Last week’s post on the vacuous catchphrases that so often
substitute for thought in today’s America referenced only a few examples of the
species under discussion. It might
someday be educational, or at least entertaining, to write a sequel to H.L.
Mencken’s The American Credo, bringing his choice collection
of thoughtstoppers up to date with the latest fashionable examples; still, that
enticing prospect will have to wait for some later opportunity.In the meantime,
those who liked my suggestion of Peak Oil Denial Bingo will doubtless want to
know that cards can now
be downloaded for free.
What I’d like to do this week is talk about another popular
credo, one that plays a very large role in blinding people nowadays to the
shape of the future looming up ahead of us all just now. In an interesting
display of synchronicity, it came up in a conversation I had while last week’s
essay was still being written. A friend and I were talking about the myth of
progress, the facile and popular conviction that all human history follows an
ever-ascending arc from the caves to the stars; my friend noted how
disappointed he’d been with a book about the future that backed away from
tomorrow’s challenges into the shelter of a comforting thoughtstopper: “Technology will always be with us.”
Let’s take a moment to follow the advice I gave in last
week’s post and think about what, if anything, that actually means. Taken in the
most literal sense, it’s true but trivial. Toolmaking is one of our species’
core evolutionary strategies, and so it’s a safe bet that human beings will
have some variety of technology or other as long as our species survives. That
requirement could just as easily be satisfied, though, by a flint hand axe as
by a laptop computer—and a flint hand axe is presumably not what people who use
that particular thoughtstopper have in mind.
Perhaps we might rephrase the credo, then, as “modern
technology will always be with us.” That’s also true in a trivial sense, and
false in another, equally trivial sense. In the first sense, every generation
has its own modern technology; the latest up-to-date flint hand axes were, if
you’ll pardon the pun, cutting-edge technology in the time of the
Neanderthals. In the second sense, much
of every generation’s modern technology goes away promptly with that
generation; whichever way the future goes, much of what counts as modern
technology today will soon be no more modern and cutting-edge than eight-track
tape players or Victorian magic-lantern projectors. That’s as true if we get a
future of continued progress as it is if we get a future of regression and
decline.
Perhaps our author means something like “some technology at
least as complex as what we have now, and fulfilling most of the same
functions, will always be with us.” This is less trivial but it’s quite simply
false, as historical parallels show clearly enough. Much of the technology of
the Roman era, from wheel-thrown pottery to central heating, was lost in most
of the western Empire and had to be brought in from elsewhere centuries
later. In the dark ages that followed
the fall of Mycenean Greece, even so simple a trick as the art of writing was
lost, while the history of Chinese technology before the modern era is a cycle
in which many discoveries made during the heyday of each great dynasty were
lost in the dark age that followed its decline and fall, and had to be
rediscovered when stability and prosperity returned. For people living in each
of these dark ages, technology comparable to what had been in use before the
dark age started was emphatically not always with them.
For that matter, who is the “us” that we’re discussing here?
Many people right now have no access to the technologies that middle-class
Americans take for granted. For all the good that modern technology does them,
today’s rural subsistence farmers, laborers in sweatshop factories, and the
like might as well be living in some earlier era. I suspect our author is not
thinking about such people, though, and the credo thus might be phrased as
“some technology at least as complex as what middle-class people in the
industrial world have now, providing the same services they have come to expect,
will always be available to people of that same class.” Depending on how you
define social classes, that’s either true but trivial—if “being middle class”
equals “having access to the technology todays middle classes have,” no middle
class people will ever be deprived of such a technology because, by definition,
there will be no middle class people once the technology stops being
available—or nontrivial but clearly false—plenty of people who think of
themselves as middle class Americans right now are losing access to a great
deal of technology as economic contraction deprives them of their jobs and
incomes and launches them on new careers of downward mobility and radical
impoverishment.
Well before the analysis got this far, of course, anyone
who’s likely to mutter the credo “Technology will always be with us” will have
jumped up and yelled, “Oh for heaven’s sake, you know perfectly well what I
mean when I use that word! You know, technology!”—or words
to that effect. Now of course I do know exactly what the word means in that
context: it’s a vague abstraction with no real conceptual meaning at all, but
an ample supply of raw emotional force.
Like other thoughtstoppers of the same kind, it serves as a verbal
bludgeon to prevent people from talking or even thinking about the brittle,
fractious, ambivalent realities that shape our lives these days. Still, let’s
go a little further with the process of analysis, because it leads somewhere
that’s far from trivial.
Keep asking a believer in the credo we’re discussing the
sort of annoying questions I’ve suggested above, and sooner or later you’re
likely to get a redefinition that goes something like this: “The coming of the
industrial revolution was a major watershed in human history, and no future society
of any importance will ever again be deprived of the possibilities opened up by
that revolution.” Whether or not that turns out to be true is a question nobody
today can answer, but it’s a claim worth considering, because history shows
that enduring shifts of this kind do happen from time to time. The agricultural
revolution of c. 9000 BCE and the urban revolution of c. 3500 BCE were both
decisive changes in human history. Even
though there were plenty of nonagricultural societies after the first, and plenty
of nonurban societies after the second, the possibilities opened up by each
revolution were always options thereafter, when and where ecological and social
circumstances permitted.
Some 5500 years passed between the agricultural revolution
and the urban revolution, and since it’s been right around 5500 years since the
urban revolution began, a case could probably be made that we were due for
another. Still, let’s take a closer look at the putative third revolution. What
exactly was the industrial revolution? What changed, and
what future awaits those changes?
That’s a far more subtle question than it might seem at
first glance, because the cascade of changes that fit under the very broad
label “the industrial revolution” weren’t all of a piece. I’d like to suggest,
in fact, that there was not one industrial revolution, but four of them—or,
more precisely, three and a half. Lewis Mumford’s important 1934 study
Technics and Civilization identified three of those
revolutions, though the labels he used for them—the eotechnic, paleotechnic,
and neotechnic phases—shoved them into a linear scheme of progress that
distorts many of their key features. Instead, I propose to borrow the same
habit people use when they talk about the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions,
and name the revolutions after individuals who played crucial roles in making
them happen.
First of all, then—corresponding to Mumford’s eotechnic
phase—is the Baconian revolution, which got under way around 1600. It takes its
name from Francis Bacon, who was the first significant European thinker to
propose that what he called natural philosophy and we call science ought to be
reoriented away from the abstract contemplation of the cosmos, and toward
making practical improvements in the technologies of the time. Such
improvements were already under way, carried out by a new class of “mechanicks”
who had begun to learn by experience that building a faster ship, a sturdier
plow, a better spinning wheel, or the like could be a quick route to
prosperity, and encouraged by governments eager to cash in new inventions for
the more valued coinage of national wealth and military victory.
The Baconian revolution, like those that followed it,
brought with it a specific suite of technologies. Square-rigged ships capable
of long deepwater voyages revolutionized
international trade and naval warfare; canals and canal boats had a similar
impact on domestic transport systems. New information and communication
media—newspapers, magazines, and public libraries—were crucial elements of the
Baconian technological suite, which also encompassed major improvements in
agriculture and in metal and glass manufacture, and significant developments in
the use of wind and water power, as well as the first factories using division
of labor to allow mass production.
The second revolution—corresponding to Mumford’s
paleotechnic phase—was the Wattean revolution, which got started around 1780.
This takes its name, of course, from James Watt, whose redesign of the steam
engine turned it from a convenience for the mining industry to the throbbing
heart of a wholly new technological regime, replacing renewable energy sources
with concentrated fossil fuel energy and putting that latter to work in every
economically viable setting. The steamship was the new vehicle of international
trade, the railroad the corresponding domestic transport system; electricity
came in with steam, and so did the telegraph, the major new communications
technology of the era, while mass production of steel via the Bessemer process
had a massive impact across the economic sphere.
The third revolution—corresponding to Mumford’s neotechnic
phase—was the Ottonian revolution, which took off around 1890. I’ve named this
revolution after Nikolaus Otto, who invented the four-cycle internal combustion
engine in 1876 and kickstarted the process that turned petroleum from a source
of lamp fuel to the resource that brought the industrial age to its zenith. In
the Ottonian era, international trade shifted to diesel-powered ships,
supplemented later on by air travel; the domestic transport system was the
automobile; the rise of vacuum-state electronics made radio (including
television, which is simply an application of radio technology) the major new
communications technology; and the industrial use of organic chemistry, turning
petroleum and other fossil fuels into feedstocks for plastics, gave the
Ottonian era its most distinctive materials.
The fourth, partial revolution, which hadn’t yet begun when
Mumford wrote his book, was the Fermian revolution, which can be dated quite
precisely to 1942 and is named after Enrico Fermi, the designer and builder of
the first successful nuclear reactor.
The keynote of the Fermian era was the application of subatomic physics,
not only in nuclear power but also in solid-state electronic devices such as
the transistor and the photovoltaic cell. In the middle years of the 20th
century, a great many people took it for granted that the Fermian revolution
would follow the same trajectory as its Wattean and Ottonian predecessors:
nuclear power would replace diesel power in freighters, electricity would elbow
aside gasoline as the power source for domestic transport, and nucleonics would
become as important as electronics as a core element in new technologies yet
unimagined.
Unfortunately for those expectations, nuclear power turned
out to be a technical triumph but an economic flop. Claims that nuclear power would make
electricity too cheap to meter ran face first into the hard fact that no nation
anywhere has been able to have a nuclear power industry without huge and
ongoing government subsidies, while nuclear-powered ships were relegated to the
navies of very rich nations, which didn’t have to turn a profit and so could
afford to ignore the higher construction and operating costs. Nucleonics turned
out to have certain applications, but nothing like as many or as lucrative as
the giddy forecasts of 1950 suggested.
Solid state electronics, on the other hand, turned out to be economically
viable, at least in a world with ample fossil fuel supplies, and made the
computer and the era’s distinctive communications medium, the internet,
economically viable propositions.
The Wattean, Ottonian, and Fermian revolutions thus had a
core theme in common. Each of them relied on a previously untapped energy
resource—coal, petroleum, and uranium, respectively—and set out to build a
suite of technologies to exploit that resource and the forms of energy it made
available. The scientific and engineering know-how that was required to manage
each power source then became the key toolkit for the technological suite that
unfolded from it; from the coal furnace, the Bessemer process for making steel
was a logical extension, just as the knowledge of hydrocarbon chemistry needed
for petroleum refining became the basis for plastics and the chemical industry,
and the same revolution in physics that made nuclear fission reactors possible
also launched solid state electronics—it’s not often remembered, for example,
that Albert Einstein got his Nobel prize for understanding the process that
makes PV cells work, not for the theory of relativity.
Regular readers of this blog will probably already have
grasped the core implication of this common theme. The core technologies of the
Wattean, Ottonian, and Fermian eras all depend on access to large amounts of
specific nonrenewable resources. Fermian
technology, for example, demands fissible material for its reactors and rare earth
elements for its electronics, among many other things; Ottonian technology
demands petroleum and natural gas, and some other resources; Wattean technology
demands coal and iron ore. It’s sometimes possible to substitute one set of
materials for another—say, to process coal into liquid fuel—but there’s always
a major economic cost involved, even if there’s an ample and inexpensive supply
of the other resource that isn’t needed for some other purpose.
In today’s world, by contrast, the resources needed for all
three technological suites are being used at breakneck rates and thus are
either already facing depletion or will do so in the near future. When coal has
already been mined so heavily that sulfurous, low-energy brown coal—the kind
that miners in the 19th century used to discard as waste—has become the
standard fuel for coal-fired power plants, for example, it’s a bit late to talk
about a coal-to-liquids program to replace any serious fraction of the world’s
petroleum consumption: the attempt to do so would send coal prices soaring to economy-wrecking
heights. Richard Heinberg has pointed
out in his useful book Peak Everything, for that matter,
that a great deal of the coal still remaining in the ground will take more
energy to extract than it will produce when burnt, making it an energy sink
rather than an energy source.
Thus we can expect very large elements of Wattean, Ottonian,
and Fermian technologies to stop being economically viable in the years ahead,
as depletion drives up resource costs and the knock-on effects of the resulting
economic contraction force down demand. That doesn’t mean that every aspect of
those technological suites will go away, to be sure. It’s not at all unusual, in the wake of a
fallen civilization, to find “orphan technologies” that once functioned as
parts of a coherent technological suite, still doing their jobs long after the
rest of the suite has fallen out of use.
Just as Roman aqueducts kept bringing water to cities in the post-Roman
dark ages whose inhabitants had neither the resources nor the knowledge to
build anything of the kind, it’s quite likely that (say) hydroelectric
facilities in certain locations will stay in use for centuries to come,
powering whatever electrical equipment can maintained or built from local
resources, even if the people who tend the dams and use the electricity have
long since lost the capacity to build turbines, generators, or dams at all.
Yet there’s another issue involved, because the first of the
four industrial revolutions I’ve discussed in this essay—the Baconian
revolution—was not dependent on nonrenewable resources. The suite of technologies that unfolded from
Francis Bacon’s original project used the same energy sources that everyone in
the world’s urban-agricultural societies had been using for more than three
thousand years: human and animal muscle, wind, water, and heat from burning
biomass. Unlike the revolutions that followed it, to put the same issue in a
different but equally relevant way, the Baconian revolution worked within the
limits of the energy budget the Earth receives each year from the Sun, instead
of drawing down stored sunlight from the Earth’s store of fossil carbon or its
much more limited store of fissible isotopes.
The Baconian era simply used that annual solar budget in a more
systematic way than previous societies managed, by directing the considerable
intellectual skills of the natural philosophers of the day toward practical
ends.
Because of their dependence on nonrenewable resources, the
three later revolutions were guaranteed all along to be transitory phases. The
Baconian revolution need not be, and I think that there’s a noticeable chance
that it will not be. By that I mean, to begin with, that the core intellectual
leap that made the Baconian revolution possible—the scientific method—is sufficiently widespread
at this point that with a little help, it may well get through the decline and
fall of our civilization and become part of the standard toolkit of future
civilizations, in much the same way that classical logic survived the wreck of
Rome to be taken up by successor civilizations across the breadth of the Old
World.
Still, that’s not all I mean to imply here. The specific
technological suite that developed in the wake of the Baconian revolution will
still be viable in a post-fossil fuel world, wherever the ecological and social
circumstances will permit it to exist at all. Deepwater maritime shipping,
canal-borne transport across nations and subcontinents, mass production of
goods using the division of labor as an organizing principle, extensive use of
wind and water power, and widespread literacy and information exchange
involving print media, libraries, postal services, and the like, are all
options available to societies in the deindustrial world. So are certain other
technologies that evolved in the post-Baconian era, but fit neatly within the
Baconian model: solar thermal technologies, for example, and those forms of
electronics that can be economically manufactured and powered with the limited
supplies of concentrated energy a sustainable society will have on hand.
I’ve suggested in previous posts here, and in my book The Ecotechnic Future, that our current industrial society may turn out
to be merely the first, most wasteful, and least durable of what might best be called “technic societies”—that is,
human societies that get a large fraction of their total energy supply from
sources other than human and animal muscle, and support complex technological
suites on that basis. The technologies of the Baconian era, I propose, offer a
glimpse of what an emerging ecotechnic society might look like in practice—and
a sense of the foundations on which the more complex ecotechnic societies of
the future will build.
When the book mentioned at the beginning of this essay
claimed that “technology will always be with us,” it’s a safe bet that the
author wasn’t thinking of tall ships, canal boats, solar greenhouses, and a low-power
global radio net, much less the further advances along the same lines that
might well be possible in a post-fossil fuel world. Still, it’s crucial to get
outside the delusion that the future must either be a flashier version of the
present or a smoldering wasteland full of bleached bones, and start to confront
the wider and frankly more interesting possibilities that await our
descendants.
***************
Along these same lines, I’d like to remind readers that this
blog’s second post-peak oil science fiction contest has
less than a month left to run. Those of you who are still working on
stories need to get them finished, posted online, and linked to a comment on this
blog before May 1 to be eligible for inclusion in the second After
Oil anthology. Get ‘em in!
