I've mentioned in previous posts here on The Archdruid
Report the educational value of the comments I receive from readers in the
wake of each week’s essay. My post two weeks ago on the death of the internet
was unusually productive along those lines.
One of the comments I got in response to that post gave me the theme for
last week’s essay, but there was at least one other comment calling for the
same treatment. Like the one that sparked last week’s post, it appeared on one
of the many other internet forums on which The Archdruid Report, and it
unintentionally pointed up a common and crucial failure of imagination that
shapes, or rather misshapes, the conventional wisdom about our future.
Curiously enough, the point that set off the commenter in
question was the same one that incensed the author of the denunciation
mentioned in last week’s post: my suggestion in passing that fifty years from
now, most Americans may not have access to electricity or running water. The
commenter pointed out angrily that I’d claimed that the twilight of industrial
civilization would be a ragged arc of decline over one to three centuries. Now,
he claimed, I was saying that it was going to take place in the next fifty
years, and this apparently convinced him that everything I said ought to be
dismissed out of hand.
I run into this sort of confusion all the time. If I suggest
that the decline and fall of a civilization usually takes several centuries, I
get accused of inconsistency if I then note that one of the sharper downturns
included in that process may be imminent.
If I point out that the United States is likely within a decade or two
of serious economic and political turmoil, driven partly by the implosion of its
faltering global hegemony and partly by a massive crisis of legitimacy that’s
all but dissolved the tacit contract between the existing order of US society
and the masses who passively support it, I get accused once again of
inconsistency if I then say that whatever comes out the far side of that
crisis—whether it’s a battered and bruised United States or a patchwork of
successor states—will then face a couple of centuries of further decline and
disintegration before the deindustrial dark age bottoms out.
Now of course there’s nothing inconsistent about any of
these statements. The decline and fall of a civilization isn’t a single event,
or even a single linear process; it’s a complex fractal reality composed of
many different events on many different scales in space and time. If it takes one
to three centuries, as usual, those centuries are going to be taken up by an
uneven drumbeat of wars, crises, natural disasters, and assorted breakdowns on
a variety of time frames with an assortment of local, regional, national, or
global effects. The collapse of US global hegemony is one of those events; the
unraveling of the economic and technological framework that currently provides
most Americans with electricity and running water is another, but neither of
those is anything like the whole picture.
It’s probably also necessary to point out that any of my
readers who think that being deprived of electricity and running water is the
most drastic kind of collapse imaginable have, as the saying goes, another
think coming. Right now, in our oh-so-modern world, there are billions of
people who get by without regular access to electricity and running water, and
most of them aren’t living under dark age conditions. A century and a half ago,
when railroads, telegraphs, steamships, and mechanical printing presses were
driving one of history’s great transformations of transport and information
technology, next to nobody had electricity or running water in their homes. The
technologies of 1865 are not dark age technologies; in fact, the gap between
1865 technologies and dark age technologies is considerably greater, by most
metrics, than the gap between 1865 technologies and the ones we use today.
Furthermore, whether or not Americans have access to running
water and electricity may not have as much to say about the future of
industrial society everywhere in the world as the conventional wisdom would
suggest. I know that some of my American
readers will be shocked out of their socks to hear this, but the United States
is not the whole world. It’s not even the center of the world. If the United
States implodes over the next two decades, leaving behind a series of bankrupt
failed states to squabble over its territory and the little that remains of its
once-lavish resource base, that process will be a great source of gaudy and
gruesome stories for the news media of the world’s other continents, but it
won’t affect the lives of the readers of those stories much more than
equivalent events in Africa and the Middle East affect the lives of Americans
today.
As it happens, over the next one to three centuries, the
benefits of industrial civilization are going to go away for everyone. (The
costs will be around a good deal longer—in the case of the nuclear wastes we’re
so casually heaping up for our descendants, a good quarter of a million years,
but those and their effects are rather
more localized than some of today’s apocalyptic rhetoric likes to
suggest.) The reasoning here is straightforward. White’s Law, one of the
fundamental principles of human ecology, states that economic development is a
function of energy per capita; the immense treasure trove of concentrated
energy embodied in fossil fuels, and that alone, made possible the sky-high
levels of energy per capita that gave the world’s industrial nations their
brief era of exuberance; as fossil fuels deplete, and remaining reserves
require higher and higher energy inputs to extract, the levels of energy per
capita the industrial nations are used to having will go away forever.
It’s important to be clear about this. Fossil fuels aren’t
simply one energy source among others; in terms of concentration, usefulness,
and fungibility—that is, the ability to be turned into any other form of energy
that might be required—they’re in a category all by themselves. Repeated claims
that fossil fuels can be replaced with nuclear power, renewable energy
resources, or what have you sound very good on paper, but every attempt to put
those claims to the test so far has either gone belly up in short order, or
become a classic subsidy
dumpster surviving purely on a diet of government funds and mandates.
Three centuries ago, the earth’s fossil fuel reserves were
the largest single deposit of concentrated energy in this part of the universe;
now we’ve burnt through nearly all the easily accessible reserves, and we’re
scrambling to keep the tottering edifice of industrial society going by burning
through the dregs that remain. As those run out, the remaining energy
resources—almost all of them renewables—will certainly sustain a variety of
human societies, and some of those will be able to achieve a fairly high level
of complexity and maintain some kinds of advanced technologies. The kind of
absurd extravagance that passes for a normal standard of living among the more
privileged inmates of the industrial nations is another matter, and as the
fossil fuel age sunsets out, it will end forever.
The fractal trajectory of decline and fall mentioned earlier
in this post is simply the way this equation works out on the day-to-day scale
of ordinary history. Still, those of us who happen to be living through a part of
that trajectory might reasonably be curious about how it’s likely to unfold in
our lifetimes. I’ve discussed in a previous series of posts, and in my book Decline
and Fall: The End of Empire and the Future of Democracy in 21st Century America,
how the end of US global hegemony is likely to unfold, but as already noted,
that’s only a small portion of the broader picture. Is a broader view possible?
Fortunately history, the core resource I’ve been using to
try to make sense of our future, has plenty to say about the broad patterns
that unfold when civilizations decline and fall. Now of course I know all I
have to do is mention that history might be relevant to our present
predicament, and a vast chorus of voices across the North American continent
and around the world will bellow at rooftop volume, “But it’s different this
time!” With apologies to my regular readers, who’ve heard this before, it’s
probably necessary to confront that weary thoughtstopper again before we
proceed.
As
I’ve noted before, claims that it’s different this time are right
where it doesn’t matter and wrong where it counts. Predictions made on the basis of history—and
not just by me—have consistently predicted events over the last decade or so
far more accurately than predictions based on the assumption that history
doesn’t matter. How many times, dear reader, have you heard someone insist that
industrial civilization is going to crash to ruin in the next six months, and
then watched those six months roll merrily by without any sign of the predicted
crash? For that matter, how many times have you heard someone insist that this
or that policy that’s never worked any other time that it’s been tried, or this
or that piece of technological vaporware that’s been the subject of failed
promises for decades, will inevitably put industrial society back on its
alleged trajectory to the stars—and how many times has the policy or the vaporware
been quietly shelved, and something else promoted using the identical rhetoric,
when it turned out not to perform as advertised?
It’s been a source of wry amusement to me to watch the same
weary, dreary, repeatedly failed claims of imminent apocalypse and inevitable
progress being rehashed year after year, varying only in the fine details of
the cataclysm du jour and the techno-savior du jour, while the future nobody
wants to talk about is busily taking shape around us. Decline and fall isn’t
something that will happen sometime in the conveniently distant future; it’s
happening right now in the United States and around the world. The amusement,
though, is tempered with a sense of familiarity, because the period in which
decline is under way but nobody wants to admit that fact is one of the
recurring features of the history of decline.
There are, very generally speaking, five broad phases in the
decline and fall of a civilization. I know it’s customary in historical
literature to find nice dull labels for such things, but I’m in a contrary mood
as I write this, so I’ll give them unfashionably colorful names: the eras of
pretense, impact, response, breakdown, and dissolution. Each of these is
complex enough that it’ll need a discussion of its own; this week, we’ll talk
about the era of pretense, which is the one we’re in right now.
Eras of pretense are by no means limited to the decline and
fall of civilizations. They occur whenever political, economic, or social
arrangements no longer work, but the immediate costs of admitting that those
arrangements don’t work loom considerably larger in the collective imagination
than the future costs of leaving those arrangements in place. It’s a curious
but consistent wrinkle of human psychology that this happens even if those
future costs soar right off the scale of frightfulness and lethality; if the
people who would have to pay the immediate costs don’t want to do so, in fact,
they will reliably and cheerfully pursue policies that lead straight to their
own total bankruptcy or violent extermination, and never let themselves notice
where they’re headed.
Speculative bubbles are a great setting in which to watch
eras of pretense in full flower. In the late phases of a bubble, when it’s
clear to anyone who has two spare neurons to rub together that the boom du jour
is cobbled together of equal parts delusion and chicanery, the people who are
most likely to lose their shirts in the crash are the first to insist at the
top of their lungs that the bubble isn’t a bubble and their investments are
guaranteed to keep on increasing in value forever. Those of my readers who got
the chance to watch some of their acquaintances go broke in the real estate
bust of 2008-9, as I did, will have heard this sort of self-deception at full
roar; those who missed the opportunity can make up for the omission by checking
out the ongoing torrent of claims that the soon-to-be-late fracking bubble is
really a massive energy revolution that will make America wealthy and strong
again.
The history of revolutions offers another helpful glimpse at
eras of pretense. France in the decades before 1789, to cite a conveniently
well-documented example, was full of people who had every reason to realize
that the current state of affairs was hopelessly unsustainable and would have
to change. The things about French politics and economics that had to change,
though, were precisely those things that the French monarchy and aristocracy
were unwilling to change, because any such reforms would have cost them privileges
they’d had since time out of mind and were unwilling to relinquish.
Louis XIV, who finished up his long and troubled reign a
supreme realist, is said to have muttered “Après
moi, le déluge”—“Once I’m
gone, this sucker’s going down” may not be a literal translation, but it
catches the flavor of the utterance—but that degree of clarity was rare in his
generation, and all but absent in those of his increasingly feckless
successors. Thus the courtiers and aristocrats of the Old Regime amused themselves
at the nation’s expense, dabbled in avant-garde thought, and kept their eyes
tightly closed to the consequences of their evasions of looming reality, while
the last opportunities to excuse themselves from a one-way trip to visit the
guillotine and spare France the cataclysms of the Terror and the Napoleonic
wars slipped silently away.
That’s the bitter irony of eras of pretense. Under most
circumstances, they’re the last period when it would be possible to do anything
constructive on the large scale about the crisis looming immediately ahead, but
the mass evasion of reality that frames the collective thinking of the time
stands squarely in the way of any such constructive action. In the era of
pretense before a speculative bust, people who could have quietly cashed in
their positions and pocketed their gains double down on their investments, and
guarantee that they’ll be ruined once the market stops being liquid. In the era
of pretense before a revolution, in the same way, those people and classes that
have the most to lose reliably take exactly those actions that ensure that they
will in fact lose everything. If history has a sense of humor, this is one of
the places that it appears in its most savage form.
The same points are true, in turn, of the eras of pretense
that precede the downfall of a civilization. In a good many cases, where too
few original sources survive, the age of pretense has to be inferred from
archeological remains. We don’t know what motives inspired the ancient Mayans
to build their biggest pyramids in the years immediately before the Terminal
Classic period toppled over into a savage political and demographic collapse,
but it’s hard to imagine any such project being set in motion without the usual
evasions of an era of pretense being involved
Where detailed records of dead civilizations survive, though, the sort
of rhetorical handwaving common to bubbles before the bust and decaying regimes
on the brink of revolution shows up with knobs on. Thus the panegyrics of the
Roman imperial court waxed ever more lyrical and bombastic about Rome’s
invincibility and her civilizing mission to the nations as the Empire stumbled
deeper into its terminal crisis, echoing any number of other court poets in any
number of civilizations in their final hours.
For that matter, a glance through classical Rome’s literary
remains turns up the remarkable fact that those of her essayists and
philosophers who expressed worries about her survival wrote, almost without
exception, during the Republic and the early Empire; the closer the fall of
Rome actually came, the more certainty Roman authors expressed that the Empire
was eternal and the latest round of troubles was just one more temporary bump
on the road to peace and prosperity. It took the outsider’s vision of Augustine
of Hippo to proclaim that Rome really was falling—and even that could only be
heard once the Visigoths sacked Rome and the era of pretense gave way to the
age of impact.
The present case is simply one more example to add to an
already lengthy list. In the last years of the nineteenth century, it was
common for politicians, pundits, and mass media in the United States, the
British empire, and other industrial nations to discuss the possibility that
the advanced civilization of the time might be headed for the common fate of
nations in due time. The intellectual history of the twentieth century is,
among other things, a chronicle of how that discussion was shoved to the
margins of our collective discourse, just as the ecological history of the same
century is among other things a chronicle of how the worries of the previous
era became the realities of the one we’re in today. The closer we’ve moved
toward the era of impact, that is, the more unacceptable it has become for
anyone in public life to point out that the problems of the age are not just
superficial.
Listen to the pablum that passes for political discussion in
Washington DC or the mainstream US media these days, or the even more vacuous
noises being made by party flacks as the country stumbles wearily toward yet
another presidential election. That the American dream of upward mobility has
become an American nightmare of accelerating impoverishment outside the
narrowing circle of the kleptocratic rich, that corruption and casual disregard
for the rule of law are commonplace in political institutions from local to
Federal levels, that our medical industry charges more than any other nation’s
and still provides the worst health care in the industrial world, that our
schools no longer teach anything but contempt for learning, that the national
infrastructure and built environment are plunging toward Third World conditions
at an ever-quickening pace, that a brutal and feckless foreign policy embraced
by both major parties is alienating our allies while forcing our enemies to set
aside their mutual rivalries and make common cause against us: these are among
the issues that matter, but they’re not the issues you’ll hear discussed as the
latest gaggle of carefully airbrushed candidates go through their carefully
scripted elect-me routines on their way to the 2016 election.
