Over the last week or so, I’ve heard from a remarkable
number of people who feel that a major crisis is in the offing. The people in
question don’t know each other, many of them have even less contact with the
mass media than I do, and the sense they’ve tried to express to me is inchoate
enough that they’ve been left fumbling for words, but they all end up reaching
for the same metaphors: that something in the air just now seems reminiscent of
the American colonies in 1775, France in 1789, America in 1860, Europe in 1914,
or the world in 1939: a sense of being poised on the brink of convulsive
change, with the sound of gunfire and marching boots coming ever more clearly
from the dimly seen abyss ahead.
It’s not an unreasonable feeling, all things considered. In
Washington DC, Obama’s flunkies are beating the war drums over Ukraine,
threatening to send shipments of allegedly “defensive” weapons to join the
mercenaries and military advisors we’ve already not-so-covertly got over there.
Russian officials have responded to American saber-rattling by stating flatly
that a US decision to arm Kiev will be the signal for all-out war. The current
Ukrainian regime, installed by a US-sponsored coup and backed by NATO, means to
Russia precisely what a hostile Canadian government installed by a
Chinese-sponsored coup and backed by the People’s Liberation Army would mean to
the United States; if Obama’s trademark cluelessness leads him to ignore that
far from minor point and decide that the Russians are bluffing, we could be
facing a European war within weeks.
Head south and west from the fighting around Donetsk, and
another flashpoint is heating up toward an explosion of its own just now. Yes,
that would be Greece, where the new Syriza government has refused to back down
from the promises that got it into office: promises that center on the
rejection of the so-called “austerity” policies that have all but destroyed the
Greek economy since they were imposed in 2009.
This shouldn’t be news to anyone; those same policies, though they’ve
been praised to the skies by neoliberal economists for decades now as a
guaranteed ticket to prosperity, have had precisely the opposite effect in
every single country where they’ve been put in place.
Despite that track record of unbroken failure, the EU—in
particular, Germany, which has benefited handsomely from the gutting of
southern European economies—continues to insist that Greece must accept what
amounts to a perpetual state of debt peonage. The Greek defense minister noted
in response in a recent speech that if Europe isn’t willing to cut a deal,
other nations might well do so. He’s quite correct; it’s probably a safe bet
that cold-eyed men in Moscow and Beijing are busy right now figuring out how
best to step through the window of opportunity the EU is flinging open for
them. If they do so—well, I’ll leave it to my readers to consider how the US is
likely to respond to the threat of Russian air and naval bases in Greece, which
would be capable of projecting power anywhere in the eastern and central
Mediterranean basin. Here again, war is a likely outcome; I hope that the Greek
government is braced for an attempt at regime change.
That is to say, the decline and fall of industrial
civilization is proceeding in the normal way, at pretty much the normal pace.
The thermodynamic foundations tipped over into decline first, as stocks of
cheap abundant fossil fuels depleted steadily and the gap had to be filled by
costly and much less abundant replacements, driving down net energy; the
economy went next, as more and more real wealth had to be pulled out of all
other economic activities to keep the energy supply more or less steady, until
demand destruction cut in and made that increasingly frantic effort moot; now a
global political and military superstructure dependent on cheap abundant fossil
fuels, and on the economic arrangement that all of that surplus energy made
possible, is cracking at the seams.
One feature of times like these is that the number of people
who can have an influence on the immediate outcome declines steadily as crisis
approaches. In the years leading up to 1914, for example, a vast number of
people contributed to the rising spiral of conflict between the aging British
Empire and its German rival, but the closer war came, the narrower the circle
of decision-makers became, until a handful of politicians in Germany, France,
and Britain had the fate of Europe in their hands. A few more bad decisions,
and the situation was no longer under anybody’s control; thereafter, the only
option left was to let the juggernaut of the First World War roll mindlessly
onward to its conclusion.
In the same way, as recently as the 1980s, many people in
the United States and elsewhere had some influence on how the industrial age
would end; unfortunately most of them backed politicians who cashed in the
resources that could have built a better future on one last round of absurd
extravagance, and a whole landscape of possibilities went by the boards. Step
by step, as the United States backed itself further and further into a morass
of short-term gimmicks with ghastly long-term consequences, the number of
people who have had any influence on the trajectory we’re on has narrowed
steadily, and as we approach what may turn out to be the defining crisis of our
time, a handful of politicians in a handful of capitals are left to make the
last decisions that can shape the situation in any way at all, before the tanks
begin to roll and the fighter-bombers rise up from their runways.
Out here on the fringes of the collective conversation of
our time, where archdruids lurk and heresies get uttered, the opportunity to
shape events as they happen is a very rare thing. Our role, rather, is to set
agendas for the future, to take ideas that are unthinkable in the mainstream
today and prepare them for their future role as the conventional wisdom of eras
that haven’t dawned yet. Every phrase on the lips of today’s practical men of
affairs, after all, was once a crazy notion taken seriously only by the lunatic
fringe—yes, that includes democracy, free-market capitalism, and all the other
shibboleths of our age.
With that in mind, while we wait to see whether today’s
practical men of affairs stumble into war the way they did in 1914, I propose
to shift gears and talk about something else—something that may seem whimsical,
even pointless, in the light of the grim martial realities just discussed. It’s
neither whimsical nor pointless, as it happens, but the implications may take a
little while to dawn even on those of my readers who’ve been following the last
few years of discussions most closely. Let’s begin with a handful of data
points.
Item: Britain’s largest bookseller recently noted that sales
of the Kindle e-book reader have dropped
like a rock in recent months, while sales of old-fashioned printed
books are up. Here in the more gizmocentric USA, e-books retain more of their
erstwhile popularity, but the bloom is off the rose; among the young and hip,
it’s not hard at all to find people who got rid of their book collections in a
rush of enthusiasm when e-books came out, regretted the action after it was too
late, and now are slowly restocking their bookshelves while their e-book
readers collect cobwebs or, at best, find use as a convenience for travel and
the like.
Item: more generally, a good many of the hottest new trends
in popular culture aren’t new trends at all—they’re old trends revived, in many
cases, by people who weren’t even alive to see them the first time around. Kurt
B. Reighley’s lively guide The
United States of Americana was the first, and remains the best,
introduction to the phenomenon, one that embraces everything from burlesque
shows and homebrewed bitters to backyard chickens and the revival of Victorian
martial arts. One pervasive thread that runs through the wild diversity of this
emerging subculture is the simple recognition that many of these older things
are better, in straightforwardly measurable senses, than their shiny modern
mass-marketed not-quite-equivalents.
Item: within that subculture, a small but steadily growing
number of people have taken the principle to its logical extreme and adopted
the lifestyles and furnishings of an earlier decade wholesale in
their personal lives. The 1950s are a common target, and so far as I know,
adopters of 1950s culture are the furthest along the process of turning into a
community, but other decades are increasingly finding the same kind of welcome
among those less than impressed by what today’s society has on offer.
Meanwhile, the reenactment scene has expanded spectacularly in recent years
from the standard hearty fare of Civil War regiments and the neo-medievalism of
the Society for Creative Anachronism to embrace almost any historical period you
care to name. These aren’t merely dress-up games; go to a
buckskinner’s rendezvous or an outdoor SCA event, for example, and you’re as
likely as not to see handspinners turning wool into yarn with drop spindles, a
blacksmith or two laboring over a portable forge, and the like.
Other examples of the same broad phenomenon could be added
to the list, but these will do for now. I’m well aware, of course, that most
people—even most of my readers—will have dismissed the things just listed as
bizarre personal eccentricities, right up there with the goldfish-swallowing
and flagpole-sitting of an earlier era. I’d encourage those of my readers who
had that reaction to stop, take a second look, and tease out the mental
automatisms that make that dismissal so automatic a part of today’s
conventional wisdom. Once that’s done, a third look might well be in order, because
the phenomenon sketched out here marks a shift of immense importance for our
future.
For well over two centuries now, since it first emerged as
the crackpot belief system of a handful of intellectuals on the outer fringes
of their culture, the modern ideology of progress has taken it as given that
new things were by definition better than whatever they replaced. That assumption stands at the heart of
contemporary industrial civilization’s childlike trust in the irreversible
cumulative march of progress toward a future among the stars. Finding ways to
defend that belief even when it obviously wasn’t true—when the latest, shiniest
products of progress turned out to be worse in every meaningful sense than the
older products they elbowed out of the way—was among the great growth
industries of the 20th century; even so, there were plenty of cases where
progress really did seem to measure up to its billing. Given the steady
increases of energy per capita in the world’s industrial nations over the last
century or so, that was a predictable outcome.
The difficulty, of course, is that the number of cases where
new things really are better than what they replace has been shrinking steadily
in recent decades, while the number of cases where old products are quite
simply better than their current equivalents—easier to use, more effective,
more comfortable, less prone to break, less burdened with unwanted side effects
and awkward features, and so on—has been steadily rising. Back behind the myth
of progress, like the little man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz,
stand two unpalatable and usually unmentioned realities. The first is that
profits, not progress, determines which products get marketed and which get
roundfiled; the second is that making a cheaper, shoddier product and using
advertising gimmicks to sell it anyway has been the standard marketing strategy
across a vast range of American businesses for years now.
More generally, believers in progress used to take it for
granted that progress would sooner or later bring about a world where everyone
would live exciting, fulfilling lives brimfull of miracle products and
marvelous experiences. You still hear that sort of talk from the faithful now
and then these days, but it’s coming to sound a lot like all that talk about
the glorious worker’s paradise of the future did right around the time the Iron
Curtain came down for good. In both cases, the future that was promised didn’t
have much in common with the one that actually showed up. The one we got
doesn’t have some of the nastier features of the one the former Soviet Union
and its satellites produced—well, not yet, at least—but the glorious consumer’s
paradise described in such lavish terms a few decades back got lost on the way
to the spaceport, and what we got instead was a bleak landscape of decaying
infrastructure, abandoned factories, prostituted media, and steadily declining
standards of living for everyone outside the narrowing circle of the
privileged, with the remnants of our once-vital democratic institutions hanging
above it all like rotting scarecrows silhouetted against a darkening sky.
In place of those exciting, fulfilling lives mentioned
above, furthermore, we got the monotony and stress of long commutes, cubicle
farms, and would-you-like-fries-with that for the slowly shrinking fraction of
our population who can find a job at all. The Onion, with its usual
flair for packaging unpalatable realities in the form of deadpan humor, nailed
it a few days ago with a faux health-news article announcing that the
best thing office workers could do for their health is stand up at their desk,
leave the office, and never go back. Joke or not, it’s not bad
advice; if you have a full-time job in today’s America, the average medieval
peasant had a less stressful job environment and more days off than you do; he
also kept a larger fraction of the product of his labor than you’ll ever see.
Then, of course, if you’re like most Americans, you’ll numb
yourself once you get home by flopping down on the sofa and spending most of
your remaining waking hours staring at little colored pictures on a glass
screen. It’s remarkable how many people get confused about what this action
really entails. They insist that they’re experiencing distant places, traveling
in worlds of pure imagination, and so on through the whole litany of
self-glorifying drivel the mass media likes to employ in its own praise. Let us
please be real: when you watch a program about the Amazon rain forest, you’re
not experiencing the Amazon rain forest; you’re experiencing colored pictures
on a screen, and you’re only getting as much of the experience as fits through
the narrow lens of a video camera and the even narrower filter of the
production process. The difference between experiencing something and watching
it on TV or the internet, that is to say, is precisely the same as the
difference between making love and watching pornography; in each case, the
latter is a very poor substitute for the real thing.
For most people in today’s America, in other words, the
closest approach to the glorious consumer’s paradise of the future they can
expect to get is eight hours a day, five days a week of mindless, monotonous
work under the constant pressure of management efficiency experts, if they’re
lucky enough to get a job at all, with anything up to a couple of additional
hours commuting and any off-book hours the employer happens to choose to demand
from them into the deal, in order to get a paycheck that buys a little less
each month—inflation is under control, the government insists, but prices
somehow keep going up—of products that get more cheaply made, more likely to be
riddled with defects, and more likely to pose a serious threat to the health
and well-being of their users, with every passing year. Then they can go home
and numb their nervous systems with those little colored pictures on the
screen, showing them bland little snippets of experiences they will never have,
wedged in there between the advertising.
That’s the world that progress has made. That’s the shining
future that resulted from all those centuries of scientific research and
technological tinkering, all the genius and hard work and sacrifice that have
gone into the project of progress. Of course there’s more to the consequences
of progress than that; progress has saved quite a few children from infectious
diseases, and laced the environment with so many toxic wastes that childhood
cancer, all but unheard of in 1850, is a routine event today; it’s made
impressive contributions to human welfare, while flooding the atmosphere with
greenhouse gases that will soon make far more impressive contributions to human
suffering and death—well, I could go on along these lines for quite a while.
True believers in the ideology of perpetual progress like to insist that all
the good things ought to be credited to progress while all the bad things ought
to be blamed on something else, but that’s not so plausible an article of faith
as it once was, and it bids fair to become a great deal less common as the
downsides of progress become more and more difficult to ignore.
The data points I noted earlier in this week’s post, I’ve
come to believe, are symptoms of that change, the first stirrings of wind that
tell of the storm to come. People searching for a better way of living than the
one our society offers these days are turning to the actual past, rather than
to some imaginary future, in that quest. That’s the immense shift I mentioned
earlier. What makes it even more momentous is that by and large, it’s not being
done in the sort of grim Puritanical spirit of humorless renunciation that
today’s popular culture expects from those who want something other than what
the consumer economy has on offer. It’s being done, rather, in a spirit of
celebration.
One of my readers responded to my
post two weeks ago on deliberate
technological regress by suggesting that I was proposing a Butlerian
jihad of sorts. (Those of my readers who don’t get the reference should pick up
a copy of Frank Herbert’s iconic SF novel Dune and read it.) I demurred,
for two reasons. First, the Butlerian jihad in Herbert’s novel was a revolt
against computer technology, and I see no need for that; once the falling cost
of human labor intersects the rising cost of energy and technology, and it
becomes cheaper to hire file clerks and accountants than to maintain the
gargantuan industrial machine that keeps computer technology available,
computers will go away, or linger as a legacy technology for a narrowing range
of special purposes until the hardware finally burns out.
The second reason, though, is the more important. I’m not a
fan of jihads, or of holy wars of any flavor; history shows all too well that
when you mix politics and violence with religion, any actual religious content
vanishes away, leaving its castoff garments to cover the naked rule of force and
fraud. If you want people to embrace a new way of looking at things,
furthermore, violence, threats, and abusive language don’t work, and it’s even
less effective to offer that new way as a ticket to virtuous misery, along the
lines of the Puritanical spirit noted above. That’s why so much of the
green-lifestyle propaganda of the last thirty years has done so little good—so
much of it has been pitched as a way to suffer self-righteously for the good of
Gaia, and while that approach appeals to a certain number of wannabe martyrs,
that’s not a large enough fraction of the population to matter.
The people who are ditching their Kindles and savoring books
as physical objects, brewing their own beer and resurrecting other old arts and
crafts, reformatting their lives in the modes of a past decade, or spending
their spare time reconnecting with the customs and technologies of an earlier
time—these people aren’t doing any of those things out of some passion for
self-denial. They’re doing them because these things bring them delights that
the shoddy mass-produced lifestyles of the consumer economy can’t match. What
these first stirrings suggest to me is that the way forward isn’t a Butlerian
jihad, but a Butlerian carnival—a sensuous celebration of the living world
outside the cubicle farms and the glass screens, which will inevitably draw
most of its raw materials from eras, technologies, and customs of the past,
which don’t require the extravagant energy and resource inputs that the modern
consumer economy demands, and so will be better suited to a future defined by
scarce energy and resources.
