"This year’s Earth Day in Ashland, Oregon, where I live,
featured an interfaith service at the local Unitarian church, and I wasn’t too
surprised to get a call inviting me to be one of the presenters.”
That was the opening sentence of the first post ever to
appear on The Archdruid Report, Real
Druids, which went up ten years ago this Friday. When I typed those
words, I had no clear idea of what I was going to do with the blog I’d just
started. The end of the publishing industry I wrote for in those days was just
then waking up to the marketing potential of author blogs; I was also in the
third year of my unpaid day job as head of the Ancient Order of Druids in
America (AODA), a small and old-fashioned Druid order distinctly out of step
with the pop-culture Neopaganism of the time, and hoped to use a blog to bring
the order to the attention of anyone out there who might be interested in something
so unfashionable.
So I sat down at the computer, logged into my Blogger
account, clicked on the button marked new post, and stared blankly at it
for a while before I started to type. That, as they say, is how it all began.
In terms of the perspectives with which this blog deals—the
grand sweep of human history, and the much vaster sweep of geological and
evolutionary deep time—ten years is less than an eyeblink. In terms of a single
human life, though, it’s a considerable span. Over that period I’ve moved from
Ashland to Cumberland, Maryland, the red-brick mill town in the north central
Appalachians where I now live. My writing career has burgeoned since then, too,
helped along considerably by the two novels and nine nonfiction books that started
out as sequences of blog posts.
My other career, the unpaid one mentioned above, also went
through plenty of changes—if any of my readers ever have the opportunity to
become the presiding officer of a nearly defunct Druid order and help it get
back on its feet, I certainly recommend the experience! Still, twelve years in
the hot seat was enough, and at the winter solstice just past I stepped down as
Grand Archdruid of AODA with a sigh of relief, and handed the management of the
order over to my successor Gordon Cooper.
There have been plenty of other changes over the last ten
years, of course, and quite a few of them also affected The Archdruid Report.
One that had a particularly significant impact was the rise, fall, and
resurgence of the peak oil scene. Most of a decade before that first post, a
handful of people—most of them petroleum geologists and the like—noticed that
oil was being pumped much more quickly than new oilfields were being
discovered. Now of course this turn of events had been predicted in quite a bit
of detail well before then; back in the 1970s, in particular, when the phrase
“limits to growth” hadn’t yet become taboo in polite company, plenty of people
noticed that trying to extract an infinite supply of oil from a finite planet was
guaranteed to end badly.
That awareness didn’t survive the coming of the Reagan
counterrevolution. More precisely, it survived only on the far fringes of the
collective conversation of our time, where the few of us who refused to drink
Ronnie’s koolaid spent most of two decades trying to figure out how to live in
a civilization that, for all intents and purposes, seemed to have succumbed to
a collective death wish. Still, our time in exile didn’t last forever. It was 1998, as I recall, when I found the
original Running On Empty email list—one of the first online meeting places for
people concerned about peak oil—and I stayed with the movement thereafter as it
slowly grew, and the rising tide of data made the case for imminent peak oil
harder and harder to dismiss out of hand.
Two books published in the early 2000s—Richard Heinberg’s The
Party’s Over and James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency—helped
launch the peak oil movement into public awareness. Not incidentally, those
were also the books that convinced me that it might just be possible to talk
frankly about the predicament of industrial society: not just peak oil, but the
broader collision between the economic ideology of limitless growth and the
hard realities of a fragile planet. The Archdruid Report came out of
that recognition, though I thought at first that its audience would be limited
to the Druid community; I figured that people who had embraced Druid nature
spirituality might be more open to the kind of intellectual heresy I had in mind.
The blog turned out to have a much broader audience than that, but it took me
quite a while to realize that, and longer still to recognize its implications.
Meanwhile the peak oil movement hit its own peak between
2008 and 2010, and began skidding down the far side of its own Hubbert curve.
That’s standard for movements for social change, though it was probably
worsened by the premature triumphalism that convinced many peakniks that once
they’d proved their case, governments had to do something about the impending
crisis, and that also led some large peak oil organizations to spend money they
didn’t have trying to run with the big dogs. At this point, as the fracking
bubble falters and the economy misbehaves in ways that conventional economic
theory can’t account for but peak oil theory can, the bottom has likely been
reached, and a much shorter period of exile is duly ending. Talk about peak oil in the media and the
political sphere is picking up again, and will accelerate as the consequences
of another decade of malign neglect bear down with increasing force on the
industrial world.
One of the things I find most interesting about this
trajectory is that it didn’t impact The Archdruid Report in the way I
would have expected. During the years when the peak oil movement was all over
large portions of the internet, my monthly page views and other site stats
remained fairly modest. It wasn’t until 2010, when the peak oil scene was
beginning to falter, that my stats started to climb steadily; my first breakout
all-over-the-internet post came in 2011, and thereafter readership has remained
high, wobbling up and down around an average of a quarter million page views a
month. All ten of my top ten posts, in terms of total unique page views,
appeared between 2011 and this year. On the off chance my readers are
interested, here they are:
1. Collapse
Now and Avoid the Rush, June 30, 2012
2. Donald
Trump and the Politics of Resentment, January 20, 2016
3. How
It Could Happen, Part One: Hubris, October 3, 2012
4. How
Not to Play the Game, June 29, 2011
5. An
Elegy for the Age of Space, August 24, 2011
6. The
Next Ten Billion Years, September 4, 2013
7. Into
an Unknown Country, January 2, 2013
8. Fascism
and the Future, Part Three: Weimar America, February 26, 2014
9. The
Recovery of the Human, February 1, 2012
10. The
Death of the Internet: A Pre-Mortem, April 29, 2015
(I discovered in the process of making this list, by the
way, that the Blogger gizmo for tracking all time top posts doesn’t actually do
what it’s supposed to do. Like so much of the internet, it provides the
illusion of exact data but not the reality, and I had to go back over the raw
numbers to get an accurate list. My readers may draw their own conclusions
about the future of a society that increasingly relies on internet-filtered
information as a source of guidance.)
None of these posts are only about peak oil, or even about
peak energy. You’ll find references to
the hard physical and geological limits of the energy resources available to
our species in most of them, to be sure, and quite a few detailed discussions
of those limits and their implications among the other 489 posts that have
appeared here in the last decade. That said, those limits aren’t quite central
to this blog’s project. They derive, like the other common themes here, from
something else.
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer noted that his treatise The
World as Will and Representation, massive though it is, was simply the
working out of a single idea in all its ramifications. The same is true of this
blog, though I’m an essayist and novelist rather than an analytical
philosopher, and thus my pursuit of the idea I’m trying to pin down has been
somewhat more discursive and rambling than his. (I make no apologies for that
fact; I write the way I like to write, for those who like to read it.) Not all
ideas can be summed up in a few words or a snappy slogan. In particular, the more thoroughly an idea
challenges our basic preconceptions about the nature of things, and the more
stark the gap between its implications and those of the conventional wisdom,
the more thoroughly and patiently it must be explored if it’s going to be
understood at all.
Even so, there are times when an unexpected turn of phrase
can be used, if not to sum up a challenging idea, at least to point in its
direction forcefully enough to break through some of the barriers to
understanding. Thanks to one of my readers—tip of the archdruidical hat to
Mgalimba—I encountered such a turn of phrase last week. That came via a
2014 talk by cutting-edge thinker Donna Haraway, in which she
challenged a currently popular label for the geological period we’re entering,
the Anthropocene, and proposed her own coinage: the Cthulhucene.
She had specific reasons for the proposal, and I’d encourage
my readers to see what she had to say about those, but I have somewhat
different reasons for adopting the term. H.P. Lovecraft, who invented the
squid-faced, dragon-winged, monster-clawed devil-god Cthulhu for one of his best
stories, used that being and the other tentacled horrors of his imaginary
pantheon to represent a concept as alien to the conventional thought of
industrial society as the Great Old Ones themselves. The term Lovecraft used
for that concept was “indifferentism”—the recognition that the universe is
utterly indifferent to human beings, not sympathetic, not hostile, not anything,
and that it’s really rather silly of us, all things considered, to expect it to
conform to our wishes, expectations, or sense of entitlement.
Does this seem embarrassingly obvious? The irony, and it’s a
rich one, is that most people nowadays who insist that the universe is
indifferent to humanity turn around and make claims about the future that
presuppose exactly the opposite. I’ve long since lost track of the number of
committed atheists I’ve met, for example, who readily agreed that the universe
is indifferent to our desires, but then insisted there has to be some other
energy resource out there at least as cheap, concentrated, and abundant as the
ones we’re currently using up. That claim only makes sense if you assume that
the supplies of matter and energy in the cosmos have somehow been arranged for
our benefit; otherwise, no, there doesn’t have to be any other resource out
there. We could simply use up what we’ve got, and then have to get by without
concentrated energy sources for the rest of the time our species happens to
exist.
That’s far from the only example of stealth anthropocentrism
I’ve encountered in the same context. I’ve also long since lost track of the
number of committed atheists who reject the idea of a caring cosmos out of
hand, but then go on to claim that technological progress of the kind we’ve
made is irreversible. That claim only makes sense if you assume that history is
somehow arranged for our benefit, so that we don’t have to worry about sliding
back down the long slope we climbed so laboriously over the last five centuries
or so. If history is indifferent to our
preferences, by contrast, the way down is just as easy as the way up, and
decline and fall waits for us as it did for all those dead civilizations in the
past.
Then there’s the most embarrassing claim of all, the devout
insistence that humanity’s destiny lies out there in space. “Destiny” is a theological
concept, and it’s frankly risible to find it being tossed around so freely by
people who insist they’ve rejected theology, but let’s go a step further here.
If the universe is in fact indifferent to our wishes and desires, the mere fact
that a certain number of people have gotten worked up over science-fiction
visions of zooming off toward the stars does not oblige the universe to make
space travel a viable option for our species. There are in fact very good
reasons to think that it’s not a viable option, but you won’t get many people
to admit that these days. We (or, rather, some of us) dream of going to the
stars, therefore it must be possible for us to go to the stars—and before you
claim that human beings can achieve anything they can imagine, dear reader, I
encourage you to read up on the long history of attempts to build a working
perpetual motion machine.
I’ve picked on atheists in these three examples, and to some
extent that’s unfair. It’s true that most of the really flagrant examples of
stealth anthropocentrism I’ve encountered over the last ten years came from
people who made quite a point of their atheism, but of course there’s no
shortage of overt toxic anthropocentrism over on the religious side of
things—I’m thinking here of those Christian fundamentalists who claim that
Christ is coming soon and therefore it doesn’t matter how savagely we lay waste
a world they themselves claim that God made and called good. I’ve met atheists,
to be fair, who recognize that their belief in the absence of purpose in the
cosmos implies that no providence will protect us from the consequences of our
own stupidity. I’ve also met religious people who recognize that the universe
defined by their beliefs is theocentric, not anthropocentric, and that human beings
might therefore want to cultivate the virtue of humility and attend to the
purposes that God or the gods might have in mind, rather than assuming in
blithe arrogance that whatever humanity thinks it wants, it ought to get.
The dawn of the Cthulhucene represents the arrival of a
geological period in which those latter ways of understanding the world will be
impossible to ignore any longer. We are beginning to learn no matter how hard
we scrunch our eyes shut and plug our ears and shout “La, la, la, I can’t hear
you” to the rest of the universe, the universe is not going to give us what we
want just because we want it: that the
resources we waste so cluelessly will not be replaced for our benefit, and we
will have to face every one of the consequences of the damage we do to the
planetary biosphere that keeps us alive. In place of the megalomaniacal fantasy
of Man the Conqueror of Nature, striding boldly from star to star in search of
new worlds to plunder, we are beginning to see a vast and alien shape rising
before us out of the mists of the future, a shape we might as well call
Cthulhu: winged, scaled, tentacled, clawed, like a summary of life on earth,
regarding us with utterly indifferent eyes.
In those eyes, we balding social primates are of no more
importance in the great scheme of things than the trilobites or the dinosaurs,
or for that matter the countless species—intelligent or otherwise—that will
come into being long after the last human being has gone to join the trilobites
and dinosaurs in Earth’s library of fossil beds. The sooner we grasp that, the easier it will
be for us to drop the misguided anthropocentric delusions that blind us to our
situation, wake up to the mess we’ve made of things, and get to work trying to
save as many of the best achievements of the last three hundred years or so
before the long night of the deindustrial dark ages closes in around us.
Given that the universe is simply not interested in
pandering to the fantasies of omnipotence currently fashionable among influential
members of our species—given that no special providence is going to rescue us
from the consequences of our assorted stupidities, no resource fairy is going
to give us a shiny new energy source to make up for the resources we now
squander so recklessly, and the laws of nature are already sending the results
of our frankly brainless maltreatment of the biosphere back in our faces with
an utter lack of concern for our feelings and interests—how should we then
live? That’s the theme that I’ve been trying to explore, in one way or another,
since this blog got under way. It’s a vast theme, and one that I haven’t even
begun to exhaust yet. I have no idea if I’m still going to be blogging here ten
years from now, but if not, it won’t be due to lack of things to talk about.
