The Long Descent (28 page)

A book of scientific doctrines of the sort Lovelock proposes could also ensure that the most important dimension of science itself would be lost. Science, it's crucial to remember, is not a set of teachings about the universe, however accurate those might be. At its core, science is a system of practical logic, a set of working rules that allow hypotheses to be tested against experience so that they can be discarded if they're false. That set of rules isn't perfect or flawless, but it's the best method for investigating nature that our species has invented so far, and it's worth far more to the future than any compendium of currently accepted scientific opinions.

In his essay, Lovelock imagines a survivor in some postcollapse society faced with a cholera epidemic, equipped with nothing but a book on aromatherapy. It's a compelling image. What, though, if the survivor has to deal with a new disease — one that hasn't yet jumped to human beings from its original animal host, let's say — or an old disease that has mutated into a new form? What if the antibiotics and treatments we use today have become useless due to the spread of antibiotic resistance in microbes? A textbook focused on existing knowledge circa 2008 might not offer much help. Nature is constantly changing. Science as a method of inquiry can keep track of those changes; science as a set of doctrines can't.

A book that might actually succeed in saving science for the future would be a very different book from the one Lovelock has envisioned. Rather than projecting the infallibility and misplaced reverence that a phrase like “the scientific equivalent of the Bible” suggests, this new book would present the scientific method as an open-ended way of questioning nature, providing enough practical tips and examples to help readers learn how to create their own experiments and ask their own questions. It would treat its readers in the present and future alike as participants in the process of science, not simply consumers of the knowledge it produces. The role of participant is not one that many scientists today are comfortable seeing conferred on laypeople, but if today's science is going to be saved for the future, getting past that discomfort is one of the first and least negotiable requirements.

Whatever its flaws, though, Lovelock's proposal has at least had the positive effect of focusing attention on one of the biggest challenges of the deindustrial age — preserving as much as possible of the cultural heritage of the last six thousand years or so. That's a tall order because nearly all of that heritage is brutally vulnerable to an age of decline. Nearly all books printed in the last century and a half are on high-acid paper, which gradually turns back to sawdust; librarians are already struggling to preserve collections of disintegrating 19th-century books. CDs and DVDs, like other electronic media, have even shorter lifespans; moreover, they won't even be playable in a low-tech future. During the most challenging parts of the transition to the deindustrial age, when people are struggling to survive on a day-by-day basis, literature, music, art, and science may not rank very high on their list of priorities anyway.

Any effort toward cultural survival, in other words, will demand ruthless sorting. Today's sprawling libraries will need careful winnowing to sort out collections small enough to be copied by hand if it comes to that. Musical forms that can be passed on as living traditions will be more likely to make it, which means folk music has a better chance than Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. A huge amount of our present cultural heritage will inevitably be lost; the job at hand is to try to make sure that the best possible selection gets through.

Those cultural, artistic, and spiritual traditions that will be sustainable and relevant in a future of modest energy supplies and limited resources belong at the top of the list of what to save. These traditions will be crucial during the crisis periods of the catabolic collapse process, when they will provide desperately needed balance to the grim realities of a disintegrating society. They will be even more crucial in the long term. Just as the creative minds of the early Middle Ages drew much of their inspiration from classical poetry and philosophy that had been preserved by Irish monks through the worst of the intervening years,
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cultural legacies handed down over the decades and centuries to come will form crucial parts of the inheritance on which our successor societies will build.

Building Tomorrow's Societies

One core concept that has to be grasped to make use of any of the possibilities mentioned in this chapter, however, is the rule that the community, not the individual, is the basic unit of human survival. History shows that local communities can flourish while empires fall around them; the Chinese towns and villages mentioned earlier in this book have remained viable while dynasties rose and fell, and they have countless parallels around the world. Any attempt to bring today's local communities through the approaching crises, however, depends on having viable communities in the first place, and viable communities are in short supply just now.

The reason for this shortage deserves discussion. In the second half of the twentieth century, most of the industrial world abandoned modes of social organization based on local communities in favor of mass society.
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Most of the fragmented communities that remain depend on mass society not only for economic survival but for the subtler but equally important support that comes from common goals and worldviews. Many of the social changes that have made viable communities scarce will have to be undone in a hurry, so that local society can survive and flourish as the larger systems of society disintegrate. The rebuilding of civil society in the industrial world has already begun, but it still faces many challenges. At least three factors in short supply need to be brought on line for communities to have a good chance at survival in the dein-dustrializing world of the near future.

1. A community needs local organizations.
Our present culture here in North America has discarded most of the local organizations it once had, in favor of a mass society where individuals deal directly with huge government and corporate institutions. This has to be reversed. Some recent moves toward reinvigorating civil society have been made, and these are a step in the right direction, but much more needs to be done. One often-neglected but useful resource, mentioned earlier in this book, consists of the old fraternal orders — the Masons, the Odd Fellows, the Grange, and so on — which once included in their memberships more than 50% of adult North Americans. Many of these organizations still exist, and they're far less exclusive than people outside them tend to think. Joining such an organization, or some other local community group, and helping to revive local civil society is a crucial step that will provide your community with essential networks of cooperation and mutual aid in difficult times.

2. A community needs a core of people who know how to do
without fossil fuel inputs.
An astonishing number of people, especially in the educated middle class, have no practical skills whatsoever when it comes to growing and preparing food, making clothing, and providing other basic necessities. An equally astonishing number are unable to travel more than a mile or two by any means that doesn't involve burning fossil fuels — and how many people in the developed world can light a fire without matches or a lighter? Survival skills such as organic gardening, low-tech medicine, basic hand crafts, and the like need to be learned and practiced now, while there's time to do so. Similarly, those people who cut their fossil fuel consumption drastically now — for
example, by getting rid of their cars and using public transit or bicycles for commuting — will be better prepared for the inevitable shortages.

3. A community needs to be able to meet basic human requirements.
Above all else it must be able to obtain food. The ability to feed people without wrecking the Earth will be the bottom line for human survival in the future. The revolutionary advances of modern organic farming offer one way to meet this set of needs. Other approaches such as permaculture also have a wealth of valuable methods and perspectives to offer. The more completely such methods are preserved and expanded, the better off we and our descendants will be.

The ability to meet basic human requirements also calls for the establishment of local networks of production and distribution, especially of food and other necessities. Here, farmers markets, food co-ops, and the like are of central importance. Functioning networks of exchange and food distribution will become the frameworks around which new social forms coalesce; it's a routine event in the aftermath of collapsing civilizations. Helping to support these right now, and in the years to come, will ensure that some of them make it through the crises of the next century and are in place, in some form, for successor societies.

The availability of a range of ecologically balanced, renewably powered, sustainable technologies will also be of crucial importance in establishing these local networks. Food is the foundation, but the more technically adept a community is, the more likely it is to survive and grow. We live in a society in which most people have totally neglected their own innate abilities in favor of ersatz mechanical imitations. Even our schoolchildren use pocket calculators instead of learning how to add and subtract. All this has to be reversed as soon as possible, at least by those people who hope not only to survive the approaching waves of crisis but to contribute to the great project of making a better future.

Those people who can use their own hands and minds to make tools, grow food, brew beer, treat illnesses, generate modest amounts of electricity from sun and wind, and the like, will have a major survival advantage over those who can't. Those communities that focus their efforts on helping members achieve skills like these, and pass them on to others, will become the seedbeds of the sustainable societies of the future. Whatever they preserve and develop will not need to be laboriously reinvented by their descendants.

None of these things can be left until the first wave of crises hits, though. During the last two centuries, the quickest way to prosper was to ride the wave of progress, using more energy, more resources, and more technology than your competitors. For the next two centuries, the quickest way to prosper will stand this rule on its head. Those who accept the reality of decline and get by on less energy, fewer resources, and less technology than their competitors will win out. Now, before the immense knowledge base of industrial society begins to come apart, is the best time to look for ways of living that use less of what we won't have soon.

Organic farming, again, is an excellent case in point. The extraordinarily effective methods used by today's organic farmers may turn out to be our civilization's greatest gift to the future, but only if they survive the approaching age of decline. Today they're covered in detail in dozens of readily available books. Whether that will be true in a hundred years depends, at least in part, on what we do right now. If people come to terms with the future now, and begin assembling and using skills and lifeways our deindus-trial descendants can follow, the approaching age of decline can be made less traumatic than it will otherwise be.

SIX
The
Spiritual
Dimension

O
ne of the things that gives the mythology of progress its emotional power is the circular logic at its center. From within the worldview defined by the narrative of progress, what's new is better than whatever it replaces simply because it's newer; whatever our technology happens to be good at doing is the most important thing to do, and whatever our technology does poorly, or doesn't do at all, doesn't really need to be done. Thus the much-repeated claim that our technological worldview is bound to triumph because it works better than any other approach begs the question. Modern industrial technology does certain things better than any other suite of tools we've got, to be sure, but it's by no means a given that the things it does best are the things that we most need to do as the industrial age winds down.

There's an old saying that if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything around you starts to look like a nail. This variety of mental blindness — the habit of redefining our problems to fit the solutions we happen to have on hand, rather than looking for solutions that fit the problems we're actually facing — pervades current discussions about the future of industrial society.

It's crucial to remember, too, that there's no such thing as “technology” in the singular, only technologies in the plural. The notion that technology is a single, monolithic thing is a convenient bit of mystification that is used to hide the fact that our society, like all others, picks and chooses among available technological options, implementing some and neglecting others. This fact needs hiding because most of these choices are made by influential factions of America's political class for their own private profit, very often at the expense of the rest of us. Wrapping the process in a smokescreen of impersonal inevitability is a convenient way to keep awkward questions from being raised via what remains of the democratic institutions of an earlier age.

In a broader sense, of course, technologies of some sort will be an inevitable part of whatever society comes into being out of the ruins of the industrial world. Toolmaking is as natural to human beings as singing is to finches. Every human culture across space and time has had its own technologies, each of which draws on available resources to meet culturally recognized needs in culturally desirable ways. It's habitual in our own culture to think of the particular suite of technologies we've come up with as not only better than anybody else's, but more advanced, more progressive. Think about what these two phrases imply, and you'll see how they derive from and feed into the core narrative of the myth of progress — the way of telling the story of our species that turns every other culture and every past technology into a stepping-stone on the way to us. From within this narrative, all earlier technologies are simply imperfect attempts to achieve what we've got.