Preparing cont'd

Look for proposals for responding to the crisis of industrial society these days and you?ll find that nearly all of them fall into three groups. First are those who want to organize a political movement to throw the current rascals out of office and put a new set of rascals in. Second are those who talk about building ecovillages in the countryside, to provide a postapocalyptic version of suburban living to today?s smart investors. Third are those who plan on holing up in a cabin in the mountains with guns and canned beans, and waiting until the rubble stops bouncing. I?ve argued elsewhere that none of these is a viable response to the future we?re most likely to face, but there?s another point worth noting: each of them is also something many people in today?s American middle class want to do anyway. Quite a few people nowadays think they ought to have more political power; an equally large number like to daydream about moving to a new exurban development far out in the countryside; and of course, the appeal of firearms collections and fantasies of self-reliance remains strong in an age that has problematized traditional images of masculinity. To a great extent, peak oil has simply become another excuse for the pursuit of activities, real or imagined, that many people find desirable for other reasons.

Amplifying this is one of the most enduring habits in the American tradition of public rhetoric ? the attempt to scare the bejesus out of people in the hope that this will motivate them to follow a desirable course of action. Colonial preacher Jonathan Edwards? famous sermon ?Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God? set a cultural fashion that remains alive to this day. Choose any cause you care to think of, and if it?s attracted anything like a mass movement, odds are that its prophets are announcing the imminent arrival of some variety of doom ? closely modeled on the Book of Revelations, far more often than not ? unless people change their wicked ways. If it?s not a mass movement, the odds are even better that its prophets will be proclaiming some inevitable doom which will sweep away the unbelieving multitudes and leave the earth to the righteous remnant ? that is, the prophets in question and those who agree with them. In either case, the catastrophe is simply rhetorical ammunition meant to back the claim that whatever action you?re supposed to take is the only alternative to doom. Peak oil, of course, has attracted a sizeable number of would-be prophets of both kinds.

I should hasten to say at this point that I?m not assigning Sharon Astyk to either camp. Mind you, I suspect she would propose relocalization as a good idea ? as, indeed, many people have been doing, for a variety of good reasons, since the early decades of the 20th century ? even if nothing like peak oil were in the offing. Still, retooling lifestyles to rely more on local resources and one?s own efforts, and less on a far-flung and increasingly fragile global economic system, is likely to prove a very useful strategy during the cascading series of crises unfolding around us right now. In that, I think, we?re very much in agreement. Going beyond that, however, requires a clearer sense of what kind of future we are facing ? and not just on a global basis.

Local and personal scales also count; everyone shares the same future only when ?the future? has been reduced to an ideological abstraction. The same problem afflicts current talk about the possibility of a crash, fast or otherwise: exactly what is crashing, and how far, and how uniformly? I?ve done my best to be clear about such issues here and elsewhere, but it?s probably worth repeating myself. My take is that modern industrial civilization is on the downslope of its history, headed for the compost heap of fallen empires alongside all the dead civilizations of the past. Peak oil and the other elements of the crisis of the contemporary world, in this analysis, are simply the current manifestations of patterns that shaped the fall of other civilizations, and our future will most likely follow a similar course ? an extended, uneven decline extending over more than a century, including repeated periods of crisis followed by partial recoveries, ending in a dark age in which much of the technology, knowledge base, and cultural heritage of today will survive in fragments or be completely lost.

Those parts of the world peripheral to today?s industrial civilization will follow trajectories of their own ? it?s worth remembering that the Muslim world and T?ang dynasty China reached the zeniths of their own cultural arcs while the western world was scraping the bottom of the last round of dark ages ? and new cultures will arise from the ruins of the modern industrial world in time. The global reach of industrial civilization, though, makes it unlikely that any part of the world will escape the approaching troubles entirely, and the equally global drawdown of resources erases the possibility that societies of the future will be able to duplicate the industrial model; their technics, while potentially even more sophisticated than ours, will have to work with much less concentrated and abundant energy sources.