The Long Descent (12 page)

Even those who reject the myth of progress in favor of the myth of apocalypse draw most of their ideas from the faith they think they've abandoned. Like Satanists who accept all the presuppositions of Christian theology but root for the other side, or like that minority of feminists who argue that gender discrimination is bad when it privileges men but good when it works the other way around, most of today's believers in apocalypse swallow whole the mythic claim that progress is as inevitable as a steamroller; it's simply that they believe the steamroller is about to roll its way off a cliff. The suggestion that the steamroller is in the process of shifting into reverse, and will presently start rolling patiently back the way it came, is just as foreign to them as it is to believers in progress.

It's not going too far, I think, to call belief in progress the established religion of the modern industrial world. In the same way that Christians have traditionally looked to heaven and Buddhists to nirvana, most people nowadays look to progress for their salvation and their explanation for why the world is the way it is. To believers in the religion of progress, all other human societies are steps on a ladder that lead to modern industrial civilization. From the standpoint of the myth, the things our civilization happens to be good at are the things that matter, and the things our civilization has never been able to master don't count; our kind of progress is the only kind there is, and the road to the future thus inevitably leads through us to future societies that will be like ours, but even more so. All of these claims are taken for granted as self-evident truths by most people in today's industrial societies. Not one of them has a basis in logic or evidence; like the doctrine of the Trinity or the Four Noble Truths, they are statements of faith.

The religion of progress has a central role in driving the predicament of industrial civilization because the dead end of dependence on rapidly depleting fossil fuels can't be escaped by continuing on the path we've been following for the last three centuries or so. Almost without exception, the technological progress of the industrial age will have to shift into reverse as its foundation — cheap, abundant energy — goes away, and most of the social and cultural phenomena that grew out of fossil fuel-powered technology will go away as well. The peak and decline of the world's oil reserves is the first step in this process, and the slower exhaustion of coal and other nonrenewable fuels will complete it, setting the industrial world on a trajectory that will most likely lead to something like the technology and society it had before the industrial revolution began in the first place.

What will happen to the faith in progress in an age of obvious technological regress, when cars and computers and footsteps on the Moon all belong to the departed glories of the past? No doubt some diehard believers will claim that whatever changes come as we slide down the far side of Hubbert's peak are further evidence of progress. We've already seen the first wave of that among green-tech proponents who argue that their technologies are “more advanced” and therefore more progressive than the competition alternatives. Still, it seems unlikely that many people will keep the faith. The religion of progress has maintained its hold for the last three centuries because it has delivered on its promises, filling our lives with technological marvels wondrous enough to distract us from the cost to our world, our communities, and ourselves.

When the parade of wonders grinds to a halt, then, the impact on deindustrializing cultures may be immense. If, as I've suggested, progress is the unrecognized religion of the industrial world, the failure of its priests to produce miracles on cue could plunge many people into a crisis of faith with no easy way out. The recent vogue for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic visions of the future strike me as two clear signs that people are beginning to turn their back on the religion of progress and seek their salvation from other gods. Neither pursuing scapegoats nor waiting for redemption through catastrophe are productive as ways of dealing with the transition to the deindustrial age, but both of them offer a great deal of emotional consolation, and it's likely to take more than the usual amount of clearheadedness to avoid them in the difficult times we are likely to encounter in the near future.

Peoples of the past, when stripped of their traditional faith in one way or another, have responded in many ways. Some launched revitalization movements to renew the old faith or to revive some older vision of destiny, some embraced newly minted belief systems or traditions imported from distant lands, and some simply huddled down into themselves and died. We have begun to see examples of each of these reactions in the modern industrial world. Which of them turns out to be most common may have drastic effects on the way the twilight of the industrial age works out, because the stories we tell ourselves will have an immense impact on the world we create at the end of the industrial age.

THREE
Briefing
for the
Descent

I
n the wide space between the myth of perpetual progress and the myth of imminent apocalypse, we can begin seeking a clearer and more nuanced sense of the possible futures open to industrial civilization as the age of cheap, abundant energy comes to an end. Any such exploration has to start from a sense of the possibilities of civilization — the form of human society that includes such things as cities, schools, market economies, and the combination of literacy and book distribution that makes it possible for you to encounter my ideas in the first place — because those possibilities define crucial limits on what can be achieved as the deindustrial age begins.

It's long been fashionable to claim that civilized societies are better by definition than the less complex tribal societies from which civilizations emerge and to which, in times of decline and disintegration, they tend to revert. In recent years, it's become just as fashionable in some circles to stand the equation on its head and insist that civilized societies are by definition worse than tribal societies. Both these claims reduce history to a morality play in which all human cultures, in their richness and moral complexity, are forced into two-dimensional roles as good guys or bad guys. This sort of moralizing is fine if your goal is cultivating self-righteous–indignation, but it's a good deal less useful in the quest for understanding.

It's clear from the historical record that some civilizations have, on the whole, been good places for human beings to live, and others have been much less so. It's also clear that civilization can flourish indefinitely with minimal ecological damage in certain bioregions, and equally clear that in other bioregions civilization is a mayfly phenomenon that flits past and vanishes in a blink of ecological time. Visit eastern China, where the same rice paddies, villages, and cities have been in use for five thousand years, and the potential continuity of civilization is hard to dispute; visit the ruins of Tikal in the Yucatan jungle, where classic Maya civilization crashed and burned a thousand years ago, and the potential fragility of civilization is just as obvious. Trying to force both these examples to fit the Procrustean bed of a single story requires so much stretching and lopping that the results have much more to do with the prejudices of the storyteller than the facts on the ground.

One of the keynotes of history, though, is that a long rhythm of rise and fall seems to shape the lives of civilizations. Over the five thousand years they have witnessed so far, for instance, the cities and villages of eastern China have seen Chinese civilization expand and contract numerous times. Periods of economic growth and cultural creativity have been followed by periods of economic contraction and social disintegration. The same rhythm appears in other civilizations around the world with astonishing regularity. On average, civilizations take between five hundred and one thousand years to rise out of the ruins of some past civilization, then decline and fall in their turn over a period of one to three centuries, and give way to a new cycle that follows the same trajectory.

This rhythm offers little support to either the progressive or the apocalyptic faith. Fortunately, there are other options. The rise and fall of civilizations has been a central preoccupation of historians since not long after history first emerged as a distinct form of scholarship. Many of the greatest historians of the past, from –Polybius (c. 200–118 bce) through ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) to Giambattista Vico (1688–1744), focused much of their efforts on the question of why civilizations rise and fall. These three historians were among those who pointed out that wildly different societies followed very similar trajectories, and they tried to tease out general laws that defined the expansion and contraction of civilizations.

Their lead was taken up by two of the leading figures in 20th century historical studies, Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) and Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975).
¹
Spengler, surveying the casualty list of past societies, concluded that civilizations were organic entities with lifespans like any other living thing. He has been roundly condemned for that, but as an observation of facts rather than a theory about causes it has much to recommend it. Toynbee, building on Spengler's insights while rejecting his biological metaphor, took the argument one step further and proposed that what drives the cycle is a factor he called “the nemesis of success.”
²
Each human society faces challenges; when a society meets its challenges with successful responses, it opens up a space of possibility that allows for growth. The greater the success won by any given response, though, the greater the chance that the society will become locked into that response and will keep on trying to solve new challenges with old methods. To use terms introduced in Chapter 2, the society gets stuck in a single story and enters a spiral of repeated failure that ends in collapse.

More recently, in
The Collapse of Complex Societies,
(1988), Joseph Tainter critiqued Spengler and Toynbee harshly but argued for what, in many ways, is simply a more precisely worked out version of Toynbee's theory. To Tainter, the rising costs and dwindling payoffs of social complexity form the two jaws of the nemesis of success. Each civilization starts out at a low level of social complexity and, as it develops, adds complexity to respond to challenges and take advantage of the results of its success. Like everything else, though, complexity taken too far reaches the point of diminishing returns; the cost/payoff ratio goes negative, and each additional layer of complexity costs the civilization more than it produces. Since increasing complexity has always worked in the past, though, most civilizations keep on adding new layers of complexity to deal with problems that are caused by complexity itself. Finally the sheer cost of maintaining complexity outruns the available resources, and the result is collapse.

Around the same time Tainter's book saw print, environmental historians began to point out that the nemesis of success could easily take the shape of a head-on crash between a civilization and the limits of its environment. Clive Ponting's
A Green History of the
World
(1992) and Jared Diamond's
Collapse
(2005) (among many other books) present a strong case that many past societies committed suicide by wrecking the ecological systems on which they depended for their survival. The collapse of the Maya civilization, as outlined back in Chapter 1, is the poster child for this theory, and the close resonance between the Maya collapse and our own predicament make it particularly relevant here.

Tainter's theory and the environmental hypothesis can easily be combined into a single narrative of how civilizations fall. My attempt to frame that narrative is the theory of catabolic collapse.

Catabolic Collapse

The word “catabolism” comes from the Greek, by way of the life sciences. In today's biology it refers to processes by which a living thing feeds on itself. One of the most striking features of the dead civilizations of the past is that they go through precisely this process as they move through the stages of decline and fall. In the course of the Maya collapse, for example, a complex, literate society with an abundance of practical, scientific, and religious knowledge reduced itself step by step to scattered villages in a jungle dotted with ruins. In some cases, the process of collapse has erased the vast majority of a civilization's legacy, leaving only sparse fragments for later peoples to puzzle over.

At the same time, there are other examples where collapse stopped short of this point, and a new civilization picked up where its predecessor left off. The Maya heartland went through this cycle at least once before the final collapse, and Mayan successor states in the northern Yucatan managed the same thing on a smaller scale after the classic Maya collapse.
³
China is perhaps the most remarkable example of this less disastrous form of collapse on record; from the Hsia dynasty's origins well before 2000 bce right up to the present, a slow drumbeat of collapse and recovery has given Chinese civilization its measure, without impairing cultural continuity.
⁴
The theory of catabolic collapse started off as an attempt to understand the difference between these two possible outcomes of the cycle of rise and fall.

My original essay on catabolic collapse
⁵
bristles with equations, footnotes, and all the other impedimenta of the modern academic paper. Still, the basic idea is simple enough, and it's best communicated through a metaphor: imagine that, instead of the fate of civilizations, we're discussing home ownership. Until recently, when people went shopping for a home, most of them were sensible about it and bought one within their means. The housing bubble of the last few years, though, encouraged many people to buy much more house than they could afford, on the assumption that appreciating real estate values and the other advantages of home ownership would make up the difference.