Please Read This Book

I recently finished The Long Descent, a piece of nonfiction by John Michael Greer, whose musings you will find in The Archdruid Report, also linked on my sidebar.
Upon finishing the book, I wasn't sure whether I should (a) start over or (b) immediately go online and buy copies for all my loved ones. Lacking sufficient funds, I chose (c) throw it in the Breadbin and hope people see it hanging out in there.

First, I suppose I should tell you how I came to be reading Greer and his contemporaries at all. It's because I embody a paradox.

On the one hand, I wrestle continually with that yokozuna Instant Gratification. Iggy's a grand champion sumo and he floors me in short order entirely too often even now. Patience may be a virtue, but it ain't one of mine. On the other hand, I tend to take a global long view, and am acutely aware of causes and consequences of actions both individual and collective. Perhaps the shame of the first trait reinforces the zeal of the second, I don't know and it really doesn't matter. I have a keen interest in the future. Oddly for a human, and even more oddly for a human without offspring, I have never felt that the future ended with my death.

Iggy once ruled my mind, my heart and my soul. That was in my early twenties, a period of profligacy that resulted in a fiscal flameout which took the better part of a decade to dig myself out of. The big old fat bugger still pops up on entirely too many occasions. I still lose bouts to him. But at least now I recognize the rascal. Sometimes I can even summon the strength to step out of the ring. By the rules of sumo--and the rules of a culture obsessed with the I-wannas--stepping out means I lose. But the rules I've so painfully evolved for myself state that you can't lose if you don't play.

I'm increasingly choosing not to play, and it's a choice I make with eyes wide open. Not playing means I'm unlikely to become monetarily rich, for instance. But my existence is more than comfortable and I consider myself wealthy beyond price in other ways.

Choosing not to play has another consequence: it's much easier to observe the game when you're standing outside it. The further away from the ring I step, the crazier the whole thing looks.

It's rigged, to begin with. Any "game" that forces its participants to forsake simple, proven pleasures (good enough for humanity for millennia) in favour of ever-increasing speed and complexity isn't a game at all: it's a death march. Ve vill haf FUN, und ve vill haf it NOW, yes? Add in an overlay of quasi-religious fervour--"there is no God but Greed, and Dollar is His Profit"...and pretty soon you're on a tightrope over an abyss. Blindfolded.

One day I woke up with a disquieting epiphany: if my eyes are open, I'm looking at something that's a product of oil. Even if the thing wasn't made with oil and neither was the machine on which it was manufactured, the odds are pretty damn good the thing was at least transported to my line of sight using oil. Our entire civilization is utterly dependant on cheap oil.

Now, I'm not stupid, but nor am I anyone's visionary. I figured many other people must have had this thought before me, and I was right. Trouble is, most of the people who acknowledge this self-evident truth are relegated to the fringes of society. The mad tinfoil hatters of Peak Oil, who wants to listen to them? They go on and on about things like "sustainability". Who wants "sustainability"? There's something in that word I don't like. It makes it sound like there's a limit to growth, a limit to progress. Ridiculous. Everybody knows we're the pinnacle of creation!

Yep, we are. The peak, the pinnacle, the tippy-top, I'd say, or damn close to it. Nice view, eh? Just whatever you do, don't look down, it's a long, long way to fall.

Read enough 'doomers' and you'll be outfitting your bunker and awaiting apocalypse. They're all pretty much the same: they have a smug tone about them, an I-was-right-and-you-were-wrong vibe that's mighty comforting if you're an I and not a you. And most of them imply that we're right on the precipice...a slight gust of wind will send billions hurtling to their deaths. It makes for a great Hollywood thriller, but there's no there there. The initial premise is sound, I'd say: oil is finite, and we're running out. But the substance beyond that initial premise is exchanged for high drama. Fun to read, but ultimately unbelievable.

THE LONG DESCENT is not your typical doomer manifesto. Even though it covers much of the same territory--it's subtitled A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, after all--it approaches that territory from a whole different direction.

Greer created the theory of Catabolic Collapse (pdf) which states, in effect, that we are not poised at the edge of a cliff, but rather at (or near) the top of a staircase. Society will indeed collapse, says Greer, but it won't be an overnight process. In fact, he argues quite convincingly, it will take generations (plural) to reach the place that some other Messiahs of Doom have us chugging into by next weekend. The collapse will be slow, majestic if you will, interrupted by periods of stability and partial recovery. A tremendous effort will be expended not to stabilize the decline, but to 'normalize' it. In other words, everything is fine, says the television.

He then makes a number of eminently practical suggestions for dealing with slow deindustrialization. He suggests that our grandchildren will be likely to be living at the same level of technology as were our grandparents, and further suggests we may wish to investigate and perhaps acquire the all-but lost skills that defined our grandparents' existences.

This is a sobering thought, to be sure, but it's also tremendously liberating. Freed from the twin straitjackets of eternal progress and Armageddon--both of which are closely examined and dismissed before Greer gets to the gritty-bitty of his vision of the future--it becomes easier to imagine a fulfilling future existence and much easier to prepare for one.

It also makes a little more sense of the daily news. The stock market has largely recovered from the crash of '08, even if the wider economy hasn't, quite. Greer's theory predicts both this recovery and the next stairstep I felt very strongly (even before reading the book) that we're approaching.

Please, read this book. You'll be glad you did.