The Butlerian Carnival
By John Michael Greer
February 18, 2015 "ICH"
- "Archdruid
Report " -
Over the last week
or so, I’ve heard from a remarkable
number of people who feel that a major
crisis is in the offing. The people in
question don’t know each other, many of
them have even less contact with the
mass media than I do, and the sense
they’ve tried to express to me is
inchoate enough that they’ve been left
fumbling for words, but they all end up
reaching for the same metaphors: that
something in the air just now seems
reminiscent of the American colonies in
1775, France in 1789, America in 1860,
Europe in 1914, or the world in 1939: a
sense of being poised on the brink of
convulsive change, with the sound of
gunfire and marching boots coming ever
more clearly from the dimly seen abyss
ahead.
It’s not an unreasonable
feeling, all things considered. In
Washington DC, Obama’s flunkies are
beating the war drums over Ukraine,
threatening to send shipments of
allegedly “defensive” weapons to join
the mercenaries and military advisors
we’ve already not-so-covertly got over
there. Russian officials have responded
to American saber-rattling by stating
flatly that a US decision to arm Kiev
will be the signal for all-out war. The
current Ukrainian regime, installed by a
US-sponsored coup and backed by NATO,
means to Russia precisely what a hostile
Canadian government installed by a
Chinese-sponsored coup and backed by the
People’s Liberation Army would mean to
the United States; if Obama’s trademark
cluelessness leads him to ignore that
far from minor point and decide that the
Russians are bluffing, we could be
facing a European war within weeks.
Head south and west from
the fighting around Donetsk, and another
flashpoint is heating up toward an
explosion of its own just now. Yes, that
would be Greece, where the new Syriza
government has refused to back down from
the promises that got it into office:
promises that center on the rejection of
the so-called “austerity” policies that
have all but destroyed the Greek economy
since they were imposed in 2009. This
shouldn’t be news to anyone; those same
policies, though they’ve been praised to
the skies by neoliberal economists for
decades now as a guaranteed ticket to
prosperity, have had precisely the
opposite effect in every single country
where they’ve been put in place.
Despite that track record
of unbroken failure, the EU—in
particular, Germany, which has benefited
handsomely from the gutting of southern
European economies—continues to insist
that Greece must accept what amounts to
a perpetual state of debt peonage. The
Greek defense minister noted in response
in a recent speech that if Europe isn’t
willing to cut a deal, other nations
might well do so. He’s quite correct;
it’s probably a safe bet that cold-eyed
men in Moscow and Beijing are busy right
now figuring out how best to step
through the window of opportunity the EU
is flinging open for them. If they do
so—well, I’ll leave it to my readers to
consider how the US is likely to respond
to the threat of Russian air and naval
bases in Greece, which would be capable
of projecting power anywhere in the
eastern and central Mediterranean basin.
Here again, war is a likely outcome; I
hope that the Greek government is braced
for an attempt at regime change.
That is to say, the
decline and fall of industrial
civilization is proceeding in the normal
way, at pretty much the normal pace. The
thermodynamic foundations tipped over
into decline first, as stocks of cheap
abundant fossil fuels depleted steadily
and the gap had to be filled by costly
and much less abundant replacements,
driving down net energy; the economy
went next, as more and more real wealth
had to be pulled out of all other
economic activities to keep the energy
supply more or less steady, until demand
destruction cut in and made that
increasingly frantic effort moot; now a
global political and military
superstructure dependent on cheap
abundant fossil fuels, and on the
economic arrangement that all of that
surplus energy made possible, is
cracking at the seams.
One feature of times like
these is that the number of people who
can have an influence on the immediate
outcome declines steadily as crisis
approaches. In the years leading up to
1914, for example, a vast number of
people contributed to the rising spiral
of conflict between the aging British
Empire and its German rival, but the
closer war came, the narrower the circle
of decision-makers became, until a
handful of politicians in Germany,
France, and Britain had the fate of
Europe in their hands. A few more bad
decisions, and the situation was no
longer under anybody’s control;
thereafter, the only option left was to
let the juggernaut of the First World
War roll mindlessly onward to its
conclusion.
In the same way, as
recently as the 1980s, many people in
the United States and elsewhere had some
influence on how the industrial age
would end; unfortunately most of them
backed politicians who cashed in the
resources that could have built a better
future on one last round of absurd
extravagance, and a whole landscape of
possibilities went by the boards. Step
by step, as the United States backed
itself further and further into a morass
of short-term gimmicks with ghastly
long-term consequences, the number of
people who have had any influence on the
trajectory we’re on has narrowed
steadily, and as we approach what may
turn out to be the defining crisis of
our time, a handful of politicians in a
handful of capitals are left to make the
last decisions that can shape the
situation in any way at all, before the
tanks begin to roll and the
fighter-bombers rise up from their
runways.
Out here on the fringes
of the collective conversation of our
time, where archdruids lurk and heresies
get uttered, the opportunity to shape
events as they happen is a very rare
thing. Our role, rather, is to set
agendas for the future, to take ideas
that are unthinkable in the mainstream
today and prepare them for their future
role as the conventional wisdom of eras
that haven’t dawned yet. Every phrase on
the lips of today’s practical men of
affairs, after all, was once a crazy
notion taken seriously only by the
lunatic fringe—yes, that includes
democracy, free-market capitalism, and
all the other shibboleths of our age.
With that in mind, while
we wait to see whether today’s practical
men of affairs stumble into war the way
they did in 1914, I propose to shift
gears and talk about something
else—something that may seem whimsical,
even pointless, in the light of the grim
martial realities just discussed. It’s
neither whimsical nor pointless, as it
happens, but the implications may take a
little while to dawn even on those of my
readers who’ve been following the last
few years of discussions most closely.
Let’s begin with a handful of data
points.
Item: Britain’s largest
bookseller recently noted that sales of
the Kindle e-book reader have
dropped like a rock in recent months,
while sales of old-fashioned printed
books are up. Here in the more
gizmocentric USA, e-books retain more of
their erstwhile popularity, but the
bloom is off the rose; among the young
and hip, it’s not hard at all to find
people who got rid of their book
collections in a rush of enthusiasm when
e-books came out, regretted the action
after it was too late, and now are
slowly restocking their bookshelves
while their e-book readers collect
cobwebs or, at best, find use as a
convenience for travel and the like.
Item: more generally, a
good many of the hottest new trends in
popular culture aren’t new trends at
all—they’re old trends revived, in many
cases, by people who weren’t even alive
to see them the first time around. Kurt
B. Reighley’s lively guide
The United States of Americana was
the first, and remains the best,
introduction to the phenomenon, one that
embraces everything from burlesque shows
and homebrewed bitters to backyard
chickens and the revival of Victorian
martial arts. One pervasive thread that
runs through the wild diversity of this
emerging subculture is the simple
recognition that many of these older
things are better, in straightforwardly
measurable senses, than their shiny
modern mass-marketed
not-quite-equivalents.
Item: within that
subculture, a small but steadily growing
number of people have taken the
principle to its logical extreme and
adopted the lifestyles and furnishings
of an earlier decade wholesale in
their personal lives. The 1950s are a
common target, and so far as I know,
adopters of 1950s culture are the
furthest along the process of turning
into a community, but other decades are
increasingly finding the same kind of
welcome among those less than impressed
by what today’s society has on offer.
Meanwhile, the reenactment scene has
expanded spectacularly in recent years
from the standard hearty fare of Civil
War regiments and the neo-medievalism of
the Society for Creative Anachronism to
embrace
almost any historical period you care to
name. These aren’t merely dress-up
games; go to a buckskinner’s rendezvous
or an outdoor SCA event, for example,
and you’re as likely as not to see
handspinners turning wool into yarn with
drop spindles, a blacksmith or two
laboring over a portable forge, and the
like.
Other examples of the
same broad phenomenon could be added to
the list, but these will do for now. I’m
well aware, of course, that most
people—even most of my readers—will have
dismissed the things just listed as
bizarre personal eccentricities, right
up there with the goldfish-swallowing
and flagpole-sitting of an earlier era.
I’d encourage those of my readers who
had that reaction to stop, take a second
look, and tease out the mental
automatisms that make that dismissal so
automatic a part of today’s conventional
wisdom. Once that’s done, a third look
might well be in order, because the
phenomenon sketched out here marks a
shift of immense importance for our
future.
For well over two
centuries now, since it first emerged as
the crackpot belief system of a handful
of intellectuals on the outer fringes of
their culture, the modern ideology of
progress has taken it as given that new
things were by definition better than
whatever they replaced. That assumption
stands at the heart of contemporary
industrial civilization’s childlike
trust in the irreversible cumulative
march of progress toward a future among
the stars. Finding ways to defend that
belief even when it obviously wasn’t
true—when the latest, shiniest products
of progress turned out to be worse in
every meaningful sense than the older
products they elbowed out of the way—was
among the great growth industries of the
20th century; even so, there were plenty
of cases where progress really did seem
to measure up to its billing. Given the
steady increases of energy per capita in
the world’s industrial nations over the
last century or so, that was a
predictable outcome.
The difficulty, of
course, is that the number of cases
where new things really are better than
what they replace has been shrinking
steadily in recent decades, while the
number of cases where old products are
quite simply better than their current
equivalents—easier to use, more
effective, more comfortable, less prone
to break, less burdened with unwanted
side effects and awkward features, and
so on—has been steadily rising. Back
behind the myth of progress, like the
little man behind the curtain in The
Wizard of Oz, stand two unpalatable
and usually unmentioned realities. The
first is that profits, not progress,
determines which products get marketed
and which get roundfiled; the second is
that making a cheaper, shoddier product
and using advertising gimmicks to sell
it anyway has been the standard
marketing strategy across a vast range
of American businesses for years now.
More generally, believers
in progress used to take it for granted
that progress would sooner or later
bring about a world where everyone would
live exciting, fulfilling lives brimfull
of miracle products and marvelous
experiences. You still hear that sort of
talk from the faithful now and then
these days, but it’s coming to sound a
lot like all that talk about the
glorious worker’s paradise of the future
did right around the time the Iron
Curtain came down for good. In both
cases, the future that was promised
didn’t have much in common with the one
that actually showed up. The one we got
doesn’t have some of the nastier
features of the one the former Soviet
Union and its satellites produced—well,
not yet, at least—but the glorious
consumer’s paradise described in such
lavish terms a few decades back got lost
on the way to the spaceport, and what we
got instead was a bleak landscape of
decaying infrastructure, abandoned
factories, prostituted media, and
steadily declining standards of living
for everyone outside the narrowing
circle of the privileged, with the
remnants of our once-vital democratic
institutions hanging above it all like
rotting scarecrows silhouetted against a
darkening sky.
In place of those
exciting, fulfilling lives mentioned
above, furthermore, we got the monotony
and stress of long commutes, cubicle
farms, and would-you-like-fries-with
that for the slowly shrinking fraction
of our population who can find a job at
all. The Onion, with its usual
flair for packaging unpalatable
realities in the form of deadpan humor,
nailed it a few days ago with a faux
health-news article announcing that
the best thing office workers could do
for their health is stand up at their
desk, leave the office, and never go
back. Joke or not, it’s not bad
advice; if you have a full-time job in
today’s America, the average medieval
peasant had a less stressful job
environment and more days off than you
do; he also kept a larger fraction of
the product of his labor than you’ll
ever see.
Then, of course, if
you’re like most Americans, you’ll numb
yourself once you get home by flopping
down on the sofa and spending most of
your remaining waking hours staring at
little colored pictures on a glass
screen. It’s remarkable how many people
get confused about what this action
really entails. They insist that they’re
experiencing distant places, traveling
in worlds of pure imagination, and so on
through the whole litany of
self-glorifying drivel the mass media
likes to employ in its own praise. Let
us please be real: when you watch a
program about the Amazon rain forest,
you’re not experiencing the Amazon rain
forest; you’re experiencing colored
pictures on a screen, and you’re only
getting as much of the experience as
fits through the narrow lens of a video
camera and the even narrower filter of
the production process. The difference
between experiencing something and
watching it on TV or the internet, that
is to say, is precisely the same as the
difference between making love and
watching pornography; in each case, the
latter is a very poor substitute for the
real thing.
For most people in
today’s America, in other words, the
closest approach to the glorious
consumer’s paradise of the future they
can expect to get is eight hours a day,
five days a week of mindless, monotonous
work under the constant pressure of
management efficiency experts, if
they’re lucky enough to get a job at
all, with anything up to a couple of
additional hours commuting and any
off-book hours the employer happens to
choose to demand from them into the
deal, in order to get a paycheck that
buys a little less each month—inflation
is under control, the government
insists, but prices somehow keep going
up—of products that get more cheaply
made, more likely to be riddled with
defects, and more likely to pose a
serious threat to the health and
well-being of their users, with every
passing year. Then they can go home and
numb their nervous systems with those
little colored pictures on the screen,
showing them bland little snippets of
experiences they will never have, wedged
in there between the advertising.
That’s the world that
progress has made. That’s the shining
future that resulted from all those
centuries of scientific research and
technological tinkering, all the genius
and hard work and sacrifice that have
gone into the project of progress. Of
course there’s more to the consequences
of progress than that; progress has
saved quite a few children from
infectious diseases, and laced the
environment with so many toxic wastes
that childhood cancer, all but unheard
of in 1850, is a routine event today;
it’s made impressive contributions to
human welfare, while flooding the
atmosphere with greenhouse gases that
will soon make far more impressive
contributions to human suffering and
death—well, I could go on along these
lines for quite a while. True believers
in the ideology of perpetual progress
like to insist that all the good things
ought to be credited to progress while
all the bad things ought to be blamed on
something else, but that’s not so
plausible an article of faith as it once
was, and it bids fair to become a great
deal less common as the downsides of
progress become more and more difficult
to ignore.
The data points I noted
earlier in this week’s post, I’ve come
to believe, are symptoms of that change,
the first stirrings of wind that tell of
the storm to come. People searching for
a better way of living than the one our
society offers these days are turning to
the actual past, rather than to some
imaginary future, in that quest. That’s
the immense shift I mentioned earlier.
What makes it even more momentous is
that by and large, it’s not being done
in the sort of grim Puritanical spirit
of humorless renunciation that today’s
popular culture expects from those who
want something other than what the
consumer economy has on offer. It’s
being done, rather, in a spirit of
celebration.
One of my readers
responded to
my post two weeks ago on deliberate
technological regress by suggesting
that I was proposing a Butlerian jihad
of sorts. (Those of my readers who don’t
get the reference should pick up a copy
of Frank Herbert’s iconic SF novel
Dune and read it.) I demurred, for
two reasons. First, the Butlerian jihad
in Herbert’s novel was a revolt against
computer technology, and I see no need
for that; once the falling cost of human
labor intersects the rising cost of
energy and technology, and it becomes
cheaper to hire file clerks and
accountants than to maintain the
gargantuan industrial machine that keeps
computer technology available, computers
will go away, or linger as a legacy
technology for a narrowing range of
special purposes until the hardware
finally burns out.
The second reason,
though, is the more important. I’m not a
fan of jihads, or of holy wars of any
flavor; history shows all too well that
when you mix politics and violence with
religion, any actual religious content
vanishes away, leaving its castoff
garments to cover the naked rule of
force and fraud. If you want people to
embrace a new way of looking at things,
furthermore, violence, threats, and
abusive language don’t work, and it’s
even less effective to offer that new
way as a ticket to virtuous misery,
along the lines of the Puritanical
spirit noted above. That’s why so much
of the green-lifestyle propaganda of the
last thirty years has done so little
good—so much of it has been pitched as a
way to suffer self-righteously for the
good of Gaia, and while that approach
appeals to a certain number of wannabe
martyrs, that’s not a large enough
fraction of the population to matter.
The people who are
ditching their Kindles and savoring
books as physical objects, brewing their
own beer and resurrecting other old arts
and crafts, reformatting their lives in
the modes of a past decade, or spending
their spare time reconnecting with the
customs and technologies of an earlier
time—these people aren’t doing any of
those things out of some passion for
self-denial. They’re doing them because
these things bring them delights that
the shoddy mass-produced lifestyles of
the consumer economy can’t match. What
these first stirrings suggest to me is
that the way forward isn’t a Butlerian
jihad, but a Butlerian carnival—a
sensuous celebration of the living world
outside the cubicle farms and the glass
screens, which will inevitably draw most
of its raw materials from eras,
technologies, and customs of the past,
which don’t require the extravagant
energy and resource inputs that the
modern consumer economy demands, and so
will be better suited to a future
defined by scarce energy and resources.
The Butlerian carnival isn’t
the only way to approach the deliberate
technological regression we need to carry
out in the decades ahead, but it’s an
important one. In upcoming posts, I’ll talk
more about how this and other avenues to the
same goal might be used to get through the
mess immediately ahead, and start laying
foundations for a future on the far side of
the crises of our time.
John Michael Greer is the
Grand Archdruid of the
Ancient Order
of Druids in America and the author of
more than thirty books on a wide range of
subjects, including peak oil and the future
of industrial society. He lives in
Cumberland, MD, an old red brick mill town
in the north central Appalachians, with his
wife Sara.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk