The Long Descent (10 page)

That habit of rage isn't going to help us, or anyone, as we move toward a future that promises to leave most of our culture's familiar stories in tatters. As we face the unwelcome realities of the limits to growth, clinging to whatever single story appeals to us may be emotionally comforting in the short term, but it leads to a dead end familiar to those who study the history of extinct civilizations. Learning other stories, and learning that it's possible to see the world in many ways, is a more viable path — but it can be a challenging one that many people can't or won't take.

Faustus and the Monkey Trap

The modern habit of trying to fit all of reality into a single story — whether that's the myth of progress, the myth of apocalypse, or any other — forms one of the mainsprings behind industrial society's failure to deal with the limits to growth. Albert Einstein commented that it's impossible to solve a problem with the same sort of thinking that created it, and this dictum has rarely been so relevant as it is today. In particular, many of today's attempts to do something about peak oil rely on the same thinking, and derive from the same story, that got us into our present predicament. These habits of thought turn out “solutions” guaranteed to make our situation worse than it is already.

Of the dozens of good examples in the daily news, the one that seems most worth noting right now is the economic blowback set in motion by the US government's attempt to bolster its faltering petroleum-driven economy with ethanol. As corn and other grains get diverted from grocery stores to gas tanks, commodity prices spike, inflation ripples outward through the economic food chain, and poor people around the world face the prospect of starvation. More than twenty years ago, William Catton pointed out in his seminal classic
Overshoot
that the downslope of industrial society would force human beings to compete against their own machines for dwindling resource stocks.
¹¹
His prediction has become today's reality.

It's all very reminiscent of an old metaphor much used in cognitive psychology. Many centuries ago in southeast Asia, some clever soul figured out how to use the thinking patterns of monkeys to make a highly effective monkey trap. The trap is a gourd with a hole in one end just big enough for a monkey's hand to fit in, and a stout rope connected to the other end, which is fastened to a stake in the ground. Into the gourd goes a piece of some food prized by monkeys, large and solid enough that it can't be shaken out of the gourd. You set the trap in a place monkeys frequent, and wait.

Sooner or later, a monkey comes along, smells the food, and puts its hand into the gourd to grab it. The hole is too small to allow the monkey to extract hand and food together, though, and the rope and stake keeps the monkey from hauling it away, so the monkey keeps trying to get the food out in its hand. Meanwhile you come out of hiding and head toward the monkey with a net (if there's a market for live monkeys), or with something more deadly (if there isn't). Instead of dropping the food and scampering toward the safety of the nearest tree, most monkeys will frantically keep trying to wrestle the food out of the gourd until the net snares it or the club comes whistling down.

The trap works because monkeys, like the rest of us, tend to become so focused on pursuing immediate goals by familiar means that they lose track of the wider context of priorities that make those goals and means meaningful in the first place. In the terms used earlier in this chapter, the monkey gets stuck in a single story, failing to notice that there may be more options than the obvious one. Once the monkey smells the food in the gourd, it defines the problem as how to get the food out, and it tries to solve the problem in a familiar way, by manipulating the food and the gourd. When the hunter appears, that simply adds a note of urgency, and makes the problem appear to be how to get the food out before the hunter arrives. Phrased in either of these terms, the problem is impossible to solve. Only if the monkey remembers that food is of no value to a dead monkey, and it redefines the problem as primarily a matter of getting away from the hunter, will it let go of the food, get its hand out of the trap, and run for the nearest tree.

The monkey trap may not look like a theme for great literature, but exactly the same dilemma forms the main plot engine of Christopher Marlowe's classic play
Doctor Faustus.
In Marlowe's vision, Faustus is an intellectual
manqué
who has mastered all the scholarship of his time and dismisses it as worthless because he can't cash it in for power. So he conjures the devil Mephistopheles, who offers him twenty-four years of power over the world of appearances, in exchange for his immortal soul. Faustus gladly makes the bargain and proceeds to run riot for the better part of nine scenes, with the ever-obsequious Mephistopheles always ready to fulfill his every wish but one. Finally, the twenty-four years are up, and at the stroke of midnight a crew of devils swoops down on Faustus and hauls him off to Hell.

All this came to Marlowe out of the folk literature that gave him the raw materials for his play. What makes Marlowe's retelling of the story one of Elizabethan England's great dramas, though, is his insight into the psychology of Faustus' damnation. Faustus spends nearly the entire play a heartbeat away from escaping the devil's pact that ultimately drags him to his doom. All he has to do is renounce the pact and all the powers and pleasures it brings him, and salvation is his — but this is exactly what he cannot do. He becomes so focused on his sorcerer's powers, so used to getting what he wants by ordering Mephistopheles around, that the possibility of getting anything any other way slips out of his grasp. Even at the very end, as the devils drag him away, the last words that burst from his lips are a cry for Mephistopheles to save him.

The logic of the monkey trap underlies the entire scenario, because the monkey and Faustus trap themselves in essentially the same way. Both have a proven track record of solving problems using a specific method — the monkey, by manipulating things with its hands; Faustus, by summoning Mephistopheles and having him take care of it. Both keep on trying to use their familiar set of problem-solving tools even when they clearly don't work. Even when the real shape of the problem becomes clear and breaking out of the old way of thinking becomes a question of immediate survival, they keep on struggling to make the problem fit their choice of solutions, rather than adjusting their solution to the actual problem.

Mephistopheles and the monkey hunter have a crucial ally here, and its name is stress. It's one thing to step back and take stock of a situation when there seems to be plenty of time and no sign of danger. It's quite another to do it in the presence of an imminent threat to survival. Once the true shape of the situation appears, stress reactions hardwired into the nervous systems of men and monkeys alike cut in, making it very difficult indeed to reassess the situation and consider alternative ways of dealing with it. The final scene of Marlowe's drama expresses this dilemma with shattering intensity: as midnight approaches, Faustus tries every means of escaping his fate except the one that can actually save him.

The same dilemma on a larger scale underlies current efforts to deal with the imminent decline of world oil production by finding something else to pour into our gas tanks: ethanol, biodiesel, hydrogen, you name it. Our petroleum-powered vehicles — not just cars, but the trucks, trains, ships, and aircraft that make our current way of life possible — are the food in the monkey's hand and the pact that binds Mephistopheles to Faustus' service. Even in the peak oil community, the problem of peak oil is too often framed as how to find some other way to keep the fuel tanks topped up. This seems like common sense, but that's what the monkey thinks about getting the food out of the gourd, too.

Approached as a question of finding something to fill our gluttonous appetite for highly concentrated energy, the problem of peak oil is just as insoluble as the monkey trap when that's approached as a question of getting food. The discovery and exploitation of the Earth's petroleum reserves gave human beings a fantastic windfall of essentially free energy, and we proceeded to burn through it at an astonishing pace. Now that the supply of petroleum is beginning to falter, the question before us is not how to keep burning something else at the same pace, or how to find some other way to power a civilization of a sort that can only survive by burning extravagant amounts of energy, but how to scale back our expectations and our technology enough to make them work within the limits of the same renewable sources our ancestors had four hundred years ago.

I've suggested earlier in this book that expecting some other energy resource to provide energy on the same scale and level of concentration that petroleum does — just because we happen to want one — is a little like responding to one huge lottery win by assuming that when that money starts running out, another equally large win can be had for the cost of a few more tickets. This is close enough to today's consumer psychology that it's easy to imagine somebody in this position pouring all the money he has left into lottery tickets, throwing away his chances of avoiding bankruptcy because the only solution he can imagine is winning the lottery again. And this, again, is exactly the mentality of current attempts to fuel industrial society by pouring our food supply into our gas tanks.

Faustus may be a better model for the emerging crisis than the monkey because the predicament we face, like his, is precisely the result of what we're best at. Faustus became so dependent on his attendant devils that he lost track of the possibility that he could do something without them. Replace “devils” with “machines” and the parallel is exact. We have become so used to solving problems by throwing energy-intensive technologies at them that when technologies themselves become the crux of a predicament, we have no idea what to do. If any of the achievements of the last three hundred years are to be salvaged from the approaching spiral of crises, we need to rethink this now, before the social, economic, and political stresses become so pressing that clear thought becomes impossible and fossil-fueled spirits appear, on schedule, to drag us off to a close equivalent of the Hell of Marlowe's play.

Distracting Ourselves

The problem of the monkey trap is already a potent factor in contemporary society. Watch the way that pundits and politicians keep trying to solve today's crises with yesterday's solutions — no matter how counterproductive the results — and it's hard not to see a reflection of the poor monkey trying to get its hand out of the trap without letting go of the food that keeps it stuck there. The old saying, “When you realize that you're in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging,” has relevance here. Easy to say, this can be hard to put into practice, especially when digging has been so successful and so profitable for so long that it's the only thing you really know how to do any more.

Yet the monkey trap fastened to the hand of modern industrial society has implications not often recognized. It's best to come at this one in a roundabout way, so I'll begin from an unlikely starting point and talk a bit about the history of the New Age movement.
¹²

It's common these days for people to roll their eyes when the New Age or any of the movements of thought associated with it come up for discussion. This fashionable scorn, though, leads many of us to miss the chance to watch a crucial barometer of social trends. In any civilization, it's the cults, fads, and passions of the fringe that point out roads that the rest of society will presently take.

If some prescient Roman scholar of the reign of Nero or Claudius, say, wanted to catch some whisper of the world that would supplant his own, he'd have been wasting his time listening to speeches in the Forum or lectures in the fashionable academies of the day. Instead, he would have had to search out the cultural underbelly of his age, where strange cults from distant lands bid for the loyalties of those long since alienated from the worship of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. The Middle Ages already existed there in larval form, long before anyone in Rome had ever heard of Goths or Huns, or thought of Jesus of Nazareth as anything but a footnote in the history of a minor province somewhere back east.

The New Age movement is unlikely to become for the coming deindustrial age what Christianity became during and after Rome's collapse. If it had an equivalent in the classical scene, it would be the Gnostic movement. Like the New Age, Gnosticism was a diffuse and wildly diverse phenomenon that was popular among the privileged classes of its time, and reflected the attitudes and interests of those classes far too closely to survive the collapse of the society that gave them their status. Gnosticism's Achilles' heel was its intense spiritual elitism — its rigid distinction between the few who had the capacity for
gnosis
(redeeming knowledge) and the many who did not. The New Age movement formulates its notions of privilege in a different way, but those notions are still central to the movement.

Like the Gnostics, the New Age movement drew heavily on older traditions; despite its name there was never that much new about it. Nearly all its ingredients were first assembled by the Spiritualist movement of the mid-19th century: channeling (they called it “mediumship” back then); alternative health systems; positive-thinking psychology; an intense reverence for the wisdom of the East that never quite stooped to learn much about Asian spiritual teachings; and other key elements. By the 1950s, when the New Age movement began to coalesce, this package was the common property of a dizzying range of alternative spiritualities in the Western world, many of which had apocalyptic mythologies of the sort already discussed in this chapter.

Like other apocalyptic faiths, these belief systems made the trip from grand announcements of the imminent arrival of a new world to embarrassed excuses for its failure to appear. One of the classics of modern sociology,
When Prophecy Fails,
came out of a prime example of this sort of apocalyptic embarrassment from the 1950s.
¹³
Against this backdrop of repeated failure, though, some of the leading figures of the nascent New Age community came up with a novel gambit. They proposed that believers should live their lives in the ordinary world as if the new age had already arrived. By making the prophesied great change a reality in their own lives here and now, they hoped to catalyze it in the world as a whole.