All things considered, 2015 just isn’t shaping up to be a
good year for believers in business as usual. Since last week’s post here on
The Archdruid Report, the anti-austerity party Syriza has
swept the Greek elections, to the enthusiastic cheers of similar parties all
over Europe and the discomfiture of the Brussels hierarchy. The latter have no
one to blame for this turn of events but themselves; for more than a decade
now, EU policies have effectively put sheltering banks and bondholders from the
healthy discipline of the market ahead of all other considerations, including
the economic survival of entire nations. It should be no surprise to anyone
that this wasn’t an approach with a long shelf life.
Meanwhile, the fracking bust continues unabated. The number
of drilling rigs at work in American oilfields continues to drop vertically
from week to week, layoffs in the nation’s various oil patches are picking up
speed, and the price of oil remains down at levels that make further fracking a
welcome mat for the local bankruptcy judge. Those media pundits who are still
talking the fracking industry’s book keep insisting that the dropping price of
oil proves that they were right and those dratted heretics who talk of peak oil
must be wrong, but somehow those pundits never get around to explaining why
iron ore, copper, and most other major commodities are dropping in price even
faster than crude oil, nor why demand for petroleum products here in the US has
been declining steadily as well.
The fact of the matter is that an industrial economy built
to run on cheap conventional oil can’t run on expensive oil for long without
running itself into the ground. Since 2008, the world’s industrial nations have
tried to make up the difference by flooding their economies with cheap credit,
in the hope that this would somehow make up for the sharply increased amounts
of real wealth that have had to be diverted from other purposes into the
struggle to keep liquid fuels flowing at their peak levels. Now, though, the
laws of economics have called their bluff; the wheels are coming off one
national economy after another, and the price of oil (and all those other
commodities) has dropped to levels that won’t cover the costs of fracked oil,
tar sands, and the like, because all those frantic attempts to externalize the
costs of energy production just meant that the whole global economy took the
hit.
Now of course this isn’t how governments and the media are
spinning the emerging crisis. For that matter, there’s no shortage of people
outside the corridors of power, or for that matter of punditry, who ignore the
general collapse of commodity prices, fixate on oil outside of the broader
context of resource depletion in general, and insist that the change in the
price of oil must be an act of economic warfare, or what have you. It’s a logic
that readers of this blog will have seen deployed many times in the past:
whatever happens, it must have been decided and carried out by human beings. An
astonishing number of people these days seem unable to imagine the possibility
that such wholly impersonal factors as the laws of economics, geology, and
thermodynamics could make things happen all by themselves.
The problem we face now is precisely that the unimaginable is
now our reality. For just that little bit too long, too many people have
insisted that we didn’t need to worry about the absurdity of pursuing limitless
growth on a finite and fragile planet, that “they’ll think of something,” or
that chattering on internet forums about this or that or the other piece of
technological vaporware was doing something concrete about our species’
imminent collision with the limits to growth. For just that little bit too
long, not enough people were willing to do anything that mattered, and now
impersonal factors have climbed into the driver’s seat, having mugged all seven
billion of us and shoved us into the trunk.
As I noted in
last week’s post, that puts hard limits on what can be done in the
short term. In all probability, at this stage of the game, each of us will be
meeting the oncoming wave of crisis with whatever preparations we’ve made,
however substantial or insubstantial those happen to be. I’m aware that a
certain subset of my readers are unhappy with that suggestion, but that can’t
be helped; the future is under no obligation to wait patiently while we get
ready for it. A few years back, when I posted an essay here whose title sums
up the strategy I’ve been proposing, I probably should have put more
stress on the most important word in that slogan: now.
Still, that’s gone wherever might-have-beens spend their time.
That doesn’t mean the world is about to end. It means that
in all probability, beginning at some point this year and continuing for
several years after that, most of my readers will be busy coping with the
multiple impacts of a thumping economic crisis on their own lives and those of
their families, friends, communities, and employers, at a time when political
systems over much of the industrial world have frozen up into gridlock, the
simmering wars in the Middle East and much of the Third World seem more than
usually likely to boil over, and the twilight of the Pax Americana is pushing
both the US government and its enemies into an ever greater degree of
brinksmanship. Exactly how that’s going to play out is anyone’s guess, but no
matter what happens, it’s unlikely to be pretty.
While we get ready for the first shocks to hit, though, it’s
worth talking a little bit about what comes afterwards. No matter how long a train of financial
dominoes the collapse of the fracking bubble sets toppling, the last one fill
fall eventually, and within a few years things will have found a “new normal,”
however far down the slope of contraction that turns out to be. No matter how
many proxy wars, coups d’etat, covert actions, and manufactured insurgencies
get launched by the United States or its global rivals in their struggle for
supremacy, most of the places touched by that conflict will see a few years at
most of actual warfare or the equivalent, with periods of relative peace before
and after. The other driving forces of collapse act in much the same way;
collapse is a fractal process, not a linear one.
Thus there’s something on the far side of crisis besides
more of the same. The discussion I’d like to start at this point centers on
what might be worth doing once the various masses of economic, political, and
military rubble stops bouncing. It’s not too early to begin planning for that.
If nothing else, it will give readers of this blog something to think about
while standing in bread lines or hiding in the basement while riot police and
insurgents duke it out in the streets. That benefit aside, the sooner we start
thinking about the options that will be available once relative stability
returns, the better chance we’ll have of being ready to implement it, in our
own lives or on a broader scale, once stability returns.
One of the interesting consequences of crisis, for that
matter, is that what was unthinkable before a really substantial crisis may not
be unthinkable afterwards. Read Barbara Tuchman’s brilliant The Proud
Tower and you’ll see how many of the unquestioned certainties of 1914
were rotting in history’s compost bucket by the time 1945 rolled around, and
how many ideas that had been on the outermost fringes before the First World
War that had become plain common sense after the Second. It’s a common
phenomenon, and I propose to get ahead of the curve here by proposing, as raw
material for reflection if nothing else, something that’s utterly unthinkable
today but may well be a matter of necessity ten or twenty or forty years from
now.
What do I have in mind? Intentional technological regression
as a matter of public policy.
Imagine, for a moment, that an industrial nation were to
downshift its technological infrastructure to roughly what it was in 1950. That
would involve a drastic decrease in energy consumption per capita, both
directly—people used a lot less energy of all kinds in 1950—and
indirectly—goods and services took much less energy to produce then, too. It
would involve equally sharp decreases in the per capita consumption of most
resources. It would also involve a sharp increase in jobs
for the working classes—a great many things currently done by robots were done
by human beings in those days, and so there were a great many more paychecks
going out of a Friday to pay for the goods and services that ordinary consumers
buy. Since a steady flow of paychecks to the working classes is one of the
major things that keep an economy stable and thriving, this has certain obvious
advantages, but we can leave those alone for now.
Now of course the change just proposed would involve certain
changes from the way we do things. Air travel in the 1950s was extremely
expensive—the well-to-do in those days were called “the jet set,” because
that’s who could afford tickets—and so everyone else had to put up with fast,
reliable, energy-efficient railroads when they needed to get from place to
place. Computers were rare and expensive, which meant once again that more
people got hired to do jobs, and also meant that when you called a utility or a
business, your chance of getting a human being who could help you with whatever
problem you might have was considerably higher than it is today.
Lacking the internet, people had to make do instead with
their choice of scores of AM and shortwave radio stations, thousands of general
and specialized print periodicals, and full-service bookstores and local
libraries bursting at the seams with books—in America, at least, the 1950s were
the golden age of the public library, and most small towns had collections you
can’t always find in big cities these days. Oh, and the folks who like looking
at pictures of people with their clothes off, and who play a large and usually
unmentioned role in paying for the internet today, had to settle for naughty
magazines, mail-order houses that shipped their products in plain brown
wrappers, and tacky stores in the wrong end of town. (For what it’s worth, this
didn’t seem to inconvenience them any.)
As previously noted, I’m quite aware that such a project is
utterly unthinkable today, and we’ll get to the superstitious horror that lies
behind that reaction in a bit. First, though, let’s talk about the obvious
objections. Would it be possible? Of course. Much of it could be done by simple
changes in the tax code. Right now, in the United States, a galaxy of perverse
regulatory incentives penalize employers for hiring people and reward them for
replacing employees with machines. Change those so that spending money on
wages, salaries and benefits up to a certain comfortable threshold makes more
financial sense for employers than using the money to automate, and you’re
halfway there already.
A revision in trade policy would do most of the rest of
what’s needed. What’s jokingly called
“free trade,” despite the faith-based claims of economists, benefits the rich
at everyone else’s expense, and would best be replaced by sensible tariffs to
support domestic production against the sort of predatory export-driven
mercantilism that dominates the global economy these days. Add to that high
tariffs on technology imports, and strip any technology beyond the 1950 level
of the lavish subsidies that fatten the profit margins of the welfare-queen
corporations in the Fortune 500, and you’re basically there.
What makes the concept of technological regression so
intriguing, and so workable, is that it doesn’t require anything new to be
developed. We already know how 1950 technology worked, what its energy and
resource needs are, and what the upsides and downsides of adopting it would be;
abundant records and a certain fraction of the population who still remember
how it worked make that easy. Thus it would be an easy thing to pencil out
exactly what would be needed, what the costs and benefits would be, and how to
minimize the former and maximize the latter; the sort of blind guesses and
arbitrary assumptions that have to go into deploying a brand new technology
need not apply.
So much for the first objection. Would there be downsides to
deliberate technological regression? Of course. Every technology and every set
of policy options has its downsides. A
common delusion these days claims, in effect, that it’s unfair to take the downsides
of new technologies or the corresponding upsides of old ones into consideration
when deciding whether to replace an older technology with a newer one. An even
more common delusion claims that you’re not supposed to decide at all; once a
new technology shows up, you’re supposed to run bleating after it like everyone
else, without asking any questions at all.
Current technology has immense downsides. Future
technologies are going to have them, too—it’s only in sales brochures and
science fiction stories, remember, that any technology is without them. Thus
the mere fact that 1950 technology has problematic features, too, is not a
valid reason to dismiss technological retrogression. The question that needs to
be asked, however unthinkable it might be, is whether, all things considered,
it’s wiser to accept the downsides of 1950 technology in order to have a
working technological suite that can function on much smaller per capita inputs
of energy and resources, and thus a much better chance to get through the age
of limits ahead than today’s far more extravagant and brittle technological
infrastructure.
It’s probably also necessary to talk about a particular
piece of paralogic that comes up reliably any time somebody suggests
technological regression: the notion that if you return to an older technology,
you have to take the social practices and cultural mores of its heyday as well.
I fielded a good many such comments last year when I
suggested steam-powered Victorian technology powered by solar energy
as a form the ecotechnics of the future might take. An astonishing number of
people seemed unable to imagine that it was possible to have such a technology
without also reintroducing Victorian habits such as child labor and sexual
prudery. Silly as that claim is, it has deep roots in the modern imagination.
No doubt, as a result of those deep roots, there will be
plenty of people who respond to the proposal just made by insisting that the
social practices and cultural mores of 1950 were awful, and claiming that those
habits can’t be separated from the technologies I’m discussing. I could point
out in response that 1950 didn’t have a single set of social practices and
cultural mores; even in the United States, a drive from Greenwich Village to
rural Pennsylvania in 1950 would have met with remarkable cultural diversity
among people using the same technology.
The point could be made even more strongly by noting that
the same technology was in use that year in Paris, Djakarta, Buenos Aires,
Tokyo, Tangiers, Novosibirsk, Guadalajara, and Lagos, and the social practices
and cultural mores of 1950s middle America didn’t follow the technology around
to these distinctly diverse settings, you know. Pointing that out, though, will
likely be wasted breath. To true believers in the religion of progress, the
past is the bubbling pit of eternal damnation from which the surrogate messiah
of progress is perpetually saving us, and the future is the radiant heaven into
whose portals the faithful hope to enter in good time. Most people these days
are no more willing to question those dubious classifications than a medieval
peasant would be to question the miraculous powers that supposely emanated from
the bones of St. Ethelfrith.
Nothing, but nothing, stirs up shuddering superstitious
horror in the minds of the cultural mainstream these days as effectively as the
thought of, heaven help us, “going back.” Even if the technology of an earlier
day is better suited to a future of energy and resource scarcity than the
infrastructure we’ve got now, even if the technology of an earlier day actually
does a better job of many things than what we’ve got today, “we can’t go back!”
is the anguished cry of the masses. They’ve been so thoroughly bamboozled by
the propagandists of progress that they never stop to think that, why, yes,
they can, and there are valid reasons why they might even decide that it’s the
best option open to them.
There’s a very rich irony in the fact that alternative and
avant-garde circles tend to be even more obsessively fixated on the dogma of
linear progress than the supposedly more conformist masses. That’s one of the
sneakiest features of the myth of progress; when people get dissatisfied with
the status quo, the myth convinces them that the only option they’ve got is to
do exactly what everyone else is doing, and just take it a little further than
anyone else has gotten yet. What starts off as rebellion thus gets coopted into
perfect conformity, and society continues to march mindlessly along its current
trajectory, like lemmings in a Disney nature film, without ever asking the
obvious questions about what might be waiting at the far end.
That’s the thing about progress; all the word means is
“continued movement in the same direction.” If the direction was a bad idea to
start with, or if it’s passed the point at which it still made sense,
continuing to trudge blindly onward into the gathering dark may not be the best
idea in the world. Break out of that mental straitjacket, and the range of
possible futures broadens out immeasurably.
It may be, for example, that technological regression to the
level of 1950 turns out to be impossible to maintain over the long term. If the
technologies of 1920 can be supported on
the modest energy supply we can count on getting from renewable sources, for
example, something like a 1920 technological suite might be maintained over the
long term, without further regression. It might turn out instead that something
like the solar steampower I mentioned earlier, an ecotechnic equivalent of 1880
technology, might be the most complex technology that can be supported on a
renewable basis. It might be the case, for that matter, that something like the
technological infrastructure the United States had in 1820, with windmills and
water wheels as the prime movers of industry, canalboats as the core domestic
transport technology, and most of the population working on small family farms
to support very modest towns and cities, is the fallback level that can be
sustained indefinitely.
