Lords of the Fall
Lords of the Fall
It’s been nine months now since I set aside the other preoccupations of this blog and launched a project I’d had in mind for many years—a discussion of the political and economic subtext underlying Richard Wagner’s vast operatic cycle The Nibelung’s Ring. All things considered, nine months ago was a propitious time for such a venture, as Donald Trump’s bombastic baritone and Kamala Harris’s fingernails-on-blackboard soprano rang out over a bellowing chorus of media pundits and election officials, while billionaires George Soros and Elon Musk frantically conducted competing orchestras of braying donkeys and trumpeting elephants. The only possible word for the cacophony that resulted is “Wagnerian.”
I don’t expect things to get quieter any time soon. Nonetheless, the discussion of Wagner’s ideas finished up two weeks ago, and it’s time to move on to other things. The world didn’t join us in the notional opera house while Wotan et al. worked out their destinies, after all, and the political opera that wrapped up one overblown scene last November and is busy acting out another at top volume is far from the only thing worth discussing just now. In fact, I think this would be a good time to circle all the way back to the beginning of my blogging career almost nineteen years ago and talk again about the decline and fall of industrial civilization.
Yes, that’s still happening. All this while, as the corporate media flogged one set of peripheral issues after another as The Thing That Matters™ and an assortment of dissident subcultures did their level best to gain that coveted label for their own pet obsessions, our civilization has moved patiently through the stages of a cycle that was already old when Babylon was young. It may seem odd that this process, which historians a thousand years from now will consider the one news story that matters from out time, gets so little attention just now. If you’ve studied the fate of past civilizations, though, it’s a familiar oddity. The official voices of every civilization, as the world they know slides down the well-greased chute into history’s dumpster, babble breezily onward, convinced that nothing of the sort can possibly happen to them.
For the sake of clarity, I’m going to cover a few of the basics very quickly for those readers who weren’t here a decade ago. This is a very fast survey of an even more complex subject, and we’ll be going back over each of these points repeatedly in the months ahead. For now, let’s just touch on a few crucial points.
First of all, like human beings and other organic growths, civilizations have a life cycle that runs from birth to death. Sometimes that life cycle doesn’t run all the way to completion—a twenty-year-old gets flattened by a drunk driver, a thriving Aztec civilization gets flattened by Spanish conquistadors whose microbial ecosystems turned out to be far deadlier than their swords—but a person or a civilization that avoids such risks can expect to get old and die in the usual way. Gray hair and wrinkles in individuals have exact equivalents in civilizations, and we’re seeing them now. The only reason any of this is controversial just now is that the official voices of our civilization, in the usual way, have convinced themselves and most of their listeners that we’re special and it’s different this time.
Second, the stages in a civilization’s life cycle are measured in centuries. The process of decline and fall is no exception. From the beginning of decline to the final collapse usually takes one to three centuries, give or take a little. The notion that we can expect a sudden shock that will plunge us straight back into the Stone Age in a matter of days is popular, for straightforward reasons: like most of our supposedly secular credos these days, it’s a borrowed religious myth with the serial numbers filed off, and people cling to it because familiar-sounding myths are always comforting in difficult times like these. A glance at history, however, shows that this isn’t how civilizations fall.
Third, the process of decline is broadly invariant across geographical scales and technological levels. The same trajectory of decline and fall, over the same time scale, has brought down Neolithic civilizations restricted to a single river valley, and it’s also brought down literate, cosmopolitan civilizations with sophisticated technologies and international trade networks that sprawled over much of a continent. Our civilization happens to be larger and more dependent on artificial technologies than any other civilization we know about, and that’s the most common excuse people give for insisting that we’re special and it’s different this time. Meanwhile the usual signs of decline are piling up around us at the usual rate, and the deindustrial dark age a couple of centuries ahead of us is becoming increasingly easy to glimpse.
Finally, the end of a civilization is not the end of the world. Doubtless it will feel that way to some of the people caught up in the most difficult phases of decline, but then that’s another common factor in the process we’re discussing. To begin with, our species will survive the inevitable pruning of global population, and so will most other species; there will be a spike in extinctions, of course, but it will be followed in the usual way by a spike in what biologists call speciation, as tough, resilient generalist species move into vacant niches and start adapting to prosper there. This is already happening now, by the way; all the squawking about “invasive species” is an attempt by the ecologically clueless to insist that this natural and healthy rebalancing of the biosphere shouldn’t be allowed to happen.
It’s not just rats, cockroaches, human beings, and other adaptable generalist species that will get through the bottleneck of decline and fall, however. Communities have differing experiences as a civilization lurches slowly toward ruin; so do cultures and nations, if the civilization is big enough to embrace more than one of each. Some of each are destroyed, others scramble and struggle but pull through, and still others will suffer little impact and be left wondering what all the fuss is about. On average, those furthest from the centers of wealth, power, and technology will suffer the least disruption. If industrial civilization plunges into dark age conditions, to point out only one example, how much difference will that really make to the lives of tribal farm families in the mountains of New Guinea?
And the scientific and technological knowledge that our civilization has pieced together? It’s going to undergo a savage pruning, as its equivalents have in the past. (We still have no clear idea, for example, how the Romans made concrete so much stronger and more resilient than ours.) The sciences and technologies that survive, as usual, will be an odd mix. Some things will get through the bottleneck because they’re highly useful and can be made and maintained in dark age conditions; soap, firearms, and the simpler end of radio technology all fall into this category. Others will survive through the accidental preservation of books, or because some group of people decided for idiosyncratic reasons that they wanted to preserve it. The resulting hodgepodge will then become the foundation on which the successor societies of the future will build their own unique sciences and technologies, which will not be the same as ours.
By this point I know perfectly well that a good-sized chorus of my more recent readers will be ready to belt out some variation on “No, no, this cannot be!” in proper operatic style. That reaction is quite understandable: the schools, the corporate media, and the other official mouthpieces of our civilization have been singing those same lyrics to you in four-part harmony all your lives. They’re wrong, just as their exact equivalents in the twilight years of every other civilization were wrong, but it’s worth taking a moment to talk about why they’re wrong.
Every civilization starts out under the sway of a traditional religion—in our case, Christianity—adapted to the modes of thought that arise in dark age conditions, and uses mythic narratives as a template for thinking. Every civilization eventually moves away from those modes and sets aside the traditional religion in favor of some form of rationalism. Our historians talk about the age of faith giving way to the age of reason around 1650 AD; most of them try to avoid noticing that an earlier age of faith gave way to an age of reason around 450 BC in the classical world, and comparable changes happened in other civilizations as they moved through their own life cycles.
The great irony of these ages of reason is that they’re far less rational than their cheerleaders like to claim. All of the “rational” ideas that play a central role in society during its age of reason are, like the apocalyptic fantasies mentioned earlier, religious ideas with the serial numbers filed off. That’s why, for example, our scientists insist that the universe began at a specific moment in the past with the Big Bang—this is simply a secularized version of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, complete with “Let there be light.” It’s why so many of our allegedly secular ideologies insist that everyone in the world ought to accept a single belief system, adopt its moral rules, and obey its taboos—all this is simply following the template of Christian evangelism.
It’s also why so many people in modern industrial society believe with all their heart in a specific vision of history that, at least in their imaginations, will inevitably lead the faithful to a blessed life somewhere up there in the sky. We call that vision of history “progress.” For all practical purposes, blind faith in progress is the established religion of the modern industrial world. It doesn’t matter in the least that by most measures, progress peaked in the 1880s and has been slowing down since then; it doesn’t matter that for decades now, nearly every technological “improvement” has been a mere cosmetic change when it didn’t make things actively worse; it doesn’t matter that life in the world’s industrial nations is getting bleaker, grimmer, and shabbier with every passing year. We must have faith that sooner or later the great god Progress will lead us to salvation out there among the stars!
In reality, of course, progress—like most other things—is subject to the law of diminishing returns. We’re well into the downside of that law, the point at which each new tranche of technology yields negative results. That’s why every upgrade these days takes away useful functions and places more burdens on the users. It’s why so many musicians have started releasing their new music on vinyl records, and why a bevy of other retro technologies are grabbing increasing market share. That’s one of the great changes under way nowadays, and it’ll play a massive role in shaping the future ahead of us, but most people can’t let themselves notice it. Doing so would mean admitting that progress has shifted into reverse, and that would require them to abandon the pseudosecular belief system that gives their lives meaning and value.
Again, we’re going to talk about all these things in much more detail later on. For now, I want to make a point that gets ignored far too often, and then say a few things about the interface between the big picture just sketched out and the themes that have been central to discussions on this blog for the last nine years or so.
The point I want to make may seem simple enough, but it gets ignored quite reliably. My critics tend to be especially quick to ignore it. Yes, I have critics; it amuses me no end that in recent years, despite all my efforts to position myself here on the outermost fringes of our cultural discourse, some people have been sufficiently ruffled by what I’ve said to post their disagreements with me in various corners of the blogosphere. I have no objection whatever to this. Quite the contrary, the fact that there are people critiquing my ideas—in tones ranging from calm reason to the shrieks of a gutshot banshee—is a sign that in a few circles, at least, those ideas are getting a certain amount of traction. That’s very promising, at least from my perspective; I only wish that the people who leveled critiques at my ideas were a little more careful about paying attention to what those ideas actually are.
During the first few years of my blogging career, peak oil was a hot topic, and I focused a lot of attention in my former blog, The Archdruid Report, on that theme. Peak oil? That’s shorthand for the peak and subsequent decline of global conventional petroleum extraction, which happened twenty years ago. It’s also sometimes used as shorthand for the peak and subsequent decline of global liquid fuels production, which probably hasn’t begun yet. There are reasons why these are both important, and we’ll be talking about them in quite some detail as we proceed, but it’s simply not true—as some of my critics claim—that I’m arguing that peak oil is the sole and exclusive reason why industrial society is on its way down.
Our culture has a weird fixation on finding one and only one cause for every effect. It’s responsible for quite an impressive share of the cascading failures of our time—one of the core reasons that modern medicine does such a poor job of dealing with so many health conditions, for example, is that our medical researchers try to find a single cause for conditions that are the product of many intersecting factors—but it’s hardwired into our sciences, our politics, and our popular culture. Reduce every problem to the effects of a single cause, and (in theory) you can find a single solution for it: that’s the promise, and the mere fact that it fails so often does nothing to budge this deeply rooted prejudice from our minds.
In strict point of fact, the causes of any event embrace the entire universe. Consider a flipped coin. The movement of that coin when it leaves your hand has been shaped by everything that has influenced the muscles of your hand and arm, and that includes your whole life experience as well as the entire evolutionary lineage that gave you those muscles and that kind of forelimb. As it leaves your hand, the coin encounters an environment of air full of subtle movements and variations in pressure, and this can’t be understood perfectly without taking into account the local and continental weather, the tidal forces of moon and sun, and ultimately the entire history of the atmosphere, back to its origins in the slowly collapsing dust cloud that birthed the solar system. All of this comes together to make the coin land on one side or the other.
The fall of a civilization, it should not have to be said, is just a little more complex than the flip of a coin. It has a vast array of causes. The exhaustion of a certain set of fossil fuel resources is an important factor, but it’s only one of many resource issues that beset the modern industrial world, and resource issues are only one set of challenges pushing our civilization along the usual trajectory toward the usual destination. Even if we had access to limitless resources, we’d end up in the same place; it would probably take longer, and involve even more destruction on the way down, but we’d get there one way or another.
All this is more than a little like looking at a group of old men. Some of them are richer and others poorer, some more prudent and others more careless, some put effort into staying healthy and others couldn’t have cared less…but they’re all old, and it’s a safe bet that they’ll all be dead before too many more years have passed. If a physician starts insisting that he can keep them from dying of heart disease—well, that may be so, but it doesn’t mean that they’ll live forever. It simply means that each of them will die, in the not very distant future, of something else.
Mind you, that doesn’t mean that it’s a waste of time to take care of your health. Those old men who took care of themselves are likely to have a longer, happier, and healthier old age than the ones who didn’t. In the same way, there are things that industrial civilization could have done to make its old age longer and less difficult than it would otherwise be, and there are still some things that can still be done even this late in the game to stave off the worst outcomes. I don’t expect any of them to be done, but the possibilities are there.
Far more significantly, there are still plenty of things that nations, cultures, and communities can do to shield themselves against some of the impacts of the ongoing decline. Until quite recently, I was fairly sure that none of those would be done on any scale large enough to matter. At the moment, though, it appears as though one of the most important of those steps is being carried out with considerable verve by the government of the United States. Readers who have been with me since the peak oil days will remember when economic relocalization was a major theme of discussion, and dependence on global resources was recognized as a lethal weakness in the face of decline. Now, to my great surprise, here we are: the global economy is being dismantled and economic relocalization pushed by, of all people, Donald Trump.
I have no reason to think that Trump realizes that he’s fulfilling one of the great hopes of the long-dead peak oil movement. I doubt it has ever occurred to him that industrial civilization is on the downslope of its history; if anything, his singleminded focus on “making America great again” suggests that he’s sure that any problems we face can be overcome with the right mix of legal and regulatory changes, hopeful rhetoric, and bluster. The fact remains that he’s responding to one of the core features of the crisis of our time in a way that might just give the United States a less abrupt decline, and also make room for other constructive changes.
Though I didn’t expect this, a case could be made that I should have. Trump is a type that surfaces tolerably often during the twilight of a civilization: brash, charismatic, ruthless, and ambitious pragmatists who rise to power when the existing order has failed to deal with the challenges of the age. Call them the Lords of the Fall. They quite often become figures of legend in retrospect, grown larger and grander than life in folk memory, though that process also strips away most of their harsher aspects: the few early accounts we have of the Roman-British warlord Artorius, to cite only one famous example, suggest that he was a far more brutal and ambivalent figure than the “King Arthur” that minstrels manufactured from surviving scraps of his legend centuries later.
It’s anyone’s guess whether Trump, once his reputation has been manhandled in the usual way by folk memory and industrious minstrels, will become the center of a cycle of legends in the dark age towns and countryside of deindustrial America; it could as well be some other figure of the same broad type who rises to power fifty or a hundred years from now. For the time being, though, we have a Lord of the Fall to deal with, and quite a few of the apparent certainties of our situation are up for grabs at this point, for good or ill. That, too, we’ll discuss in later posts.
Source: Ecosophia
Comments
Post a Comment