The Long Descent (29 page)

Again, this is mystification, and it serves a socially necessary purpose in a culture where talking about the goals and values of specific technologies is taboo. The frequently repeated claim that “technology is value-free” is fatuous nonsense, but as long as we think about tools and techniques as a single thing called “technology,” it's also plausible nonsense. In reality, of course, individual technologies embody the values and goals of their designers, and they are selected by users on the basis of the technology's relationship to values and goals. Look at the suite of technologies used by a person or a culture, and it's an easy matter to divine the values that person or that culture holds and the goals they pursue. This is unmentionable in our culture because, among other reasons, the values and goals our technologies reveal to the world are a very long distance indeed from the ones we claim to embrace.

Thus it's crucial that any meaningful discussion about the future finds its way out of debates about technology in the abstract and addresses at least two other, more specific questions:

• First, which technologies, out of the many available options, will still be useful as we wake up from the dream of perpetual progress and start down the far side of Hubbert's peak?

• Second, what are the values and goals that might usefully gov-ern our technologies — and the rest of our society — as the deindustrial age dawns around us?

The first of these questions was central to Chapter 5 of this book; the second forms the core of the present chapter. The latter issue can't be settled, or even meaningfully discussed, without asking hard questions about some of the most basic assumptions of the modern world. It's one thing to talk about which technology to use for a given project, but it's quite another to ask whether the project itself is worth doing and, if so, whether applying some form of technology is the best way to go about it at all. Questions like these may start out in the most pragmatic terms, but they lead inescapably into the dimension of human thought that our society is least comfortable discussing: the dimension of spirituality.

After the Prosthetic Society

It's often said that generals prepare to fight the last war rather than the next one, and the same thing deserves to be said at least as much of societies in general. In every age, most people believe that the current state of affairs can be counted on to keep on going forever, and they plan for the future on the assumption that it will be just like the present, only more so. Political, economic, and cultural institutions do the same thing, and too often spiritual traditions — which have the social function of pointing out inconvenient realities — get caught up in the same way of thinking. Then the future comes along and turns out different, and everyone who thought they knew what was coming ends up sitting in the wreckage wondering what happened.

Prophecies about the future made on the basis of conventional wisdom just don't wear very well. When I was growing up in the suburban America of the 1960s, everyone knew that by 2000 we'd have manned bases on the Moon and a Hilton hotel in orbit. Back here on the ground, our homes would be run by nuclear power that would literally be too cheap to meter; you'd just pay a monthly hookup fee and use all the juice you wanted. The decaying inner cities would be replaced by huge, terraced megastructures or Paolo Soleri's gargantuan arcologies, while Sealab (does anybody remember Sealab any more?) was going to be the prototype for whole cities under the sea. It would have been quite a world, but somehow it got lost in the 1970s energy crises, and we ended up instead with SUVs, metastasizing suburban sprawl, and the short-term political gimmicks that papered over fossil fuel depletion for twenty years and lost us our best bet of getting through the next century without some form of collapse.

So it may not be out of line to suggest that many current ideas about where we're headed are as misplaced as the atomic Utopia of 1960s futurists turned out to be. One trend usually pointed out as the wave of the future seems particularly likely to end up in history's compost heap in much the same way: the replacement of human abilities with electronic and mechanical devices.

This mechanization of everyday life has become a huge trend, especially, but not only among the middle classes of the industrial world, who set fashions for the rest of the planet. Think of something that people used to do, and the salesman at your local mall can probably sell you something to do it for you. My favorite example is the breadmaking machine. A hundred years ago nearly every family baked its own bread; it's a simple, enjoyable task that can be done with Stone Age technology. Now, though, you can drop hundreds of dollars on a countertop machine with buttons and flashing lights that will do it for you.

Similarly, people used to entertain themselves by singing and playing musical instruments, but now we have CDs and –iPods. They used to exercise by taking walks in the park, but now we have treadmill machines. In place of memories, we have Palm Pilots; in place of imagination, we have TVs, and so on. At the zenith of the mechanizing trend came that bizarre figure of the late 20th century, the suburban couch potato, whose sole activity outside of work hours and commuting was sitting on a couch clicking a baroque array of remote controls while delivery drivers came to the door with an endless supply of consumer products ordered, bought, and paid for online.

In effect, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed the creation of a prosthetic culture. A prosthetic is an artificial device that replaces a human function. They are, of course, valuable technologies for those who have lost the use of the function in question; if you've lost a leg via accident or illness, for example, an artificial leg that lets you walk again is a very good thing to have. Still, when a society starts convincing people to saw off their own legs so businesses can sell them artificial ones, something has gone decidedly wrong — and that's not too far from the situation we're in today.

There are at least two drastic problems with our prosthetic culture. First, the abandonment of human abilities in favor of mechanical replacements has no little impact on who we are and what we can be. As E. M. Forster pointed out in his harrowing 1909 short story “The Machine Stops,” it's hard to imagine that anyone's highest potential as a human being can be achieved in a lifestyle that consists solely of sitting in a chair and pushing buttons. On the other hand, Forsteresque remote-control dystopias are about as likely now as those orbital hotels and undersea cities because the basis for the couch potato lifestyle is trickling away as I write these words.

The driving force behind the prosthetic culture of the 20th century's last decades was the final hurrah of the age of cheap oil. The manipulations that crashed the price of petroleum in the early 1980s made energy cheaper than it has ever been in human history. At several points in the 1980s and 1990s, oil dropped to $10 a barrel, its lowest price ever, once inflation is factored in. During those years, oil was the single largest component in the industrial world's energy mix, and the “gateway resource” that gave access to all other forms of energy: the machines that mine coal, drill for natural gas, build hydroelectric dams, and so on, are all powered by oil. The plunging price of oil thus pulled the bottom out from under the cost of energy as a whole, and it put the world's industrial societies into a historically unprecedented situation. For the first (and probably only) time in history, it was cheaper to build a machine to do almost everything than to have a human being do it.

In some ways, of course, this was simply the culmination of a process that got started at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and then went into overdrive with the birth of the petroleum economy in the years just before the First World War. Earlier efforts to replace human skills with machines had to deal with much more limited and expensive energy supplies, which forced a reliance on economies of scale; machine-made bread, for instance, had to be made in big factories (rather than home breadmaking machines) to keep costs within reach of most consumers. The pinnacle of the age of cheap oil made energy so abundant and so inexpensive, at least in the more privileged industrial countries, that it was briefly possible to ignore economies of scale and make each middle-class person the beneficiary of a microfactory designed to produce, or at least deliver, whatever goods and services were wanted.

All this, though, depended on cheap energy, and with today's plateauing of world oil production and the approach of inevitable declines in the near future, the prosthetic culture of the last few decades is headed for the recycling bin of history. The reasons for this have nothing to do with the romanticism of which people who question today's technological triumphalism are so often accused. Rather, they're a matter of cold, hard economics.

The modern faith in progress has its blind spots, and one of the most pervasive is the tendency for people to believe that the present arrangement of society is somehow inevitable and the natural result of all those centuries of progress. To this way of thinking, for example, it seems inevitable that every culture will end up relying on machines rather than people for tasks like data processing, simply because that's the way we do things. Behind the grand facade of progress, though, lies a simple economic fact: in an age of abundant fossil fuel energy, it's cheaper — a lot cheaper — to build and power a machine to do something than it is to train and employ a human being to do the same thing. As long as that equation holds, the only constraint that limits how many people get replaced by machines is the sophistication of the machines, and so the same equation drives technological advances. Because machines powered by cheap fossil fuels do things at lower costs than people do, investment in new technology tends to pay for itself. The last three centuries of the Western world's history show what happens when this process goes into high gear.

The whole process depends, though, on having a cheap, abundant source of mechanical and electrical energy. For the last three centuries, fossil fuels have provided that, but the lesson of peak oil is that this was a temporary situation, possible only because human beings found and exploited the huge but finite reserves of cheap energy in the Earth's crust. Everything based on that fact is subject to change — including the equation that makes machine labor cheaper than human labor.

In a world where fossil fuels are expensive and scarce, the equation works the other way. Modern machines require very specialized and resource-intensive inputs of energy and materials, and if those aren't available within tight specifications, the machines don't work. Human beings, by contrast, can be kept happy and productive with very simple, generally available resources — food, drink, warmth, shelter, companionship, and mental stimulation, all of which have wide tolerances and a great deal of room for substitution. In a society that has to operate within the energy budget provided by renewable resources, ordinary human needs are a good deal less challenging to provide than the pure, concentrated, and precisely controlled inputs needed by complex machines.

This disparity explains why the steam turbine, invented in ancient Greek times by Hero of Alexandria, remained a philosopher's toy, and why the brilliant mechanical inventions of medieval China never caused the sort of social and economic transformations the Industrial Revolution launched in the modern West. Machines existed, but without the energy resources to power them — more exactly, without the realization that coal, oil, and natural gas can be turned into mechanical energy if you have the right kind of machine — human labor was more economical, and so the machines languished. In the deindustrial world of the future, when human labor will again be less expensive than mechanical energy, counting on machines to maintain some semblance of today's prosthetic society may turn out to be an expensive mistake; focusing on human potential may be a better option.

All this suggests that current visions of the future, and the policies based on them, are in desperate need of a rethink. The decades to come will see many things that are now done by machines handed back over to human beings for the eminently pragmatic reason that it will again be cheaper to feed, house, clothe, and train a human being to do those things than it will be to make, fuel, and maintain a machine to do them. How many things? That depends on how much renewable energy capacity gets brought online before production rates of oil and natural gas start slipping down the steep slopes of Hubbert's peak.

In a worst-cast scenario in which nothing significant is done until major crises start to hit (and in the United States especially, we're uncomfortably close to that scenario right now), energy shortages could be severe enough that during the worst phases of crisis, essentially everything will have to be done with human labor alone. In any realistic future, however, old skills are likely to be in high demand again. Professions that involve doing useful things with one's hands, brain, and a relatively simple muscle-powered toolkit should be high on any list of hot career tracks in the 21st century.

The Butlerian Future

One of the ironies of this situation is that science fiction, the branch of modern literature most often caught up in the uncritical celebration of progress, has more than once worked through the consequences of the equation just discussed. Now it's true that science fiction has a very mixed track record for predicting the future, and quite a few of the major trends of the last half century were missed entirely by science fiction's would-be prophets. Manned landings on the moon were a staple of science fiction from Jules Verne until Apollo 11, yet nobody in the SF scene even guessed at the immense cultural impact that television coverage of that first lunar landing would turn out to have. The thought that the Apollo flights would turn out to be, not the beginning of a golden age of space exploration, but an extravagant gesture too costly to push further out into the solar system, would have been rejected out of hand in science fiction's own golden age between the two World Wars.