Regular readers of this blog will no doubt recall that,
toward the beginning of last month, I
commented on a hostile review of one of my books that had just
appeared in the financial blogosphere. At the time, I noted that the mainstream
media normally ignore the critics of business as usual, and suggested that my
readers might want to watch for similar attacks by more popular pundits, in
more mainstream publications, on those critics who have more of a claim to
conventional respectability than, say, archdruids. Such attacks, as I pointed
out then, normally happen in the weeks immediately before business as usual
slams face first into a brick wall of its own making
Well, it’s happened. Brace yourself for the impact.
The pundit in question was no less a figure than Paul
Krugman, who chose the opinion pages of the New York Times for a shrill and nearly fact-free diatribe lumping Post Carbon Institute
together with the Koch brothers as purveyors of “climate despair.” PCI’s crime,
in Krugman’s eyes, consists of noticing that the pursuit of limitless economic
growth on a finite planet, with or without your choice of green spraypaint, is
a recipe for disaster. Instead of paying
attention to such notions, he insists, we ought to believe the IMF and a panel
of economists when they claim that replacing trillions of dollars of fossil
fuel-specific infrastructure with some unnamed set of sustainable replacements
will somehow cost nothing, and that we can have all the economic growth we want
because, well, because we can, just you wait and see!
PCI’s Richard Heinberg responded with a
crisp and tautly reasoned rebuttal pointing out the gaping logical
and factual holes in Krugman’s screed, so there’s no need for me to cover the
same ground here. Mind you, Heinberg was too gentlemanly to point out that the
authorities Krugman cites aren’t exactly known for their predictive
accuracy—the IMF in particular has become notorious in recent decades for
insisting that austerity policies that have brought ruin to every country that
has ever tried them are the one sure ticket to prosperity—but we can let that
pass, too. What I want to talk about here is what Krugman’s diatribe implies
for the immediate future.
Under normal circumstances, dissident groups such as Post
Carbon Institute and dissident intellectuals such as Richard Heinberg never,
but never, get air time in the mainstream media. At most, a cheap shot or two
might be aimed at unnamed straw men while passing from one bit of conventional
wisdom to the next. It’s been one of the most interesting details of the last
few years that peak oil has actually been mentioned by name repeatedly by
mainstream pundits: always, to be sure, in tones of contempt, and always in the
context of one more supposed proof that a finite planet can
too cough up infinite quantities of oil, but it’s been
named. The kind of total suppression that happened between the mid-1980s and
the turn of the millennium, when the entire subject vanished from the
collective conversation of our society, somehow didn’t happen this time.
That says to me that a great many of those who were busy
denouncing peak oil and the limits to growth were far less confident than they
wanted to appear. You don’t keep on trying to disprove something that nobody
believes, and of course the mere fact that oil prices and other quantitative
measures kept on behaving the way peak oil theory said they would behave,
rather than trotting obediently the way peak oil critics such as Bjorn Lomborg
and Daniel Yergin told them to go, didn’t help matters much. The cognitive
dissonance between the ongoing proclamations of coming prosperity via fracking
and the soaring debt load and grim financial figures of the fracking industry
has added to the burden.
Even so, it’s only in extremis that
denunciations of this kind shift from attacks on ideas to attacks on
individuals. As I noted in the earlier post, one swallow does not a summer make,
and one ineptly written book review by an obscure blogger on an obscure website
denouncing an archdruid, of all people, might indicate nothing more than a bout
of dyspepsia or a disappointing evening at the local singles bar. When a significant media figure uses one of
the world’s major newspapers of record to lash out at a particular band of
economic heretics by name, on the other hand, we’ve reached the kind of
behavior that only happens, historically speaking, when crunch time is very,
very close. Given that we’ve also got a wildly overvalued stock market, falling
commodity prices, and a great many other symptoms of drastic economic trouble
bearing down on us right now, not to mention the inevitable unraveling of the
fracking bubble, there’s a definite chance that the next month or two could see
the start of a really spectacular financial crash.
While we wait for financiers to start raining down on Wall
Street sidewalks, though, it’s far from inappropriate to continue with the
current sequence of posts about the end of industrial civilization—especially
as the next topic in line is the way that the elites of a falling civilization
destroy themselves.
One of the persistent tropes in current speculations on the
future of our civilization revolves around the notion that the current holders
of wealth and influence will entrench themselves even more firmly in their
positions as things fall apart. A
post here back in 2007 criticized what was then a popular form of
that trope, the claim that the elites planned to impose a “feudal-fascist”
regime on the deindustrial world. That critique still applies; that said, it’s
worth discussing what tends to happen to elite classes in the decline and fall
of a civilization, and seeing what that has to say about the probable fate of
the industrial world’s elite class as our civilization follows the familiar
path.
It’s probably necessary to say up front that we’re not
talking about the evil space lizards that haunt David Icke’s paranoid
delusions, or for that matter the faux-Nietzschean supermen who play a parallel
role in Ayn Rand’s dreary novels and even drearier pseudophilosophical rants.
What we’re talking about, rather, is something far simpler, which all of my
readers will have experienced in their own lives. Every group of social primates has an inner
core of members who have more access to the resources controlled by the group,
and more influence over the decisions made by the group, than other
members. How individuals enter that core
and maintain themselves there against their rivals varies from one set of
social primates to another—baboons settle such matters with threat displays
backed up with violence, church ladies do the same thing with social
maneuvering and gossip, and so on—but the effect is the same: a few enter the
inner core, the rest are excluded from it. That process, many times amplified,
gives rise to the ruling elite of a civilization.
I don’t happen to know much about the changing patterns of
leadership in baboon troops, but among human beings, there’s a predictable
shift over time in the way that individuals gain access to the elite. When
institutions are new and relatively fragile, it’s fairly easy for a gifted and
ambitious outsider to bluff and bully his way into the elite. As any given
institution becomes older and more firmly settled in its role, that possibility
fades. What happens instead in a mature institution is that the existing
members of the elite group select, from the pool of available candidates, those
individuals who will be allowed to advance into the elite. The church ladies just mentioned are a good
example of this process in action; if any of my readers are doctoral candidates
in sociology looking for a dissertation topic, I encourage them to consider
joining a local church, and tracking the way the elderly women who run most of
its social functions groom their own replacements and exclude those they
consider unfit for that role.
That process is a miniature version of the way the ruling
elite of the world’s industrial nations select new additions to their number.
There, as among church ladies, there are basically two routes in. You can be
born into the family of a member of the inner circle, and if you don’t run off
the rails too drastically, you can count on a place in the inner circle
yourself in due time. Alternatively, you can work your way in from outside by
being suitably deferential and supportive to the inner circle, meeting all of
its expectations and conforming to its opinions and decisions, until the senior
members of the elite start treating you as a junior member and the junior
members have to deal with you as an equal. You can watch that at work, as
already mentioned, in your local church—and you can also watch it at work in
the innermost circles of power and privilege in American life.
Here in America, the top universities are the places where
the latter version of the process stands out in all its dubious splendor. To
these universities, every autumn, come the children of rich and influential
families to begin the traditional four-year rite of passage. It would require
something close to a superhuman effort on their part to fail. If they don’t
fancy attending lectures, they can hire impecunious classmates as “note takers”
to do that for them. If they don’t wish
to write papers, the same principle applies, and the classmates are more than
ready to help out, since that can be the first step to a career as an executive
assistant, speechwriter, or the like. The other requirements of college life
can be met in the same manner as needed, and the university inevitably looks
the other way, knowing that they can count on a generous donation from the
parents as a reward for putting up with Junior’s antics.
Those of my readers who’ve read the novels of Thomas Mann,
and recall the satiric portrait of central European minor royalty in
Royal Highness, already know their way around the sort of
life I’m discussing here. Those who don’t may want to recall everything they
learned about the education and business career of George W. Bush. All the
formal requirements are met, every gracious gesture is in place: the diploma, the prestigious positions in
business or politics or the stateside military, maybe a book written by one of
those impecunious classmates turned ghostwriter and published to bland and
favorable reviews in the newspapers of record:
it’s all there, and the only detail that nobody sees fit to mention is
that the whole thing could be done just as well by a well-trained cockatiel,
and much of it is well within the capacities of a department store
mannequin—provided, of course, that one of those impecunious classmates stands
close by, pulling the strings that make the hand wave and the head nod.
The impecunious classmates, for their part, are aspirants to
the second category mentioned above, those who work their way into the elite
from outside. They also come to the same top universities every autumn, but
they don’t get there because of who their parents happen to be. They get there
by devoting every spare second to that goal from middle school on. They take
the right classes, get the right grades, play the right sports, pursue the
right extracurricular activities, and rehearse for their entrance interviews by
the hour; they are bright, earnest, amusing, pleasant, because they know that
that’s what they need to be in order to get where they want to go. Scratch that
glossy surface and you’ll find an anxious conformist terrified of failing to
measure up to expectations, and it’s a reasonable terror—most of them will in
fact fail to do that, and never know how or why.
Once in an Ivy League university or the equivalent, they’re
pretty much guaranteed passing grades and a diploma unless they go out of their
way to avoid them. Most of them, though, will be shunted off to midlevel posts
in business, government, or one of the professions. Only the lucky few will
catch the eye of someone with elite connections, and be gently nudged out of
their usual orbit into a place from which further advancement is possible.
Whether the rich kid whose exam papers you ghostwrote takes a liking to you,
and arranges to have you hired as his executive assistant when he gets his
first job out of school, or the father of a friend of a friend meets you on
some social occasion, chats with you, and later on has the friend of a friend
mention in passing that you might consider a job with this senator or that
congressman, or what have you, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, not
to mention how precisely you conform to the social and intellectual
expectations of the people who have the power to give or withhold the prize you
crave so desperately.
That’s how the governing elite of today’s America recruits
new members. Mutatis mutandis, it’s how the governing elite
of every stable, long-established society recruits new members. That procedure
has significant advantages, and not just for the elites. Above all else, it
provides stability. Over time, any elite self-selected in this fashion
converges asymptotically on the standard model of a mature aristocracy, with an
inner core of genial duffers surrounded by an outer circle of rigid
conformists—the last people on the planet who are likely to disturb the settled
calm of the social order. Like the lead-weighted keel of a deepwater sailboat,
their inertia becomes a stabilizing force that only the harshest of tempests
can overturn.
Inevitably, though, this advantage comes with certain
disadvantages, two of which are of particular importance for our subject. The
first is that stability and inertia are not necessarily a good thing in a time
of crisis. In particular, if the society governed by an elite of the sort just
described happens to depend for its survival on some unsustainable relationship
with surrounding societies, the world of nature, or both, the leaden weight of
a mature elite can make necessary change impossible until it’s too late for any
change at all to matter. One of the most consistent results of the sort of
selection process I’ve sketched out is the elimination of any tendency toward
original thinking on the part of those selected; “creativity” may be lauded,
but what counts as creativity in such a system consists solely of taking some
piece of accepted conventional wisdom one very carefully measured step further
than anyone else has quite gotten around to going yet.
In a time of drastic change, that sort of limitation is
lethal. More deadly still is the other disadvantage I have in mind, which is
the curious and consistent habit such elites have of blind faith in their own
invincibility. The longer a given elite has been in power, and the more august
and formal and well-aged the institutions of its power and wealth become, the
easier it seems to be for the very rich to forget that their forefathers
established themselves in that position by some form of more or less blatant
piracy, and that they themselves could be deprived of it by that same means.
Thus elites tend to, shall we say, “misunderestimate” exactly those crises and
sources of conflict that pose an existential threat to the survival of their
class and its institutions, precisely because they can’t imagine that an
existential threat to these things could be posed by anything at all.
The irony, and it’s a rich one, is that the same conviction
tends to become just as widespread outside elite circles as within it. The
illusion of invincibility, the conviction that the existing order of things is
impervious to any but the most cosmetic changes, tends to be pervasive in any
mature society, and remains fixed in place right up to the moment that
everything changes and the existing order of things is swept away forever. The
intensity of the illusion very often has nothing to do with the real condition
of the social order to which it applies; France in 1789 and Russia in 1917 were
both brittle, crumbling, jerry-rigged hulks waiting for the push that would
send them tumbling into oblivion, which they each received shortly
thereafter—but next to no one saw the gaping vulnerabilities at the time. In
both cases, even the urban rioters that applied the push were left standing
there slack-jawed when they saw how readily the whole thing came crashing down.
The illusion of invincibility is far and away the most
important asset a mature ruling elite has, because it discourages deliberate
attempts at regime change from within. Everyone in the society, in the elite or
outside it, assumes that the existing order is so firmly bolted into place that
only the most apocalyptic events would be able to shake its grip. In such a
context, most activists either beg for scraps from the tables of the rich or
content themselves with futile gestures of hostility at a system they don’t
seriously expect to be able to harm, while the members of the elite go their
genial way, stumbling from one preventable disaster to another, convinced of
the inevitability of their positions, and blissfully unconcerned with the
possibility—which normally becomes a reality sooner or later—that their own
actions might be sawing away at the old and brittle branch on which they’re
seated.
If this doesn’t sound familiar to you, dear reader, you
definitely need to get out more. The behavior of the holders of wealth and
power in contemporary America, as already suggested, is a textbook example of
the way that a mature elite turns senile. Consider the fact that the merry
pranksters in the banking industry, having delivered a body blow to the global
economy in 2008 and 2009 with worthless mortgage-backed securities, are now
busy hawking
equally worthless securities backed by income from rental properties.
Each round of freewheeling financial fraud, each preventable economic slump,
increases the odds that an already brittle, crumbling, and jerry-rigged system
will crack under the strain, opening a window of opportunity that hostile
foreign powers and domestic demagogues alike will not be slow to exploit. Do such
considerations move the supposed defenders of the status quo to rein in the
manufacture of worthless financial paper? Surely you jest.
It deserves to be said that at least one corner of the
current American ruling elite has recently showed some faint echo of the hard
common sense once possessed by its piratical forebears. Now of course the
recent announcement that one of the Rockefeller charities is about to move some
of its investment funds out of fossil fuel industries doesn’t actually justify
the rapturous language lavished on it by activists; the amount of money being
moved amounts to one tiny droplet in the overflowing bucket of Rockefeller
wealth, after all. For that matter, as
the fracking industry founders under a soaring debt load and slumping petroleum
prices warn of troubles ahead, pulling investment funds out of fossil fuel
companies and putting them in industries that will likely see panic buying when
the fracking bubble pops may be motivated by something other than a sudden
outburst of environmental sensibility. Even so, it’s worth noting that the
Rockefellers, at least, still remember that it’s crucial for elites to play to
the audience, to convince those outside elite circles that the holders of
wealth and power still have some vague sense of concern for the survival of the
society they claim the right to lead.
Most members of America’s elite have apparently lost track
of that. Even such modest gestures as the Rockefellers have just made seem to
be outside the repertory of most of the wealthy and privileged these days. Secure in their sense of their own
invulnerability, they amble down the familiar road that led so many of their
equivalents in past societies to dispossession or annihilation. How that
pattern typically plays out will be the subject of next week’s post.
