Last Friday was, as I’m sure most of my readers noticed, an
ordinary day. Here in the north central Appalachians, it was chilly but not
unseasonably so, with high gray clouds overhead and a lively wind setting the
dead leaves aswirl; wrens and sparrows hopped here and there in my garden,
poking among the recently turned soil of the beds. No cataclysmic earth
changes, alien landings, returning messiahs, or vast leaps of consciousness
disturbed their foraging. They neither knew nor cared that one of the great
apocalyptic delusions of modern times was reaching its inevitable end around
them.
The inimitable Dr. Rita Louise, on whose radio talk show I
spent a
couple of hours on Friday, may have summed it up best when she wished
her listeners a happy Mayan Fools Day.
Not that the ancient Mayans themselves were fools, far from it, but then
they had precisely nothing to do with the competing fantasies of doom and
universal enlightenment that spent the last decade and more buzzing like flies
around last Friday’s date.
It’s worth taking a look back over the genesis of the 2012
hysteria, if only because we’re certain to see plenty of reruns in the years
ahead. In the first half of the 20th century, as archeologists learned to read
dates in the Mayan Long Count calendar, it became clear that one of the major
cycles of the old Mayan timekeeping system would roll over on that day. By the 1970s, that detail found its way into
alternative culture in the United States, setting off the first tentative
speculations about a 2012 apocalypse, notably drug guru Terence McKenna’s
quirky "Timewave Zero" theory.
It was the late New Age promoter Jose Arguelles, though, who
launched the 2012 fad on its way with his 1984 book The Mayan
Factor and a series of sequels, proclaiming that the rollover of the
Mayan calendar in 2012 marked the imminent transformation of human
consciousness that the New Age movement was predicting so enthusiastically back
then. The exactness of the date made an
intriguing contrast with the vagueness of Arguelles’ predictions about it, and
this contrast left ample room for other authors in the same field to jump on
the bandwagon and redefine the prophecy to fit whatever their own
eschatological preferences happened to be.
This they promptly did.
Early on, 2012 faced plenty of competition from alternative
dates for the great transformation. The
year 2000 had been a great favorite for a century, and became 2012’s most
important rival, but it came and went without bringing anything more
interesting than another round of sordid business as usual. Thereafter, 2012 reigned supreme, and became
the center of a frenzy of anticipation that was at least as much about
marketing as anything else. I can
testify from my own experience that for a while there, late in the last decade,
if you wanted to write a book about anything even vaguely tangential to New Age
subjects and couldn’t give it a 2012 spin, many publishers simply weren’t
interested.
So the predictions piled up.
The fact that no two of them predicted the same thing did nothing to
weaken the mass appeal of the date.
Neither did the fact, which became increasingly clear as the last months
of 2012 approached, that a great many people who talked endlessly about the
wonderful or terrible things that were about to happen weren’t acting as though
they believed a word of it. That was by
and large as true of the New Age writers and pundits who fed the hysteria as it
was of their readers and audiences; I long ago lost track of the number of 2012
prophets who, aside from scheduling a holiday trip to the Yucatan or some other
fashionable spot for the big day, acted in all respects as though they expected
the world to keep going in its current manner straight into 2013 and
beyond.
That came as a surprise to me. Regular readers may recall my earlier
speculation that 2012 would see scenes reminiscent of the "Great
Disappointment" of 1844, with crowds of true believers standing on
hilltops waiting for their first glimpse of alien spacecraft descending from
heaven or what have you. Instead, in the last months of this year, some of the
writers and pundits most deeply involved in the 2012 hysteria started claiming that,
well, actually, December 21st wasn’t going to be the day everything changed; it
would, ahem, usher in a period of transition of undefined length during which
everything would sooner or later get around to changing. The closer last Friday came, the more evasive
the predictions became, and Mayan Fools Day and its aftermath were notable for
the near-total silence that spread across the apocalyptic end of the
blogosphere. Say what you will about Harold Camping, at least he had the
courage to go on the air after his May prophecy flopped and admit that he must
have gotten his math wrong somewhere.
Now of course Camping went on at once to propose a new date
for the Rapture, which flopped with equal inevitability a few months
later. It’s a foregone conclusion that
some of the 2012 prophets will do the same thing shortly, if only to kick the
apocalypse marketing machine back into gear.
It’s entirely possible that they’ll succeed in setting off a new frenzy
for some other date, because the social forces that make apocalyptic fantasies
so tempting to believe just now have not lost any of their potency.
The most important of those forces, as I’ve argued in
previous posts, is the widening mismatch between the fantasy of entitlement
that has metastasized through contemporary American society, on the one hand,
and the ending of an age of fossil-fueled imperial extravagance on the other.
As the United States goes bankrupt trying to maintain its global empire, and
industrial civilization as a whole slides down the far side of a dizzying range
of depletion curves, it’s becoming harder by the day for Americans to make
believe that the old saws of upward mobility and an ever brighter future have
any relevance to their own lives—and yet those beliefs are central to the psychology,
the self-image, and the worldview of most Americans. The resulting cognitive dissonance is hard to
bear, and apocalyptic fantasies offer a convenient way out. They promise that the world will change, so
that the believers don’t have to.
That same frantic desire to ignore the arrival of
inescapable change pervades today’s cultural scene, even in those subcultures
that insist most loudly that change is what they want. In recent months, to cite only one example,
nearly every person who’s mentioned to me the claim that climate change could
make the Earth uninhabitable has gone on to ask, often in so many words,
"So why should I consume less now?"
The overt logic here is usually that individual action can’t possibly be
enough. Whether or not that’s true is
anyone’s guess, but cutting your own carbon footprint actually does
something, which is more than can be said for sitting around
enjoying a standard industrial world lifestyle while waiting for that imaginary
Kum Ba Ya moment when everyone else in the world will embrace limits not even
the most ardent climate change activists are willing to accept themselves.
Another example? Consider the rhetoric of elite privilege
that clusters around the otherwise inoffensive label "1%." That rhetoric plays plenty of roles in
today’s society, but one of them pops up reliably any time I talk about using
less. Why, people ask me in angry tones,
should they give up their cars when the absurdly rich are enjoying gigantic
luxury yachts? Now of course we could
have a conversation about the total contribution to global warming of cars
owned by people who aren’t rich, compared to that of the fairly small number of
top-end luxury yachts that usually figure in such arguments, but there’s
another point that needs to be raised. None of the people who make this
argument to me have any control over whether rich people have luxury yachts.
All of them have a great deal of control over whether and how often they
themselves use cars. Blaming the global ecological crisis on the very rich thus
functions, in practice, as one more way to evade the necessity of unwelcome
change.
Along these same lines, dear reader, as you surf the peak
oil and climate change blogosphere and read the various opinions on display
there, I’d encourage you to ask yourself what those opinions amount to in
actual practice. A remarkably large
fraction of them, straight across the political landscape from furthest left to
furthest right and including all stops in between, add up to demands that somebody
else, somewhere else, do something. Since the people making such demands rarely
do anything to pressure, or even to encourage, those other people elsewhere to
do whatever it is they’re supposed to do, it’s not exactly hard to do the math
and recognize that here again, these opinions amount to so many ways of
insisting that the people holding them don’t have to give up the extravagant
and unsustainable lifestyles most people in the industrial world think of as
normal and justifiable.
There’s another way to make the same point, which is that
most of what you’ll see being proposed in the peak oil and climate change
blogosphere has been proposed over and over and over again already, without the
least impact on our predicament. From the protest marches and the petitions,
through the latest round of grand plans for energy futures destined to sit on
the shelves cheek by jowl with the last round, right up to this week’s flurry
of buoyantly optimistic blog posts lauding any technofix you care to name from
cold fusion and algal biodiesel to shale gas and drill-baby-drill: been there, done that, used the T-shirt to
wipe another dozen endangered species off the face of the planet, and we’re
still stuck in the same place. The one
thing next to nobody wants to talk about is the one thing that distinguished
the largely successful environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s from the
largely futile environmental movement since that time, which is that activists
in the earlier movement were willing to start the ball rolling by making the
necessary changes in their own lives first.
The difficulty, of course, is that making these changes is
precisely what many of today’s green activists are desperately trying to avoid.
That’s understandable, since transitioning to a lifestyle that’s actually
sustainable involves giving up many of the comforts, perks, and privileges
central to the psychology and identity of people in modern industrial
societies. In today’s world of
accelerating downward mobility, especially, the thought of taking any action
that might result in being mistaken for the poor is something most Americans in
particular can’t bear to contemplate—even when those same Americans recognize
on some level that sooner or later, like it or not, they’re going to end up
poor anyway.
Those of my readers who would like to see this last bit of
irony focused to incandescence need only get some comfortably middle class
eco-liberal to start waxing lyrical about life in the sustainable world of the
future, when we’ll all have to get by on a small fraction of our current
resource base. This is rarely difficult;
I field such comments quite often, sketching out a rose-colored contrast
between today’s comfortable but unsatisfying lifestyles and the more meaningful
and fulfilling existence that will be ours in a future of honest hard work in
harmony with nature. Wait until your
target is in full spate, and then point out that he could embrace that more
meaningful and fulfilling lifestyle right now by the simple expedient of discarding
the comforts and privileges that stand in the way. You’ll get to watch backpedaling on a heroic
scale, accompanied by a flurry of excuses meant to justify your target’s
continued dependence on the very comforts and privileges he was belittling a few
moments before.
What makes the irony perfect is that, by and large, the
people whom you’ll hear criticizing the modern lifestyles they themselves
aren’t willing to renounce aren’t just mouthing verbal noises. They realize,
many of them, that the lifestyles that industrial societies provide even to
their more privileged inmates are barren of meaning and value, that the pursuit
and consumption of an endless series of increasingly shoddy manufactured
products is a very poor substitute for a life well lived, and that stepping
outside the narrowing walls of a world defined by the perks of the consumer
economy is the first step toward a more meaningful existence. They know this; what they lack, by and large,
is the courage to act on that knowledge, and so they wander the beach like J.
Alfred Prufrock in Eliot’s poem, letting the very last inch or so of the waves
splash over their feet—the bottoms of their trousers rolled up carefully, to be
sure, to keep them from getting wet—when they know that a running leap into the
green and foaming water is the one thing that can save them. Thus it’s not
surprising that their daydreams cluster around imaginary tidal waves that will
come rolling in from the deep ocean to sweep them away and make the whole
question moot.
This is why it’s as certain as anything can be that within a
year or so at most, a good many of the people who spent the last decade or so
talking endlessly about last Friday will have some other date lined up for the
end of the world, and will talk about it just as incessantly. It’s that or face up to the fact that the
only way to live up to the ideals they think they espouse is to walk straight
toward the thing they most fear, which is the loss of the perks and privileges
and comforts that define their identity—an identity many of them hate, but
still can’t imagine doing without.
Meanwhile, of course, the economy, the infrastructure, and
the resource flows that make those perks and privileges and comforts possible
are coming apart around them. There’s a
great deal of wry amusement to be gained from watching one imaginary cataclysm
after another seize the imagination of the peak oil scene or society as a
whole, while the thing people think they’re talking about—the collapse of
industrial civilization—has been unfolding all around them for several years
now, in exactly the way that real collapses of real civilizations happen in the
real world.
Look around you, dear reader, as the economy stumbles
through another round of contraction papered over with increasingly desperate
fiscal gimmicks, the political system of your country moves ever deeper into
dysfunction, jobs and livelihoods go away forever, whatever social safety net
you’re used to having comes apart, towns and neighborhoods devastated by natural
disasters are abandoned rather than being rebuilt, and the basic services that
once defined a modern society stop being available to a larger and larger
fraction of the people of the industrial world.
This is what collapse looks like. This is what people in the crumbling Roman
Empire and all those other extinct civilizations saw when they looked out the
window. To those in the middle of the
process, as I’ve discussed in previous posts, it seems slow, but future
generations with the benefit of hindsight will shake their heads in wonder at
how fast industrial civilization went to pieces.
I commented in a post at
the start of this year that the then-current round of fast-collapse
predictions—the same predictions, mind you, that had been retailed at the start
of the year before, the year before that, and so on—were not only wrong, as of
course they turned out to be, but missed the collapse that was already under
way. The same point holds good for the identical predictions that will no doubt
be retailed over the next few weeks, insisting that this is the year when the
stock market will plunge to zero, the dollar and/or the Euro will lose all
their value, the economy will seize up completely and leave the grocery shelves
bare, and so on endlessly; or, for that matter, that this is the year when cold
fusion or algal biodiesel or some other vaporware technology will save us, or
the climate change Kum Ba Ya moment I mentioned earlier will get around to
happening, or what have you.
It’s as safe as a bet can be that none of these things will
happen in 2013, either. Here again,
though, the prophecies in question are not so much wrong as irrelevant. If you’re on a sinking ocean liner and the
water’s rising fast belowdecks, it’s not exactly useful to get into heated
debates with your fellow passengers about whether the ship is most likely to be
vaporized by aliens or eaten by Godzilla.
In the same way, it’s a bit late to speculate about how industrial
civilization will collapse, or how to prevent it from collapsing, when the
collapse is already well under way. What
matters at that stage in the game is getting some sense of how the process will
unfold, not in some abstract sense but in the uncomfortably specific sense of
where you are, with what you have, in the days and weeks and months and years
immediately ahead of you; that, and then deciding what you are going to do
about it.
With that in mind, dear reader, I’d like to ask you to do
something right now, before going on to the paragraph after this one. If you’re in the temperate or subarctic
regions of the northern hemisphere, and you’re someplace where you can adjust
the temperature, get up and go turn the thermostat down three degrees; if that
makes the place too chilly for your tastes, take another moment or two to put
on a sweater. If you’re in a different
place or a different situation, do something else simple to decrease the amount
of energy you’re using at this moment.
Go ahead, do it now; I’ll wait for you here.
Have you done it? If
so, you’ve just accomplished something that all the apocalyptic fantasies,
internet debates, and protest marches of the last two decades haven’t: you’ve decreased, by however little, the
amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. That sweater, or rather the
act of putting it on instead of turning up the heat, has also made you just a
little less dependent on fossil fuels. In both cases, to be sure, the change
you’ve made is very small, but a small change is better than no change at
all—and a small change that can be repeated, expanded, and turned into a
stepping stone on the way to bigger
changes, is infinitely better than any amount of grand plans and words and handwaving
that never quite manage to accomplish anything in the real world.
Turning down your thermostat, it’s been said repeatedly,
isn’t going to save the world. That’s
quite true, though it’s equally true that the actions that have been pursued by
climate change and peak oil activists to date don’t look particularly likely to
save the world, either, and let’s not even talk about what wasn’t accomplished
by all the wasted breath over last Friday’s nonevent. That being the case, taking even the smallest
practical steps in your own life and then proceeding from there will take you a
good deal further than waiting for the mass movements that never happen, the
new technologies that never pan out, or for that matter the next deus ex
machina some canny marketer happens to pin onto another arbitrary date in the
future, as a launching pad for the next round of apocalyptic hysteria.
Meanwhile, a world is ending. The promoters of the 2012 industry got that
right, though they missed just about everything else; the process has been
under way for some years now, and it won’t reach its conclusion in our
lifetimes, but what we may as well call the modern world is coming to an end
around us. The ancient Mayans knew,
however, that the end of one world is always the beginning of another, and it’s
an interesting detail of all the old Mesoamerican cosmological myths that the
replacement for the old world doesn’t just pop into being. Somebody has to take action to make the world
begin.
