There are nights, now and then, when I sit up late with a
glass of bourbon and look back over the long strange trip that’s unfolded over
the last thirty years or so. When a
substantial majority of Americans straight across the political landscape
convinced themselves in the early 1980s that mouthing feel-good slogans and
clinging to extravagant lifestyles over the short term made more sense than
facing up to the hard choices that might have given our grandchildren a livable
future, that choice kickstarted a flight into fantasy that continues to this
day.
That act of humility,
finally, may be the best ticket out of the confusion that the collective
imagination of our time has created around itself, the proliferation of
abstractions divorced from reality that makes it so hard to see the future
looming up ahead of us. By turning our
attention to what actually happens in the world around us, and asking the hard
but necessary questions about our preferred notions concerning that world and
its future, we might just be able to extract ourselves far enough from that
confusion to begin to grapple with the challenges of our time. In the process,
we’ll have to confront once again the issues with which this series of posts
started out—the religious dimension of peak oil and the end of the industrial
age. We’ll proceed with that discussion next week.
Over the seven years that I’ve been writing and posting
essays here on The Archdruid Report, in turn, a tolerably
good sample of the resulting fantasies have been dumped on my electronic
doorstep by readers who were incensed by my lack of interest in playing along.
There’s a certain amusement value in reviewing that sample, but a retrospective
glance that way has another advantage: the common threads that unite the fantasies
in question form a pattern of central importance to the theme that this
sequence of posts is trying to explore.
Back in 2006, when I made my first posts suggesting that the
future waiting for us on the far side of Hubbert’s peak was a long, ragged descent
punctuated by crises, there were three common ways of dismissing that
prediction. The first insisted that once the price of petroleum got near $100 a
barrel, the sheer cost of fueling the industrial economy would trigger the
economic crisis to end all economic crises and bring civilization crashing down
at once. The second insisted that once that same price threshold was met, any
number of exciting new renewable energy technologies would finally become
profitable, resulting in a green-energy boom and a shiny future. The third insisted that once that price
threshold was met, the law of supply and demand would flood the market with
petroleum, force prices back down, and allow the march of economic growth to
continue merrily on its way.
A case could be made that those were reasonable hypotheses
at the time. Still, the price of oil went soaring past $100 a barrel over the
next few years, and none of those predictions panned out. We did have a
whopping economic crisis in 2008, but emergency actions on the part of central
banks kept the global economy from unraveling; a variety of renewable energy
technologies got launched onto the market, but it took massive government
subsidies to make any of them profitable, and all of them together provide only
a very small fraction of our total energy use; and, of course, as prices rose,
a certain amount previously uneconomical oil did find its way to market, but
production remains locked into a plateau and the price remains stubbornly high.
That is to say, the perfect storms weren’t, the
game-changing events didn’t, and a great many prophets ended up taking a total
loss on their predictive investments.
It’s the aftermath, though, that matters. By and large, the people who
were making these claims didn’t stop, look around, and say, “Hmm, clearly I got
something wrong. Is there another way of
thinking about the implications of peak oil that makes more sense of the data?”
Instead, they found other arguments to back the same claims, or simply kept
repeating them at higher volume. For a while there, you could go visit certain
peak oil bloggers every January and read the same predictions of imminent
economic doom that appeared there the year before, and then go to another set of
peak oil bloggers and read equally recycled predictions that this would be the
breakthrough year for some green energy source or other, and in neither case
was there any sign that any of them had learned a thing from all the times
those same predictions had failed before.
Nor were they alone—far from it. When I think about the number of arguments
that have been posted here over the last seven years, in an effort to defend
the claim that the Long Descent can’t possibly happen, it’s enough to make my
head spin, even without benefit of bourbon. I’ve fielded patronizing lectures
from believers in UFOs, New Age channelers, and the fake-Mayan
2012 prophecy, airily insisting that once the space brothers land, the New Age
dawns, or what have you, we’ll all discover that ecological limits and the laws
of thermodynamics are illusions created by lower states of consciousness.
Likewise, I’ve received any number of feverish pronouncements that asteroids,
solar flares, methane burps from the sea floor or, really, just about anything
you can imagine short of titanic space walruses with photon flippers, are going
to wipe out humanity in the next few years or decades and make the whole issue
moot.
It’s been a wild ride, really. I’ve been labeled dogmatic and intolerant for
pointing out to proponents of zero point energy, abiotic oil, and similar
exercises in wishful thinking that insisting that a completely unproven theory
will inevitably save us may not be the most sensible strategy in a time of
crisis. I’ve been dismissed as closed-minded by believers in artificial
intelligence, fusion power, and an assortment of other technological
will-o’-the-wisps for asking why promises of imminent sucess that have been
repeated word for word every few years since the 1950s still ought to be
considered credible today I’ve been
accused of being a stooge for the powers of evil for questioning claims that
Bush—er, make that Clinton—uh, well, let’s try Dubya—um, okay, then, Obama, is
going to suspend the constitution, impose a totalitarian police state and start
herding us all into camps, and let’s not even talk about the number of people
who’ve gotten irate with me when I failed to be impressed by their insistence
that the Rapture will happen before we run out of oil.
Not one of these claims is new, any more than the claims of
imminent economic collapse, green-energy breakthroughs, or oceans of petroleum
just waiting to be drilled. Most of them have been recycled over and over
again, some for over a century—the New Age, for example, was originally slated
to arrive in 1879, and in fact the most popular alternative spirituality
magazine in 1890s Britain was titled The New Age—and the few
that have only been through a few seasons’ worth of reruns follow familiar
patterns and thus fail in equally familiar ways. If the point of making
predictions in the first place has anything to do with anticipating the future
we’re actually likely to get, these claims have flopped resoundingly, and yet
they remain wildly popular.
Now of course there are good reasons why they should be
popular. All the claims about the future I’ve listed are, in practical terms,
incentives to inaction and evasions of responsibility. If rising oil prices are guaranteed to bring
on a rush of new green energy options, then we don’t have to change our lifestyles,
because pretty soon we’ll be able to power them on sun or wind or what have
you; if rising oil prices are guaranteed to bring on a rush of new petroleum
sources, well, then we don’t need to change our lifestyles, either, and we can
make an extra donation to the Sierra Club or something to assuage any lingering
ecological guilt we might have. The same goes for any of the other new
technologies that are supposedly going to provide us with, ahem, limitless
energy sometime very soon—and you’ll notice that in every case, supplying us
with all that energy is someone else’s job.
On the other hand, if the global economy is sure to go down
in flames in the next few years, or runaway climate change is going to kill us
all, or some future president is finally going to man up, impose a police state
and march us off to death camps, it’s not our fault, and there’s nothing we can
do that matters anyway, so we might as well just keep on living our comfortable
lifestyles while they’re still here, right? It may be impolite to say this, but
it needs to be said: any belief about the future that encourages people to sit
on their backsides and do nothing but consume scarce resources, when there’s a
huge amount that could be done to make the future a better place and a grave
shortage of people doing it, is a luxury this age of the world can’t afford.
Still, I’d like to cycle back to the way that failed
predictions are recycled, because it leads straight to the heart of an
unrecognized dimension of the predicament of our time. Since the future can’t
be known in advance, attempts to predict it have to rely on secondhand
evidence. One proven way to collect
useful evidence concerning the validity of a prediction is to ask what happened
in the past when somebody else made that same prediction. Another way is to look for situations in the
past that are comparable to the one the prediction discusses, in order to see
what happened then. A prediction that fails either one of these tests usually
needs to be put out to pasture; one that fails both—that has been made
repeatedly in the past and failed every time, and that doesn’t account for the
way that comparable situations have turned out—ought to be sent to the glue
factory instead.
It’s in this light that the arguments used to defend
repeatedly failed predictions can be understood. I’ve discussed these arguments
at some length in recent posts: the
endlessly repeated claim that it’s
different this time, the refusal to think about the
implications of well-documented sources of negative feedback, the
insistence that a
prediction must be true if no one’s proved that it’s impossible, and
so on. All of them are rhetorical gimmicks meant to stonewall the kind of
assessment I’ve just outlined. Put another way, they’re attempts to shield
repeatedly failed predictions from the normal and healthy consequences of
failure.
Think about that for a bit.
From the time that our distant ancestors ventured out onto the East
African savannas and started to push the boundaries of their nervous systems in
ways for which millions of years of treetop living did little to prepare them,
their survival and success have been a function of their ability to come up
with mental models of the world that more or less correspond to reality where it
counts. If there were ever australopithecines that couldn’t do the sort of
basic reality testing that allows food to be distinguished from inedible
objects, and predators from harmless animals, they didn’t leave any
descendants. Since then, as hominids and then humans developed more and more
elaborate mental models of the world, the hard-won ability to test those models
against the plain facts of experience with more and more precision has been
central to our achievement.
In the modern West, we’ve inherited two of the great
intellectual revolutions our species has managed—the creation of logic and
formal mathematics in ancient Greece, and the creation of experimental science
in early modern Europe—and both of those revolutions are all about reality testing.
Logic is a system for making sure that mental models make sense on their own
terms, and don’t stray into fallacy or contradiction; experimental science is a
system for checking some mental models, those that deal with the quantifiable
behavior of matter and energy, against the facts on the ground. Neither system
is foolproof, but then neither is anything else human, and if both of them
survive the decline and fall of our present civilization, there’s every reason
to hope that future civilizations will come up with ways to fill in some of
their blind spots, and add those to the slowly accumulating body of effective
technique that provides one of the very few long-term dynamics to history.
It remains true, though, that all the many methods of
reality testing we’ve evolved down through the millennia, from the most basic
integration of sense inputs hardwired into the human brain right on up to the
subtleties of propositional logic and the experimental method, share one
central flaw. None of them will work if their messages are ignored—and that’s
what’s going on right now, as a vast majority of people across the modern
industrial world scramble to find reasons to cling to a range of popular but
failed predictions about the future, and do their level best to ignore the
evidence that a rather more unpopular set of predictions about the future is
coming true around them.
Look around, dear reader, and you’ll see a civilization in
decline, struggling ineffectually with the ecological overshoot, the social
disintegration, the institutional paralysis, and the accelerating decay of
infrastructure that are part and parcel of the normal process by which
civilizations die. This is what the decline and fall of a civilization looks
like in its early-to-middle stages—and it’s also what I’ve been talking about,
very often in so many words, since not long after this blog got under way seven
years ago. Back then, as I’ve already
mentioned, it was reasonable to propose that something else might happen, that
we’d get the fast crash or the green-energy breakthrough or all the new
petroleum that the law of supply and demand was supposed to provide us, but
none of those things happened. (Of course, neither did the mass landing of UFOs
or any of the other more colorful fantasies, but then that was never really in
question.) It’s time to recognize that
the repetition of emotionally appealing but failed predictions is not a helpful
response to the crisis of our time, and in fact has done a great deal to back
us into the corner we’re now in. What was Ronald Reagan’s airy twaddle about
“morning in America,” after all, but another emotionally appealing failed
prophecy of the kind I’ve just been discussing?
Thus I’d like to suggest that from now on, any claim about
the future needs to be confronted up front by the two hard questions proposed
above. What happened at other times when
people made the same prediction, or one that’s closely akin to it? What
happened in other situations that are comparable to the one the prediction
attempts to address? Any prediction that
claims to be about a future we might actually encounter should be able to face
these two questions without resorting to the kind of rhetorical evasions noted
above. Any prediction that has to hide behind those evasions, in turn, needs to
be recognized as being irrelevant to any future we might actually encounter. My
own predictions, by the way, stand or fall by the same rule, and I encourage my
readers to ask those questions of each prediction I make, and answer them
through their own research.
Yes, I’m aware that those two questions pack an explosive
punch that makes dynamite look weak. It’s embarrassingly common in contemporary
life for theories to be embraced because of their emotional appeal, and then
defended with every rhetorical trick in the book against any inconvenient
contact with unsympathetic facts. As suggested in last week’s post, that’s a
common feature of civilizations toward the end of their rationalist period,
when abstract reason gets pushed to the point of absurdity and then well beyond
it. Fantasies about the shape of the
future aren’t uncommon at such times, but I don’t know of another civilization
in all of recorded history that has put as much energy as ours into creating
and defending abstract theories about the shape of the future. With any luck,
the civilizations that come after ours will learn from our mistakes, and direct
their last and most overblown abstractions in directions that will do less
harm.
In the meantime, those of us who are interested in talking
about the kinds of future we might actually encounter might find it useful to
give up the standard modern habit of choosing a vision of the future because
it’s emotionally appealing, demanding that the world fulfill whatever dream we
happen to have, and filling our minds with defensive gimmicks to keep from hearing
when the world says “no.” That requires a willingness to ask the questions I
mentioned above, and to accept the answers, even when they aren’t what we’d
like them to be. More generally, it
requires a willingness to approach the universe of our experience from a
standpoint that’s as stunningly unfashionable these days as it is necessary—a
standpoint of humility.
What would it mean if, instead of trying to impose an
emotionally appealing narrative on the future, and shouting down any data that
conflicts with it, we were to approach the universe of our experience with
enough humility to listen to the narratives the universe itself offers us? That’s basically what I’ve been trying to
suggest here all along, after all. That’s the point to my repeated references
to history, because history is our species’ accumulated body of knowledge of
the way human affairs unfold over time, and approaching that body of knowledge
with humility and a willingness to listen to the stories it tells is a proven
way to catch hints about the shape of the future as it unfolds.
That’s also the point to my equally frequent references to
ecology, because history is simply one subset of the behavior of living things over
time—the subset that deals with human organisms—and also because ecological
factors have played a huge and all too often unrecognized role in the rise and
fall of human societies. Whether humans are smarter than yeast is less
important than the fact, and of course it is a fact, that humans, yeast, and
all other living things are subject to the same ecological laws and thus
inevitably experience similar processes over time. Attentive listening to the
stories that history tells, and the even richer body of stories that nature
tells, is the one reliable way we’ve got to figure out what those processes are
before they clobber us over the head.
