenland ice cap. In an upcoming post I plan on discussing at
some length what those particular historical parallels promise for our future,
and it’s not pretty.
Oh, and the aftermath of the post-Younger Dryas temperature
spike was a period several thousand years long when global temperatures were
considerably higher than they are today. The Holocene Hypsithermal, as it’s
called, saw global temperatures peak around 7°
F. higher than they are today—about the level, that is, that’s already baked
into the cake as a result of anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. It was not a particularly pleasant time. Most
of western North America was desert, baked to a crackly crunch by drought
conditions that make today’s dry years look soggy; much of what’s now, at least
in theory, the eastern woodland biome was dryland prairie, while both coasts
got rapidly rising seas with a side order of frequent big tsunamis—again, we’ll
talk about those in the upcoming post just mentioned. Still, you’ll notice that
our species survived the experience.
As those droughts
and tsunamis might suggest, the lessons taught by history don’t necessarily
amount to "everything will be just fine." The weird inability of the
contemporary imagination to find any middle ground between business as usual
and sudden total annihilation has its usual effect here, hiding the actual
risks of anthropogenic climate change behind a facade of apocalyptic fantasies.
Here again, the question "what happened the last time this occurred?"
is the most accessible way to avoid that trap, and the insistence that it’s
different this time and the evidence of the past can’t be applied to the
present and future puts that safeguard out of reach.
For a third
example, consider the latest round of claims that a sudden financial collapse
driven by current debt loads will crash the global economy once and for all.
That sudden collapse has been being predicted year after weary year for decades
now—do any of my readers, I wonder, remember Dr. Ravi Batra’s The
Great Depression of 1990?—and its repeated failure to show up and
perform as predicted seems only to strengthen the conviction on the part of
believers that this year, like some financial equivalent of the Great Pumpkin,
the long-delayed crash will finally put in its long-delayed appearance and
bring the global economy crashing down.
I’m far from sure
that they’re right about the imminence of a crash; the economy of high finance
these days is so heavily manipulated, and so thoroughly detached from the real
economy where real goods and services have to be produced using real energy and
resources, that it’s occurred to me more than once that the stock market and
the other organs of the financial sphere might keep chugging away in a state of
blissful disconnection to the rest of existence for a very long time to come.
Stil, let’s grant for the moment that the absurd buildup of unpayable debt in
the United States and other industrial nations will in fact become the driving
force behind a credit collapse, in which drastic deleveraging will erase
trillions of dollars in notional wealth. Would such a crash succeed, as a great
many people are claiming just now, in bringing the global economy to a sudden
and permanent stop?
Here again, the
lessons of history provide a clear and straightforward answer to that question,
and it’s not one that supports the partisans of the fast-crash theory. Massive
credit collapses that erase very large sums of notional wealth and impact the
global economy are hardly a new phenomenon, after all. One example—the credit
collapse of 1930-1932—is still just within living memory; the financial crises
of 1873 and 1893 are well documented, and there are dozens of other examples of
nations and whole continents hammered by credit collapses and other forms of
drastic economic crisis. Those crises have had plenty of consequences, but one
thing that has never happened as a result of any of them is the sort of
self-feeding, irrevocable plunge into the abyss that current fast-crash theories
require.
The reason for
this is that credit is merely one way by which a society manages the
distribution of goods and services. That’s all it is. Energy, raw materials,
and labor are the factors that have to be present in order to produce goods and
services. Credit simply regulates who
gets how much of each of these things, and there have been plenty of societies
that have handled that same task without making use of a credit system at all.
A credit collapse, in turn, doesn’t make the energy, raw materials, and labor
vanish into some fiscal equivalent of a black hole; they’re all still there, in
whatever quantities they were before the credit collapse, and all that’s needed
is some new way to allocate them to the production of goods and services.
This, in turn,
governments promptly provide. In 1933, for example, faced with the most severe
credit collapse in American history, Franklin Roosevelt temporarily
nationalized the entire US banking system, seized nearly all the privately held
gold in the country, unilaterally changed the national debt from "payable
in gold" to "payable in Federal Reserve notes" (which amounted
to a technical default), and launched a flurry of other emergency
measures. The credit collapse came to a
screeching halt, famously, in less than a hundred days. Other nations facing
the same crisis took equally drastic measures, with similar results. While that
history has apparently been forgotten across large sections of the peak oil
blogosphere, it’s a safe bet that none of it has been forgotten in the
corridors of power in Washington DC and elsewhere in the world.
More generally,
governments have an extremely broad range of powers that can be used, and have
been used, in extreme financial emergencies to stop a credit or currency
collapse from terminating the real economy. Faced with a severe crisis,
governments can slap on wage and price controls, freeze currency exchanges,
impose rationing, raise trade barriers, default on their debts, nationalize
whole industries, issue new currencies, allocate goods and services by fiat,
and impose martial law to make sure the new economic rules are followed to the
letter, if necessary, at gunpoint. Again, these aren’t theoretical
possibilities; every one of them has actually been used by more than one
government faced by a major economic crisis in the last century and a half.
Given that track record, it requires a breathtaking leap of faith to assume
that if the next round of deleveraging spirals out of control, politicians
around the world will simply sit on their hands, saying "Whatever shall we
do?" in plaintive voices, while civilization crashes to ruin around them.
What makes that
leap of faith all the more curious is in the runup to the economic crisis of
2008-9, the same claims of imminent, unstoppable financial apocalypse we’re
hearing today were being made—in some cases, by the same people who are making
them today. (I treasure a comment I
fielded from a popular peak oil blogger at the height of the 2009 crisis, who
insisted that the fast crash was upon us and that my predictions about the
future were therefore all wrong.) Their logic was flawed then, and it’s just as
flawed now, because it dismisses the lessons of history as irrelevant and
therefore fails to take into account how the events under discussion play out
in the real world.
That’s the problem
with the insistence that this time it really is different: it disables the most
effective protection we’ve got against the habit of thought that cognitive
psychologists call "confirmation bias," the tendency to look for
evidence that supports one’s pet theory rather than seeking the evidence that
might call it into question. The scientific method itself, in the final
analysis, is simply a collection of useful gimmicks that help you sidestep
confirmation bias. That’s why competent
scientists, when they come up with a hypothesis to explain something in nature,
promptly sit down and try to think up as many ways as possible to
disprove the hypothesis.
Those potentials for disproof are the raw materials from which
experiments are designed, and only if the hypothesis survives all experimental
attempts to disprove it does it take its first step toward scientific
respectability.
It’s not exactly
easy to run controlled double-blind experiments on entire societies, but
historical comparison offers the same sort of counterweight to confirmation
bias. Any present or future set of events, however unique it may be in terms of
the fine details, has points of similarity with events in the past, and those
points of similarity allow the past events to be taken as a guide to the
present and future. This works best if you’ve got a series of past events, as
different from each other as any one of them is from the present or future
situation you’re trying to predict; if you can find common patterns in the
whole range of past parallels, it’s usually a safe bet that the same pattern
will recur again.
Any time you
approach a present or future event, then, you have two choices: you can look
for the features that event has in common with other events, despite the
differences of detail, or you can focus on the differences and ignore the
common features. The first of those
choices, it’s worth noting, allows you to consider both the similarities and
the differences. Once you’ve got the
common pattern, it then becomes possible to modify it as needed to take into
account the special characteristics of the situation you’re trying to
understand or predict: to notice, for example, that the dark age that will follow
our civilization will have to contend with nuclear and chemical pollution on
top of the more ordinary consequences of decline and fall.
