Myths, according to the philosopher Sallust, are things that
never happened but always are. With a few modifications, the same rule applies
to the enduring narratives of every culture, the stories that find a new
audience in every generation as long as their parent cultures last. Stories of that stature don’t need to
chronicle events that actually took place to have something profoundly relevant
to say, and the heroic quest I used last week to frame a satire on the
embarrassingly unheroic behavior of many of industrial civilization’s more
privileged inmates is no exception to that rule.
That’s true of hero tales generally, of course. The thegns
and ceorls who sat spellbound in an Anglo-Saxon meadhall while a scop chanted
the deeds of Beowulf to the sound of a six-stringed lyre didn’t have to face
the prospect of wrestling with cannibalistic ogres or battling fire-breathing
dragons, and were doubtless well aware of that fact. If they believed that terrible creatures of a
kind no longer found once existed in the legendary past, why, so do we—the
difference in our case is merely that we call our monsters “dinosaurs,” and
insist that our paleontologist-storytellers be prepared to show us the bones.
The audience in the meadhall never wondered whether Beowulf
was a historical figure in the same sense as their own great-grandparents.
Since history and legend hadn’t yet separated out in the thinking of the time,
Beowulf and those great-grandparents occupied exactly the same status, that of
people in the past about whom stories were told. Further than that it was
unnecessary to go, since what mattered to them about Beowulf was not whether he
lived but how he lived. The tale’s
original audience, it’s worth recalling, got up the next morning to face the
challenges of life in dark age Britain, in which defending their community
against savage violence was a commonplace event; having the example of
Beowulf’s courage and loyalty in mind must have made that harsh reality a
little easier to face.
The same point can be made about the hero tale I borrowed
and rewrote in last week’s post, Tolkien’s The Lord of the
Rings. Frodo Baggins was no Beowulf, which was of course exactly the
point, since Tolkien was writing for a different audience in a different
age. The experience of being wrenched
out of a peaceful community and sent on a long march toward horror and death
was one that Tolkien faced as a young man in the First World War, and watched
his sons face in the Second. That’s what gave Tolkien’s tale its appeal: his
hobbits were ordinary people facing extraordinary challenges, like so many
people in the bitter years of the early twentieth century.
The contrast between Beowulf and
The Lord of the Rings is precisely that between the
beginning and the zenith of a civilization. Beowulf, like his audience, was
born into an age of chaos and violence, and there was never any question of
what he was supposed to do about it; the only detail that had to be settled was
how many of the horrors of his time he would overcome before one of them
finally killed him. Frodo Baggins, like his audience, was born into a world
that was mostly at peace, but found itself faced with a resurgence of a
nightmare that everyone in his community thought had been laid to rest for
good. In Frodo’s case, the question of what he was going to do about the crisis
of his age was what mattered most—and of course that’s why I was able to stand
Tolkien’s narrative on its head last week, by tracing out what would have
happened if Frodo’s answer had been different.
Give it a few more centuries, and it’s a safe bet that the
stories that matter will be back on Beowulf’s side of the equation, as the
process of decline and fall now under way leads into an era of dissolution and
rebirth that we might as well call by the time-honored label “dark age.” For the time being, though, most of us are
still on Frodo’s side of things, trying to come to terms with the appalling
realization that the world we know is coming apart and it’s up to us to do
something about it.
That said, there’s a crucial difference between the
situation faced by Frodo Baggins and his friends in Middle-earth, and the
situation faced by those of us who have awakened to the crisis of our time here
and now. Tolkien was a profoundly conservative thinker and writer, in the full
sense of that word. The plot engine of
his works of adult fiction, The Silmarillion just as much as
The Lord of the Rings, was always the struggle to hold onto
the last scraps of a glorious past, and his powers of evil want to make
Middle-earth modern, efficient and up-to-date by annihilating the past and
replacing it with a cutting-edge industrial landscape of slagheaps and
smokestacks. It’s thus no accident that Saruman’s speech to Gandalf in book
two, chapter two of The Fellowship of the Ring is a parody
of the modern rhetoric of progress, or that The Return of the
King ends with a Luddite revolt against Sharkey’s attempted industrialization
of the Shire; Tolkien was a keen and acerbic observer of twentieth-century
England, and wove much of his own political thought into his stories.
The victory won by Tolkien’s protagonists in The
Lord of the Rings, accordingly, amounted to restoring Middle-Earth as
far as possible to the condition it was in before the War of the Ring, with the
clock turned back a bit further here and there—for example, the reestablishment
of the monarchy in Gondor—and a keen sense of loss surrounding those changes
that couldn’t be undone. That was a reasonable goal in Tolkien’s imagined
setting, and it’s understandable that so many people want to achieve the same
thing here and now: to preserve some
semblance of industrial civilization in
the teeth of the rising spiral of crises that are already beginning to tear it
apart.
I can sympathize with their desire. It’s become fashionable
in many circles to ignore the achievements of the industrial age and focus
purely on its failures, or to fixate on the places where it fell short of the
frankly Utopian hopes that clustered around its rise. If the Enlightenment
turned out to be far more of a mixed blessing than its more enthusiastic
prophets liked to imagine, and if so many achievements of science and
technology turned into sources of immense misery once they were whored out in
the service of greed and political power, the same can be said of most human
things: “If it has passed from the high and the beautiful to darkness and
ruin,” Tolkien commented of a not dissimilar trajectory, “that was of old the
fate of Arda marred.” Still, the window of opportunity through which modern
industrial civilization might have been able to escape its unwelcome destiny
has long since slammed shut.
That’s one of the things I meant to suggest in last week’s
post by sketching out a Middle-earth already ravaged by the Dark Lord, in which
most of the heroes of Tolkien’s trilogy were dead and most of the things they
fought to save had already been lost. Even with those changes, though,
Tolkien’s narrative no longer fits the crisis of our age as well as it did a
few decades back. Our Ring of Power was the fantastic glut of energy we got
from fossil fuels; we could have renounced it, as Tolkien’s characters
renounced the One Ring, before we’d burnt enough to destabilize the climate and
locked ourselves into a set of economic arrangements with no future...but
that’s not what happened, of course.
We didn’t make that collective choice when it still could
have made a difference: when peak oil
was still decades in the future, anthropogenic climate change hadn’t yet begun
to destabilize the planet’s ice sheets and weather patterns, and the variables
that define the crisis of our age—depletion rates, CO2 concentrations, global
population, and the rest of them—were a good deal less overwhelming than
they’ve now become. As The
Limits to Growth pointed out more than four decades ago, any effort
to extract industrial civilization from the trap it made for itself had to get
under way long before the jaws of that trap began to bite, because the rising
economic burden inflicted by the ongoing depletion of nonrenewable resources
and the impacts of pollution and ecosystem degradation were eating away at the
surplus wealth needed to meet the costs of the transition to sustainability.
That prediction has now become our reality. Grandiose
visions of vast renewable-energy buildouts and geoengineering projects on a
global scale, of the kind being hawked so ebulliently these days by the prophets of eternal business as usual, fit
awkwardly with the reality that a great many industrial nations can no longer
afford to maintain basic infrastructures or to keep large and growing fractions
of their populations from sliding into desperate poverty. The choice that I
discussed in last week’s post, reduced to its hard economic bones, was whether
we were going to put what remained of our stock of fossil fuels and other
nonrenewable resources into maintaining our current standard of living for a
while longer, or whether we were going to put it into building a livable world
for our grandchildren.
The great majority of us chose the first option, and
insisting at the top of our lungs that of course we could have both did nothing
to keep the second from slipping away into the realm of might-have-beens. The
political will to make the changes and accept the sacrifices that would be
required to do anything else went missing in action in the 1980s and hasn’t
been seen since. That’s the trap that was hidden in the crisis of our age:
while the costs of transition were still small enough that we could have met
them without major sacrifice, the consequences of inaction were still far
enough in the future that most people could pretend they weren’t there; by the
time the consequences were hard to ignore, the costs of transition had become
too great for most people to accept—and not too long after that, they had
become too great to be met at all. .
As a commentary on our current situation, in other words,
the story of the heroic quest has passed its pull date. As I noted years ago,
insisting
that the world must always follow a single narrative is a fertile
source of misunderstanding and misery. Consider the popular insistence that the
world can grow its way out of problems caused by growth—as though you could
treat the consequences of chronic alcoholism by drinking even more heavily!
What gives that frankly idiotic claim the appeal it has is that it draws on one
of the standard stories of our age, the Horatio Alger story of the person who
overcame long odds to make a success of himself. That does happen sometimes,
which is why it’s a popular story; the lie creeps in when the claim gets made
that this is always what happens.
When people insist, as so many of them do, that of course
we’ll overcome the limits to growth and every other obstacle to our allegedly
preordained destiny out there among the stars, all that means is that they have
a single story wedged into their imagination so tightly that mere reality can’t
shake it loose. The same thing’s true of all the other credos I’ve discussed in
recent posts, from “they’ll think of something” through “it’s all somebody
else’s fault” right on up to “we’re all going to be extinct soon anyway so it
doesn’t matter any more.” Choose any thoughtstopper you like from your randomly
generated Peak
Oil Denial Bingo card, and behind it lies a single story, repeating
itself monotonously over and over in the heads of those who can’t imagine the
world unfolding in any other way.
The insistence that it’s not too late, that there must still
be time to keep industrial civilization from crashing into ruin if only we all
come together to make one great effort, and that there’s any reason to think
that we can and will all come together, is another example. The narrative
behind that claim has a profound appeal to people nowadays, which is why
stories that feature it—again, Tolkien’s trilogy comes to mind—are as popular
as they are. It’s deeply consoling to be told that there’s still one last
chance to escape the harsh future that’s already taking shape around us. It
seems almost cruel to point out that whether a belief appeals to our emotions
has no bearing on whether or not it’s true.
The suggestion that I’ve been making since this blog first
began eight years ago is that we’re long past the point at which modern
industrial civilization might still have been rescued from the consequences of
its own mistakes. If that’s the case, it’s no longer useful to put the very
limited resources we have left into trying to stop the inevitable, and it’s
even less useful to wallow in wishful thinking about how splendid it would be
if the few of us who recognize the predicament we’re in were to be joined by
enough other people to make a difference. If anything of value is to get
through the harsh decades and centuries ahead of us, if anything worth saving
is to be rescued from the wreck of our civilization, there’s plenty of work to
do, and daydreaming about mass movements that aren’t happening and grand
projects we can no longer afford simply wastes what little time we still have
left.
That’s why I’ve tried to suggest in previous posts here that it’s time to set aside some of our more
familiar stories and try reframing the crisis of our age in less shopworn ways.
There are plenty of viable options—plenty, that is, of narratives that talk
about what happens when the last hope of rescue has gone whistling down the
wind and it’s time to figure out what can be saved in the midst of disaster—but
the one that keeps coming back to my mind is one I learned and, ironically,
dismissed as uninteresting quite a few decades ago, in the early years of my
esoteric studies: the old legend of the fall of Atlantis.
It’s probably necessary to note here that whether Atlantis
existed as a historical reality is not the point. While it’s interesting to
speculate about whether human societies more advanced than current theory
suggests might have flourished
in the late Ice Age and then drowned beneath rising seas, those
speculations are as irrelevant here as trying to fit Grendel and his mother
into the family tree of the Hominidae, say, or discussing how plate tectonics
could have produced the improbable mountain ranges of Middle-earth. Whatever
else it might or might not have been, Atlantis is a story, one that has a
potent presence in our collective imagination. Like Beowulf
or The Lord of the Rings, the Atlantis story is about the
confrontation with evil, but where Beowulf comes at the beginning of a
civilization and Frodo Baggins marks its zenith, the Atlantis story illuminates
its end.
Mind you, the version of the story of Atlantis I learned, in
common with most of the versions in circulation in occult schools in those
days, had three details that you won’t find in Plato’s account, or in most of
the rehashes that have been churned out by the rejected-knowledge industry over
the last century or so. First, according to that version, Atlantis didn’t sink
all at once; rather, there were three inundations separated by long intervals.
Second, the sinking of Atlantis wasn’t a natural disaster; it was the direct
result of the clueless actions of the Atlanteans, who brought destruction on
themselves by their misuse of advanced technology.
The third detail, though, is the one that matters here.
According to the mimeographed lessons I studied back in the day, as it became
clear that Atlantean technology had the potential to bring about terrifying
blowback, the Atlanteans divided into two factions: the Children of the Law of
One, who took the warnings seriously and tried to get the rest of Atlantean
society to do so, and the Servants of the Dark Face, who dismissed the whole
issue—I don’t know for a fact that these latter went around saying “I’m sure
the priests of the Sun Temple will think of something,” “orichalcum will always
be with us,” “the ice age wasn’t ended by an ice shortage,” and the like, but
it seems likely. Those of my readers who haven’t spent the last forty years
hiding at the bottom of the sea will know instantly which of these factions
spoke for the majority and which was marginalized and derided as a bunch of
doomers.
According to the story, when the First Inundation hit and a
big chunk of Atlantis ended up permanently beneath the sea, the shock managed
to convince a lot of Atlanteans that the Children of the Law of One had a
point, and for a while there was an organized effort to stop doing the things
that were causing the blowback. As the immediate memories of the Inundation
faded, though, people convinced themselves that the flooding had just been one
of those things, and went back to their old habits. When the Second Inundation
followed and all of Atlantis sank but the two big islands of Ruta and Daitya,
though, the same pattern didn’t repeat itself; the Children of the Law of One
were marginalized even further, and the Servants of the Dark Face became even
more of a majority, because nobody wanted to admit the role their own actions
had had in causing the catastrophe. Again, those of my readers who have been
paying attention for the last forty years know this story inside and out.
It’s what happened next, though, that matters most. In the
years between the Second Inundation and the Third and last one, so the story
goes, Atlantis was for all practical purposes a madhouse with the inmates in
charge. Everybody knew what was going to happen and nobody wanted to deal with
the implications of that knowledge, and the strain expressed itself in
orgiastic excess, bizarre belief systems, and a rising spiral of political
conflict ending in civil war—anything you care to name, as long as it didn’t
address the fact that Atlantis was destroying itself and that nearly all the
Atlanteans were enthusiastic participants in the activities driving the destruction.
That was when the Children of the Law of One looked at one another and, so to
speak, cashed out their accounts at the First National Bank of Atlantis,
invested the proceeds in shipping, and sailed off to distant lands to become
the seedbearers of the new age of the world.
That’s the story that speaks to me just now—enough so that
I’ve more than once considered writing a fantasy novel about the fall of
Atlantis as a way of talking about the crisis of our age. Of course that story
doesn’t speak to everyone, and the belief systems that insist either that
everything is fine or that nothing can be done anyway have no shortage of
enthusiasts. If these belief systems turn out to be as delusional as they look,
though, what then? The future that very few people are willing to consider or
prepare for is the one that history shows us is the common destiny of every
other failed civilization: the long,
bitter, ragged road of decline and fall into a dark age, from which future
civilizations will eventually be born. If that’s the future ahead of us, as I
believe it is, the necessary preparations need to be made now, if the best
achievements of our age are to be carried into the future when the time of the
seedbearers arrives.
*************************
Even archdruids need to take a break from time to time, and it’s been quite a while since I took time off from these weekly essays. The Archdruid Report will therefore be on hiatus for the next month and a half. I’ll look forward to meeting my readers at The Age of Limits conference in southern Pennsylvania, the Economics, Energy and Environment conference in London, or one of the less peak oil-centric speaking gigs I’ll be having over the same period. In the meantime, I wish my readers good weather for gardening, pleasant days of weatherstripping and caulking, and plenty of spare time to learn the knowledge and skills that will be needed in the future ahead of us; we’ll talk again on June 18th.