Here in the Appalachians, at least, there’s something about
the month of January that encourages sober thoughts. Maybe it’s the weather, which is pretty
reliably gray and cold; maybe it’s the arrival of the bills from the holiday
season just ended, or the awkward way that those bills usually arrive about the
same time that the annual crop of New Year’s resolutions start landing in the
recycle bin. Pick your reason, but one
way or another it seems like a good time to circle back and finish up the theme
I’ve been developing here for most of a year now, the decline and fall of
America’s global empire and the difficult task of rebuilding something
worthwhile in its wake.
The hard work of reinventing democracy in a post-imperial
America, the subject of several of last month’s posts, is only one facet of
this broader challenge. I’ve mentioned
before that the pursuit of empire is a drug, and like most other drugs, it
makes you feel great at the time and then wallops you the next morning. It’s been just over a hundred years now since
the United States launched itself on its path to global empire, and the
hangover that was made inevitable by that century-long bender is waiting in the
wings. I suspect one of the reasons the
US government is frantically going through the empties in the trash, looking
for one that still has a few sips left in it, is precisely that first dim
dawning awareness of just how bad the hangover is going to be.
It’s worth taking a few moments to go over some of the more
visible signposts of the road down from empire.
To begin with, the US economy has been crippled by a century of imperial
tribute flowing in from overseas. That’s
what happened to our manufacturing sector; once the rest of the industrial
world recovered from the Second World War, manufacturers in an inflated tribute
economy couldn’t compete with the lower costs of factories in less
extravagantly overfunded parts of the world, and America’s industrial heartland
turned into the Rust Belt. As the impact
of the tribute economy spread throughout US society, in turn, it became next to
impossible to make a living doing anything productive, and gaming the imperial
system in one way or another—banking, investment, government contracts, you
name it—turned into the country’s sole consistent growth industry.
That imposed distortions on every aspect of American
society, which bid fair to cripple its ability to pick up the pieces when the
empire goes away. As productive economic
sectors withered, the country’s educational system reoriented itself toward the
unproductive, churning out an ever-expanding range of administrative
specialties for corporations and government while shutting down what was once a
world-class system of vocational and trade schools. We now have far more office fauna than any
sane society needs, and a drastic shortage of people who have any less abstract
skill set. For the time being, we can
afford to offshore jobs, or import people from other countries to do them at
substandard wages; as our empire winds down and those familiar bad habits stop
being possible, the shortage of Americans with even the most basic practical
skills will become a massive economic burden.
Meanwhile the national infrastructure is caught in a
downward spiral of malign neglect made inevitable by the cash crunch that
always hits empires on the way down.
Empire is an expensive habit; the
long-term effects of the imperial wealth pump on those nations subjected to its
business end mean that the income from imperial arrangements goes down over
time, while the impact of the tribute economy at home generally causes the
costs of empire go up over time. The
result can be seen on Capitol Hill day by day, as one fantastically expensive
weapons system after another sails through Congress with few dissenting votes,
while critically important domestic programs are gutted by bipartisan
agreement, or bog down in endless bickering.
The reliable result is a shell of a nation, seemingly strong when
observed from outside but hollowing out within, and waiting for the
statistically inevitable shove that will launch it on its final skid down the
rough slope into history’s compost bin.
You may well be thinking, dear reader, that the logical
response of a nation caught in a predicament of this sort would be to bite the
bullet, back away from empire in a deliberate fashion, and use the last bit of
income from the tribute economy to pay for the expenses of rebuilding a
domestic economy of a more normal kind.
You’d be right, too, but there are compelling reasons why very few
empires in history have had the great good sense to manage their decline in
this manner. Imperial China did it in
the fifteenth century, scrapping a burgeoning maritime empire in the Indian
Ocean, and of course Britain did it after 1945, though that was largely because
a 500-pound gorilla named the United States was sitting on Britannia’s
prostrate body, informing her politely that in future, the global empire would
be American, thank you very much; other than that, examples are few and far
between.
The logic here is easy to follow. Any attempt to withdraw from imperial
commitments will face concerted resistance from those who profit from the
status quo, while those who claim to oppose empire are rarely willing to keep
supporting a policy of imperial retreat once it turns out, as it inevitably
does, that the costs of that policy will include a direct impact on their own
incomes or the value of their investments. Thus politicians who back a policy
of withdrawal from empire can count on being pilloried by their opponents as
traitors to their country, and abandoned by erstwhile allies who dislike empire
in the abstract but want to retain lifestyles that only an imperial tribute
economy can support. Since politicians
are, after all, in the business of getting into office and staying there, their
enthusiasm for such self-sacrificing policies is understandably limited.
The usual result is a frantic effort to kick the can as far
as possible down the road, so that somebody else has to deal with it. Most of what’s going on in Washington DC
these days can be described very exactly in those terms. Despite popular rhetoric, America’s
politicians these days are not unusually wicked or ignorant; they are, by and
large, roughly as ethical as their constituents, and rather better
educated—though admittedly neither of these is saying much. What distinguishes them from the statesmen of
an earlier era, rather, is that they are face to face with an insoluble dilemma
that their predecessors in office spent the last few decades trying to
ignore. As the costs of empire rise, the
profits of empire dwindle, the national economy circles the drain, the burden
of deferred maintenance on the nation’s infrastructure grows, and the impact of
the limits to growth on industrial civilization worldwide becomes ever harder
to evade, they face the unenviable choice between massive trouble now and even
more massive trouble later; being human, they repeatedly choose the latter, and
console themselves with the empty hope that something might turn up.
It’s a common hope these days. I’ve commented here more than
once about the way that the Rapture, the Singularity, and all the other
apocalyptic fantasies on offer these days serve primarily as a means by which
people can pretend to themselves that the future they’re going to get isn’t the
one that their actions and evasions are busily creating for them. The same is true of a great many less gaudy
fictions about the future—the much-ballyhooed breakthroughs that never quite
get around to happening, the would-be mass movements that never attract anyone
but the usual handful of activists, the great though usually unspecified leaps
in consciousness that will allegedly happen any day now, and all the rest of
it. The current frenzy of meretricious
twaddle in the media about how shale gas is going to make the US a net energy
exporter gets a good share of its impetus from the same delusive hope—though
admittedly the fact that a great many people have invested a great deal of
money in companies in the fracking business, and are trying to justify their
investments using the same sort of reasoning that boosted the late housing
bubble, also has more than a little to do with it.
There’s likely to be plenty more of the same thing in the
decades ahead. Social psychologists have
written at length about what James Howard Kunstler has usefully termed the
psychology of previous investment, the process by which people convince
themselves to throw bad money after good, or to remain committed to a belief
system even though all available evidence demonstrates that it isn’t true and
doesn’t work. The critical factor in
such cases is the emotional cost of admitting that the decision to buy the stock,
adopt the belief system, or make whatever other mistake is at issue, was in
fact a mistake. The more painful it is to make that admission, the more
forcefully most people will turn away from the necessity to do so, and it’s
safe to assume that they’ll embrace the most consummate malarkey if doing so
allows them to insist to themselves that the mistake wasn’t a mistake after
all.
As America stumbles down from its imperial peak, in other words, the one growth industry this
country will have left will consist of efforts to maintain the pretense that
America doesn’t have an empire, that the empire isn’t falling, and that the
fall doesn’t matter anyway. (Yes, those statements are mutually
contradictory. Get used to it; you’ll be
hearing plenty of statements in the years to come that are even more more
incoherent.) As the decline accelerates,
anyone who offers Americans a narrative that allows them to pretend they’ll get
the shiny new future that our national mythology promises them will be able to
count on a large and enthusiastic audience.
The narratives being marketed for this purpose need not be convincing;
they need not even be sane. So long as
they make it possible for Americans to maintain the fiction of a brighter
future in the teeth of the facts, they’ll be popular.
The one bit of hope I can offer here is that such efforts at
collective make-believe don’t last forever.
Sooner or later, the fact of decline will be admitted and, later still,
accepted; sooner or later, our collective conversation will shift from how
America can maintain perpetual growth to how America can hold onto what it has,
then to how America can recover some of what it lost, and from there to
figuring out how America—or whatever grab bag of successor societies occupies
the territory currently held by the United States—can get by in the harsh new
deindustrial world that grew up around it while nobody was looking. It’s a normal process in an age of decline,
and can be traced in the literature of more than one civilization before ours.
It bears remembering, though, that individuals are going
through the same process of redefinition all by themselves. This process differs from the five stages of
peak oil, which I’ve discussed elsewhere, in that it’s not primarily about the
emotional impact of loss; it’s a matter of expectations, and of the most
pragmatic sort of economic expectations at that. Consider a midlevel managerial employee in
some corporation or other whose job, like so many other jobs these days, is
about to go away forever. Before the
rumors start flying, she’s concerned mostly with clawing her way up the
corporate ladder and increasing her share of the perks and privileges our
society currently grants to its middle classes.
Then the rumors of imminent layoffs start flying, and she abruptly has
to shift her focus to staying employed.
The pink slips come next, bearing bad news, and her focus shifts again,
to getting a new job; when that doesn’t happen and the reality of long term
joblessness sinks in, a final shift of focus takes place, and she has to deal
with a new and challenging world.
This has already happened to a great many people in
America. It’s going to happen, over the
years ahead, to a great many more—probably, all things considered, to a large
majority of people in the American middle class, just as it happened to a large
majority of the industrial working class a few decades further back. Not everyone, it has to be said, will survive
the transition; alcoholism, drug abuse, mental and physical illness, and
suicide are among the standard risks run by the downwardly mobile. A fair number of those who do survive will
spend the rest of their lives clinging to the vain hope that something will
happen and give them back what they lost.
It’s a long, rough road down from empire, and the losses involved
are not merely material in nature. Basing one’s identity on the privileges and
extravagances made possible by the current US global empire may seem like a
silly thing to do, but it’s very common.
To lose whatever markers of status are respected in any given social
class, whether we’re talking about a private jet and a Long Island mansion, a
fashionable purse and a chic condo in an upscale neighborhood, or a pickup and
a six-pack, can be tantamount to losing one’s identity if that identity has no
more solid foundation—and a great many marketing firms have spent decades
trying to insure that most Americans never think of looking for more solid
foundations.
That last point has implications we’ll be exploring in a
later sequence of posts. For the time
being, though, I want to talk a bit about what all this means to those of my
readers who have already come to terms with the reality of decline, and are
trying to figure out how to live their lives in a world in which the
conventional wisdom of the last three hundred years or so has suddenly been
turned on its head. The first and, in many ways, the most crucial point is one
that’s been covered here repeatedly already:
you are going to have to walk the road down from empire yourself. Nobody else is going to do it for you, and
you can’t even assume that anybody else will make it easier for you. What you can do, to make it a little easier
than it will otherwise be, is to start walking it before you have to.
That means, to return to a slogan I’ve used more than once
in this blog, using LESS—Less Energy, Stuff, and Stimulation. The more energy you need to maintain your
everyday lifestyle, the more vulnerable you’ll be to sudden disruptions when
the sprawling infrastructure that supplies you with that energy starts having
running into serious trouble. Today,
routine blackouts and brownouts of the electrical grid, and rationing or
unpredictable availability of motor fuel, have become everyday facts of life in
Third World nations that used to have relatively reliable access to
energy. As America’s global empire
unravels and the blowback from a century of empire comes home to roost, we can
expect the same thing here. Get ready
for that in advance, and you won’t face a crisis when it happens.
The same is true of the extravagant material inputs most
Americans see as necessities, and of the constant stream of sensory stimulation
that most Americans use to numb themselves to the unwelcome aspects of their
surroundings and their lives. You will
be doing without those at some point.
The sooner you learn how to get by in their absence, the better off
you’ll be—and the sooner you get out from under the torrent of media noise
you’ve been taught to use to numb yourself, the sooner you can start assessing
the world around you with a relatively clear head, and the sooner you’ll notice
just how far down the arc of America’s descent we’ve already come.
Using LESS isn’t the only thing that’s worth doing in
advance, of course. I’ve discussed
elsewhere, for example, the need to develop the skills that will enable you to
produce goods or provide services for other people, using relatively simple
tools and, if at all possible, the energy of your own muscles. As the imperial tribute economy winds down
and the United States loses the ability to import cheap goods and cheap labor
from abroad, people will still need goods and services, and will pay for them
with whatever measure of value is available—even if that amounts to their own
unskilled labor. There are plenty of
other steps that can be taken to prepare for life in a post-imperial society
skidding down the far side of Hubbert’s peak, and the sooner you start taking
those steps, the better prepared you will be to cope with that unfamiliar
world.
Still, it may be possible to go further than that. In several of December’s posts here I raised
the possibility that, in the wake of empire, the deliberate cultivation of
certain core skills—specifically, clear reasoning, public speaking, and
democratic process—might make it possible to kickstart a revival of America’s
formerly vibrant democratic traditions. The same principle, I’d like to
suggest, may be able to be applied more generally. Certain core insights that were central to
pre-imperial America’s more praiseworthy achievements, but were tossed into the
dumpster during the rush to empire, could be revived and put back to work in
the post-imperial era. If that can be
done at all, it’s going to involve a lot of work and a willingness to challenge
some widely held notions of contemporary American culture, but I think the
attempt is worth making. We’ll begin
that discussion next week.
