Last week’s discussion was a bit of a divagation from the
main theme of the present sequence of posts here on The Archdruid
Report, but it was a divagation with a purpose. The three movements I
traced from hopeful beginnings to their final guttering out in fantasies of
universal destruction—Christian fundamentalism, the New Age scene, and the
environmental movement—each attempted to change the direction in which the
industrial world is moving, and failed. Both the attempts and the failures
are instructive, and make it possible to
glimpse certain aspects of contemporary life that all parties involved have
done their best to keep as obscure as possible.
To begin with, it’s important to recognize that no fixed
rule sets apart those changes that get called “progress” from the ones that
don’t. The three competing kinds of
progress discussed in an
earlier post in this sequence are responsible for part of that
diversity, but the majority of it is a function of ordinary power
politics. Any change in any part of
society will benefit certain people at the expense of others, and in the
bare-knuckle brawl of modern political life, slapping the label of progress on
those changes that will benefit one’s supporters and annoy one’s enemies is an
obvious and constantly used tactic. Just as common and effective is the gambit
of pinning labels such as "regressive" on those changes that would
benefit one’s enemies.
At any point in time, as a result, what exactly counts as
progress is a fiercely contested matter, and the success or failure of a
pressure group in the political sphere can often be gauged to a fine degree by
noting where public opinion puts that group’s agenda on the spectrum reaching
from most progressive to most reactionary.
Those assignments can shift dramatically with changes in context and the
relative strength of different factions. Thus the kind of Protestant
religiosity that’s now associated with the far right in America used to be an
ideology of the far left—William Jennings Bryan, the radical Democratic
politician whose fire-breathing speeches against corporate power make most of
today’s anticorporate rhetoric look tame, was also the prosecuting attorney in
the famous Scopes monkey trial—and environmental protection was dismissed by
the American left of a century ago as a reactionary notion that stood in the
way of bringing prosperity to the poor.
These shifts are possible because the concept of progress
has no content of its own. In one sense, to borrow a bit of edgy mockery from
C.S. Lewis, the contemporary faith in progress can be described as the
conviction that the word "better" simply means "whatever comes
next." In the age of unparalleled
abundance and technological power that is now passing, what came next was usually settled by the
most recent round of political and economic struggle, and the winners of each
round were pleased to see their partisan agenda redefined as the next
inevitable step in the onward march of progress.
And the losers?
That’s where things get interesting.
Each of the three movements I sketched out in last week’s
post started out as a contender—a movement that might have succeeded in
accomplishing the changes it wanted to make to American society, and so in
defining those changes as the next inevitable step in that same onward march of
progress. The first surge of what would
become today’s Christian fundamentalist movement spun off the youth movement of
the 1960s, embracing the teachings of that bearded and sandaled hippie, Jesus
Christ, as the next stage in the moral transformation of American society. The days of the Jesus People,
Godspell, and the Good News Bible have been so thoroughly
erased from our collective imagination that it can be hard, even for people who
were there at the time, to think of fundamentalism as a radical movement, a
social force that saw itself as moving forward toward a brighter future.
The transformation of the New Age movement was even more
drastic. In its early years, most of what provided the New Age scene with
inspiration had at least some claim to be called scientific; quantum physics
and a dozen or so avant-garde schools of psychology played a far larger role in
the movement than, say, the mutterings of channeled entities. There was plenty of interest in extrasensory
perception, to be sure, but parapsychology hadn’t yet been blackballed by the
American scientific establishment, and significant figures in the sciences
argued that the possibility of extrasensory knowledge ought to be taken
seriously. Early New Age books such as
Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy raised the hope
of a convergence of science and spirituality, in which scientific research
would put a solid foundation of proven fact under such traditional practices as
yoga and meditation.
The environmental movement had much the same flavor in its
first flowering. To many of us in the appropriate-tech scene, industrial
society’s encounter with the hard reality of planetary limits was at least as
much an opportunity as a threat, and the integration of technologically
advanced societies with a thriving planetary biosphere—the goal of a great deal
of enthusiastic thinking in those days—seemed to promise a future of almost
unimaginable richness and possibility.
The coming world of solar panels and geodesic domes, thriving organic
farms and lively human-scale cities, in which Paolo Soleri’s arcologies would
rise above newly reforested landscapes and dirigibles would move silently
through unpolluted skies, set the stage for many soaring hopes and dreams.
It’s instructive to observe what happened as each of these
movements followed its trajectory through time. The New Age movement, despite
the overblown hopes placed on it by some of its supporters, never had a shot at
significant political or cultural power, and it soon found its way to the
fringes, where it shed its links to science, mingled with the remains of older
alternative spiritualities, and began to take the unwholesome interest in
conspiracy theories and apocalyptic prophecies that eventually dominated the
whole movement. Christian fundamentalism
and the environmental movement had far more political clout even in their
idealistic early phases, and so had to be bought off; in both cases this was
done, as it’s usually done, by dangling the bait of money and influence in
front of organizations and spokespersons in the movement who were willing to
"be realistic"—that is, to scrap any serious challenge to the
existing order of society and focus on a narrowly defined agenda instead.
Once the bait was taken, in turn, the jaws of the trap
snapped smoothly shut. The organizations and spokespersons who had swallowed
the bait were expected to cooperate in the marginalization of those who refused
it, and to buy into the broader agenda of the people who were cutting the
checks even when that agenda contradicted the original purpose of the movement,
as it inevitably did. Meanwhile, the narrowing of each group’s purpose
committed it to an increasingly defensive and reactive stance: the fundamentalists fixated on defending a
handful of sexual customs, the environmentalists on defending a handful of
species, and in both cases the larger partisan coalition to which the movement
now belonged made plenty of noise about supporting the movement and then did
essentially nothing, insisting that the hard realities of politics made it
impossible to follow through on its commitments.
Both movements thus became what I’ve called captive
constituencies of existing power centers. The current fracas around the
Keystone pipeline shows just how much effective influence the environmental
movement succeeded in buying by cashing in its hopes, its dreams and its principles. The Obama administration, if it chooses to do
so, can agree to the pipeline and suffer no noticeable backlash from the
environmental movement. There would be
some yelling in the media and the blogosphere, to be sure, and a few protest
marches in designated free speech zones, but come 2016 the Democrats will wave
the scary Republicans at whatever remains of the environmental movement, the
leaders of the big environmental organizations will give speeches about how
disappointed they are in the Democrats but we still have to support them
against the GOP, and rank and file environmentalists will line up meekly and
vote for the Democratic candidate despite it all. Obama could as well order the
national park system strip-mined for coal and launch a new biofuels program
that will turn endangered species into synthetic petroleum, and the results
would be precisely the same; it doesn’t help, of course, that the Republicans
treat their captive constituencies with the identical degree of scorn.
It’s no accident that when movements for social change
fail—whether the failure is simply a matter of banishment to the fringes, as
happened to the New Age, or whether the movement is courted, seduced, betrayed
and abandoned like the hapless heroine of a Victorian penny-dreadful novel, as
happened to the fundamentalists and the environmentalists—apocalyptic beliefs
become increasingly central to their rhetoric. Partly, that’s a reflection of
the massive role that threats of imminent doom have always had in the rhetoric
of social change, especially but not only here in America. Since the Reverend
Jonathan Edwards thrilled colonial New England with his famous sermon
"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," attempts to move American
society in any direction have normally relied on the insistence that failing to
make whatever change is being proposed guarantees some awful fate or other. The
less effective the movement, by and large, the more strident the threats of
apocalypse tend to be, and the decline of a social movement into political
irrelevance is normally accompanied by a final burst of rhetoric pushing the
movement’s apocalyptic claims to their ultimate extreme.
Still, there’s more going on here than the common tendency
of activists at all points on the political continuum to respond to the failure
of rhetorical threats by doubling down. The distinction made in an earlier post
between the shape of time defined by Augustine of Hippo and the one proposed by
Joachim of Flores has a great deal of relevance here. All three of the
movements I’ve discussed above started their trajectory with a Joachimist model
of history: the world had arrived at the
brink of a grand transformation, and once people embraced the great forward
leap that the movement offered, some equivalent of Joachim’s Age of the Holy
Spirit would usher in a bright new future.
The New Age movement officially kept that faith—it could hardly do
otherwise, having defined itself in terms of a new age that was supposedly about
to be born—but as the Aquarian Conspiracy fizzled out and the world kept
following its accustomed path, New Age thinkers drifted out of a Joachimist
model into an Augustinian one, in which the repeated failures of ordinary
history would finally be redeemed by an equivalent of the Second Coming on
December 21, 2012.
For the fundamentalist and environmentalist movements, the
shift from Joachimist to Augustinian models of time was if anything more
sharply defined. Once both movements abandoned the hope of changing society as
a whole, they had slipped over into Augustinian time, and they promptly
identified themselves with the righteous remnant of the Augustinian vision.
Once they did that, their defeat was certain; the role of the righteous remnant
in Augustine’s shape of time is to strive to defend the good against the
assaults of an evil world, and fail heroically, so that the triumph of the Second Coming or its secular equivalent
can be all the more glorious. Activists in both movements, without ever quite
noticing it, accordingly embraced tactics that were guaranteed to fail.
What media activist Patrick Reinsborough has called
"defector syndrome"—the fine art of arguing for your side in such a
way that only those who already agree wholeheartedly with your viewpoint will
be favorably impressed, while everyone else will be repelled—has played a large
role in such exercises. I’m thinking here, among other things, of a book on
energy issues I got in the mail not long ago, an unwieldy coffee table-sized
object that started out with a photo essay in which each page had an slogan in
60-point type, all caps, yelling something or other about the world’s energy
situation. It’s hard to imagine that anybody but a true believer in the
editor’s point of view would get past the bellowing; I found it unreadable, and
I more or less agree with the book’s viewpoint.
To the ordinary citizens and opinion makers in the middle of
the road, the people the environmental movement desperately needs to engage,
that sort of tirade simply confirms the other side’s insistence that
environmentalists are by definition a pack of raving extremists. The same sort
of self-inflicted damage is even more common in the fundamentalist scene—think
of Reverend Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, whose shrill ravings
about the alleged evils of homosexuality have probably done more to make
ordinary Americans sympathetic to gays and lesbians than any other factor in
living memory. That’s the kind of own
goal that tends to get scored when a movement for social change embraces the Augustinian
shape of time in an uncritical fashion.
It’s important to understand why this should be so. The shape of time that Augustine proposed in
The City of God was ultimately a response to failure—the
failure of the Roman state and society to maintain itself against the forces
that were dragging it down the road to collapse, and the failure of the
Christian religion to make good on the promises of an earlier generation of
theologians and save the Roman world from itself. As a response to failure, in
turn, it was extraordinarily effective.
If you and your civilization are staring the Dark Ages in the face, a
way of thinking about time that treats ordinary history as an evil irrelevance
and focuses all hope on a shining vision of a world after history ends is not
merely comforting, it’s adaptive. It inspired monks and nuns across Dark Age
Europe to preserve the cultural and scientific
heritage of the ancient world, and helped many ordinary people find a reason
to keep going even in the harshest times.
A way of thinking that’s adaptive during the decline of a
civilization, though, may not be equally so in struggles for influence in an
age of abundance. As I suggested earlier in this post, any social change will
benefit some people at the expense of others; what counts as progress from the
point of view of the winners in any given struggle, in other words, will
usually look very like decline from the point of view of the losers. If the only two ways of thinking about
historical change your culture offers you are the Joachimist and the
Augustinian shapes of time, in turn—and this is decidedly true of contemporary
industrial society—the winners in any given social conflict are likely to
embrace a Joachimist view in which their triumph marks the arrival of a grand
positive transformation and a great leap forward along the inevitable track of
progress, while the losers are just as likely to embrace an Augustinian view in
which their defeat will inevitably be paid back with interest by some
apocalyptic transformation in the near future.
Those beliefs are comforting, they allow the cascading randomness of
history to be forced into an emotionally satisfying shape, and they encourage
each side to continue to enact their assigned social roles as winners and
losers.
This is one of the core reasons, I’ve come to believe, that
peak oil has been the red-haired stepchild of the environmental movement since
the contemporary peak oil scene began to emerge in the late 1990s. There have
been any number of attempts to force it into a Joachimist patterm—think of all
the attempts to claim that we can overcome the challenge of peak oil through
some great collective leap to a better world—or an Augustinian one—think of all
the attempts to extract a satisfyingly sudden cataclysm from the long slow
downward arc of fossil fuel depletion—but the great collective leaps have
proven embarrassingly out of reach, and the sudden cataclysms contrast
awkwardly with the reality of rising energy costs, disintegrating
infrastructure, and economic dysfunction that peak oil is helping to bring
about right now. If peak oil and the
wider impact of the limits to growth define the future we actually face, both
the winners and the losers are out of luck.
Of course this points up one of the other features of peak
oil that’s rendered it so unwelcome: it
provides a basis for accurate predictions. I accept that there are at least a
few people on any given side of today’s reality wars who believe, totally and
trustingly, that victory for their side will bring about a great leap forward
to a new epoch of history, or that the inevitable defeat of their side will be
followed by a vast catastrophe that will prove to the rest of humanity just how
wrong they were. I find myself questioning, though, just how large a percentage
of those who make such claims can be counted among the true believers. I’ve known far too many people whose belief
in the imminent destruction of the world didn’t keep them from putting money into
their retirement accounts, or whose loudly proclamed commitment to some cause
never quite caused them to live up to the ideals they claimed to espouse.
I commented in
a blog post last year on the odd way that mainstream climate
activists had reacted to news that the Arctic Ocean was fizzing with methane.
Many public figures—iconic climate scientist James
Lovelock among them—who had insisted not that long before that
releases of Arctic methane meant "game over" suddenly backed away
from those claims, making embarrassed noises. Those who accepted at face value
the predictions of imminent doom issued by Lovelock and his peers are at least
being consistent when they decide that, now that methane is bubbling out of the
Arctic ooze, it’s all over. It may
simply be their bad luck to have missed the winks and nudges that signaled, as
I suggested in the post just mentioned, that the predictions had more to do
with putting pressure on China and her allies than they did with purely
objective science.
